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Puny mortals!

I love this thing. The internet tells me it’s a stone sculpture in Krabi, Thailand. I go to sleep at night listening to a looping MP3 recording of ocean waves and imaging happy little crabs skittering across sandy ocean floors.

But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about GamerGate.

GamerGate is an unfolding nasty slap-fight between low-status nerdy video game players and high-status hipster smartasses. It should be small and meaningless, but it’s blossomed into something big and ugly…and emblematic.

I’m firmly on Team Nerd, but I haven’t been able to articulate what I think about it — and before I managed to do it, someone at PopeHat did it ever so much better than I could, with links and references and everything. (If you don’t read PopeHat, I recommend that you do. This group blog frequently pisses me off — I’m just sure they take more pokes at my team than they do the other guys — but is nearly always thoughtful and interesting and seldom wasted time).

Clark does a bang-up job relating the current kerfuffle to the larger historical trends, which is the very thing I have been thinking about lately. Larger historical trends, I mean. If you haven’t got time for the whole thing, skip to the bit that’s sub-headed “Our forces have Technograd surrounded are pounding it with shame bombs, and our sappers are inside the walls” (I’d link to it directly, but there isn’t a tag for me to grab onto. That’s nerd talk).

Oh, and see you back here tomorrow, 6pm WBT, Dead Pool Round 70!

October 23, 2014 — 9:06 pm
Comments: 8