it isn't but "articulating some vague anti-system sentiment and chasing clout" is a part of almost all subcultural ideologies at this point https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1355129456009080833

in practice what this often leads to is a sort of free-floating suspicion of "the elites" coupled with -- when push comes to shove -- an emphasis on libertarian populism even for ostensibly left-wing groups

https://bostonreview.net/politics/william-callison-quinn-slobodian-coronapolitics-reichstag-capitol

this isn't entirely new https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1354814237839790087

but at the same time the cumulative impact of various social trends since the 90s (in particular the 2008 crash), technological trends (databases over narratives), and cultural trends (the 'cynical romanticism' of social networks) take it to new levels

in a way this is also a great test of the hypothesis of how much of it is Trump-related. Trump, especially at the beginning, acted as a kind of gathering point for this energy because of his unique abilities to be a "galaxy brain" politician

https://aelkus.github.io/eris/2020/03/14/indifference.html

but now that Trump has left office and been perma-banned from social media you see how much it both preceded him and will survive him

this in particular is the #1 reason why I tend to dismiss most subcultural panic stories https://twitter.com/akaashkolluri/status/1355232887096954885

what people overwhelmingly fail to understand is why so many of these stories are essentially the same. its not because of some dumb thing like "all of this can be traced to a nefarious plot by the Hacker Known As GamerGate"

it's that the same recurring personality, template conflict, and set of iconography seems to recur constantly https://aelkus.github.io/culture/2019/11/08/idle.html

each conflict also comes down to the same chaotic struggle to manage the passions of the e-droogs, cope with the contingency of viral environments, and calculate how to play the game at scale at machine speed https://aelkus.github.io/theory/2019/11/27/trinity.html

that these things all look the same is part of why writers like to reach for conspiratorial narratives (a conspiracy to fight a conspiracy?) but this coupled with the recurring aspect of alienation and distrust is simply an atmospheric feature

it's not the end of the world -- Qanon is really the only subcultural panic story that I think actually deserves panic -- but the cumulative impact of perpetual insurgencies over time has not really been great (uh, look around if you're American)

It's not about the inherent merits of the targets -- at the outset in the GG era I was, to put it mildly, not really so big on woke or video game journalism -- but that almost all of this energy is purely destructive and generally fails to leave something better and lasting

We're locked on this course, though, really. "The system" -- whatever it means to e-insurgents -- isn't likely to change in the way all of these groups want. And what exactly they want -- or if they want anything at all besides a quasi-parental figure as a target -- is debatable

this is part of why I unironically think bashing "solutionism" has outlived usefulness. Some kind of big exogenous change, whether its Mars colonization or @antimule's unique 3D printing of cat-human hybrids policy proposal, would be nice

because alternatively the pent-up energy will go into fomenting digital jacqueries 24/7. and i'd rather place a bet on some kind of exogeneous factor that kicks can down the road than ability of system to solve all "root cause" grievances in time for the next Twitch stream