We Hunted The Mammoth
UPDATE: Alec Holowka’s sister reports that he has died, apparently of suicide.
By David Futrelle
#MeToo hit the gaming industry hard this week, with an ever-growing number of women and non-binary people coming forward to accuse men in the industry — including some big names — of rape and harassment and other forms of abuse.
By David Futrelle
I think a lot about this Tweet from Zoe Quinn:
The Spring 2018 WHTM pledge drive will be wrapping up soon — and we’re still a ways short of what I need to get in order to make the site ad free! Please donate what you can! Thanks!
By David Futrelle
Candace Owens — self-proclaimed “Red Pill Black” conservative — is having a bit of a moment, hanging out with new Trump fan Kanye West, posing for selfies with Don Jr., getting an effusive Twitter shout-out from Don Sr,, threatening to sue people who talk about her in what she considers the wrong way.
So this Social Autopsy debacle is one of the saddest, most surreal spectacles I’ve seen in a long time.
Social Autopsy is, as you may have heard, a spectacularly wrongheaded attempt to fight cyberbullying by posting the personal information of alleged bullies online — that is, in internet lingo, by doxxing them, thus exposing them to the sort of vigilante “justice” that the Internet handles so very, very badly. Social Autopsy planned to assemble a database of 150,000 alleged bullies; how they were to be selected wasn’t altogether clear.
So a couple of days ago, as you probably have heard, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn testified at the United Nations about online harassment of women. The two, along with a number of other victims of/experts on online harassment also paid a visit to Google Ideas to share their thoughts on the matter.
This is, in essence, what #GamerGate has achieved over the past year: By launching an unprecedented wave of organized harassment, mostly aimed at women, the Gators have brought about a new awareness of the seriousness of online harassment. And they’ve given the women whose lives and careers they’ve tried most energetically to destroy an influence they never would have had otherwise.
Welcome back, my friends, to the harassment that never ends.
It’s not news that GamerGate is fading – the media hubbub has died down, and the last I checked the volume of Tweets to the #GamerGate hashtag has dropped to only about a fifth of what it was in its glory days.
But it’s too soon to say it’s over. Because while the number of Gaters has shrunk, the harassment of GamerGate’s targets goes on, and on, and on. Indeed, for the three “Literally Whos” who’ve been the central targets of #GamerGate harassment little has changed. The death threats, the rape threats, the insults, the harassing Tweets and comments and emails and phone calls all continue.
And then the Gaters accuse the “Literally Whos” of faking their harassment in a bid for sympathy and cash.
Let’s look at each in turn:
This is the final day of the We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Every time you think they can’t go any lower, they go lower. This morning game designer and #GamerGate target Zoe Quinn discovered that someone was selling, er, “erotic fiction” about her on Amazon. Which is to say: a Kindle eBook apparently filled with explicit descriptions of her being gang-raped by five “upset” gamers trying to “teach her a lesson.”
Here’s the author’s blurb for the book:
Hey, remember that beyond-terrible “crowdsourced” GamerGate book I featured here not long ago? Well, Zoe Quinn has put together a crowdsourced dramatic reading of it! That’s it, above, if you hadn’t already figured that out.
Enjoy!
I‘m on a brief blog hiatus, but I wanted to direct your attention to idledillettante’s definitive account of how Eron Gjoni, Zoe Quinn’s vengeful ex-boyfriend, not only launched what became #GamerGate but has shaped and directed it both in public and behind the scenes. And it’s all carefully documented with screenshots of Gjoni’s own words online — on 4chan, on Reddit, on Twitter, and on his own blog, often in direct violation of the restraining order that’s supposed to prohibit him talking about Quinn online.
Here’s idledilletante’s summary of the whole sordid story:
1. Eron knowingly promoted his tell-all blog post about Quinn on 4chan, knowing it was likely to cause harassment.
2. Rather than try to quell the harassment (As he might have you believe), Gjoni actually basked in the attention, to try and stir up even more agita against his ex.
3. Once confronted with his actions, Eron tried to distance himself from #gamergate, and move his involvement of Quinn behind the scenes. Unfortunately we have evidence of this string-pulling.
4. Eron’s fight against his restraining order is merely a continuation of the harassment he was already engaging in. If he wins his legal battle he’s likely to post even more private info about Quinn as a reward for his backers.
5. Gjoni has essentially ruined his good name in pursuit of this revenge quest. He knows this, and it makes him bitter that his plans to sideline Quinn in her own industry have backfired so spectacularly.
6. Gjoni sexually harasses women critical of him; especially when caught in a lie or backed into a corner logically. I find this a telling clue about his real attitude about women, although Gjoni claims to be a feminist.
But I suggest you read the whole thing; the details are creepy and revealing indeed.
Whoever said that a picture is worth a thousand words clearly hasn’t been looking at the artwork of #GamerGate — unless by “a thousand words” you mean the word “poop” repeated a thousand times.
Nonetheless, to honor the hard work of GamerGate’s unsung graphic heroes, and on the off chance that I might not be fully grasping the subtle meanings of these aesthetically impaired visionaries, I would like to present to you all today a series of [] incomprehensible GamerGate Cartoons, which I have collected from 8chan and Twitter and various other places I don’t even remember.
CONTENT WARNING: Cartoon violence, misogyny, raging anti-Semitism, really bad drawing.
