This whole saga was actually quite funny.
sarkeesian says there is a lot of misogyny in gaming (with some misguided early takes imo) and the overwhelming response by the gaming community was rampant misogyny
if the gamers just shut up and let her whine about how mean Batman games were because Batman’s character walks one way and catwoman walks another way she would have just been noise that wouldn’t have been taken seriously at all. Instead they made a martyr out of her and justified her complaints post hoc
Gamergate theory of the technofascist putsch: women who have sex and play video games ruined the world for nerds who can't get laid, and that justifies everything.
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/Fascists have always been clowns, but it's a 21st-century innovation that they're so proud of their juvenile behavior. Unfortunately, many in online journalism saw this coming a decade ago, with the emergence of the dumbest social movement in American, and probably world, history: Gamergate. For those blissfully aware of this history, Gamergate was the first major crowd-sourced harassment campaign of the social media era.
On its surface, it was mostly a bunch of young gamers having a year-long tantrum because they didn't want women getting girl cooties on their video games. But for those of us who watched it closely at the time, it was a troubling portend of what turned out to be a full-blown fascist movement.
DOGE owes everything to Gamergate, from its aesthetics to its tactics to its manpower, which largely draws on the same young men — now 10 years older — who were radicalized to the far-right via social media. As journalist Max Read pointed out recently, Musk's project isn't "like" Gamergate, but "straightforwardly is Gamergate, composed of many of the exact same people" rehashing the same unjustified grievances. Literally, in between bouts of attacking federal workers as "parasites," Musk and his fanboys also whine that video games are too "woke" and this justifies fascism.
paging vy65
But what DOGE owes to Gamergate goes much deeper than the gripes of those suffering arrested development. The propaganda tactics and strategic incoherence of DOGE come straight out of that year of Gamergaters sharpening their techniques through a sustained — and still painfully stupid — harassment campaign against feminists online.
The first lesson of Gamergate was the propaganda value of bad faith, reinforced by endless repe ion. Gamergaters were motivated primarily by two grievances: that feminists were criticizing sexism in video games and, crucially, that these same feminists seemed to have more sex than the Gamergaters. This is no exaggeration. The whole campaign first started as targeted harassment of a female (now non-binary) video game developer whose bitter ex-boyfriend riled up a mob against her by telling them she had sex with lots of men. It soon spread to target other outspoken feminists, especially those who criticized video games, but the underpinning of sexual jealousy was always present.
Gamergaters realized quickly that outsiders would not be sympathetic to their real complaint, which was, "How dare women who have sex more than me make me feel bad about my sexist video games?" Instead, they invented a claim that female game developers were exchanging sex with male journalists for good reviews. It wasn't true, but "ethics in journalism" was credible-sounding enough to trick gullible journalists into writing stories that cast Gamergate in a more sympathetic light than the misogynist witch hunt deserved.
4chan is rumored to be dead for good
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/a-week...dead-for-good/Nearly a week after a major hack forced it offline, the notorious imageboard 4chan remains inaccessible, and there's a growing feeling that it's going to stay that way—and that maybe it's not so bad.
Founded in 2003, 4chan is—or was—something of a waypoint for a particular part of online subculture: Basic, unrefined, unmoderated, and almost entirely anonymous, which is what made it so notorious. Vice called it "the internet’s favorite hotspot of moral bankruptcy" in its report on the hack, and that seems about right: There are certainly worse places to go in the digital world, but none that are so singularly famous for it.
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