Zoe Quinn survived one of the internet’s most vicious hate mobs, and has counseled thousands of victims of online abuse. That hard-won experience is on full display in her new book Crash Override, which is part memoir and part manifesto.

“I’m still an engineer at heart,” Quinn says in Episode 271 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So if I can automate conversations that I find myself keep having to have, it seems like a good opportunity for me.”

Quinn says that the legal system is generally too slow and cumbersome to deal with online abuse, so instead she’s been working with various tech companies to help craft appropriate terms of use. Unfortunately she’s come to believe that too many companies aren’t really interested in fixing the problem.

“People really need to know how the sausage is getting made here,” she says. “Because [these companies] aren’t going to change or move on anything until it’s actually a bad look for them, until they actually have something to lose.”

She says that well-meaning bystanders often react to online abuse by attacking the abuser or by trying to publicize the victim’s misfortune, but neither approach is as helpful as simply offering aid and comfort to the victim. “We need to really be our brother’s keeper in a lot of ways,” she says. “If there’s someone who’s dealing with some shit online that you know and you’re close to, check in on them, just see how they’re doing.”

That said, it is possible to stop abusive behavior if the abuser is challenged by someone that they like and respect. This sort of confrontation may be uncomfortable, but it’s become vitally necessary as online abuse increasingly spills over into real life.

“It’s at the point where people are marching through the streets with torches,” Quinn says. “You’ve got to speak up.”

Listen to the complete interview with Zoe Quinn in Episode 271 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Zoe Quinn on the mob mentality:

“There’s so much collateral damage and so much inaccurate information when it comes to this, like when people were trying to figure out who the Charlottesville driver was who killed that woman at the rally. They got a bunch of people wrong at first, and those people got mob attacked and so did their families. The second that you make this stuff public and you send up the signal flare for the mob, you give up control over what happens next. … Are you even right about this person’s identity? Are you OK with what would happen if you’re wrong? Are you OK with their family becoming super-targeted? Are you OK with the families of someone who just has the same name as them being targeted? You give up that control in a mob setting.”

Zoe Quinn on the so-called alt-right:

“If you want to do effective reporting on the effect that these people are having, why not actually speak to the victims? Why not speak to the people that they’ve targeted? Why go and give them a microphone? How is that helpful to anybody? You’re just giving these people more opportunities than the people they’re targeting. Imagine a place where the only people who were given a platform to speak about Nazis were the people that they were actually hurting. You’d be able to get the same sort of journalistic merit and information, you could do the same homework, and then you’re actually putting a human face on the impact that this stuff has.”

Zoe Quinn on the media:

“There have been a number of film, TV, and—actually—theater productions that have been based off of me. Pretty much none of them have ever actually spoken to me, and I die in most of them. It’s really kind of weird to see fictionalized versions of you die or get raped or whatever. There was somebody who was selling Kindle erotica of me getting gang raped by five guys and stuff like that. It’s weird when you stop being a person to a lot of folks and just become a weird talking point. It’s like you become a meme, and you’re not a person anymore, and people don’t mind stealing your life. Even if you’ve already sold the rights to your story to someone, and you’re writing your own memoir, they’re so eager to tell the parts of your story that they find more interesting, and they’re super not eager to talk to you at all to find out what actually happened or who you are.”

Zoe Quinn on her new game:

“[Chuck Tingle] sent me a bunch of drawings, and I took a couple tweets and started assembling them into this [game] starring Wil Wheaton, Mara Wilson, and Dante Basco. … It’s FMV—Full Motion Video—so like Night Trap, stuff like that. And we’re doing the sex scenes via dramatic reading by a celebrity. Everything in the game is FMV, all of our characters—including the Unicorn Butt Cops and Bigfoot Pirate Ghost. We’ve got the animator who did Omega Flowey from Undertale helping out with some of our animations, so if you’ve played that game then you probably know that we’re going to get a little bit weird. But the whole thing is really about loving yourself and loving other people, and trying to do a romantic comedy that doesn’t suck.”