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Oct. 14, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
25:05
The Lie Heard Around the World #GamerGate #NotYourShield
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Brianna Wu went into hiding over the weekend.
She felt she had to after receiving death threats like these.
Wait, does Brianna know this person?
Because it doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Gamergate.
It seems to be someone with a personal vendetta against Brianna herself.
You just made a blank game nobody liked.
That's it.
Nobody will care when you die.
And this one.
I hope you enjoy your last moments alive on this earth.
You did nothing worthwhile with your life.
Sorry, this is keeping me up.
What?
Yeah, someone sent nasty words on the Twitter.
Can we get the FBI to investigate, perhaps?
There were also tweets so graphic we can't show them to you.
Sure, I'll just take your word for it.
The mainstream media is well known for being incredibly honest.
It's all part of what's being called Gamergate.
A shocking debate about sexism in the gaming industry.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Why don't we actually read some of these tweets?
You don't just ignore social issues because of a website's political stance.
That's how Gamergate was born in the first place.
Doesn't sound like sexism to me.
...that you might not have heard of, but that has already spawned one million tweets and count- Whoa, whoa, whoa!
Wasn't that Adam Baldwin, as in famous Hollywood actor Adam Baldwin, who's been in, say, Full Metal Jacket, Predator 2, Independence Day, and played Jane in Firefly?
Oh, just making sure that we know who we're dealing with.
Do tell me how Adam Baldwin is a giant sexist.
Good morning to the GamerGate hashtag.
It's an online battle of the sexes over...
You what, mate?
It's an online battle of the sexes over.
Yeah, that's what I thought you said.
I guess it must be pretty uncomfortable for you that when I tweeted this, the amazing ladies of Gamergate replied with this.
Keep watching.
You pissed off an awful lot of gamers by suggesting that this was in any way a battle of the sexes.
I mean, those were your exact words, weren't they?
It's an online battle of the sexes over how- Yeah, I thought so.
We're gonna keep going, too.
Look at all these ladies who have no idea that they're on the wrong side of Gamergate.
They should be with Brianna Wu, because I do believe she knows a lot of female video game developers.
Wow, this just keeps going, doesn't it?
It's almost like this isn't gendered in any way, and you have been lied to, MSNBC, although I honestly think you may already know that.
It's an online battle of the sexes over how gamers are portrayed in the sometimes violent reaction to women who speak out.
Yeah, I'm completely buying that.
Eric Johnson writes about the video game industry for Recode.
And Eric, explain how the Gamergate began.
Right, so from the beginning, Gamergate supporters have claimed that this is about journalistic ethics and about supposed corruption in the gaming industry.
Why would they claim that?
It's not like the video game media were all colluding behind gamers' backs on a private mailing list called Game Journal Pros.
It's not like this is the actual proof of collusion or anything.
But it has originated as and has continued to be about sort of undermining women in the gaming industry.
Oh yeah, I did hear all about that.
If I recall correctly, the Fine Young Capitalists did a video game jam for female-only contestants to allow them to pitch an idea for a video game that the Fine Young Capitalists would produce to help get female talent into the video game industry.
To which a one Zoe Quinn decided to get her cronies on social media to dogpile them and absolutely screw their project.
Probably because it was garnering a lot more attention than Quinn's own game was.
Luckily though, 4chan of all places came to the rescue.
And with the support of Adam Baldwin, the project was fully funded and is currently going ahead.
So despite the best efforts of Brianna Wu's friends, there are still going to be women in the video game industry who aren't bullied and harassed out, no matter how much Brianna Wu's friends try.
It began as a blog post that was accusing a female game developer of sleeping with a prominent games journalist.
Oh, you mean Zoe Quinn herself?
The one who screwed over the fine young capitalists.
And the blog post in which she admits to cheating on her boyfriend with her boss.
Yeah, I know exactly who you're talking about.
And I think everyone else should too.
And then that claiming that then that journalist then went on to write a favorable review of her game.
Now, the reality is that review doesn't exist.
Never written.
And that doesn't even matter.
What matters is that you're currently on TV attempting to defame Gamergate in defense of someone whose actions against the fine young capitalists are indefensible and to whom the reaction from the gaming press all colluding together for her benefit is even worse.
But that claim is still being repeated in Gamergate circles.
People are still saying, well, this is evidence of corruption.
This is, you know, a thing that happened.
No, no.
Zoe Quinn has not been relevant for over a month.
People are actually worried about the actual corruption that is going on.
Even though it didn't.
And the person that you're talking about is named Zoe Quinn, and she actually also had to go into hiding.
She was actually the first person apparently who had to go into hiding after getting all these threats.
I'm glad you used the qualifier, apparently, because thus far I've seen no proof that she had to do anything.
But why don't you keep talking about it as if it's a fact?
And people claiming that she was, I guess, I don't know, using sexual wiles to get better reviews of her games.
But then how did a second woman, Brianna Wu, get drawn into it?
Yeah, what did Brianna Wu, the poor innocent victim of all of this, possibly do to deserve the ire of people on the internet?
Sure, so it's been sort of an ongoing thing for coming up on two months now, this sort of online debate, this hashtag campaign.
And as I understand it, Brianna posted a meme sort of making fun of Gamergate.
She had tweeted some things sort of exposing some of the problems with the internal logic of Gamergate.
The internal logic of Gamergate.
Sorry, Milo Ioannopoulos of Breitbart has displayed no lack of journalistic integrity.
Unlike the collusion he has revealed from the extremely progressive game journal Prose.
Not only was Brianna's tweet a slanderous attack, but it pissed everyone off.
And someone made an online meme out of it where it's a funny picture with text over it, sort of like a lolcat.
She posted that, and as quote-unquote, retaliation for just sharing a meme, someone made death threats against her.
Well, that's just flat out not true.
From Wu's own tweets, it's evident that the person who's called Death to Brianna seems to just really hate her game.
There's no mention of any memes, and there's no mention of Gamergate from the person.
The only person who linked it to Gamergate was Brianna herself.
Which means the burden of proof is on Brianna.
So let's bring in Brianna.
Brianna Wu, who is a video game designer, an independent video game designer, who says she did receive death threats for speaking up for women in gaming.
Get your story straight, you fools.
You just told us, wrongly, that she got death threats for posting a meme, not for standing up for women in games.
So Brianna, thank you for being here.
And we should note that you are not in your home right now, you are somewhere else because you said you've been threatened.
Talk a little bit about how these threats began for you.
Well, it was like, you know, it was like my friend over at Recode was saying.
I posted this meme.
It was just six.
Six shots.
It was a simple tweet.
I didn't think anything about it.
And later that evening, I tuned, turned back on my Twitter.
That is some pretty coincidental timing, given that the threats made against you were made 11 to 7 minutes before you took this screenshot of those threats that you then posted on your Twitter.
I'm not going to say you're lying, Brianna.
I'm just going to sit here and imply it.
And I saw that 8chan, which is an extremist group of people that were actually banned from 4chan, as controversial as 4chan is.
I don't use 4chan, but I do understand that the people there do not have accounts.
Anyone can just go there and post something.
How on earth do you ban people from that site, Brianna?
Or is this another lie?
These are the people too controversial for 4chan.
It's a board completely starred for Gamergate.
No, it wasn't.
8chan was founded in October 2013.
Gamergate began on the 26th of August, 2014.
8chan started picking up speed when everyone left 4chan because Moot, the founder of 4chan, decided to throw his lot in with the gaming press for some reason.
And these people had flooded this meme with thousands of alter memes kind of attacking me.
Attacking you, quoting notorious anti-Gamergate Fez developer Phil Fish.
Tomatoes, tomatoes.
Many of them insulted me.
Unsurprising, since you insulted them first.
Many of them threatened me.
You are yet to prove that anyone from Gamergate has threatened you.
Some of them were very scary, and you and your viewers can go look at those.
And I recommend you do.
I'll be linking all of the relevant sources in the description of this video.
And Brianna, can I just ask you, is there a general sense of sexism in the video game designing industry?
Do you as a woman feel like there is sort of a constant undercurrent of sexism?
Absolutely.
Given that that was her entire pitch for this entire segment, I'll try and contain my surprise.
It's not like Brianna Wu has proven herself to be a liar.
If you look at my career professionally, I speak out on these issues, you know, very regularly.
And because of that, I'm a target.
It's not that she's a notorious provocateur or anything.
So I can tell you right now, this is a very powerful message.
And I want you and your viewers to hear this.
I know almost all the women in the game industry.
Prove it.
At this point, all of us are terrified about this.
We are terrified about our jobs.
So far, I'm only aware that you know Zoe Quinn.
And yes, I do think that possibly you and Zoe Quinn should be worried about your jobs.
There are plenty of female game developers who are on the Gamergate side.
I've listed a bunch of them already.
And none of them are worried about their jobs.
I wonder if it's anything to do with your actions, Brianna Wu.
Or maybe it's just sexism in the video game industry.
We are terrified that we are going to be next.
And what we feel is there is a literal war in this industry on women.
Oh, there absolutely is.
And it's being instigated by women.
In this case, it was a one Zoe Quinn, a self-proclaimed cutie killing video games against the fine young capitalists, that group who were trying to actively help women get into the video game industry.
But Zoe Quinn's one of your buddies, isn't she?
So I'm not surprised you'd misrepresent this like you've misrepresented everything else, Brianna Wu.
They've taken out my friend Samantha Allen.
Oh no, not Samantha Allen, polygon contributor and notorious man-hater.
Quote, I'm a misandrist.
That means I hate men.
I'm not a cute misandrist.
I don't have a fridge magnet that says boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.
My loathing cannot be contained by a fridge magnet.
I am not an equality feminist.
Need I go on?
They took out my friend Jan Frank.
Ah yes, Jen Frank, another good buddy of Zoe Quinn, and currently giving her money every month.
There's no corruption in journalism.
By intimidating her, they took out my friend Matty Bryce.
Matty Bryce, man-hater and video game hater.
Frankly, I'm glad these bigots are no longer in the video game industry.
And when you say take out, what do you mean?
Got them to leave the industry?
Absolutely.
Bullied to the point that you say, hey, I have other career opportunities.
Given that you all hate video games so much, maybe you should take them.
I'm going to go work somewhere else.
You know, I'm a software engineer.
I can work in different industries other than this one.
And, you know, I have to tell you, a question I ask myself a lot lately is, do I just want to go get a job in an industry that's frankly less sexist?
Yeah.
Is it about video games being sexist, or is it about you guys hating video games?
Yeah, go ahead.
And Eric, I want to bring Eric back in because this is an industry that used to be just overwhelmingly male, but now it is about 22%.
We just put the graphic up, we can put it back up again, that men make about 76% of game designers, women about 22% in the game development industry, a very small number transgender.
It is an industry that is still overwhelmingly male-dominated.
And women are reporting things like inappropriate sexual jokes in the workplace, belittlement of their skills, being invited to quote-unquote meetings that were actually dates.
I'm with Christopher Hitchens on this one, I'm afraid.
Prove it.
How long and how extensive is, at least in your reporting, this issue of not just sexism, but really sort of threatening sexism inside of this industry?
I mean, it's been a long bubbling under the surface, but this has been happening for a long time.
There's been some really interesting writing online about, especially in the consumer culture, the gamer culture, about sort of the roots of why people are lashing out at women at these groups that are now having an increasing voice in the industry.
But it's not something that's really been overt or explicit.
It's been a lot of things happening sort of in the office and kind of behind closed doors, as I understand it in the past.
This is really something where it's coming to the surface and that the consumers, that the gamers are really the ones who are now running with this now, as opposed to the industry doing stuff where it's not something that the public is exposed to.
Eric, do you get a sense of why these male gamers are so angry?
What is the source of the kind of rage in some of these attacks?
So I'm cripping from some very good writing online that I've been reading about this, but there's a really interesting theory that in the past, nerd culture and gamer culture, it was marginalized.
It was considered this geeky thing, these losers in their basement, and that the culture got stronger because they rejected outsiders.
They rejected the people who told them they were wrong.
And now games are this huge industry and a huge amount of money represented here.
And now it's a much, much bigger group than it used to be.
But they're still clinging to this idea that, oh, well, we need to reject people who are criticizing the way we do things.
What a marvelous, marvelous lie.
It began with the corruption in journalism.
It began with the gaming press closing ranks around those corrupt and immoral people who are causing a lot of problems.
And then it ended with 10 articles in one day from all of the major gaming news outlets declaring gamers to be dead.
Your dishonesty knows no bounds.
But go on, tell me how academic Anita Sarkeesian is.
So for instance, you have academics like Anita Sarkeesian.
Hi, my name's Anita Sarkeesian.
And I just want to let you all know how amazing Alex's Tele Seminar Secrets was.
It really motivated me to get my own business started.
In my current day job, I saw how teleseminars could change the face of your business and make a lot of money, but I didn't really understand how it worked.
Yeah, she's a con artist, and Feminist Frequency's video series is written by a political leftist extremist.
You have journalists like Lee Alexander saying, hey, there's a problem with your culture.
Yeah, I don't care what Leia Alexander says because she is crazy.
Lei, I am a megaphone Alexander, has literally gone mad with power.
And their reaction is an overreaction.
It's to lash out and to violently reject any sort of perceived threat to who they are.
Did you miss that the game journalists declared gamers dead?
All on the same day, I might add.
Brianna, do you see any way of, I mean, you've been tweeting that you're not going anywhere and despite the fact that you are currently in hiding that you want to change this culture?
That's right, you do want to change this culture.
Instead of being about gamers, you want us to listen and believe.
How do you suppose that that can be done?
I think it needs to happen from the top down.
You know, to tack on to something Eric was saying, this is a problem with the gamer culture, but it's also a problem with the professionals within the gaming industry.
If you look at IGN and Giant Bomb, these are sites that are predominantly run by men, and they are choosing to not cover what's happening to women in the industry.
If you look at the industry's hiring practices as a whole, they are tilted very, very severely against women.
Prove it.
You just gave the stat that 22% of the people in this industry are women.
But I have to tell you, there's a deeper story than that because many of those roles are in marketing.
So?
You know, in tech as a whole, women make up a little bit more than 20% of programmers.
Women are free to choose the careers they want to choose.
But here in the games industry, we're only 3% of programmers.
So I think you have to look at the culture from the top down that's sending these messages to women very subtly and unconsciously.
You are not welcome here.
This is a boys' club.
You know, this is our turf.
Gaming is not a boys' club.
I have proven this.
Gaming is a gamers club.
And you are on the side that has declared gaming and gamers to be dead.
And it's not that the men are conscious that they're doing this.
I love and respect the men that work in this industry with me, but they have attitudes frequently that they don't understand or antagonistic.
Unlike yourself, a person who is knowingly and willfully antagonistic.
And what we need as an industry is a dialogue about this.
And we need these men to listen to women when we tell them what our experiences are.
Right, and when you are starting their dialogue right now, they you liar.
You do not have a pro-Gamergate person on this program.
You don't even have someone neutral to Gamergate on this program to present the other side of the argument.
Brianna was actually scheduled to appear on Milo Ioannopoulos' Radio Nero show today.
Let's hear from Milo why she didn't appear.
Remember, this is the journalist she slandered for being a hack, because he is right-wing and she is extremely left-wing.
Welcome to Radio Nero and what was supposed to be a special edition of the show with Brianna Wu, a developer who received a death threat on Twitter last week, who approached me on Sunday, suggesting that we talk to bridge the divide between pro-Gamergate and anti-Gamergate supporters.
Though I'm a reporter and not a member of the Gamergate movement, I felt well placed to facilitate this conversation, so I said yes.
Ms Wu originally told me that she'd made the same request to Adam Baldwin but that he had declined her offer.
This turned out to be not quite true.
In fact, he had offered to meet with her the next time she was in Los Angeles.
I suggested to Wu that we record a segment for my internet radio show, the one you're listening to now, Radio Nero.
I told her I was prepared to pre-record the interview, to discuss any edits with her, as I had done for a previous interviewee, Damien Schubert, who was very satisfied with the result, and to discuss questions ahead of time.
None of these are conventional journalistic practices, but they were an expression of good faith.
I also told Wu we would need to record within the next two days.
She agreed to these terms enthusiastically at first.
I would love to do your radio show, she wrote, as I think it would be great to help calm things down.
Please send me some questions ahead of time.
I think you'll find in regards to journalistic ethics, we agree on practically everything.
So I wiped the schedule for the show clean, cancelling and postponing other segments.
We then asked Wu four or perhaps five times to get a slot in the diary, but she didn't respond to these emails.
I didn't think anything untoward was up at the time.
She was after all at a conference and dealing with the fallout from what must have been an absolutely horrendous experience.
Meanwhile, I sent over indicative questions for the interview, which I said were on the harsh side but fairly reflected what I wanted to talk about.
I didn't want to be accused of springing any gotcha questions on her, so I wrote them out all in full ahead of time.
Wu marked which items she was happy to answer and which she wasn't.
There were around 30 questions and she had concerns about seven of them.
I agreed to every request she made, even though I knew listeners would be disappointed that she would not be challenged about what appeared, on the face of it, to be some questionable behaviour on her behalf.
I also postponed the release date of the episode by 24 hours to give Wu more time to prepare and to give her personal circumstances a chance to settle down after a traumatic evening.
As I write this, unfortunately, Wu has postponed talking or simply not replied to our emails for the third or perhaps the fourth time.
I do not now believe she ever had any intention of fulfilling the commitment she made to us.
I'm left with no option but to cancel this week's show since there's no longer time to book guests, record, produce or release an episode this week.
This is a pity because this episode was a chance for me, a reporter sympathetic to the objectives of Gamergate, to have a detailed honest conversation with a critic and a victim of the sort of online harassment Gamergate's been accused of.
My hope was that this could be a moment of convergence and understanding that would lead to a new karma chapter in the relations between prominent female developers, some of whom have received disgusting threats on the internet, and Gamergate supporters who've been blamed for those threats, often in the absence of any evidence that they were responsible for them.
Putting together a weekly show of 90 minutes takes a huge amount of preparation.
It's also not free, so we'll have to cover the production costs, the technical costs, and we'll also lose the booked advertising revenue for this show.
Plus I personally invested time in preparing for the interview, which is at a premium at the moment as I finish my first book, fulfill daily column commitments and record a documentary.
But truthfully, the time and money aren't the real issue here.
I'm deeply disappointed and, if I'm honest, quite angry, that I was taken for a ride.
My team was messed around, as so many people warned us that we would be.
And I should have listened to them, and I should have known that the constant promises that we will do this and it will happen were going to amount to nothing.
Having seen Wu's appearance this evening on MSNBC on the Read report, it's clear to me that she has no interest in building bridges or smoothing down tensions, and in fact, sought on national television in the United States to inflame those tensions and to wrongly paint Gamergate as a conspiracy against women, in her words, literally a war.
I'll finish with a little tableau from my conversations with Wu that I found personally quite revealing.
It's from a private email, but given Wu's slipperiness and how angry we feel about the way we've been fobbed off, I feel released from any obligation to keep our correspondence confidential.
In any case, the emails were not marked as off the record.
In the course of discussing her appearance on the show, Wu wrote the following.
This is what I would also like to do, and I hope you'll be up for it.
I would like you and I to pick a location, perhaps San Francisco, and I'd like to open a crowdfunded event where people all sides of this can donate to pay for our flights and hotels.
And I'd like you and I simply to have dinner together.
Maybe we could also bring along other people in the movement on both sides that would also like to see this de-escalated.
My response, predictably enough, was that I'd love to have dinner together, to talk.
I think it would be enormously constructive, but that quite obviously I'm not comfortable with asking other people for money to make it happen.
Could we not sort it between us?
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