We need a break from the horror of watching a president of the US laughing gleefully at the recommendation to shoot immigrants at the border, so how about we reminisce about the days of Gamergate:
Most women who were working in or around the video games industry in late 2014 know exactly who Benjamin is. He was one of the more vocal figureheads of Gamergate, an online “movement” that began when an aggrieved ex-boyfriend spread malicious gossip about his game-developer ex-girlfriend. It metamorphosed into a coordinated harassment campaign against a huge number of women, under the smokescreen of anti-censorship and concern over ethics. It is now impossible not to see Gamergate as a foreshadowing of a disease that has since engulfed political and public life.
But long before Gamergate – three years before to be exact – there was Elevatorgate, which was another such foreshadowing.
What people like Benjamin want, with his disgusting speculation on whether female politicians are rape-worthy, is to bring the rank misogyny of the worst online spaces into public dialogue. It is Trumpian trolling transferred into British political life. People like Benjamin believe in a form of consequenceless free speech that dictates that if women wish to exist publicly, create things or have an opinion, they should expect all the harassment and degrading commentary and ceaseless mean-spirited scrutiny that will inevitably follow. This was the message of Gamergate, back in 2014.
And of Elevatorgate back in 2011.
For many women this abuse got bad enough to get the police involved. This largely turned out to be pointless, because the police’s advice to victims of online harassment essentially amounted to “why don’t you stay off the internet?”, as if the internet were some parallel universe that had no bearing on real life.
This kind of rhetoric is just as prevalent in the real world: on the streets outside Westminster, in politics, behind presidential pulpits, in Charlottesville. So, thanks for that, law enforcement. Perhaps it might have been an idea to hold people responsible for their targeted, sometimes violent harassment or hate speech, rather than making it the victim’s responsibility to avoid looking at it. Instead people like Benjamin, who established themselves as anti-feminist mouthpieces in 2014, have forged alliances with other alt-right agitators – including Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently announced he will be joining Benjamin on the campaign trail – and are now speaking at Brexit rallies and running as an MEP for Ukip.
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I wonder sometimes what could have happened if people had properly listened to the women subjected to the worst of the Gamergate movement, instead of writing infuriating, prevaricating think-pieces gamely digging for legitimate grievances within the mountain of straightforward gendered harassment. Instead it took Trump’s election two years later, led by some of the exact same forces (including Steve Bannon and his coterie of alt-right Breitbart shock jocks), to prompt the tech platforms and wider society to notice that something very bad was going on and that online discourse was definitely enabling it.
If the women of the games industry had been listened to more closely in 2014, would it have taken five more years before toxic bullshitters such as Alex Jones and Yiannopoulos were banished from Twitter and Facebook? Would it have taken so long for online hate speech to become a prosecutable offence? Might white supremacy have spread so easily online, along with misogyny? Would an anti-feminist YouTuber have gained enough of a platform to be running for the European parliament?
Or if the women of the skepticism-atheism industry had been listened to more closely in 2011, would it have taken eight more years before toxic bullshitters such as Jones and Yiannopoulos were taken seriously? Probably, but they weren’t, so here we are.
