Right-Wing Authoritarianism in Gamergate

“What people didn't understand about Gamergate 2014 is that it was fundamentally a fight over public space and who had a right to feel comfortable in it. There is a direct line between the communication tactics that enabled Gamergate and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in American politics. The goal of the project was to remove women, LGBTQIA folks, Black people, and anyone else who would today have been called "woke" from participation in gaming by making it too miserable to stay. Back then, the common wisdom was "don't feed the trolls." This proved to be a massive tactical error that failed because the trolls, in this case, had quite a lot of power, and in their years-long campaign of stochastic terror, they leveraged the opposition's passive approach to transform the online nerd spaces into sites of recruitme nt into militant misogyny and fascism. Just look at the recommendations you get on YouTube after watching just a few videos about gaming. This year has felt more like Gamergate to me than any year since then. Between the full radicalization of X, the abuses hurled at actors in The Acolyte, and the Ghost of Totei discourse, it's never been more important to remember the lessons of 2014: misogyny, homophobia, and racism in nerdy, masculine spaces online aren't the exception; they're the rule. Let's not repeat the same mistakes as before and act like it goes away when we ignore the cretins sustaining this system.”—Jordan Wood, @playinginthebinaries