I ended up watching one of Anita’s videos. I thought some of them were well-made, and she clearly had an audience. I don’t understand what all the outrage was about. It was straight up McCarthyism. Her videos were relatively inoffensive and can easily be moved on from.
“Gamers” are mindless consumers who are completely subjected to the whims of corporations. Even the category of ‘Gamer’ is made up and not coherent (no an activity you do does not constitute an identity).
I don’t understand what all the outrage was about.
I genuinely believe gamergate was and is an online movement that continues to beg for more serious analysis. It wasn’t a harbinger of Trump politics like some pundits think, actually it was a culmination of half a decade of continuous culture war waged by Rush Limbaugh types during the Obama years, and eventually evolved into a the more coherent belief of “politics is downstream from culture” by Andrew Breitbart. I said this before but this “culture war” was waged on several fronts, from movies, to sci-fi books to fucking MtG. Breitbart the magazine under Bannon was just waiting for the right movement to latch itself onto and the most explosive one was GG.
The book “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency” goes into this pretty well, and echoes your exact sentiment. Bannon had been lurking around “gamer culture” since the early World of Warcraft days.
Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is very very good and covers exactly this subject. It was one of the main sources Robert Evans used for his similar shorter work The War On Everyone (regardless of feelings of the author it’s a good concise history of the evolution of fascist movements in the US into what they are now.
It is embarassing how much of a pant shitting outrage gamers threw over some pretty innocuous videos.
Right up to YouTube removing the dislike button, videos uploaded to the femenist freq channel still had at best 50:50 ratios of likes to dislikes. So wild to me gamers really spent the last decade continuing to go to her channel to downvote anything even tangentially related to her.
I ended up watching one of Anita’s videos. I thought some of them were well-made, and she clearly had an audience. I don’t understand what all the outrage was about. It was straight up McCarthyism. Her videos were relatively inoffensive and can easily be moved on from.
“Gamers” are mindless consumers who are completely subjected to the whims of corporations. Even the category of ‘Gamer’ is made up and not coherent (no an activity you do does not constitute an identity).
I genuinely believe gamergate was and is an online movement that continues to beg for more serious analysis. It wasn’t a harbinger of Trump politics like some pundits think, actually it was a culmination of half a decade of continuous culture war waged by Rush Limbaugh types during the Obama years, and eventually evolved into a the more coherent belief of “politics is downstream from culture” by Andrew Breitbart. I said this before but this “culture war” was waged on several fronts, from movies, to sci-fi books to fucking MtG. Breitbart the magazine under Bannon was just waiting for the right movement to latch itself onto and the most explosive one was GG.
The book “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency” goes into this pretty well, and echoes your exact sentiment. Bannon had been lurking around “gamer culture” since the early World of Warcraft days.
Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is very very good and covers exactly this subject. It was one of the main sources Robert Evans used for his similar shorter work The War On Everyone (regardless of feelings of the author it’s a good concise history of the evolution of fascist movements in the US into what they are now.
It is embarassing how much of a pant shitting outrage gamers threw over some pretty innocuous videos.
Right up to YouTube removing the dislike button, videos uploaded to the femenist freq channel still had at best 50:50 ratios of likes to dislikes. So wild to me gamers really spent the last decade continuing to go to her channel to downvote anything even tangentially related to her.
To be fair they don’t really have anything better to do