The Chaos Machine Chapter 2: Everything is Gamergate

A New Era

It was August 2014, Zoe Webb was celebrating her 27th birthday.

Her phone was buzzing with a text from a friend that said,”You just got helldumped something fierce.”

A programmer named Eron Gjoni had posted a narrative to his blog of their short relationship and breakup. This included screenshots of private emails, text messages and Facebook messages.

Quinn, a video game developer was familiar with geek forums and social platforms.

She received positive attention for indie art pieces like Depression Quest, a text-based simulation for navigating depression and her strong feminism.

There is a lot of harassment online mostly directed at women in the technology industry and girls who are “gamers”. Some online gaming circles are not supportive of feminist gamers. It seems as if females were seen as a threat to the community supposedly created and existing for males only. It could become very scary and dangerous for people who are attacked on social media. Individuals’ ability to hack into others’ lives and share private, personal information (such as social security numbers and home addresses) online as a way of threatening those who were not welcome in certain online communities. Some of the threats became violent with personal threats made and bricks being thrown through windows. The act of “swatting” or calling in hostage or bomb threats to the police in the hopes of a SWAT team being sent to the home of the unknowing victim with the possibility of serious harm coming to the resident due to the extreme situation. These examples are so far from what people could have probably imagined when social media was being created as a platform for communicating ideas. Even a ten-year-old girl was not safe from the type of harassment that could destroy lives. When the police were contacted about the harassment and threats, little help was offered. Because it is so easy to remain anonymous online many people say things that they would never say if they had to reveal their identity. “Trolling” online combined the two activities of “flaunting taboos” and “pulling pranks.” With activities such as mocking the death of a child or encouraging individuals to take their own lives have become common in some online groups. When people only had a family computer that could easily be monitored it would have seemed almost impossible for anyone to use technology for such hateful behavior. Now that people’s phones and watches can be easily used to send such messages, people feel empowered to hurt others with little fear of consequences. It is very sad that something that could be used to share cute puppy videos could also be used to ruin people’s lives.

Facebook and Reddit were some of the least responsive companies.  

At the beginning of internet culture in 2009, a thirteen-year-old kid named Adam started using social media and it would become a hobby for him. He heard the word meme somewhere and soon landed a blog called I Can Haz Cheezburger? It drew the attention of two million people for cat pictures and childlike text said in a cat’s voice (“i maked you a dinner but I eated it”). A video on YouTube showed two boys abusing a cat named Dusty. The video caused anger among viewers on a message board called 4chan. The video maker was a fourteen-year-old boy from Oklahoma. Both boys were charged with animal cruelty. 4chan filled with posts celebrating the boys getting in trouble. Adam was fascinated. People like Adam had turned clicking around on the internet into a bonding social experience. He started spending hours a day on 4chan, whose unique features made it popular with early internet users. Anytime users wanted to start a thread or send a message, they had to upload an image to the platform. It was filled with user-made memes and cartoons. Like Snapchat, conversations were deletedafter a short period of time. This gave some users an opportunity to post messages that would be reported on any other platform.