On Heresy, Fallacy and Neutrality
(Disclosure: I am in support of a better standard of media, dislike censorship, do not support harassment and regularly use the GamerGate tag and KotakuInAction subreddit. What follows is my opinion and mine alone, and I do not represent anyone besides myself with these views unless otherwise noted. I also tend to ramble. Like, a lot. Sorry.)
Say hello to Chris Mancil.
He is the Director of Digital Communications for Electronic Arts.
He is a very bad man.
Why?
Because he complained.
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Confused? Let’s back it up a bit and start from the top.
In his recent blog post (ARCHIVE HERE), Chris Mancil talks about his experience with Twitter Autoblockers - more specifically, an instance where he was cut off from over 2000 followers simply because he followed Pro-GamerGate reporter Milo Yiannopoulis and retweeted his small comment about Chess’s inherent feminism - even though Mancil admits to following the works of other ‘Anti-GamerGate’ users such as Damion Schubert because he enjoys exposing himself to many opinions. He then goes on to lament the inherent problems with Guilt By Association, the increasingly warlike use of dehumanising rhetoric, the widening partisan divide of online discourse and then links to an article by Ben Kuchera on better ways to fix online interactions, commenting his well wishes that things would improve.
Pretty benign stuff, really.
And yet what happened next beggar’s belief.
A slew of vitriol began to descend upon Chris Mancil in reaction to his apparently inflammatory stance. Some users declared him to be a ‘bigoted, misogynist supporter of a terror group’. Others still wanted EA to punish Mancil apparently because he may occassionally read articles from Breitbart.com.
One even went so far as to fully endorse the ostracisation of those remotely connected to the hashtag - a notion apparently applauded by many onlookers.
But chief among this cacophony was Ben Kuchera, a journalist of major gaming media site Polygon, who accused Mancil of using his linked article to ‘defend a hate group’, accused all of those stuck on such similar autoblocker lists (which now of course includes Mancil) of deserving the block treatment for sending death threats (?) and proceeded to tag both EA’s official account and Peter Moore into the Twitter conversation in order to add corporate pressure.
Eventually it got to a point where Mancil removed the contentious link to Kuchera’s work from the blog post, apologised for agreeing with him and set his entire blog into private lockdown. All because Mancil remarked on the current hostility of online discourse.
As some have rightly noted, the precedent here is dangerously untenable and certainly inexcusable from a supposed professional, let alone someone representing one of the largest gaming publications around.
Fantasy could only aspire to match this farcical perversion of reality - but sadly enough, this is only the latest behavioural symptom of a feverish haze which has quickly been reaching new heights over the past months as GamerGate carries on unabated.
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This is the atmosphere as it stands right now.
We are in a time where simple questions are being derided as dishonest trickery and shut down as ‘sea-lioning’, where fundraising efforts to raise awareness against bullying are considered so personally hostile that they are declared to be ‘weaponised charity’ and where a media site updating an ethics policy is considered 'conceding to terrorists’.
We exist in a place where a Journalist who allows a neutral platform for both Pro and Anti sides of the issue to be heard is met with intense demands to renounce his professional impartiality and denounce GamerGate or be publicly smeared, and where a years old digital distribution company receives numerous threats solely for having a similar name to a months old hashtag.
Where women who are sympathetic to GamerGate are diagnosed with ‘internalised misogyny’ and often inelegantly dismissed off hand as ‘stupid’ and ‘uninformed’ for the simple act of disagreeing with the prevailing media opinion.
Where an internet hashtag is gleefully compared to the KKK - and where stating the opposite of that narrative invokes a high profile public callout to your employer.
Where giving a massive media boost to a small charity stream justifies harassment and wishes of death upon the booster … because they aren’t the ‘right kind’ of person.
Where developers petitioning for media to help alleviate the demonisation of gamers are laughed off with subtle threats warning against others with similar ideas.
Where merely advocating against dehumanisation, noting the less-than-stellar qualities of some Anti-GamerGate adherents or even having a coffee break with a GamerGate sympathising developer is seen as treason, treated by some with the same contemptuous outrage as criminal apostasy - and where protesting the use of proxy-guilting autoblockers as ‘Anti-Harasser’ tools alongside GamerGate users is enough to apparently be labeled a GamerGate supporter and then have your family used by an anonymous doxxer as leverage for your silence.
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What kind of madness is this?
This widely promoted antagonistic attitude toward the very notion of GamerGate encourages viewing this decidedly organic conversation through a binary lens and with all the dogmatic fervency of a religious war - an ‘Us vs Them’ team deathmatch with no neutral ground and no room for compromise with the ‘politically incorrect’ who voice opposition. It promotes an unusually inquisitorial McCarthy-lite obsession preoccupied with identifying individuals tainted by supposed ‘GamerGate ideals’ and punishing them for that merest slight or connection using whatever methods deemed necessary, deciding a person’s worthiness and guilt not by their own actions but by those attributed to the broadly defined labels applied to them. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that radical stances like this create a variety of obvious issues, but a curious side question remains - what has actually been acheived?
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For around seven months now, a vigorous crusade of proxy-blaming has done little to falter the persistence of GamerGate’s userbase despite it’s ferocity and wider media support - a wound further salted when it is noted that the hashtag alone has now amassed over 6,000,000 tweets while KotakuInAction, the lone subreddit dedicated to general GamerGate-related discussion, recently reached 31,000 subscribers, maintains around 400,000 unique visits and even recently became subreddit of the day.
Numerous media sites made a point to jovially declare GamerGate dead in the past - so why has it not yet actually collapsed?
I’ll answer that question with another question :
Have you ever tried to sieve flour with a mallet?
GamerGate is a massive cultural phenomenon that can be hard to understand on the whole (especially on a day to day basis), but the quickest way to get it all so very horribly wrong is to treat all involved as a single uniform organisation and hammer at them with blunt accusations. There is no royal hierarchy, no leader and certainly nothing in the way of a formal membership charter beyond it’s existence on anonymity-friendly social platforms open to the public - and that’s precisely because GamerGate exists not as a formal conglomerate but as a grassroots revolt; a strong community reaction to a perceptible cultural imbalance, the perception being the increasing distrust, politicisation and broad stroke demagoguery of the conversation surrounding Gaming culture. Effectively it’s thousands of individuals of all colours, creeds and walks of life whose only true shared bond in all of this is a mutual distaste for the shockingly brutish behaviour on display - and unsurprisingly they all don’t see the continuing persistence of such behaviour as a reason to pack up and go home.
Though there were many notable instances of controversy before #GamerGate’s existence, the heavy handed censoring of discussions about the ‘Quinnspiracy’ scandal was among the prime examples of tactical faux pas that got people more curious and concerned about subsequent events instead of allaying their suspicions - and when Leigh Alexander’s tone deaf caricature of Enthusiast Gamers as ‘socially inept, hyperconsumerist, unsophisticated cis white male dudebros’ hit the web and was passed around by other major sites without nary a counter, it only ended up successfully spooking those same concerned people into vocally protesting what they saw as an unnecessarily harsh attack.
Every time since then, such widely witnessed attempts to censor, demonise, malign or misrepresent quickly engender equal and opposite responses from the many ‘targets’ unceremoniously lumped together.
When various consumer concerns from GamerGate users about media impropriety such as biased reviews were dismissed and discarded off hand, those users then put in double effort to dig further, conclusively prove their point and get things sorted - highlighting conflicts of interest and ethical issues while celebrating alternative news sources, new ethics policies, FTC rulings and disclosures.
When ‘minority’ Gamers angry at the media’s handling of events were being constantly dismissed as fake sockpuppets of scheming white men, they joined together to popularise the tag #NotYourShield and unmask themselves online just to prove to their contemporaries that they are actually the real flesh and blood human beings they claim to be.
When GamerGate users get collectively dismissed as monsterous harassers, many of those users then made a habit out of supporting positive charitable acts to prove their own humanity, helping to collectively fund initiatives and charities to the tune of over $100,000 dollars for organisations ranging from Extra Life to UNICEF, - even ironically adopting the ‘sea lion’ dismissal (both metaphorically and literally) as a badge of honour.
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These are the retorts of bystanders who grow increasingly appalled and frustrated by the events that repeatedly transpire, and yet still the standard response from folks such as Kuchera and others remains unchanged : escalation, not introspection. Rather than parse the myriad related issues and stances from a measurably objective perspective, the ‘upstarts’ are branded as iredeemable sexists, rape apologists and racists then condemned for the crime of using a hashtag to be heard in the wider public sphere. It’s led to the bizarre circumstance where those who identify as Feminists, Liberals and Women and who also support GamerGate’s general existence have even been thusly labeled as Anti-Feminists, Conservatives and Men for the shallow purpose of summary excommunication - a hilariously absurd quirk to see in action, if it wasn’t so very disheartening to witness repeated time and time again.
All of this partisan tit for tat, however, ultimately misses the core complaints in favour of shouting down the protestors and that in turn only further convinces the protestors that they are onto something bigger, creating an endless feedback loop sustaining the outrage indefinitely for both sides.
In other words this entire bullying approach to ‘ending’ GamerGate via shaming and suppression is in fact a major factor in perpetuating it’s continued existence.
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If this is going to ever be properly solved, there needs to be recognition that neutrality is not a sin and that association is not a crime. Life is not a game of Good and Evil, full of flawless heroines and defect-ridden monsters - this is the real world where things are not so cut and dry and no one ‘side’ of this social debate has an inherent monopoly on ‘justice’, ‘ethics’ or any other vague valued idea. The current muffled conversation about the industry’s problems (and there are many) is a long overdue one, but as more and more voices begin to chime in and get involved (sometimes anonymously) it becomes doubly important to avoid polarising the situation beyond repair so that an actually productive community discussion can happen. The problem is not that people use a hashtag to talk - it’s that people are choosing to use hashtags to define a mass of others they can’t see and don’t know very well.
Quite a few of those involved in GamerGate on both sides are peaceful, while some others are quite admittedly less so and others still form a third angle that openly cares more about using the overwhelmingly tense powder keg situation to stir up trouble for teh lulz over enabling a fruitful conversation. While the main media focus is often on victims of internet harassment who oppose the hashtag, it is quite clear that users on both ‘sides’ of the issues have suffered harassment and threats and I’m fairly certain both sides would prefer such things to stop - plus let’s all face it; the actual perpetrator is often unclear and nebulously pinning all the blame on a phantom boogeyman term like GamerGate or Anti-GamerGate doesn’t exactly help solve anything. But perhaps the most important point to be reaffirmed is that we are all individuals with our own ideas, responsible for our own actions and worth more than the mere sum of our labels.
It’s impossible to be ‘inclusive’ when such efforts are coached in the exclusion of others who are simply ‘different’. It’s hypocritical to take a stand against harassment whilst effectively declaring open season on those who fall out of lockstep. It’s asinine to bill yourself as ‘fighting for justice’ whilst campaigning to ostracise and prejudge people for so called ‘genetic’ crimes they never personally committed. If people are to actually acheive better diversity - and I mean TRUE diversity of opinion and person, not this ‘More-of-mine-less-of-yours’ hogwash - we all need to stop reducing complex human beings down to two-dimensional walking tropes and cease segregating people into pernicious labels for the purpose of carelessly swift dismissal or approval.
The ‘Not All _____’ meme is often said mockingly around these parts, but it nonetheless remains unintentionally true at it’s core; Not all Gamers are awful white male misogynists and Not all Journalists are inherently dishonest PR mouthpieces by default, just like how Not all men are lumbering abusive violence-prone oppressors and Not all women are man-hating anti-sex cultural imperialists. We are all human beings, and a fundamentally critical piece of nuance is being gradually forced out of everyday conversation in order to instead push divisive politics into a traditionally non-political hobby … and for what real gain?
All of the silencing, the labeling, the increasing antagonism and the general strife has failed to stop any harassment from taking place and certainly hasn’t pacified the sentiments behind the ongoing GamerGate protests - in fact it hasn’t done anything notable to be proud of apart from deepening pre-existing divisions, and now that ‘acheivement’ risks ruining the very thing that makes Gaming great : the ability for people from all over to connect with others across the globe, let loose, chit chat and have some fun together enjoying something we collectively love without dragging in the bullshit and chaos of the outside world.
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Chris Mancil is not a bad man.
He calmly stated his case arguing against the current climate of brandishing Guilt by Association to invalidate others, and in return was promptly declared guilty of being a GamerGate sympathiser, invalidated due to his diverse personal tastes and neutralised from the overall discussion - and in doing so, his various detractors did more to confirm his premise than he ever could have done alone.
Yet for all the points proven, Mancil’s ‘victory’ is decidedly pyrrhic. If this kind of reaction to neutrals is to be called progress, then forgive me if I dare aspire to something else.