Aram Zucker-Scharff

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Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn’t have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors. This is how you get St. Louisans sincerely explaining that Ferguson protestors are the real racists, and how you end up with an organized group of precisely the same video game enthusiasts to whom an entire industry is catering honestly believing that they’re an oppressed minority. From this kind of ideological fortification, you can stage absolutely whatever campaigns you deem necessary. […]

The demands for journalistic integrity coming from Gamergate have nothing at all to do with the systemic corruption of the gaming media. They’ve centered instead on journalists purportedly pursuing social-justice agendas and on ridiculous claims that the press sees gamers as vectors of social contagion. Some of the complaints, like the idea that outlets ought to reconsider their editorial positions if enough readers disagree with them, even stand in direct opposition to traditional journalistic ethics.

All of this makes sense, though, if you think about Gamergate as a mutant variant of the traditional American grievance movement, a rearguard action marching under the banner of high-minded media critique.

”

– The future of the culture wars is here and it is GamerGate.

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“No imagined future paradise is worth terror in the here and now. […]

“The furious, crowdsourced prosecution of perceived feminist “corruption” violently conflicts with any anti-harassment ethic. GamerGate, more than most such movements, is morally unmusical: they have rules with no moral framework, they call for ethics without finding ways of instilling a sense of ethics in their followers. It becomes hollow rhetoric that ultimately bows before the terrible logic of revolutionary thinking: ethics are for paradise, in the here and now we must fight til our final breath with everything we have, no matter the wreckage we may leave behind us.

If you sincerely believe that the cyber mob is the ideal jury to fight corruption, and you marshal a perilous stack of indictments against dozens of writers, organisations, websites, and developers that charges them all with a conspiracy to destroy gaming, then harassment-as-praxis is inevitable. […]

the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation… transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations […]

When I and others questioned the ethics and objectivity of an operation whose chief exponent promised that academics like myself would “fear us even in their sleep” and pledged to target only “feminists,” […] we were simply told by gentler voices in the movement that we had nothing to fear if we had done no wrong. They are unable to understand that their ability to discern right from wrong is what is at issue here. […]

They are now all but criminalising the very notion that writers should be paid for their work, suggesting this is a conflict of interest in its own right. […]

On the doorway to paradise appeared the words: Agendas Are Unethical.

Thus we were all made to walk through.”

”

– Gamergate and the Licence to Inflict Suffering.

“

“No imagined future paradise is worth terror in the here and now. […]

“The furious, crowdsourced prosecution of perceived feminist “corruption” violently conflicts with any anti-harassment ethic. GamerGate, more than most such movements, is morally unmusical: they have rules with no moral framework, they call for ethics without finding ways of instilling a sense of ethics in their followers. It becomes hollow rhetoric that ultimately bows before the terrible logic of revolutionary thinking: ethics are for paradise, in the here and now we must fight til our final breath with everything we have, no matter the wreckage we may leave behind us.

If you sincerely believe that the cyber mob is the ideal jury to fight corruption, and you marshal a perilous stack of indictments against dozens of writers, organisations, websites, and developers that charges them all with a conspiracy to destroy gaming, then harassment-as-praxis is inevitable. […]

the demand that everybody display in public his innermost motivation… transforms all actors into hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy begins to poison all human relations […]

When I and others questioned the ethics and objectivity of an operation whose chief exponent promised that academics like myself would “fear us even in their sleep” and pledged to target only “feminists,” […] we were simply told by gentler voices in the movement that we had nothing to fear if we had done no wrong. They are unable to understand that their ability to discern right from wrong is what is at issue here. […]

They are now all but criminalising the very notion that writers should be paid for their work, suggesting this is a conflict of interest in its own right. […]

On the doorway to paradise appeared the words: Agendas Are Unethical.

Thus we were all made to walk through.”

”

– Gamergate and the Licence to Inflict Suffering.

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I mentioned offhand to my sister, about two hours in, that “it was getting to be my turn anyways,” to nonchalantly minimize my hurt. That was the moment I broke down.

I realized just how much I’d internalized the presumed process: if you’re even asking about equality or diversity in games, being shouted down in a traumatizing manner is now a mandatory step that you have to sit back and endure.

But I don’t hate #Gamergate for what they’ve done to me. I’m a researcher; my goal is to analyze and to understand. And after two weeks of backtracking through the way they’ve carried out their operations, this is the conclusion I’ve reached:

#Gamergate, as we know it now, is a hate group.

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– Gamergate trolls aren’t ethics crusaders, they’re a hate group.