this has just made me imagine this asked in like, a history classroom 40 years from now. and I shuddered.
a lot of people link the rise of the alt right to gamer gate, and it's fair to say there was a growth in the far right over gamer gate. that said, as materialists we ought to understand it is not simply cultural movements that create history, but the material factors behind them. the far right would like have continued to rise due to the decay and collapse of capitalism, and they have done. so, I think there is some in how fringe elements of the online right did grow from gamer gate, but other larger factors matter way way more
You could argue that "the red pill"/Pickup Artists had a much bigger impact on the rise of the alt-right given that people like Cernovich were actually part of the political establishment (who from GamerGate actually went anywhere?). They're also far more odious. GamerGate gets more attention because journalists are whiny babies who care mostly about things that made them feel A Sad.
Right it's like, the alt right 100% originated in white supremacist circles a la Stormfront and Gateway Pundit, but then filtered out into much more mainstream, reactionary audience. Cernovich had a part in it. So did Breitbart. So did Gamergate, along with a bunch of other sources that knowingly or unknowingly passed it along from hardcore fascist areas.
Like, I saw reactionary people I know parrot lines that were watered down versions of things you'd see on Stormfront years earlier. George Soros is a perfect example. He was largely unknown to nearly everyone. I was aware of him only as "that guy who almost bankrupted the UK with currency trading". Then along came the Syrian refugee crisis. Soros made some comments about how Europe needs to accept more refugees and he donated some money to that cause. The global white supremacist movement absolutely lost their shit over this, I mean completely lost it. This gave them real energy. The white supremacists found a fair number of sympathizers in Europe over this. Combined with white supremacists in the US who were angry over GOP inaction on undocumented workers pre-Trump, and now Soros is a name every person to the right of Romney is familiar with.
Personally, I think the thing that supercharged the growth of the alt right was the response of white supremacists to the concurrent immigration issues going on in Europe (EU accepting Syrian refugees) and in America (lots of conservatives wanting the GOP to "solve" immigration but the party mostly doing nothing).
He was largely unknown to nearly everyone.
Among our generation(s), maybe. But just for the record, Soros has been a right-wing boogeyman for a long time, at least as far back as the 90s.
It's a bit more complex than that, with Neoreaction splitting out of the right/libertarian wing of the Transhumanists and New Atheists of the 1990's-2000's and providing a wonky theoretical core that allowed Stormfront ideologies to infect edgy /b/ teens.
That in turn had economic roots in the death of the long 90s in 2008. It pretty much crushed the Libertarian/techno-progressive/bright-green alliance as they realised you can't capitalism your way into utopia via a kind of centrist-accelerationism.
I'd argue that gamergate marked the beginning of a broader culture war movement and the conversion of a bunch of chauvinist libertines who were previously politically disengaged succdems into frothing fascists over the suggestion that women and minorities want to take away their shiny fun time treats.
I'm kind of struck by how similar that is to how fascist movements develop in general, just in an even more alienated and pathetic form. Like at the basic level you have the whole "real freedom is subjugating others so they serve me and cannot refuse any desire I have" shit that's been a cornerstone of reactionary ideology forever from slavers to fascists, but then there's also the sort of direct material conditions that lead the middle class of moderately privileged people to become fascists: historically these were small landowners and patriarchs who feared losing their land, their status as a privileged class, and their control over women, whereas the modern culture war (in addition to leveraging the classic fears) also focuses on the media being consumed as something that's endangered by some nebulous threat from the left so you have people who don't own land or have much status in general becoming reactionary culture warriors over the suggestion that someone out there wants to take away their loli hentai.
I think there's a case to be made that they are creating their own material conditions.
You don't actually need to create the material conditions to make your movement boom. What you need is to make people believe those material conditions exist. By doing that, you create your reaction and you create growth in your reactionary movement.
I argue this is what gamergate and countless others online have fed off of. They have created their own material conditions by manufacturing things to be absurdly outraged about and by driving members of their spaces into the headspace that is usually created by having the correct material conditions.
It is as if those material conditions exist, and therefore the outcome is the same.
And I argue the left is just as capable of using this same mechanism but we are woefully behind on understanding this concept.
The material conditions are that people, especially young men due to shifts in the economy towards more stereotypically "female" jobs, are increasingly alienated from society in general and have nothing to live for besides video games/porn/cartoons.
It's really easy to radicalize people who have that mindset by telling them that "The Left", or anything other group, is going to take away the only thing that gives their lives meaning.
Partly I agree. However, things like the great replacement are literally intended to make people believe material conditions are different to what they actually are in reality.
I don't think this can all be put down to some people being alienated. Many of these people are petty-bourgeoise and extremely comfortable economically. Contrary to popular belief many of the people in Gamergate are sadly the kind of people that are getting laid, I am willing to bet there's a strong crossover in that crowd with the abusive pickupartist crowd that was equally popular at that moment in time.
I strongly believe there's a case to be made for false-material-conditions to be a thing in the same way false consciousness is a thing. If you can make people believe their situation is precarious and that they are being threatened by something then you are creating the material conditions that exist in their mind. It's like manufacturing consent, except it's manufactured conditions.
In some cases, it's a matter of perspective. If you're one of those comfortable, but downwardly mobile petit-boug, the "great replacement" is exaggerated, but it is material reality for people in that situation. That doesn't mean we should listen to them (they should be completely gutted/GULAGed like the Kulaks), but just saying "they're delusional/lost" makes it harder to oppose them.
The petite bourgeoisie is the one that will rapidly move towards reaction as soon as material conditions start to press on them. I think they are comfortable but I also think they're in constant danger of being proletarized, which is what they most fear
Nah you need them, they are a fertile soil for anything. Material conditions are global recession/lack of housing/weird job prospects in that case, just as they were for occupy, so they were for gamer bros
I’m reminded of Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.” Gamer gate types among other reactionary cultures were unique in their ability to utilize memes and the internet ca. 2014. While men’s rights activists, pizzagaters or neo-confederates or trad weirdos may have been a part of the subculture, I think the ability to get their toxicity to spread was aided by computer savvy and a competitive spirit in gamergate.
one of the guys got elected to parliament in Brittan.
I think it would fall under the sub heading of how something awful kicked out the weebs and got 4chan started and how that forum was basically the source of all internet culture for a decade.
if you're talking about carl of swindon, he tried to get elected to the eu parliament and failed spectacularly lmao
who would have guessed that being internet famous among mostly americans does not translate into votes in europe
I don't think it was even that much a story. Before there was ADTRW the subforum the weebs were caught up in forum drama along with the furries and got purged. This was all very web 1.0 so moot made fourchan as a place to post hentai and shota and it became reddit before reddit was reddit. Just full of cyberpunk wild west energy inst of cia money though. People posted the worst stuff ironically so much it stoped being ironic.
There is also the endless summer effect. Or is it endless fall? I forget. But basically. For lots of us we were simply ironically posting gross things cause we were 13. We grew out of it while others made it their identity. So now that there isn't a singular age cohort the way there used to be things are different as well
One of my politics classes in grad school spent like a week picking apart gamergate and its effects in great detail. But no, there's no academic value whatsoever.
I’ve heard the argument made that GG was the catalyst for the online right to move away from market libertarianism to right populism because it caused a bunch of AnCap nerds to realize the corporations they had parasocial relationships with didn’t actually give a flying fuck about them. Idk how true that is.
Really interesting question. As some others have pointed out, if we're materialists, as a lot of people are here, our instinct is to look first to the material conditions that produced GamerGate. But stopping there elides some interesting questions. If we accept that some sort of far right resurgence was inevitable, did it have to take the form of GamerGate? If so, what about this particular moment in history made it inevitable? If not, why then did it take the form of GamerGate and not something else? What other possibilities were there?
Only in the broader context of the "politics is downstream from culture" idea of appropriation. From a vantage point you can see there was actually a million cultural woes that could all have culminated into a potential gamergate of sorts and Breitbart was leveraging all of them.
