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Gamers + the Alt-Right
TychoCelchuuu
PIGEONRegistered User regular
PIGEONRegistered User regular
One weird thing about getting older is that you get to experience worldwide decades-long slides into shit in real time, whining all the while about what's happening, and if you're chronically online, chances are you've got records. I've been on these forums so long that I can basically go back through threads almost 9 years old and trace the various conversations we've all had that document in part how we've gotten to the point where someone spouting memes mass murders Muslims. It's a story that starts (somewhat arbitrarily) 9 years ago with scantily-clothed video game characters and ends if we ever escape this hellscape that is modernity.
Back in 2010, there was this thread about video game characters dressed up in revealing clothes. I chimed in a bit on the 3rd page, noting among other things that "video games are a symptom but this does not make them okay, and like almost every other symptom of our current culture they also reinforce the culture." That thread was followed two years later by this discussion of Cortana which more or less coincided with the #1reasonwhy movement (discussed here and here). Things like the Cortana discussion had always brought out various voices whining about the feminists trying to ruin video games and explaining why straight white men are the only ones who matter, but #1reasonwhy also frontloaded a lot of the hostility to women in gamer culture.
A few months later, the Penny Arcade GOTY thread (in which Gone Home ended up winning over BioShock Infinite, although if you counted voters just from the PA forums, Infinite won) kicked off a discussion about what counts as a game and who the true gamers are. In that thread, I wrote that restrictive views about what counts as a game could cause "the PA forums to turn into something like NeoGAF or RPG Codex, a bastion of 'true' gamers who take every opportunity to assert that 'true' games are better than obscure indie games that nobody gives a shit about." (Thankfully the PA forums have only grown less friendly to exclusion and parochialism as time has gone on.) That discussion spawned this thread, in which I posted these two tweets from game designer JP LeBreton and twitter parody account The Game Police, which exists just to be fake-pedantic about the use of the term 'game':
Later that year (we're in 2014 now), GamerGate happened. GamerGate, as you might know, is a lot of things. It's a spawn of 4chan, reddit, and other hangouts of white supremacists, and also a forerunner to places like 8chan. It's the flipside of #1reasonwhy: a concerted effort to hound women out of the gaming industry (in many cases, successfully) and to engage in various other nefarious actions. In one GamerGate thread the OP notes the link between Gone Home (from the GOTY poll, remember?), GamerGate, racism and sexism and other forms of conservatism (including anti-LGBTQ stuff). Around the same time in an unrelated thread which had some GamerGate discussion, someone suggested that "more and more i agree with TychoCelchuuu's stance that this has its roots in an attempt to gatekeep what can and can not be a game" in reference to GamerGate and 4chan's dealings more generally. They're referring there to my posts in that "what is a game" thread above. I responded:
More than anything else, GamerGate put the final nail in the coffin for my giving much of a shit about gaming culture, so I was less involved in these discussions over the years in the PA forums. So, fast forward about three years to 2017, post Trump's election, to my BioShock Infinite Let's Play, which is bizarrely tied up in all this in a lot of ways. (For instance, you'll recall that this was the winner of the GOTY poll if we excluded non PA people, and as an incentive to donate to Child's Play, I offered to Let's Play one of the GOTY winners, either this or Gone Home... or consider how Ken Levine has always been a shitty middle of the road "both sides are wrong" milquetoast politics guy and how Infinite is the ultimate expression of both sides being wrong even when one side is literally white slaveowners and the other side is black slaves... anyways.) In that thread (which also includes relevant stuff about racism and violence in games, although you'll have to connect those dots yourself) I wrote (the following quote has some stuff redacted for length - check out the thread for the full version):
That last paragraph is the real kicker. Someone who yells "subscribe to PewDiePie" and guns down Muslims in a mosque is the spear tip of an entire social movement which I've seen grown from people whining about SJWs ruining Halo by making Cortana's boobs smaller to literally just neo-Nazis spewing racial epithets, and I have a real time record of getting fed up with this shit that goes back 10+ years, thanks to these forums. When a major video game company goes on 8chan to do its PR this feels like the logical result of 9 or so years ago a bunch of women coming together and explaining why the game industry is not a welcoming place for women, and a bunch of tiny pre-teenager Internet warriors getting together on 4chan to coordinate harassment. Those Internet warriors have grown up, and they've graduated from being fans of games to working in the games industry, which is still just as welcoming for them and as exclusive to women as it ever was. See for instance just five days ago, this tweet from Jessica Price, whom you may recall was the developer who was fired from ArenaNet, the creators of Guild Wars 2, for standing up to misogynists:
And it's not just that those kids grew up and got jobs in games where they go onto the successors to the message boards they grew up on so they can hobnob with white supremacist pedophiles. The new generation is getting radicalized the same way, but it's all much faster, because the default has slid so far to the right over the years. Just 5 days ago I got into an argument on reddit with someone arguing that people like PewDiePie spitting out the n word left and right is just "chat in an internet videogame between pseudonymous strangers. nobody is being oppressed." Remember that Game Police tweet from earlier? Years later gamers are still unironically parroting that sentiment, but it's about racial slurs (or rather "heated gaming moments"). And of course we still have all the same "free speech" arguments for why YouTube and twitter and so on can't ban the white supremacists, arguments which were trotted out years earlier to defend sexy character designs against SJW censorship.
Back in 2014, I said I didn't think this starts with gamers - I said it starts with racism/sexism/heterosexism/etc. I've changed my mind. Obviously in a world without bigotry, games wouldn't turn anyone into a bigot. But in today's world, I think it's clear that the route is not what I pictured back in 2014, which was bigoted teenagers turning their bigotry into gaming movements which then cause further problems. It's clear now that children who literally just want to play video games are getting radicalized by PewDiePie and YouTube algorithms and Twitch chat and everything else. They're literally being brainwashed by the white people version of ISIS before ISIS was cool, aka Nazism. I didn't see it back then because gaming was not as mainstream back then. I was so used to the shitty gamers being shitty nerds that I figured they were shitty beforehand. But nowadays all the kids play Fortnite. And all the kids watch YouTube instead of TV. (I remember riding home from the Women's March last year next to a 3 year old child of some friends. She spent the ride watching Dora videos on YouTube. They were not videos of Dora the Explorer the show - they were recorded playthroughs of a Dora flash game.) And anyone who starts clicking on YouTube is like, four clicks away from crypto-Nazi bullshit.
I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop this sort of thing aside perhaps from tinkering with the YouTube algorithms so that they aren't custom designed to turn children into literal Nazis, but I at least do know that we don't have to be blindsided by the ways in which this starts or the warning signs. You don't have to wait until someone's been radicalized enough to start mass murdering (or enough to vote for Trump). You can see it far on the horizon, and then post about it unhappily for about a decade.
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*Incidentally, India is not entirely separate from this gaming shit. "Subscribe to PewDiePie" is a meme about making sure PewDiePie doesn't lose the subscription battle versus an Indian YouTuber, because of course we can't let the pure white shining beacon of Evropean Christendom lose out to a heathen from the foreign shores. And PUBG Mobile is so popular here that one state has recently outlawed it. India, like many other places around the world, has lately started sliding into regressive ethnonationalism. It's not white supremacy, of course, but maybe it's partially YouTube's fault here, too? I don't know.
Back in 2010, there was this thread about video game characters dressed up in revealing clothes. I chimed in a bit on the 3rd page, noting among other things that "video games are a symptom but this does not make them okay, and like almost every other symptom of our current culture they also reinforce the culture." That thread was followed two years later by this discussion of Cortana which more or less coincided with the #1reasonwhy movement (discussed here and here). Things like the Cortana discussion had always brought out various voices whining about the feminists trying to ruin video games and explaining why straight white men are the only ones who matter, but #1reasonwhy also frontloaded a lot of the hostility to women in gamer culture.
A few months later, the Penny Arcade GOTY thread (in which Gone Home ended up winning over BioShock Infinite, although if you counted voters just from the PA forums, Infinite won) kicked off a discussion about what counts as a game and who the true gamers are. In that thread, I wrote that restrictive views about what counts as a game could cause "the PA forums to turn into something like NeoGAF or RPG Codex, a bastion of 'true' gamers who take every opportunity to assert that 'true' games are better than obscure indie games that nobody gives a shit about." (Thankfully the PA forums have only grown less friendly to exclusion and parochialism as time has gone on.) That discussion spawned this thread, in which I posted these two tweets from game designer JP LeBreton and twitter parody account The Game Police, which exists just to be fake-pedantic about the use of the term 'game':
Later that year (we're in 2014 now), GamerGate happened. GamerGate, as you might know, is a lot of things. It's a spawn of 4chan, reddit, and other hangouts of white supremacists, and also a forerunner to places like 8chan. It's the flipside of #1reasonwhy: a concerted effort to hound women out of the gaming industry (in many cases, successfully) and to engage in various other nefarious actions. In one GamerGate thread the OP notes the link between Gone Home (from the GOTY poll, remember?), GamerGate, racism and sexism and other forms of conservatism (including anti-LGBTQ stuff). Around the same time in an unrelated thread which had some GamerGate discussion, someone suggested that "more and more i agree with TychoCelchuuu's stance that this has its roots in an attempt to gatekeep what can and can not be a game" in reference to GamerGate and 4chan's dealings more generally. They're referring there to my posts in that "what is a game" thread above. I responded:
Around the same time, still in reference to GamerGate, I got a PM from someone who wrote "I used to think you were extreme and maybe even a little wacky on your views about sexism in games. I don't think so any more. I wish I had supported you in this sooner, but I just didn't want to look into this ugly corner of playing and caring about games and stuff." They continued in another PM: "The last few weeks feels pretty much like when the neo-nazis tried taking over the punk scene in the 80s. I must admit that I'm ashamed that I didn't really notice the relationship until now. I really should have known better."I actually think the fight about "what is a game" isn't where it starts - it starts with hostility towards minorities/people who care about them/marginalized artists/"SJWs."
More than anything else, GamerGate put the final nail in the coffin for my giving much of a shit about gaming culture, so I was less involved in these discussions over the years in the PA forums. So, fast forward about three years to 2017, post Trump's election, to my BioShock Infinite Let's Play, which is bizarrely tied up in all this in a lot of ways. (For instance, you'll recall that this was the winner of the GOTY poll if we excluded non PA people, and as an incentive to donate to Child's Play, I offered to Let's Play one of the GOTY winners, either this or Gone Home... or consider how Ken Levine has always been a shitty middle of the road "both sides are wrong" milquetoast politics guy and how Infinite is the ultimate expression of both sides being wrong even when one side is literally white slaveowners and the other side is black slaves... anyways.) In that thread (which also includes relevant stuff about racism and violence in games, although you'll have to connect those dots yourself) I wrote (the following quote has some stuff redacted for length - check out the thread for the full version):
TychoCelchuuu wrote: »Infinite is almost everything anyone could have an issue with in AAA gaming. [...] Gone Home, meanwhile, was a cute little game about lesbians where you walk around a house rearranging coffee mugs and listening to riot grrl music. This is when it was first starting to dawn on some people that games could maybe be about more than just murdering lots and lots of people. The fight over who is and isn't a gamer, and what is or isn't a game, began to kick off, which is the middle of the three main Gamer Identity Moments lately that brought us up to our current shitstorm (the other two being #1reasonwhy and #GamerGate). [...]
If you read through those threads and the other related stuff [...] you'll see that the narrative I'm pushing and that I think is pretty clear is that all these things are linked together. Misogyny and sexism built into the game industry, parochialism about what counts as a game and who counts as a gamer, #GamerGate and Depression Quest (which, if you read the GOTY thread closely, was already incipient)... it's all part and parcel of the culture war that, to put it rather bluntly, got us a Trump in the White House (among other things). [...]
The suggested reading for this section originally included an article called "The Case for Never Talking about AAA Games" which is no longer online, unfortunately, plus a dumb reply article I included just to illustrate the sort of responses it got. [...] In the time since then, the person who wrote that dumb reply has become one of the main faces of Heat Street, one of the big alt-right Internet sites. [...] I'm not saying everyone who likes BioShock Infinite is a #GamerGator who loves Donald Trump, but I am saying that AAA gamer culture was formed in part by, and is thus inextricably linked to the output of, places like 4chan. Do with that what you will.
That last paragraph is the real kicker. Someone who yells "subscribe to PewDiePie" and guns down Muslims in a mosque is the spear tip of an entire social movement which I've seen grown from people whining about SJWs ruining Halo by making Cortana's boobs smaller to literally just neo-Nazis spewing racial epithets, and I have a real time record of getting fed up with this shit that goes back 10+ years, thanks to these forums. When a major video game company goes on 8chan to do its PR this feels like the logical result of 9 or so years ago a bunch of women coming together and explaining why the game industry is not a welcoming place for women, and a bunch of tiny pre-teenager Internet warriors getting together on 4chan to coordinate harassment. Those Internet warriors have grown up, and they've graduated from being fans of games to working in the games industry, which is still just as welcoming for them and as exclusive to women as it ever was. See for instance just five days ago, this tweet from Jessica Price, whom you may recall was the developer who was fired from ArenaNet, the creators of Guild Wars 2, for standing up to misogynists:
And it's not just that those kids grew up and got jobs in games where they go onto the successors to the message boards they grew up on so they can hobnob with white supremacist pedophiles. The new generation is getting radicalized the same way, but it's all much faster, because the default has slid so far to the right over the years. Just 5 days ago I got into an argument on reddit with someone arguing that people like PewDiePie spitting out the n word left and right is just "chat in an internet videogame between pseudonymous strangers. nobody is being oppressed." Remember that Game Police tweet from earlier? Years later gamers are still unironically parroting that sentiment, but it's about racial slurs (or rather "heated gaming moments"). And of course we still have all the same "free speech" arguments for why YouTube and twitter and so on can't ban the white supremacists, arguments which were trotted out years earlier to defend sexy character designs against SJW censorship.
Back in 2014, I said I didn't think this starts with gamers - I said it starts with racism/sexism/heterosexism/etc. I've changed my mind. Obviously in a world without bigotry, games wouldn't turn anyone into a bigot. But in today's world, I think it's clear that the route is not what I pictured back in 2014, which was bigoted teenagers turning their bigotry into gaming movements which then cause further problems. It's clear now that children who literally just want to play video games are getting radicalized by PewDiePie and YouTube algorithms and Twitch chat and everything else. They're literally being brainwashed by the white people version of ISIS before ISIS was cool, aka Nazism. I didn't see it back then because gaming was not as mainstream back then. I was so used to the shitty gamers being shitty nerds that I figured they were shitty beforehand. But nowadays all the kids play Fortnite. And all the kids watch YouTube instead of TV. (I remember riding home from the Women's March last year next to a 3 year old child of some friends. She spent the ride watching Dora videos on YouTube. They were not videos of Dora the Explorer the show - they were recorded playthroughs of a Dora flash game.) And anyone who starts clicking on YouTube is like, four clicks away from crypto-Nazi bullshit.
I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop this sort of thing aside perhaps from tinkering with the YouTube algorithms so that they aren't custom designed to turn children into literal Nazis, but I at least do know that we don't have to be blindsided by the ways in which this starts or the warning signs. You don't have to wait until someone's been radicalized enough to start mass murdering (or enough to vote for Trump). You can see it far on the horizon, and then post about it unhappily for about a decade.
Suggested Discussion Topics
- I have two main theses in this post: one about the ways in which various arguments in gaming are all tied together, and one about the increased pace and reach of radicalization as driven by YouTube algorithms. What do you think is the relationship between the two, if any? Am I overstating the link between the two? Understating it?
- Was I right all along? Was making a fuss about Cortana's huge tits a way of trying to stop the rise of the alt-reich? Or have I been insane this whole time?
- What are some aspects of this topic that reach beyond gaming? One big topic is Facebook, WhatsApp, and fake news. I live in India now, and my impression is that most people here are radicalized by WhatsApp threads full of fake news, which are forwarded to them by their racist uncle. This has nothing much to do with gaming. Is it still the same issue? What about fake Facebook news in America, which shares responsibility not just for Trump but also for measles? Is this too big a topic to even tackle?*
- Can YouTube and twitter and Twitch fix things by banning PewDiePie and rewriting algorithms? Or is the problem too huge to admit of a fix, whether it's algorithmic or manual content review or anything else?
- Even if they can fix this, will they? Why would they? Can anyone make them? Would that be a good idea? That would actually be censorship, if, say, governments force YouTube to censor videos. Would this censorship be okay?
- This is more than just a video game problem - YouTube will do its best to force Nazi takes on Marvel movies down your throat, for instance. Did this start with video games? Or is that just what I paid the most attention to over the years?
- Are there other PA threads from years past that you think help highlight how we've gotten where we are?
*Incidentally, India is not entirely separate from this gaming shit. "Subscribe to PewDiePie" is a meme about making sure PewDiePie doesn't lose the subscription battle versus an Indian YouTuber, because of course we can't let the pure white shining beacon of Evropean Christendom lose out to a heathen from the foreign shores. And PUBG Mobile is so popular here that one state has recently outlawed it. India, like many other places around the world, has lately started sliding into regressive ethnonationalism. It's not white supremacy, of course, but maybe it's partially YouTube's fault here, too? I don't know.
Tube on
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The algorithms, for example, prioritize "engagement", which usually includes stuff you don't actually want to see because it creates a bigger reaction so you get more Nazi shit.
Youtube could deprioritize Nazi stuff so that you only see it if you are subscribed, if they couldn't be bothered to ban them altogether.
Also, I disagree with some of your analysis on Bioshock Infinite, but I am positive we had that conversation.
Anyway ..
I don't live in the USA so my views on the matter are fragmented at best. And while some of what you describe can be applied here (Germany), things are, as usual, bigger and "better" in the USA. I don't click with your take on "Gamer" culture (I'm old. I play games. I don't spend my free-time making the lives of immigrants harder. I feel offended by being lumped in with idiots that do). I get my information from this forum and links posted in threads, The_Donald, reddit and by watching left leaning and right leaning videos on Youtube.
Having clarified my "credentials", there are 3 points I'd like to make:
1) There seems to be very little overlap in narration between the left and the right
You'd think that given any event, there'd be a large consensus on what actually happened with the differences being on how to interpret it. Particularly during the Trump campaign and whenever horrible things happen, if you take a look at how Fox/The_Donald spins it and how CNN or Colbert talk about it, you'd be forgiven for thinking they were talking about different events. I don't know if this is by design, but if neither side can agree upon the most basic of things (i.e. what objectively happened) then dialogue simply isn't possible. This is made worse by ..
2) Ultimately, society only works if people are acting in good faith
And many people simply aren't. People like Trump, Hannity, Carlson do nothing but lie, distort and evade. And yet these people are given incredibly large platforms to speak from. And it isn't just their "fault". The people listening to them are just as responsible. If you want a nice democracy where people can get along then it is your duty to inform yourself and avoid these idiots acting in bad faith. And I don't think censorship is the way forward. Because once you open that particular door you're going to end up with things being censored that perhaps shouldn't be or some sort of demented "social points" system like China recently implemented. And even if you look at countries that severely restrict what you can look at and what you cannot, people still managed to find ways to access forbidden materials. Therefore ..
3) We need to be teaching children how to deal with all of this
Because racism and bigotry isn't going to go away. People need to given the tools to identify people that are not interested in the greater good (the flat-earth movement and the debunking thereof is a great example). As to how to tackle societal variables (upbringing, norms) .. I have no idea. Perhaps the trade-off of the internet is that it will produce extreme viewpoints.
You play video games, i play video games, my sisters play video games, my nephews and nieces play video games, my mom plays video games.
Everybody plays videogames.
Gamer culture is very separate from people who play games.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the effect they are having are the modern day equivalent to the printing press. When the printing press came into use the increased proliferation of ideas (often via pamphlets) from people who would otherwise never be able to share their thoughts led to the destabilization of Europe and the shattering of the Catholic Church's authority over religious matters in many countries. All because of printed words and the new ideas they contained.
Today, pretty much anyone in the world can have their own modern equivalent of printing press and distributor. Perhaps this is introducing too much chaos into society? If so, how do we limit who can spread ideas, who's ideas should we forbid from being shared, and how can we make sure that the people we want to be able to spread their ideas are not themselves censored?
Like, for example, what if Twitter or Facebook decided one day that talking about race in any context was forbidden because it attracted too much negativity? I'm sure most here wouldn't be happy with that.
I know a couple of kids like this I’m worried about. I like to think they’ve got a solid moral compass, but then I overhear them while they play online games and it’s like if Andrew Dice Clay was a klansman.
gotta talk to the parents. The lift is very heavy for parents to push back against YouTube at this point though. It was much harder to keep my youngest from being radicalized than it was the other two.
I have more thoughts on this, but I think one of the critical components of this situation is the intense balkanization of gamers along sociopolitical lines, and especially the increased tendency of progressives and moderates to cede ground to the screaming alt-right. My desire to hear rants about SJWs is far lower than their desire to spew them, and the result is we lose control of the public square, and then the alt-right moves on to the next frontier and takes that as well.
At some point, we have to stop abandoning our spaces (and stop driving away allies). Gamer culture could have been a place where you get kicked from a party for racism on mic, but it's not, and that's in part on us.
I've been involved with another gaming forum that plays games competitively.
And I would guess that community has been around in some form or another for a couple of decades.
And it contains and appears to have always contained the sort of casual joking toxicity that I see mirrored in the NZ terror attack.
So I don't play those games anymore because of that community.
I don't think there's been much evolution in at least that space, and I don't think there needed to be to enable this.
So I feel this has always been with us.
Or at least in Aus.
I don't know how you combat this, because 'combat' is probably the wrong word.
These are people who find crudeness funny, and attacking that is attacking them.
To fix it you'd have to make them feel uncomfortable for repeating these things, and short of removing them from their social group and ostracising them from their new social groups because of such views, you'd probably need to show pain caused by them which they can't dismiss outright.
So yeah.
I don't feel like the hate needed social media (Youtube/Twitter) to grow, and I think politicians peddling the hate has more to do with where we are today than anything social media has done.
Perhaps it helps with resourcing such attacks? But I don't know what's out there or been used.
A lot of that is on whoever provides and moderates the space, though, which is the problem we’ve seen with Twitter (i.e., corporate leadership either bring ambivalent or cryptically supportive of fascist ideologies).
Imgur actually has a great TOS that prohibits the kind of behavior that fosters bigotry and radicalization, but it’s virtually never enforced and the right-wing membership feels completely uninhibited to spread hate unmitigated.
There’s no solution to any of these problems if there’s no enforcement of good policy.
Wow... that brings me back.
I don't know how long ago it was, but at least 10 years ago, if not longer, I realized that being an optimist and positive on a discussion was far harder than being a pessimist/negative. It takes energy to learn about a culture, examine your mistakes, and present sourced rhetoric. It is very, very easy to just say something negative, only apologize if needed, and keep saying negative stuff.
Thing is, we need those voices. And those voices get tired. They get jaded because there's always someone negative lurking out there. And if you ever slip up, the negative voices will never let you forget.
... as I'm typing this, it's reminding me a lot of my personal battles with depression, but that's not the point.
Anymore, I only hang out here online. And that's because a handful of amazing individuals take up the work of stopping the negative folks from taking the easy way out. They've set an example, and as a result everyone else shares the burden of policing the community. And this, naturally, leads to burnout. But in the meantime, it presents a form of gatekeeping for respect and inclusion, instead of gatekeeping by easier methods.
The big communities? There is no one doing that gatekeeping. They need eyeballs present to make money and increase their influence, so they welcome everyone. There is no Tube or Elki or what not. So that leaves the advertisers in control... and that creates things like the algorithm, and the desire not to spend money on policing things. And honestly, and depressingly, I don't think there is any way back from that. Because again, it's hard - it requires a company to be willing to give up money in return for being a good steward. So instead they automate it away, trying to earn more money but allowing for holes.
I don't think I'll ever forget a moment I had back in 2013. Due to circumstances, my brother had his gaming PC in the same room where I was sleeping. He was a huge DotA player, and I got to hear him cracking jokes with his teammates. And he said something I found incredibly offensive. I called him on it, told him I never wanted to hear him say such things again... His defense was that it didn't mean anything, that they were just playing around, etc, and I said I didn't care. You don't use that language because it hurts people. And more than that, he knows better - and I was disappointed in him. I don't think I've ever heard him talk like that again.
Sadly, voices on the internet are not as real as friends and family... and I highly suspect many don't have friends and family who know about this issue and are willing to speak up on this issue. Again, the path of least resistance wins. And thus you get a culture. A culture where it's just expected that people will be shitty, and others are tired of calling them on their behavior, and instead just avoid them.
And then we get to where we are. Where people are broken into treehouses, not talking to each other, and not learning from each other.
... I wish I had a better answer after all this typing. But I don't. The only thing I can think of is education - knowledge that the problem exists, and how to combat it. Maybe that can be done in school. Maybe that can be done online (like Crash Course's internet literacy courses). Or maybe it could just be shining a light on these issues and calling a spade a spade. I don't know.
I'm just glad I have this place. And I wish more people had places like this too.
Im not sure if its always the moderators, its like there is a taking the high road feeling with progressive content creators that ultimately damages them and the whole medium, for example on youtube. People that I adore, like Contra Points, Shaun, Hbomberguy, etc. they do some great analysis on alt-right videos and opinions, but they link those videos, and urge people to watch them.
Even if you dont watch them, they will start showing up on playlists or recommended because they are somehow linked.
And I have a hard time beliving that creators who are so invested in their trade are ignoring how youtube groups videos, or how helpful it can be for a relatively small alt-right channel to get a lot of viewers, even if the new viewers disagree with the content, it makes them more visible to everyone. It feels like the alt-right is a lot more focused when it comes to spreading propaganda than the progressive/left is willing to fight it, or at least it not give it extra traffic.
Mother Jones had a report about that on 2017.
Look at Reddit, as a quick example. It took the Christchurch massacre to get them to ban snuff subreddits like /r/watchpeopledie and /r/gore .
Honestly I'm not sure what that solution looks like at this point. On a per-forum scale, the best solution is moderation - ban people who violate the norms, in order to keep the people who don't want to be around that stuff. But that just pushes the banned users into forums that are less moderated, or else subreddits where everybody agrees with them. They'll always have a forum somewhere or other. What we want is for those forums to fade away and be marginalized by a shrinking number of people who find them appealing. That goes right back to the bigger sociopolitical problem.
Quick call-out: Othering parts of this forum kind of runs counter to this whole discussion, no? SE++ has its own culture and history and the like, but to call it the cellar implies it is lesser, dark, evil, rotten, etc. In reality it is home to some of the most uplifting and supportive threads I've seen in the forums. It's also a place where a spade will be called a spade, sometimes moreso than in D&D.
Just.. keep that in mind with the general context of this thread.
It’s taking internet cultural hubs a disturbingly long time to answer the question, “Am I okay with hosting hategroups?” The reason for that can really only be either it suits their own ideologies or their bottom line.
Imgur's moderation team is largely volunteer(edit: at least it used to be, not sure about now), so you have a situation where regardless of the ideals set in the ToS, it's wildly inconsistent based on the moderator that's actually reviewing the content.
To the mod staff here: thanks for being pretty great.
And that's the thing that's scary. The establishment (or just older people) have no idea as to the extent of the problem and how the current fight is literally for the continued existence of democratic government.
I mean... slave revolts in the United States were bloody and often involved the murder of people we would often consider innocent, like children. They were violent because it was a group of brutalized and terrified people taking back power, however temporarily.
I felt like bioshock had a more accurate representation of armed revolutions by oppressed people than most games. The populi weren’t evil, but they only know suffering and rage so they’re going to inflict that on other people. It was as bloody and arbitrary as the Bolshevik revolution or most peasant uprisings.
Yeah these people have entered the work force in general and are very tech savvy, so naturally many of them congregate in Silicon Valley. We can speculate that they are mostly still young though and unlikely to be in executive-level positions yet. Right now I think the problem we've been seeing in social media companies like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit is one of amoral leadership - the alt right aren't controlling these companies directly, rather corporate leadership is consistently unwilling to jeopardize their business by speaking out against any portion of their userbase. It's a similar situation in politics. The only thing that ever seems to work is for the situation to reach a boiling point with something everyone can agree is a tragedy that must be acted upon. Basically the danger of alienating the general public has to be greater than the danger of alienating the fringe group.
One thing I'll note is the effect this has had on me, personally. For about a decade I've been critical of the culture around video games and "nerd" media, beginning with criticisms of the pseudo-female empowerment of Firefly and continuing up to more recent things like the power dynamics of female characters in the Witcher series, with everything from the racism of Bioshock Infinite to the "game/not game" status of Depression Quest, and the shitty subtle misogyny of Altered Carbon being things that I've complained about in some form.
I don't limit this to spaces like these forums, and it has earned me a reputation among my various friend groups as someone who, and I quote "doesn't actually like anything." It's exhausting for me, to have my opinions stripped away and reduced to a meme status.
More importantly though, is how I feel now like the Cassandra of myth- in all those PA threads linked you I'm sure you can find me insisting that no, complaining about the dumb, gross, big titty wizard game wasn't a wast of time, that these depictions have real effects on real people, and make them devalue women and minorities because the only versions they see are disgusting caricatures... and then Gamergate happens. And then PewDiePie happens. And then the alt-right actively courts gamers mad about the current shift in culture, and here I was warning people about this for years, but being brushed to the side as an "angry SJW who just needs to put the turbofeminism down and enjoy things." And this is from people who I wouldn't consider alt-right, or even adjacent! People who condemn PewDiePie even!
I can't say I predicted a mosque shooting being led with "Subscribe to PewDiePie!" but I'd be lying if I said it surprised me in any way.
I don't really know what to do except keep getting mad at shitty things and actions in the communities I belong to, and hope that I can put political pressure on some governments or industries to work to neuter the online spaces where these feelings fester and grow.
I think this is the case with Facebook (Zuckerberg is an amoral asshole who thinks he's a good person, which is dangerous in its own way), don't know with Reddit, but Jack Dorsey? That dude at least has extremist leanings.
Ive noticed, anecdotally at least, a strong libertarian streak in programmers and that feels like a gateway drug to alt-rightism
Programmers are often smart with a relatively narrow field of knowledge. Many are self taught, or simply got a 4 year degree and suddenly earn 6 figures which makes them think being poor is a choice. That background, combined with the overwhelmingly white male workplaces at every tech company make a worrying breeding ground for extremism
I remeber at Facebook they had a big wall people can draw on, and people would write All Lives Matter in response to someone writing Black Lives Matter. I recall Zuckerberg having to email the staff to tell them not to do that and patiently explaining what black lives matter means
EDIT: I don't think we can let traditional news media off the hook, either. Not in this modern age of news agencies feeling like they need to "present both sides" as though all opinions are equally valid, or for not calling out racist/sexist behavior and dog whistles for what they are, or for simply trading facts for sensationalism. Or for shit like this happening without legit news agencies calling it out: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/03/local-news-imitation-sites-deal-in-gop-political-messaging/
As their not-parent, you have very few options and little power here.
Frankly, the only real solution is for parents to just not let their kids use youtube without fairly strict limits I think. Youtube is refusing to police their own shit-house properly so the best you can do is control their exposure.
And, obviously, educate them about what videos can lie to you about and such, which you as a (I assume) trusted uncle can help with.
Social media is just not a place you should let children play around in.
Mentioned this in the Christchurch thread, but smartest thing a teen has said to me in my four years of teaching so far: "Social media been dangerous."
Jack Dorsey gives me the same vibes as Notch: a hack with no real savvy, sense, or self-awareness accidentally stumbling into something ludicrously successful, and thus unable to manage it while also being unable to realize his own limitations. These people naturally go bad because there is nothing to contain their worst impulses, internally or externally, so they just steep and fester in it.
Honestly this sounds like a "the boy who cried wolf" situation, although with concerns that are actually valid. They're still fringe, and if people who aren't onboard hear them enough they eventually tune out.
I know I personally met a Chinese woman through two mutual Chinese friends at a Lunar New Year gathering a few years ago who I added as a friend on Facebook. Probably 90% of her posts are critical of men and whites. I never commented on anything she posted, but my mutual friends frequently argued with her. Now they've both unfriended her, and one of them has started sharing "NPC" memes despite hating Trump and the alt-right and being a fan of ContraPoints.
Once I'm living by him it'll be way easier to be a good influence. But even at the soonest he'll be 16 by then.
I have 14 year old freshmen absolutely drowning in this stuff. Trying to work on educating them but it's hard (especially in a math classroom, maybe I should teach civics...)
I mentioned this when we were talking about this earlier but, like, let your kids watch TV instead. Dead serious. TV is incredibly safe. The worst thing Netflix is gonna do to a child is try and get them to watch a Netflix Original movie. And while offensive to good taste, it's not bigotry and fascism.
But because it had not mauled anyone (that people saw, though there have been quite a lot of corpses with teeth marks that look very wolfish), nobody gave a shit.
I think something similar happened ( or is happening?) to gaming. Gaming used to be alarming. People freaked out about Doom and other games like it (and to a certain extent that still happens today). And it developed an out-group stigma that exists to this day. My wife, for example, is happy to spend a lazy day watching Netflix but considers 4-5 hours in a gaming session unhealthy. She doesn't know why. It's just something she absorbed from the culture around her. Gaming is bad. Gaming is not healthy. These kind of outside pressures shaped the gaming community much like it shaped the metal community, and like most outgroups gamers did not take well to their niche going mainstream. They didn't like the people that always mocked them coming in and changing shit.
I think that's..... normal? For lack of a better word. Perhaps expected? Gaming went from a niche and much maligned hobby for nerds to a humongous mainstream industry. It's been the focus of intense academic study and critique, and as it was pretty much a boy's club not a lot of that focus has been positive. The interesting thing to me is that the gamers who were outraged about shit like Cortana's boobs were actually correct. Perhaps not right but correct. Stuff like that was the sign of things to come, the beginning of their genre opening up to a wider audience, the "cleansing" of undesirable elements for the mainstream.
So, in response to suggested OP topic
I'd say no, the mainstreaming of gaming was always going to happen and it was always going to bring turmoil with it. It's a thing that will pass, as it always does, when the gentrification process is complete. You can even see this with internet places like Reddit, Youtube, etc. Once upon a time the New Zealand video would have been EVERYWHERE, now longtime subreddits are instabanned for having it. It's not the wild west anymore, and it's becoming less wild all the while. The only awkward thing about this particular process was that the teams got mixed up somewhere along the way, and that's what I've never been able to really understand. The internet, gaming communities, online communities, all these new and non-mainstream elements should have been for the left what they are now perceived to be for the right. Progressives are and liberals tend to be the artists, the limit pushers, the thinkers. Historically that's been the case. Crazy edge-pushing artists does something radical, conservatives gasp and clutch pearls. How that got turned around in regards to the internet, gaming and such is eternally puzzling to me.