Randi Harper is one of the women that Gamergaters love to hate the most. A software developer, she became Gamergate Public Enemy #4 — after the troika of Sarkeesian, Quinn, and Wu — when she developed a BlockBot that enabled Twitter users to easily shield themselves (insofar as this is possible) from possible Twitter harassment at the hands of Gamergaters and others of their ilk.
This little bit of software garnered her many months of vicious harassment herself, and ultimately a three-part smear series on Breitbart by Gamergate’s pet “journalist,” Milo Yiannopoulos.
Now one Gamergater is going after Harper’s Patreon supporters, using personal information taken from the crowdfunding site when it was hacked earlier this month.
After finding the names and addresses of Harper’s several hundred Patreon supporters in the leaked data, British blogger Sam Smith took it upon himself to “warn” these people of Harper’s alleged crimes against decency by sending a mass email to everyone he found on the list.
But to a lot of people — myself included — his supposedly friendly warning read more like a blackmail attempt.
One of the recipients of the email shared it with me yesterday. It starts off in a decidedly unfriendly manner:
I am the author of the major blog www.matthewhopkinsnews.com. I am sending you this email because your name appears in a list of people who donate to a Patreon operated by a person called Randi Harper. The list was confidential but has been hacked and placed online by unknown third parties. As a result of the leak you may be named, so please read this email carefully.
Smith — who goes by the name “Matthew Hopkins” online, styling himself as a sort of digital reincarnation of the original “Witchfinder General” — then lays out what he sees as Harper’s ethical failings, linking to Yiannopoulos’ three-part smear job as proof. Among Smith’s complaints:
Harper has … admitted to drug abuse, including attempting to smoke meth from a broken lightbulb. She also irresponsibly dyed her dog blue and accidentally allowed it to lick up her drugs.
Dyeing a dog blue may annoy the dog, but if done properly it will not harm it. And literally billions of human beings on our blue planet have used drugs at some point in their lives.
Now we come to the blackmaily bit, which Smith insists is not blackmaily at all:
You are supporting a person who is associated with some of the vilest imaginable extremism. …
As a responsible journalist, I can assure you I shall not be publishing the list. However, some of you may work in regulated roles with responsible access to information, vulnerable adults or children. There may be a lawful public interest in my contacting the relevant authorities (including an employer).
Smith went on to ask Harper’s supporters if they, personally, “endorse her extremist views” and if they felt “aggrieved at Ms Harper’s failure to safeguard your personal data.” (Never mind that it was Patreon’s job, not Harper’s, to protect the data on its servers.)
If Smith’s email was intended to rattle its recipients, it seems to have succeeded. The person who sent the email to me reported that “[i]t left me quite shaken and furious.”
If the email was intended to scare donors into abandoning Harper, it has apparently backfired in a big way. Indeed, Motherboard reports that, according to Harper,
Smith’s efforts has had the opposite effect: her backers have responded by doubling, and sometimes tripling their donations. Her campaign has jumped more than $1,300 a month in donations after the emails went out.
For his part, Smith insists, as he did in a post yesterday, that his email wasn’t intended to be threatening. He had simply
decided the ethical thing to do would be to warn the people concerned, reassuring them I would not release the data and also what might happen, as I thought the Patreon boilerplate warning insufficient.
That bit about there being “a lawful public interest in my contacting the relevant authorities (including an employer)?” That was
actually just boilerplate legal language related to UK law. Obviously I am analysing these supporters and in some limited circumstances I might be required to report things – for example if they were a risk to a child. As a person who may wish to enter a regulated profession, I would be expected to cooperate with the authorities. Far from being a blackmail demand it is just standardised ‘cover-yourself’ legal language.
I will have to consult with the monkey lawyers flying out of my butt on that one.
Some Gamergaters have insisted that Smith isn’t really one of them, which is a bit silly, considering that he is a regular on the KotakuInAction subreddit — one of Gamergate’s main hubs of activity — who happily posted a photo of himself hobnobbing with Yianopoulos at a #Gamergate meetup in London last April.
But it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of those posting about Smith’s email blast on KotakuInAction since word of it got out earlier this week have been strongly critical, blasting it as the sort of thing that (in their mind) only evil anti-Gamergaters would do. (Never mind that they haven’t.)
Of course, Gamergaters (and the mythic “third party trolls” they like to talk about so often) have been doing far worse to Sarkeesian, Quinn, Wu, Harper and many others among Gamergate’s favorite villains for more than a year now.
Still, the reaction to Smith’s blackmail-that’s-not-really-blackmail-honest suggests that at least some Gamergaters have a few sickly shreds of decency still living deep inside them somewhere. I can only hope they can nurse their decency back to full health before they ruin the lives of more people in their attempt to rid the game world of anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.
And I hope Patreon brings the full force of its lawyers down on Smith.
@ Paradoxy
It’s interesting to consider that up until the 1400s it was official church doctrine that there were no such thing as witches (if you think about it, how could anybody other than Jesus or a saint do supernatural stuff?)
People who professed either to be witches or believe in witches were generally considered a little [redacted in compliance with comments policy 🙂 ]
Heresy was the big concern of the church, not people talking to cats.
That all changed with the publication of the Malleus Malefacoram, a treatise arguing for the existence of witches and s manual for dealing with them.
It might have remained a daft little historical footnote but with the increasing popularity of the printing press and the need for stuff to publish, it’s lurid contents made it a best seller.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Malleus Maleficarum kind of fills the same niche as modern-day Satanic Ritual Panic & Abuse stories (in form of “former Satanist gone straight”) confessions do.
It allows you guilt-free witnessing of a lurid spectacle of sinful of Other, and wallowing in fantastic details which are normally forbidden to behold.
Re: witches
Yup, for a bit of history, witch accusations turned out like this:
http://satwcomic.com/art/what-comes-around-goes-around.jpg
TessaBeau is right:
@skiriki,
Malleus Maleficarum is an especially hilarious example because it runs both directions. A conspiracy theory that has become the object of conspiracy theories.
@ catalpa
I love that cartoon. It’s even funnier if you imagine she really is a witch.
I have issues with my mentality, at times, and I sometimes have trouble processing information.
I have largely ignored gamergate, I wasn’t even aware of it until there were big issues, and I am having trouble figuring out what started the mess. Was it a few women that started speaking out about the woman characters in video games, and the sexist aspects of that?
I’m thinking that is it, but, unless I get information kind of in order, it’s tricky for me to backtrack. Can someone please tell me if I understand that right?
@Raysa: GamerGate proper started with The Zoe Post, which was written by one of Zoe Quinn’s ex boyfriends (who she got a restraining order against and while outwardly saying he wishes her no ill will and he’s not condoning her harassment, he’s been notably behind the scenes directing traffic all while claiming to be “feminist”) accusing her of cheating on him with five different guys, most notably with a Kotaku writer for good reviews of her game, Depression Quest (Which was later proven false as the guy in question, Nathan Grayson, had never written a word about her game). A shitty right-wing actor dubbed it “GamerGate”, and the name has carried on.
However, harassment of Zoe, Anita, Brianna, ect has been going on for months, or even years before this. GamerGate is just a name for the group as it stands now, and a name for the shitty excuse they’ve got for harassing them “ethics in game journalism”, despite the fact that there are actual problems with games journalism that they could be focusing on, like Let’s Players not being forthcoming with how they’re related to projects (which most of them have been good about), the whole Shadow of Mordor incident (linked because it’s to The Escapists YouTube channel, even though it’s Jim Sterling’s video, because he still worked for them at the time), or even the pro-military narrative that games are pushing on people, but nope. Obviously this one story that’s been proven false about an indie developer is everything wrong with the industry.
[/rant]
Forgot to add: With the whole harassment of Anita, Zoe, Brianna, et al., that harassment actually just stems from “these women have opinions I don’t like about games, which I do like, and I don’t want to hear it”.
Anita said “Here’s what I want to do with Tropes vs. Women” and she was harassed for that (and then the goalposts were shifted to “She has too much money!” “She’s not making videos fast enough!” “She ripped her backers off!”, all of which are demonstrably not true).
Zoe said “I want to make a game about my experiences with depression.” and was harassed for that (and then harassed afterwards because “it’s not a real game” bullshit).
And Brianna Wu is a game developer who spoke out against how women are treated in the industry and got harassed for that.
So yeah, the reasons are ever changing, the goalposts are ever shifting. The only constant facts are: The harassers, no matter what name they’ve gone under or what cause they say they’re for, just don’t like what these women have to say, and just want to harass them, “justified” or not.
@Orion: But the part people are talking about mandatory reporting wasn’t in the original letter, but in his “oh no! I’m not blackmailing them!” blog post where he said:
[1] Why is he “analysing” the supporters? This is the part that bothers me the most.
[2] The part about him being required to report if he discovers something in these completely unprovoked invasions of these people’s privacy.
@Orion: Yup.
@Raysa: RationalWiki has a pretty good explanation, and it is a snarky one.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gamergate/Timeline
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gamergate
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Gamergate_claims
Paradoxal intention:
Thanks for the synopsis. I swear I have been trying to find the original reason, it always seems to be changing. So, it basically comes down to women finding various ways to ruin games for the mens. Makes perfect sense! 🙂
Skiriki:
Yes, those links broke it down very well, and in order. Very helpful, thank you. 🙂
@Alan
Slightly OT:
Dogs are colourblind, but they don’t see the world in just black and white (and here I’d like to pause for a moment to thank EL James for making it impossible to use the phrase “shades of grey”, with or without a number appended. And when I say thank, well…you get the picture).
Dogs do in fact see blue. They may not see all the same shades of blue we do, but they definitely have blue colour receptors in their eyes. Dogs actually have two types of colour receptor – blue and yellow. Hence, they are dichromats. Humans are trichromats – we also have a red colour receptor in our eyes. It’s thought there might be some women (to be precise, humans with a XX sex chromosome pairing) who are tetrachromats, but this it EXTREMELY difficult to test and verify. It’s all academic anyway when you consider the mantis shrimp, which has sixteen(!) colour receptors.
If you’re interested in this stuff, the Radiolab podcast did a fun and excellent piece on it for their show “Colors”. It’s the first section. Link http://www.radiolab.org/story/211178-rip-rainbow/
TL;DR – Dogs can see blue.
Tessa,
Ah, I see. I did miss that, somehow. Thanks.
@ scalyllama
Cheers for that.
Now of course I want to see an action film where a mantis shrimp has to defuse a bomb.
“Cut the blue wire!”
“Which blue? There’s loads of them!”
“Dude, nice dye job!” “WHAT DYE JOB?”
Oy vey gevalt on a roll. -_- Unrelated, but a UK student is taking issue with the existence of sexual consent courses and there aren’t enough oy veys.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/14/people-are-really-angry-about-what-this-student-wrote-about-consent_n_8293104.html?1444832864&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067
Mantis shrimp should not exist. They have traits that I don’t want to know wtf was going on that caused their evolution. The eyes are cool, the punching at the speed of sound it terrifying.
Terrifying? I think the word you’re looking for is “brilliant”!
How come these guys don’t have their own film franchise?
@Sarity
Wow, if being invited to a seminar along with everybody else in his class is the “Biggest insult he’s received in years,” he must have the sort of life a feel-good movie would tone down for being too awesome.
White male entitlement, everybody! *sarcastic clapping*
(Inb4 we get a repeat of last time, where it turned out the guy was a rapey predator.)
@Alan
Bahahaha! I nearly had coffee running out of my nose!
Yes, we need a new superhero – Mantis Woman! Able to see in ultraviolet! Literally kills enemies with her supersonic punch! Has no concept of camouflage!
Of course, her alter ego would need to be careful about playfully punching people in the arm…and noise complaints from breaking the sound barrier.
Now we need a Kickstarter campaign.
That he thinks a rapist has any particular look, proves the need for consent lessons.
Time to repost the gif I just used in the other thread
http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr01/2013/5/2/14/anigif_enhanced-buzz-20569-1367521176-1.gif
Your hurt manfeels are not important than preventing rape. For fuck’s sake!
So apparently, KiA is, in a rare moment, calling out Smith for his bullshit.
Of course, the reasons they’re doing it is for their own personal gain “We don’t do shit like this!”, “This is what we rally against!”, and all that other bullshit, but hey, at least they’re calling it out?
I’m sure a lot of people have already seen this, but I’m still just going to leave it here.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
“The mantis shrimp is the harbinger of blood-soaked rainbows.”
Oh wow. Hadn’t actually seen that before.
Can someone who understands the square/cube law work out the maximum possible size for these things. I’ve got some genetic engineering to plan.
In unrelated news, does anyone want to buy some atomic powered super monkeys? Unfinished hobby project.