Lovers of literary catastrophes rejoice! Some GamerGaters are crowdsourcing a book about what they see as the death of 4chan and the rise of GamerGate, and so far the results have been even more amazingly awful than that even sounds.
So far all the Gaters have managed to produce have been some rough drafts of a lyrical prologue written almost entirely in mixed metaphor, a somewhat plodding first chapter, and a rough outline of the rest of the book. But there is much comedy gold in these rough pages.
And so I would like to present to you The Nine Most Ridiculous Quotes from The Crowdsourced GamerGate Book That Were Actually Written by Real Human Beings Who Thought What They Were Writing Was Awesome.
1) The endless sea of ones and zeroes
We would not be forgotten in the endless sea of ones and zeroes that many other events have been dissolved by, but drowned by liars who could only just grasp the lowest bars of the social ladder.
2) The Steps We Took To Pull Back the Curtain
Let’s take a walk through no man’s land. What you will find here among the ash piles are evidence of lies, deception, ill-gotten gains, facades, and false morality. You will also find the mark of our footprints; the steps we took to pull back the curtain and expose the corruption around us.
3) Never Stop Riding
Hold on to your seat. The ride never ends.
4) Like Terminator or Something
I’m writing in nostalgia of a now lost past, and fear of an uncertain future. You know, like Terminator or something.
5) Fighting in a Maelstrom of Pettiness
The ugliness on both sides, and the villains, and heroes, all fighting in a maelstrom of pettiness for a future that doesn’t care for them.
6) Something Larger in the Vacuum
While on the surface it just seems like trolls feeding trolls, death threats, and angry nerds on the surface, the picture painted is of something larger moving through the cultural vacuum that is the modern west.
7) Calculated and Painful
We were scattered by a well calculated and painful defeat.
8) Like Many a Writers Have Commented
4chan is probably, and like many a writers have commented before us, one of the most important websites of its type in the English world; known even to have affected how other unrelated websites published content and worked.
9) Not Technically Illegal
Despite being a minor, a majority of Poole’s early updates to 4chan were adding explicit boards. Many critics claimed the content of these boards were of borderline legality. Originally in /b/, and later /h/ (hentai) and /d/ (hentai/alternative), anime pornography of children (lolikon) and anime pornography depicting extreme fetishes such as necrophilia (guro). Poole responded to these complaints, by reminding them that this type of pornography is not technically illegal, and the content would not be removed.
So what will this new masterpiece be called? Well, there have been many suggestions so far. A few of my favorites:
1984Chan – The Rise and Fall of 4Chan
The point is MOOT (moot does not mean what you think it means) -40 keks
Our Kampf
So whats the deal with 4chan?
To Reign in Hell: The Fall from Grace
The Willing Executioners
Poole’s Closed
404 – (Chronicle of the Executioners), (4chan Not Found), (Freedom Failed to ` Load), (Freedom Not Found)
The Caliphate of the Internet
To Kill |Crush| a |Mocking| Cloverleaf
Ooh, someone took high school English!
The heroes who rose from the pariahs
Tales of the struggles of modern-day Huckleberry Finns
Oh, yet another High School graduate!
How we tried and slew Leviathan
How to win friends and crash your community, by MOOT
We are piss babies who like to suck diaper farts
I don’t think that last one was meant completely seriously.
(I am also aware that the bit about the Terminator was probably added by a troll.)
H/T — To Literally Who herself for pointing me to this literary masterpiece. She is also organizing a crowdsourced dramatic reading of the book’s prologue.
BONUS: Here are a few more of the proposed book covers.
I will never cease to be amazed by just how full of themselves the Gaters are. Whenever I start thinking these guys can’t be serious, something like this comes up to remind me that yes, Gaters really think sending death and rape threats somehow helps make a better world for everyone. Of course, by everyone, they mean straight male gamers, NOT those ICKY GURLZ with their cooties; NOT trans people, who as per David’s recent post, are apparently just feminism’s devious plot to take over computer programming from the good, “sane” white boy’s club; NOT people of color, except when stock photos of PoC can be used to make people think that maybe YOU are the real racist…
Is our children learning? No, Dubya. No, they isn’t.
Also, that “artwork” is like an unholy hybrid of AVFMorons and bad anime. Well done, Gomers, well done!
I wonder what the title of an actually professional (and presumably truthful) account of this whole fracas would be?
“Gatekeepers and Girls”?
“Thesis and Anti-Thesis”?
“Gamer is Dead”?
“Five Guys and an Angry Internet”?
“Tropes Versus Women Versus Twitter Wrath Versus Ethics”?
i saw an estimate that a total of ~500 twitter accounts were tweeting pro-#gg. take into account that some ggers created multiple sock accounts and my estimate would be in the ~250 range.
which would seem like a vast crowd if they were all in an irc channel together, or all posting on the same message board, so an uncritical gger might assume that they are an economic and political force.
Have they adopted slender man as their mascot? That’s how it looks to me, except I didn’t think slender man was red….
Um. What?
i think that means, “we wouldn’t run out of steam naturally, but be dragged down by our lessers, which is to say women, but don’t dare call us misogynist!”
I’m sure they believe tomorrow belongs to them
http://youtu.be/29Mg6Gfh9Co
I may need to try another embed
Here’s a title suggestion for them “Mein Kampfy Chair” in recognition of the place from which they do all their “social activism”.
I think what bothers me most about these guys is all the aureate nonsense they write to puff themselves up. They’re cribbing liberally from famous war speeches, painting themselves as being on the front-lines of the greatest culture war the world have ever seen…
Or at least they would if they weren’t, you know, GG supporters. That the end result comes across as something closer to Turner D Century than Douglas MacArthur is… well, it’s actually just adorable. Like a newborn baby who can’t quite hold his/her head up.
“The heroes who rose from the pariahs”
Holy shit that. Is. Amazing.
Also: what’s the deal with these guys and the font from The Wall?*
–
* – I know exactly what the deal is with these guys and the font from The Wall.
The more I learn about the Gators mindset, the harder it is for me to understand. My first reaction to seeing this crap was “What children. They’re so stuck on the idea that supervillains are ‘cool’ that they haven’t figured out that it’s a bad way to present themselves to the world.”
But then I thought on it a little more, and I realized that even the youngest child realizes that supervillains are “bad guys”.
What I think we have here is something like what you see in Goodfellas – a subculture so cut off from the norm that their values become twisted until up is down, good is bad, and hijacking trucks is working hard for a living.
The Gators are so fixated on the coolness of supervillains, and their own identification with them as transgressive badasses, that they’ll identify with even the most stupid, oppressive and banal evils of the real world because any transgression is badass. And they’re so insulated from the wider culture that they expect that to be moving to someone other than themselves.
I’m an imaginative fellow, but that is difficult to get my head around.
*whistles*
The document itself is truly a sight to behold. Hilariously enough, despite gamergate not being 4chan, the book intros are all about 4chan. Despite gamergate and 4chan being large groups of people (you totally can’t pin any bad behavior on the whole group), they literally are describing themselves as a hive mind, both in text and in the suggestions.
I’d suggest at least reading page 11… that’s when they outline a chapter dedicated to defining social justice. From what I gather, Social Justice is wrong about patriarchy because it’s accusing men of being men, and it’s the fault of the Jews rather than the fault of dudes. Also, 4channers are just as oppressed as black people.
They don’t use the phrase “black people.”
@seraph:
I always figured it was a combination of being in a separated culture like you said and trying to own their criticism. 4chan is widely known as an internet cesspool… I guess the people who stay there figure they might as well live up to the expectation. Plus, anti-heroes are all the rage these days.
Ah, perfect, an excerpt!
This is how they see themselves.
It’s really getting annoying that the “moderates” pretend to be polite and civil and concerned about ethics when they post on Twitter, Gawker/Kotaku, and wherever else they speak to outsiders but then they run back to 8chan where they think no one is watching and act gleefully villainous. If they want to be the baddies, they should just embrace it. Nobody is buying the sweet and innocent act anymore anyway.
A place of pure anarchy is never a place of pure freedom. It’s the boot of the biggest bully stamping on everyone else’s face forever.
holy cow. i thought i knew what to expect going in, but no. no, it was even worse.
Ugh…Christmas season starts beginning of November and I have made it 24 days without having to sit through a Christmas song. Damn you Subway!
Back on topic:
Blockquote monster nooooo!
If they actually managed to get it published and the someone were to review it, a whole new front in the war would open in the outraged aftermath: ethics in book reviewalism.
They’d have to pay a literary critic if they wanted a review even slightly positive.
Even then GamerGate would still be about ethics, amirite?
Very true. But what they don’t understand is that antiheroes usually have traits that are sympathetic or relatable for the audience. Walter White has cancer and huge medical bills. Don Draper went through his early years with no support system and isolated himself even further by crafting a whole new persona. Tyrion Lannister has a highly dysfunctional family and is discriminated against for his dwarfism. Etc.
The thing is, these characters are crafted by skilled writers who know how to create complex and interesting characters. They know how to highlight the sympathetic aspects of their character’s personalities so the audience will sympathize with them even as they make immoral choices. Gamergaters don’t have any of these skills. The only thing the show their audience is their trolling and their gleeful villainy. These people might have stories that would make them slightly more sympathetic, but there’s no one to tell these stories and all we know them as is are internet trolls. There’s nothing human and relatable there. When they claim to not be evil, there’s nothing to indicate that is true. We are expected to just take their word for it. And why should we?
Plus, antiheroes usually go up against opponents who are less moral than the antihero. That’s a big part of what makes them sympathetic. They aren’t constantly picking on innocent people. Gamergaters have picked an opponent that they see as more evil. The “SJWs.” But most people don’t view people who are pro social justice as villains. They might think the antihero narrative is working for them. But it isn’t.
@kirbywarp:
For fuck’s sake, more juvenile celebration of the Hobbesian interpretation of anarchy as a state of utter chaos and destruction? Let me guess, these are the same dumbpants who eagerly await a speculative dog-eat-dog world of postapocalyptic proportions, where people have suddenly and inexplicably lost their ability to work together since no one is around telling them to do so, and where these guys will be kings because reasons.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
@sunnysombrera:
I was going to write about Putin in my last post! The “there is no stopping group X when they feel they are in the right” thing is approximately what Mr. Putin recently said in an interview (referring to the Russian people). Note that it’s about feeling that you are right, not about actually being right. That’s right, strength of convictions and no self-awareness count as virtues to authoritarian assholes. I agree that the mindset is the same, even if the power frame is totally different.