A couple of days ago, on the 5th anniversary of GamerGate, the New York Times published a collection of articles on the topic. I’ve been ramping down my GamerGate activities due to personal circumstances, so I’m only getting to read them now, but so far, I’m pretty impressed by how little we’ve traveled in so much time.

I want to start with Charlie Warzel’s article “Everything Is Gamergate”. Charlie Warzel is a great journalist on these sort of internet controversy topics, if you’re only concerned with the usual mainstream left view of the world. It can’t be helped, so it’s best to not worry about how one-sided the view is. I mostly want to focus on places where he takes the step from “one-sided” to “outright lying” or “plainly ignorant”.

His article begins:

ON AUGUST 15, 2014, an angry 20-something ex-boyfriend published a 9,425-word screed […] a manic, all-caps rant made to go viral.

We won’t be bothering with the word count, but I’m concerned that Warzel has apparently never read the Zoe Post, and is certainly not going to link to it in his article. I understand that if you believe that it’s all lies, likely to radicalize the reader into a foaming-at-the-mouth Gator, you don’t want to be spreading it, but it’s kind of insane to not even mention Gjoni by name.

The beyond the slurs against it (which is “fine” because it’s an opinion article), we have a factual error that’s trivial to check. This sort of “why would you even make that up about GamerGate?” type error drives me absolutely nuts, so a huge porportion of this article is going to just be spent whining about it. I’m unironically triggered by this, and have decided it’s my mission to at least correct this tiny error at the expense of almost everything else. Anyone can just go to https://thezoepost.wordpress.com and find out for themselves how much of it is “all-caps”. Here, I’ll do it for you.

An all caps instruction to trolls that they’re not only bad people, but they’re also making a tactical mistake, one that has apparently so undermined the good parts of GG that we’re faced with a bunch of NYT hitpieces 5 years later. 25 words all-caps, running total 25/9,425.

Two sentences where all-caps is meant to indicate mental yelling. It troubles me that Warzel has never seen personal blogs before, or is somehow otherwise unaware that this is a thing millenials do in informal contexts. About 40 more all-caps words in these couple of paragraphs, running total 65/9,425

Sure, it counts. 67/9,425

Every act has these bolded TL;DRs. Visually, they make a big impact, so we’ll count them. Let’s say 20 words, 87/9,425

30 more words, 117/9,425

3 more words, 120/9,425

20 more words, 140/9,425

A full paragraph of all-caps near the end of act 6. 27 words bringing us to 167/9,425

Another all-caps in act 6. Let’s just call it 25. 192/9,425.

Just gonna dump a bunch of the TL;DR section. “LOT” and “NEW CONTENT” are the only ones here that should really count, so let’s just say 200 all-caps words in a 10,000 word “screed”, not counting “I”. 2%, give or take.

“Screed” is a perfectly flexible descriptor, which people love to throw around for everything. This medium post will be inevitably described as a screed. “Angry” is a pretty obviously true descriptor, probably used by himself. “Manic” is a bit on the iffy side, I wouldn’t use it because it seems to methodically built and calculated. The Boston Magazine article painted him in that light too, quoting him as saying that his earliest drafts were reminescent of a “really boring, really depressing legal document” before he rewrote it to appeal to the audience.

But “all-caps” is just plainly wrong. I feel like I saw more all-caps in the screencaps of Zoe Quinn’s facebook messages than I did in the main text. It’s even worse, because it has so many flexible definitions, and all of them wrong. I could reasonably read that as “the entire thing is written in all-caps because that’s how angry misogynists write on the internet” and that would be a clearly false statement. A more flexible “has a high percentage of all-caps” is still plainly wrong, because we have paragraph upon paragraph of angry writing, but only like 10 excerpts can capture the entirety of the all-caps, showing that only ~2% of the document is all-caps, and of that, several are just eye-catches for TL;DRs, and one is an explicit call to tell harassers to stop. Warzel might have been more accurate if he complained about Gjoni’s use of bolding, which I’m too lazy to bother counting for now and will be left to the reader.

And what does this blatant lie, which the reader is not invited to check themselves with a link to the Zoe post, going to do? Nothing! It really ads nothing. Warzel could have just NOT lied, and just leave it at “screed” and “manic”. Hell, call it “vindictive gossip” for all I care. Why lie?

I asked him if he had seen the articles and what he thought about the all-caps line. https://imgur.com/a/BoF7Q3g for the messages I sent.

Anyway, moving on, we have

and quickly conjured a conspiracy theory that Quinn slept with gaming journalists in return for good coverage. It didn’t matter that the writer in question had never reviewed her games.

+10 Points for the use of the word “coverage”. Looks like someone learned their lesson the last time we bitched and moaned about it. -10 points for still falling into the trap of “had reviewed her games”.

I’m not going to get super into it right now, but the TL;DR of this particular “reviews vs coverage” nitpick is that people on both sides say “reviews” and there was never a review. So anti-GG always pulls it out as a “dumb gators will believe anything, they must be misogynists that are only using ethics as a cover, didn’t even check that the original spark was true.” There are plenty of GG people that say “reviews” and/or have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about, so it’s kinda true, but the people that DO know what the fuck they’re talking about are exasperated by people acting like this is some big gotcha. Some idiot wrote a proGG article yesterday (in the wake of the NYTimes articles) and got this wrong, only stealth-editing it after KiA corrected him. The super short version of why that’s wrong is that after GG was sparked by the Zoe Post, the things that blew it up were the Gamers Are Dead articles (taken as proof of industry-wide collusion, later deepened with GamesJournoPros) and massive crackdowns on almost every discussion board (taken as proof of collusion extending to the discussion board moderators/admins). Even if you were COMPLETELY ignorant of the Zoe Post, you might have come to GG after massive backlash to either Boogie2988’s or TotalBiscuit’s coverage of the surrounding events (links needed, but too lazy and rushed right now). When the entire industry, from journalist to pro devs to forum moderators, turned against those two, it was pretty shocking. A lot of people came to GG because of a massive comment graveyard in /r/Gaming. In other words, Streisand effect and other second order effects were more responsible for GG activity than anything involving Zoe, so a lot of GGers focus on the angle that the “review vs coverage” question is largely moot. Also, the Quinnspiracy videos were headed with “sex for favors”, and focused on a whole bunch of other people defending Quinn. Phil Fish going ballistic on Twitter, tons of indiegogo/kickstarter circlejerking between people in the industry (Polygon people donating to ZQ on petreon is something I seem to remember, but don’t want to dig up right now), the fact that Grayson was defended by Totilo by saying “oh that’s fine, he only got into a relationship a month after the last time he wrote about her”. People become concerned and suspicious if they’re not allowed to talk about something, and GG was more concerned about the unity of the “don’t talk about this” message, taking that as proof of collusion. This is all so rushed, I shouldn’t have even bothered with it when there’s so much more to talk about in this article.

I swear to god this “reviews vs coverage” nitpick is going to keep happening forever. Someone please just debunk this shit forever. Fuck I just remembered that Patrica Hernandez was roommates with someone she wrote about. Anna Anthropy maybe? Christine Love has a shitload of connections with various writers. People just never thought to look until they were told not to. I’m franky embarrassed I even remember any of this shit after 5 years.

Now Warzel is talking about a bunch of preceedents, but I would’ve used #YesAllMen because that was literally the month before, iirc. Also Sarkeesian, Jennifer Hepler, and Patricia Hernandez are way more relevant than YourSlipIsShowing, imo. Minor nitpick, most of this seems perfectly fine, except for the kind of “oh, this behavior is new and unique to the internet” tone some of it has. I’m not generally convinced, but I blame Jon Ronson. When we get to the “influencers” part, I really like this argument. The rise of Instagram Influencers is kind of an interesting phenomenon that Crystal Abdin is researching professionally, and we’re framing GamerGate as a specific case of a widespread phenomenon. I definitely can get aboard that, but I do wonder how well that makes sense if you’re willing to look equally hard at all parts of it. So for example, tons of ink is spilled on the harassment of certain women/minority influencers, but nobody’s gonna give a shit if people are constantly telling Dave Rubin to go fuck himself. It’s an interesting research question if you like data, but it’s not something that will ever really make it to the NYTimes Op Eds as a heartwrenching anecdote. I wonder what the at-mentions on Richard Spencer’s Twitter are like, if he’s not banned yet.

One can draw a crooked line between Gamergate’s online advertiser boycott, which caused Intel to pull ads from gaming sites like Gamasutra, and Sean Hannity’s 2017 campaign against Keurig coffee

I unironically love that we’re in full “Everything is GamerGate” mode after years of sort of dancing around it. Someone finally said it. The problem here is that it’s weird that we’re calling this a GamerGate playbook. The above… is stolen from the left, isn’t it? Maybe that’s just how I see it because I’m on the left and think of boycotting in general as a progressive-liberal thing to do. As for the crowdfunding and Patreoning, isn’t that the left too? I’m thinking Obama and Sanders campaigns. I’m thinking Chris Avellone, full of tattoos and clearly a leftie, running a recordsetting kickstarter. I’m thinking of the zillions of “help me pay for HRT” indiegogos. Earlier I praised Warzel for treating GG as a specific example of the wider shifts in tech… but here he’s treating crowdfunding and boycotts as a thing that was spawned by the GamerGate grifter economy. Does that really make sense? Why not BLM and Antifa as examples of where the GG playbook has been used?

Next we get to slander against Vivian James and Pepe. The sources used in Daily Beast-cited by the Clinton campaign, were openly trolling the writer, something I’ve discussed and investigated at lenght and you can see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/52mztp/twitter_user_jaredtswift_trolls_his_way_into_the/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/532iel/daily_beasts_pepe_reporter_is_confirmed_for/ They even showed up for a mea culpa, which was basically immediately discarded as irrelevant: https://dailycaller.com/2016/09/14/heres-how-two-twitter-pranksters-convinced-the-world-that-pepe-the-frog-meme-is-just-a-front-for-white-nationalism/ No correction or annotation was ever made to my knowledge.

I wonder here at “ bigotry disguised as media criticism”. In general we call this “mindreading journalism”. A relevant question is “What is the way to convince you that someone is actually just criticizing media? How can I distinguish myself from a bigot, or are you literally never going to believe me?” I’ll think about that at some point. Total Biscuit and Erik Kain have repeatedly said that everyone should abandon GamerGate immediately because the well has been poisoned against it. They’re right, but GamerGate is also where everyone gathered up, so you’d have to start from scratch if you went somewhere else. AntonioOfVenice always wanted KiA to become Anti-SJW-Central for the same reason, but has officially failed.

The problem of mindreading/distinguishing comes up later at “trollish successes in intimidating women, deceiving clueless brands…” Brands only know that people are angry and that they want to protect their image. I think brands in general shouldn’t give in to internet outrage mobs, but B-Volleyball-Ready can probably tell you a great story about when Warzel wishes the “clueless brand” would be deceived instead. What counts as a “legitimate” boycott? People often get stuck on how BDS simultaneously is and isn’t woke. Is it jew-hating (unwoke) or anti-war (woke)? Let me know when you figure that one out, and we’ll see who will buy it.

A bigger complaint I have with this article along these lines is the complete lack of discussion of “muh freeze peach”. Even if you believe everything regarding GamerGate is misogyny, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of Gators have transitioned towards free speech and first amendment issues (which many liberals believe is also just a front for racism and sexism). He’s completely dropping that angle from the article, despite Van Valkerburg v. Gjoni being defended by one of the leading First Amendment scholars in the country, and many Gators’ first run in with the deep and fascinating world of how free speech _actually_ works. Even if he believes that this is just a legal cover for misogyny, he should bring it up as evidence of systemic sexism, and further proof of how the right weaponizes free speech arguments to attack women and minorities. Also, I know for a fact that a lot of people on the GamerGate subreddit KotakuInAction (KiA) will yell about how much they love free speech and the First Amendment, then call for “racist” professors at public Universities to lose their jobs when they say some stupid shit in class or on social media. That’s not how it works, and you’re a fucking disgrace, get out of my sub, reee.

Anyway, that’s all for now, because I gotta make some wine. I’ll come back for more rants later.

Edit 2019–08–18: part 2 is here https://medium.com/@itsnotmyfault01/nytimes-5-year-gamergate-anniversary-response-pt-2-d41f8ef3c58c Somehow is even less focused on the actual content and arguments of the articles.