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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 the true boundary between gen-z and millennials isn't a specific year, it's whether or not someone is able to remember 9/11. If you remember 9/11, you can point to a specific point where the world changed. Otherwise, all you remember is that the world has always been like this. Gen-z movements should be understood in that framework. Millennials and gen-x-ers are fundamentally revanchist. They might be left or right wing, but fundamentally they want to return to the pre-9/11 world of optimism and progress. Gen-Z assumes the world is its default, persistent, shitty state, and it's up to them to change it. In particular, where harsh truths conflict with what their elders told them the world should be, gen-z-ers perceive this emotionally as betrayal and deception rather than elders simply having obsolete beliefs. This explains the rage about gamergate, incels, "capitalism", "chopped men", and any number of other gen-z-complaints.
Now, being on the very oldest end of the gen-z agerange, I'm inclined to the same emotional response to world conditions. But a childhood in a largely pre-smartphone/pre-social-media world means that millennial media formats (which means no short-form videos, no non-anonymous social media, no podcasts) do a better job at appealing to me. That means I only tend to be partially captured by mass movements like gamergate. I sympathize with some of their arguments, but I simply can't immerse myself in them. Ironically, that leaves me with a complaint that's perpendicular to yours: I have no idols, and therefore can't join shared communities based on idolization. In particular, my antipathy for any sort of celebrity has grown so large that I've taken to telling people (and working to make myself believe) that "celebrities aren't really people." Meaning: it is an absolute, complete waste of time to care about any "named character" I do not personally interact with. Actually, I've got this whole theory about how Dunbar's number implies that having any sort of parasocial connection to non-local people (including fictional characters) inhibits your ability to make durable social bonds. I think one of the chief evils of stratified/hierarchical societies is that the compel you to invest your limited emotional resources into the lives of high-status people who will never care about you in return.
In the end, the irony is that after all my introspection, all my epiphanies merely serve to replicate a piece of ancient wisdom you'll perhaps recognize... that ancient Jewish prohibition against worshipping false idols.
I wouldn't say this is quite accurate. I'm technically in the zoomer bucket, and can't remember 9/11, but I absolutely remember a time with more optimism than we have now. Perhaps it's just that I grew up in a conservative part of the US, but the George W. Bush hate especially after Iraq just wasn't really present in my childhood. He was kind of buffonish sometimes, but obviously all my evangelical Republican family members loved him. I remember being impacted by the great recession, but I was young enough that it didn't seem to matter very much. The idea of patriotism was just real, people believed in it.
And even as I grew older, Obama's election was a moment of massive optimism on the left and center, a black guy named
"Osama""Obama" was elected president of the United States.The smartphone (and before that the iPod) were actually a big part of the optimism of the time. We remember these changes as negative, but people were massively excited about them at the time in a way they just aren't for technological changes today.
I place the turning point
USAaround the time that the Black Lives Matter movement started, that's where the left abandoned the narrative of Obama being the signpost of full racial integration and brotherhood. The modern culture war can be traced back to that, IMO. Feminism and gamergate and that kind of stuff were fellow travelers, but around that time that stuff was just a few weird girls on Tumblr and hadn't hit the mainstream yet. I guess in some sense it never did, I can't imagine the left legitimately scrawling "KILL ALL MEN" in all caps like an Umbridge punishment the way the Tumblrinas used to do.I guess in some ways this was true, particularly as we look at prices for major expenses. But I'll say that my elders are just as flabbergasted at cost disease in healthcare and ballooning house prices as any young person. My parents are shocked at how much the family home is worth, and my mom is kind of a YIMBY.
But the big thing I think that's changed is just social trust. My dad was a hippie back in the day, and hasn't gotten a raise as an associate professor in a decade; he's no evangelist for institutional loyalty. My mom is, but she trusts everyone, so that's just her personality.
I actually think the boomers have a good counterpoint when they say that young people just aren't willing to do low-tier work and consider a hard day's labor beneath them. I think that's true. I think about the kinds of things my dad put up with before he got hired as a professor -- 12 hour days, cleaning buildings in the middle of the night, saving all week to buy a movie ticket as his weekly entertainment. I'm pretty sure zoomers would call that a human rights abuse. But many, many boomers did things like that.
If there's one thing where I feel resentment about the scripts I was handed not fitting reality, it's that the depictions of flirting and romance in popular media were almost calculatedly misleading about how you actually develop a relationship with a woman. Lots of friends-to-lovers arcs and will-they-or-won't-they nonsense. That makes for good TV. But real relationships usually require some level of approach and some kind of status display, even if we're polite and we don't call it that.
I think a lot of our intimacy crises kind of go back to that, we never taught young men how to flirt and young women how to intelligently discern flirting from offense, and hence we're in a place where lots of young people don't know how the fundamental human mating ritual is supposed to work and either fear it or smash through it like a bull in a China shop. I guess we assumed it's instinctual -- it isn't. Turns out our prefrontal cortexes were actually a load-bearing part of human reproduction after all.
If culture as a whole doesn't teach this, that's how you end up with the PUA subculture and redpill bros doing it. They're winning the social game among young men because they actually give actionable information about how to achieve an intimate relation with a woman. The honest truth is that it's not so different to court a woman passionately as it is to seduce her, at least in terms of the feelings of attraction and interest you have to create in her for it to happen.
Regarding low-tier work I reckon we have discussed it multiple times both here and on the subreddits, and for a good reason. I think it bears repeating here that lots of types of low-tier work that Western societies currently employ immigrants to perform was normally performed by high school or college students on weekends or nights or during the summer. It was sometime during the '90s that Western societies seemed to have collectively decided that prep school and after-school activities are a better use of the free time of sufficiently gifted high schoolers than working. And I do think that society did end up losing something significant with that.
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