ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a tweet from Zoe Quinn (Figure 2.1), video game developer and one of the primary targets of a ferocious campaign of online abuse known as Gamergate. As Quinn’s tweet suggests, she is amongst a number of other women targeted by Gamergate to the point where online abuse has become the ‘background hum’ of their lives, which they are now forced to live ‘differently’. Gamergate was the culmination
of a series of incidents within the gaming industry, and in the field of informational technology more generally, indicative of the misogynist hostility that has greeted the perceived ‘intrusion’ of women and more diverse users. Through an analysis of Gamergate, the chapter emphasises the political dimensions of online abuse as a perpetuation of the exclusion of groups that have typically been unwelcome in the public sphere. The particular technical affordances of online platforms are inextricably bound up with such collective projects of abuse in the way that they sponsor cultures and practices of harassment while inhibiting victim or bystander intervention. The chapter begins with an examination of the political relevance of
the public/private divide before applying it to the internet and social media, focusing in particular on the culture of anonymous online sociality sustained by 4chan, Reddit and 8chan and their clash with the heterogeneous publics of social media. The chapter emphasises how the misuse of personal and private information, so central to online abuse, is made possible through the technological configurations of social media, against a backdrop of stigma and discrimination in which the personal information of subordinate groups is particularly vulnerable to misappropriation. Drawing on Beck’s (1997) notion of the ‘subpolitical’, the chapter characterises Gamergate as structured by an implicit politics of aggrieved masculine entitlement and sexism. While highly personal, online abuse is also fundamentally political, and suggestive of an ongoing struggle for control and dominance within online publics.
