Crash Override, page 1
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Zoë Quinn
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Quinn, Zoë, 1987-author.
Title: Crash override : how Gamergate (nearly) destroyed my life, and how we can win the fight against online hate / Zoë Quinn.
Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017017273 (print) | LCCN 2017028703 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610398091 (e-book) | ISBN 9781610398084 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Quinn, Zoë, 1987-| Women video game designers. | Video gamers. | Video games—Psychological aspects. | Cyberbullying. | Online hate speech. | Internet—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC GV1469.34.A97 (ebook) | LCC GV1469.34.A97 Q56 2017 (print) | DDC 794.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017273
ISBN: 978-1-61039-808-4 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-61039-809-1 (e-book)
LSC-C
E3-20170810-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One: Crash
Chapter Two: Signing On
Chapter Three: An Eternal Flame in a Taco Bell Dumpster
Chapter Four: Witches and Inquisitors
Chapter Five: Cracks in My Armor
Chapter Six: All My Exes Live in .Txts
Chapter Seven: Override
Chapter Eight: Net Worked
Chapter Nine: Law and Order SJW
Chapter Ten: Actually, It Really Is About Ethics. Sometimes.
Chapter Eleven: I Was a Teenaged Shitlord
Chapter Twelve: Digital Hygiene and You!
Chapter Thirteen: Miss Manners’ Guide to Being a Better Internet Citizen, as Told by Some Rude Nerd
Chapter Fourteen: Okay, but Seriously, Please Tell Me Exactly What I Can Do to Help If Someone I Know Is Being Screamed At by Anime Nazis
The End: August Isn’t the End
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Further Reading
To everyone who watched the world tell their story wrong and never got the chance to tell it themselves.
Wish you were here.
Introduction
Most relationships end in a breakup. Sometimes that breakup is so crazy that it becomes a horror story you tell your friends, family, and therapist. For the past three years, I’ve watched my breakup story told and retold by everyone from the writers on Law and Order: SVU to President Trump’s chief strategist. It has a Wikipedia page. It spawned in-jokes and internet slang and has dedicated community hubs. It has a cartoon mascot. My breakup required the intervention of the United Nations.
You might have heard stories about the darker side of the internet—hackers, hordes of anonymous people attacking an unlucky target, private nude photos made public by vengeful exes—but to you they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. You’re not famous. You don’t go around picking fights with anyone online. Who would even think to mess with you?
I used to feel that way too. I’m an independent game developer who makes weird little artsy video games about feelings and farts—Mario Brothers and Call of Duty they ain’t. In the game world, my work was obscure enough that people could score serious hipster points by referencing it. I was a relatively low-profile internet citizen, living and working online like plenty of other people. But for all its awesomeness, the internet has become such a volatile place that anyone can become a target of devastating mob harassment in an instant. Including you. Including me.
It doesn’t take much. Maybe you’ll express your opinion on a political issue and it will get noticed by the wrong person. Maybe you’ll wake up to find that a company you once bought shoes from online was careless with security, and now your personal information is in the hands of anyone who bothers to look. Maybe someone who has a grudge against you is relentless enough to post and promote bogus information about you online—stuff that can never be erased. Maybe you’re a member of a demographic that is constantly targeted—you’re a woman, you’re black, you’re trans, or any combination of these or other marginalized groups—and someone who wants to get people like you off “their” internet decides to take it upon themselves to make your life hell. Online abusers target countless people every year for any number of arbitrary reasons.
In my case, it started with the aforementioned breakup.
After five months of a toxic on-again, off-again relationship, I finally cut all ties to my abusive ex in an attempt to heal and move on. But abusers hate nothing more than losing their ability to control you. If I no longer cared what he thought about me, he’d have to attack the things I did care about—my friends, my career, and my art.
Shortly after I ended things, my ex posted a sprawling manifesto, just shy of 10,000 words, detailing the ways in which I was a whore on multiple websites dedicated to my industry, but not before workshopping it with friends in order to cause the most possible damage to my career and sanity. The post was immediately taken down for being wildly inappropriate, so he moved his masterpiece to the parts of the web populated by people who are recreational life-destroyers. It spread like wildfire. Thousands of people who had never heard of me before rallied around his banner and took up the crusade, latching on to me as a stand-in for any number of things they hated. The places where I sold my games, talked with friends, or even just looked at cute cat videos were suddenly awash in pictures of mutilated bodies, images of horrible violence, and threats to do these things and worse to me. My home address and phone number were discovered and distributed, leading to 5 a.m. phone calls from strangers detailing the ways they planned to rape me and people bragging about leaving dead animals in my mailbox. Nude photos of me were dug up, printed out, jizzed on by strangers, and mailed to colleagues, friends, and family.
So, why me? I was an unconventional game developer. I’m a queer, feminine person in an industry still struggling to handle fictional women made of pixels let alone flesh-and-blood ones who can say no, and I was more interested in making games about depression and comedy than the more commercial ones that come to mind when you think of video games. I am outspoken and ambitious, and at the time, I was one of independent gaming’s rising stars during a time when the industry and geek culture at large were experiencing an identity crisis. There were more diverse players, developers, and games than ever before, and a loud, irrational minority saw this as an invasion and attacked anyone they saw as a witch to burn.
As it turned out, when I cut off my ex for good, I was basically sitting in a black robe and wide-brimmed, pointed hat on top of a pile of kindling.
The spark was an insinuation that I had slept with a game journalist for a positive review of my game. That accusation turned what would have been a few horrible weeks for me into a cascade that shook my entire industry before developing into a full-on culture war.
Somehow, the fact that the game reviewer had never actually reviewed my game didn’t come up.
After the release of the manifesto, the witch hunt spread across every social media networking platform in a matter of hours and escalated from there. Using the same techniques that are used to spread hoaxes or viral in-jokes, the mob began running coordinated “operations” with the goal of destroying my life from every possible angle while rebranding their abuse as a crusade for “ethics in games journalism” to attract new members and obfuscate the repugnant behavior by disguising it as a consumer revolt.
This phenomenon wasn’t unfamiliar to me—the internet was my home turf, and witch hunts like these were regular occurrences even before everyone and their grandmother signed up for Facebook. I knew it would be vicious as thousands of strangers attacked my life from every angle they could and that everything from jokes I had made years ago to patently made-up information was fair game. I also knew it’d last maybe two weeks and then fade away like everything that goes viral. Online mobs tend to be equal parts vicious and erratic.
I couldn’t possibly have been more wrong.
It was just beginning. My personal disaster metastasized into the phenomenon known as #GamerGate: a new front in the full-blown culture war over the heart and soul of the internet itself. It’s spread far and wide, with a Canadian prime minister, geek legends like Joss
Why would anyone possibly care so much about a shitty breakup between two nerds?
GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.
Online abuse is by no means uncommon and can affect just about anyone for any reason, including totally normal people minding their own business. However, just because it can happen to anyone doesn’t mean that it strikes totally at random. The less you look and sound like a 1950s sitcom dad, the more likely it is that you’ll find yourself where I did—having your life torn apart by neo-Nazis.
But that isn’t the end of my story.
Everything I have, everything good in my life, I owe to the internet’s ability to empower people like me, people who wouldn’t have a voice without it. All the garbage that is thrown at us is enabled by this broken machine, yet I firmly believe that the internet is also the best tool we have to address the problem. To the uninitiated, it might seem easy to blame the very things that make the internet great for the rampant abuse, but that reaction would be alarmist and simply incorrect. One might see the relative anonymity of the online world as something that allows people to do heinous things to one another without accountability, but anonymity is also what can give isolated teenagers like I was the ability to talk about their queerness without fear of being outed. Others might look at how enormous the internet has become and declare it impossible to fix, but to do so would be to overlook the brilliant minds who have been missing from mainstream cultural conversations, who find one another on the internet and work together to make positive cultural changes, both offline and on.
I went on a mission to do just that. Half a year deep into GamerGate, I cofounded a grassroots organization called Crash Override, an online crisis hotline and victim advocacy group. Crash Override seeks to help people who have been failed in the same ways we were and works to address the root causes of those failures. In our first year of operation, we helped over a thousand people via the hotline, created multiple guides to educate the public about online abuse, and partnered with multinational tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Google to help inform policy, regulate their platforms, and get swifter assistance for the people who came to us for help. We formed working relationships with prosecutors’ offices, law enforcement, Congress, and the United Nations to tackle the issue through policy, all while trying to make sure the good parts of the internet don’t become collateral damage. We set out on a mission to inform everyone about how online abuse actually happens, how to prevent more people like me from having their lives derailed, and how to protect yourself until everyone else gets onboard.
It’s been an uphill battle, and one I didn’t opt into. But now I’ve seen the machinery from outside and in. Our culture has systematically failed to help victims of online harassment while simultaneously leaving it up to them to fix those same failing systems with little or no support. Law enforcement, lawmakers, and private corporations have done little more than shrug their shoulders, telling me and other victims to just get offline—and cede the internet to those who want to use it only to hurt people. The longer I spent trying to change these systems from within, the more I found that they were constructed from the ground up to resist effective change. You can hear the same nonexcuses from people in power only so many times before realizing that they know how broken things are, and that they’re not going to change.
Some see despair in this failure; I see hope and opportunity. The thing about systems? They’re predictable, and anything that can be predicted can be disrupted, dismantled, and destroyed. The more time I spent trying to change things, the more mentors I found and the more friends I made who were trying to change things, too. When reporting abuse that had already done its damage to any institution would exhaust me, my community and peers would pick me back up and keep me going. For every person who ignored us who had the power to fix things, I found five with no power who actually managed to provide help.
We don’t have to wait around for slow and risk-averse institutions to start caring about us. We can get informed and press them where pressure is needed while taking care of each other and ourselves. But first we must identify the key points of failure—and who better to do so than those who have had the dubious honor of being failed firsthand? We can tweak all the variables until the mechanisms of unchecked online abuse break down, and the world can be better for it.
I mean, I’m a game designer for a reason. Games are, at their core, just systems, and systems are the terms in which I think. Unfortunately, I’m not alone—people participating in online abuse treat it like a game, too, seeing who can do the most damage to a target they see as a dehumanized mass of pixels on a screen, more like a monster in a game to be taken down than an actual human being with thoughts and hopes and weaknesses and moments of brilliance. But although what was done to me was heinous, those responsible for obliterating my old life have overlooked one important thing:
I’m better at games than they are.
1
Crash
This is me on the night of August 15, 2014, a few minutes before the life I had built for myself—after clawing my way out of poverty, homelessness, isolation, and mental illness—would be destroyed by someone I had once loved.
The guy next to me at the restaurant is Bill, and I’m waiting for him to turn to his right and see the weird face I’m making at him. Bill and a handful of local San Francisco friends had come out for one of the “I’m in town, let’s hang out!” events that happen when you live and work online—suddenly a person from your long-distance network of friends and colleagues is in the area, and you drop everything to see them. This visit to the Bay Area was going to be my last chance to see these friends for a while, since I was about to move from the dingy Boston sublet I currently called home to the south of France for a few months with my boyfriend, Alex. He was starting a new job there, and since I had built a small but sustainable full-time career out of making niche games for the digital marketplace, I had the luxury of being able to work from anywhere.
Alex and I had been dating for only a week, though we’d been friends for a lot longer. Our friendship had turned into something more when he had shown me profound kindness while I was shaking off the remnants of my abusive relationship. He saw the good in me when I couldn’t see it myself. It soon became apparent that we had accidentally fallen in love at the worst possible time. We decided to give it a shot anyway, even if it meant going from zero to living together for a few months. The worst-case scenario, we figured, was if it didn’t work out, we’d remain friends and I’d spend the duration of my visitor’s visa making games in France. It was risky, it was romantic, it was like the end of a bad romantic comedy—but I’ve never been one to turn down an adventure.
Back at the restaurant, I checked my phone just in time to see that dream die.
--
Yo
--
I know you probably stopped caring about your [Something Awful] account ages ago but you just got helldumped something fierce
--
Basically, a guy regged to post a 5k+ words wall of text and pictures about dating you.
Internet-to-English translation: Someone had paid the $10 registration fee to get an account on Something Awful, a comedy website and message board that I’d participated in for about a decade, to post something long and unflattering about me. The friend tried to reassure me that the post was already gone, that it had been yanked by Something Awful’s admins almost immediately for violating the bejesus out of the forum rules and was unavailable even in the archives. Unsure who would do something like this to me, or what the post even said, I emailed a moderator for details.
