YUP 🔝 This Elon Trump insanity- IS Definitely one for the books, and movies! It was a shocker, because Kamala DID Legitimately WIN! With close to four Million more votes than Trump, Elon used StarLink to change votes 🗳️ He also PAID voters in PA. To vote RED! Is that NOT? against the LAW?!
I second what Rahul said, but I am also glad that Max wrote this "explainer" for Gen X'ers like me who basically hate all American politicians (on both sides of the political spectrum) right now! LOL
I am glad that I understand this which also validates my decision to not participate in the social media flim flam game. I think there needs to be a very deep analysis of Soy which is a small bean that can and does provide relatively cheap protein. Now when I eat some crispy fried tofu I will have an image of Thiels boy JD, kinda makes it hard to enjoy ya dinner.
the decadent rich and degenerate reactionary indulge their prerogative to be free from embarrassment
they revel in cringe without shame, because their privilege allows them to self-abase while remaining self-important
they have a humiliation kink but one that enhances rather than diminishes their status and domination, like a master who behaves undignified before his slaves precisely to remind them of his absolute power and control
The real nihilistic 4 Chan types really do come from nothing. Theyre born losers, they have conviction in the sense of being driven by raw hate/self loathing. At the first scent of blood in the water they will turn on these soylord opportunists, because they have nothing to lose. In the end they won’t be playing the same consensus seeking status game, they’re just along for the ride. And there’s nothing that this mob is better at than rooting out a fake, lurk more etc. The soy right is playing with a purely destructive force, and it will backfire.
That's true. Up until 2016, 4chan routinely organized harassment campaigns targeting conservatives and bigots. They routinely organized harassing and threatening phonecalls against Hal Turner (a card-carrying white nationalist radio host), eventually getting him reported to the FBI
I remember back in 2017 or so that someone (Jeet Heer maybe?) pointed out that they did not think that the MAGA phenomenon had legs because the base of the movement was old/had no long tail youth component.
The eclipse of the truck-selfie crowd in favor of Elon’s brood seems to pretty clearly show that, if nothing else, some forces on the right realized that problem in 2017 and, as Max points out, Gamergate provided a straightforward playbook for riling up reactionary youths who spend an increasing amount of time in digital spaces where “boobs in video games” seem like earnest political goals.
The good news, or, at least, the cope, is that I don't think the Gamergate/Woke Right actually consist of a social base in the way that older no-college voters did for Trump I—Trump was elected on the back of low-engagement voter dissatisfaction with the economy and Joe Biden, and I think based on that it's politically stupid of him to hand the keys over to Musk and a16z and their online creep armies, who don't really command a serious political base of their own.... Of course, if you're feeling doomerish, that may not matter much once DOGE is done with the government.
A good point, Trump fared no better among young voters than Romney and McCain did. And Gamergate itself failed to convert a significant number of people to the right, every peer-reviewed study of the group's political leanings found that by 2015 about 80% still identified as leftist or liberal.
See:
Ferguson, C. J., & Glasgow, B. (2021). Who are GamerGate? A descriptive study of individuals involved in the GamerGate controversy.Psychology of Popular Media, 10(2), 243–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000280
WOW I just had to look up a LOT of terms and words -- THIS IS WHY I AM A PAYING SUBSCRIBER. Pay this man, people!! He goes into the workshop of stupidity and labels every nut and dolt. How you do this Max without going insane is beyond me, but thank you for your service!!
Dead on. I think there's a lot more to be written about how so much of this political faction's demented worldview exists downstream from video games even more so than politics. Civ-modding the Gulf of Mexico. Cutting trans people from the military like they're female avatars in CoD. Elon Musk paying schmucks to speed-level his characters then, when he gets called out, having his smelly ex-girlfriend defend his gaming abilities online. It all has the air of a poorly executed zerg rush.
The reason I do believe this "movement" is important is:
1.) The only people getting involved in GOP politics since 2016 have been insanely online racists. This includes both the people working in GOP issue networks, but also the people actually running for office
2.) Every "Young Republican" organization is filled with Nazis at this point
3.) Half the country will pull the lever reflexively for a Republican no matter what and another 5-10% will switch between Democrats and Republicans forever based on gas prices. Which means
Chris Rufo posted a while back about how you can make 100k a year being a manager at Chipotle and the replies were veryyyyyy angry. These people do NOT want to hear that you have to work for a living.
1. You either get banned a hero or live long enough to post cringe (the Nolan Batverse is a pillar of the Soy Right)
2. As an American, we don't even get the satisfaction of being sacked by competent and scary barbarians. These idiot motherfuckers are going to fire fed bureaucrats and rile up online hate mobs (notably ineffective at actually killing anyone) regardless of what anyone does, and that's the extent of their power, so why hasn't someone taken "Big Balls" and given that broccoli haircut a loooong swirlie
Thank you for setting out the situation in the US so clearly. It's a great article. So much damage is being done by so few, so quickly.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, on top of increasing unemployment, a chronic shortage of decent affordable housing and massive numbers of families existing in poverty, we now have open slather on mining in ecologically fragile areas, fisheries protections being lifted, orders for vital ferries being cancelled, a major city getting half a new hospital, no doctors on duty at nights for weeks in rural hospitals, attempts to curtail the use of te Reo (Māori language) in government messaging, and a blatant effort to gut the Treaty of Waitangi (our founding document) - and a couple of days ago the leader of one of the government's coalition partners and the soon-to-be Deputy PM drove a land rover onto the steps of parliament. What fun.
Evolution of the snitch. It’s all so pathetic. There are traces of this in left overly online discourse too — think those types that pretend to be 80s movie ish high school bullies “let’s stuff this nerd in a locker”. Almost an equal reaction to the soy right
Anyway does any of this matter? I sure hope not. Maybe it’s some kind of collective mental illness that stems from being too attuned to online spaces. We need a new DSM for collective personality disorders: rabid fandoms, self harm cults, whatever this is.
Of course Vance is a posterboy for this, going from liberal darling to dissident soylord. Anyone with actual convictions would be immune to this kind of posturing. There is an undercurrent of false edginess, “safe edginess” like what the red scare type scene has become (ugh). Fake contrarianism , bandwagoning. If you hold no convictions, you can never be “wrong”, and always can be wronged, a forever victim.
People with real bonafide believes are seen as suckers now. Sad, but eventually these crybaby types will be up against a wall that their contrarianism, tattling won’t let them wriggle out of. The contradictions will close in on them in the form of a million angry mobs. You can’t please everyone.
Incredible that we live in a time when our ersatz-fash overlords are so weepy that we need an even more elaborate synonym for “lachrymose.” And yet these are the larmoyant times that we live in.
I go back to that gamergate essay every once in a while just because of how prevent that was.
I remember gamergate very well because to me as an extremely online person, that was the linkage where the 4chan nihilism irony kind of broke containment when Milo Yiannapolos latched onto the gamergate discussion
Ironically, it did open with a story about a death threat Brianna Wu got- which wound up being traced to a single guy with no ties to Gamergate. She had assumed that a mob was responsible for sending her dozens of death threats, but they all came from one loser with a personal vendatta long predating Gamergate's existence. The fact that it was never corrected maybe does say something about the state of online journalism.
And even 4channers were calling Milo a "grifter" and "mercenary" the day he publishes his first article about them. Because even they could see he was only in it for the money.
It did, but you wouldn't know those things unless you read the FBI's report, or were digging through the original 4chan threads where GG was first being organized. They're still archived if you want links.
As described by the press, Gamergate comes across as a conspiracy theory which no one could seem to prove, despite the hashtag movement being organized entirely in public forums and chatrooms. After years of digging through their convos, I cannot find any instances of them organizing or plotting any harassment. It raised a red flag that no journalist could so much as produce screenshots.
That's not to deny anyone was harassed- they clearly were. But all indications shows that they were attacked by people acting alone, disconnected from Gamergate or any hashtag movement.
I feel sorry for the future historians who have to write up Gamergate like it's the Spanish Civil War.
💀
YUP 🔝 This Elon Trump insanity- IS Definitely one for the books, and movies! It was a shocker, because Kamala DID Legitimately WIN! With close to four Million more votes than Trump, Elon used StarLink to change votes 🗳️ He also PAID voters in PA. To vote RED! Is that NOT? against the LAW?!
HA!!! omg so true
i’m glad i don’t understand most of this and it only validates for me my decision to delete and block all social media platforms from my life
sigh. I was just thinking how unhealthfully-online it is that I understood almost everything here.
I second what Rahul said, but I am also glad that Max wrote this "explainer" for Gen X'ers like me who basically hate all American politicians (on both sides of the political spectrum) right now! LOL
I am glad that I understand this which also validates my decision to not participate in the social media flim flam game. I think there needs to be a very deep analysis of Soy which is a small bean that can and does provide relatively cheap protein. Now when I eat some crispy fried tofu I will have an image of Thiels boy JD, kinda makes it hard to enjoy ya dinner.
the decadent rich and degenerate reactionary indulge their prerogative to be free from embarrassment
they revel in cringe without shame, because their privilege allows them to self-abase while remaining self-important
they have a humiliation kink but one that enhances rather than diminishes their status and domination, like a master who behaves undignified before his slaves precisely to remind them of his absolute power and control
The real nihilistic 4 Chan types really do come from nothing. Theyre born losers, they have conviction in the sense of being driven by raw hate/self loathing. At the first scent of blood in the water they will turn on these soylord opportunists, because they have nothing to lose. In the end they won’t be playing the same consensus seeking status game, they’re just along for the ride. And there’s nothing that this mob is better at than rooting out a fake, lurk more etc. The soy right is playing with a purely destructive force, and it will backfire.
That's true. Up until 2016, 4chan routinely organized harassment campaigns targeting conservatives and bigots. They routinely organized harassing and threatening phonecalls against Hal Turner (a card-carrying white nationalist radio host), eventually getting him reported to the FBI
I remember back in 2017 or so that someone (Jeet Heer maybe?) pointed out that they did not think that the MAGA phenomenon had legs because the base of the movement was old/had no long tail youth component.
The eclipse of the truck-selfie crowd in favor of Elon’s brood seems to pretty clearly show that, if nothing else, some forces on the right realized that problem in 2017 and, as Max points out, Gamergate provided a straightforward playbook for riling up reactionary youths who spend an increasing amount of time in digital spaces where “boobs in video games” seem like earnest political goals.
The good news, or, at least, the cope, is that I don't think the Gamergate/Woke Right actually consist of a social base in the way that older no-college voters did for Trump I—Trump was elected on the back of low-engagement voter dissatisfaction with the economy and Joe Biden, and I think based on that it's politically stupid of him to hand the keys over to Musk and a16z and their online creep armies, who don't really command a serious political base of their own.... Of course, if you're feeling doomerish, that may not matter much once DOGE is done with the government.
A good point, Trump fared no better among young voters than Romney and McCain did. And Gamergate itself failed to convert a significant number of people to the right, every peer-reviewed study of the group's political leanings found that by 2015 about 80% still identified as leftist or liberal.
See:
Ferguson, C. J., & Glasgow, B. (2021). Who are GamerGate? A descriptive study of individuals involved in the GamerGate controversy.Psychology of Popular Media, 10(2), 243–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000280
WOW I just had to look up a LOT of terms and words -- THIS IS WHY I AM A PAYING SUBSCRIBER. Pay this man, people!! He goes into the workshop of stupidity and labels every nut and dolt. How you do this Max without going insane is beyond me, but thank you for your service!!
Dead on. I think there's a lot more to be written about how so much of this political faction's demented worldview exists downstream from video games even more so than politics. Civ-modding the Gulf of Mexico. Cutting trans people from the military like they're female avatars in CoD. Elon Musk paying schmucks to speed-level his characters then, when he gets called out, having his smelly ex-girlfriend defend his gaming abilities online. It all has the air of a poorly executed zerg rush.
The reason I do believe this "movement" is important is:
1.) The only people getting involved in GOP politics since 2016 have been insanely online racists. This includes both the people working in GOP issue networks, but also the people actually running for office
2.) Every "Young Republican" organization is filled with Nazis at this point
3.) Half the country will pull the lever reflexively for a Republican no matter what and another 5-10% will switch between Democrats and Republicans forever based on gas prices. Which means
4.) We will eventually get a groyper President
We are so, so close to President Jonah Ryan
Male extended adolescence and immaturity will kill us all. We couldn’t even have evil men as nemeses, just punk bitchass little boys.
These guys make me feel like a '90s Republican. Where's the personal responsibility??
Chris Rufo posted a while back about how you can make 100k a year being a manager at Chipotle and the replies were veryyyyyy angry. These people do NOT want to hear that you have to work for a living.
100% right.
Two thoughts
1. You either get banned a hero or live long enough to post cringe (the Nolan Batverse is a pillar of the Soy Right)
2. As an American, we don't even get the satisfaction of being sacked by competent and scary barbarians. These idiot motherfuckers are going to fire fed bureaucrats and rile up online hate mobs (notably ineffective at actually killing anyone) regardless of what anyone does, and that's the extent of their power, so why hasn't someone taken "Big Balls" and given that broccoli haircut a loooong swirlie
Thank you for setting out the situation in the US so clearly. It's a great article. So much damage is being done by so few, so quickly.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, on top of increasing unemployment, a chronic shortage of decent affordable housing and massive numbers of families existing in poverty, we now have open slather on mining in ecologically fragile areas, fisheries protections being lifted, orders for vital ferries being cancelled, a major city getting half a new hospital, no doctors on duty at nights for weeks in rural hospitals, attempts to curtail the use of te Reo (Māori language) in government messaging, and a blatant effort to gut the Treaty of Waitangi (our founding document) - and a couple of days ago the leader of one of the government's coalition partners and the soon-to-be Deputy PM drove a land rover onto the steps of parliament. What fun.
i hate that i understand all of this
Reddit Sephiroth tone is a great turn of phrase
Evolution of the snitch. It’s all so pathetic. There are traces of this in left overly online discourse too — think those types that pretend to be 80s movie ish high school bullies “let’s stuff this nerd in a locker”. Almost an equal reaction to the soy right
Anyway does any of this matter? I sure hope not. Maybe it’s some kind of collective mental illness that stems from being too attuned to online spaces. We need a new DSM for collective personality disorders: rabid fandoms, self harm cults, whatever this is.
Of course Vance is a posterboy for this, going from liberal darling to dissident soylord. Anyone with actual convictions would be immune to this kind of posturing. There is an undercurrent of false edginess, “safe edginess” like what the red scare type scene has become (ugh). Fake contrarianism , bandwagoning. If you hold no convictions, you can never be “wrong”, and always can be wronged, a forever victim.
People with real bonafide believes are seen as suckers now. Sad, but eventually these crybaby types will be up against a wall that their contrarianism, tattling won’t let them wriggle out of. The contradictions will close in on them in the form of a million angry mobs. You can’t please everyone.
A rare privilege to these days to learn a new word. Extra rare that I get 2 ("larmoyant" and "unctuous") in one piece. #based 🙏
Incredible that we live in a time when our ersatz-fash overlords are so weepy that we need an even more elaborate synonym for “lachrymose.” And yet these are the larmoyant times that we live in.
I go back to that gamergate essay every once in a while just because of how prevent that was.
I remember gamergate very well because to me as an extremely online person, that was the linkage where the 4chan nihilism irony kind of broke containment when Milo Yiannapolos latched onto the gamergate discussion
Ironically, it did open with a story about a death threat Brianna Wu got- which wound up being traced to a single guy with no ties to Gamergate. She had assumed that a mob was responsible for sending her dozens of death threats, but they all came from one loser with a personal vendatta long predating Gamergate's existence. The fact that it was never corrected maybe does say something about the state of online journalism.
And even 4channers were calling Milo a "grifter" and "mercenary" the day he publishes his first article about them. Because even they could see he was only in it for the money.
That is not at all how gamergate progressed if memory serves.
It did, but you wouldn't know those things unless you read the FBI's report, or were digging through the original 4chan threads where GG was first being organized. They're still archived if you want links.
As described by the press, Gamergate comes across as a conspiracy theory which no one could seem to prove, despite the hashtag movement being organized entirely in public forums and chatrooms. After years of digging through their convos, I cannot find any instances of them organizing or plotting any harassment. It raised a red flag that no journalist could so much as produce screenshots.
That's not to deny anyone was harassed- they clearly were. But all indications shows that they were attacked by people acting alone, disconnected from Gamergate or any hashtag movement.
Sure, Jan.