The Verge PC Build: The Aftermath of a Harassment Campaign
A harassment campaign against a Vox Media reporter is again in full effect.
Some topics to abord on YouTube are naturally more volatile than others. In the case of PC hardware, there are far too many know-it-alls and online vigilantes that chomp at the bits to set the record straight if and when the slightest deviation from the script is sighted. This is what happened to Verge journalist Stefan Etienne when he tried to build a PC on camera, and it’s a probable cause for why he now no longer works there anymore.
To get a good sense of why that matters, one has to look at the grander PC hardware landscape on YouTube–namely, that it is dominated by straight white dudes. LinusTechTips, JayZTwoCents, Hardware Unboxed, Paul’s Hardware–you get the idea. The straight white dude variety has become synonymous with the PC space, and this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since the average income of a white family household is a far cry from most other minorities in America — where most of these channels happen to spring up from — allowing them to populate this segment more prominently just by sheer possession of more argent de poche. So when a black man waltzes in to participate in a white man’s ordeal, things are bound to get dirty, and dirty did they get.
