Tedium - Shaking The Wasp’s Nest 🐝

Fans of insect metaphors, this post is for you. (Ante Hamersmit/Unsplash)

What Gamergate was, at a high level

If you never followed the whole Gamergate saga, here’s a quick explainer of what happened—without leaning too hard onto the specific players, who have honestly had to deal with the bulk of this for long enough. (First, do no harm.)

In the summer of 2014, a game developer faced accusations by a former boyfriend that she engaged in a sexual relationship with a journalist in exchange for favorable coverage of her game. (The game, an interactive fiction title that discussed the complexities of depression, was fairly non-traditional, which didn’t help matters.) The apparently scorned boyfriend wrote a lengthy blog post that went into extreme detail, and had the effect of making the developer a target of ongoing harassment.

The claim fell apart with even a modest amount of scrutiny—the journalist didn’t even review the game—but the accusation nonetheless played into the negative feelings some gamers had about Kotaku, the outlet the journalist worked for. In other words, it was a flash point for the airing of online grievances. And people complained. Repeatedly, and often anonymously. In graphic detail.

The harassment came from various corners, including mainstream social media accounts, IRC channels, and anonymous forums. But the connecting thread was that it was leaderless, which made it difficult to stop. David Wolinsky found this dynamic disconcerting, in large part because it made clear that there are real-life consequences for conflicts borne in the digital realm.

“It was this very worrying, alarming, disturbing revelation that people can organize others to target an individual and make their life absolute hell—and, potentially, ruin their professional livelihood,” he told me in an interview. “And it doesn’t matter whether the provocation or the attacks were about something based in truth or not.”

Eventually, the campaign began to shift focus beyond its initial flashpoint, soon targeting other voices in the gaming sphere, with two in particular the target of pushback: a trans game developer and a feminist commentator on YouTube. (They weren’t the only ones, but they were the most prominent.) The spreading campaign, driven by misogynistic overtones, ultimately became a key example of how cultural conflict and misinformation can infuse itself in otherwise apolitical communities.

Even as on outside observer, it was messy and hard to experience at the time. Years later, it’s still not the most fun discussion to have—but it’s one still worth having.

Wolinsky’s book leans heavy into the oral-history approach, focusing less on his own perspective and more on the perspective of his many interviewees.

A decentralized campaign, an oral history

Gamergate is messy to talk about, and many people have struggled to do just that. Wolinsky has had an easier time than most. As he put it in The Hivemind Swarmed:

Gamergate had no leaders and no manifesto. People who got involved in Gamergate attacked women, minorities, and progressives who professionally created or criticized video games, publicly sending them round-the-clock death and rape threats on Twitter and other social media platforms.

But he is ultimately not the voice leading the discussion in his own book, which you can find on Amazon or Bookshop.org. He has spent more than a decade digging into the underlying issues that created the flashpoint issues that the controversy emerged. In Swarmed, his strategy is best described as an inclusive oral history.

In a way, it makes sense: Just as Gamergate itself was decentralized, so is Wolinksky’s book, which brings in 88 people from numerous walks of life. Among gamers, this included professionals and legends alike—prominent gamers, historians, employees of large gaming companies like Electronic Arts and Sony, and developers of popular games like Monument Valley. (Even Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, not exactly known for his progressive views on gender issues, appears in the quote list.)

What makes the book stand out, in my view, is his choice to bring in voices not associated with gaming. Two of the best voices quoted in the entire book are the TV critic Maureen Ryan and Halt and Catch Fire writer Angelina Burnett. Both speak with a broader perspective than just gaming, and the book benefits greatly from that. Ryan, for example, makes an excellent point early in the book about the blog post that started it all:

… it’s abusive and it’s mean and it’s shitty, but what it foundationally is, is that “she betrayed me.” What’s the foundation of that betrayal? Turn on your radio someday and just take note of the percentage of songs that could be translated as: “she would no longer do my emotional work for me.” And I’m not saying that we don’t all ask that of each other, but honestly the dynamic of men being unable to process their emotions and their hurts and their injuries and their questions and their desires without having a woman there to do it for them or be either their carer or, whatever, therapist? That’s a huge part of this.

(Never listening to a Phil Collins song the same way after this.)

Wolinsky’s interviews occasionally aim for the rafters. (He even talked to the nonfiction essayist Chuck Klosterman, who I consider a personal hero.) But despite the prominence of some interviewees, no one voice dominates the discussion.

Which is good, because it lets Wolinsky pull deeper lessons from the many insights he brings together.

Feels like we’re going to keep running into nests over and over, aren’t we. (Enrique Vidal Flores/Unsplash)

The hivemind continues to swarm. Can we get rid of the nest?

Wolinsky released The Hivemind Swarmed last summer, and (I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but) much has happened since then. In the U.S., the political climate has grown more toxic, and the coordinated strategies once used to harass are now being used to push aggressive political narratives.

Some of this stuff isn’t new, but when you’re constantly hearing headlines about a disruptive pseudo-agency named after what was once an innocent meme, things have clearly shifted.

One fascinating element of the book is its discussion about how large game companies effectively stayed radio silent during the worst of the saga, and arguably made the situation worse. And given that many point to Gamergate as the genesis point of this kind of online interaction, it’s not hard to see the parallels.

Some point to Steve Bannon, in his role as editor-in-chief of Breitbart and later in his White House role, as making the connection between the ugly parts of gamer culture and how it more broadly infected the cultural sphere. (He notably hired an infamous troll, Milo Yiannopoulos, to be the site’s technology editor, and his new hire immediately leaned hard into Gamergate.)

At least some of his interviewees share that view, but Wolinsky has a more complicated perspective. He thinks it makes for great shorthand, but having researched it a lot, he’s not so sure.

In the book, he describes the scenario as one of a number of “autocomplete assumptions that get handed down and accepted as true due to sheer repetition.” But I think having talked to him, the impression I get is that the answer is unsatisfying, in part because it takes the onus off the internet itself for creating the dangerous dynamic. That dynamic has allowed conspiracy theories to take hold, let for-profit charlatans and sycophants dominate the conversation, and even in some cases spread to the highest reaches of power.

And while these dynamics might have started in BBSes or forums and bled into video games, they scale, just like the internet at large.

“We need to point to the bad thing and point out that it’s bad,” he told me. “But it sort of entrenches people, and the internet doesn’t really seem to have a system for giving people a pathway for coming back from it.”

At one point, Wolinsky shared an anecdote from his interest in Transcendental Meditation that feels particularly enlightening here. Essentially, he recently heard a sermon about a wasp’s nest near a zendo (or meditation center) that was stinging the monks. These are Buddhists who place high value on the sanctity of life, so there was a back-and-forth debate about what to do about this nest. It was not an easy decision, but eventually they decided to get rid of the nest.

“I always have like this swarming stuff, stinging insects, on my mind with the internet,” he says, noting that the metaphor fit perfectly with his book.

“With the internet, everyone has a breaking point, and turning the other cheek gets old,” he says. “There’s a limit to how long you can do it.”

When chaos rules the day, the hope is eventually even those who feel passive about it will get rid of the nest. That might require them to turn off their phones more often. It might require more extreme measures. But eventually, they will want to experience life without wasps constantly hanging overhead. (For his part, Wolinksy largely avoids social media these days, and he’s not the only person in my online life who surfaces in my inbox, far away from the swarms.)

This is a tough topic to cover carefully with a single pressure point. By dispersing the issue across many people and admitting that an oral history won’t solve the problem, Wolinsky has found a way to defuse the pressure point. Yes, the scary stuff is out there, but we can still consider it at a high level, so it’s not quite as scary.

Maybe it’s a lesson that will carry as the political climate becomes just as precarious as gaming culture was a decade ago.