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A post-Gamergate Gen-Z core retrospective
I can't be the only one with this exact same experience. The worst thing to ever happen to my high school dating life was watching that first “feminist owned” compilation by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Thirteen-year-old me was recruited from the Minecraft let’s plays and dropped into the hardened battle lines of what we now call the culture war.
Since I was a young boy, my enemies and friends were already decided for me. People nowadays often make jokes along the lines of “this is what radicalised me.” But I can, honest to God, say it was videos of ladies with dyed hair throwing hissy fits at a supposed patriarchy.
But how did I get to this point? This was my conception of the state of internet politics circa 2013 at the time. Between 2008–2013 there was an event called Gamergate. Akin to World War I, I arrived after the ossification into trench warfare was already complete. As a person late to the party, the commentary I saw was very confusing and never actually touched on what caused the big shitstorm in the first place. I even tried to watch an explainer video, after which I was left even more confused, because it all seemed so inane and random and everyone kept having Very Strong Opinions about little nuances of the situation that I still am confused about to this day.
My vague understanding: a female indie video game developer slept with a journalist to get a good review for her game. She was also annoying about it or something. (Fun fact: I came across Brianna Wu on Twitter recently, who was also involved, I guess. Turns out she has always been a fairly likeable, nuanced, low-key trans woman. Don’t really know how that fits any narrative.)
At this point it had all become, by my estimation, more about feminist influence in gaming than what actually happened (whatever that was exactly). As an avid consumer of video game reviews at the time, I had the vague understanding that, of the people whose videos I watched the more respectable sort, like TotalBiscuit (RIP), AngryJoeShow, and Jim Sterling (WTF happened there, am I right?) I was supposed to be on the other side. These guys always came across as if they really didn’t want to talk about the topic, treating it as a toxic cesspit.
I’ve set the stage. Drum roll please. Come in:
Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. It all starts with this guy. Pioneer of the political video essay format. Progenitor of the low-effort news commentator. Prime user of the still stock-image background picture.
The “This Week in Stupid” series was the succulent roast-dinner to the “feminist pwned” appetizer. A menagerie of this week’s most epic fails, most ludicrous feminist lies, most egregious overreaches, righteously torn asunder by the smooth, scornful, and eloquent voice of reason.
This man didn’t avoid talking about Gamergate; he bravely confronted it full force. He even had a reaction video to Angry Joe’s video on the topic that honestly was impossibly hard to follow. I don’t understand how people who actually went through the whole Gamergate saga don’t start tweaking when they hear “journalistic ethics in gaming.”
Suffice it to say, embarrassingly so, he was a role model for a young lad like me. (If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes: he was also solely responsible for Jordan Peterson getting discovered.)
You had to be there. Imitators popping up left, right, and centre, today uncharitably called grifters, amassing large audiences rapidly. It was a golden era. Anyone with a microphone and vocal cords could make it big. There was a voracious, previously uncatered-to appetite for this content, and I feasted.
I started adding Kraut and Tea (now just called Kraut), Armoured Skeptic, and dozens more to my rotation. I saw them go from a few thousand subscribers to tens of thousands (YouTube wasn’t as big back then; a hundred thousand subs made you a Big Deal).
The content expanded from video game politics to IRL politics. The Establishment joined in as a canonical enemy and ally to the feminists, ruthlessly deplatforming these new up-and-comers left and right. It was literally 1984. You had to be there. Free speech became the core load-bearing belief. But the good times couldn’t last forever. At some point the explosive growth slowed down, people started circling the wagons, collabs were handed out jealously. Production values increased along with the drama.
At this time I noticed the prevalence of a certain type of channel in the network: the Skeptic™ cadre. Names like “The Amazing Atheist” and “Armoured Skeptic.” I started connecting the pieces to a deeper origin story for the whole Gamergate thing. It all invariably led to New Atheism and Atheism+. Fourteen-year-old me didn’t know what New Atheism was, but it clarified to me what the fault lines were. Why was one side of the gamer army so hung up about the sexual proclivities and false statements of an, by all accounts, irrelevant developer, and the other side hated them for it?
Basically, the group with the beef was clearly the disenfranchised remains of New Atheism. These people were veterans who had debated internet creationists from before I was born, hyper-vigilant about correct argument and debate. After winning that war, they had been ruthlessly discarded over… something to do with people being busybodies and entryists making it a feminist thing with Atheism+. The important thing was that these same guys, perceiving that gaming was next, didn’t want a repeat. They dusted off their AOL majigs and went to war. (Sorry, don’t know what AOL is; I’m not unc-coded.)
And then I think they lost that battle too. And they realized the problem must be attacked at the root: the birthplace of the totalising feminist menace, universities.
And whatever your thoughts on these people are, they changed the world. This is a bit crazy to say, but I think they started and defined the online-era culture war.
I have a million more things to say and will maybe make a follow-up post on my view of the continued evolution to the present day. I want to go deeper into my shameful ̶P̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson, red-pill era, and how the skeptic-to-Nazi pipeline had more than a grain of truth to it.
Nowadays I feel a lot of resentment for all the broken trust between me and my childhood idols. I fought this war alone in my classrooms. They gave me the forbidden fruit of knowledge, only for years later to become what they taught me to hate.
But really, am I the only one who went through this live?
Gamergate, thankfully, occurred during the period where I was less online than I had been both before and after. Like many, I was a New Atheist during it's heyday, before the split of Atheism+. Thankfully, the split just made the space boring to me, and I avoided joining either the proto-alt-right or the proto-woke factions that emerged.
The impetus for the split really was Elevatorgate. At the time, I remember being sympathetic to the feminist side (and was very much a feminist at that point). In retrospect, I still think they were right on the object level. It involved one female atheist blogger (Rebecca Watson) sharing a video talking about her experience at a recent atheism conference. She recounted a story in which a guy (with whom she hadn't really interacted with) was in an elevator with her at the end of the night and invited her back to his room for coffee. Her message was (I believe I'm quoting directly) "Guys, don't do that." And, at the end of the day, I think that's perfectly good advice. It is a pretty lame move, and while not worthy of strong social sanction, I think it's worth telling a bunch of guys (many of whom are nerdy, maybe autistic, and too-online) that it's not a great way to get a girl to like you or to invite women into your movement.
As the feminist side tells it, this spawned a surge of hate mail and complaints from guys, threatening sexual violence etc etc. Who knows how profound that was, but the fact is the internet did seem to react pretty strongly to what seemed to be like relatively mild chastisement.
However, the feminist side pushed back hard (irrationally so, imo). I remember eyerolling at the essay "Schrodinger's Rapist" asserting that, due to rape being a statistically male-dominated practice, any guy in an elevator was potentially a rapist, and thus making a proposition/move in a confined setting like that understandably triggers a woman's fears of getting raped. The other side had a lot of fun writing a parallel essay about black people and crime-- which, to be clear, was trying to show that such statistical discrimination was unfounded.
Like Gamergate, the event spiraled into a discussion about whether/how this male-dominated subculture treated women poorly, and whether/how entryist women were ruining the culture. Richard Dawkins even chimed in with his satirical letter "Dear Muslima", mockingly comparing the plight of an American woman being asked for coffee to the brutally patriarchal culture of Islam.
Soon after that, Atheism+ was explicitly founded, with a number of the popular blogs adopting the logo and claiming that reason not only tells us to disbelieve in God, but furthermore should guide our behavior on other aspects of life and society (read: social justice). For me, the blogs just became boring at that point, but I was still feminist/SJW enough that those who dug in their heels on the other side didn't really resonate with me either. By the time Gamergate rolled around, I was still online but just not that into it. Several years later, a friend sharing a Scott Alexander post brought be back into the world of online discourse.
Despite the similarities, I think it's really important to see one crucial difference between Elevatorgate and Gamergate: Elevator Guy remains anonymous to this day. The goal of Watson's video was not to punish this guy in particular. Whereas Gamergate, to my best understanding, involved lots of doxxing on both sides, and aimed to hit people where it hurt: in "real life." This is why I'd say there is a strong case to be made that Gamergate is a time to flag as the starting point for modern culture war. Before then, internet conflicts were internet conflicts, and insane level to which flame wars could be taken was a humorous badge of honor for nerds. After Gamergate, the stakes started to become real.
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