“Out of the transient and ephemeral effluvia of the internet comes something ivied, revelatory, permanent. Bravo.” —Ken Burns, filmmaker
Ten years ago I started interviewing people in the wake of Gamergate. If you've never heard that word before, the gist is: It was an important event that traumatized the videogame industry and its surrounding fandoms in 2014, going on to etch out the foundational tactics for online culture wars everywhere else since. Gamergate walked so QAnon and Donald Trump and the alt-right could run, so the story goes.
Watching an institution crumble in real-time, as Gamergate allowed with the social internet, is something we've all had experience with in the years since. The pandemic revealed flaws in healthcare, government, education, the economy, and our social safety nets. #MeToo exposed widespread lack of accountability in the power dynamics in entertainment industries, the legal system, media, and higher education. These things happened, and no one's ever sure if they ever are really resolved—we just move on as new headlines take their place.
But when Gamergate violently erupted, no one had ever seen anything like it. If you have heard of Gamergate before, you know that how it got started is somewhat irrelevant to the thorny force multipliers it later took on. It is horrifying that an ugly and public break-up between a videogame and software developer became a breeding ground for devious internet trolls who, driven by hateful whims, exploited online echo chambers, targeted and harassed marginalized voices in the gaming community, and took advantage of the internet's lack of meaningful moderation. But it was always that second part, how Gamergate revealed tragic flaws in the internet while also exposing that no one was sure who should or could do anything about it that kept me up at night most.
That's why I started interviewing people a decade ago—to take conversations about these really heavy, swimmy topics away from 140-character Twitter threads and onto the telephone for unguarded conversations that flowed until I either ran out of questions or the person speaking with me had to rest their voice. Now, over 500 people all over the world have sat and talked with me for hundreds of hours about this devastating internet crisis and what it means. I've stopped counting and don't like laying out these numbers because that glosses over the fact that every person is a complicated individual with their own point of view.
The Hivemind Swarmed is an oral history of Gamergate's aftermath. It is not a retelling of the inciting incidents, but instead a patchwork quilt of conversations with a variety of people who were in and outside of Gamergate's first detonation. It’s them talking about its effects and implications, about the time since and the road ahead. It's them still trying to make sense of it. Many speak of redemption for the internet and for videogames as an industry and culture—they wonder whether that’s still a possibility, something that's moment has passed, or maybe just a myth.
Everyone's still trying to figure out how to make peace with, and endure, the internet we're seemingly stuck with. But just because I got the opportunity to put a book out filled with my questions posed to all kinds of people doesn't mean I have any of the answers, myself. But my hope is this book helps us all start to figure them out.