The chiptunes label and review community, Chiptunes = WIN, parted ways with musical artist Alex Soborov because he publicly criticized Zoe Quinn for her Alec Holowka’s suicide. This came shortly after a thread spread around castigating Soborov for his comments, and initiating the cancel culture tactic of trying to get him removed from the community.

It started with a tweet chain from Twitter user clover on September 4th, 2019, after Soborov made a tweet criticizing Zoe Quinn following Alec Holowka’s death.

yesterday, a chiptune artist, label founder, and chiptunes=win judge had tweeted out a pretty nasty response to the recent events of zoe quinn’s allegations against alec holowka. as i write this, its still up, but ill leave out who said it, in case he sincerely learns from this. pic.twitter.com/J58o61F3MP — clover (@soullessclover) September 4, 2019

If you can’t view the image through the tweet, you can view Soborov’s original tweet below.

Clover would continue to pepper criticism in the direction of Soborov, like a salt shaker going to work on a tasteless teak.

its easy to hope for the best in people. and its hard to admit that people who arent Capital-S. Shitty Dudes can still harbor biases, or apathy, or hatred. i get it. but theres a difference between optimism and making assumptions that give harmful people the benefit of the doubt — clover (@soullessclover) September 4, 2019

(zoe uses they/them pronouns by the way. a lot of people whove been talking about recent events dont seem to be aware of that. not your fault, its not super common knowledge. they also write a comic for dc image! its called “goddess mode” and it fucking rocks, i love comics yall) — clover (@soullessclover) September 4, 2019

This was later picked up by the official Chiptunes = WIN Twitter account on September 5th, 2019, who promptly responded by announcing publicly that they would no longer be working with Alex Soborov nor hosting his music through their platform.

If you’re unable to read the message in the tweet, it states…

“As of yesterday, Chiptunes = WIN will no longer be working with Alex Soborov aka Purely Grey as his statements on Twitter go against our Mission Statement and goals of the project. “Chiptunes = WIN was founded on the ideals of inclusivity, diversity, and spreading the reach of chipmusic to those who love it. We do not always reach that goal, but we will continue to work to be more and more like our ideals.”

Soborov certainly wasn’t quiet when it came to being thrown under the bus, and responded with a tweet of his own, calling out Cancel Culture.

Here’s a follow up to that tweet I made. Make your own conclusions.https://t.co/BTOFntY1dK — Alex Soborov (@alexsoborov) September 5, 2019

More: I do not expect that anything from it is going to help me, I only hope it helps people like me in the past who are afraid of saying anything in fear of being kicked out — Alex Soborov (@alexsoborov) September 5, 2019

There’s a massive image collage that features Soborov’s commentary on the event, which you can view below.

While there is a lot of text and plenty of seemingly incoherent Twitter conversations captured in the image, the gist of the message is actually contained at the top of the image, where Soborov writes…

“I am not proud of how I said it, it is harsh, yes, but also it is accurate. Believe it or not, I sometimes think harsh thoughts. “To clarify: I don’t think ZQ single handedly caused suicide, that would be giving her too much credit. I still think that she is a liar and her motives are ulterior, and while I prefer to think that people are good by default, I don’t think she is any good and deserves to be taken at face value after all scandals. I can’t come up with any other explanation why people believe her except because she is a woman, and women are beautiful. If this was a guy he would just “get bent” or something I’m pretty sure. “Also as you might have noticed I refuse to use her “pronouns”, because I think she is again, lying for profit, and it in my opinion it is a disgrace for everyone who are actually bi/trans/whatever. Not that I care about sexuality, if you are a good person to me, I am a good person to you. Simple. “It’s not like I don’t believe “survivors”, I don’t believe anyone. Some people can spout lies with a straight face and profit from it while ruining lives. Everyone should be questioned. And not only ZQ is a liar extraordinaire, her tweet was about events that happened 8 years ago and she had zero evidence, it was just her word and word of “other people”. If a bunch of people spout the same nonsense it’s not evidence, remember. What if witnesses lie? Lying in court is a serious offence for a reason. “People like Scott Benson don’t get to play victim after the guy has died. Where’s basic human decency? It’s not like he was a serial killer or anything, and even if he was, talking about how you was such a victim and “survived” him because you caused yourself a bunch of mental anguish is a disgrace. I’m not sorry for you Scott, not in the slightest. Also I dislike how you intertwined the feminist narrative and your hatred of capitalism into it. It’s all about you, isn’t it? You didn’t “survive” Alec, you are a wolf who plays sheep.” [sic]

What he’s referring to is that Alec Holowka’s former studio partners at Infinite Fall, threw him under the bus after Quinn made public allegations about Holowka. Scott Benson and Bethan Hockenberry proceeded to fire Holowka from the studio.

After Holowka committed suicide, the two quickly deleted their Twitter accounts following the badmouthing they laid at his feet while he was still alive.

Soborov, however, still had more to say. In his rebuttal to the Cancel Culture parasites, he wrote…

“I am disgusted at how they are trying to paint [Alec Holowka as] the villain and pat each other’s backs. Maybe the guy had problems, maybe he did stuff he wasn’t proud of. So did I. I was a somewhat weird dude, sometimes hard to work with. 8 years ago I was a completely different person and I was in the shittiest relationships with a girl who could lie with a straight face, too. But it doesn’t matter now. I’m also a musician and the work of Alec had a positive impact on my life, and the ripples spread, I made a work inspired by his work and it had a positive impact on even more people. And I am not alone. I would argue that his positive impact on the world was bigger than negative one. “There is another important reason why I decided to speak out. “For the longest time I’ve been in disagreement with lots of things that happen in the ‘chiptune community’. At some point I started to fear that the type of people I usually disagree with will go after me and try to ruin my career if any of my ‘wrong’ thoughts would surface. Mind you, it never was this way, if you’d ask me 3 years ago if I was a feminist I’d tell you that I was despite the fact that I had no idea what ‘feminism’ is actually about, once I remember I was pissed that some guy said there’s less woman CEO’s because they are not fit for the job or something. I was a good one, I suppose. But things happened along the way and bit by bit I started to question if this is really what I want to stand for. Turns out that it is not. My choice was to pretend that I am, not to do anything at all, or to speak out and face the consequences. The first two are basically lying to yourself, so I chose the latter, but because I feared the rejection and the pretty much exact reaction I’ve seen I just couldn’t do it for almost a year. “And now it is out. Everybody showed their true colors because of it. Some might say that I used the tragedy to do something for myself and yes I did, it was spontaneous but I knew exactly what I was doing and what to expect, and I am not proud of it. After all I am a faulty human being, just like everyone else. I meant what I’ve said. “I’m sure there are other people like me, so if the story rings any bells – speak up! It will only get worse with time if you don’t.”

Soborov may have been dogpiled online, but he still held his own and expressed his discontent with the way Cancel Culture pushed a mentally unstable indie developer over the edge. This still goes to show that speaking up and being truthful has steep consequences in today’s society given the fact that propagandists and cult-like activists basically rule social media at this point.

Even still, while Chiptunes = WIN may have parted ways with Soborov, you can still purchase his music and check out his work over on his official Purely Grey website.

(Thanks for the news tip Lyle)