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Gamergate but actually from NeverKnowsBest is maybe the best original, primary source based research I've seen concerning Gamergate. It's also a six-hour long youtube video. I'm going to make the argument that - for the average person who is at all interested in this sort of thing - it's well worth your time to watch it.
If you're like me, before watching you may think you already know most of what was important about the event, incessantly relitigated as it has been over the years. On top of that, it's a highly adversarial information environment, and because of link rot, it's not getting any easier to make sense of what happened. I was very-online enough then to be there from the beginning, after all!
These were all very reasonable thoughts, but they're wrong.
Things I didn't know before watching:
The link to the sources is down, unfortunately, but a great deal are shown during the video.
I looked around for some reactions to it, and I don't think it has traveled very far yet. Or, perhaps everyone's just burned out on the subject. I actually feel bad for the person who refuses to watch it because NeverKnowsBest was "misgendering" Quinn. It's all out there, now in a long but accessible format. The event does deserve clarity and reflection, if only because of the demonstrable failures of the wider mainstream media, something that should concern all Americans.
If you still don't want to watch it, well, I suppose I can still give a pithy take-away for what it's worth: Gamergate spiraled not because someone was harassed on the internet, because that happens all the time, but was rather a paper-thin smokescreen deployed by powerful people to escape accountability; and because the national media failed to perform the most basic aspects of their job, they got away with it, allowing these obviously bad actors to continue to harm and exploit others for their own gain.
Presumably, the people who don't think GamerGate was about harrassment think it has any new information; and those who do will either not watch it, not believe it, or not share/discuss something critical of their stance unless it can be debunked/used for internet points.
I've seen some right-leaning people dismiss the video because the author is a known leftist and assuming that it's going to be a hackjob, but so far it leans heavily towards showing gamers having legitimate grievances. It does seem pretty weird to make a 6 hour video about gamergate without mentioning the part where events spiraled all the way to the UN though.
6 hours is way too long as well, it's really nice that he dug up so many primary sources, but it's really long-winded and feels like it could have been cut to half-length.
I'd rather read 200k words (as long as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, and half of the Prisoner of Azkaban) than watch a six-hour video. It's faster, easier to quote/reference, and hopefully contains more information (maybe even links to optional external sources and/or primary evidence).
People rarely say "read several books on the topic, then we can continue the discussion", but for some reason it's common with videos.
Transcript and summary (cw: gemma4) alternative (cw: muse-glimmer). Will caveat that this was as much to test a new service I've been working on than to vouch for its precision: in particular, there's some audio gating and dechunking errors, so the transcription timers roll over on the hour.
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Long-form video is the closest media format we have to the human ancestral environment. We didn’t evolve to learn by looking at page-after-page of squiggly lines. We evolved to learn by listening to some guy talk while showing us stuff.
We evolved to do a lot of things, like running from lions, starving through famines, and living to the ripe old age of died-from-childbirth. The last few millennia of technological advancements have improved many things, including communication and education.
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