"Fandom Is Broken" And Other Silly Ideas

About this:

1. GamerGate = "terrorist hate group"? Grow up. Your definition of "terrorist" is too broad.
2. Re: the Ghostbusters reboot, if you don't have enough funny moments to make a funny trailer, you lose. Also, it's a comedy, but neither the franchise's new masters nor its executrices have any visible skill at that art.
3. OH HAI LET'S PICK A SINGLE RANTING POST AS TYPICAL OF PEOPLE I HATE. Weak.
4. Death threats are always so much bluster. Read The Gift of Fear some time. (They do, however, have some commercial value.)
5. How dare people engage with and have an opinion about books, movies, TV shows, and videogames, and worse, have the temerity to inform their creators. I'm sure most creators would rather their output exist in a vacuum, Emily Dickinson style. Right?
6. I don't know the canon well enough, but Captain America's embrace of Hydra appears to have been a commercialized rape of the character, destroying it for no particular good reason other than sales. You do that, you will hear from the fans, and in some very unpleasant ways.
7. Funny how you failed to mention how it was the SJWs who chased Joss Whedon off Twitter. Why is that? Yes, I know, he claimed afterward that it was a new project whose time he did not wish to split with social media; fine. Nevertheless, it does not excuse the behavior of the People's Front Of Judea, nor does it absolve the author of this piece of pinning the worst excesses exclusively on people he apparently dislikes for other reasons.

Update 2016-06-02: Christopher Landauer elsewhere pointed out Devin Faraci's follow-on post that is so larded with self-contradiction it's hard to tell whether it amounts to self-parody:

Over the years I have written extensively - and with passion - about the need for more representation in our media. About the need for more actors of color in our films, about the need for more queer characters in our stories, about the need for more perspectives behind the scenes to better represent the great diversity of people who love the pop culture we all love. Nothing has changed for me. I still feel that way.

I believe that people should let the decision-makers know that they want more stories featuring underrepresented groups. I believe that the only way to get more representation is to let the suits and the bean counters know that there's an audience for this stuff, to loudly proclaim your willingness to buy tickets or comic books (and then follow up on it by actually buying tickets and comic books). Everyone should let the companies behind the stories we love know that they would like to be included in them.

But the line is crossed when you go from "Disney, I would really like to have a queer princess in one of your cartoons" to "I demand that the writers and directors of Frozen 2 make Elsa canonically queer." You can - and should! - let the higher ups know the kinds of stories you want told. You should not demand that storytellers tell their stories in the ways that you want. 

This strikes me as fundamentally an impossible demand, the idea that once a franchise is in place, it is up to the creators and the creators exclusively to set the story arcs and world. The second quoted graf above stands in stark opposition to the third.

The Censor, Anita Sarkeesian

I recently had cause to discuss whether Anita Sarkeesian's "Feminist Frequency" videos amounted to censorship or not. By a strict definition, no they are not, because she had not at that point demanded state action, i.e. prior restraint on video game publishers. Criticism, of course, is not the same thing as censorship, but with Sarkeesian, there have been a number of "tells" that she has a strong itch in that direction, the principle one being that she demands the right to direct the course of video game production — of which she is not, by her own admission, much of a customer. It would be one thing to play video games and want something better. (For a parallel example in the related world of comics, see my brief remarks about Barbara Randall Kesel.) It's quite another to see content she is only peripherally interested in (or worse, demands others pay for) and then expects producers thereof will hew to her cloistered thinking. She has also been unwilling to take the stage with any opponent (most notably the firebrand journalist Milo Yiannopoulos) to debate her ideas; she appears to want a megaphone, not exchange, which again suggests she has a totalitarian's indifference to anyone else's opinion.

But charitably, the question remained at least until recently an open one, when she somehow got a report published through the United Nations on "cyber violence". (The full report can be found here (PDF), because the link from the title page appears to be broken.) This includes

Cyber VAWG includes hate speech (publishing a blasphemous libel), hacking (intercepting private communications), identity theft, online stalking (criminal harassment) and uttering threats.

 Sarkeesian expanded on those goals considerably:

According to feminist culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, who spoke at the event, online “harassment” doesn’t simply consist of what is “legal and illegal,” but “also the day-to-day grind of ‘you’re a liar’ and ‘you suck,’ including all of these hate videos that attack us on a regular basis.”

Unable to prove that they are the victims of a wave of “misogynistic hate” – no bomb threat against a feminist critic of video games has ever been deemed credible and there are serious doubts about threats supposedly levelled at transsexual activist Brianna Wu – feminists are trying to redefine violence and harassment to include disobliging tweets and criticisms of their work.

In other words: someone said “you suck” to Anita Sarkeesian and now we have to censor the internet. Who could have predicted such a thing? It’s worth noting, by the way, that if Sarkeesian’s definition is correct, Donald Trump is the world’s greatest victim of “cyber-violence.” Someone should let him know.

As a bonus points follow-on, Yiannopoulos found a Redditor willing to slog through all 120 of the report's footnotes, concluding that 30% are broken, blank, duplicated, or nonexistent in some other way, with another 15% self-referentially linking back to UN documents. (Also, yikes, for Popehat phoning it in, though at least he recognized it at the time.) The benefit of the doubt no longer applies; schoolyard taunts provide sufficient cause for Sarkeesian to demand governments silence others, and that the mechanisms for doing this be built into the technical infrastructure of the Internet. Sarkeesian is nothing more than a schoolmarm with an overgrown ego.

The Rise Of "Commercial Feminism"

I've written damned near nothing about #GamerGate, with the justification that it's one of those culture war thingies that makes you always wrong no matter what side you take:

(Cathy Young's short course at Reason, the best there is on the subject, is worth reading, but even that makes my head spin.) But I read something today that came across my transom on Twitter via Ms. Young by one Chihiro Onitsuka at VGChartz entitled "Journalism Is Dead" providing an unusual perspective on the matter. Armored as she is against the charge of owning a penis, her interactions with various media outlets is telling:

As I am myself a woman in the games industry - one that has worked on a number of major blockbuster titles - I have been approached a number of times from news outlets such as the BBC and several US news stations requesting an interview, and each and every time this has happened I have been asked various questions about my experiences in the industry and "what I think about how Anita has been treated", and each and every time when I have made my opinions clear, the desire to interview me moves swiftly from wanting to nail down a specific day and time to conduct it to "thanks for your time, we'll be in touch", which is seemingly journalist lingo for "you don't have the right opinions we want to share, bye".

Onitsuka has a sharp take on the cultural reasons for the hostility of so-called "gaming journalism" sites covering that beat (Kotaku, TechCrunch, Polygon, even to some degree Ars Technica, etc.) to their purported audience versus that of the actual game publishers: it all comes down to dollars.

To developers and publishers, gamers are potential customers and something they need in order to stay in business, The gaming media, on the other hand, sees gamers as a commodity; a page impression and potential advertising click, and thus a revenue stream. By acting as the aggressor the resulting argument draws in both gamers and social warriors for a grand battle, all the while they stand back and watch with glee as their views and ad revenue both increase.

It's a cynical approach, but expanding the audience to taking the side of people who are in fact hostile to your nominal audience makes good business sense. I just can't think of a single place elsewhere this has been tried; imagine Daily Kos running essays favoring Donald Trump or Jeb Bush while decrying the state of the Democratic Party.  Onitsuka then turns her guns to Anita Sarkeesian and the gaming press that plays along with her; she claims (without linking to) Polygon's 5/10 rating for Mad Max was entirely due to political considerations, i.e. it contained scantily clad women, one of Sarkeesian's perpetual bugaboos. (In fairness, Philip Kollar does cite that consideration ["The closest thing Mad Max has to a female lead... is a concubine for the villain and a love interest for Max"], but other reviewers have been similarly harsh on the game and for reasons of tedious game play, e.g. Chris Suellentrop in Kotaku.)

To her credit, Onitsuka waded into the residual Twitter wars still lingering, and found label-based argumentation is bullshit, per usual, and on both sides, but then she dropped a phrase I hope will have real staying power:

All of this, combined with the lust for being in the news, on the news, and at the center of news reports themselves, has led me to coin this approach to "feminism" as "Commercial feminism", where the plight of feminism and equality is exploited for commercial gain.

She's on to something. Whether Title IX "rape" adjudication (which seeks ever more picayune dating fiascoes to police) or Anita Sarkeesian and her shrill, ceaseless criticisms of others' efforts that has remarkable staying power as a business model — both are parasitic attempts to garner sinecures atop or adjacent to others' work. Both are best thought of as jobs programs for their advocates, fueled by a shift to a victimhood culture that can only end badly. Predictably with both, the size of the offenses diminish over time; as Jonathan Haidt observes,

... [A]s progress is made toward a more equal and humane society, it takes a smaller and smaller offense to trigger a high level of outrage. The goalposts shift, allowing participants to maintain a constant level of anger and constant level of perceived victimization.

This ability to turn even the tiniest of faults into epic screechfests means Sarkeesian will be in the green for a good long while; patriarchy means never having to examine your first principles.

Bomb Threats And Harassing Phone Calls Attend Gamer Meetup In D.C.

Arthur Chu, Twitter's male answer to the question, "what would a Kardashian be without looks?", lost his shit about Cathy Young, Christine Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos and other pro-#GamerGate individuals having a meetup at the Washington, D.C. bar Local 16:

Hey @localsixteen just so you know there's an Internet hate speech movement meeting up at your place tonight http://t.co/MRcw2mqqqy

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) May 1, 2015

This sparked a flood of angry calls to the bar, and eventually a bomb threat:

What makes this serious threat of violence even more disturbing is that the GGinDC event was packed. Yiannopoulos told us on Sunday that there were at "least 250" people in attendance at the time of the incident. He added that he "shook at least 150 hands" during the course of the evening: "I run a lot of events and normally you can expect 40-60 per cent of RSVPs to show up. But there were even more people there on Friday night than the 220 who had RSVPed," he told us.

My suspicion is that it was one raging idiot intending to scare rather than an actual bomb, but whatevs. I'm not especially interested in label-based argumentation, which is 95% bullshit, nor in establishing victimhood cred; that's a game for losers. Chu has since blocked me on Twitter, which probably says more about his limited cognitive abilities and intolerance than what I tweeted at him (the only thing to my recollection I ever said was hardly abusive). No one is allowed to have wrongthink, and especially, to do so over frosty adult beverages, apparently.

The Trouble With Legos

I encountered a fine interview with Maritsa Patrinos at the blog of Dr. Rebecca Hains over a charming and arresting comic Patrinos published earlier in the week about how Lego didn't need to manufacture a separate girl-themed line of products, but rather integrate female characters as options within the individual sets. That this plain and common-sense approach might work perfectly is in fact almost as old as Lego itself, as a recently resurfaced note that came with early sets attests. This is not a company that has given no thought to the matter, or came to it only recently. Here's the part I want to focus on (emboldened text in the responses are all my doing):

REBECCA HAINS: Your LEGO Friends cartoon has clearly struck a chord with people, and as someone who does work in this area, it’s been really gratifying to me as a bystander to see your piece go viral—as of this writing, it’s been reached by 106,304 people from my facebook page alone. The traction it has gained is really impressive. Can you tell me what inspired you to create this cartoon?

MARITSA PATRINOS: Thank you! This past week has certainly been a surprise! I definitely don’t consider myself an expert on anything regarding gender roles or LEGO. I can only speak for myself, someone who started playing with LEGO as a girl in the 90’s (and still plays with them now… I just bought a minecraft set…). 

But I made this comic after I saw the short documentary Inside Lego. It was very informative, but the last stretch of it highlighted the “Friends” line and I was a little surprised. I had thought LEGO was a company that prided itself with being a unisex toy, so it seemed strange that now they would create a line targeted towards just girls. I actually don’t have a problem with the content—I know there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing with juice bars or shopping malls. I just don’t know if those things should be associated with gender. I thought about the girls who don’t like those things, and the boys who do like those things, and wondered if they felt alienated at all. 

I’m sure LEGO’s heart was in the right place and I’m sure they’ve done tons of research to pick their content. But when I saw the men in this documentary talk about how to connect with girls, it sounded a little like they were trying to decipher how to make contact with an alien species.

I am very much inclined to agree with that last sentence; as I have said before, the opposite sex lives in a foreign land (and that, by the way, goes both ways). Finding out what might please them, and in this case, get them (or their parents) to buy things is an even more delicate business, one that should give people more appreciation for the likes of Maksymilian Faktorowicz.

But Patrinos does not get to speak for all girls, and while her cartoon has garnered much attention, neither she nor Dr. Hains have presumably any actual market research backing their preferences, and, unlike Lego, they have no skin in the game. Hains' outlined prescription in her book, The Princess Problem, sounds like one part sensible critical thinking skills (people who want to sell you things don't always have your interests at heart) and two parts feminist indoctrination (must resist pink things).

The idea that girls might not make choices preferred by people such as Hains is ultimately very difficult to escape at the far end of the STEM pipeline. Anita Sarkeesian appears to have succeeded in bullying Intel into a renewed jab at the Sisyphean rock, as the New York Times reported they are about to spend $300 million on improving "diversity" within the company in the wake of the stupidly named GamerGate. I take this to mean ad campaigns to improve their public image, and a few efforts here and there to get more girls into STEM careers. It's enough to make one pine for the days of Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rogers, and his blunt letter to meddling nuns about the consequences of hiring on anything other than merit. It's important to remove structural impediments to women entering those careers, but it's also important to recognize that attempts to pink-ify the sciences in an effort to attract more women are also demeaning. If girl-Legos are broken and miss the point of Legos overall, then so are Intel's efforts.