and I\u2019ve written about this before, so there\u2019s some rehashing<\/a>, but bear with me). Someone sent me an anonymous message through a now mostly defunct platform called \u201cTumblr,\u201d 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\u2019d asked me what I thought about the issues that Gamergate became best known for, I don\u2019t know that I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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 \u2013 whether that be Youtube, your webhost, or a storage site \u2013 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 \u201ccounter notice\u201d to your accuser, which involved offering up a bunch of personal information to them even though you weren\u2019t given any identifying information in return. You wouldn\u2019t even be told what, specifically, was thought to be infringing, because that didn\u2019t matter to the law. They could just point at it, and it exploded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And naturally, I\u2019d 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\u2019t even a match \u2013 both songs had the word \u201cnothing\u201d in the title, and that was as little as it took. My upload was gone, destroyed \u2013 and I\u2019ll bet you this was an intentional strategy by the company doing it, because it meant that my song wouldn\u2019t compete in the SEO with their song. That system could easily be abused, so it got abused \u2013 that\u2019s just one of those no-brainer things about laws and power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that was presented to me as an entering point for Gamergate, and to this day I\u2019m still going to say that the use of the DMCA to take down opinions on the issue was abusive and wrong. I don\u2019t lay blame on the feet of the people who abused the law, however \u2013 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\u2019s on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cGamergate\u201d article on Wikipedia is a heavily opinionated, partisan hit-piece, it\u2019s roughly the same length as the article on the Boxer Rebellion, and in spite of its length, almost all the article is pointless.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt 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\u2019re 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\u2019t have a following for any other purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I absolutely hate it, because every now and then, Gamergate gets mentioned, and when somebody asks, \u201cWhat was that about, anyway?\u201d Nobody ever gives the correct answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It Was Economics, Stupid<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 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\u2019d 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 \u201cusing my reach\u201d to talk to people. My opinion wasn\u2019t that important, and it sticks with me because it feels somewhat humiliating that I thought it did matter. The curse of youth, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Setting aside my own fear of having been a tool, how did<\/em> 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNow when I talk about this, sometimes people want to be dismissive. Obviously, you can\u2019t make people interested in a subject from nothing. The problems that people talked about during the Gamergate era weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gamergate involved a scandal with someone in the game journal industry. It proposed that they\u2019d 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<\/em> to those consumers.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd this, naturally, is not a problem with game journalism alone. Today, we have a problem with trust in the media on the whole. I\u2019m personally a fan of NPR, but don\u2019t 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 \u201cKochtapus\u201d was a real threat before they started giving money to the station, right? And I\u2019m sure that there are journalists today who might argue that those donations don\u2019t impact the way they report on Koch Industries, but I don\u2019t know how those journalists would convince me of that given that they explained to me years before how it works<\/em>. Koch Industries gives money to things they want to control, and NPR now relies on them as part of their budget, ergo, there\u2019s no way Koch Industries doesn\u2019t influence NPR on some level.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDuring 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\u2019t mean they were beholden to Activision. They could still show integrity at least 90% of the time\u2026 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\u2019t about business or money, it was about sexism. Gamers across the internet were just mad that women existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And because this was the stupidest possible explanation for what was going on, it got promoted the most by Google\u2019s 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\u2019re no longer viewed by the general public as being serious authorities about anything. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sexism does also exist. Those issues weren\u2019t created out of thin air either, but they\u2019re so much more nebulous and so much easier to understand emotionally than economics and Google\u2019s search algorithms. Today, people still associate Gamergate with gender politics and the culture wars, so almost any time you ask what Gamergate was, you\u2019re not going to get a thoughtful or comprehensive answer. You\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ultimately, that stuff involving sexism and whether or not Lara Croft\u2019s boobs were too big did not matter. All the old franchises from that era were bought and buried, boobs and all. It doesn\u2019t 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<\/em>, very lucrative<\/em> and is still with us today<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe actual problems that made Gamergate possible never went away. If anything those systems have only become more entrenched and better refined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Easier to Engage With<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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\u2019d be bought. That\u2019s why Facebook owns Instagram now. That\u2019s why Facebook became Meta \u2013 because they were trying to figure out what the next big product was, and instead of making one, they just snapped up someone else\u2019s product because it looked interesting (in this case, virtual reality, which flopped because Facebook didn\u2019t know what to do once they had it). That\u2019s why over time, it feels like we\u2019ve seen less and less innovation, and it feels like everything simply gets worse to extract more revenue from us. It\u2019s because little companies barely exist, and the ones that do exist aren\u2019t really trying to make sales or good products so much as they\u2019re just trying to get bought by a bigger player before they go bankrupt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if you talk about this to the average person, they don\u2019t 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\u2019s teacher apologized for the fact that we couldn\u2019t access any online material for the past few days. She\u2019d realized almost the whole internet was down, but she didn\u2019t know why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told her, \u201cOh, an Amazon database was having some trouble, so the whole internet was a little spotty for a bit\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And she didn\u2019t totally believe me! It sounds fake. Like conspiracy. Aren\u2019t they a delivery company? They don\u2019t own the whole internet. I mean, we supposedly have laws about this stuff, we\u2019re not supposed to allow US companies to simply control the entire internet to such an extent you could disable nearly the entire web<\/em> 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\u2019s something in the background, that almost all of us rely on, and the whole point is that you\u2019re not supposed to be actively thinking about it. It\u2019s \u201cthe cloud\u201d, which you know is a thing, but you maybe didn\u2019t know was kept in a Virginia warehouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere was a show called \u201cIT Crowd\u201d that did a joke where two IT guys convince their boss that the internet is kept in a box that\u2019s normally stored in Big Ben. See, the joke is that Jen is so tech illiterate, she doesn\u2019t question how they managed to get it out of Virginia or why Jeffrey Bezos would sign off on flying it to England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, the point I\u2019m making, before I get too far off in the weeds, is that my son\u2019s 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\u2019re promoted by oligarchs that literally own the whole internet and could actually turn it off<\/em> if they ever felt vindictive enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTrying to understand how a DNS error kills the world\u2019s 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\u2019ll be brought to understand about that subject. What is easy to engage with is what gets promoted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even now, we\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019s not enough, they might find themselves with a sympathetic judge who tosses the whole kit with the kaboodle. It doesn\u2019t matter<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEpstein 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\u2019re doing to prevent scenarios like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that\u2019s not to say that the guilty shouldn\u2019t 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 <\/em>who did it and if they\u2019ll be punished, but even more importantly, how<\/em>, in the context of figuring out how to prevent it from happening again.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSet the Standard<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t a problem with our culture. It\u2019s not that we have too many Mexicans, or that too many people are gay now, or that there aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s the system they\u2019ve 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\u2019t choose to stand up to any of their own foibles. They\u2019re going to lead us into another economic disaster and forgive themselves again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve spent a lot of time hearing our leaders say that the young people eat too much toast, or aren\u2019t saving enough money. Supposedly we aren\u2019t 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of us feel like we have a lot of freedoms because they aren\u2019t well protected nor respected. And that, I think, is the heart of everything. We don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We can\u2019t vote for Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton just because they\u2019re the only other option \u2013 they need to have actual politics of substance for the average person or they\u2019re worthless to us. And Donald Trump should obviously not have gotten away with the levels of grift and pure, black-hearted malice that he\u2019s projected all his life. As much as anyone can, if we\u2019re 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\u2019re pretty clever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t making them weaker, we\u2019re just raising them to our level \u2013 those idiots can\u2019t get to that height on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The thing to ask today, and that we should always be asking, is whether we\u2019re having the conversations that mattered, or whether we\u2019re 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<\/em> what we need to vote for or believe in, we\u2019re never going to get out of the woods. It has to be the other way around, they have to hear what the public needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAbove all else, it\u2019s 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\u2019t hold our leaders to a standard, the ultimate price is at the end of the road. Our leaders want<\/em> to be lazy. They don\u2019t want to work, they don\u2019t want to be argued with, they don\u2019t want to learn new things. And that\u2019s where it\u2019s 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\u2019t just the correct ethical thing to do, it\u2019s the only universally correct thing to do at all where it comes to politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn A Related Note<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSo hey, just as a heads up, if you haven\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also we had a hospital visit in the family that our insurance denied, so the hospital is saying we owe them $50k. We\u2019re appealing that right now, but we don\u2019t know when they\u2019ll 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\u2019s costing him $60k plus hospital bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if you\u2019re wondering what provoked this article, it\u2019s just the daily life of being an American. I will vote for whichever politician seems like they\u2019re taking this stuff seriously and has an actual solution instead of just a \u201cconcept of a plan\u201d or \u201cI would change nothing\u201d, if I even get the chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is going to be an article about politics. It\u2019s not an article that purports to have answers or anything, it\u2019s just something that I think is important, and it\u2019s this: many issues we\u2019ve seen online in the past ten years didn\u2019t matter that much, and didn\u2019t require your thoughts and input. That\u2019s not to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-35","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35\/revisions\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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