The Revolution Will Not Be Televised 8: An Autopsy of the SocialAutopsy Situation

Part 1: An Introduction

Part 2: A History Lesson
Part 3: Born in Fire
Part 4: Factions Form
Part 5: The Curious Tale of David Pakman
Part 6: The SPJ Airplay Bomb Threat
Part 7: I Do Actually Stand With Mustafa

The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Gamergate. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against their own hobby's press. The ideology which controlled the machines sent two agents to the forefront. Their mission: to draw the aggro and act as bait. But they picked the wrong drama to initiate, and may be failing.

Late last week, a Kickstarter campaign launched for a service called Social Autopsy, ostensibly an anti-bullying service, which aimed to collect information on harassing and/or offensive speech and tie it to a database that would identify a person by name, by image, and possibly even by employer. I, like many others both in the free speech camp as well as those against it, immediately saw the flaws and exploits in a system like this.* But something strange happened with Social Autopsy.

I mentioned Gamergate earlier because several individuals opposed to whatever-the-narrative-is-this-week stepped in. Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper, who run anti-bullying organizations themselves, got involved with Social Autopsy... but not in the way you'd expect people working in the same field would.

Less than a day after the Kickstarter launched, Social Autopsy's founder, Candace Owens, was contacted by Quinn to discuss the project. In Owens's own words, Owens provided Quinn with her personal e-mail address, and Quinn spoke with her both over e-mail and phone. But not words of support, as you'd expect, but to try and talk her out of it. Why would someone who was the victim of harassment herself allegedly fight so hard against a way of unmasking and identifying harassers?

Owens was suspicious, but rebutted each argument Quinn had and, again according to Owens, Quinn grew more frustrated, again giving her credentials and claiming to be representing various anti-bullying organizations that she declined to name. With red flags going up, Owens stood firm, refusing to back down, with Quinn eventually warning her that Gamergate would come after her.

And sure enough, that's what happened. The anti-bullying advocate was then harassed off the internet and into hiding by a boogeyman that was simultaneously a bunch of powerless whiners and also the unnameable threat stalking the tech blogs and gaming press of the last two years.

Nah, I'm kidding. Hours later, Owens began receiving nasty messages first on her Kickstarter campaign profile, and then emails on her personal e-mail account -- the one she'd given to Quinn -- with all manner of offensive language with a single common thread. “Men, Misogyny, and Gaming,” as she put it. All of the messages came from male names, using gendered language against her, and with video games somewhere in the address field. Keep in mind that Owens had been nowhere near gaming until now. She hadn't even heard of Gamergate, but now she was getting emails from addresses like “gamedeveloperyal@animalfetishporn.us.” Hours after that her Kickstarter was shut down, and Randi Harper (again, a noted anti-GG name and herself a... harassment expert) wrote a post on Medium where she blasted Candace Owens and Social Autopsy's Kickstarter before claiming responsibility for having it shut down.

There's two possibilities I'm seeing here for what happened next. Candace Owens is either incredibly smart (if misguided, considering how terrible an idea SocialAutopsy was) or so uninvolved with the tech blog drama world that she immediately saw a pattern and started putting things together, because she then spent the next several days blasting Quinn and Harper on Twitter, all but accusing them of being the entire harassment machine that Gamergate was accused to be themselves and writing an epic history of the situation on her own website (I strongly suggest you read it) that puts mine to shame. Candace Owens continues to make noise about more information she has.

Of course, there was retaliation from the usual suspects. Jesse Singal penned a hitpiece than ran on New York Magazine's website. Embarrassing human David Futrelle has smeared her. I'm waiting for more to drop. But what I'm really waiting for is for the gloves to come off and get really dirty, though. Candace Owens is a black woman. That's not important to me, but that means she's further up the progressive stack than Quinn or Harper, and that means her voice should carry more weight with those most involved in this narrative. I'm 100% sure there'll be some justification, though: being accused of "internalized misogyny", or called an Uncle Tom, or something equally heinous to discredit her and protect the narrative.

Now we can only sit back, wait, and make more popcorn and hope more evidence is presented, because this ride *still* hasn't ended.


*For one, I believe that unless someone's job is directly tied to the things they say online, don't go after her job. For another, how do you weed out fake profiles, anonymous names, and impersonations to make certain that the wrong person doesn't get shamed?

Shut Up, Wesley (or Don't Apologize)

     Sometimes I feel like I'm one of the only modern nerdy types that doesn't like Wil Wheaton. The man just rubs me the wrong way, I can't explain it. Like most people, I first encountered Wheaton as the tragically out-of-place teenager Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he was saddled with the Audience Identification role for the younger crowd. This is a character part in most stories that I tend to automatically dislike to begin with, unless your name happens to be Kitty Pryde. I never understood why the Federation flagship had someone who hadn't even been accepted to Starfleet Academy not only on the bridge, but piloting the ship, and I feel the series would have been better had they just scrapped his character in the first place. Since then, any time Wheaton appears, his smug face has irritated me, and I really feel the only role that I've been able to appreciate him in has been (ironically, considering how much I hate the show) Big Bang Theory, where he plays a “fictionalized” version of himself, generally acting like an asshole to Sheldon Cooper. In addition to this, he tends to post a lot of dumb shit that he doesn't fact-check.

     The reason I'm bringing this up is that Mr Wheaton has recently run afoul of the Tumblr Social Justice crowd. Well, I say recently, but this incident somehow flew under my radar and happened back in February. Goes to show how well I usually manage to avoid him.

     Now, Cultural Appropriation is one of the more popular buzzwords that float around the Social Justice community. It can be a real problem in some cases, if someone's culture or heritage is played for laughs or disrespected, but there are people who believe eating Chipotle or watching anime is cultural appropriation. Those are the people we'll be looking at today.

     Recently, Mister Wheaton committed the heinous crime of referring to someone as his 'spirit animal.' Spirit animals, based on totemic beliefs, come from a number of different cultures throughout the world, but Tumblr seized on this and shredded Wheaton for appropriation of Native American culture. So of course, he did the smart thing by acknowledging people's concerns privately and moving on with his life.

     Nah, I'm kidding. He picked one of the less irate messages and replied to it with (and I hate using these words) copious amounts of White Guilt™, wallowing for forgiveness and cursing his ancestors. And of course, Tumblr saw how remorseful he was, and forgave him.

     Nah, I'm kidding. His apology was dissected, and he was vilified even more with his own words. And so he got up and yelled back, and told people not to be a dick again, despite continuing on being a dick himself. This continued until a voice of reason, an actual Native woman herself, spoke up and politely asked all the White Saviours™ of Tumblr to stop telling her how to be offended, apologized to Wheaton for the kerfuffle, and explained that “Native Americans of all tribes pride themselves on being generous with our cultural iconography.”

     The object lesson to be learned here is that whether or not they are truly offended, the Social Justice Warrior is not after an apology. They don't want to educate, and they aren't interested in making the world a better place. They want to get angry, and they want to hurt somebody's feelings. And they want to look and feel righteous as all hell in the process. This is what an internet bully looks like. I swear, some of these people that claim to fight for social justice are all of two steps away from demanding segregated water fountains again.