Do you remember when #GamerGate was young? You know, back before #NotYourShield and Vivian James and bizarrely complicated conspiracy theories involving Gawker, Weird Twitter and some sort of international Jewish conspiracy?
Remember when #GamerGate was still called #BurgersAndFries, and the angry gamebro army was focused on the real enemy of all that is good and true – a young game designer by the name of Zoe Quinn?
If you’ve been feeling nostalgic for those good old days, you’re in luck. A sprawling blog post by a female friend of Quinn’s obsessive, accusatory ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni takes us back to the dog days of August when his even more sprawling thezoepost was unleashed upon the world.
Rachel M, who describes herself as an “engineer, designer, accidental writer,” recalls the months she spent with Gjoni as he began to process his breakup with Quinn and marshal his arguments against her. She was there when he posted thezoepost, making her a sort of midwife of what became #GamerGate.
It’s no secret whose side of this controversy she’s on. Her depictions of Gjoni are written with affection and indulgence; her portrayal of Quinn is brutal and a step or two beyond unfair. When Rachel M pretends for a moment that she’s not “someone with an ax to grind against Zoe,” that’s because her little hatchet is already buried in Quinn’s back.
If there is a point to GamerGate Launched in My Apartment, and, Internet, I’m Sorry (Not that sorry) beyond making Gjoni look angelic and Quinn look like a demon, I’m not sure what it is.
After presenting us with a series of uninteresting and unnecessary details of her own life, Rachel M repeats a number of largely discredited myths about Quinn and even seems to have made up a new myth of her own, accusing Quinn of “telling Eron she believed I was lying about my PTSD” in an online chat.
Never mind that the chat log itself, which Gjoni pasted into his zoepost, and which Rachel M also pasted into an earlier post of her own, suggests that Quinn was dubious not about Rachel M’s medical diagnoses but about Rachel’s intentions towards her then-boyfriend.
As I searched through the screenshots on Eron’s site to see if Rachel M’s recollections of this exchange matched the evidence, I was struck again by the utter surreality of #BurgersAndFries and its successor #GamerGate.
Because, the thing is, I don’t want to be reading these chat logs. I shouldn’t be reading these chat logs. These are private moments between two people at a vulnerable moment in both of their lives. They shouldn’t have been posted on the internet in an act of petty revenge against an ex-girlfriend. They shouldnt’ be on the internet at all.
The fact that the details of Zoe Quinn and Eron Gjoni’s sex lives and their messy breakup are so central to the conflicts now roiling the video game world that I have to turn to these screenshots to fact check this post is weird and wrong and rather depressing. Zoe Quinn isn’t the president, caught pantsless in flagrante delicto with a Haliburton lobbyist. She’s a video game developer, and the details of her sexual history are none of our fucking business.
None of this matters much to Rachel M, who seems to have become trapped in Gjoni’s reality distortion field, borrowing some of his narcissism for herself. She describes Gjoni’s decision to “go public” with the ugly details of his breakup with Quinn and her various alleged infidelities and lies:
Eron talked about going public. He talked about panic, about awareness, about making sure that people knew what they were getting into, about taking a hit – there’d be a hit, for speaking publicly against a woman in any field, but especially against a woman with Zoe’s position and friends in progressive indie gaming – for the good of all, eventually.
This is so perverse and backwards and wrong it’s hard not to wonder if Gj himself wrote it.
He talked about evaluating the risk to his current job, his future jobs, his family, himself. You know, whether he’d get stalked or murdered for this. He talked about the danger to Zoe, about how he could minimize personal harm toward her, whether he could effectively defray harassment towards her.
Well, he did a bangup job of that, huh?
He settled on a few plans toward that end, and decided the risk to himself was worth it. Even the total loss cases for him still meant greater than zero public knowledge about Zoe’s manipulative behavior, her role as an abuser, and the number of lies she’d told. Anything was better than the way it was now.
Really? Because for a lot of people, not just Quinn, things have gotten a lot worse since Gjoni launched his attack against his ex.
Rachel M is actually quite aware of this; indeed, she notes explicitly that the movement that was born out of Gjoni’s long post has directed much of its fury towards women.
Zoe received floods of hate and threats within hours of the post going live. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic, was forced to cancel a speech at USU after receiving death threats referencing the École Polytechnique Massacre … Brianna Wu, Liana K, and anyone who identifies as a feminist within gaming — they’ve been getting smeared.
Women in games, creators and critics alike, are working through a tide of hate that’s reached the front page of the New York Times. Each new story makes me a little sicker.
Yet somehow she’s still “not that sorry” she helped Gjoni to launch the movement that caused all this. She thinks it’s all somehow … good for women. Because people now know what she thinks is the truth about Zoe Quinn. She ends her post with these bizarre assertions:
I want more women in tech and media, at all levels—in development, in journalism, in the games and books and comics themselves.
I want those women to be as safe, respected, creative, and supported as any man, and I do not want them unprepared in an industry with Zoe Quinn.
And this, I guess, is how someone who helped Gjoni to usher in a hateful, spiteful, reactionary “movement” that has left numerous women fearing for their lives convinces herself that she’s on the side of the angels after all.
EDIT: I corrected Rachel M’s name. No idea why my brain turned her name into Sarah.
OK, kibry. I thought it would be easier to use that term, which I will not mention again, then to write– a situation in which someone over-identifies, then eventually sides with with someone who is wrong-headed.
@Shiraz:
Personally I don’t care if you name the term. It’s just that you wrote a sentence that could clearly be interpreted as diagnosing someone and then asserted that you weren’t. Just don’t do that.
In any case, you could have just gone with the longer version, because that seems to be different than Stockholm syndrome.
Yes.
I saw Eron comment on this medium article and get schooled so bad.
“Do you know what adults do when they break up with someone? They don’t hand over their ex’s private conversations to their harassers online. Don’t pretend you were acting in the public’s interest. Zoe Quinn was not an executive who was using her position of influence to sexually harass employees—at worst she’s a broke indie developer guilty of being less of a jerk than you.”
https://medium.com/@MikeSchnier/what-to-do-when-an-ex-cheats-on-you-3a41323a3502#7290-a2fdd08d62b0
Not sure if the previous link worked. You can find the comment on
https://medium.com/@MikeSchnier/what-to-do-when-an-ex-cheats-on-you-3a41323a3502
Or by clicking on the top response to the pro-Eron article on medium.
I’m kind of… leery of this post. Getting Rachel M’s name wrong among other things makes it smack of hasty and defensive responding on David’s part, and I think dismissing the possibility of Zoe Quinn being abusive is not fair; we simply don’t have all the information and we SHOULDN’T have it because it IS none of our fucking business. Whatever their intentions Gjoni and Martin should not have handled this the way they did, but that does not automatically mean we should rush to the defense of someone who may be abusive. Zoe Quinn may be a horrible person for all I know, but #GamerGate doesn’t actually care about that.
What needs to be emphasized is that NOTHING justifies the harassment, abuse, and threats she or anyone else have received as a result of GamerGate. It’s not about Zoe Quinn in particular any more than it is actually about ethics in games journalism: it’s about an anti-feminist backlash against an industry growing more diverse. Gjoni handed 4chan a bunch of ammunition but the war had already started. Zoe Quinn had already become a target last year when she tried to get Depression Quest on Steam, and others like Sarkeesian have been targets for years.
“That would make Zoe not a good person to date, an irritant to work with, and a savvy manipulator of people and news for her small business. Like Steve Jobs. Or a million other fucking tech guys with messy marriages, tense coworkers, and a well-advertised product. I. Don’t. Get. It.”
This is actually a really good point, @karak. Being charming and manipulative (for the sake of argument, not actually saying Zoe is those things) isn’t a crime when a man is involved, but heaven forfend if any woman used her charms to her advantage.
And speaking of double standards, I’m sure this has been said many, many, MANY times here or elsewhere, but I hope people realize that if the genders were flipped, Gjoni would have gotten raked over the coals for being “a crazy, whiny, hysterical bitch who just can’t take no for an answer.” Why is he, all of a sudden, lauded as a hero for airing his dirty laundry? (Because penis = “let the man talk, he’s got a point to make!”)
Just read her little note to the universe, what a bunch of sixth grade, self-involved bullshit this is. She’s pissed because Zoe is getting the press and only her inner circle know she was so-very-instrumental in this clusterfuck. I can’t actually believe these are people in their mid-twenties, they behave like middle schoolers with crushes who have to make sure everyone knows their business. Before social media, this would have happened on notebook paper and blue canvas notebooks: RM & EG xoxoxo 2good 2b 4gotten. He’s obviously her hero, brave, tortured screamo lover, and she wants to be his hero, too. She’s being a little media whore just like he is. She has no regrets about anything that’s happened to anyone, especially the women. And as someone with FMS and most of her other diagnoses, I sure wouldn’t be asking for the shitstorm headed her way. There was absolutely no reason for her to do this. Sad, sad children.
Gojoni’s mother to!d him not to put up his post. Good for her, I feel bad for her about now.
This Sarah M is a piece of…work. Nobody is buying this whole smug, mealy-mouth “of course, I don’t want anyone to get hurt but…” This reads as if she’s worried that Quinn’s harassment might be in decline. Even worse, she’s obviously courting the #GG crowd – a new low in virtual starfucking.
Gamergate has consistently embraced non-gamers who encourage or excuse harassment so I’m sure her twitter feed will get a lot more followers. Heck, it might be enough for Sarah M to feel relevant.
@chaltab:
I’m having trouble seeing the “other things” beyond the name mix-up that shows the OP was hastily written or defensive. I’m also having trouble seeing where in the OP David “dismiss[es] the possibility of Zoe Quinn being abusive,” or even mentions it. Or does he have to mention it as a valid possibility in order to prove he thinks it is irrelevant?
What I do see is this:
Which mirrors your sentiment here:
So… what’s making you leery?
“He talked about evaluating the risk to his current job, his future jobs, his family, himself.”
With some reason, because if heaps of facts come out about this, and if they mostly tell against him, he might find himself inconvenienced. That could happen.
“You know, whether he’d get stalked or murdered for this.”
Oh, please. Such crap. Whether he dumped her or she dumped him she’s never shown any sign of wanting to do anything but keep the whole incident strictly in the rear-view mirror, nor has she ever encouraged anybody to do anything but walk on past it and keep going. Nobody’s going to bother the dude for gassing-off; to the contrary; he’s going to be given a gigantic bullhorn/foghorn/megaphone and he’s going to be encouraged to keep blowing air and noise through it for as long as he can. There’s zillions of guys out there in the gaming world and in the manosphere who are eager to eat anything he coughs out up with grins on their faces (and there’s also zillions of guys in the same worlds who couldn’t care less about any of it, but we’re not concerned with them). He’s a wounded dude who wants commiseration, and he’s going to get it, in large gushing amounts. I fail to see where that’s a problem for him.
@chaltab
@chaltab
The bottom line is that , as David said (and many, may agree) it is none of our business.
His perception of an intimate relationship is the basis for what has become a worldwide event, affecting scores of people in very negative ways, to put it mildly. If it is his and his little sidekick’s perception that there was abuse there are a lot of more mature and acceptable ways to go about addressing it than parading it on 4 Chan and editing it “for entertainment value”. Can you really not see that? This was not a public service they’re involved in, it is nasty, thoughtless retribution which might have made him the man of the hour in places like 4chan but the wider world now sees him as a whiny little shit.
*many, many*
I hate this tablet, shopping for used laptop on another tab, I swear!
@vaiyt I’m aware of that, that’s what I’ve been saying from the start. I feel like David’s post is giving too much thought to the red herring (whether Rachel M. is even remotely trustworthy on the topic of ZQ) and not enough on what we should be saying and what I’ve been saying since this clusterfuck started: Zoe Quinn could be literally Satan for all I care, her own sins, whatever they may be, do not justify what #GamerGate is doing. Zoe Quinn is not a target because of the content of her character or really even because of what Gjoni did. She’s a target because a group of manchildren have a problem with women invading ‘their’ space in the gaming community. The message here should not be to target Rachel M. and question her honesty, but to point out that her side of the story is completely irrelevant when it’s actually about anti-feminism in games criticism.
Johanna,
“The more this goes on the more I am absolutely fucking convinced that Eron is the abusive one in the relationship, not Zoe. A lot of what he says she was doing could also be depressive episodes, I’ve seen enough of those to actually think of that first before emotional abuse, especially given his blog post, sending 4chan after her and acting like a general human shitpile out to ruin someone’s life.”
Reading Lundy Bancroft’s book, it’s also something that can happen to women in abusive relationships – they can mirror some of the behavior of their abuser. IIRC.
@chaltab:
… but the OP is about Rachel’s blog post, not about gamergate as a whole. There are plenty of other blog posts where David makes the point you wish he made here; that the personal details don’t matter when condeming the harassment. This post was not about the harassment, though, it was fact-checking a post about events that are relevent to how gamergate started.
You’re basically arguing that this post shouldn’t have been written.
I get it chaltab. You think David should be writing about what you think David should be writing about instead of what David thinks he should wrote about. Yeah. He gets that a lot. I think all bloggers do.
And Rachel’s post is certainly not a red herring. She’s making claims about how this whole mess got started, and painting Eron as an Angel and Zoe as a demon. It certainly is relevent. David isn’t arguing that this is what proves the harassment is unjustified or wrong, he’s just covering a piece of the picture.
@kirbywarp
Fair enough. I don’t buy her characterization of Eron as a sensitive soul just trying to keep Zoe from hurting people (seriously, if that were the case then what the fuck was he doing in the burgers&fries IRC?) but David getting her name wrong and referring to her as having ‘her little hatchet’ buried in Zoe’s back makes it come off as dismissive and patronizing and somewhat out of character for a feminist blog. It’s the sort of language I’d expect from GamerGate*, not here.
*well minus the gendered slurs and info-graphics
Well done, Rachel M. You’ve bravely helped made the gaming world even more unsafe for women. Here is your prize: five minutes of fame and a boyfriend who quit his job to manage an internet hate campaign. Good for you.
Yeah… I didn’t get that at all, chaltab. I can sort of see what you’re getting at with “little hatchet” (a diminuitive instead of just repeating axe?), but it still seems like a big stretch, especially in isolation, and far far tamer than anything you’d see from GamerGate.
Way to move on and get over someone, Eron!
*sirens wail* Step aside everybody, the tone police are here!
FWIW, I don’t think David’s Sarah/Rachel mixup is indicative of anything more than an odd thing people do sometimes that people named Sarah and/or Rachel might notice. And I see he’s corrected it.