I've noticed this growing trend over the years where a lot of people are obsessed with being perceived as morally pure and using their purity clout to smear and belittle other people for not having the same obessive attitude towards their treat consumption.
The biggest example I can think of, that recently happened, was that Harry Potter game where people got doxxed and had their streaming careers destroyed for playing it.
the game sold more than 12 million copies and generated $850 million in global sales revenue.
I refuse to believe that even a fraction of those 12 million people even care about Rowling's shitty opinions or even think about trans people, yet online moral guardians had a month long freakout and acted as if just mentioning the game was making trans people unsafe and felt the need to exclude and punish anyone who admitted to playing it.
You see the same delusional behaviour around every American culture war issue where somehow, your consumption of media or certain treats somehow carries a moral gravity to it.
Where your virtues are defined by which brand of capsule coffee machine you prefer, which superhero franchise you watch, which flavor of the month movie you watch or what type of video games, cartoons or books you enjoy.
It feels like every moral issue in the online world is defined by your treats. And what you are as a person is exclusively defined by what treats you spend money on. As if abstaining from reading a fucking Harry Potter book is going to impact the very real violence LGBTQ people are exposed to in the real world.
The moral fanatics who spend all their time waging their holy wars on the internet, never interact with people in real life activist communities.
I've never heard my offline comrades even mention Harry Potter, Keurig capsule machines, rainbow beers, that pedo-movie, niche online identities or other brands that get these online moralists to froth in their mouths.
And yet, on the internet, you have to constantly tread on eggshells, lest you upset some twitter-obsessed rageaholic with an axe to grind over some imagined issue that isn't even known about in the real world.
With my offline friends and comrades, we just hang out and shoot the shit like normal people while doing our activities together. No one's trying to start a flamestorm over what brand of clothing we wear or what movies we like.
The phenomenon of viciously punishing anyone for not being as obsessed about their consumption as the Arbiters Of Morality is such an absurd thing to see when it accomplishes absolutely nothing and doesn't even impact anything or anyone in real life.
There seems to be a huge disconnect between actual real life activism that actually does something and the weird online activism where people sit in their caves and scream at the shadows in front of them.
I don't even know what point I'm trying to make here. I'm just typing some thoughts that I've had stuck in my head for a while.
Your example is pretty bad, streaming a game is actively advertising it, and there was a popular consensus among trans communities on the internet that people should not do that. It's about solidarity.
Also who had their streaming career ruined? All the streamers I am aware of who streamed it still seem to have careers. The cases of doxxing I am aware of also turned out to be lies. I'm just not sure the thing you are talking about actually exists.
Sidenote, but sort of related - what about games like COD and Battlefield? And other military games to a certain extent.
I don't hear a lot of discourse about cancelling those games, despite the fact that they're mostly 'russia china bad, USA good', and COD even went to the lengths of turning real life US warcrimes into Russian ones in the Highway of Death level. They've both done Vietnam war expansions, but I suppose one could argue that the games technically didn't support either side.
Other milsims like Americas Army it's more clear cut, but even then, how much of a fuck should we give?
I'm a little Battlefield pig. Sorry folks. I just can't get enough of it. They could make a level about committing warcrimes against communists, and I think I'd probably still play it.
I think CoD and BF are just so obvious that nobody bothers to bring it up, similar to how we often complain about libs more than chuds. We know the games are a recruitment tool and general propaganda for the US military. The audience for those games are also generally pretty young kids or old guys, neither of whom are going to get into beef on twitter.