Indeed, that’s one solution :-). After all, that’s the usual solution for those who are crazy enough to try it in real space, and a fair number are discouraged from performing further attacks.
Unfortunately, we want something that stops the crime from happening in the first place. And I’m not certain there could ever be enough enforcement to make slightly insane adolescents feel unsafe practicing little psychotic games from their own home.
(Catches a lot of adults, too. Amazing the number of people who feel it can’t be a “real” crime if they can do it from the comfort of their computer at home…)
It isn’t clear why Vivian is so joyless about games, or why she’s never wearing any shoes.
The first two critiques of the Vivian character: she isn’t smiling like a feeeeeeemale is supposed to, and she isn’t dressed how the author would like her to be.
Nice.
Welcome to BoingBoing.
That, I think, is most of the problem. Much like the people who attack feminism by attacking the least informed, most vitriolic voices, I think we’re mostly shitting on teenage kids with more mouth than brains.
Kids need to go through the Blunder Years, yeah. But they need to do it amongst their peers, and they need mentoring. Instead, they’re unleashing their weirdness via a pseudoanonymous medium, out into the world…and we treat it like it’s a super-serious problem.
I wish I remembered who wrote the piece about getting anonymous death threats via email, who then (rightly) called the cops, and in the end…it was this shy 12-year-old kid that they knew. And anyone who’s been in certain social media knows that, no matter what the political orientation, with a certain segment, “kill yourself” is the ultimate witless comeback.
I know I did shitty things as a teenager. I don’t know too many people I grew up with who didn’t. What we didn’t have back then was the Internet. Now, we did have call-ins to radio shows, access to CB radios (get off my lawn!), calling in to Walmart to page for Mike Rotch, and hell, even a Letter To The Editor or two. But thank GOD none of the sadistic “poetry” I wrote back then was preserved by the Wayback Machine!
Let’s put it this way: while I think people like Anita Sarkeesian are right to take death threats seriously, I think the approach of publicizing them is wrong, because my skeptical mind–one that remembers adolescence–pictures a couple of nerdy social outcast 14-year-olds laughing themselves silly when they see their hijinks making the rounds on sites like BB and HuffPo.
And if anyone’s seen me expressing frustration and anger on the subject, it’s because there are people who have decided to judge half the human race based on the actions of these idiots. And I mean, look, I don’t judge all women based on 14-year-old kids posting “Kill All Men” to their Tumblrs, surely you can do the same.
But we need to discuss the important issues!
Finally,
I’m not sure whether to be appalled that this story brought the expected wall of derpy comments from all sides, or whether to marvel at how clickbaity it is. Anyways, toodles, all.
Doubtless some of them are dumb teenagers. But certainly not all of them. There’ve been documentaries and books about them, and we see that there are lots of adults involved. And in most characterizations, they’re mildly obnoxious but clever rogues, champions of free speech. But somehow, the racism, sexism, homophobia, and general murderous bigotry have been glossed over.
There’s been a lot of lionization of the culture of anonymous imageboards in the last few years, and one thing that’s clear is that a lot of them are adults. Auernheimer has been treated as a hero by a number of Internet celebrities, who clearly glossed over his overt racism and his methodical harassment of Kathy Sierra. Much as they gloss over the culture of 4chan and 8chan.
I’ve been here a decade plus…my opinions don’t hold up so well because I’m not allowed to “fight” back when my opinion is attacked because 9 times out of 10 my opinion is the minority one. It’s either give up or get banned.
The world isn’t getting any worse. It is only getting more transparent. The meaningless “bad things” that weren’t visible before are seen now and it is suddenly The Problem.
True that. Also, taking a threat seriously should include the analysis and decision if it is an empty one to silently ignore, or an actual one to silently address.
On the other hand, when we widen the scope by the public relations aspect, “I am getting death threats” can be a pretty good visibility-increasing headlines-making move.
Triage is one of the keywords here. The black issues are what we cannot do anything with with the amount of resources we got. The red ones are the pressing and addressable ones, the yellow ones can wait for a while, and the green ones will take care of themselves.
Then there is the approach choice. Arguing your lungs out on The Internet is not likely to achieve much, especially in the case of the “soft” problems with mostly emotional bases. It can be even counterproductive if done wrong; the most rabid MRAs aren’t but the inversion of the most rabid feminists and both camps are strengthening each other, in the similar way as other conflicting ideologies do. But suggest to drop the emotions and take a break and then talk it over calmly and you become the bad guy for both of the sides.
Internet shoutouts achieve exactly nothing but squander the energy/time/resources needed elsewhere. (But they feel good for the moment and give each of the sides some shared outrage to unite over. And so they are with us to stay.)
Choose the marvel. It will do you better than anger inward-wise, and it achieves exactly the same outward-wise.
I’m replying to this, very late, because I’ve just seen it and it is an interesting post.
I am a member of the Quakers, a marginal religious group which tries to achieve what you lay down in your second paragraph. But I am by inclination a Zen Buddhist (there is no contradiction). Through Zen and introspection I have come to a view of the self which doesn’t agree with yours - for most people I believe the self is pretty invariant. What is variant and fragile to a greater or lesser degree is the story we tell ourselves about our self. When Robert Burns wrote “Oh would some power the giftie gi’e us to see ourselves as others see us” this is what he was talking about. We want to believe we are successful, well regarded, intelligent, and a whole lot of other things but for most of us most of the time we fail at this, and we tell ourselves comforting lies. Through Zen we have to unlearn the lies we tell ourselves, and then overcome selfhood. And no, I’m not there yet.
Your fourth paragraph on the tyranny of structurelessness rings several bells. I have always studied organisations to which I belong, and Freeman’s comment is spot on. Even Quaker meetings are prone to this; I have seen one where the real leadership was the “coven”, a group of elderly women, and because they were not chosen by the Meeting they could not be challenged. They made a number of quite seriously wrong decision and this only came to an end when they started to die off.
The anonymous internet has no way of establishing webs of trust or of testing its members. Therefore, it can destroy but it cannot create. In the Miyazaki film, Spirited Away, this mindset is represented by the anonymous masked character which Miyazaki has said represents the mindset of the male adolescent.
I am guessing Throwaway is one of these. His amazing statement about women in the workforce shows an utter inability to relate to women. In fact it was their enthusiastic participation in military work in both world wars that started the liberation of women, and after the wars people like Throwaway put a lot of effort into getting them out of the workforce again. My own daughters would be incredulous, then angry, if someone told them they had been forced into working.
I am skeptical that believing or wanting to believe anything ever actually helps people. Of course, it could be possible to regress this by claiming that I only “choose to believe” I am skeptical, but I am not convinced that this is effective either. The foundation seems to me to be that “image” tends to be an ineffective oversimplification when compared to “essence” - which could simply be what actions and/or methods one performs. As could be summed succinctly in “you are what you do”.
It seems to me that people can create by providing frameworks which enable people. I suspect that “trust” is merely an image one has of others, which is likely to be inaccurate in the same way as one’s image of one’s own self would be. Is there any way for me to know to what extent I know another? Perhaps we are separate bubbles of activity in this world, or emergent properties of the same process. What certainty is there, apart from choosing a particular arbitrary frame of reference?
That’s attributing to the critiques elements that don’t exist. The critique pointed out apparent joylessness in a fictional character who supposedly ‘just wants to play games’. There’s no ‘females are supposed to be this way’. Games are this particular character’s fundamental raison d’etre, and yet she is rarely portrayed as actually having fun playing them.
The shoelessness, meh, I haven’t seen that many examples of the Vivian character to know if it’s standard, but it is also a potentially interesting semiotic comment that has nothing to do with what people “would like her to be” but rather what shoelessness projects. It’s variously interpretable. To me it reads as comfortable at-home-ness (somewhat ironically counterbalanced by her joylessness). To others it may read as lack of mobility or freedom, or diminutiveness.
More informative would be to think about what led you to impute those particular elements on the critique, when they were so clearly not the intent.
That doesn’t sound like any kind of social, though. I don’t understand people who think that the connections don’t matter, although I see from the evidence that many anonists do.
Having had to survive the actions of those who did, I have no tolerance for the behaviour of the chans. It is still PTSD inducing even if they don’t intend to act on it.
There is a possible interpretation that she looks joyless because she just wants to play games while others insist on her getting involved in their sociopolitical fights.
Explaining such subjectivity-driven iconographies is a good way to kill time while drinking with buddies, but there is no way to make sure the result you get is anywhere close to reliable. If there is a reliable one at all.
Here’s the story of how Vivian was born (for the sake of brevity, I’m providing a link rather than pasting the full image. One of the relevant parts is here:
…and one of the initial images seems to have been porn of Vivian.
I think it’s important to point out the obvious: Vivian is not an actual girl or a gamer; she’s a two-dimensional mascot who represents the interests of people like 4Chan as they attempt to counter the critiques of misogyny in games and among gamers. The fact that a good amount of money was raised for women in gaming is significant, but doesn’t hide the fact that this money and the campaign in general were specifically designed to defeat these arguments and provide cheap credibility. Vivian is just tired of all these SJWs trying to rope her into their battles. She and real girls like her (i.e. fictional girls who oppose fake gamers like the real Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian) are the victims of people like Zoe Quinn, and wish she would just let things carry on as they have been.
If she’s not happy with the games that are out there, Vivian just makes her own games. Boom, take that misogyny. What she doesn’t do is criticise misogynistic elements in games, because what’s important is that she has her own voice - within the parameters set by 4Chan. She loathes dishonesty and hypocrisy, which probably explains why she’s so miserable all the time - it’s kind of what she stands for.
This is true to an extent, but when Vivian is designed for a specific purpose with a stated personality and motivations (and her development is recorded for posterity), it is easier to explain what she stands for.
