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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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August 2014 is a weird starting point, even from the progressive view. That post-dates Atheism +, Racefail, Zimmerman, It Gets Better, the first and second Scott Walker John Doe investigations, so on. In particular, discussing the modern social justice movement without the Affordable Care Act -- both its effects, and also the discussions it depended on to get public legitimacy -- is missing a lot.

2014 contained two of the biggest flashpoints for what we call "wokeness". If wokeness is principally designed by a political fixation on racial and gender identity politics, Gamergate was the "gender" catalyst and the Ferguson riots were the "race" catalyst. I was working in a hotel for the last four months of 2014 and first four of 2015, and remember discussing with a colleague the edit wars on the Gamergate Wikipedia page and also watching a report on the Ferguson riots on a TV in the hotel restaurant. August 2014 was a busy month.

While you're correct to point out that Atheism+ and Elevatorgate was a big precursor to this kind of thing, I think 2014 was the moment when "wokeness" went mainstream: unlike Gamergate, I don't think Elevatorgate made the front page of the New York Times.

I don’t think so. The modern online culture war can be traced directly back to Gamergate, which is what got millions of previously apolitical young men interested in politics.

Previously there was /pol/ (which had only been remade from /new/ a few years previously, and hadn’t yet fully taken over the site) and the generic stormfront type neonazi sphere. And on the more ‘intellectual’ dissident right there was the Taylor & MacDonald sphere, which was much smaller, and a handful of publications like TakiMag and to some extent Moldbug and his sphere, which initially had a lot of overlap with the more political side of TRP, derived from more generic PUA stuff. But it’s almost hard to overstate how niche and esoteric these things were, and how many of them (eg. AmRen conference attendees) had a primarily older audience. On the ‘mainstream right’ it was all old men, the ‘classic’ Christian right, and a few nerdy libertarians. It was Gamergate and now almost forgotten figures like Sargon who were responsible for the political investment of millions of young men in conservative politics. The ‘new right’ that emerged post-2014 was completely different to the right of McCain etc that opposed the ACA. Young millennial (white) men in 2008 didn’t give a shit about conservative politics. It’s unclear whether Trump wouldn’t have won without Gamergate because the Facebook boomer MAGAverse was largely unrelated to it, but the success of the entire millennial online movement around ‘The Donald’ on the subreddit, on /pol/ and so on was a product of it.

On the left you’re correct that the chain of causation extends a little further back because it can be drawn more directly from SomethingAwful in the late 00s and the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women. But still, the explosion of support around eg trans issues does date to around 2014. That was when Amazon’s Transparent debuted to extreme critical and media praise and extensive commentary on its sympathetic portrayal of a transwoman, Dragon Age had the first positively-portrayed trans character in a major game, Caitlyn Jenner came out towards the end of the year and, as the US came out of a long period of economic pain, progressive attention focused more wholly on social issues again as Occupy receded into memory.

So yes, I think 2014 is critical.

I would say the events of 2012 are a crucial inflection point leading to your basic normiecons being willing to support harder edged, less sensitive right wing movements. The DR is twitter weirdos but it does crosspollinate with the republican grassroots leading to some(overstated) actual influence; I don't think that would happen if it wasn't for things like the Trayvon Martin case or a lot of the 2012 election behavior.

I agree that it's crucial and maybe a turning point (though I'm not sure that, in a world where Gjoni got distracted before posting, some other thing wouldn't have taken the same role). I just don't think it makes sense as a starting point.

My post to FCfromSSC goes over the left side, but while I think the impact was bigger on the right, I think you're overlooking the extent a lot of pre-Gamergate groups were less 'apolitical' or not 'interested in politics', and more just hadn't yet been shoved out of mainstream groups.

In 2009, I could write at length on rpgnet on political topics, if at the risk of (even boring) threads getting locked. A couple years before gamergate, conservative-leaning positions had stopped being zebras and started being understood as unacceptable on their own premises; by the Trump era support of a Republican President was verborten; today, "support or apologism for the use of AI generation in commercial projects" is outside of the bounds of acceptable discussion. My politics didn't change, but the extent I would be visible from the outside and especially the extent I could be seen-as-a-state-sees did, and while my pathway was unusual, I don't think the direction was.

A lot of those groups that these people motions around collapsed, either when the broader Tea Party movement did or with the collapse of web culture into social media and doxxing, and they were never as large, but they existed and in many ways were the very things that the early SJW movement were reacting to.

the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women

The thing that made me a conservative as a young man wasn’t gamergate, it was this. I distinctly remember the day a friend said, “hey come look at this,” and he was showing me tumblrinaction. The intense “KILL ALL MEN ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS EVERY ADVANCEMENT TOWARDS ARTIFICIAL CONCEPTION GETS US CLOSER TO ELIMINATING MEN” stuff that was du jour on tumblr back during this time shocked the shit out of me. And the racial and trans (and it’s almost forgotten now, but otherkin) stuff too.

Then I started to see women I knew in real life saying those things explicitly. And then I saw people in institutions saying it. And then it seemed to take over. At each stage, of course, the rough edges were sanded off. The radfems who truly hated men were very quickly marginalized. But the animating spirit remained the same.

So I remember when it wasn’t “crazy kids on college campuses.” I remember when it was crazy girls on tumblr. And I saw the crazy tumblr girls’ ideas take over the world.

That certainly does for making one a conservative.

I discovered Scott's blog in the comments of a post on TumblrInAction in 2014.

I believe I did the same. Crazy to think he was the most insightful anti-SJ voice at the time. But he was.

When people wonder why there are so many non-rationalist types here, the origin story is Scott writing about feminism in 2014.

Crazy to think he was the most insightful anti-SJ voice at the time. But he was.

Sadly, few remember Kazerad.

Prequel will update any day now. I want to believe.

Interesting.

Gamergate is roughly where I put the starting point as well, and it's the date I feel like I see people citing the most often. Notably, Gamergate (and the several other concurrent Feminist pushes, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, Listen and Believe, etc) was the point at which the Rip hit me personally, a heretofore more-or-less doctrinaire progressive and a true believer in what I then understood Social Justice ideology to be. I think it's possible that it's the same for a lot of other people; previous to that point, people saw this stuff playing out in their individual subcultural niches, but 2014 was the point at which Social Justice cohered into an acute movement and began seriously pushing for society-wide solutions. Gamergate figures were invited to speak at the UN. Listen and Believe's efforts had what seemed to be a continual media presence from that point on, and there were no more lulls, only compounding acceleration as we transitioned into the 2016 election.

I generally think of it in terms of policy starvation. Progressives had a theory of how things should be fixed; the Bush wars and the recessions convinced them that the time of action was at hand. Obama's presidency was supposed to be the turning point, but nothing significant actually changed. 2014, halfway through Obama's second term, is the point where those who'd run out of patience hit critical mass, and the whole culture started tipping toward radical ideology.

I could see it as a point of heightened visibility or 'crucial', but it feels too much like calling the start of McCarthyism at the Communist Control Act in '54. Dickwolves was 2010, and it wasn't like that was a battle specific to the people pissed off at Penny Arcade. RailFail '09 wasn't just about writing native voices, but heavily balanced around the extent the wrong people got to talk at all, or that tone mattered.

Even other contemporaneous-feeling things end up coming first, like Brendan Eich (April 2014) and arguably TeamHarpy (first posts in May 2014, lawsuit filed in July 2014). NotAllMen and YesAllWomen were promoted and popularized through the first half of 2014, too.

That's not to call it any less of a turning point, but it's hard to call a starting point.

In my perspective, the major difference between gamergate and dickwolves or racefail or elevatorgate or Eich's ouster is that it was with gamergate that the online journalists stopped even trying to understand the other side. Previously articles would include a sentence or two explaining roughly the other side's position (this is stupid and hysterical usually) but with gamergate it was just mouth breathing chodes impotently raging at Quinn the whole way down. And when the publications started doing that, so did the rank and file - you could sit an agg down and walk them through your perspective and at the end of it they'd bsod, shake their head and call you a mouth breathing chode impotently raging at Quinn*. Everyone acted like Arthur Chu was a lone spark of extra insanity after he talked about mind killing himself, but that's because he was actually giving the game away.

*Note I am not saying they would bsod because they knew I was right about gamergate, I am saying they would bsod because they could feel themselves empathising with me.

What is this about Arthur Chu?

Chu rather famously wrote a couple Facebook posts back in the early gamergate / late rationalist diaspora days where, as while mockingly taking the terms from LW discussion of the time, produced this copypasta. I don't know if it got archived fully in context at any point.

In one of his many many rants against rationalism and in favour of social justice Arthur Chu said:

"“I rigorously manage my own thinking and purge myself of dangerous ‘unthinkable’ thoughts—‘mindkill’ myself—on a regular basis.

This is what you have to do to be a feminist anti-racist progressive, i.e. a social justice stormtrooper, You have to recognize that there is no neutral culture, neutrality is impossible, that culture is a cutthroat war of memes and that you have to commit to picking a side and setting yourself up as a neutral arbiter of memes is impossible and is a form of surrender. You have to constantly “check your privilege” and “unpack the knapsack” and all those other buzzwords.

You need to understand that the only way to be “rational” in this world is to be irrational, that the only way to be “fair” is to pick the right side and fight for it.

The people who genuinely win are the people who do this. The people who refuse to do this are the ones who sit on the sidelines and never even lose because they aren’t really playing.”

For more wisdom from the "Asian American icon" (his words, sorry Asian Americans), check out In favour of niceness, community and civilisation. (I know you're familiar with it grognard, but for anyone else who sees this who is less familiar with the history.)

First time?

I get what you're motioning around, but that's what it felt like for a lot of other people a lot earlier. Any opposition to the Affordable Care Act deriving solely from the President's race was a mainstay from 2009-2012. The only possible motivation for a specific anti-gay policy being thoughtless homophobia is gold-standard SCOTUS law, recognized at three different major cases, and with far broader academic and institutional support. Gun owners as wanting more Trayvon Martin shootings was absolutely a thing.

Journolist was revealed in 2010: it wasn't just that it happened, but even the why and how was common knowledge for a set.

It matters that a bunch of people suddenly got to see it first-hand! But it's why I'm skeptical of it as a starting point.

See that's just US politics to me, but I see your point, maybe it's better described as an escalation. A dramatic escalation. Gamergate marked a change to me not just as an event, but because it coincided with complete US control over the Western cultural hegemon through social media. It went pro and spread from politics to everything, and from the US to everywhere (in the west). I have been politically aware since 2004/5, but trying to get Australians to talk about US politics back then was like pulling teeth. Even during Obama's election people mostly just saw it as a curio - he's going for the record for the fastest assassinated US president they'd laugh and then change the subject. 2012 wasn't much different - Obama was going to win or else Americans are all bigots so what's there to talk about? But after gamergate started, people started paying attention to US politics too. Suddenly every politically aware Australian I knew wanted to talk to me about the midterms! I didn't even want to talk about the midterms. But a lot of Australians and Europeans became very interested in US politics from then on, and I had to start explaining that I was an expat so other Americans wouldn't tell me to shove my opinions up my ass.

So the way I see gamergate is as the engagement where the scolds tried out their new weapon to great success - mind killing themselves in the face of empathising with the enemy. And it hit my shitty little corner of the internet - tech and gaming journalism - just before spreading everywhere. I wrote neutral stories on many of those previous events, and the only one I got push back on was Eich, because Eich himself supported his ousting. I'm sure there was bitching and sniping behind my back about what a chud I was, but it stayed behind my back. Then when gamergate came around, merely asking for a link to gjoni's post had people threatening to blacklist me. The ideology had become so totalising that not even enthusiast press could escape it - and enthusiast press has always been one of the most trivial things in existence.

Agreed, seeing multiple major online publishers run near-identical stories with near-identical headlines at the same time was a gigantic redpill.

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