The public square is increasingly in private hands. It is controlled by a number of commercial choke-points regarding social media and sales points.
Amazon, for example, down lists and de-prioritises self-published works - especially erotica. This means that independent and smut authors have a hard time competing on an equal playing field. Producers of adult content also often find themselves paying premiums on payment processing and even being barred from services such as Paypal. This is a misuse of 'Operation Chokepoint' again.
It may be necessary, soon, to assert the human right to free expression over private companies, in the same way, that LGBT and racial minority rights have been asserted over bakers, bars, diners and cafes in the past. With that going to the Supreme Court in the USA soon, this may present a precedent for the extension of civil rights into the private sphere on a larger scale. I rather hope so.
For my part, I am fairly close to a free speech absolutist, so far as pragmatism allows. To my mind, the only valid excuse for censorship is if that expression meets the Harm Principle – something that's nearly impossible for mere speech. The Harm Principle, as formulated by J.S Mill is:
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
It shouldn't need clarifying, but it is [current year] so, unfortunately, we have to. When we talk about harm here, we're not talking about hurt feelings or feelings at all. What would meet the harm principle, regarding speech, would be direct calls for violence?
“I hate white people,” wouldn't meet it.
“Kill whitey,” would.
Context, of course, also plays a role. Things are excusable in comedy – for example – that aren't when said with sincerity and genuine intent.
Having been a – repeated – victim of private censorship has, no doubt, shaped my view and I do not claim, in any way, to be unbiased.
Occupy Wall Street
Perhaps the first huge sign that something was going wrong emerged during Occupy Wall Street. The factors that contributed to its collapse as a useful and meaningful movement are obvious in retrospect. What ha begun as an incredibly broad-based and unifying cause against corporate and moneyed influence on government ended up as a divided and sectarian laughing stock[25].
The problem then, as now – though for different reasons – was intersectionality.
“Intersectionality is a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another.”
- Geek Feminism Wiki
In theory that can sound like a good idea, after all, yes, these things can and do stack up. In practice, it tends to create a sprawling orthodoxy where the 'perfect is the enemy of the good', and where nobody can sufficiently agree on a singular cause to get anything done. Sometimes these aims even become contradictory.
It has also lead to a rather regressive inversion of the, presumed, normal social hierarchy. In this version priority is given to the most 'oppressed' and 'marginalised' person in the form of 'The Progressive Stack'. This is a form of 'oppression Olympics' that forces people to exaggerate and even fabricate their identities and forms of oppression so that they can speak at meetings and be taken seriously in a broader context. If you ever wondered why so many people seem to preface anything they say with a laundry list of race/gender/sexuality/mental illness etc., now you know why. They're seeking both permission to speak, and power from victimhood.
Intersectionality killed Occupy by dividing and subdividing that initial, broad-based, citizen uprising until all that was left were the true crazies. What was left was incapable of compromise and only the most 'pure' regarding 'Social Justice' credentials. A handful of the worst of the worst.
I best saw this explained on a Youtube video, closer to the time, that I have since been unable to re-find.
Imagine a whiteboard, clean and pristine, gleaming white.
Now picture drawing a circle on that board – as large as it will allow – and label this one 'money in politics'. That's about as large and inclusive as Occupy ever got to be, everyone who agreed on that singular issue. That took in many conservatives, a tonne of libertarians, masses of socialists and many ordinary folks concerned with the way politics was going.
Now draw a slightly smaller circle, barely any smaller and label that 'corporate personhood'. Most people still agreed on that, but you might have lost a few of the more extreme libertarians and Rand-fans who were concerned by corporatism but who saw 'money as speech' as fine.
Now draw a more significantly small circle within that one, down and to the right a little. Label that one 'wealth inequality'. You're probably losing more of the capitalism fans by this point, a lot of the libertarians too and a lot of regular folks, no matter how good the arguments might be.
Now another, smaller circle within the last one, mark that 'wealth redistribution'. This occurs already of course, but many people associate it with 'socialism', Communism and other associated terms have negative connotations, especially in the USA, wildly beyond what they deserve – but there you go.
You can already see how the size of the movement is shrinking away, and this is just sticking to directly related issues. Try drawing a much smaller circle and label this one 'rape culture'. This is an unrelated, radical feminist narrative that the remaining, somewhat reasonable, people are unlikely to go along with as a concept.
What about 'forgiving all debt', a rather extreme demand? What about asking for a racial/gender equality amendment (unnecessary as said rights are already guaranteed)? How many people from that original big circle are going to be left at this point? How many people are going to agree with everything in all those circles?
Occupy showed how the left could eat itself, alienate liberals who could otherwise agree with many of the professed aims and it showed just how harmful pseudo-left, pseudo-academic discourse and weird identity politics could be to genuine causes. Many of Occupy's concerns and practices were so extreme, so unrelated, so obscure, so laughable that they harmed the central movement. We saw a shift though, and mere ridiculousness wouldn't be enough to disarm this kind of thing for long.
Atheism Plus
An immediate precursor to Gamergate and sharing many factors with it, Atheism Plus was an attempt to stage a 'coup' of sorts within the New Atheism movement. This was a split that was, in many ways, between the 'sceptic atheists' – rooted in a tradition of science and scepticism - and the 'political atheists'. That second group's reasoning appeared to come more from opposition to the Christian Right on an ideological level, rather than a basis of logic, reason and commitment to the intellectual pursuit of truth.
Supposedly it was about atheism plus dealing with a bunch of other things. Initially proposed by blogger Jen McCreight, it suggested that atheist activism should also apply itself to feminism, social justice, racism, homophobia and so forth. Unfortunately, it forgot to implement the foundational scepticism and critical thinking inherent to much of the New Atheist movement to its sacred cows. As leading figures like Rebecca Watson, PZ Myers and more embraced it and began making intellectually weak 'Social Justice' arguments and attacking fellow sceptics those professed beliefs came under scrutiny. They were weighed, measured and found wanting. The Atheism Plus people found their ideas being considered with the same attention to detail that atheists and sceptics had previously turned on religious beliefs, pseudoscience and alternative medicine.
They didn't like it much.
Social Science is barely science in the minds of many. Its relative lack of rigour, its lack of reproducibility [26], its vulnerability to hoaxes [27][28] and its hostility to peer review [29] make it a joke amongst those involved in the hard sciences. All of this is doubly true for Gender Studies and similar 'disciplines' that wear their biases on their sleeve.
&nb
sp; This isn't to say that all Social Science is garbage, but it does appear to be deeply compromised and infected with ideological bias and postmodernism. Little wonder that people who weren't impressed by the Creation Institute have not been impressed by the pseudo-scientific end of these disciplines, even when they've been embraced by people who called themselves sceptics, albeit selective ones.
Of course, that scepticism, that questioning, has, in turn, caused the other side to double down, to accuse any who disagree of misogyny, racism or whatever other 'accusation du jour' seems apposite. This has created an enormous fracture within that sceptic/atheist community which will likely never be healed.
Much of what happened in Gamergate is similar. People sceptical of the sexism/racism and 'mind control' claims made of video games were accused of all manner of horrible things simply for asking for evidence. It's also similar in that with both Atheism Plus and Gamergate, the problems started with people from within, rather than without. A break in the tradition of most moral panics which are usually attacks by external enemies.
I have been an atheist since I was old enough to realise that Father Christmas wasn't a real thing and I was able to draw the obvious parallel between the one and the other. The sceptic and atheist communities had been as much of a haven as gaming for me, a place to meet like-minded people and to continually learn.
To see this fringe group of crazy people, operating as much on faith as any religion, break up what had been a consistent and growing movement since 2001 was, frankly, heartbreaking. It made me a hell of a lot more cynical and suspicious of people's motives in a way that I doubt will ever change back.
Anita Sarkeesian
Any discussion of the lead-up to Gamergate that doesn't mention Anita Sarkeesian would be incomplete. In many ways, she, and her fêting by the games media set the fertile ground from which Gamergate would sprout.
Sarkeesian began her Feminist Frequency project in 2009, a feminist critique of popular media of various kinds. It wasn't too popular and came in for a little criticism and counter-accusations against that criticism but failed to get any real traction until she put video games in her sights.
In 2012 she launched a Kickstarter campaign for her series 'Tropes Versus Women in Video Games' which received an enormous amount of media attention, especially from the desperately virtue-signalling games media. Gamers themselves were, however, not impressed. Alarm bells of a Jack Thompsonesque nature were ringing. Many of the kinds of claims she appeared to be making about the alleged sexism, racism, etc. of games didn't ring true. She seemed to have a profound ignorance of the history of games, their audiences or the lore she was criticising.
These counter-criticisms – along with some inevitable trolling – were characterised as 'misogynistic' abuse and also given enormous media exposure, priming the pump for gamer resentment towards their news outlets and distrust of the narratives that they presented. Off the back of this victim-based publicity the Kickstarter was massively oversubscribed and yet, despite that, the series only just finished in 2017, many years late and short of its original aims.
The production of Tropes Vs Women in Video Games caused a lot of gamers to start digging away, trying to figure out what was going on. Especially as the project ran behind, and episode after episode betrayed a near-total ignorance of the source material as well as writing her enormous ideological bias so large it could be seen from space.
In relatively short order links were found between Sarkeesian and dubious internet marketing scams[30]. She was exposed as lying about her 'gamer' cred [31]. She was found to be stealing art and footage[32][33], and she was found to be misrepresenting what was happening in the games she critiqued[34]. None of this seemed to have any impact on her credibility in feminist or media circles, but it was a death blow so far as gamers were concerned. They began to become more and more confused and betrayed by the fact that the games media, and some companies, were giving this obvious-seeming fraud the time of day.
Despite this, few game media outlets took any of this seriously. Instead, they decided to focus on the harassment narrative. There's little doubt that Sarkeesian did receive some harassment, but in the immortal words of Tyler the Creator:
“Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Cyber Bullying Real Hahahaha Nigga Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Nigga Close Your Eyes Haha”
- Tyler the Creator on Twitter, retweeted and liked well over 300,000 times.
There was a bigger problem than some blockable trolls attacking someone who had advertised their vulnerabilities. That problem was that the genuine criticism and warnings about her ended up being treated as though they were harassment.
Any critique of Sarkeesian, or her later imitators, was met with accusations of misogyny, harassment, bullying and so forth. Intentionally or not, Sarkeesian had also proven the financial viability of a new form of business – monetised victimhood.
I had initially thought Sarkeesian was a slightly dishonest critic, shifting things to suit her agenda. Her total unwillingness to discuss, debate or address any questions has hardened my attitude towards her though. Her use of spurious abuse to advocate for Internet censorship is dangerous, whether it's ignorant or not, and she fits into a long tradition of 'critics' seeking to control subcultural media.
This was compounded for me recently when she was present at a Youtube oriented convention called 'Vidcon'. While there she was on two panels. From the first she abused one of her critics who was sitting in the audience, in the second she attacked and abused a Youtuber by the name of Boogie2988, one of the loveliest people in the online-famous space and a genuine victim of real, and horrific, harassment himself. Any lingering sympathy or understanding for Sarkeesian I might have had vanished over that weekend. Especially with other, similar, feminist and 'SocJus' online personalities finally reaching out to discuss and debate.
Side Note: Synergistic Trolling
Anyone who has spent any amount of time on the Internet knows that the standard wisdom when being trolled or anonymously harassed is to ignore it:
'Don't feed the trolls'.
This is, and remains, sound advice. It's the only way to retain a free internet and to deal with its more noxious elements effectively. Some threats and actions are, of course, more serious and deserve to be taken seriously. The posting of Navy Seal memes[35] and anonymous threats of various kinds are, however, safe to ignore and are usually blatantly, obviously trolling.
Despite this, some people continue to take them seriously, despite them being obviously spurious within an instant or so to anyone with a modicum of Internet experience. This rather requires us to ask 'why?'
In my estimation, from what I've observed, this is a phenomenon that I call 'synergistic trolling'.
What this means is that where 'don't feed the troll' generally works, it assumes that the victim of the trolling finds the attacks annoying and wants to break the cycle. Trolls desire feedback and infamy, denying them attention and exposure prevents them from getting the pleasure that they seek. Where this goes wrong is where the person being trolled is also served and validated by the trolling.
This has been particularly visible from feminist blogs and articles. They often post rather petty 'bait' articles about things like 'manspreading' or beating up their boyfriends. This, in turn, attracts a reaction from trolls and critics, who then get conflated and used to fuel the harassment and sexism narrative.
The troll gets the reaction and publicity they want; the trollee gets the reaction and publicity (and money) they want. Everyone is a 'winner', and yet, at the same time, everyone is a loser, since taking trolling seriously fuels censorship and control demands over the Internet.
Perhaps the starkest embodiment of this abject stupidity is Lewis' law:
“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
- Helen Lewis, New Statesman/Guardian etc. Stated on Twitter.
The tautological, circular nature of this statement should be obvious. It can be
applied to any extreme and ideological position that causes a reaction.
“The comments on any article about white supremacy justify white supremacy,” for example.
It's worthless, meaningless, not even slightly intelligent, but it does indicate how fishing for a reaction can be rewarding for the targeted party.
Genuine critics, such as myself, are left in something of a bind. Do we leave the bait alone and, thereby, leave it unchallenged, to be taken as true? Do we take the bait and take it apart, knowing we'll be conflated with the inevitable trolls and be ignored and have our reputations trashed? There's no way to 'win'.
'Entitled' Gamers
Gamers are demanding, with little tolerance for bullshit. Games are expensive. The hype around games promises a lot, and if a game fails to deliver on its promises woe betide the developer who lets down their audience.
There had been rumblings about 'entitled gamers'[36] for some time, and a similar harassment narrative as that found around female and minority critics (no matter how shitty they were as people). It blew up over the ending of Mass Effect 3[37].
Gamers adored Mass Effect. It was a sprawling science fiction epic that had the whole galaxy in peril. It had engaging characters, a 1970s/80s NASA-art aesthetic and an involving storyline so good that people forgave many of its gameplay quirks and variations. It was much more consistent than Dragon Age – it's fantasy counterpart – and its fans became emotionally invested.
The big buy-in came about because this was a game in which your decisions were supposed to matter. Your progress saves from game one would carry over into game two and on into game three. They would inform the way interactions unfurled and the way the conflicts and nature of the galaxy were presented. All of this promised that every decision you made would accumulate from game to game all the way through to the climax at the very end. Every person you saved, every critical decision you made would all result in a personalised and meaningful outcome.
Inside Gamergate Page 5