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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?
I think in a way both sides were right about Gamergate. On the one hand, it really was about women entering into a "boys' club" space, not ethics in gaming journalism. So at the level of literal claims, the feminists were basically correct. However, I don't think it was wrong to oppose women entering a men's space and seeking to change it, just the pro-Gamergate side didn't have the language to frame this in a sympathetic way so they avoided saying it.
What was happening to gaming and online nerd spaces (like Reddit itself) was essentially a form of gentrification. You had a "marginalized" community (nerds) that had made something interesting in their ghettoized spaces (videogaming, online forums like Reddit, open source software, tabletop games). The mainstream that had previously stigmatized them decided they wanted to move in, force out the original communities and sanitize them for mainstream consumption. The same process that happened to Reddit is what leftists complain about when it happens to some neighborhood in Queens.
Anyway, as for my own personal journey through it, I was a bit older than you. All of this happened after I had already graduated college, and so I never really got invested in the whole Youtube debate/criticism sphere. I never watched Sargon of Akkad or Jordan Peterson or whoever. I think it was around that time, 2013 or 2014 that my brother sent me a link to one of the more popular SlateStarCodex posts which became my entry point.
I would say that both of these things were instances of a broader problem. It spread from the latter to include the former because they were instances of a broader problem.
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