10 Years after #GamerGate (September 1st) - Mad at the Internet #Bonus 2024-09-09

0:00:00
Unknown_22: Hello again, not chat. I feel like I should do a proper introduction to this video so that everybody knows who I am and what I'm doing, because this might be shared.

Unknown_22: My name is Joshua Moon. I run a website called The Kiwi Farms. I used to be an administrator and developer related to 8chan.

Unknown_22: I no longer am. I have not been for a long time. And I'm doing a video talking about how I remember Gamergate.

Unknown_22: Because today is September the 1st. The Gamergate 10th anniversary just happened. And I feel it's an interesting topic, because I've never really spoken about this at length, because... And Gamergate, in retrospect, has become embarrassing. And it never had a proper funeral. Sort of hard to explain. Even to this day, there are people who pretend that Gamergate is like a real thing that's still going on. A lot of them take credit for all counterculture that has happened since Gamergate. Because in this era, there wasn't even like transgenders. Like transgenders as a concept was like drag queens and then like a couple really mentally ill people on Tumblr. And now these days, it's like everyone is transgender. So this is how long ago this was. This was right around the point where the world lost its fucking mind. And

0:01:13
Unknown_22: There's probably a lot of things I'm going to get wrong, as I always do, because I'm just going off and remembering a couple things that I put together for this. And a couple things I may not remember that are important, but it's been a long time. And I think that really what's really hard to communicate about Gamergate, in retrospect, is that it wasn't really an event that happened. Because, you know, there are things like battles. You can look at Gettysburg, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who died and... You know, there's all these artifacts and monuments. But while there were tons of people involved in this and it was really effective to the people involved, there's no artifacts, there's no monuments to it. It was just a thing. It was sort of like two groups of people expressing their frustrations at things and people trying to make money off of this. And now that it's over, there's not a grave site. There's not like a mass grave, you know, like in Gettysburg. It's just sort of like a thing that people have to recall from memory. Because the other thing that's also particularly relevant to Gamergate as a controversy is that there are no contemporary records of it that are accurate.

0:02:21
Unknown_22: And I'll get into that. So if we start off at the set the stage of when this was.

Unknown_22: There were a lot of people who were upset at the state of games media and to even discuss games media like it's a or games journalism like it's a real thing. Kind of now feels ridiculous. Like, how could you possibly invest any emotional energy in what fucking Kotaku says? But back in the day, you know, if any news about a video game came out, it would always come out through these good boy publishing studios like Kotaku. And, you know, it's a lot of people, even people who were conservative at the time or didn't or were completely apolitical, which a lot of Gamergate was. Um, they were reading these articles on Kotaku and they were upset. It's like, hey, you know, I'm a straight white male. I don't deserve to be shit on by these fucking game journos. Like, how dare you?

0:03:32
Unknown_22: I'm your audience. I'm your consumer base. I give you my money. I invest my time and attention into your products. Why are you coming out here and telling me how terrible I am for the innate qualities of the person I am? And again, saying all that sounds really like naive and quaint, like, oh, wow, there were people back then who thought that way. That there weren't people out there that would hate them just because they're white. Nowadays, it's just accepted. But back in the day, you know, this was Bush's or not Bush's. This was Obama's second term.

0:04:04
Unknown_22: Trump.

Unknown_22: Wasn't wasn't even like a thing, wasn't even like a concept, you know, like none of that stuff had happened yet.

Unknown_22: Actually, I think this might this is Obama's second term. So it's sort of like.

Unknown_22: There was a naivety to it. You know, things were still good. They were getting weird, but they were still good. And there wasn't a lot of hate. So this kind of heel turn and turning on the American majority and the American male gamer and saying like, hey, you're a piece of shit, really upset people. And it was really like starting to grate on people.

0:04:42
Unknown_22: This was the other article that was prominent around the time of August 28th. This is right around the same time. I think the Gamers Are Over article is, I think this original title was Gamers Are Dead, actually.

Unknown_22: This is what they mark Gamergate, because this was so on the nose. Game culture as we know it is kind of embarrassing. It's not even culture. It's buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it's getting mad on the internet.

0:05:17
Unknown_22: Oops. Guilty.

Unknown_22: Lowercase i internets. Just so we're clear.

Unknown_22: They're probably talking about the internet, but they're talking about a roundabout. Anyways, this article really pissed a bunch of people off, and they said, like, hey, you know, we're not fucking dead. We're still here. We're still spending our money. Fuck you. So, this upset a bunch of people, and it even got a name.

Unknown_22: Before it did, there was one other thing that kind of

0:05:49
Unknown_22: Like, the games journos, a lot of people hated, and sure, there was stuff where they were trying to find out these male feminists, and a lot of these male feminists were guilty of, like, sex crimes and stuff later down the road. But Depression Quest came out, and it's effectively just like a choose-your-own-story, like, slideshow, like a PowerPoint presentation, and it was made by Zoe Quinn.

Unknown_22: And it won at the IndieCade Best Narrative Category Winner and Honorable Mention.

Unknown_22: This upset a lot of people because it is a pretty shit-fucking game. And it came out at this Tumblr blog, the Zoe Post. And it's effectively a long series of accusations trying to allege that Zoe Quinn, this person... had sex with five different men, including, um, who were all games journalists, including one who was married. Um, and she was actually in a relationship at the time that this happened. So this big post kicked off a huge five guys, burgers and fries. That was the big meme. Um,

0:06:36
Unknown_22: kicked off a huge outrage. And to give you an idea of why I say that contemporary writing about this is extremely hard to trust, we go to this article, and this is August 20th.

Unknown_22: Actually, okay, so sorry, I got the timeline a little bit wrong. This was before the Gamers Are Dead stuff, but I think it was the other way around. The Zoe Quinn outrage led to the Gamers Are Dead post, and that's what kicked off, officially, GamerGate. Um, Kotaku did an investigation into, I think Nathan Grayson was the article, the, um, yeah, Nathan Grayson, who I think was also the married man who was involved in Kotaku and who wrote the, a allegedly had wrote a flattering review or Kotaku had in general had written a flattering review. And the allegation was that Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson got the flattering review in for depression quest.

0:07:13
Unknown_22: Because he was having sex with Zoe Quinn at the time and did her a favor. And this is canonically the Kotaku side of this that nothing had happened and gamers were just making shit up is actually the canonized version of this in Wikipedia.

0:08:01
Unknown_22: This is the Wikipedia article about Depression Quest and we go down here to reception. It says here.

Unknown_22: In the audience response, it says here, the Depression Quest received mostly positive reviews from critics who generally viewed it as not being intended for entertainment, but for education. Then the audience response was, faced a backlash online. And this is because of the walk-in simulator stuff. At this time, this is when Life is Strange came out, and all these non-game games came out, and they were like, hey, we're going to tell stories through an interactive medium. But we're really going to de-emphasize the gaming aspect of it. It's going to be an interactive story, but really it's going to be a linear story. It's going to be told like a book. Your choices aren't really going to matter that much. And the gameplay itself is going to be weak or non-existing.

0:08:37
Unknown_22: And a lot of gamers found this to be very insulting and didn't like it. I personally, I don't give a fuck. I think there's definitely enough space in any medium for there to be a variety of games. I think what people found insulting is that this game is knocking out real games from the indie space because indie stuff was really taking off at this point in time. Nowadays, it's very commonplace for an indie game by a no name publishing studio made by one guy and like Sweden to be like a smash blockbuster game because all the tools are out there now. It's possible to start up Unreal or Unity and make a great game and then have cloud computing that can accommodate an infinite number of players overnight like that all exists already.

0:09:23
Unknown_22: Whereas back in the day, it was, you know, at this point in time, Depression Quest was what you could have thought of as an indie game, something very low effort, and they were just really starting to get good as their own medium. So that's why people were upset, I believe. But as we see here on Wikipedia, in mid-August 2024, soon after the game's official Steam release, a former boyfriend of Quinn wrote a lengthy and negative blog post about their relationship. The post alleged that Quinn had been in a relationship with Nathan Grayson. who was then a video game journalist for Kotaku. Opponents of Quinn claimed that Grayson had given Depression Quest a positive review as a result of this relationship. Investigations proved this to be false. Grayson had at no point reviewed Depression Quest. These false accusations against Quinn sparked what would later be known as the Gamergate harassment campaign. And indeed, if you look at their official page, it's actually called the Gamergate parentheses harassment campaign. So that's how, right off the gate, that's how they're going to canonize it.

0:10:04
Unknown_22: Quinn was subjected to wide-scale harassment. The game's profile page was flooded with what the New Yorker described as angry user reviews, and reviews for the game were disabled. The Daily Dot reported that 4chan's video game board had bombarded the game's Metacritic page with negative reviews. So this is the official... Quinn uses the pronoun.

0:10:37
Unknown_22: This was the official official history book version of what had happened. And I really got to stress that this one of the big things that Gamergate fucked with was how people who were very apolitical and mostly concerned with finding the next anime or video game to fill their time with. Uh, we're suddenly forced to realize that the, um, media around them, the, the journalist and Wikipedia actually hated them and would lie to their fucking face. And there was nothing they could do about it. That was a huge outcome of Gamergate.

0:11:17
Unknown_22: In case you're wondering, Zoe Quinn is an actual whore. She did a nude photo shoot with whatever the fuck this thing is, and she's just hideous. But she's so egomaniacal. It's true. I believe that, again, the Wikipedia version is that Kotaku looked into it and said that Nathan Grayson never reviewed this game. Yeah, but... If this fine young lady is giving you some under-the-table advantages, you can put in a good word for it or get her fucking game reviewed. So, it's just bullshit. And there's evidence for everything, I'm pretty sure.

0:12:02
Unknown_22: Now, the real cultural long-term impact of Gamergate is not really the nameless, faceless mob that was on 4chan and later 8chan. It was the heroes of the war. The generals, the commanders who led the fight, who led the battle.

Unknown_22: As this artist says, Who are these guys, Dad? That's Sargon, Milo and Adam, the Internet Aristocrat, and Ralph, honey, five great men who helped save Western civilization.

0:12:38
Unknown_22: Well, then, if we really want to talk about Gamergate, we should talk about the heroes of Gamergate in no particular order. Start with Adam Baldwin. Actually, I put him first because he coined this is his only contribution to Gamergate. As far as I'm aware, he was a blue checkmark back in the day, back when it was very rare to get these. I believe he's an actual actor that has starred in movies and shit. Um, he coined the term Gamergate and he linked to, uh, a couple of Gamergate videos. One in particular, I will actually play on this video.

Unknown_22: And the outcome of him was that I think he's been blacklisted or he had a very hard time. He was, um, uh, and justice to hit. And then Adam Baldwin was not allowed to play, uh, his character or whatever the fuck. I don't really care about Cape ship or movies, uh, But effectively, I think it was blacklisted because of his involvement in Gamergate. As he says, Gamergate doesn't pay. It's got 85 claps. Let's read the comments, actually.

0:13:15
Unknown_09: Author is an asshole.

Unknown_22: Adam Baldwin isn't active on TV. Well, there you go. There's the counterpoint, I guess.

Unknown_22: I honestly don't know what happened to Adam Baldwin. Considering that he only coined the term, basically, it's not that relevant.

0:13:52
Unknown_22: This, however, you may recognize. If you don't recognize the picture, you're going to recognize the voice.

Unknown_15: Sex for favors, secrets, cover-ups, corruption. I've heard things that'll blow your mind, and now I think it's time you get the whole story. I'm Jesse Ventura, and this is Quinspiracy Theory.

Unknown_17: The video I was originally going to upload tonight is gone. I've scrapped it. It's deleted. I've decided to do something different because of this. What you're looking at is a copyright claim against a YouTube user by the name of Mundane Matt on a video called Hell Hath No Fury Like a Lover Scorned. That copyright claim was filed by Zoe Quinn. the person who is the subject of the video itself. Now, in the copyright claim, she had stated that he'd used a still image of her game, Depression Quest, which she's a creator of, and that she had ownership over that, and that's why the video needed to be pulled down. Because it was infringing on her intellectual property. But the truth is, it had nothing to do with that. The image Matt used in his video, and it was just one image, I want to show you his typical format. This is a typical video that Mundane Matt will put up. You have a still image in the background, you have a transparent barrier on the left-hand side with a title, and he talks over it. And that is exactly what Hell Hath No Fury was. It had a still image in the background, a transparent barrier, title, and he talked over it. Now the image he used was a publicly available image. This game is out on Steam. You can see these images. They've been used in news articles, they've been posted on websites, they're publicly available through the company on Steam itself. So her copyright claim had nothing to do with him using her intellectual property. What it had to do with was suppressing information from getting out.

0:15:34
Unknown_22: This was Jim, currently known as Meneker, and he...

Unknown_22: He created this video, which was a series of videos about Gamergate, and they lasted, I think, for about a year. Jim did exit Gamergate, and there is a goodbye message that he posted that I will play towards the end of my video.

Unknown_22: But he was very influential and he accrued, I think, a significant number of his audience from the Gamergate stuff. But at some point he just decided that it was cringe and gay and he left. But he was on good terms at this time with Mundane Matt, who you may not even know if you're a recent listener. Mundane Matt was a culture critic who kind of made his entire career

0:16:12
Unknown_22: off of Zoe Quinn DMCAing his video about her sex scandals for reviews.

Unknown_22: Medeker took his side because at that point it's like, you know, it's us versus them. Monday Night hadn't really developed a personality as a broadcaster.

0:16:46
Unknown_22: Also kind of significant who I don't have any slides for was King of Pole, Brian Dunn. He just kind of took the moniker King of Pole and started talking about Gamergate. So he also got like a little fandom. Ethan Ralph had been running the kill stream for a little while with his first wife, Nora.

Unknown_22: And he clung on to the Gamergate thing and really kick-started his career pretty significantly off of this. Gamergate wasn't the height of the kill stream, but it did give it a lot of its energy that led to its height.

0:17:27
Unknown_22: And Medeker was also friendly with Ralph to the point where Ralph considers Medeker the person who gave him the kill stream and kind of made his career.

Unknown_22: I don't remember if Medicare was ever friendly with Milo Yiannopoulos, who's also part of Mount Gamergate.

Unknown_22: But I do think he was on talking terms with Sargon of Akkad. Back in this period, when these streamers did their video chats with each other, they used Google Hangouts. So a significant number of these old Gamergate videos are like three or four hour long, like Google Hangout things where it's just like avatars talking to each other. And that was back when Google first introduced Super Chats. That was the content, the quality content that people craved at the time.

0:18:10
Unknown_22: This is Matt's channel now. It's kind of unrecognizable because Matt has been so thoroughly humiliated that he's at several points deleted his entire library. So I have no old videos of Matt to show anybody. I even archive some of his old videos, but they were all from the time where he like, I guess there's no point I'll ever do a video about mundane Matt because who gives a fuck?

Unknown_22: As I mentioned, he got his notoriety from being DMCA by Zoe Quinn, effectively false flagged to try and cover up information. And then Monday, Matt went around flagging everybody and Medicare bullied him on stream into showing his report history by Medicare and Zidane, actually, who was a co-host of the kill stream in this era. And when he did it outed him as what we would call a flag. It so that effectively torch any reputation that he, he had, um,

0:18:51
Unknown_22: So his new videos are very like, I don't even know what the fuck he's trying to do anymore. He doesn't get any views, so whatever it's doing, it's not working.

Unknown_22: His current most notable contribution to culture and society is that some guy remixed his voice flawlessly into rap songs about raping babies and stuff, and they are extremely brutal rapes. um a little bit over the top to be quite honest with you but they're very catchy uh excellently excellently produced songs um however there is one old pre-deletion jarbo video that i had in archive and um this was even before gamergate i think you might appreciate this one so

0:19:38
Unknown_07: Hey, kids, it's me, Pauly the Polar Bear, and I'm here to tell you a random word of the day. My word today is nigger. That's right, folks. I'm going to tell you about the word nigger. Now, these people are not ones you want to talk with. Now, these people, according to UrbanDictionary.com, are lazy, black, ignorant people who don't like to have jobs and usually tries to fuck the system.

0:20:41
Unknown_09: I hope you guys are enjoying hearing the flag. It effortlessly spitting out that fire like a fucking dragon.

Unknown_06: You know what I mean? This is MC Jarboe straight up in your fucking ass. You know what I mean? Miguel. A lot of Poli fans I see here tonight. Speaking of which, I want to reintroduce a very good friend of mine. So without further ado, why don't we give a big round of applause for Poli the fucking polar bear. Tyrone in Arabia.

Unknown_07: Rape ya, kill ya, rip ya off, fuck your sister, hit the spot. Now take it from this here racist polar bear. My ass is broken, there's African American jizz in my hair. These people are not ones you wanna fuck with. Now these people are not ones you wanna fuck with. According to UrbanDictionary.com, Tyrone beats me unconscious and then feeds me the cum. Hey kids, it's me, Pauly the Polar Bear, and I'm here to tell you a random word of the day. My word today is nigger, nigger, nigger. That's right folks, I'm going to tell you about ignorant people who don't like to have jobs and usually try to get my dumb ass robbed. Word nigger, nigger.

0:21:51
Unknown_12: It was plainly a different era when mundane that was respected or respectable in any way. I can proudly say I was never a fan. I was ever a fan of him or King of Pole.

Unknown_22: Honestly, I didn't like any of the E-Celebs when Gamergate was happening. I was more interested in the image board side of things. But, oh, what's this? Oh my gosh. It seems like the ralphretort.com is down, chat. I would like to show you all the lovely articles that Ethan Ralph wrote about fucking Gamergate over the years, but they're all gone now, I guess. I guess they're archived, but nobody cares. Ralph really built himself up as a writer first, and then the kill stream took on the Google Hangout trend when it came about.

0:22:30
Unknown_22: But Ralph's contribution as a journalist was actually most significant during this period because people did read his articles, like real articles. And they were mostly countering the narrative pushed out by the journalists. And the journalists were, of course, one-sidedly against the evil doxing people on 4chan and 8chan. So he got himself a little following. I don't even have to dive into what's happened to Ralph since then. But I feel like it's always worth reminding people that back in the day, there was a point where Ralph had a very respectable career. He was married to Nora, who is undoubtedly the best woman he has ever had or will ever have in his life.

0:23:10
Unknown_22: He was writing articles that people actually wanted to read. At the height of his streams on YouTube, he was getting 6,000 viewers on special streams and making hundreds of dollars a night. He was really on top of things and no longer.

0:23:46
Unknown_22: This, you may not even recognize him, but this is Milo Yiannopoulos in 2014, 10 years ago. He had dark hair at some point. I didn't even know this until I searched for a picture of him from this era.

Unknown_22: Milo's contribution to Gamergate was the same contribution that he's maintained ever since, and that is he's a token. He is a token gay, and he's also an anti-racist token because at this point in time, I don't know if he was married yet, but he eventually got married to a black guy. So he was a gay British coal burner, and he's also Jewish. So he was basically perfect to show like, look, we don't hate gays. We don't hate... Black people. We don't hate Jews because look at this guy. He's a gay Jewish coal burner and we buy his merchandise that says don't be poor or stop being poor or whatever. And this actually had a name. And it was the start of the end.

0:24:30
Unknown_22: This is Not Your Shield. Not Your Shield is a hashtag campaign that was on Twitter. And it was basically the gamers of 4chan and 8chan begging women and blacks and gays to debase themselves and take pictures of themselves on the internet with messages saying hashtag Not Your Shield.

0:25:06
Unknown_22: Um...

Unknown_22: This black guy saying, like, look, I found out that I'm a Klansman. Or this woman saying, hashtag Gamergate, hashtag not your shield. Yes, Tom, a girl. As if to say, women don't support your social justice warriors.

Unknown_22: Black guy. Oh, look, there's a whole montage of it. Perfect. Oh my god, so many foreign passports. Russia, what kind of fucking... Dude, here's a weird thing. I love passports. Passport iconography is one of my favorite things. I love it when I'm in a foreign ministry or something, and I get to stare at passports that other people are holding in their hands. It's really cool.

0:25:51
Unknown_22: We're not here to look at passports, actually. We're here to look at the tokens. Is that a woman? I thought that was a hijab. It's just dark hair, though.

Unknown_22: And I say this was the beginning of the end because when Gamergate tried to do this counter-narrative shit, it was always cringe. And you never want to be on the defensive. You never want to, oh, an outlet for many diverse voices in gaming and a supporter of Gamergate and hashtag not your shield. Gamers are not dead. We are diverse and we are alive. When they tried to take on the enemy's language and beat the enemy at their own game, it never works, because this is not an ideologically pure combat. This is a group of people who want to destroy you, and they use certain terms and phrases to accomplish that, but they don't actually really care about what they say.

0:26:29
Unknown_22: So when GamerGate started getting really defensive and started doing things on the back foot, instead of attacking the disgusting journalist scum for what they were, it lost a lot of momentum and purpose because it couldn't accomplish anything.

0:27:05
Unknown_22: And I bring this up at this point because this was effectively Milo's job as a celebrity, besides making himself a fuckton of money, of course.

Unknown_22: Also involved, I don't know really if Sargon got involved or big before or after Gamergate. I think that his big thing was This Week in Stupid. And I think that this channel is mostly retired because it doesn't have good search.

Unknown_22: At a certain point during the Trump era, they kind of put the kibosh on his channel and just said, well, you're not going to get any more organic growth. So he now runs something instead called the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. You may have... Sargon has tried to get involved in actual, as he says, trans-European politics, because he ran for office in the UKIP party.

0:27:43
Unknown_22: He really considered himself a hotshot, because he made a fuckton of money. I think Sargon was probably one of the most productive members of Gamergate in terms of self-enrichment.

Unknown_22: Armored Skeptic and Shuon had...

Unknown_22: I don't want to say that they were actually involved in Gamergate. I don't remember. Sargon definitely was. He was definitely one of those Google voice people that were very active during Gamergate. And he made a stupid amount of money by transferring that energy into the This Week in Stupid recap videos. I knew people at that time who watched this program that he did and were subscribed to him on Patreon. Not because they used 8chan or 4chan, but because they were just fans of This Week in Stupid.

0:28:27
Unknown_22: So he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. He did make a fool of himself at several points, but he kind of grew up and stabilized and he just kind of, he does like the grind at this point. He did okay. Sargon did all right.

Unknown_22: Now, one thing that kind of deserves a little bit of mention is Vivian James. The name is just a play on the name video games. And she was drafted through consensus in a 4chan thread. This is kind of the whole outline of this, how it was tweaked over time. The gist is that there was a guy that – and Medeker talks about this in his original Gamergate video. There was a guy who was trying to do something for women in the game industry. Oh, it was that somebody would pitch a game and then their studio would crank out like a little proof of concept for this game. And they were only accepting submissions by women. But for whatever reason, they got maligned and attacked by the pro-women journalist. And it was called like a sexist operation. So they set up like a kick fund, kick fund me or whatever the fuck.

0:29:45
Unknown_22: And made a ton of money. And because so much of the money came from the video game board on 4chan.

Unknown_22: Uh, the developers actually went on to V and confirmed that was them cap coding and, uh, oh, this, they, they added, they route raised $2,000 for a character design. So they came to the board and then work this out, this final design. And it was like, they said, oh, can you like add stripes? Can you like give her like, um, those little like sleepy eyes, like an anime can do this and that. And that's how they came up to that final design, uh, for, uh, Vivian.

0:30:23
Unknown_22: which there is an absurd amount of fan art for in cosplayers and shit.

Unknown_22: However, Vivian also became an icon of Gamergate as a whole, and after this post, and I'll read this, this is from Moot, back when Moot owned 4chan, he says, "...the decision to remove Gamergate threads has been poorly communicated and that's my fault. Said threads are being deleted primarily because they violate our blanket no-personal-information-raids-cause-to-invasion rule." Regarding a perceived lack of free speech or censorship...

0:31:13
Unknown_22: Many seem to misinterpret my advocating for anonymous communication and highlighting that it allows people to share things they otherwise wouldn't be comfortable on other platforms as, quote, you can say and do anything on 4chan, which simply is not the case. We've had rules and moderators since the site was founded 11 years ago.

Unknown_22: And I've only reinforced this statement over the years, and there's a Q thread, which was the Q&A board. To those who actually want to use V to discuss a video and on a movement that has outgrown 4chan, like Project Chanology, apologies for the inconvenience. If you don't know, Project Chanology was a sort of movement that came out of B in the mid-2000s after the South Park episode about Scientology.

0:32:02
Unknown_22: And they basically just committed harassment against the Church of Scientology. They were sending black pages to the fax machine, trying to DDoS their sites and shit like that. They really wanted to destroy the Church of Scientology.

Unknown_22: And this was like a precursor movement to Occupy Wall Street, which I think also started on B. I can't remember.

Unknown_22: At some point, Moot said that 4chan was never a free speech site. And this outraged a lot of people because it had always been perceived as such. And it led to a mass exodus from V to 8chan.

0:32:40
Unknown_22: 8chan had existed prior to GamerGate.

Unknown_22: But when the exodus happened and the Gamergate topic was completely banned on 4chan, they all went to V. And Frederick heavily promoted this.

Unknown_22: The images that were posted on 4chan to try and move people over to 8chan, a lot of that was directly Frederick and his friends trying to promote their site. And it worked.

Unknown_22: Blanket banned a topic and it pissed a bunch of people off and they left and they went to 8chan.

0:33:16
Unknown_22: So this is where I can give a little bit more of my personal entanglement, because at this point in time, the Kiwi Farms didn't really have too much to do with Gamergate, and the things that I cared about had nothing to do with Gamergate.

Unknown_22: But I was invited around this time when Gamergate was happening to become a global volunteer for the 8chan website.

Unknown_22: And it was really easy to love 8chan at this point in time.

Unknown_22: The lovely man that you see on the screen right now is Brianna Wu, who I'll talk about in just a little bit.

Unknown_22: But he was doing a huge media blitz, in part bankrolled by his connections with his husband, Frank Wu, who I've mentioned is a genetic patent, like either attorney or like just an expert in patents.

0:34:05
Unknown_22: And

Unknown_22: During this Huffington Post Live, even this, this is a Google Hangouts video on the Huffington Post Live. This was Brianna Wu talking about his experience being harassed. And, like, nobody knew who the fuck this guy was. He came out of literally nowhere and said, I was a primary victim of Gamergate. At this point, Brianna Wu came literally, like, Gamergate had this weird thing where, like, it was a contest between popular figures.

0:34:38
Unknown_22: But at the same time, Gamergate really didn't want to give attention to these people. So they earned nicknames that were kind of dehumanizing. Zoe Quinn was literally Who 1. Anita Zarkizian was literally Who 2.

Unknown_22: Brianna Wu became literally Who 3. And then Randy Lee Harper would become literally Who 4. And that was their way of addressing them without saying their names because they were trying to diminish the media impact that they were having. That did not work. They were very aggressive about pushing their products on media, and the media was happy to have these products because it allowed them to write these stories about the Nazi terrorists on 8chan that were doxing and murdering women for fun.

0:35:22
Unknown_22: But this interview came about and 8chan's founder, Frederick Brennan, was invited to talk to Brianna Wu. I will spare you the entire conversation. This is a very low quality archive. And I will just show you the best part.

Unknown_19: We do have to wrap up. Before that we do wrap up, I want to say one thing to Frederick and Brianna. The both of you are incredibly brave for joining this debate, having this conversation with each other. I think it says so much about. I do not know why the video is just gone.

Unknown_22: You have to see the video.

Unknown_19: and about your objective within this controversy. My intentions are to get A-chan off my neck and the necks of other women in the industry.

0:36:01
Unknown_03: Absolutely. We can have a conversation about this stuff after you stop terrorizing them.

Unknown_19: And we will continue having this conversation here at HuffPost Live. Frederick, Eric, Brianna, thank you so much for joining me.

Unknown_14: Believe it or not, Brianna, A-chan is not all about you.

Unknown_19: All right, guys. I don't want to leave it there. I don't want to leave it there, Frederick. It was kind of unnecessary to do that. Brianna, I apologize for those last comments.

Unknown_22: That comment, so completely epically owned, Brianna Wu, because this entire thing has just been like, oh, 8chan is like an organized harassment hub that exists only to harass these poor women. And it's like, no, it's a variety board. It's like Reddit. There's tons of places for people to talk about stuff. Believe it or not, Brianna, 8chan is not all about you.

0:36:43
Unknown_14: Believe it or not, Brianna, 8chan is not all about you.

Unknown_04: I was such a better time.

Unknown_22: You have no idea. Everything.

Unknown_22: Things were just so much nicer. Oh, look, there's a shoe on head video from nine years ago. Oh, geez.

0:37:18
Unknown_22: Yeah. So let me just explain my perspective at this point, because I don't think I have anything else to say or anything else to show. My first day as a global volunteer involved Zoe Quinn's docs being posted on 8chan.

Unknown_22: And it was being posted on a dead board. Basically, this person just dumped his docs on some random... I can't remember what it was. I think it was called Raid or Invasion or something. It had some kind of weird name like that.

0:37:51
Unknown_22: But when Zoe Quinn tweeted about her docs being on this random board... The Gamergate people freaked out because it's like, oh, my God, this is harassment. And we're not a harassment movement. We're just a hashtag about ethics in video game journalism. That was the meme.

Unknown_22: So they freaked out and filed, I swear to God, literally hundreds of reports on this post. And it was just like a random post somewhere on like a raid board.

Unknown_22: And this was my first day. And I was like, well, we don't have a rule against doxing when HN. So I went through and one at a fucking time over like an hour, I dismissed every single one of these reports. And then I made a cap coded post saying, And I just said, like, look, doxing is not against the rules of global HN rules.

0:38:26
Unknown_22: So it's like, I'm not deleting this post. And this cap-coded post actually got screenshot, posted by Zoe Quinn on Twitter. And I think even a journalist used this screenshot to be like, oh my god, it's a harassment murder site for innocent women. And the Gamergate people, I remember, spurred out so fucking hard about this.

0:39:05
Unknown_22: that they decide, well, it's not going to be deleted by reports.

Unknown_22: Let's delete it by trashing the board. So if you don't know, on an image board, typically there are, I think, 10 or 15, I think it's 15, 15 pages of like, or maybe, no, it's 10 pages of 15 posts, I think, per page.

Unknown_22: So their idea was, what we're going to do is we're going to spam the thread. Now, if you post in a thread on an image board using traditional rules, it will hit what's called a bump lock after 300 posts. And you can also not bump a thread by using sage or sage, as Frederick would say. I think that's how you pronounce it in Japanese. And if you sage the post, it wouldn't bump the thread. So it was a way to post without drawing more attention to the thread if that was desirable. So they would spam this thread with sagay posts to try and hit it to the bump limit because the sagay posts count towards the bump limit. And they would also spam the RAID board with new threads. So eventually the thread with the docs would become unbumpable and then it would also be pushed off the 10 pages and would be automatically deleted as a result of an activity.

0:40:24
Unknown_22: However, although they conspired to do this and did do it successfully, what they did not count on was that someone else would just copy paste it into a new thread and completely undo all their action.

Unknown_22: And that happened. That was not me, by the way. It did happen. I did not have anything to do with it. I'm just saying I saw it happen. It made me laugh.

Unknown_22: So that was my first day as an HN volunteer.

Unknown_22: And this work actually led me to create my first contribution to the 8chan software where you could dismiss all reports on a single post. So instead of having to go one at a time and dismiss every single report on every single post one at a time, you could simply dismiss all reports on a single post. I even added a way to mark a post clean so it could not be reported again. It would just automatically dismiss the report.

0:41:08
Unknown_22: And that's how I got involved in 8chan's development, and that's what led eventually to me becoming the software developer for the replacement software for Infinity Next, as it was called, and led to my involvement with them for, I think, seven months before we had a falling out.

Unknown_22: But it all started from Gamergate.

0:41:47
Unknown_22: There was a lot of drama.

Unknown_22: The Gamergate board changed like 40 times.

Unknown_22: It went from GG to Gamergate to GG Revolt and then GG Revolt 2 even.

Unknown_22: They had issues holding it together. And I think some of them even moved to like Reddit and shit. There's rKotakuInAction, which I think is still fucking active. The KotakuInAction people, I think, are the last vestige of Gamergate that's still active and still believes in a Gamergate. Um, they're basically a cult at this point. If they're still around, they might be dead now. But, um, they were definitely active for a very long time after the movement had completely fucking collapsed.

0:42:20
Unknown_22: So there were, um, as I mentioned, the four literally who's. And on Zitter, I posted screenshots of their LinkedIn posts.

Unknown_22: Perhaps the most successful and relevant, literally, who was Anita Zerkeesian, who is the person behind Feminist Frequency, which was a feminist newsletter. I think they've closed down, but she created like a feminist gamer video series that she sold to schools. So it was just like this huge fucking scam to sell woke bullshit to the government, and it worked. I don't know what she's doing now.

0:42:53
Unknown_22: She doesn't say what she's doing anymore, so I'm assuming that whatever she's picked up pays pretty well and doesn't need her to talk about it.

Unknown_22: Oh, sorry, let me do this.

Unknown_22: This is Randy Lee Harper. Randy Lee Harper was perhaps the most competent of all the Literally Whos. Unlike Brianna Wu, who claimed to be a developer but only published the shittiest game ever known to man, that's including Depression Quest.

0:43:38
Unknown_22: Um, uh, Randy Lee Harper is actually an engineer. She knew things, uh, she knew software and, uh, it says here that she's just working in, um, uh, like a regular tech job. I'm not surprised. I'm sure she does good enough. Um,

Unknown_22: And then there's Zoe Quinn herself, who actually got a writing gig as a contractor with Marvel, and was a lead game developer at something called Black Triangle Productions, was a senior content designer with Undead Labs, and now is a lead narrative designer in something called Servios, which is developing a new immersive single-player action horror aliens game. So there you go. Your next Alien game will be led in terms of narrative design by Zoe Quinn, a washed-up prostitute who fucked five guys for positive reviews.

0:44:23
Unknown_22: Just horrific.

Unknown_22: They all did pretty well for themselves. When I made this, by the way, I said I only showed these three profiles. But as I mentioned, there's four. Now, I was being kind of cheeky. I said in the decades since all three of the most prominent women have been integrated into modern gaming tech companies and as consultants for other gaming industries or entertainment industries. But I did not include Brianna Wu. And that was because I, number one, did not want to include Brianna Wu in a list of women. Right.

0:44:56
Unknown_22: But I also didn't want to undermine what I was saying. Brianna Wu is the only person who has accomplished nothing since Gamergate. Brianna Wu, who's involved in literally nothing of note, never published a sequel to their shit-ass game, Revolution 60, never accomplished anything, just bums money off of Frank Wu and gets fucked in the bussy, I guess, and that's basically it.

Unknown_22: Brianna Wu has kind of stayed a little bit relevant because every so often he gets in drama with, like, catholes. And that's just because Brianna is like a conservative gay male. He's basically a log house Republican. I think he's from Missouri or Kentucky or something. And his father was a conservative politician. So he's still very conservative as far as like trannies go. For instance, he's a true scum, meaning he doesn't believe that people should be able to self-identify as transgender, gain access to estrogen. Or that people should be doing DIY HRT or whatever the fuck like that. He believes that becoming a woman is a serious process that involves a lot of investment and requires a diagnosis. Which is, as far as lunatic fringe tranny shit goes, not the most unreasonable thing. So...

0:46:07
Unknown_22: It's kind of interesting that Brandon, who is by far the most contemptible and disgusting of all the people involved in Gamergate because he basically lied about being harassed for the sake of getting involved, is now one of the least insane people in, like, the tranny sphere.

Unknown_22: So I showed this post before, or not this post, this article, about how Gamergate is now, in retrospect, referred to exclusively as a harassment campaign. I also very much love that it says date August 14th until the 15th.

0:46:50
Unknown_22: Ignoring the many, many people who said that it went on for years long.

Unknown_22: And then we have a list of the literally who's. Randy Lee Harper as number four is not going to mention.

Unknown_22: It's a misogynistic, anti-feminist, anti-progressive trolling movement by internet trolls, particularly from 4chan, Internet Relay Chat, and 8chan, targeting women in the video game industry. And this is how it's remembered. They got to write whatever the fuck they wanted. And this is what I mean by it's cemented in people that the media apparatus was evil. There was still trust in the media. There was kind of rumblings that things were a little bit biased. But back in the day, we just kind of considered like, well...

0:47:30
Unknown_22: You know, there's bias on Fox towards conservatives and there's bias on CNN or MSNBC towards liberals. But then CNN was kind of in the middle, kind of neutral, more trustworthy. That's how it was. That's how people saw it. And then when all these mainstream journalists came out and they lied and they lied about, like, all sorts of shit and they nebulously blamed every fucking thing on, like, thousands of people and set up a harassment campaign and advocated deplatforming 8chan and all this other shit, it was, like, shocking. And it woke a lot of people up out of this stupor that was just like, we are in the good times and I can play my video games and watch anime and masturbate all day and everything will be fine. Because then you're looking at the media and you're like, wow.

0:48:12
Unknown_22: These people have an inordinate amount of power and influence, and they use this to lie. That's no good. If they're willing to lie about fucking video games, what they would call a consumer revolt, what else are they going to lie about?

Unknown_22: And I don't know how broad the implications would be outside of the people directly involved in Gamergate, but for thousands and thousands of people who were active in 4chan and 8chan during this time, it was a no going back moment where you're like, fuck Wikipedia and fuck all these journalists and fuck all of them, regardless of if they're working for Kotaku or a larger media platform, like fuck them. You can't trust them. And that segued a lot of people and perhaps, you know, maybe many people outside of just Gamergate into trusting smaller correspondents on like YouTube and now Rumble and stuff and Twitter accounts for news instead of big, big journalist websites. You know, that's definitely the greatest impact that I believe that it had.

0:49:03
Unknown_22: The literally who's tried to set up. This is crash override. This one was very funny because it's crash override network. This was Zoe Quinn's and it was supposed to be like an anti harassment crisis helpline. That's now like completely fucking abandoned. But it was funny because the acronym for it is literally con.

0:49:35
Unknown_22: So Zoe Quinn launched a nonprofit hotline literally named con. And that was pretty great.

Unknown_22: This one's by Anita Zarkizian. The Games and Online Harassment Hotline. These are all, I'm sure, just fucking ways for Anita Zarkizian and her friends to enrich herself by accepting donations for a hotline that literally does nothing. Like, you go out and you say, like, oh, well, these are our overheads, and we're hoping to expand, and so on and so forth. But, like, nobody... Like, who the fuck is going to be playing a video game? And they're like, oh, my God, I'm being bullied in a video game. I need help. You know what I mean? So...

0:50:15
Unknown_22: More bullshit. This is the funniest thing. This happened in 2018, so it wasn't directly in GamerGate, but I'm going to include it in this because it's very funny and it fits right in. I'm going to assume that this was a consequence of GamerGate. More people just looking at this shit thinking like, oh, fuck, I can make some kind of fucking scam for bullshit like this.

0:50:53
Unknown_09: Let's try this.

Unknown_09: Get the fuck back in the kitchen and take your goddamn hands off of video games. If you're a fat pig of war, after I kill you, I'm going to feed you a neck roll and rape your body.

Unknown_08: As soon as they know you're a girl, they're just waiting for you to, like, screw up. I am a bit scared sometimes to just kind of go on by myself. There are times where I've had to just quit a game. Like, in the middle of a match, I'm like, I can't do this. I'm kind of terrified of what I'm going to have to face, really.

0:51:26
Unknown_09: Stupid bitch.

Unknown_08: If you think harassment is just part of the game, we know who you are.

Unknown_08: We know what you play. Finn, we are coming for you.

Unknown_08: This is an eye game.

Unknown_22: So the gist was is that if you were being cyberbullied on the internet, you would call up the bully hunters and be like, help, helpies, I'm being called a fat whore in CSGO. And they'd be like, we're locking in on your coordinates and sending our best girl gamers to counter the cyberbullies. And then they would join, and I think they would either join to back you up on voice chat or kill the enemy, like kill them on the enemy team.

0:52:09
Unknown_22: So that was the gist of this, and it was fucking ridiculous. They even streamed it, but it was just an embarrassing fake bullshit scam. But that did happen.

Unknown_22: Now, I watched this on my stream. Oh, my God. I'm losing track of space and time. Two days ago on Friday, which was the day after the Gamergate anniversary. The day, yeah, something like that, whatever. And I'm going to rewatch it with you guys. Um, this was Brianna Wu. And one of the things that happened towards the end of Gamergate was that, um, uh, Jace Connors, who was the character played by Jen Rinkowski, uh, and I didn't know entire stream on him. He got kind of interested in Gamergate because Gamergate was at this point floundering. So it's sort of like, let's troll these idiots. Because remember, like with the docs, it's like you can do something and be like, I'm going to say I'm the leader of Gamergate, which he did.

0:53:20
Unknown_22: And I'm going to go after Brianna Wu, who's very happy to make a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to like trolls. I'm going to give her exactly the kind of attention that he wants.

Unknown_22: And then the Gamer Gators are going to get mad. Like, no, no, he's not our leader. He's not our leader. No, we don't condone harassment. And that was like his gambit. And it was very funny and it worked.

Unknown_22: Um, I remember there was a brief time where the Kiwi farms was, uh, re-skinned to be called the Gamergate farms. And we hadn't, we had like, it's still, you can still find this board in Spurgatory, but I promoted it to like the very top place on the forum list. And it was like the Gamergate HQ board. And it was just like a shit posting board where people would pretend to like really care about Gamergate and hate Brianna Wu and shit. Um, so, uh,

0:54:04
Unknown_22: So this was the culmination of this, was Brianna Wu showing up on a sci-fi show called The Internet Ruined My Life to complain about gamers harassing him out of his house. I'll rewatch it now for the gumroad.

0:54:45
Unknown_22: All right, here we go. Brianna Wu on The Internet Ruined My Life, Season 1, Episode 2.

Unknown_10: Brianna Wu went into hiding over the weekend. She felt she had to after receiving death threats like these.

Unknown_18: It's our high priest for the death's omen on Brianna Wu's life. We're going to deal with this vigilante stuff.

Unknown_22: That is Tice, by the way. If you didn't watch the Deagle Nation, Maddie, that I did a long time ago.

Unknown_22: Tyce was a co-conspirator with Jan, who was the counterpart to Jace. He was like an edgy skinhead character, and he put out this super edgy video.

0:55:20
Unknown_03: And I'm a game developer. I sent a tweet, and I've received over 180 death threats in the last 13 months.

Unknown_03: I work in the video game industry. I remember in retrospect, the whole, like, I received a number of death threats.

Unknown_22: Like, that was a number that kept going up. Like, every time he's told the story, he's like, I received 50. I received 100. I received 196 death threats over the last four femto minutes. It's like, bro, calm the fuck down. Nobody cares about you. Violent harassment.

0:55:56
Unknown_22: I remember when those tweets as well, they were specifically trying to debunk if real people sent those fucking tweets. Because like I said, it was so easy. They were so prickly about their PR because the journalists would lap up anything that random people would just go out and like threaten to kill Brianna Wu just because it was like free attention. The journalists would print it. The target would scream about it. And even Gamergate would cry and win. Oh, they're not related. They're just a troll. There was nothing they could do about it because the journalists were just waiting for shit like that.

0:56:28
Unknown_03: My Nintendo Entertainment System, that became my world.

Unknown_22: He's told the story about how much fucking Super Mario 2 influenced him like a thousand times. I got to play as a girl when I was a little boy, and my pee-pee got hard, and I've always wanted to be a game developer ever since.

Unknown_03: I remember thinking, wow, this is great. From now on, the video game industry is going to represent women, too. And that's also bullshit, because he transitioned as like a...

0:57:03
Unknown_22: A university student, like there are pictures of him in college and then he was like an editor in the newspaper and those pictures of him as John Walker Flint, you know, even as he was nearing graduating college. keep changing and we kind of got stuck there there are now more adult women playing video games than there are teenage boys today as i'm sitting here women are in between 48 and 52 percent of gamers we don't make games that's um statistic by the way um at this time it was almost exclusively referring to mobile games So in terms of counting in candy crush and shit, that's where the high number of female players come from.

0:57:49
Unknown_03: That women can really see themselves represented in is anything besides sex objects and damsels in distress.

Unknown_22: I don't know, by the way, if this is from Tomb Raider, but I... Oh, God. When I lived in Florida with my friend and his family... His mom's boyfriend had a PlayStation, and I got him Tomb Raider. Because when I was about to leave, I bought all of them gifts because I had lived with them for two months, and they never charged me rent.

Unknown_22: So I bought all of them something.

0:58:26
Unknown_22: God, I bought his mom cleaning stuff because she ran a cleaning business. And they all told me all of her kids told me like, don't, she doesn't wear fancy anything. She doesn't like stuff. But if you just give her like a hundred dollars of her favorite cleaning products for her business, uh, she would appreciate that the most. So I was like, okay. So I got her like a bucket of like all of her, her, all of her like essential products. And she loved that. And I got, um, her boyfriend Tomb Raider.

Unknown_22: And I wasn't leaving the day off, so I was there for like another week or two before. But he played this game. And I remember sitting there because his couch and the TV was on one side of the room. And me and my friend, we sat at a circled dining table with our laptops playing League of Legends. I remember I had a direct line of sight to this TV. And I just remember every time she dies, it's like the most gruesome torture porn ever. Like, the death cutscenes of this fucking game are, like, way, like, extreme. Like, there's, like, ones where she, like, if you, there's one part in particular he couldn't get through. And there was this death animation. He was going down a river. And this log would, like, impale her through the back, like, through her throat, through the back of her head. And she would, like, just have, like, this huge log in her mouth. And she would, like, weakly pat it with her hands before going limp. And I saw this animation over and over again. It was honestly a little bit uncomfortable.

0:59:33
Unknown_03: i realized that there was this need for women to see ourselves represented in video games and i went and founded my own studio for it if you had made a woman actor oh god i didn't play i should find you guys before i end this i should show you what revolution 60 was like the gameplay for i think there's a video of low tax playing this fucking game it's just terrible

1:00:18
Unknown_22: and um natal woman is reenacting the story by the way sold that this would be my profession i would have thought my life would be a dream come true but the truth is the video game industry is a really incredibly difficult place for women to work

Unknown_03: As gaming goes increasingly mainstream, a darker side of the industry is emerging.

Unknown_01: Now the women calling for change in this multi-billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including death threats. Much of the vitriol appears on Twitter hashtag Gamergate. It has grown into a loose movement associated with the worst of online harassment of women.

Unknown_16: Gamergate is a group of online individuals.

Unknown_22: Ira Ezra Waldman. One person. Ouch. A professional that can talk about these issues.

1:01:04
Unknown_03: What was saddest about this is the men in our field were choosing to remain silent.

Unknown_03: So the only thing I knew to do was to use my own voice and start speaking out about that. I posted this meme on Twitter. I remember, God, them trying to deduce if this was like a real thing.

Unknown_22: If this post actually got like death threats and shit. Because this was like, he claims this was the initial incident. And I can't remember exactly what the timeline was. But it really felt like he was on the news before anyone knew who the fuck he was or about this tweet. Trying to poke fun at how ridiculous the whole movement was and how the things they were trying to fight against were ridiculous.

1:01:38
Unknown_03: I had about 8,000 followers on my Twitter, and this was the tweet that ruined my life.

Unknown_22: I love that.

Unknown_22: I pointed this out in the stream too, but that scene where it's just like, the internet ruined my life. It's a real, I'm white trash and I'm in trouble type of thing. Where it's like, dude, say the line. Say the fucking line. You want to be famous, don't you?

1:02:16
Unknown_03: Within minutes of posting that, Gamergate started countering this meme with thousands and thousands of their own, some of them threatening me with violence.

Unknown_22: We cut to an unrelated woman.

Unknown_03: It was truly scary to see them targeting me like this.

Unknown_03: I closed my MacBook and I took a breath and I talked to my husband. She came to me and asked me, well, what should I do?

Unknown_20: What should we do?

Unknown_03: Are we willing to stand up for this? Are we willing to have our lives destroyed?

Unknown_20: And we decided that it was worth it to stay in this fight.

Unknown_03: And I came back and I told Gamergate that I wasn't going to go anywhere.

1:03:01
Unknown_03: And this is when they started to dox me.

Unknown_00: Whenever you dock somebody, you hear that sound.

Unknown_22: Expose a person, their name, age, date of birth, where they live, where they work, to embarrass a person, to shame a person.

Unknown_03: And it's a method of psychological warfare where the object is to make someone feel scared for their own safety.

Unknown_03: Within seconds, Gamergate sent me this message saying, guess what? I know where you live. And they said, your dead mutilated corpse is going to be on the front page of Jezebel tomorrow. If you have children, they're going to die too. If you have children, all the children you have, fertile woman. You don't know how that's going to affect you until you're sitting there and you're fearing for your own life.

1:03:37
Unknown_03: It made me realize that I wasn't going to be safe. Quick, throw in the gamer essentials. We got to get out of here. Get the switch. And we went and checked into a hotel.

Unknown_21: While we were driving to the hotel, I was constantly looking in the rearview mirror to make sure that we weren't followed. Gamers could be anywhere.

1:04:10
Unknown_03: It was a really frustrating time because I would have to go to my house during the day.

Unknown_22: Gamers are most known for going out of their house and doing spec ops missions in real life. As soon as the sun went down, we would not feel safe in our own home.

Unknown_03: I had no idea your life could change this suddenly. And then things got worse. I had no idea your life could change this suddenly. You know, one... So this is the best part, objectively, just so we're clear.

Unknown_22: I think this is coming up.

Unknown_03: I sent a tweet and 24 hours later, I had to leave my house. I thought that I was going to die. 12 Monkeys season premiere.

1:04:45
Unknown_03: One time I looked at Twitter and there were six specific death threats for me. And we had to call the police and have them meet us at our home. And they came in and swept our entire house looking for people there to hurt us.

Unknown_03: And the police's response to me is to simply stay off my electronic devices.

Unknown_16: The law generally finds itself... The law doesn't know how to arrest everyone for freedom of speech yet.

Unknown_22: Sometimes people say something mean, and you think, well, that motherfucker should be locked up. Well, one day when we get our way, they're going to go to jail for that one. But for right now, it's not happening.

1:05:21
Unknown_03: we spent about a week and a half out of our house and at a certain point you can't live out of a hotel forever this wasn't what i was thinking over to the system if the death threats i got that day were particularly terrible we would leave and go stay at a friend's house i was living my life where depending on how many threats i got that day it would determine where i would sleep at night

1:05:56
Unknown_03: I would sit there and check my voice messages, and it was dozens and dozens and dozens of threats.

Unknown_13: I'm coming to your house right now. I will split your throat, you stupid little whore.

Unknown_22: I was also getting a video.

Unknown_13: My honest reaction to that message.

Unknown_18: We're high priests for the death's omen on Brianna Wu's life, and we are going to finish the fight. We're going to deal with this vigilante style. When we go bloodthirsty on these fascists...

Unknown_03: Gamergate targeted me because I decided to say, we are not going to quit.

Unknown_22: By the way, at this point, the Deagle Nation stuff had ended, and it was known fact. Like, there's a video of Tice's guy and Jan sitting together on the Deagle Nation channel, and they're doing a stream. I forgot the name of the stream, but they're just chilling. They're talking about it. They're like... I remember one thing in particular that really sealed the deal was early on, Jace did a thing where he spazzed out, collapsed on the floor for three to five minutes, and then pissed himself. And then he woke up and screamed and ran outside the room. And everyone was like, there's no fucking way that this guy pisses himself to seal the deal and make people believe that he's a real guy, like a real person. And I remember...

1:07:17
Unknown_22: I remember him in this stream, this final farewell stream.

Unknown_22: He confirmed that he did piss himself to trick people. So it was already known that this shit was all fucking fake. And this guy literally pisses his own pants to troll people. And Brianna Wu is still on the fucking television lying to people saying that this was a real threat.

Unknown_03: there was one day at my office people start calling my phone alerting me that this terrible man using an alias was threatening very very specific violence to me he claimed that he was there with an accomplice driving to my house literally he said i'm gonna street race you and then when they say uh he had guns they're not showing those tweets

1:08:09
Unknown_22: Because I'm very sure he's specifically saying that I have an airsoft deagle and I'm going to airsoft deagle you to the grave. And it's like, oh, well, we can't put that on TV because then everyone knows it's bullshit. So he just says this without any screenshots. To kill me.

Unknown_03: And then moments later, this man himself sent me a very specific, terrifying video.

Unknown_03: We claimed he had crashed his car on the way to my house.

1:08:47
Unknown_22: It's so, it's so incredible. It's like so unbelievable that he crashed his car and his first thought is hole up. I got to do an in-person video about this for the memes from, for the, the Kiwi farms and for, for gamer gate, the troll gamer gate really is just a gift.

Unknown_03: He is just screaming like an absolute lunatic at his most terrified thing I've ever seen. He swears he's going to deliver justice to me in his own hands.

1:09:24
Unknown_03: It made me feel so helpless.

Unknown_03: Cut to the real woman's hands so nobody can see those fucking man hands. ...is you constantly worry that people around you are targeting you.

Unknown_21: We worry all the time... Help, we're being gang-stalked by gamers. ...we worry about strange cars parking on our street.

Unknown_03: Holy shit, is that a red car? ...comes up to me. I have to push past this fear that it's Gamergate that's coming to hurt me.

1:09:57
Unknown_03: You don't come back from something like this. You just change. And I'm not the same person I was a year ago. And I realized if I didn't speak up and bring this to the larger media's attention, nothing was going to happen. If I did an attention whore and make money off of this, nobody would. They attacked you personally. They did. The goal was simple. It was to personally destroy the woman that was critiquing. The woman. Emphasis. Emphasis.

Unknown_03: Not one person to even be brought to a court to answer these charges.

Unknown_22: I don't really ever feel...

1:10:44
Unknown_03: safe anymore but i don't actually god this has nothing to do with brown and woo but it actually ended all of um the j stuff for because um jan as a child had seizures and his story was and i think he's not telling the truth when he says this he hit his head on something on like a playground and it fixed his seizures and his seizures came back after the car accident

Unknown_22: Um, so that's his story. And I, I believe he's telling the truth. So for a while after the car accident, um, he was just like completely out of it. Uh, he was gone for months at a time and it was really sad. And then, um, the, the stuff came out about him being, you know, Chairman Kalski came out.

Unknown_03: It's going to be like this.

Unknown_16: People like Brianna are increasingly turning to the possibility of new federal locks. Help me, government. It is not bounded by state borders. We need federal legislation for victims of cyber harassment. By the way, that's bullshit.

1:11:40
Unknown_22: If you cross state lines to go to somebody's house and actually intimidate them, there are crimes for this already. We don't need it so that when somebody says something we don't like, we have to arrest them.

Unknown_03: The FBI does have one very strong lead that they are investigating. This is the Jace thing, by the way. This would be the first case brought against someone in Gamergate that has been violently threatening to kill women. Because of the internet, my life as I knew it was over. But if I could go back in time, I would absolutely do this again.

1:12:17
Unknown_22: Because otherwise I wouldn't be relevant at all, ever. I actually want to watch the original Jace video. Let's watch it uncut so you can see what they took out of it.

Unknown_22: This is the wrong thing. One second.

Unknown_22: Now that's what I'm talking about. Let's watch the OG, the original, the great...

Unknown_05: Oh, YouTube, this is Chase right here, and this is my fucking car, or my mom's car, that when I was straight racing, could not perform! Couldn't fucking perform on the road! And now this bitch's shit is crushed! Okay, I didn't kick the windshield because it's made of bullshit plastic from chinks! And of course, I wasn't even fucking drunk! I was just racing, you know, like normal! I was trying to street race in the fucking hallway. And look at this bullshit. Look at this shit. Totally useless. I hit and I fucking rolled on the ice. Fucking rolled down here. And now look at this piece of shit. I'm a street racer. God! After this, this is, um, he says that Brianna would try to kill him.

1:13:43
Unknown_22: And I love how they so selectively edited that to take out anything about trolls, anything about being a member of the United States street racers as if it's like a military branch. All the silly stuff that was indicative of his mental state.

Unknown_22: If he was a real person, if you're going to portray this, anything about how harmless he was was stripped out to just make it seem completely psychotic. Just so manipulative. You can't hate journos enough. Not chat. You just can't.

Unknown_22: Okay, I did say that I wanted to show a little bit of Revolution 60, so I figured, why not go to the Gaming Garbage Revolution 60? It took them an hour to complete this game, which was the only game that Giant Space Cat Games ever published.

1:14:29
Unknown_22: Let's skim through this a little bit.

Unknown_02: Let's see if we can do this. Okay, so anyways, this game, it has something to do with... gamer gate it's like some lady named brianna woo who i i had purposely tried to avoid all the gamer gate shit because it uh it really didn't appeal to me but uh brianna is this uh like like sasquatch kind of looking creature who apparently people either did or didn't say that they're gonna come over to her house and kill her because she was a woman or something

1:15:08
Unknown_02: Future crates. Oh, this is good. This is also very fucking loud. That was great. We avoided the future crate. Oh, my God. I forgot it was all quick time events. Yes, multiple circles. Finally, a game where I can complete multiple circles.

Unknown_02: okay okay here's uh one circle and here is multiple circles oh good more typing oh it was it was um typing challenges and then also um circle spinning i forgot and then i think this is the original like the actual like meat of the game like all the dialogue shit stitched together and then you have to like jump around and shoot people and it's like impossible what do i do here okay i'm fighting snow leopard naturally okay i'll press the key

1:15:55
Unknown_14: Mm-hmm.

Unknown_02: Okay, okay. So, like, left makes you go to the left.

Unknown_02: I understand that part, but what does up do? I don't know. I'll just push left. There we go.

Unknown_02: Press a spacebar to fire your needler. Okay. Okay.

Unknown_02: I think you get it. It's a giant piece of shit. And by the way, all four of these characters, one of the major reasons why people could figure out that Brianna Wu was John Flint...

1:16:34
Unknown_22: was that John Flint in that newspaper for his college that I mentioned, he published a cartoon featuring women. And guess what characters were in that cartoon? Yeah, that's right. These spindly-looking, weird-ass fucking sex doll things.

Unknown_22: Actually, this is it right here.

Unknown_22: So this is the locale wiki. We used to run a wiki, and I shut it down just due to general lack of interest, but the most complete article that we had on the entire thing was about Brianna Wu, because there was a Gamergate guy who was a moderator at the time, and he was extremely fixated on Brianna Wu and wrote this extraordinarily comprehensive article, and This is the comic. You can see that they're very similar to the characters in the game. And this was one of the Dead Ringers that...

1:17:21
Unknown_22: That he was the... That this was like a hard link. Because it's not just that he looks alike, it's that they have the same exact fictional characters as well. It was called Socially Unconscious, and it was about women for whatever reason. By the way, this is now like an officially Brianna Wu mini-person video for you guys.

Unknown_22: Because I was scrolling through this. And I forgot just how like completely fucking ridiculous Brianna Wu as a locale is. He ran for Congress. I'm going to show you his campaign video. But honest to God, I forgot he published this. This was supposed to be his camp. You know how like people have little bumper stickers and it's usually like the American flag. And it says like moon for Congressional District one twenty twenty four. This was his fucking bumper sticker. Instead of using like American fonts and like patriotism and shit, it's just like whatever the fuck emo band bullshit tattoo this is. This was his campaign video.

1:18:34
Unknown_09: I'm truly terrified of what's going to happen to women's rights under this president.

Unknown_01: And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the... I shouldn't hear more from Teen Vogue about women's rights than from the man that represents me in Congress.

Unknown_10: Republicans have promised to repeal Obamacare, and now the process is underway. And it's ironic because more unintended pregnancies is actually going to increase the number of women seeking abortions and then the number of women who will die trying to seek them illegally. It is frightening. So screw them. You should feel no shame burning this bill to the ground.

1:19:08
Unknown_03: I don't want a single Republican to run unopposed in 2018. Women need to run for office at every single level. And if you can't run, support someone who can.

Unknown_03: I stood up to the alt-right during Gamergate. I'll stand up to them in Congress, too. If not now, then when?

Unknown_03: I'm ready for a bolder Democratic Party.

Unknown_22: Dude, I forgot how he's, um, he's very similar to, um, that fucking, uh, Patrick Tomlinson and that Brianna Wu like super pretends to be like hardcore into old motor, like muscle cars and motorbikes and shit. It's so fucking ridiculous. It's such a stereotypical man hobby. And I love how his entire campaign was just like, I'm a womanly woman and I woman it up. And we need a womanly woman to counter all that manly madness up in Congress and Capitol Hill. Yeah, I bet we do, buddy.

1:19:48
Unknown_22: So that's Brianna Wu. Also, I guess Gamergate. If you want to know how Gamergate ended up, there's a goodbye message from somebody familiar who you may enjoy hearing from. This is five minutes from Jim at the very end of his involvement. He left Gamergate a little bit early before it really petered out. I remember a lot of people were actually quite hurt when this happened. There's actually a comment by this, by the way.

1:20:20
Unknown_22: Like nine years ago that I saw.

Unknown_22: This is contemporary. This guy's comment.

Unknown_22: Internet aristocrat started this. Started Gamergate, he says. He smacked the SJWs hard with his Five Guys saga. But after that, let's be honest. After his Shitaku stream, he just became a drunk streamer, having his lulls. Every stream progressively worse than the last, and mostly about him, not Gamergate. And I don't really blame people. He was an interesting personality. But he claimed people weren't attacking him?

1:20:54
Unknown_22: No. He got off his game, and that was on him. So while he did his part, just remember that he was basically an irrelevant figurehead after the first month or two. He ceased to do anything proactive for Gamergate, as it had moved beyond him. Perhaps he couldn't handle that, and that's fine, but it was a dick move to leave a message like this when he quit. So we have to take it for what it is. He was someone who was brilliant and charismatic, but in the end, he brought himself down, and that's too bad. But we don't need him. We haven't needed him for a long time now, and that's the truth of the matter. Remember, Gamergate won. Anyways, let's listen to this.

1:21:29
Unknown_17: So, realistically, I'm done. The channel's shut down. I'll pop up maybe in six or seven months. None of you are going to remember what I sound like. You're probably not going to find the channel. That's just how I'd prefer it. I didn't like a large audience. And to be frank with you, the whole Gamergate thing is depressing.

Unknown_17: It was the opportunity to finally kick the teeth in of social justice warriors and tumblerettes and draw a fucking line in the sand and push back against all these hypersensitive cunts. And for a while it was working really, really well. All you had to do was attack. See, that's the trick. That's why I love polls so fucking much. People think you need to be a moderate or an independent or a neutral. They're wrong. You need to pick an extreme. You need to pick a side with a yes or a no answer. That's how you attract people to you. If you're too focused on being a moderate, if you try to approach the middle to appeal to moderates, you become indistinguishable from them, and your message becomes diluted. And as time went on, that's what happened to Gamergate. And it's too fucking painful to watch happen anymore. I was planning on shutting down the channel anyway, but over the last month, I watched this happen more and more.

1:22:41
Unknown_17: Don't believe me? Go look at this for yourself, Bull. Go look at the people who are prominent figures right now in GamerGate and see how many of them have Indiegogo campaigns, how many of them have Kickstarter campaigns, how many of them have Patreons, how many have ad revenue on their fucking videos. Everybody's making a buck. And they're all making a buck doing the same shit the people we were supposed to be fighting against were doing. They're crying harassment and then making money off of it. And it's fucking bullshit. But they don't seem to mind. And then add on top of that all the SJW language, all the SRS bullshit where you hear them using words like toxic and signal boost and tone police and all the other 13-year-old girl fucking phrases and terms that shouldn't be anywhere associated with this. You got to do just one thing. Attack, attack, attack. Keep the pressure up and your opponent, in this case, corrupt media and the SJW cultural Marxist bullshit, they'll fold. They'll make a mistake and make themselves look stupid like Sam Biddle did, like other people did. And you capitalize off of that. The saddest fucking thing about all of this is it wasn't mainstream media, it wasn't multi-million dollar corporations, it wasn't corrupt journalists, and it wasn't social justice warriors that killed Gamergate. Gamergate shot itself in the foot by becoming what they're fighting, and that is just too much to fucking handle. It's just, I can't, I couldn't watch it happen anymore.

1:24:10
Unknown_17: They don't know what they're doing.

Unknown_17: I know now what it... I don't know how to explain it. I know what happened to Occupy Wall Street now. I know what happened to Chinology now. When you lose your edge... That's actually a really, really good point.

Unknown_22: Because I have said, in retrospect, when it comes to Gamergate, I feel like Gamergate was a proof of concept that the government had learned how to destabilize a headless movement Um, to destroy it. I think, um, channelogy was the same thing in occupy wall street or channelogy just kind of petered out, but occupy was like a serious thing where people are like, why, why does 1% of the country own 50% of the wealth? That's a higher income inequality than at any other point in history besides like the feudal era. Why is that the case?

1:24:43
Unknown_22: And that movement broke apart in part due to identity politics being injected. Like it was no longer eat the rich. It was like black people need reparations. Women need more voices. And that like, when you have those kinds of things in your movement, it alienates whites and alienates men. And you can't divide, like a headless organization like that can't survive when it's divided. And Gamergate also became an organization, a loose affiliation of, like, tokenisms and autism and cringe, and people didn't really know what they were even trying to accomplish anymore.

1:25:27
Unknown_17: You lose that chaotic element that really helps you boost something in the beginning, you're dead in the water. And that's exactly what's happening to Gamergate. I wish them the best. I don't want to see Gawker win. I don't want to see those fuckers, those smug cunts, walk away like nothing happened. But...

1:26:02
Unknown_17: It feels hopeless. It really does.

Unknown_17: As for the other saying in the thread, because I'm reading through it, because I got linked to it from somebody who happened to stumble on it, that, oh, Jim is self-promoting. Pop in the fucking IRC. Talk to Ahmad. They can check the IP addresses and confirm that's not me. I don't start threads here to talk about myself, and I don't tripfag. It takes five seconds for you to look into that. But I like that you doubt that. See, that's why I like pull. You don't fucking trust anything. that's good but just be wary of these gamergate fuckers a lot of them are out to hustle money and if you really look into it you fucking see what i mean and i can't stomach it i wanted to fight tumblr not become it and i will not ally myself with people that are just as bad as the opposition let them go whore themselves out for money let them you know become what they're fighting and see how much fucking momentum they get see how much they accomplish doing that they lost their edge and they forgot their principles and their values And there's just, there's no fucking excuse for it. There's no excuse for doing that.

1:27:00
Unknown_17: So that's the, I don't know, the explanation, if that's really what you fucking wanted. I don't know what to say. But yeah, just fuck it.

Unknown_17: I think, I don't know how to sum it up best.

Unknown_17: Actually, you know what, I do. I have a quote for you that I think really sums up my thoughts on Gamergate at this point.

Unknown_17: If the war is lost, the people will also be lost, and it is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things, for the nation has proved to be weak, and the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East. Whatever remains after this battle is in any case only the inadequate, because the good ones will be dead.

1:27:33
Unknown_17: Good luck, Pole. Keep doing what you're doing. Love the shit out of the Ferguson Threats. You glorious fucking cunts.

Unknown_09: A second message, and this is to 8chan's poll. So...

Unknown_22: That was Gamergate, basically. And you may be at this point in time, you may still not really know what Gamergate is, and that's probably accurate. There's probably no way to sum it up. It was a tidal wave of emotions and people being upset at things changing without really any direction. I think the greatest flaw with what Jim said is that making money was the problem with

1:28:15
Unknown_22: It was to an extent because it was counter to image board culture to try and make money. Around this time, we still called Patreon the hipster welfare, I think was the name of it. So there was a lot of resentment towards monetizing internet content. It was deemed something for journalists or woke tards or whatever only.

1:28:49
Unknown_22: Now, obviously, there's a great irony in me posting a video about this to the Gumroad. I definitely went along with that idea back in the day. But I think the more evolved standpoint is that money wins. There's a reason why video games changed, and it's because they were getting paid to put those changes in. There's a reason why everything changes, and it's because that's where the money is. It's more profitable to go along with these ideas. And meanwhile, the conservatives, by their very nature, are more risk adverse when it comes to or spending adverse when it comes to where they put their money. And so they will tend to support things in ways other than financial.

1:29:25
Unknown_22: For the most part. And it doesn't help that a lot of people who are counterculture also don't have the liberty to participate in the economy. But there is a distinct need for organization that's financed. If you're from a grassroots perspective, if you're going to try and compete with multinational organizations that are being financed by banks and shit. So it's a complicated topic, it's outside the scope of this, but the gist is that they made bank. These people want to make bank, and they want to make bank through safe stuff, and they don't want to pander to edgy shit.

1:30:05
Unknown_22: And every one of them, all the Literally Whos, and all the anti-Gamergate people, they were all after their different bags. And Randy Lee Harper was, we had a private conversation over Facebook at some point,

Unknown_22: And she basically told me that all the literally who's got together and they had a secret evil feminist cabal meeting and they agreed they would never, ever say the name Kiwi Farms because they never wanted to do the Kiwi Farms or they did to HN by making it by talking about it. And that's generally been the perspective up until Drop Kiwi Farms. There was a long time where a bunch of people refused to even acknowledge the forum, and then we just got deplatformed, and it was hard to grow, and then Drop Kiwi Farms happened.

1:30:51
Unknown_22: That's a long and sordid tale, but that's the gist of it. That's Gamergate, as I remember it, all the things that I remember happening that I find noteworthy to include in a video like this. I hope you find it entertaining.

Unknown_22: And I'll see you guys the next time I stream. Have a great Labor Day weekend, and don't be a gamer, I guess.

1:31:27
Unknown_22: I don't usually play an outro song for my Gumroad videos, but just this once, I have something picked out. Take it easy, guys. Bye-bye.

Unknown_04: The social justice warrior is on his way to complain About a video game That didn't tell him he was special Like most religions he has visions of a world where he leads A life that's free from critique

1:32:16
Unknown_04: Where science barely even matters It's good to know you're not the center of everything The world does not revolve around you And you can cry, scream, yell, and bitch about anything If something doesn't cater to you This world isn't for you

Unknown_04: No one needs to award you Just because your family adored you And nurtured the war you raged against The fucking real world While he relaxes on his father's private island he cries

1:33:10
Unknown_04: I'm sorry for being white How can I pay my reparations? To them you're born in condemnation Or some privileged class Reminds me of Sunday Mass Spare me your righteous indignation

Unknown_04: You know you're not the center of everything The world does not revolve around you You can cry, scream, yell, and beat you by anything If something doesn't cater to you This world isn't for you No one needs to award you Just because your family adored you

1:34:05
Unknown_04: And nurture the war you've raged against. The fucking real world. Thank you.