They Targeted Gamers. Gamers.
How to Game an Election
When it comes to the partisan political issue known as Gamergate, almost every public discussion that I have seen asks the wrong questions. The question I always see asked is “Was Gamergate really about ethics in video-game journalism?” In my opinion, this question completely misses the point. The question that people really ought to ask themselves should be “Is Zoe Quinn a bad person who deserves hate?” The reason this question is important is because - as I explained in a previous post - hate is a very useful emotion that human beings evolved specifically to weed bad people out from our society. Our unhealthy culture tells us that hate is always a bad thing and that we should feel guilty about expressing hate towards objectively bad people, but that philosophy goes against both human nature and six million years of evolution. Whenever cultural behavior collides with evolved behavior, evolution always wins.
Identifying bad people who deserve hate is useful for manipulating the electoral process because, as I mentioned in my last post, establishing a strongly polarizing political issue is crucial for turning undecided voters into your voters. Nothing gets people to the voting booths faster than seeing a bad person go unpunished, especially when one political party has decided to take up the mantle of defending that person under the guise of “feminist solidarity.” So let’s evaluate Zoe Quinn not from the perspective of “Did she manipulate video game journalism” but instead “Is her behavior indicative of a good human being, or a bad one?”
Zoe Quinn’s Behavior
Infidelity to her boyfriend, possibly exposing him to STDs. She then proceeded to manipulatively gaslight him about this.
Tried to stop Candace Owens when Owens was creating a website to eliminate online bullying.
Incited a social media lynch mob to attack a group sponsoring the inclusion of more female game designers (the Fine Young Capitalists).
Incited another social media lynch mob to harass one of her ex-boyfriends into committing suicide.
Doesn’t pay her own transgendered employees.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that these are all characteristics of a bad human being who deserves hate. Unlike many other Gamergate supporters, I don’t think Gamergate was about ethics in video-game journalism: in fact, for political purposes I think that is literally the least relevant thing about Gamergate. In reality, Gamergate was a referendum on the state of identity politics within the Democratic party. Essentially, the question being asked was “Is the Left so politically tribal that they are willing to defend sociopathic narcissism just because the person displaying it identifies as one of them?” And the answer was a resounding “Yes.” It turned out that this was an excellent strategy to make a lot of previously undecided voters decide that they hated the new direction that the Left was going in, voting for Trump out of pure spite. (I want to point out here that I am not trying to invalidate spite. All our emotions evolved for a reason, and casting a vote in anger when you have a justifiable reason to hate somebody is a perfectly legitimate and rational thing to do.) Yet despite the fact that this political miscalculation was costing them votes and generating a lot of hatred towards them, the Left decided to double down on it. Instead of saying “Zoe Quinn is a bad human being and her behavior does not represent feminism as a whole,” countless think-pieces were written defending her and insulting the people who criticized her. Let me repeat that for emphasis. They decided that insulting the undecided voters was the best way to win votes. This behavior is far more common than you would think. It happens because of an interesting tribalist phenomenon known as virtue signalling where people decide that gaining status within their own political tribe is more important than actually having their tribe win, so they sabotage their own tribe’s chances of victory in order to signal how virtuous they are (hence the name), because losing while fanatically upholding your tribe’s values is considered by some to be morally superior to winning through compromise. This deranged mindset typically occurs when tribalism has grown so intense that there is a lot of extremism on both sides.
So what was I personally doing in all of this? Mostly stirring the pot. A lot of people think that trolling is about insulting people or making misogynistic statements, but the fact is that this kind of childish behavior is very ineffectual at getting people to believe in your personal truth. Honestly, the best way to get people angry is to point out hypocrisy, because human beings are mentally wired to hate hypocritical behavior (in a sense, this is literally why we evolved the emotion of hate). For example, if you were an online troll involved in Gamergate, calling Zoe Quinn by a gendered slur would be unlikely to generate much hate towards her - on the contrary, it would probably generate sympathy. But if you point out that Zoe Quinn constantly incites online social media lynch mobs against people she dislikes (while she simultaneously claims to be a victim of those lynch mobs), you can get some real hate going, because now you’re shining a huge spotlight on her hypocritical behavior.
Another useful tactic to stir up outrage is the “bump.” A lot of social media forums prioritize the order in which their posts are shown by which comment thread has been most recently active. The term “bumping” comes from the social media practice of posting only a single-word comment - “bump” - to increase the visibility of a post. So if you are a speed reader looking through 4chan posts, you can see which posting threads cause the most public outrage against your targets and make them highly visible to maximize said outrage simply by commenting on those specific threads with the word “bump.” In theory, you could even write a script to make it happen automatically. Just have an algorithm quantify the number of keywords in a thread associated with outrage and then periodically “bump” the angriest threads to the top.
If you are more artistically inclined, a very effective way to spread your desired propaganda is through memes. The reason memes are so effective is because a picture is worth a thousand words, so memes are effectively enhanced data compression. A good meme is satire, like a political cartoon. It makes your point more effectively and concisely than an entire paragraph of typing could. For example, I could write a few paragraphs discussing the hypocrisy of some liberal behaviors, like the fact that a lot of government programs supposedly intended to end black poverty usually end up with the majority of the money spent being used to fund the high salaries of white left-wing administrators who oversee the distribution of those funds. But that kind of long-winded financial analysis would be boring, and most of my audience would tune out. So if I wanted to be more effective at spreading my message, I would simply use a meme like Two-Button Man, which is specifically designed to highlight double standards and hypocritical behavior in a very concise and entertaining format.
__________________________Figure 1: How to end racism___________________________
The last technique I would like to discuss (which may appeal to people with an improv comedy background) is to agree with the opinion that you wish to invalidate, but come up with stupid reasons for supporting it, and take offense when the “allies” you are “supporting” try to gently correct you. For example, suppose that you wish to invalidate anti-mask movements. An intelligent argument for anti-masking might be that there is no reason to wear a mask once you have already been vaccinated, so effectively wearing a mask at that point is just virtue-signalling. If you want to invalidate that point, you might agree with the person making the point about virtue-signalling, but add to what they said with your own stupid unscientific argument that masks actually spread Covid, because the virus particles all cluster in one place, meaning that the second you pull down the mask, a “more concentrated” cluster of Covid particles spreads which is more likely to infect nearby people. In your truth, dispersing the particulate more thinly over a wider area by breathing normally without a mask is actually safer, because “dilution is the solution to pollution!” When the “ally” whom you are trying to disenfranchise tries to reasonably correct you on your nonsense, feign maximum offense and tell him that he is a retard who doesn’t know what he is talking about. This has two effects:
Instead of spending time making his compelling case to the masses, the person you are targeting with your trolling is now wasting time trying to debunk your nonsense while still maintaining his position as an anti-masker.
Your trolling victim is getting increasingly more angry with the “allies” on his own side, who are behaving like ignorant jerks. If he gets angry enough with his own side, eventually he may switch allegiances to yours.
The significance of this second point cannot be understated, because smart and articulate people are elite troops in the rhetorical war of politics. Each one of them that you can “flip” to your side can shift public support in your direction by a lot. Also, it has been scientifically proven that the best way to make somebody change their opinions is by agreeing with them, but giving stupid reasons for your support. This is why, during the 2016 presidential election, the majority of alleged Russian trolling was found to have occurred within the pro-Clinton camp even though the intent of such alleged trolling would have been to disenfranchise Hillary Clinton.
All of the tactics described above are very effective at building support for your coalition while eroding support for your adversaries. For a fun time, try them out during your next election cycle, and share your results in the comments!