“We don’t have to be tolerant of other people’s intolerance. That’s bullshit, frankly...”

That’s what Zoë Quinn, author of Crash Override, told me. For the unfamiliar, Quinn was the video game developer at the center of the 2014 Gamergate saga. It’s hard to sum up something as absurd as Gamergate, but here goes: In August 2014, Quinn became the victim of a sweeping online harassment campaign, which began after her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni posted a 10,000-word manifesto online accusing her of, among other things, sleeping with a video game reviewer in exchange for a favorable review of her game.

This occurred amid an ongoing debate within the gamer world about ethics in gaming journalism and the perception that a left-leaning gaming press was obsessing over feminism and the place of women in the industry.

Of course there’s no evidence that Quinn traded sex for a positive game review, and in fact, the positive review she is accused of soliciting doesn’t exist. But that’s no matter. Like most internet mob attacks, this wasn’t really about the thing it was supposed to be about. Gamergate shape-shifted into something else entirely: an online culture war about political correctness.

Quinn, who was known for speaking out about gender inequities in the gaming industry, became an avatar for everything the male-dominated gaming subculture detested or feared. “If I ever see you are doing a panel at an event I am going to, I will literally kill you,” said one of the early messages she received. “You are lower than shit and deserve to be hurt, maimed, killed, and finally, graced with my piss on your rotting corpse a thousand times over.”

I spoke to Quinn last week about why she chose to write a memoir right now and if she’s worried about exposing herself to more harassment. “I don't know if you can do anything visible enough and still have teeth to it that doesn't piss off somebody,” she told me. “At least the people who are pissed off at me are miserable, hateful little fuckers that I don't want to like me anyway.”

We also talked about Silicon Valley’s “bro culture,” the role of Gamergate in popularizing the alt-right, and why we need to rethink how we use and regulate the internet.

Our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity, appears below.

Gamergate: What really happened

Sean Illing

A lot of people, even people who know what Gamergate is, still don’t understand it. What was it really about?

Zoë Quinn

Well, I had an abusive ex-boyfriend who I cut out of my life, and Gamergate started when he launched an online harassment campaign with me as the target. He posted this manifesto that was designed to go viral the way marketers would design an ad campaign — it included in-jokes and shareable images, and it was carefully posted in all of the places most likely to pick it up and turn it into a harassment campaign.

Later, it picked up steam when someone floated a rumor that I had slept with somebody for positive reviews of my game, even though the person in question had never reviewed my game and worked for a site that I had already written for and I would have needed a time machine to make this possible, but none of that ever really seemed to matter. It didn't matter that the review never existed. People ran with it and used it as a convenient smoke screen to say that they cared about ethics in games journalism.

Sean Illing

And this picked up steam where? On gaming sites or obscure message boards?

Zoë Quinn

It came out of subterranean message board sites like 4chan [now a popular breeding ground for alt-right content], which are almost designed to engineer and perpetuate online hoaxes. Sites like 4chan were trafficking in “fake news” before fake news was a thing. Eventually, my drama was given the name Gamergate to help it go viral and make it appear bigger than it was. The whole thing sort of steamrolled from there.

Sean Illing

What made you such a soft target in this weird online gaming world?

Zoë Quinn

I don't look like what a very vocal minority perceives as the default gamer, which is straight white guys that don't really have a whole lot going on. I'm none of those things, other than white. I make weird games that don't resemble closely mainstream stuff like Call of Duty or Mario, so I think it was easy for them to look at me and perceive me as an invader, which is really sad because I think a lot of us end up in games not only because we love them but because they're something that helps with other chaos going on in our lives.

Sean Illing

So I confess to knowing almost nothing about this world. I have this caricatured image of the lonely, alienated male nesting in his parents’ basement in coffee-stained sweatpants. And when I think about that, it makes perfect sense that a non-controversy like this could spin into a resentment-fueled, half-ironic hate campaign against someone like you.

Zoë Quinn

No, I don't think that's an accurate characterization of the game world at all. The thing is, Gamergate wasn't because of games. Games were really an afterthought. The fact is, there’s been campaigns like this across a bunch of different industries. It's a symptom of this larger brewing negative sentiment toward anybody that could be perceived as other.

The further away you get from the 1950s sitcom dad, the more people there are out there that hate you. All of the bigotry and hatred and stuff that happens offline definitely translates online, so really this was just the game-flavored version of that rather than something that is unique to games.

Sean Illing

So you really don’t see what happened to you as a product of the underbelly of gaming culture?

Zoë Quinn

I really don’t. I mean, this is our world, the broader world — not simply the gaming world. Look at who's running the country right now. It's really not unique to games at all. There are people like this all over the place, and some of them happen to play games.

“I don't really care about the people that want to hurt me, what they think about me. I care about people that might need something like this and not have it, and I feel a sense of obligation to them.”

When your breakup morphs into a culture war

Sean Illing

You talk about the surreality of watching yourself get turned into a meme, a kind of digital piñata. Can you describe what that was like?

Zoë Quinn

It was incredibly weird and disturbing. It's simultaneously the most personal and least personal thing in the world because people are attacking you personally. In my case, people were sending me nude photos of myself that they had jerked off on, and then they started targeting my friends and family.

But at the same time, it wasn’t about me at all. At some point, I realized that I had become a convenient stand-in for whatever was bothering these people [who] participated in this craziness. I was basically just a witch to burn because their crops weren't coming up. I was a scapegoat for a bunch of inaccurate bullshit about how they feel like women and people of color and trans people are trying to take their games away or something.

Sean llling

What was the scariest moment for you?

Zoë Quinn

I think it was as soon as they had found my home address and my dad's address, and my phone number and my dad's phone number, and I started getting flooded with calls and my dad started getting flooded with calls, and I had to talk to him about it. Hearing him have to say the same jokes that my ex had come up with to talk about what a whore I was, because he's like, "What's this Five Guys Burgers and Lies thing that people keep calling and screaming at me?" Hearing my dad say that out loud was horrifying.

I can deal with shit that comes my way all day long, but it’s different when someone you care about, someone who isn’t involved, is targeted because of their connection to you.

Sean Illing

Listening to you talk about all this, it sounds like the gaming world is experiencing changes that a lot of people don’t like, and so you’ve got a bunch of estranged persecution maniacs looking for an outlet.

Zoë Quinn

Yeah, and there’s nothing new about this — either in society or in the gaming world. Back when I was a teenager running around in game circles, this was the first thing. If anybody found out you were a girl, they'd be like, "Tits or get the fuck out." That was the joke. You had to show your tits or get out. There's always been this “you don’t belong here” attitude. The same thing happens for a lot of people who are Jewish or people who are not white. That stuff's been going on for a long time.

I feel like it's just a backlash reaction to the fact that gaming is becoming so much more open and diverse, and similarly culture at large, thanks to the internet and a lot of other stuff. Progress always marches forward, and some people can't deal with that.

“Gamergate just helped build some infrastructure and maybe elevate some people who would go on to be stars in this new, fucked-up constellation of assholes.”

Gamergate and the alt-right

Sean Illing

I’m still struggling to understand how this odd internet subculture evolved into what we now call the alt-right. How something marginal and virtual gradually became mainstream and concrete.

Zoë Quinn

I get that, but I think it makes plenty of sense. You’ve got these online communities, whether it's Gamergaters or men's rights activists, who are not actually interested in rights for men or really in anything that coherent. These are people who don’t have community in any other aspect of their lives. It's a place where they're surrounded by people that accept them. In that context, I feel like it's very easy for any bias or ignorance in their heart to get fed and propped up through encouragement of like-minded peers.

Sean Illing

I’ve been thinking of Gamergate as a Big Bang moment for the alt-right, but you seem to disagree.

Zoë Quinn

I do because Gamergate wasn’t the start of it. This movement was already underway. It was happening to women of color, to trans women, to gay people. Gamergate just helped build some infrastructure and maybe elevate some people who would go on to be stars in this new, fucked-up constellation of assholes.

So Gamergate was just a big recruitment drive and helped build community, and helped firm up the ties between younger online groups and older conservatives who didn’t understand how to make things go viral. By merging all of these cultural and political issues, it forged ties between Alex Jones conspiracy theorists, white nationalist sites like Stormfront, and various transgressive communities online. Anyone who resented popular and progressive culture found a common banner.

Battling hate on the internet

Sean Illing

Part of the reason you wrote this book is to help find ways to prevent the next Gamergate. But I look at the internet and conclude there’s not much we can do about this. Am I too pessimistic?

Zoë Quinn

I think people are always going to have a fear or distrust or hatred of people who are not like them. The question for me isn't, “Can we stop this?” It's, “How do we disempower that and make it as harmless as possible, and not dictate the tone and roles by which the rest of us have to live by? How do we marginalize people whose actions and beliefs are incompatible with a society that functions for everyone?”

A lot of it I think is just you've got to make it not fun for people, because that's where it is right now. It's rewarding for people. That's the horrifying thing. When people are allowed to just do this to other people, they get that little power trip. They get these high-fives from their buddies.

If you make this shit boring, and you make it sustainably boring, whether it's banning accounts or taking open stances and saying, "That sort of thing is not fucking welcome here. It will not be tolerated.” Companies that control sites and platforms have to be explicit in making this less fun and cool for the abusers. We don’t have to be tolerant of other people’s intolerance. That’s bullshit, frankly, and I’m disgusted every time I hear some variation of this attitude.

Sean Illing

I hear that, but I wonder how do we actually do that without making the internet unfree? Should we just shut down the Twitter accounts of assholes whenever they start insulting people?

Zoë Quinn

Yes.

Sean Illing

You don’t see that as stifling speech?

Zoë Quinn

We've been down this road with spam. Spam is closer to free speech than telling someone that you're going to fucking kill them. We already had this argument back when the internet was new, and people were saying the same things about spam. It's like, "I have a right to advertise my business however I want. I'm not breaking any laws. I'm not doing anything wrong." But there was an obvious problem: It was ruining everything for everyone else.

You don't even have to get into this free speech bullshit. Was this platform created with the intent that neo-Nazis would harass and ruin people’s lives? If not, then you need to fucking do something about it, and that's ultimately how spam got dealt with. This is impeding the intended function of this platform. This is taking up space. It is ruining this thing that we've built, so we need to actually do something about it. Now anti-spam stuff is a $1 billion industry. I don't see how that is not the exact same thing going on here, except way more harmful for the people that are on the receiving end of it.

Sean Illing

The spam example is interesting. I guess I see the internet and social media platforms as instruments. Which is to say, there is no goal, no intention. It’s a tool that’s as good or bad as the people wielding it. If a lot of people using it are assholes, it’s going to reflect that.

Zoë Quinn

Yeah, and there's demonstrated effects that in communities, the people that are the most toxic, and that are just out there harassing the shit out of everyone, will drive the conversation closer and closer to their side of things, as people who don't want to be around that stuff leave. But again, my point is that we have terms of service on these platforms that say, "We are against harassment." It's just that nobody actually enforces them.

“If nothing else, we’ve got another three years of having someone who is endorsed by the KKK in office”

Sean Illing

Why not? Why don’t they enforce their terms of service?

Zoë Quinn

When I was originally writing the book, I thought, "Maybe they just don't know how bad it is." Then after working with people in tech for multiple years on thousands of cases, I can say that they absolutely do know. It's just that the internet currently runs on this economy of attention that equates eyeballs on things to content that's good. That's what's attractive to advertisers. That makes a number go up in a spreadsheet. It pleases shareholders.

Taking any sort of definitive action that bans somebody, especially if it's something that gets a lot of traffic, a lot of views, or a lot of engagement, then they're digging into their own pockets. Then [with] somebody like Milo Yiannopoulos, who has built an entire brand off doing this sort of thing, and has built a very large platform because no one's ever taken action against him, it becomes a financial risk for these companies to actually do their fucking job.

Sean Illing

But Milo did get booted from Twitter, right?

Zoë Quinn

Yeah, after how many of us got our lives ruined because of him?

Sean Illing

You say you’ve gone to tech companies and asked them to enforce their terms of service, and they refused to do it. Which ones have you gone to? What was their excuse for not doing it?

Zoë Quinn

I've worked with damn near anybody that's a major platform holder at this point. A lot of what I was asking for was, "Please enforce your own policies." That's it. That's really it. I would get all sorts of bullshit responses, most of them having to do with speech and freedom.

Look, there's a big culture problem in Silicon Valley. People of color, women, trans people, and any number of combinations of those already have a hard time working there, and the burnout rate is so high that we’re basically being driven out.

I can't name the number of tech bros that have come after me. And to be fair, there are lots of good people in Silicon Valley who are trying to do the right thing, but they're working within a broken system. If you go high up enough the chain, you'll probably find someone who fucking sucks, because these are usually young, white millionaires that do not give a shit about the rest of us, that live in a bubble, that don't really see this sort of thing, that are so high on their own bullshit about how tech is disrupting and saving the world that they can’t be bothered to engage with problems like this.

Sean Illing

In the book, you say we need a total cultural shift in terms of how we think about and use the internet. That’s probably true, but culture doesn’t change overnight. So we’re stuck with this version of the internet for the foreseeable future.

Zoë Quinn

I think that’s right. If nothing else, we've got another three years of having someone who is endorsed by the KKK in office. We're at a place in our culture where neo-Nazis are literally killing people on the streets in broad daylight. Yeah, we're in trouble, and it's not great, but in the meantime, it's not like it's purely up to corporations to be doing stuff.

If we can start to take charge of our own communities in our immediate vicinity, discourage bad behavior from people, teach, start building empathy into the ways that we talk to each other, and think about the ways we use the internet, and encourage people to build resilience into their communities to help withstand that sort of thing, then that's something that doesn't have to be a slow cultural shift. We can start right now.

I feel like there's a lot of people that want to help with this sort of thing that just don't know what to do yet, and that's really what I was trying to do with the book. Here's a ton of stuff that you can do right now and that doesn't require waiting for any sort of change in policy.

“In my case, people were sending me nude photos of myself that they had jerked off on and then they started targeting my friends and family”

Life after Gamergate

Sean Illing

Do you feel like you’ll ever get back the life you lost? You say in the book that no matter what you do now, people see you as victim rather than a programmer or a creator.

Zoë Quinn

I think it's impossible for me to go back to the life I was trying to build. A few weeks before all this started happening, I think I said on Twitter, "I want to be the Oscar Wilde of games, and just toss out something weird while atop a throne of boys," or something like that. I'm not going to be able to be this weird niche person that's got my own small little following that is enough to pay the rent and maybe a little bit extra, making weird stuff on my own terms, mostly left alone and left in peace.

I know that I'm never going to be able to do anything that exists in public without being hassled and stalked and threatened, but at the same time, I refuse to stop living just because of that. Even on stuff like this book tour, there's a pretty credible threat for my next appearance. I know that, and I'm still going. I'm taking the precautions I can, but I'm not about to run and hide because ultimately that would mean giving the people who attack me what they want.

A lot of it's just been trying to learn how to be at peace with the fact that there is lies and misinformation about me propagated by people who claim to want me dead. So, yeah, maybe it’s a realistic possibility that someone could just fucking kill me someday. Any number of these threats could be completely serious, but that's so far beyond my control, it's like worrying about dying of an aneurysm or getting hit by a comet.

I try to be as safe as I can, but I can't live in fear of stuff that I have no control over. I try to think about it in terms of making the right sort of enemies. I don't really want to be someone that neo-Nazis like. I'm not here for them. I don't know if you can do anything visible enough and still have teeth to it that doesn't piss off somebody, so at least the people who are pissed off at me are miserable, hateful little fuckers that I don't want to like me anyway.

Sean Illing

Do you worry that by writing this book, by going on this tour, by continuing to be out there making this case, you're just keeping the target on your back?

Zoë Quinn

It was something that I definitely considered when I was thinking about writing it, but that is super outweighed by the thought that maybe somebody out there can read this that needs the information or is in a position where they can do something for someone else, because I don't really care about the people that want to hurt me, what they think about me. I care about people that might need something like this and not have it, and I feel a sense of obligation to them.

Honestly, I want to get back to being a goofy, creative weirdo — that’s the reason I got targeted in the first place. I'm not well suited for this hero activist role or whatever. I'm a messy person that wants to live and create and not worry about shit like this. But this thing has happened, and now I’ve got live with it.

Maybe we’re all fucked up, maybe we’re all a little crazy, but that’s okay, and we don’t have to pretend otherwise. I know I can’t make it through this thing alone. We've got to start taking care of each other now, because nobody in power is going to do it for us.