Behind The Patina of Anita Sarkeesian: Gleanings of Feminist Victim Politics – #gamergate

A must-read post from the gamergate.me site —

The author of ‘Behind The Patina of Anita Sarkeesian’ has chosen to continue under the moniker of “Source” in order to protect the security of their family. Source is top-level faculty at Harvard University. The circumstances of how GamerGate.me encountered Source were previously detailed here.

If you took an algorithm to Twitter and whisked away all the disparate voices resulting in divergent perspectives, callow nattering, and ever-familiar spleen and rancor from truculent fomenters, what would be left? An excessively sanitized, tightly circumscribed, hug-box of micromanaged homophily?—an insular reflection of a monopolistic perspective tailored to your predilections, to be sure, but not the seine of material that informs on the ambiguities of complex and contentious issues. Yet this is the modus operandi of GamerGate’s detractors, and its supporters. They are the nearest thing today to engineered narcissists. For they are so slavishly conditioned and socialized to one-sided rhetoric, to invoke Meg Wolitzer, they have butter, but no bread.

A social process itself involves a highly complex, and sometimes intractable morass of details, but media users lack fitness to the character of this process, taken up in a grand sweep of concatenations. They are ensnared within this totality which is beyond their ingress and plays in them, and of which they are also, perhaps, the active participants. Nowhere else is this more salient than the microcosm in the brewing culture wars: GamerGate, a vociferous movement about the convergence of diverse social and ethical interests against shoddy games journalism and often messier industry practices, was excoriated for its alleged harassment directed at women (especially those in the gaming industry), a complaint that betrays its own partial investigation, for no reliable evidence to buttress this claim has ever been adduced (n.b., both camps were leveling all sorts of charges against one another). Accusations were accepted as proof and suspicions as conviction, invariably leading to a collapse into further enmity. Set to continue into its fifth month, GamerGate no longer boasts the smash rankings as other trending hashtag campaigns, but it has kept astir, a reliable honeypot to set tongues wagging, to speculate and discount, and to doff tin-foil hats from pillar to post. Then, the rising winter tide. Presented in Bloomberg Businessweek, drinking all ignominy to the dregs, Sheelah Kolhatkar, dished out a cover-story interview featuring Anita Sarkeesian, labeling her “Gaming’s greatest adversary” in a detectable sense of brittle irony.

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