Today is Saturday, January 10th and I just enjoyed my first full day in three browsing the GamerGate hub at 8chan. For the unaware readers, there have been some shenanigans afoot on the part of GamerGate’s opposition over the last few days, beginning with the debacle at the Consumer Electronics Show.
In addition to the gaffe committed by Intel regarding the IGDA and the subsequent spin concocted by Vox Media, another event took center stage in the eyes of GamerGate supporters: The partnership of Intel with Feminist Frequency and its owner Jonathan McIntosh and his accompanying speaker Anita Sarkeesian.
While diversity, particularly in the form of female representation in the industry, is one of GamerGate’s explicitly stated goals, the particular choice of this outfit on the part of Intel may have done more lasting damage to their brand than even the IGDA blacklist association. Billed by supporters as an example of radical feminism done right, McIntosh (who speaks through Sarkeesian) has said and promoted an extensive array of ideas that are less in support of equality of women than… well, I’ll let you see for yourself.
I feel comfortable making the statement in the presence of my GamerGate colleagues that there is nothing objectionable about equality feminism. McIntosh and Sarkeesian, however, are more notable for peddling a form of toxic, and quite possibly racist, misandry that masquerades as the former. Little is said of this within the circles of mainstream media, where the more feminine of the duo has been interviewed in places as prestigious as The Colbert Report, but their unique form of “avant garde” social commentary is well known to the Internet. Being an Internet-based rebellion, Sarkeesian and her cohort were known to the forces of GamerGate long before the eruption of the hashtag back in August of 2013. While originally reserved to a reaction of humor and mild contempt, the idea of these two being partnered under the banner of a company like Intel from where they could spread their influence was something GamerGate did not take lightly. Spurred into action by the spin pieces of Vox Media, GamerGate launched a campaign against Intel’s decisions by spreading relevant information in the #CES2015 hashtag that was being used to promote the event.
Within hours the main GamerGate hubs were a firestorm of activity, as archives were searched, tweets recovered, infographics compiled, and rallying cries sent out to every corner of the net. The top tweets in the #CES2015 feed belonged to GamerGate for nearly seven hours before an unusual turn of events happened: A DDoS, or “Distributed Denial of Service” attack was launched against the GamerGate hub at 8chan.co. A positively massive one at that. Somewhere in the world, thousands of virus-network-infected computers had been ordered to blast the 8chan server with bogus information, causing it to overload and shut down. Hack attacks like this are commonplace on the Internet, but not ones of this scale. The attack was so big that it actually knocked out the entire Japanese “2ch” network for almost 36 hours. A network that serves 20% of the entire Japanese population.
Such attacks are normally purchased from hacker groups for a sum of money proportional to the size and duration of the desired attack. Knocking a small website offline for an hour might cost as little as $10, where taking down The New York Times website for a week could cost tens of thousands. The size, scale, and duration of the attack against 8chan were all much closer to the latter category. Right in the middle of GamerGate’s push to expose their story and Jonathan McIntosh to the good people at the Consumer Electronics Show, someone out there had spent an extraordinary sum of money to disrupt their efforts.
Fortunately it was mostly for naught. While the cutoff of the flow of information from that hub combined with a bot-fueled advertising blitz by Logitech did cost GamerGate the top picture tweets in the tag, the thousands of activists participating in the effort also discovered that they no longer had anything better to do. Without the occasional distraction of the discussion boards luring them away, they were free, after the initial shock of the attack had worn off, to put their full attention into dominating the #CES2015 tag. And dominate it they did.
“The hashtag #Gamergate appeared 30,422 times in tweets tagged #CES2015, more so than any other hashtag.”
GG. No Re.
Censorship of gamers has been the most onerous wrong committed by the anti-gamer media since this began. Indeed, while plenty of them were content to grumble and complain about the Aug 28/29 “Gamers Are Dead” articles, it was not until the wave of mass censorship of forums and comment sections across the net which followed them that many common gamers felt spurred to become full-time activists. The DDoSing of 8chan was likely one more expensive effort at silencing gamers in our dissent of a corrupt status quo in our industry, and GamerGate again refused to stand for it.
“Your resistance,” as they say, “only makes our resolve harder.”
-Acid Man
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