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Yo,

I wanted to open this thread (and write this rant) because I believe we are at a turning point in the history of the Web and it's high time to discuss why it went this way. It goes without saying that I am referring to how the evolution of online culture eventually led to the storming of the Capitol.

Before going any further, let me say that I don't actually blame the Web for this entirely. I only speak from my viewpoint of an old time memer who witnessed how online culture evolved for the past decade and wants to reflect on that. There are certainly many other reasons (political, social, generational, etc.) why the US society is as divided as it is now to the point of leading a bunch of people to storm a gouvernment building to overturn an election, and there will be perhaps tons of articles and books on the topic in the coming years (perhaps decades) that will explore in depth the roots of this event. As far as I'm concerned, I will only discuss online culture in this thread.

I'll also be straight about what I want to discuss here: I'm here to talk about the complacency with the far right that prevails today in online culture, and why it's already shaping the online reaction to the recent events (and not in a good way). Before going any further, let me be more specific about what I call complacency. Unlike what another thread suggested a few months ago, I don't think there are that many KYM users who are right-wing in the strict sense. In fact, I tend to agree that the KYM community is quite neutral overall, though we see trends shifting the apparent reaction to left or right from time to time. However, I do think that the attitude of online users is helping a lot the far right in spreading its ideas online, to the point where some subcultures are now viewed by outsiders as inherently right-wing.

While KYM is a small community overall, I take it a sample of the online community as a whole: many users around here regularly browse 4chan, reddit and the likes, and I will therefore regularly use posts from this very website to discuss specific points.

In this post, I will detail the following topics which led online culture, in my opinion, to be complacent with the far right and let it dominate today's memes and discussions.

• First is the denial of the influence of the far right, i.e., the refusal to admit that an event, a subculture or a community has been used by the far right to spread its ideas.
• Second is the feelings vs. facts which led people to acknowledge conspiracy theories or stances that eventually turned out to be untrue or irrelevant, but helped the far right anyway.
• Third, and last point I will discuss today, its the paradox of tolerance (which you can already read about the great lines here) and the problem of the so-called "containment boards".

Let's first talk about the denial of the influence of the far right.

Perhaps this is the topic that will speak the most to people around here, and also the most controversial, because I see basically every week or so a blatant sign of this denial, whether it's on this website or another board. And you all know what I'm talking about, because some years ago, this communauty was all about an event which is a prime example of an online event being used by the far right. I am of course talking about GamerGate.

First of all, what belongs to Caesar must be returned to Caesar: initially, GamerGate wasn't political. It initally was about denouncing the collusion that exists between gaming journalists and the industry (still to this day), starting with the Quinnspiracy. Rather than doing its mea culpa and admitting its lack of neutrality or that there was definitely shady stuff with Zoey Quinn, the gaming press reacted by calling out gamers for being misogynistic, stating that "gamers are dead" and so on and so forth. You know the story. But that's when things started to derail.

Back in 2014, a characteristic of GamerGate which almost everyone could agree on was that it was a faceless crowd. While the anti- side had well known figures coming from the Twitter community, the pro- side could only be defined as roughly a (large) group of 4chan users completed with other communities, which you could hardly associate to any political movement or figure at the time. At best, you had some famous Youtubers being labelled as being pro- or anti-GG, but their stance wasn't even that clear (remember for instance how people mistakingly labelled JonTron as pro-, something he cleared himself in his own way). This situation could only last for so long, until Milo Yiannopoulos became somewhat the face of GamerGate. From that point, GG was less about ethics in gaming journalism than about an online backlash against feminism and progressism as a whole. GamerGate drifted so far from its initial topic of "ethics in gaming journalism" that there was barely a reaction when Konami controlled the review process of Metal Gear Solid V.

In fact, the motivation for Milo's involvement was always about bringing people to co-opt far right (and more broadly reactionary) ideas. Milo wasn't exactly anyone, as he was working at the time for Breitbart News, a right-wing-biased news network directed by no one else than Steve Bannon, who later became the chief strategist at the start of the Trump presidency. I won't comment too long on what Bannon did during the past decade, because it's a well documented topic you can learn about either online either with books, and I will rather focus on his involvement in GamerGate. Let's have a quick look at this article.

Even though the business plan was a flop, Bannon became intrigued by the game's online community dynamics. In describing gamers, Bannon said, "These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power. … It was the pre-reddit. It's the same guys on (one of a trio of online message boards owned by IGE) Thottbot who were [later] on reddit" and other online message boards where the alt-right flourished, Bannon said.

After taking over in 2012 at the Breitbart News Network -- it was founded five years earlier by Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 -- Bannon recruited Milo Yiannopoulos to handle technology coverage.

Like Andrew Breitbart, Yiannopoulos "just had that 'it' factor," Bannon says in the book. "The difference was, Andrew had a very strong moral universe, and Milo is an amoral nihilist."

Yiannopoulos devoted much of Breitbart's tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And that helped fuel an online alt-right movement sparked by Breitbart News.

"I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."

It's pretty clear from these statements coming from the man himself that Milo's involvement in GamerGate was about bringing people to the far right from the start. In fact, Milo went as far as crediting himself with helping Trump win the 2016 presidency, as this Facebook post shows:

I was a significant factor in Donald Trump getting elected, for which I have received zero credit.

He couldn't put it in a better way. Still today, the idea that GamerGate was used to poison the well is controversial.

(next part in next post)

The title of the cited article in the previous link is yet clear:

What we still haven't learned from GamerGate

The article is not even attributing the Capitol debacle to GamerGate, but is more about how GamerGate set a precedent in the far right gaining influence online. This extract is pretty self-explaining:

5) Politicians and the media must take online “ironic” racism and misogyny seriously

Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in 2014 writing off the whole incident as “satirical” and immature “trolling,” and very few correctly predicting that Gamergate’s trolling was the future of politics -- the political wave that would essentially morph into the broader alt-right movement.

Regardless of your opinion on the anti- side (people who I don't have a much better opinion of than most people here), it's undeniable that GamerGate was used by the far right to spread its ideas and turn online communities into being at the very least complacent with its discourse. You may not be far right yourself even though you took part in GamerGate at some point, but that's no proof that the mouvement wasn't used by far right figures to bluepill a bunch of people on the topics of sexism and racism as well as to make reactionary memes a common occurrence.

Indeed, while it's very hard to quantify how many people did get attracted to the far right because of GamerGate, its fallout in online culture is difficult to rebuke. Look for its instance at the popular belief that diversity is inherently a bad thing for the video games industry, people often quoting Mass Effect Andromeda as an example of that, while this game suffered much, much more from how it was produced (long story short: developpers had no idea what kind of experience they wanted to offer for a good 4~5 years of development). See for instance the appearance then deletion of r/gamersriseup (sorry, didn't get any other source), or its polar opposite r/gamingcirclejerk. See how the expression "gamer moment" is now associated with racist slurs. See also the countless contreversies surrounding the representation of women in video games. In fact, you don't need to go very far back in time: not matter how you look at it, the The Last of Us Part II review bombing is impossible to separate from the usual crowd of people who can't stand that a game introduces a diverse cast (not to mention the amount of fakes news surrounding the game and its production, but that's another topic). In fact, the reception of Part II is a prime demonstration of how the online community evolved. Back in 2013, The Last of Us got a DLC called Left Behind which already featured Ellie as the main playable character and which already revealed her homosexuality. Do you recall any backlash at the time ? As far as I'm concerned, I don't. I barely remember a few threads I saw on /v/ some years ago where people criticized the western reception of Japanese games featuring lesbians, but that was it. Yet, during the wonderful year that was 2020, we got this.

Despite all these examples, a good part of the online community is still in denial that GamerGate became a vast operation of publicity for the far right. GamerGate is one example, but there are other instances of events during which people reacted in disbelief. The shooter of the Christchurch 2019 terrorist attack is notorious for having been an active user of /pol/, who notably left a manifesto filled with obscure memes (I say obscure because any person who wasn't familiar with online culture could hardly understand this gibberish) after the attack in the hope of increasing the divide between left and right online. Not only I saw many people online praising his "evil genius" for writing that manifesto, but I also saw many of them minimizing the influence /pol/ could have had. I'd go as far as stating that users of /pol/ and other edgy boards reacted to the Christchurch shooting the same way a part of the muslim community reacted to ISIS attacks. Instead of recognizing there's a problem within their community (N.B.: I don't consider Islam to be bad, but some currents of it are dangerous, just like any other religion), most reacted with something along the lines of "well, this guy was a nutjob who took it too litteraly, we are not violent haha".

Sadly, a good amount of reactions to the Capitol storming are not that different. The Trump supporters who appeared in the various photos are labelled either as antifa LARPers (pure disbelief), either as just nutjobs. There's still a strong denial that this kind of activists are gathered in large communities and keep gaining new members mostly through humour, many examples being found in the image gallery of KYM (though there's, of course, the problem of making an exhaustive documentation of online history).

Which brings me to the second topic: the feelings vs. facts issue which the far right thrives on.

At this point, some skeptics might point out that I keep talking about the far right without explaining why its influence is detrimental to online culture or society. Obviously, the main issue with the far right (or specifically the American alt right) is that it actively downplays serious or societal issues that are affecting western societies (not just the US) by relying on humor and antagonization. Don't get me wrong: by no means I believe the American left is without its faults, because it definitely has problems if it's unable to reach GOP voters through its discourse. But if we pick any serious issue, it's easy to realize that the left at the very least acknowledges it, why the alt right denies it. The left acknowledges problems with racism or gender equality, while the alt right states they're overblown. The left wants to tackle seriously the COVID-19 pandemic, while Trump (championed by the alt right) has spent the last year of its mandate downplaying it. The left wants to do something about climate change, the alt right wants you to believe it's made up. The left wants to implement a better healthcare, the alt right wants you to believe it amounts to converting the USA to socialism (good ol' red scare) and having your daughters being raped by immigrants in the streets.

Note how, for every issue I mentioned, the alt right is feelings-based. Even though the left has also its "feelings over facts" moments (hardcore SJWs have provided numerous examples of that), the alt right is entirely based on that, and they used (pretty well, I must recognize) various events to attract people to it or at the very least to control the narrative. How Seth Rich's death was used is a good example.

For reminders, Seth Rich was a DNC Staffer who was fatally shot during the course of July 2016. As the KYM article explains it, the timing of its death was deemed suspicious and led many people to believe he was actually assassinated because he wanted to "change the DNC from within". Nowadays, nothing proves he was shot for this reason. In fact, even Fox News retracted the story they published on the matter in 2017 (IIRC, this timing was chosen because

Think about how you would feel losing a son or brother. And while dealing with this, you had baseless accusations of your lost family member being part of a vast conspiracy. As the family, we would hope to be the first people to learn about any such evidence and reasons for Seth's death. It is a travesty that you would prompt false conspiracy theories and other people's agendas rather than work with the family to learn the truth.

The rest is anecdotal, though the timing murder is indeed shady (I'll give that to conspiracy theorists). One guy ended up butthurt around 2018, but there hasn't been any significant development since then. The Mueller report from 2019 even suggests that the conspiracy theory was a complete fabrication (see the report p. 48: "[…] the statements about Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails. […]").

(next part in next post)

Yet, this story was definitely used to convince people that the DNC was killing dissidents, even though there was no real evidence of that. At first, some KYM commentators were even pretty adamant on the matter:

And the alt right exploited this feeling. The idea that the DNC is killing people who don't go along the party lines is still pretty popular in modern memes or jokes, even though there is little evidence of that.

Seth Rich's death is one story, Pizzagate is another. Again, we have a conspiracy theory with little to no evidence (and which also ended in a cringy manner) which relies on resentment for the left to gain followers, but with a twist: if you believe it's bullshit, you will get replied with "so you don't care about child pedo rings ?" (which, unfortunately, exist). In a sense, it's the prototype of QAnon which entirely revolves around Trump being at war with some satanistic deep society that rapes children (I didn't think I would write something like that one day). If you are against it, it's because you're a monster who doesn't care about your country/the children/whatever. Again, no evidence, all feelings. Hopefully, QAnon barely managed to be as overwhelming present online as alt right memes, as it's only popular in dedicated boards. One cannot say the same for Pizzagate, which was all over the place (including here) when it was first coined.

Again, you don't have to go far back in time to find another occurrence of the current topic, i.e., where feelings were exploited for political controversy. Just look at how the alt right reacted to the sanitary measures after the COVID-19 reached the USA. Heck, Bannon even went as far as saying that Dr. Fauci should be beheaded. Regardless of how effective the measures actually are, the idea that these measures only exist for political gain (some people stretching it as far as implying the DNC is working with China) is very, very questionable. Yet, you can find instances of this contreversy online (and not just in meme culture, also in the MSM). I will perhaps stop here with this topic because this specific problem is too broad to connect any skepticism with political alignment: you cannot entirely attribute skepticism to the online presence of the far right rhetoric, even though the "mechanisms" are often similar.

However, looking again at how the Web reacts to the Capitol event and prior events that led to it, it seems this "feelings over facts" isn't going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, I find it very worrying that an event of historical proportion, where supporters of a politican tried to overturn an election on the basis of a false premise, is again reviewed under the perspective of "left vs. right" and the resentment each side has for the other. I mean, the gallery for the entry litteraly has these two pictures quasi side by side in Most commented:

(comments here and here, respectively)

Even though one picture is more upvoted than the latter, there's definitely controversy and bothsidism in both instances. Regardless of the consequences of both protests, one exists because of dramatic events that actually took place, the other exists because of a shady conspiracy theory. One is about fixing US society (even though the way it tries to achieve this is debatable), one is a collective temper tantrum by a part of the electorate who's been nurtured with alternative facts for the past 4 or 5 years (this pasta is spot on). From what I saw, it's only in the US-based online communities that people are still trying to make the events look similar in order to justify what just happened, and the worst part is that it still works. Hopefully, this is still mostly an US-exclusive behaviour, but I've saw other countries start following this trend. As I said in the very beginning, you can of course find plenty of other reasons why the storming happened, and I only try to discuss its online aspect. Nevetherless, the "it's them against us" attitude fueled by feelings-based politics and pushed online by the far right (but I'll give you that radical left groups also do that) over the years is definitely a considerable contributor to the current divide… and is still working.

Last but not least: the paradox of tolerance.

For reminders, the paradox of tolerance goes as follows: "if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant" (thanks Wikipedia). It's hard to not think about the recent events when you read that last part (I'll come back to this later).

Before going further, let me say that I am by no means against free speech nor for censorship. I enjoy very much the idea of having a diversity of opinions or forms of art online, even those which I personally don't like. In fact, I agree with the idea that condemning speech is inproductive at the end of the day, that what you need is more speech, with the underlying idea that ludicrous ideas will eventually get defeated in the process. Rowan Atkinson put it perfectly in this video:

However, the free speech debate online has taken a rocky part. It seems every time something divisive is censored or removed, the online community fierely argues that this same divisive content should get a platform, but at the same time, this content is never challenged and, if anything, is rewarded with free publicity. I think for instance about what happened with count Dankula. The story is pretty insignificant in itself: it's just one edgy guy who taught his dog to do a nazi salute. I agree that putting him on trial is ridiculous. But is it really what we should promote as free speech ? Coming back to Rowan Atkinson, there are actually a handful of British humorists who champion free speech because some of their works play with controversial topics (or topics which used to be controversial; something like Life of Brian would not scandalize as much today). Blackadder regularly ridicules the Church, for instance. And let's not forget the Irish Father Ted (which is now freely available on Youtube) which is even more ballsy considering it makes fun of priests while taking place (and being broadcasted at the time) in Ireland, a country where the Church is still a pillar of society. In both instances, these works did not intend any harm and were made for entertainment value (sometimes with witty social commentary, but that's another subject).

I sincerely doubt that promoting nazi imagery in a country that suffered from fighting the Third Reich can be considered as light-spirited. In an ideal setting were free speech "works", this would at least get some criticism and be quickly forgotten. Instead of that, this whole stunt has been given free publicly and championed as a prime example of free speech. Hopefully, there was no actual harm in the matter. But what about Alex Jones ? When he was deplatformed by Youtube, Facebook and the likes, the main online reaction was again that this was an attack on free speech and that this was setting a precedent for further censorship. The problem here is that Alex Jones' stunts are actually harmful.

Lenny Pozner lives in hiding. His six-year-old son Noah was one of the 20 elementary school children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting almost eight years ago.

Do I need to add anything there ? When are we going to see a consensus that this guy is actually dangerous, instead of labelling him as based ? This is the key problem with free speech in today's Web. The dominating idea in online boards (including here) is that nothing should be censored, but the way the Web works today, i.e. in separate communities which can act as echo chambers, nothing is actually challenged anymore. To be more specific, the popular idea that the Web should maintain "containment boards" for crazies and nutjobs is harming the cause of free speech, just like the paradox of tolerance states that intolerance will eventually destroy everything.

(next part in next post)

The problem with the so-called "containment boards" is that there's no way for a user of such boards to be confronted to opposite views, or to put in another way, to be put out of his/her conformt zone. I doubt things can eventually get better when one states on one hand "we should have absolute free speech, bad ideas will be challenged", and on the other hand states "we should let /pol/ the way it is, it's a containment board". The go-to solution to the paradox of tolerance would be "to be intolerant of intolerance", but in today's Web, intolerance self-reinforces itself in isolation and never gets to meet people that are intolerant of it. Of course, this doesn't just hold true for far right boards, as you can apply the same reasoning to ResetEra (which the nickname ReichEra is not that far-fetched).

With the recent events in Washington D.C., we are seeing the limits of all this. People with extreme views who went unchallenged for years went out to storm the capital hoping to overturn a democratic election. As a consequence, social media platforms are now banning accounts or services that are stimulating these people. But what else could they do, really ? Since no one is going to challenge the views of these people, how can free speech work properly ? How can we complain that they are stripped of it, while we are waiting for them to actually cause harm to think about it ?

Time to (finally) conclude…

In this (long) rant, I tried to highlight what causes today's Web to be so divisive. It goes without saying that this is tied to the political groups with extreme views, but I believe this is in particular because of how the far right managed to become a part of online culture. More precisely, how the online community learned to live with it, how it became complacent with it. More than 10 years ago, online culture was pretty neutral. As someone said in this thread in particular, even the 2012 election barely made waves online.

But not only the left became more aggressive on its own, but the far right also insidiously influenced online culture (in a way, "the left can't meme" is pretty much true). First, it used events such as GamerGate to attract new people to its ideas, or at the very least to popularize some of its views (anti-feminism being one example), which a large part of the online community still doesn't (want to) realize. Second, it used a rhetoric based on feelings to give credibility to divisive conspiracy theories which echoed through both social media and online boards, to the point where the "it's them against us" rhetoric has become the standard in US-based communities. Finally, the debate on free speech never takes into account the fact that the modern Web is made to shield you from opposite viewpoints, ending up in supporting platforms that are echo chambers for intolerant or dangerous people, who never get to see their own views challenged.

Every problem I tried to identify somehow appears in the online reaction to the Capitol storming. There's no consensus on the nature of the event, and there's still a lot of heated discussions on the matter as if it was a sports event. There is still a lof of disbelief regarding how far the corruption of online culture by far right ideas went. And the concept of "containment board", which is contradictory with a healthy version of free speech, is barely talked about, leading eventually to harm and actual censorship.

Of course, I merely tried to diagnose this whole mess, and I haven't thought about a practical solution (if there's any). But I don't think the problem will be solved anytime soon if there's no consensus on the symptoms first. Hence why I wrote all this: I wanted to get to the bottom(s) of the problem, based on what I witnessed during the past decade, hoping this would bring food for thought to the fellow memers around here. Feel free to comment and discuss any point I tried to make.

In memory of lighter times:

Everytime I tried to point out what you said about Gamergate, I get downvoted to hell and back. I'm proud of you for standing up.

Would like to point out that the dnc is very blatently corrupt (ie rigging the primaries) and that’s why people are quick to beleive anythign bad about them,
and pizzagate was an attempt to smear one part of the corporate party with complacency with the epstein shit when both are

Because you say it was far right, op stated that the far right used it