It’s like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.
But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky feminazi SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?
At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these “anti-woke” crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?
Nerd or geek culture was quite reactionary for a long time now. It’s a product of the (predominantly white male) western bourgeoisie and labour aristocrats, and its links to racism and sexism go quite deep.
This 3-page article (page 1, page 2, page 3) does a good job at analyzing these cultural aspects. It’s a very interesting read.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.
Our investigation proceeds through three core concepts / tropes prevalent in geek-centered visual narratives:
- “geek melodrama” as a means of rendering geek protagonists sympathetically,
- white male “geek rage” against women and ethnic minorities for receiving preferential treatment from society, which relates to the geek’s often raced, usually misogynistic implications for contemporary constructions of masculinity, and
- “simulated ethnicity,” our term for how geeks read their sub-cultural identity as a sign of markedness or as a put-upon status equivalent to the markedness of a marginalized identity such as that of a person of color.
We analyze these tropes via an historical survey of some key moments in the rise of geek media dominance: the early-20th century origins of geekdom and its rise as an identifiable subculture in the 1960s, the mainstreaming of geek masculinity in the 1970s and 80s via blockbuster cinema and superhero comics, and the postmodern permutations of geekdom popularized by Generation X cultural producers, including geek/slacker duos in “indie” cinema and alternative comics.
Nerds have always been “apolitical” and nazis were always nerds (seriously, look at some of the shit Himmler got up to, dude was a massive LARPing loser)
So any “apolitical” group is vulnerable to fascists, because being openly anti-fascist is a political statement, and demanding a fascist leave the group is also a political statement. But trying to “find a compromise” isn’t “political.”
So fascists infiltrating a group will always test the waters, saying things that are offensive, but juuuuust short of the dreaded “political.” Usually in the form of insisting “It’s not political, it’s just how it is.” (insert statement about the absurdity of the anti-semite here).
So you get facists constantly normalising fascist ideas, while acting like anyone calling them out is being “political” and therefore trying to “ruin” a fun hobby forum (such as a gaming forum) by “talking about politics.” Over time decent people will just leave a group that tolerates fascists, and in turn, they use the apolitical’s fear of things becoming “political” to make disagreeing with them a “political” statement.
This generally only works in communities full of privileged people who can afford to not have an ideology and don’t feel a need to care about things other than their latest distraction/treats, and people who generally don’t get out too much. So Gamers are a perfect cross section of those two most of the time.
Yes. Any space that is not actively anti-fascist will become fascist.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
- Michael B. Tager / iamragesparkle
I would hardly say that nerds are always apolitical, many nerds are some of the biggest leftists out there, with even massive personalities like George Lucas personally gushing over the Soviet Union while making a not so subtle commentary on the United State’s imperialism.
The sad part is that Nazis and fascists often hijack or force their way into communities that were originally leftist, or for leftist media, and use it for themselves. Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Star Trek, Helldivers, etc etc.
Sorry, I meant more that internet nerd culture in general has always focused on “I don’t want to talk politics, I just want to talk about this cool game etc.”
The people who make the media may not be apolitical, but a lot of people, especially in the west, demand an apolitical reading of any and all media. That’s how these groups get infiltrated, though Sickos below put it much better.
I would kind of push back on that first point though, as politics has always been part of the conversation. In my experience the ones demanding “apolitical media” and the ones saying “I don’t want politics in my XYZ” are usually the Nazis masquerading with faux-care, because to them the existence of women, black people, lgbt people, and minorities is “political”.
Most nerds seem more then eager to discuss the politics of certain media, however the same can be said for the fascists frothing at the mouth to infect the conversation or shut it down in the guise of being apolitical.
Sadly, I would agree with you and sicko that this is how it usually goes with media, but I will say that I hardly think it’s most nerds, as the ones that talk loudest and end up occupying once good spaces are usually the Nazis. Which in turn attracts more Nazis and so on.
gamergate (2014) was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right.
I wouldn’t say that it has? At least not unilaterally.
I’d lay the blame squarely on capital’s doorstep. Capital runs most major internet forums, and capital decides which views are platformed and which are muted. Fascism and capital go hand in hand. Rage gets more clicks, which means more ad revenue.
We’re both on sites loaded with nerds who are comrades. Nerds are not at all inherently fascist. The terminally online are not inherently fascist. However, “Internet/Nerd culture” was doomed to become fascist when it became a packaged commodity. The most successful “nerds” were also the most ruthlessly capitalist. Wozniak vs Jobs and all that.
Inceldom also has a part to play in this, but, again, this is largely a product of capital. They’re useful idiots. Like LBJ put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Lonely men are convinced women are to blame, that women are garbage, and they become clients and, frankly, weapons. There are a lot of lonely nerds out there thanks to the isolation that capitalism encourages.
You say this change happened in the mid-2010s; putting that in context, social media as we know it really only started taking off in the late oughts. Reddit and Facebook were like 2005-ish, and didn’t hit their strides for a few years. Facebook’s IPO was 2012. Capital.
And, finally, nobody’s immune to propaganda. It’s not just “nerd culture” that’s taken this turn, it’s a society-wide poison.
Honestly though, the direct direct direct answer to your question as phrased, “what caused internet/nerd culture to go full-on fascist [in the mid-2010s]?” is just GamerGate. That’s it. That was kinda the moment that all the right-leaning nerds who hated women that wouldn’t date them realized there were other right-leaning nerds that also hated women, and they very publicly organized around it, formed forums about it, and basically created the modern alt-right.
Before that, like, the loudest nerd voices on the internet were like Wil Wheaton whose core tenet was “Don’t be a dick”, and the loudly anti-copyright Cory Doctorow. They got drowned out by the forces of reaction.
Yep, gamergate, Steve Bannon and algorithms starting to trend towards the inflammatory.
Also the SJWs, hot off their cultural kill streak, finally extended too far with demanding pronouns. It’s ivory tower level privilege to demand the world bend around you, and then do it again, for every single person who identifies as whatever they feel like. The “I identify as an attack helicopter” really summed up the zeitgeist and capped the cultural narrative. That was the moment where the right crystalized into a mirror to point out the pronoun lunacy - and it absolutely is, if you think otherwise, get over yourself. Nowhere in anywhere, ever, do we see people just make ridiculous demands on people like that and it EVER work. Like, is every meet and greet, business networking party just gonna start with 2 hours of writing down everyone’s him/hers/zlers/swishes/a12x2 whatever nonsense? No. Never. Sorry. In a perfect world, maybe, but we got a lot of work to do before even that level of perfection can be reached, I’m not thrilled about it either.
what are you even on about lol. I don’t even know where to start in this diatribe, but I find the “there’s no time to ask everyone pronouns” part funny when corporate events already spend a ton of time on ‘team-building’ exercises and affirmations.
You know also you can just ask people these before the event?
>lemm.ee
>‘ivory tower level privilege’ (to request proper acknowledgement; when I know you’d throw a father-fucking fit if someone questioned your identity and where you deem yourself to fit within the social hierarchy)
>‘the right had a point’ (about it being ‘lunacy’ to request proper acknowledgement from crackers dead set on disrespecting those with alternate pronouns) (isn’t respect supposed to be a core tenet of fascist ideologies, you prick?)
>helicopter memes (yup, you’re just a fascist)
ok settler, go back to /pol/. Everyone who uses Outlook in my workplace has their pronouns at the bottom of their signature block, you’re just DELIBERATELY being a shithead.
There is the nature of what gets clicks. Clicks of inflamitory exaggerations of what Anita Sarkesian was up to. She would make a presentations for corporations to tell them that women are a market for games and they should be appealed to. Somehow in reactionary brain this meant that games can’t be made for 20 something manchildren. People just straight up lied about all kinds of shit and made fun of hot takes with 5 upvotes on twitter as if this meant something.
Incels and women hating are and will lead one farther down the road of reactionary beliefs
