Frankly, a serve

Hello!

I now have deity like powers over my IRC server, thanks to the hard work of reading reddit posts

host: rubyzone.duckdns.org
port: 6697

please be nice!

also, some clients refuse to connect to my server, not sure why! here are some clients I know work:

mIRC
Hexchat
igloo IRC (ios)

thanks!

join the #hello channel when you connect, please read the rules (they're in the message of the day when you first connect)

also, my server does not like it when people try to connect with custom hostnames attached to their profiles, so please just use a basic nickname, sorry in advance!

edit: apparently irssi works too

I know that hi-chew candies make my throat feel tight and uncomfortable but I've just found a new one, a yummy banana gummy that also makes me feel like everything is tightening up

This is not fair

God these are so good

To preface this: the intent of this is not to be some kind of passive-aggressive subpost. I'm more writing in reference to sentiments I've seen from many people who, like me, saw Gamergate happen at a fairly close distance, due to being in/adjacent to gaming nerd spaces.

I've noticed that many people who witnessed the horrors (which I don't think is a hyperbolic characterisation) of GG second-hand; not as targets, but as decent, relatively progressive people watching a vicious reactionary hate campaign rampage its way through the gaming industry and adjacent social spaces; have concluded that GG was a critical inciting event in the development of modern fascism.

In whole, this analysis is incorrect. However, I think it's useful to discuss why it misses the mark, but perhaps more critically, why it's still reasonable, even if, taken as a whole, misleading and not all that informative for understanding the political landscape today. Basically:

• On a society-wide scale, GG was a drop in the bucket compared to all the other factors leaning in favour of fascism regaining prominence from somewhere.
• All the forces that made GG happen were already in place long before it started, and a similar reactionary harassment campaign somewhere in the general cluster of nerd cultural spaces adjacent to the tech industry was going to happen eventually.
• As shown by "movements" such as Satanic Panic, the Tea Party, and QAnon, specific reactionary backlashes aren't some kind of once-in-a-generation phenomenon.
• Regardless, GG was a clear demarcation point at which decades of mounting toxicity in the "Anglosphere" Internet crystallised into a new, more dangerous environment.
• Furthermore, while GG alone might have not been all that important, every single one of these reactionary "movements" is a threat, and all of them need to be shut down.

(Another note: I'm trying to not spend too much time writing this, so my writing style is probably going to be rougher here than usual for my longposts.)

To start off, though, I'll give a brief recap of the chain of events many people saw — which, from the perspective of being immersed in nerd spaces, is one that could reasonably give rise the belief that GG was the "but-for" cause of the current fascist resurgence:

• 2012: reactionary nerds started harassing Anita Sarkeesian over her producing a video series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which contained feminist analyses of video games.
• 2013: Zoë Quinn released Depression Quest, a text-based game. Reactionary nerds from sites such as 4chan responded with immense amounts of harassment.
• August 2014: Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex, published a defamatory callout post about them, which included known-to-be-unsubstantiated accusations related to journalistic ethics.
• September 2014: 4chan banned GG discussion, causing most of such discussion to move to 8chan and other places.
• Later in 2014: the harassment campaign against Quinn expanded massively, to the point of them needing to move multiple times.
• Late 2014–mid 2015: the harassment continued, now against a wide range of people in the video games industry and community — generally women, racialised people, and LGBTQ+ people.
• Mid 2015: by now, there was a permanent presence of open, aggressive reactionaries all over the place online, many of whom were "apolitical" or more stealthy about their views beforehand.
• June 2015: Donald Trump started his presidential campaign.
• December 2015: the European Union Referendum Act 2015 received Royal Assent, setting the groundwork for Brexit.
• Early 2016: reactionaries throughout the "Anglosphere", now having clear campaigns aimed at taking power to rally around, did exactly that, becoming more open with their fascist politics than in prior years.
• June 2016: the Brexit referendum succeeded.
• November 2016: Trump was elected.
• January 2017: Trump was inaugurated. The new administration immediately started making moves to signal their rightward turn, and quickly demonstrated a commitment to implementing the policies they promised they would.
• 2017–early 2020: the "alt-right", emboldened further by having Trump as POTUS, became more and more bold and aggressive in its actions. Fascist violence intensifies, both in frequency and in overtness.

So what else happened?

Other factors that led to contemporary fascism

It's a bit trite to say "well, if you go back x years" to try to pinpoint why some given historical event was inevitable — almost like just saying the words "historical materialism" without explaining what's meant — so here's a very non-exhaustive sampling of reasons why things were already headed this way, in descending order of recency.

• The 2008 recession. This dealt a mortal blow against the entire "if you're white, abled, and can get a degree, you'll probably be able to own a home and retire comfortably" social contract, which was itself a vastly restricted version of the American Dream and the New Deal. By taking away the assured security of a segment of the population who'd been steeping in some form of reactionary values or another for centuries, this set the stage for some fascist backlash happening quickly.
• The weakening of the left in the late '80s–early '90s. While the power of the left fundamentally flows from oppressed people, wherever they may be, the overthrow of tens of socialist governments, at the cost of millions of lives and hundreds of millions of person-years of healthy, fulfilling life, also had the effect of removing a massive force that was providing substantial support to the left within countries like the US. The accompanying disillusionment, loss of confidence, and scattering of the organised left also made everywhere more vulnerable to a strengthening far right.
• Austerity from Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney onward. This is where the "if you're white, abled, and can finish high school, you'll definitely be able to own a home and require comfortably" arrangement died. (If you're wondering why whiteness shows up so much here, read Settlers. In all seriousness, though, the kind of reaction that defines fascist movements in the imperial core is that of the herrenvolk; those who view themselves, consciously or not, as the master race; losing what they were promised by capitalism.)
• McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and equivalents outside the US. The absolute devastation of the organised left by NATO members' governments ensured that the far right would have a leg up as soon as people's memories of what fascism even is dissipated. (At least in places that never saw full fascist occupation. More violence, such as the Years of Lead, were required to keep the left down in places that had been controlled by fascists.)

In essence, though, worsening material conditions for demographics who'd been promised a "we'll pay you to respect our authority and vote for us with other people's labour and resources — so just don't demand any control over us, and you'll be fine" arrangement, combined with there being no serious left able to not just answer their concerns with a better political program, but also channel their energy into a credible movement, led to a situation where many people saw no answer other than a cut to the right. Almost two centuries of anticommunist and anti-union propaganda also contributed, of course.

Something like GG was inevitable, in the circumstances

A tech-adjacent nerd backlash against "progressivism" or something of the sort was also going to happen eventually, for reasons such as:

• The corner of the Internet centred around 4chan was already like this. Anonymous "raids" such as the Scientology raids or ones against Internet censorship and extreme copyright restrictions were the exception, not the norm. Anonymous's usual targets were mostly women, LGBTQ+ people, and neurodivergent people. Encyclopedia Dramatica? Existed for almost a decade before GG started. The predecessors to Kiwi Farms? Started up in 2008 or 2009, IIRC.
• The "alt-right"'s seed had already been planted, in the form of the Dark Enlightenment. "scholars" such as Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land‚ among others, were working away at producing a new form of reactionary thought; namely, neoreaction. Their supporters included, even early on, people as powerful as Peter Thiel, and many other people in the Silicon Valley tech bourgeoisie.
• This explicitly reactionary movement had, as a more covert twin, the "rationalist" movement, pioneered by people such as Eliezer Yudkowsky and numerous "liberal", "reasonable" tech workers and investors — who, rather than wanting to be investor-kings like the Dark Enlightenment, basically see themselves as the engineer-priests of an effort to build The Right Kind Of AI.
• Neoreaction and "rationalism" both, via their massive exposure to the tech industry, had numerous routes into spaces such as the gaming industry and community, sites such as 4chan, and even some of the less politically coherent elements of the generally leftish base of movements such as Occupy Wall Street.
• A hobby that tends to incentivise investing a lot of money is going to tend to attract more people with money. This means more wealthier people, whose class interests favour conservative or reactionary policies, and more downwardly mobile but still not poor people, who are often anxious to change their economic trajectory, but also tend to not have the kind of class consciousness that comes from financial vulnerability.
• Owning websites, or even having the time and capacity to moderate on websites owned by others, once again favours having money, which, once again, tends to lean toward more right-wing viewpoints.

If it weren't for GG, something else would've given rise to the far right's online harassment brigade

While GG is notable for having arisen right around the same point in time as openly illiberal reactionary political movements were starting to angle for control of government, there was no particular reason that it had to be a nerd reactionary movement that would be the most visible face of the ascending far right. It could've instead been…

• Conservatives of the kind typical of the neoliberal era: say, the Tea Party. All sorts of used jetski shop owners, fracking operation managers, low-level executives in tool manufacturing businesses, and career landlords got involved in that movement.
• Owner-operators in a profession with existing reactionary tendencies: for example, (white) truckers and farmers. Any kind of regulatory shift that inconveniences them enough — vaccine requirements, stronger protections for their employees, so on — could be enough to, with the right grifters spearheading a "movement", get something going.
• Nuclear family parents: Satanic Panic, Disco Demolition, the current "groomer" panic, so on. Parents' feelings of ownership over children, so on, make them easy to rile up into violent campaigns against any given convenient target.
• Isolated older adults: QAnon, for one example. The groundwork for some sort of "movement" like that predated GG, as illustrated by Fox News.

Any of the above, and many others, could have been the place where "the public face of the alt-right" appeared first. It just happens that the stars aligned for a certain jilted ex-boyfriend to be the one who set off one of these panics at just the right time for it to intertwine nicely with campaigns such as Trump's presidential run or Brexit.

This does not mean that GG was insignificant in its effects on the Internet

Despite the unremarkable role of GG in the progression of the world's politics, its effects on the Internet have absolutely been significant. While hives of vitriol and abusive behaviour such as 4chan, Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and any number of other imageboards had existed for years beforehand, GG marked a massive escalation. No longer was the task of dishing out brutality limited to the brief sprints Anonymous engaged in. Now, the strategy of using indefinite campaigns which had only been done against a few "main characters" before, usually over grudges of an "apolitical" and petty nature or as plain old bullying, had now been turned into an explicit political weapon.

The English-speaking Internet is now substantially worse, due to the effects of GG and its progeny. While imageboard psyops on Tumblr, the pernicious effects of attitudes from FYAD and other markedly toxic subforums on SA, the simmering threat of getting raided if one angered the wrong imageboard user, and other such forces existed on the pre-GG Internet, they had been turned from a childish form of stochastic terror to a permanently heightened state of danger in nearly every corner of the Internet. This might have happened eventually no matter what — but GG is when this coalesced.

Nor does this mean that "movements" like GG don't need to be prevented and defeated

Fascism is built through numerous waves of reactionary whinging and tantrums. It's also built through the work of the highest echelons of the bourgeoisie trying to reinforce their power against the oppressed, and built through the everyday life of settler states and imperial powers (and the people granted full citizenship and full humanity by those polities), but one critical element to fascism taking power is the lashing out of the most reactionary members of society.

Any kind of chud; be it GG trolls, Convoy trucking company owners, Tea Party "protesters", sovereign citizens going rogue and building secret bases in rural areas, or respectable homeowners turning genuinely bloodthirsty at the "threat" of "their" municipality housing unhoused people; are potential Brownshirts. They're not the kind of people who, like many liberals, will quietly acquiesce to fascism. They're the ones who would have joined the NSDAP years before it took power. And they all need to be prevented from working together. So even if something like GG wasn't a turning point in the development of a fascist movement, crushing it would have weakened the fascists of today.