The Hivemind Swarmed

A conversation with oral historian David Wolinsky about Gamergate and its aftermath.

David Wolinsky is a journalist, oral historian, and, with his new book The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet, a published author. He is also the only friend whose face I've never seen.

That someone who spent a decade compiling an oral history of Gamergate would avoid social media and refuse to buy a webcam might seem incongruous. Another way to look at it is that it’s a totally reasonable reaction to spending 10 years delving into one of the ugliest, most toxic chapters in the internet’s history. 

In 2014, in response to Gamergate and what he perceived as a dearth of thoughtful coverage about it, Wolinksy started Don’t Die, a sprawling series of interviews about video game culture, the social internet, and how power and inequality manifest in creative communities online. The work, comprising some 600 interviews, is now preserved by Stanford.

A subset of the conversations that came out of the Don’t Die project,The Hivemind Swarmed is in many ways only nominally about Gamergate. Wolinsky dispenses with how the saga unfolded in a taut introduction. He is not interested in rehashing whether it was really about “ethics in gaming journalism” (no) or whether that was a convenient smokescreen for a targeted harassment campaign against people who dared to demand more from their community (yes). Instead, The Hivemind Swarmed probes the knock-on effects of Gamergate, and what it says about how we interact online today. 

Last week, I spoke with Wolinsky over Zoom—audio only, naturally—about working on Don’t Die and his perspective on Gamergate and its aftermath. It wound up being much more of a conversation than an interview, which was probably to be expected given that we’re two writer-editor-friends who have both spent a lot of time working on the internet and thinking about the internet. The following is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation.

What does it mean to you to be an oral historian? How is that distinct from journalism? And how did you make that transition?

It was a very gradual process, and it’s ongoing. I’ve never done anything in my life or career like I did when I started doing these interviews that led to the book. I’ve always been a fan of oral history. I didn’t realize how truly niche it was until I was trying to pitch editors in this lane, and for any variety of reasons, editors were not sharing my curiosity. 

A lot of the people I had been interviewing over the years didn’t really understand either. Like, “Why do you want to talk to me? I'm nobody.” Usually I found that the people who are most dubious that they are being interviewed have the most to talk about. They weren’t used to being listened to. In a weird way, there was a version of that going on for me—trying to pitch stuff around, not really finding any takers. 

Part of the way I was explaining this work to people was sending them links to these oral history books by Shales and Miller, an oral history of Saturday Night Live and an oral history of ESPN. They would do these long, deeply reported, multi-voiced things with a lot of different narrators to speak to a bigger cultural phenomenon. I was telling people that’s what I was doing, because I didn’t really know what else to call a journalism project that’s a bunch of interviews with no real editorializing on my part. It is an oral history. 

I picked up this line from, I think, the chair of the Berkeley Oral History Center: “The difference between journalism and oral history is that journalism is about understanding what's happening right now and oral history is about understanding modernity.” Which sounds a little like saying the same thing twice. But I think it’s about what versus why. 

You spent a decade working on this and Don’t Die. What is it about Gamergate, as well as the social internet and gaming in general, that made you want to start investigating in the first place, and that kept you with it for so long?

I started Don’t Die as a reaction to Gamergate. I’m a huge nerd. I’ve been around video games for forever. I had been on the internet pretty much since the very beginning of the web, and I’ve always been a big lurker. I’ve always liked this part about the internet, where you can go and hang out and see what other people are talking about.

When Gamergate started, everybody had the expectation that it was just going to blow over. It was such a radioactive topic. Don’t feed the trolls, right? Ignoring it, hoping it would blow over is, I think, a totally normal human reaction. But it was being written about as, “That's just gamers for you. Gamers are the worst. It’s such a misogynist backwater part of the internet.”

I helped start The AV Club’s Games section, so I was aware of some of the ways media can be resistant to covering games. There was a big fear of losing cool points. I’m not some Johnny Videogame-seed planting ideas that everyone should care about video games. But I always saw an opportunity to do more to care more about video games. 

After Gamergate, I realized that I had covered games but I didn’t really know anyone who worked at some of these big companies. And I really didn’t know what the responsibility of a video game company should be when there’s a hate campaign happening on Twitter, supposedly in defense of game companies and their right to make sexist video games. It felt like there was this big silence from game companies, which was the same as in media. It was a bit of a mask slip. Like, maybe this whole thing was entirely hollow, caring about video games if the companies don’t care about their audience, or don’t feel any sort of sense of responsibility for having misogynist fans. 

When you start a thing, you don’t really think, “I’m going to be doing this for 10 years.” If I’d understood I was an oral historian 10 years ago, it would have been a little less complicated. Because people I interviewed would be like, “So, is it about ethics and gaming journalism?” And I would be like, “I actually don’t give a shit about any of that.” It’s not about which conspiracy theory is true. It’s about the damage being done here, and what it means, and what we’re going to do about it.

That was something I appreciated about the book. You spend some time in the introduction explaining the beats of Gamergate. And then you say, “In a way, this story is not actually that salient to what I’m about to talk about. It’s about what Gamergate has wrought.”

It’s 10 years later. What you saw happening in Gamergate happens in communities online all the time. It certainly feels like—and you make a very persuasive case through the oral history—this was the first instance of what would become a feature of the social internet.

That was one of the other questions I had. People were saying nothing like this had ever happened before—like gamers were patient zero of figuring out how to ruin the internet. At least in the US, over the last four to eight years, we’ve forgotten what the word “unprecedented” really means, because we hear it so many times an hour. But I think what was going on with Gamergate was that we now had a language to talk about a lot of these things that we didn’t before.

People forget that we had no language in whatever it is we mean by “video game culture” for talking about this stuff. Obviously, some of it is misogyny. Some of it is the ways video games are embarrassingly regressive. But people didn’t necessarily know that other people felt that way too or noticed these other things going on. I remember this being a big revelation for some of the people I talked to. The fact that I was asking questions about this stuff meant that I saw what they saw. There was this feeling of, “I thought it was just me who noticed.”

My real hope with the book and me talking about this is not to come across as if I am the one with the definitive point of view. I just felt like, I'm so ignorant and curious about all this stuff that I’m going to bother strangers about it and see what they think and try to figure out what I think.

You have a chapter that examines the intersection between Gamergate and Me Too. I think what you said about not having a common language is true of Me Too as well. Obviously, it’s not like people became aware of sexism and abuse when the hashtag started trending on Twitter. But it did create a conversation where more people were speaking from the same lexicon, which made a huge difference. 

With the opioid crisis, too, right? Or Covid. These things exposed flaws in other systems around us. It didn’t cause them. It made us aware of them, and it made certain things worse. Maybe these are not the most perfect comparisons. But it’s almost like in the last decade there’s been some sort of awakening to these types of patterns. Or maybe I was too young before to really know. I do think a lot about Gamergate was unprecedented. But it also didn’t spring up out of nowhere. 

I found it really interesting when people brought up The WELL as an example of a space that avoided some of the toxicity of online spaces. Although you then complicate that with an interview saying, “Yeah, but there was this women-only community and a creep got in, and we all had to band together to kick him out.” It’s like we never get the toxicity out of these spaces, no matter how well intentioned they are.

That’s the awkward thing about the book. A person who does an oral history is a person who mainly asks questions. Another oral historian colleague of mine said, “When people come and interview you for a story, their job is to try to simplify it. Never forget that an oral historian’s job is to complicate it.” Oral histories are ultimately scrapbooks. You don’t read a scrapbook to get answers. It’s mainly to remember what a time was like. 

I don’t claim to have any more answers now than I did 10 years ago. I’ve certainly benefited from hearing so many people talk about it for so long. But it comes from wanting to stay optimistic about the internet. 

I don’t know that we as a species have the luxury of pessimism. But I don’t know that you can build an internet or a world where bad actors can’t get in. I don’t want to sound like I’m defending anyone who was attacking women during Gamergate, but sometimes you do switch teams. There was someone who posted on Reddit about quitting Gamergate and realizing what an agent of chaos it all was. Realizing it was a subversion of what the internet does, which is that it brings you with your people. 

Gamergate defied logic, and people were not necessarily there for logical reasons. Sometimes they’re there for the chaos. That’s one of the things Twitter accelerated. I think what we all hold out hope for is the potential of what we know the internet can be to outweigh and outshine the horrors.

In a way, it seems like the darkness that gets in is also a direct symptom of what's good about the internet, namely, bringing people together. 

Scott Galloway talks a lot about this crisis of meaning and belonging, especially among young men. When you grow up isolated and feeling like you’re losing ground to other people around you, rightly or wrongly, you’ll cling to wherever you find belonging. And if you happen to find belonging in a 4chan forum, you’ll go all in on it, because at least then you’ve found your tribe. That’s not to excuse it at all. But I wonder if that adds another layer, and I wonder if that points to the solution. I don’t know that it does…

I just started reading The Anxious Generation. I haven’t come across a Gamergate mention yet. But I think we’ve reached a critical mass of awareness where a lot of people are feeling like, “What the fuck happened over the last 20 years with the internet? What is it doing to us? What is it doing to our kids?”

That said, if you were to talk to my mom, she would be like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, the internet is fine.” Maybe there’s just something about where we hang out versus where other people hang out. I think this is what happened with Gamergate, too. It depends on where you were and what you were paying attention to, and who, and for how long. 

I sent [former VP of Microsoft game publishing] Ed Fries an email in the middle of the reporting for the book. I asked him, “Were there people at the vanguard of games who were mindful of sexism, misogyny, racism in games at the time? Were there people aware of it back then?”

He said [quoting from the book]: “If I understand your question, it’s about whether people who make stuff consider the broader implications of the things they are making. And I’d say that my experiences match those of the people you interviewed in that they often don't. Early on at Microsoft, the attitude was that we should just build the best products we can… I do think there is a responsibility for creators to consider the potential impacts of their creations. This has always been a problem with technological advancement, whether it's Facebook or the atomic bomb, and video games are part of that same advancement that brings progress in one area and problems in another.”

Earlier, you mentioned that one of the reasons to write this book was to try to understand Gamergate better. Do you feel like you understand anything better now? What do you understand better?

My knee-jerk is to say no, I haven’t learned anything, because it’s so complicated. This is when I get embarrassed doing these interviews, because it must have melted into my bones in such a way that I forget. You spend 10 years with tunnel vision. 

I think a big thing for men was learning, maybe for the first time, that their voice wasn’t really needed in something, or that other people needed to step forward and be heard. There was this calculus that happened 10 years ago for a lot of white dudes: How do I be supportive and not hog the spotlight? How do I help from where I am?

Maybe what I’ve learned and try to hold on to is that everything you come across online is probably way more complicated than it's being presented. People involved probably feel more complicated about it.  But also, I think it really was for a lot of people the first time they learned that what happens on the internet is part of real life.

What is ongoing for me now is trying to keep a good attitude and some optimism about it. And I think the way that’s done is through connecting. It definitely is for me. The original impulse for social media is right. You feel less alone talking to other people.

I guess I’m also at the start of another learning process: How do you stay hopeful? Which is a weird other thing that I’ve talked with other oral historians about. For a long time, maybe from the Obama era onward, and the darker years that followed, people had this expectation that journalism should provide hope. I don’t know if that’s true. That certainly has never been the point for me. I want to get into the weeds with weird, hard questions that other people are not being asked. I think that is the task with oral history. But maybe the point of oral history is to try to give other people hope. You take these stories down, people feel heard immediately. It may not be a perfect start, but it’s a starting point. 

I don’t think any answer I could give for why this interested me so much would be satisfying or 100 percent true, because you can’t really explain why something stirs in you. It’s just that something got stirred, and then you want to do something that makes you feel better or that sets it to rest. I don’t think these things will ever be set to rest, though. I think I did what I can. 

Some people ask me, “How do we fix Twitter?” I’m like, “I don’t know, man. I think this is as much on you as it is on me.”

So maybe I haven’t learned anything. I’m still asking questions that don't have answers.