This is going to be an article about politics. It’s not an article that purports to have answers or anything, it’s just something that I think is important, and it’s this: many issues we’ve seen online in the past ten years didn’t matter that much, and didn’t require your thoughts and input.

That’s not to say that nothing in politics has mattered. A lot of important things have happened, but I remember years ago getting direct messages from people asking me what my opinions were on hot-button issues that, at the time, seemed really important because they were being talked about by everyone. However, in the end, what got talked about the most didn’t seem important, or was actively distracting from things that were important.

Gamergate

One early instance I can recall this happening was with the issue of Gamergate (and I’ve written about this before, so there’s some rehashing, but bear with me). Someone sent me an anonymous message through a now mostly defunct platform called “Tumblr,” pointing out that someone involved in Gamergate had been using the DMCA to shut down conversation, and they wanted to know what I thought about that. Now, if they’d asked me what I thought about the issues that Gamergate became best known for, I don’t know that I’d have taken as much of a look at it, but the DMCA was a prickly subject for me because at the time (and still now, but not as egregiously), many companies and organizations used bot networks to simply remove content from the internet at random.

The DMCA was designed to protect business interests first, and thus to completely disregard the rights and needs of individuals. It proposed that if a company had a problem with something you were posting, they had the financial wherewithal to destroy you anyway, so why bother making them leap through all the hoops normally necessary to prove any wrongdoing? They report that they think you stole something of theirs, and whatever platform you posted it to – whether that be Youtube, your webhost, or a storage site – was obligated to blow your metaphorical brains out into the pavement without asking questions. Your stuff would get suspended, and then if you were feeling confident, you could opt to send a “counter notice” to your accuser, which involved offering up a bunch of personal information to them even though you weren’t given any identifying information in return. You wouldn’t even be told what, specifically, was thought to be infringing, because that didn’t matter to the law. They could just point at it, and it exploded.

And naturally, I’d been subjected to this numerous times already. For example, I once had a song I posted on Mediafire get deleted because a bot thought the name of the song was too close to something it was looking for. The songs had nothing in common, obviously a human had never compared them to see if there were any real similarities. The titles weren’t even a match – both songs had the word “nothing” in the title, and that was as little as it took. My upload was gone, destroyed – and I’ll bet you this was an intentional strategy by the company doing it, because it meant that my song wouldn’t compete in the SEO with their song. That system could easily be abused, so it got abused – that’s just one of those no-brainer things about laws and power.

So that was presented to me as an entering point for Gamergate, and to this day I’m still going to say that the use of the DMCA to take down opinions on the issue was abusive and wrong. I don’t lay blame on the feet of the people who abused the law, however – I blame the people who wrote that law, because the job of lawmakers is to be thinking about the future and how their laws will affect the populace. When they wrote the DMCA, they were only focused on shareholders and company interests, and that’s on them.

And as Gamergate went on, I grew frustrated as all the promotion focused on sensational claptrap that had nothing to do with anything. The DMCA was a real policy issue, but I know it’s one that hits closer to people who were trying to upload artwork in that time, and it flew well under the radar of the average voter. What really upsets me is that today, the “Gamergate” article on Wikipedia is a heavily opinionated, partisan hit-piece, it’s roughly the same length as the article on the Boxer Rebellion, and in spite of its length, almost all the article is pointless.

It sputters on at length about culture wars, gender issues, the reactions of law enforcements to death threats against the various online personalities who were involved. It talks about the morality of the issue. It talks about the legacy of various feminists who, if we’re being honest, did not actually go on to do anything that important after it happened. The people involved in Gamergate were, like, a random assortment of folks from a social media bubble that only existed in that specific time. Numerous Youtube channels that sprang up specifically because of Gamergate now do not exist because they were only created to rant about that one subject and didn’t have a following for any other purpose.

I absolutely hate it, because every now and then, Gamergate gets mentioned, and when somebody asks, “What was that about, anyway?” Nobody ever gives the correct answer.

It Was Economics, Stupid

In hindsight, I sometimes wonder if the anonymous message I received was from someone who really cared about my opinion, or if it was just someone trying to stir the pot. Years later, we’d learn that foreign governments had created social media divisions to foment political disorder across the web. It did spread naturally, but there were active instigators with ulterior motives. The fact that I was acting plausibly as a useful idiot either way is the thing that really makes Gamergate haunt me when I look back at “using my reach” to talk to people. My opinion wasn’t that important, and it sticks with me because it feels somewhat humiliating that I thought it did matter. The curse of youth, I suppose.

Setting aside my own fear of having been a tool, how did Gamergate happen? Why? Well, the most salient reason and the one I never hear, is that it was because Google had obtained a vertical monopoly over search and discovery, and they were experimenting with ways to hold audiences more captive to Youtube video content. Controversial content having to do with race, gender, and other sensational topics would provoke arguments in the comments section and would result in whole spates of video responses that inflated the SEO presence of the subject. Gamergate became a major cultural flashpoint of 2014 because Google promoted it.

Now when I talk about this, sometimes people want to be dismissive. Obviously, you can’t make people interested in a subject from nothing. The problems that people talked about during the Gamergate era weren’t invented from the whole cloth. There was legitimately a dwindling trust for games journalism at the time, because game journalists had become little more than cheerleaders rooting for the companies that were paying their budget through advertising. This was an era where beloved studios were being gobbled up by larger players left and right, and those major companies would then release underwhelming, half-baked products nobody was happy with. The journals would then tell their readers that the games were great, and if you trusted the journals to get burned that way, that upset you.

Gamergate involved a scandal with someone in the game journal industry. It proposed that they’d lied about the quality of a game in order to help a girlfriend with sales, and while those reports turned out to be well overblown, the fact was, it was tied to a chain of betrayals that really existed to those consumers.

And this, naturally, is not a problem with game journalism alone. Today, we have a problem with trust in the media on the whole. I’m personally a fan of NPR, but don’t think I never noticed how NPR used to do reports on the political activities of Koch Industries only until they started receiving direct funding from Koch Industries. Yeah, the “Kochtapus” was a real threat before they started giving money to the station, right? And I’m sure that there are journalists today who might argue that those donations don’t impact the way they report on Koch Industries, but I don’t know how those journalists would convince me of that given that they explained to me years before how it works. Koch Industries gives money to things they want to control, and NPR now relies on them as part of their budget, ergo, there’s no way Koch Industries doesn’t influence NPR on some level.

During Gamergate, likewise, we saw some people trying to argue that just because a game company made 10% of its total revenue from Activision, that didn’t mean they were beholden to Activision. They could still show integrity at least 90% of the time… if we, you know, assume they were fine walking away from that much revenue. Of course, that was a losing argument, so more and more, what the argument got diverted towards was gender and culture issues. It wasn’t about business or money, it was about sexism. Gamers across the internet were just mad that women existed.

And because this was the stupidest possible explanation for what was going on, it got promoted the most by Google’s system. The sexist arguments and gender accusations got to be the focal point of everything. The trustworthiness of the gaming industry or the journalists who were supposed to report on it never really got addressed. Ten years later, companies like IGN and Kotaku still exist, but they’re no longer viewed by the general public as being serious authorities about anything. I don’t know anyone who actually checks in with them to see if a new game release is good. Instead, we just watch streamers on Twitch and Youtube because those people play the games in real time and you can figure out what the game is like more directly.

Sexism does also exist. Those issues weren’t created out of thin air either, but they’re so much more nebulous and so much easier to understand emotionally than economics and Google’s search algorithms. Today, people still associate Gamergate with gender politics and the culture wars, so almost any time you ask what Gamergate was, you’re not going to get a thoughtful or comprehensive answer. You’re not going to understand why it got big, or why so many people seemed to care. The answers never examine the underlying features of the issue, and I almost never see anyone cite anything about just how many mergers were happening in that era.

Ultimately, that stuff involving sexism and whether or not Lara Croft’s boobs were too big did not matter. All the old franchises from that era were bought and buried, boobs and all. It doesn’t matter who slept with who, or whether or not certain internet feminists actually played a single video game they ever critiqued. What matters is, we had an automated system that promoted the worst parts of the controversy to generate ad revenue, and it was very successful, very lucrative and is still with us today.

The actual problems that made Gamergate possible never went away. If anything those systems have only become more entrenched and better refined.

Easier to Engage With

The internet was shrinking then, and it still is shrinking now. If a website looked as though it was going to compete with one of the major tech oligarchs, it’d be bought. That’s why Facebook owns Instagram now. That’s why Facebook became Meta – because they were trying to figure out what the next big product was, and instead of making one, they just snapped up someone else’s product because it looked interesting (in this case, virtual reality, which flopped because Facebook didn’t know what to do once they had it). That’s why over time, it feels like we’ve seen less and less innovation, and it feels like everything simply gets worse to extract more revenue from us. It’s because little companies barely exist, and the ones that do exist aren’t really trying to make sales or good products so much as they’re just trying to get bought by a bigger player before they go bankrupt.

But if you talk about this to the average person, they don’t always seem to be aware of it. A little while back, there was a massive outage that caused almost the entire internet to slow down. During a parent-teacher conference, my son’s teacher apologized for the fact that we couldn’t access any online material for the past few days. She’d realized almost the whole internet was down, but she didn’t know why.

I told her, “Oh, an Amazon database was having some trouble, so the whole internet was a little spotty for a bit”.

And she didn’t totally believe me! It sounds fake. Like conspiracy. Aren’t they a delivery company? They don’t own the whole internet. I mean, we supposedly have laws about this stuff, we’re not supposed to allow US companies to simply control the entire internet to such an extent you could disable nearly the entire web by targeting a single location in Virginia. To make it sound even more conspiratorial, Amazon Web Services is not something you see plastered all over the front of the online world. It’s something in the background, that almost all of us rely on, and the whole point is that you’re not supposed to be actively thinking about it. It’s “the cloud”, which you know is a thing, but you maybe didn’t know was kept in a Virginia warehouse.

There was a show called “IT Crowd” that did a joke where two IT guys convince their boss that the internet is kept in a box that’s normally stored in Big Ben. See, the joke is that Jen is so tech illiterate, she doesn’t question how they managed to get it out of Virginia or why Jeffrey Bezos would sign off on flying it to England.

Anyway, the point I’m making, before I get too far off in the weeds, is that my son’s teacher probably has at least some understanding of the various identity politics and culture war issues going on today. That stuff is a minefield for schoolteachers, because parents are also inundated in it and make angry phone calls about it. Yet, those same teachers are quite rarely brought to understand that these issues are hot-button right now because they’re promoted by oligarchs that literally own the whole internet and could actually turn it off if they ever felt vindictive enough.

Trying to understand how a DNS error kills the world’s internet for a week is technically complicated. It would never just casually surface in your social media feed, and if it did, it certainly would not then backfill you with information on how we got to this point or why US regulators are fine with it. It can, however, ask you for your emotional reaction to whether or not a penis makes you a superior person, so if there is ever any way to tie a penis to a subject on the internet, then by God, that is the only thing you’ll be brought to understand about that subject. What is easy to engage with is what gets promoted.

Even now, we’re looking at this stuff with the Epstein files, and a lot of what I see discussed is the question of who was actually using their penis to do crimes. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter who did what. What matters is that we have a legal system that gives wealthy and powerful people every possible opportunity to escape justice. They get second chances, then third chances, then fourth chances, then an appeal opportunity, and if that’s not enough, they might find themselves with a sympathetic judge who tosses the whole kit with the kaboodle. It doesn’t matter who did what. What matters right now is that they did it, and for some reason our system allowed it and still probably would allow it if it happened again. What matters is that nothing has changed, even in light of knowing it happened.

Epstein was, by most accounts, a very stupid and ordinary person. That means it would be shockingly easy for another Epstein to exist, because all it took was money, power, and a legal system that constantly tries to forgive and tolerate both wealth and power. A political system that embraces and celebrates those things at the cost of all else. We ask the easy questions about who did the penis stuff, or which team were they on, without asking the hard questions about why it was ever allowed and what we’re doing to prevent scenarios like this.

And that’s not to say that the guilty shouldn’t be prosecuted. What I wish people would be asking themselves is, when you engage with politics, are you engaging with whatever is easiest? Whatever is most sensational? Or are you engaging with the really difficult questions? The answer is not just who did it and if they’ll be punished, but even more importantly, how, in the context of figuring out how to prevent it from happening again.

Set the Standard

Now the big thing, here, is that the politics we often engage with now is screaming at the side-effects of the real problem. That is, we no longer hold the rich and powerful to any kind of standard, whether corporate, or political, or a blur of both. Politicians can say whatever they like, to whoever they like, and even threaten to shoot each other or their own citizens. This isn’t a problem with our culture. It’s not that we have too many Mexicans, or that too many people are gay now, or that there aren’t enough women in politics. The questions that matter have never really been that much about what race or gender you are. Those things are relevant to us as individuals, but they can only be worsened by a system that rewards profoundly underwhelming individuals with more power as a tautological congratulations for already having power. We have a system where failures rise to the top, and then they create incentives and protections for more failure. This is bad for every race and gender, and the whole world.

Now, if this were a conversation, this would be the part where both sides of the aisle would jump in to agree, but they would quickly start shouting the easily regurgitated party lines they find familiar. Because today, if you want to be shared and have your opinions talked about, they need to be familiar, easy to sort algorithmically, and also just barely stupid enough to generate an argument, because an argument is engagement and engagement means ad revenue for the company that promotes you.

But hang on to that fact that we agree on. Our leadership is composed largely of moronic failures, who want to continue a system of unaccountability, failure, and monopoly, because that’s the system they’ve grown comfortable in. They enjoy that they receive so many layers of forgiveness, because fools that they are, they hold themselves to a low standard and make constant mistakes. They break white collar laws and tell themselves that everyone else is doing it, and they just don’t choose to stand up to any of their own foibles. They’re going to lead us into another economic disaster and forgive themselves again.

We’ve spent a lot of time hearing our leaders say that the young people eat too much toast, or aren’t saving enough money. Supposedly we aren’t investing properly, as though you could after getting whacked with a surprise $50k hospital bill. You can start saving right after you pay off the college debt. Maybe you can start saving if you can find a job in this economy. The thing I think that we should all be a little frustrated with is that we’re all subjected to the rugged individualism of a supposedly free market, but the elite and powerful get to enjoy a socialized environment where a few companies control absolutely everything and get to decide what choices anyone is genuinely allowed to make and even what ideas are worth talking about.

None of us feel like we have a lot of freedoms because they aren’t well protected nor respected. And that, I think, is the heart of everything. We don’t really need to argue about what people are going to do with the freedoms if we had them. The simple fact is that we should be standing up for and defending those freedoms. We should be demanding that they be inherent, and we should expect our leaders to adhere to some kind of standard.

We can’t vote for Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton just because they’re the only other option – they need to have actual politics of substance for the average person or they’re worthless to us. And Donald Trump should obviously not have gotten away with the levels of grift and pure, black-hearted malice that he’s projected all his life. As much as anyone can, if we’re going to have a future, the one thing we all need to do is show contempt for anyone in power who thinks power alone is proof of a divine right. Society always works best when it yields to the wisdom of the masses. Every individual may not be that brilliant, but on average, when you take us all as a whole, we’re pretty clever.

The meek shall inherit the earth, not because the meek are individually better, but because the powerful are too incredibly stupid and inept to hold it alone. When the powerful are held to a standard by the public, we aren’t making them weaker, we’re just raising them to our level – those idiots can’t get to that height on their own.

The thing to ask today, and that we should always be asking, is whether we’re having the conversations that mattered, or whether we’re having conversations that powerful entities are trying to push us into having. This is a difficult distinction, but I think it could be hard to go wrong if you always circle back to expecting your leaders to adhere to standards and to respect you. As long as they try to tell us what we need to vote for or believe in, we’re never going to get out of the woods. It has to be the other way around, they have to hear what the public needs.

Above all else, it’s critical to resent and oppose laziness from power. The most horrific crimes in all of history were committed because those atrocities were easier than doing anything else. If we can’t hold our leaders to a standard, the ultimate price is at the end of the road. Our leaders want to be lazy. They don’t want to work, they don’t want to be argued with, they don’t want to learn new things. And that’s where it’s all going to go wrong, because killing people, tearing things down, and robbing everyone is way easier than actually governing. Expecting better of our supposed superiors isn’t just the correct ethical thing to do, it’s the only universally correct thing to do at all where it comes to politics.

On A Related Note

So hey, just as a heads up, if you haven’t heard: no court in the US is going to impose any real remedy on any of the tech oligarchs in the foreseeable future, so Apple is imposing a unilateral change on Patreon’s billing model in November 2026. The per-post billing system will be going away in favor of a system that better benefits Apple. Additionally, if you are donating through the Apple store at all, please stop, because Apple is taking 30% of that money. It’s better to use the web browser, which will not skim money off the top. So yes, the billing model is changing to benefit a store that is actively just taking money without really giving anything back.

Also we had a hospital visit in the family that our insurance denied, so the hospital is saying we owe them $50k. We’re appealing that right now, but we don’t know when they’ll resolve it. Throwing just a little salt in the wound, my buddy just recently had to have his child air-lifted to a hospital and it’s costing him $60k plus hospital bills.

So if you’re wondering what provoked this article, it’s just the daily life of being an American. I will vote for whichever politician seems like they’re taking this stuff seriously and has an actual solution instead of just a “concept of a plan” or “I would change nothing”, if I even get the chance.