Ericka SimoneMe, after reading a superviral post on tikkitytoks that connects the overwhelming shift towards misogyny and red pill content flooding the internet in the last few years directly to the mishandling and drama of #Gamergate, with some tying the fallout from Gamergate directly to the results *of the American election and young white males sliding into nazism:
Me realizing the dismantling of #netneutrality, #twitter safety, #facebook moderation, coming of #CambridgeAnalytica and the #Gamergate situation all happened around the same time (2011 - 2015), directly driving the downslide into racism and misogyny on the internet, while realizing the first levels of #deadinternettheory started appearing immediately after:
Nah bro… they’re really right and I cannot belieeeeeve it took me this long to put all of this together. I was hyperaware of the fallout from net neutrality being dismantled and stormfront/4chan going unregulated. But this is just…. OMG.
Nini@ErickaSimone Yuuup, they gave us all the clues.
Bomkatt@ErickaSimone "if only someone had warned us!" they cry, ignoring the stacks of published academic books going back to the early days of Web 2.0.
To say nothing of all the ongoing online activism and warnings from the people watching these trends emerge.
Jess👾Literally domino falling meme:
A woman raised some money to make videos about feminism in video games and an indie game developer had a nasty breakup with their boyfriend
--->
Downfall of the American superpower and the Republic.
Every time I see white Millennials being all self congratulatory about how much better our generation is, I look back at the early 2010s and the "alt-right" and stare into the distance.
@ErickaSimone
@ErickaSimone
Maddie’s All Sortedand, while this is speculation, the channer motivation for all of this was likely “normies are fools and I bet we can make them fascists”
what a thing to go burn the world down with
(4chan has a self-reinforcing mechanism sometimes anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a conspiratorial take but an observation of their users behavior in aggregate)
Jack William Bell@maddiefuzz @JessTheUnstill @ErickaSimone
One of my sayings, which I keep in a file for pasting on such occasions:
> "Individual people may be quite intelligent. But any group of people will exhibit less intelligence than the stupidest among them. Which explains everything from riots to religion to fashion to politics…"
And 4chan…
@jackwilliambell @maddiefuzz @JessTheUnstill what is it about being in a group that makes people…. Stupid.
@ErickaSimone @maddiefuzz @JessTheUnstill
I don't know, but it seems like an invariable rule any time the group size exceeds six. (Which one should keep in mind when scheduling meetings.)
billy joe bowers-8647This is why I laugh when people insist it's old people that are the problem and young people will save us (just like they have my entire life, and it's never happened).
Grandpa wasn't on 4chan.
@jackwilliambell I was so disconnected from Gamergate that I didn’t know all of that evil shit was happening. Continuously. I always knew gamers were racist sociopaths. Thought it was par for course.
Net Neutrality and social media dropping their protections is what I saw. 4chan and stormfront. Losers like pewdiepie and Logan whatever being violent instigators was also obvious. Saw that clearly.
But no idea the impact of Gamergate was this huge. At all. Can’t even lie.
I (and many others) believe it was deliberate from the start. And, even if it wasn't, it sure as hell became deliberate.
The goal was to split otherwise like-minded people apart and then suck the most loserly of them into the alt-right mindset. And it wasn't just Gamergate, look up the Sad Puppies fiasco in the Science Fiction literary world.
I think on 4chan it started out as a joke (like everything there), but then people got invested and it wasn't a joke after that.
John Skiles Skinner@jackwilliambell @ErickaSimone
The manipulation of the Hugo nomination process by the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies movement taught the right how to manipulate the Republican primary elections to get Trump into office.
This descends from GamerGate also.
Yup. But the SFF community rallied and fixed things. The Hugos are now puppy free without entirely cutting them out of the process. They just lose because they aren't popular now.
I'd bitch about the rest of the world not following suit, but frankly there were a lot of billionaires investing a lot of money to make sure no one went there. It was a lost cause once every major newsmedia org was bought up.
I should point out the Rabid/Sad Puppies thing was about stuffing the Hugo ballot box using a group action voting bloc. It even made Wikipedia:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
The thing is, when Biden won in 2020, this was EXACTLY what the right claimed the Democrats did in the general election. Not to mention EXACTLY what the orange one did all three times he was nominated for the Republicans. (Shutting out non hard right candidates.)
There are ways to defeat voting blocs.
The trick is allow people to vote 'none of the above' when they don't like any top-tier candidate. Which is what happened with the Hugos.
Ranked choice voting also has the same effect and has the additional advantage of encouraging smaller parties instead of locking the voters into a choice between two behemoths. This means, even if the big parties win, they have clear polling showing what voters really want.
Which is why we don't have ranked choice voting in the USA.
@jackwilliambell @ErickaSimone
It was a lot easier to repair the mechanics of a small and basically unimportant election like the Hugos than it was to repair a centuries-old constitutional government full of billionaires
It was a lot easier to repair the mechanics of a small and basically unimportant election like the Hugos than it was to repair a centuries-old constitutional government full of billionaires
No shit. And it doesn't help that at least a third of the population believes all kinds of weird shit without any proof, but insist scientists are part of a some kind of shadowy conspiracy.
Which makes them perfect fodder for the billionaire conspiracy…
@jackwilliambell @skiles oh man you just sent me down another rabbits hole I might not return from.
*edit: and some states do have ranked choice, but for smaller offices. The new NY mayor was voted in on rank. California doesn’t, however.
@ErickaSimone @jackwilliambell
I voted Ranked Choice for our most recent mayoral election here in Oakland, California. SF uses Ranked Choice as well.
@ErickaSimone @jackwilliambell
Same, I completely ignored that nonsense. But I thought from way way back that all this shit is connected, and still think so. None of it is coincidence.
suzanne@ErickaSimone @jackwilliambell
The same tactics were being used on Twitter during the Mike Brown protests, too.
Quinn Norton (@quinn@social.circl.lu)
This is a hill I will die on: there was a turning point of the net, unnoticed by nearly everyone, that laid the ground work for the global political fuckery and rise of fascism we live with now. It went unnoticed by most of the world, a totally inscrutable event. But everything changed after that moment. It was when the Bronies were forced off 4chan.
@cshlan @jackwilliambell yup. And Mike brown was about the same time twitter ended specific protections and fired their original Twitter safety thing. It just all fell apart.
Huntn00@ErickaSimone I remember the name, but you made made me look it up to remember what it was. Par for the course, in Right Wing shenanigans, the dismantling of a progressive civilization. “Oh” they muse, the longing for the good ole days of serfs and lords, gorging one’s self until you spew, big dogs eating little ones. This is what these bastards fantasize about their ideal life on Earth. 😐
@Huntn00 its day three of me really dismantling how horrible people involved in Gamergate are.
Thomas Depierre@ErickaSimone i will add that it also coincidate with a massive gap in wealth distribution and wage progression, combined to the start of the retirement wave of Boomers.
This... This has levels. In particular, the financial impact of the 401k combined to the 08 crash also happens around that time. Not saying there are not links there either, there are. But it is also the moment the under 30s realised they were totally and completely fucked with no hope of an out.