Endnote 5: A Case Study in Digital Radicalism (UC Merced Talk)

Let us play our games and you can keep being lgbtq or whatever second, shit goes down 👇

I only see misinformation

*HER.

Call her HER. No matter what mental issue she might have, she’ll always remain a woman.

Control the Conversation/Never Play Defense: "Sure, MAYBE we killed thousands of people, but what about the hostages? Talk about the hostages instead of the children we killed via carpet bombing! Don't get mad at us for killing people, get mad at those other guys for taking hostages!"

I Hate Mondays: "Sure, MAYBE we killed thousands of people, but doesn't that happen all the time during war? You should be seeing mass murder as normal, like us! If anything, you should only be condemning the things the other side is doing during war, like us! Why aren't WE allowed to commit crimes against humanity just like everyone else?!"

The Card Says Moops: "Sure, MAYBE we killed thousands of people, but they were all terrorists, and also they were being used as human shields, and also we only killed those people accidentally, and also the other side has killed people as well, and also nobody has even died in this war!"

Ship of Theseus: "Sure, MAYBE we killed thousands of people. And MAYBE most of them were civilians. But we HAVE killed terrorists, and some of those terrorists HAVE said that they want to kill all of us, so can you REALLY blame us for murdering the lot of them? Wouldn't YOU have done the same thing?"

How to Radicalize a Normie: "Sure, MAYBE we killed thousands of people, buuuuuuut either we genocide them or they genocide us. Can you debunk that claim in a debate?"

Remember back in the day when people still said "social justice warrior" and basically the narrative was, "These people acted badly."? Kind of put things in perspective doesn't it?

is it just me or does this guy sound close to Brennan lee Mulligan?

I don't think I agree with the "daily dose" thing being a rape joke, it was more just "no one wants to see this, therefore everyone will spam it specifically because no one wants to see it." The sweater seems to not really be a "joke" just a reference to it. Something similar (but more of a stretch) would be calling a loss reference a "miscarriage joke." Not to say 4channers wouldn't be making rape jokes, but it's like people spamming lemonparty, it's just making people see something they didn't want to "for the lulz"

It's so obvious that gamergate was correct. All of the outlets are like "sure this game is terrible, but it has representation. 7/10"

i kinda figured that this wasn't about gaming but just an opportunity for sick people to hate on women for liking games and wanted better representation in games. I remember reading all the articles about this crap and not getting a definitive answer on whether or not it was true or not so I summed it up as bulshit for people just to hate on people.

The problem with Gamergate was it was kinda like a riot. You had thousands, dare I say millions of people who all wanted wildly different things. You had lifeless nobodys who victimized and harrassed the women criticizing their favorite games for any reason immaginable and making it as personal, and probably illegal as possible. And then you had other people who were just mad that their favorite games were being called sexist and wanted to politely dissagree on it. It's sad bc like I remember Bayonetta got dragged into this, and I really like the Bayonetta ganes and I wanted to agrue that yeah it probably wasn't the best female representation, but the games had enough positive qualities to outweigh that, and I couldn't without siding with the worst people on the planet who victimize others for simply disagreeing with them. It's Ironic in a way. People come out saying that the gaming community is sexist, and then the absolute worst, most sexist of the community happens to be the absolute loudest.

As a heavy gamer who was not online much during Gamergate (trying to test into a good college), most of my experience with gaming journalism is from 2018 onward. And I can say that with few exceptions, the majority of gaming journalism since then from the largest companies is trash journalism. Look at Starfield, and how high of reviews it got. The majority of articles are rage-bait, or saying that bad games are good games, or strawmanning people's arguments of why a game is bad (eg, saying it's because of the character models or inclusivity, when the game is just bad).

And I love many games with diversity, and I am voting blue, definitely not Alt-Right.

Maybe the gamers outside of 4 Chan who just heard the online claims back in 2014 were just mad at the gaming journals, and had a bad outlet.

Thank you for being my sociology teacher

You were one of dozens instructors, but your channel led me to others that explained things In Deapth to help Build Understanding-- a thing I feel you do notably well.

You, Shaun, and José are my favorites for discussing the connective tissue between governence and people's lives.

When I had first heard of gamer gate, even in the context that it was *bad*, I thought something had at least happened. That maybe a games journalist had fucked up somewhere, that a source was undeclared- fucking something to have started this, even if it didn't justify all the harassment aimed at women.

But no. There was not even an actual article, and the game was fucking free. It was like you said, I was assuming they were coming from a place of good faith. I wanted to believe a giant months long harassment campaign didn't start from something baseless.

But it did.

Welp, that's 50 minutes of my life that I want back. Nice revisionism

kinda depressing without the funny edits tbh

It's frustrating. Every time I see a bunch of white guys complaining about something nerdy with a woman in it, I think "Maybe they don't know what they're actually mad about, or they do, and I don't know which is worse."

Oh, burgers and fries 😂😂😂 that takes me back.

You should do a how to normalize a radical. With tips of how to help loved once escape the maga hypnosis

At the end there, what did you mean by "the athiest community is already in their pocket".

My becoming athiest heavily coincided with me going left. The athiest communities I see are predominantly liberal.

Did I somehow dodge a major bullet with the athiest communities I fell in with?

Rewatching this after discovering an artist I (regrettably) used to follow, who used Vivian as his self-insert avatar, is now drawing ship art of the Israel and Palestine Mikusonas.

The fact that he hasn't changed since 2014 wasn't surprising.

How do I find out about the alt right attempt to recruit furries because that sounds hilarious!

The wizardchan posts were according to the former adminstrator from an I.P who wasn't a regular. Atleast one tabloid(The Escapist) covering the incident would update their article to include the fact that there's no proof of a harrasment campaign other than her own words. While nobody knows the truth as to what happened that day, it is equally believeable to me that she fabricated the whole thing on her own considering her entire career afterwards consisted of her being in the media collecting pity dollars and scamming kickstarter backers which is only a small example of her bad character.

I'm sad to admit as a teen I agreed with these lunatics. I was very close to the alt-right pipeline at like 15 thanks to people like Leafy and a friend dragging me into disgusting meme sites

What ultimately saved me was realising I was trans. It helped me pull myself out of that pipeline and actually grow a brain, not just blindly agree with whatever xX45YearOldIncel6969Xx had to say

Sad thing is there are echoes of gamergate today with how influencers, media, and developers exploit gamer outrage to gain attention, money, or exert social power.

Biggest one i know of to date is the sweet baby inc harasment and conspiracies.

"Based Mom" Man, oh man. If that doesn't say everything about these kids' neuroses and motivations....

TLDR: Some men just hate that women like video games, and they also hate that female characters would have more to offer than their looks.

"power pools when left on it's own" is like, a bar worth 100 bars

The alt right use memes to avoid scrutiny like the mob use coded language to avoid the law.

This is the same language social media owners justify not being responsible for anything that is posted on there sites.

I was in college when this all went down. For journalism. Yeah, let that sink in. I see shit about gamer gate and I feel like I'm going through PTSD. I watches it all go down. It was that moment when this stupid culture war that continues to dominate all political and media discourse manifested in its modern form.

My goal was to become a geek media journalist. Movie critic, game reviewer, essayist, general nerd media writer. After this, I just gave up, I wanted nothing to do with that world. I decided to become an international journalist, visiting foreign countries and writing about news, culture, world events... Then COVID happened. Needless to say, I have incredible timing.

I get that it's not the point, but as an Albanian, your pronunciation of "Gjoni" is atrocious.

It’s really interesting that so many people were tricked into thinking that gamergate was something genuine, and then later realized or learned that it was just a whole bunch of nazi bullshit. And furthermore it’s interesting how you can use it as a way of identifying nazis even in the modern day.

Not too long ago I got recommended a video by I think either Turkey Tom or KiraTV (I forget which one and I don’t watch either) and so for a couple days I was listening to their stuff at work cuz I had nothing better to do. And in one video he said something to the effect of “this is one of gaming’s biggest scandals since gamergate, which revealed the whole system is corrupt!” And I remember hearing that and saying, “oh, Nazi, got it,” and I closed the video and never went back.

Im so glad that in 2014 i was playing games instead of scrolling the internet and possibly getting roped into this mess

For women online, Gamergate was just another Tuesday.

Why this showed up years later in my feed I'll have no idea. There were back door deals being made (there still are) regarding games press and publisher relations, Zoe did cheat on her boyfriend at the time for that purpose, yes people are still to this day pretending any criticism of women doing unscrupulous things to get ahead is sexism when people would have similar reactions to a man behaving how she did. Any claims being made to the effect of "It's just because men don't like women" is a smokescreen being used to disregard the fact that she did what she was accused of and everyone pretending to be a liberal at the time believed her wholesale.
This is disingenuous and infantilizing behavior for people to engage in...and it should be obvious about how you actually view women as weak and in need of a savior.

videogame journalism is in the state it is now because people like this video creator kept telling lies and defending all of the horrible things they did and still do

imagine yapping for over 50 mins for a topic that could be explained in 1/5th the time

Only those who are allowed to live alongside humans have to worry about the formalities of how said humans addressed them

So I love your videos on the alt-right playbook but my question is what is the left's playbook? How do you counteract.

Also side note marketing and advertising is literally just propaganda.

Interesting. I've been a gamer since I was a child using the gameboy. As I grew older I got other consoles and mainly played with my friends or randos online. Never did I understand gamergate or understood the events. Thank you for this video, I now understand why people cite gamergate as the beginning of the modern Far Right movement

I played depression quest back in the day.
Never googled it.
Probably a good idea, in hindsight

"oh my god he pointed to rationalwiki and those people are corrupt because they wrote a false book about harry potter called Harry Potter Methods Of Rationality and because they made the book now nothing the wiki says has any merit or validity, just like encyclopedia dramatica's Offended page says so this entire video must be a falsed backwards flag pin on a hat once owned by a texan oil magistrate but he was also a farmer but he funded coke so the government cia is sucking my brain out through a straw while the fbi green lasagna men play unfitting music and based greenpilled death grips third thing here is bad down evil bad touch!"

Am I doing it right? Needs more moops? Ah, dang, I missed a Mondays reference. Hold on while I randomly insert lasagna somewhere in that nonsense. There we go, much better.

This video is what gaslighting looks like from a Progressive. Just pure, unadulterated lying and gaslighting. Just to serve a false narrative that never existed. By your logic, any criticism of corruption is "harassment" as long as it isn't coming from your preferred side of politics.

What a shitshow this video is. You deserve to work at CNN for how bad this is.

Another video attacking the wrong targets.