It’s like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.
But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky feminazi SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?
At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these “anti-woke” crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?
Interesting that you mention that, I think I talked about that one time. Basically last decade was the best until early 2017, I mean the internet, movies, games, vibe, everything, it was like early-mid 1980s for our parents and older people. Most of the popular trash today was non existent and Reddit was a lot less popular.
Then exactly like you said, it went to shit in 2017, social media became cancer with all the political shit they started, for example, on Balkan YouTube during 2012-2016/early 2017 times there were very good YouTubers making content for little kids, older kids and adults alike, playing games, especially Minecraft, GTA V and horror games, videos about tech, work out, funny sketches, Creepypasta channels etc. After that came idiots who were fighting among themselves and causing political and regular dramas because that became popular for some reason, and of course sexual content and fighting over bullshit became normalized among them.
I can’t even wrap my head around YouTube recommendations: shitting on movies, complaining about ‘‘politics’’ in them(‘‘politics’’ being women and minorities) big games being hyped and then rushed, then videos about complaining 24/7 about them, milking and shitting on OGs with countless pointless sequels and unnecessary updates, you name it. Cringe stuff on social media, people complaining about everything, cancel culture, Twitter, not to mention openly nazi nuts in the comments somehow passing unpunished.
I don’t really know what exactly caused this.
Selection bias, I think. It depends on the site you’re using, but often communities are dominated by people who can afford to spend enormous amounts of time on the internet. That’s going to favor people with money and free time, not to mention the people who are literally paid to post.
Your framing and your questions seem to mash many different things—spanning decades—together as if it was all one thing. I’m not going to try to disentangle it all, but I’ll make a few of observations.
- The Internet is a product of the US’s military-industrial complex.
- “Apolitical” isn’t. “Apolitical” is the politics of maintaining the status quo. It’s the politics of I Just Wanna Grill for God’s Sake: White American labor aristocrats.
To a large extent New Atheism was a racist, Islamophobic reaction to 9/11, which provided ideological support for the imperial core’s War On Terror.
gamergate (2014) was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right.
It’s a violent (over)reaction to 2013-2016 SJW culture. Now hating women and minorities makes you “based” and not a weirdo.
Internet was initially only accessible by military and academia, its never not been reactionary
Back in 2009, the unfortunate precipitation of the infamous Endless Eight arc caused many 4chan posters to abandon Haruhiism and drift afloat in a position of moral vulnerability which the Nazis quickly moved to exploit </s>
Anime Pope, is that you? /sus
Enough people got online to ask the original nerds to stop calling women femoids and rather than adapt they reflexively doubled down.
Rinse and repeat for 10 years.
Nerd culture was targeted by companies seeking a profit from that market.
It also became way less underground and way more pop as a result.
This allowed a lot more libs in, killing any potential left approach
Subcultures are always more extreme expressions of an aspect/aspects of their supercultures.
Internet and geek cultures both, in the Anglosphere, have always been proponents of American Exceptionalism and Liberal Exceptionalism. And both of those things have progressed to fascism.
So, the nerd culture of pre-gamergate had a big streak of the internet atheist movement. I’m not actually sure you could meaningfully say one was separate from the other. An unspoken part of that was libertarianism. Real end-of-history hours. That’s not to say there weren’t non-libertarians in that space, it’s just the default was you were assumed to be white, male, libertarian, and into pop-culture franchises above and beyond ordinary consumptive habits of the general public.
A big part of nerd-dom, promoted by the owners of these franchises themselves, was the competitive consumption of cultural artifacts. The most obvious manifestation of this is large walls of collectibles, pristine in their packaging, which requires a decent amount of disposable income to indulge in. You didn’t have to spend lots of money, of course. You could competitively consume “lore”, which is often free from your local library.
The consumptive practices excluding certain income levels, the hierarchical nature of “who was in”, and the end of history I think explains a lot of reactionary nerds today (even though nerdy stuff has been used to explore emancipatory ideas about queerness, different societies etc… The artists tend to be more woke than the fans/fan leaders).
There is also the idea of scholarly merit and social exclusion. Obviously its a stereotype, but people who lived that (or believe they lived that) became part of the tech start up culture that drove a lot of the wealth in the Anglosphere, especially as decent paid industrial work started to decline. Again, the increase in wealth lends itself to walls of arcade games and reactionary content.
Politics has always been present in the works and in the fan culture, but there was a certain tendency across everything in the 90s and 2000s to think of itself as apolitical and non-ideological.
Nowadays, enough traditional nerds have enough money and clout to direct movie franchises. No longer is it business majors dictating that “audiences wouldn’t understand a lore accurate X-Men movie” or whatever. But the economics of it are the same (or similar).
Nerd culture saw itself as white (or certain east-asian), male, middle class plus and in the developed world. It was bound to devolve into reactionary thought. The only pro I see is its tendency to be accepting or at least ambivalent towards transpeople, even 4chan (outside of /pol/) seems to be more accepting towards trans than their political opinions of everything else.
I’m truly convinced that a huge part of this was moot leaving 4chan in 2015. Nerd culture has always been misogynistic and insular, but it never seemed politically focused until the past 10 years. It used to be more unfocused horribleness. When moot resigned from 4chan, there was a genuine white supremacist plot to gain moderator positions and push fascist rhetoric. It worked. All that ambient horribleness became laser focused and more coherent.
Also probably a lot more to do with material conditions honestly. The fraying economic features of the 2008 recession were never truly fixed. People no longer believe in a future and it became harder for nerd culture to act as an escape. Everyone’s more stressed, more pissed off, and more vocal. With nerd culture the ambient feelings got pushed forward as the things themselves ceased being enough of a draw on their own. More frayed and deranged types started demanding their misogynist, white supremacy be reinforced more aggressively, in every moment, by all media.
Nerd culture was always fairly reactionary, all things considered. The “girls don’t play video games” trope was so overplayed in the mid 00’s even Ctrl+Alt+Del was able to subvert it by having a gamer gf and B^U is not a creative person by any stretch of the word.
Although it did get worse when reactionaries realised they could make money by criticizing otherwise non-issues. If San Andreas came out today the right wing youtubers would lose their minds that the protagonist is black, the main antagonist is a cop and the secondary antagonist is a CIA agent and the supporting cast includes a female Latina, a weed smoking hippy and a disabled Chinese American. Gamergate’s consequences hasn’t exactly fallen away.
Nerd culture was always fairly reactionary, all things considered.
Reminder that Dungeons and Dragons creator E. Gary Gygax justified lawful good characters killing the babies of races listed as evil by quoting
CW: genocide
an American colonizer giving his reason for pursuing the total extermination of American Indians.
Interesting thing about that one is that C.R.A.S.H. is actually barely abstracted away from a real portion of the LAPD involved in a real scandal.
I’m gonna introspect here. Most of the other explanations in this thread I agree with, but I’m gonna focus inwards on the left.
The left abandoned geek culture spaces and allowed chuddery to take root unimpeded. We have a tendency to leave spaces to create our own instead of fighting over them. There are pros and cons to this, but one clear con imo is that we forfeit any culture wars before they’re even fought. Sure, we also get banned and whatnot, but we don’t (for example) use this place to coordinate raids on ! mainstream spaces the way 4chan and like do.
I also think there was a general distain for geek culture as a hyper capitalist expression of the lumpenproletariat. To what extent that is true is up for debate imo. There are still many anti-capitalist expressions from gamers and the like, but there are not enough leftist voices to frame them as such inside those communities. Recently we’ve had some discussions here about how abandoning and looking down on the rural working poor (so called “rednecks”) and I think that’s a really apt comparison.
The far right put in the work and ideological effort to fight over gamers and geeks, the left did not. As other comrades here have pointed out, any space without a leftist presence automatically drifts right.
There are still many anti-capitalist expressions from gamers and the like, but there are not enough leftist voices to frame them as such inside those communities.
I think another aspect that has occurred recently is capital corporations have cloned the socially progressive talking points of the left.
These concessions to progressive politics to court younger consumers are no challenge to the power of capitalism. Throwing corporate sponsorship at BLM, LGBTQ or environmental organisations still keeps real power in corporate hands. Allowing an amount of dissent and protest in non disruptive forms poses no threat to them (Don’t block a motorway and they’ll let you protest as much as you like).
However it does allow the far right to radicalize the geeks. They can be convinced that the SJWs are their enemy rather than the bosses who adopted some SJW points in the name of progress so business can run as usual. Both “sides” are still just an internal contradiction within capitalism.
A big reason for this is that left spaces need to be very tightly moderated in ways that right wing spaces don’t need to be. Part of that is because left spaces are going to disproportionately represent bipoc folk, queer folk, disabled people, etc. And they’re not going to stick around in spaces where they have to constantly defend their own existence. It’s already enough of a hassle in daily life, so why go on a forum that’s full of slurs or go to a nerd con that’s full of smelly dudes who’ll say you’re the incorrect race to do cosplay? So people drift away, find their own communities where they feel safer.
Right wing spaces have the privilege of speaking to the dominant ideological authority already. Unless they’re pulling out actual Nazi flags or doing salutes, they come across as fairly normal to everyday, uninitiated people who don’t think about theory all day. Whereas leftist perspectives in the west aren’t as common, and usually at best it’s the very milquetoast progressive liberal sort of stuff. You say there’s not enough leftist voices to frame the narrative within gamer communities, well there aren’t much in the way of leftist voices in general. It’s becoming more common to express anti-capitalist sentiment, and thankfully among younger people, but it’s still fairly rare within the west and English speaking spaces.
Yeah, so the right already has the home field advantage here. Modern nerd culture can be traced back to things like Star Trek conventions in people’s basements, or ham radio enthusiasts. It started off with moderately affluent white guys who had access to Usenet in the early 80s who were prime targets for the burgeoning commercialism of little plastic trinkets. It was only a matter of time before those beginnings would coalesce into functionally coherent fascist rhetoric because of the inherent overlap with the social base for white, settler fascism.
I think everything you say is accurate. It is good that we have established a space for leftists and all people seeking to be free from discrimination and oppression. In the model of Mao’s protracted people’s war, we have completed phase one: securing a revolutionary base area.
The next difficult step is to step out of the revolutionary base area, agitating, debating, fighting, until other areas become the new revolutionary bases. This is the hard part, and my overall point is that we can’t get complacent and just vibe in the existing revolutionary bases.
I know lots of comrades are out there in the real world doing this, but internet culture is not exactly the real world and I think we can do a better job of getting out there.
How do you think we could do that? It’s hard to do much of anything in capitalist controlled spaces.
I’d love to take back these spaces cause they can provide us with an opportunity to make some of the things in nerd culture better cause we can remove all the liberalism from it.
they’re not going to stick around in spaces where they have to constantly defend their own existence.
But they don’t. Ultimately they’re just words on a screen. Even 4chan allows people to hide posts/threads, filter by username, words and so on. People are bothered by those things because they grew up in “very tightly moderated” spaces both online and in real life, where others removed “bad words” so they never had to learn how to control their emotions or develop “thick skin” in response to them. I’m not defending the usage of slurs, but over-moderation creates another extreme where the mere sight of a word makes people emotionally distressed. People love to fantasize about revolution and “seizing power”, but you think those who oppose us are going to use only nice words and be polite?
People love to fantasize about revolution and “seizing power”, but you think those who oppose us are going to use only nice words and be polite?
This is pinging ‘false equivalence’ for me. The revolution is going to be a harrowing meat-grinder of an event of which few of us will survive it and will be expected to give everything we have for it. Nerd spaces are not that deep; and do you really think I’m going to just be cool with a dozen crackers in a Halo lobby popping off every settler-crafted slur in the book? I don’t get ‘distressed’ when some cracker piece of shit hard-r’s me; I get furious. I don’t play games, I don’t watch movies, I don’t do anything entertainment/leisure-coded with the intent for fury. So of course I’m going to cut myself off from the average cracker Gamer™ to try and forge a space of my own. “Ultimately just words on a screen” is so Very much not the take. A racist online is going to be a racist IRL, and a racist IRL is a threat IRL.
“Ultimately just words on a screen” is so Very much not the take.
But that’s what they are. Because the only power those words have is the power you allow them to have.
A racist online is going to be a racist IRL, and a racist IRL is a threat IRL.
They’re not an (immediate) threat to you, by virtue of being very far away and not knowing where you live. They could be a threat to someone else, someone they share a physical space with, sure, but removing them from an online space doesn’t make that person disappear or make them less racist, if anything it’ll make them hide their racism better. Isn’t that more dangerous?
“Being racist” is not an immutable characteristic people have. The best (non-violent) way to get rid of racists is to expose them to the people/cultures/ethnicities they are racist against. Otherwise they will forge their own insular, racist communities where they will reinforce each others’ racism and push each other to extremes.
cracker Gamer™
That’s a tactic. You can call them slurs too, “cumskin” is a good one. If you let them get to you, then they will know their tactic works. So next time they are losing or want to get their opponent angry (if we’re talking about gaming) then they will just repeat what they did knowing it is successful. Showing them their words have no power might make them rethink their strategy.
and forge a space of my own.
I’m saying you shouldn’t let them kick you out with words. If you’re all gamers in a Halo lobby (to use your example) they have no way of actually removing you from a public lobby, other than getting you angry with their words. But fuck that, make them leave if they don’t like it. After a while of screaming racial slurs they might be the ones who get angry enough to ragequit. Isn’t it preferable that they be the ones who leave and not you?
but removing them from an online space doesn’t make that person disappear or make them less racist, if anything it’ll make them hide their racism better. Isn’t that more dangerous?
Bigots are cowards at heart, and largely they will act on their feelings only to the extent that they believe they have social license to do so. Scared bigots are less dangerous than emboldened bigots.
