Setting the Stage for a Post-Gamergate Future

What the movement’s past can teach us about where it’s heading, and how its legacy can become but a distant memory.

One of Gamergate’s most-prominent figureheads, Jeremy ‘TheQuartering Hambly. Courtesy of TheQuartering on YouTube.

We’re almost seven years through since Gamergate was sprung into being, and it’s safe to say the media hasn’t fully learned its lessons yet. A movement that catalyzed the gaming community’s most misogynistic tendencies became a thread of critique later extended to the broader cultural landscape, one whose partisans deem to be deliberately hamstrung by political correctness–it is of intuition to deem the current state of political discourse but a natural progression from Gamergate’s foundational rhetoric, but arriving at such a conclusion always has become a convenience far-too-many are willing to take.

I’ve written about the movement plenty–back when its claws had become newly-sharpened in the wake of Alec Holowka’s suicide in August of 2019, the conceit had been that the movement never really died, and mostly goes in and out of slumber depending on if the cultural circumstances are opportune for its involvement. Adamant as I was in proving that this was the case, a recent emergent trend in reframing the conversation with the context of America’s long-standing systemic issues in mind forced me to reconsider–it doesn’t matter what online animosity…