Crash Override Quotes

Algorithms are not arbiters of objective truth and fairness simply because they're math.

What they get wrong is precisely this false belief that online prejudice is easily compartmentalized or categorized into, say, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism when really it flows freely between these various bigotries.

The Easiest Way to Fuck Everything Up Is to Ignore Black Women

The Easiest Way to Fuck Everything Up Is to Ignore Black Women

Every rose has its thorn, and every news story has its comments section.

It’s a shame that a lot of us use the internet only to talk shit in comments sections and check our email when we have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.

I felt like if I could look at the worst humanity had to offer, I’d be prepared for anything and nothing could shock or scare me. I didn’t want to be pure; I wanted to go on adventures and roll around in the kind of filth that Oscar Wilde and Hunter S. Thompson had written about.

You cannot separate the concerns of a society from that society’s art.

GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.

Most of the activists and survivors I know... knew the loudest, most hyperbolic garbage will rise to the top if left unchecked. We knew enough people in charge either don't understand, don't care, or are part of the problem.

Seeing people who personally profited off the abuse against me being selected for Trump's cabinet scares the hell out of me. I don't know how to express to anyone the extremely weird issue of having your personal trauma wrapped up in international trauma.

When running late, "it's OK." When I have a million things to do and not enough time to do it, "it's OK." When I get stuck in a fantasy about plane crashes or normal girls, "it's OK." It's my mantra when I need to override the voice that tells me nothing I do is OK.

Well-meaning writers who were looking to expose and condemn what he had been doing to me and to the dozens of targets he moved on to afterward wrote a bunch of stories about his shoddy reporting and social media harassment of abuse victims. The problem is that you fundamentally cannot shame someone who is proud of what they are doing. Press coverage doesn’t result in bans or removals from services; it gives bad actors and whatever private, sensitive, or fictional information they’re spreading about their targets a visibility boost to a new audience.

He overrides the warning buzzer, jams the stereo over to Taxiscan, which cruises all the taxi-driver frequencies listening for interesting traffic. Can't understand a fucking word. You could buy tapes, learn-while-you-drive, and learn to speak Taxilinga. It was essential, to get a job in that business.

In criminal proceedings, laymen might assume it's one person versus another, but it's not—it's the state versus the defendant. That means that you, the victim, do not have anyone on your side by default, while defendants have lawyers who are eager to tear into you from all angles. You are an asset to the state's case, not the other way around.

Everything I have, everything good in my life, I owe to the internet’s ability to empower people like me, people who wouldn’t have a voice without it. All the garbage that is thrown at us is enabled by this broken machine, yet I firmly believe that the internet is also the best tool we have to address the problem. To the uninitiated, it might seem easy to blame the very things that make the internet great for the rampant abuse, but that reaction would be alarmist and simply incorrect. One might see the relative anonymity of the online world as something that allows people to do heinous things to one another without accountability, but anonymity is also what can give isolated teenagers like I was the ability to talk about their queerness without fear of being outed.

In all my time as an activist, I've never seen a single instance where the people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they were the 'bad guys'. There is always a righteous undertone. Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a 'villain' provides the attacker with the chance to be a 'hero'. You can rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something much larger than either of you. That's the key ingredient in the magic trick that, in the abusers' minds, turns screaming at a game developer's father through a telephone into defending an entire artistic medium from censorship.

But going offline forever, leaving behind everything I’ve built, wasn’t an option I ever considered. When people ask me where I’m from, I usually say, “The internet,” and I’m only kidding a little bit. This is my home, and I wasn’t about to be driven out of the only place I’ve ever felt like that, even if it was a digital one. This isn’t a story about how we become evacuees. This is a story about how we become resilient.

Victims are told not to say anything about the proceedings, because talking openly about your case can annoy your judge and benefit the defence. Abuses are not really known for their ability to practice this level of self-restraint, giving them control over there narrative around your case—and since court cases are frequently considered newsworthy events, this can give them a whole new platform to recruit more supporters.

Normal people don’t want me to honestly answer the question “What’s up?” Not many people are equipped to handle answers like “A fanatical juice salesman who thinks his semen is literally magic spent thousands of dollars to hire a private investigator to hang outside my old apartment and dig through my trash because he thinks he might find something to get me arrested.” And it remains incredible that that statement isn’t hyperbole.

We were cautious in how we set it up, because we were extremely afraid of creating yet another shitty institution that would fail to help people. The ethos had to come first, because our strategies had to come from the right place. The biggest thing we felt we’d lost when we were targeted was our sense of control—even when people meant to help, too often they’d do something that would accidentally end up making things worse. Furthermore, some of the offers of help we’d gotten were stressful, since they came from strangers and were indistinguishable

I’d never coded before, and I’d always thought games were huge undertakings by thousands of people in a big studio. Little did I know that a major part of coding involves Googling to find documentation, code snippets, and communities that help people fix common problems. Free information and guidance aren’t limited to programming, either. The Open Source movement makes tremendous amounts of knowledge and resources available online for free, and some major universities are making classes available for free on the internet. It’s a shame that a lot of us use the internet only to talk shit in comments sections and check our email when we have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.

Maybe you'll express an opinion on a political issue and it will get noticed by that wrong person. Maybe you'll wake up to find that a company you once bought shoes from online was careless with security, and now your personal information is in the hands of anyone who bothers to look. Maybe someone who has a grudge against you is relentless enough to post and promote bogus information about you online—stuff that can never be erases. Maybe you're a member of a demographic that is constantly targeted—you're a woman, you're black, you're trans, or any combination of these or other marginalised groups—and someone who wants to get people like you off "their" internet decides to take it upon them to make your life hell. Online abuses target countless people every year for any number of arbitrary reasons.

The benefits go beyond research and influence. We lack comprehensive historical records of internet culture and patterns of abuse. Those of us on the front lines tend to have institutional memory, but archiving this information would be extremely beneficial for tracking patterns and mechanisms in different settings. The kind of coordinated mob abuse that I went through was the same kind of abuse the women who exposed #EndFathersDay experienced was the same kind of abuse the infosec community instigated against Kathy Sierra in 2007 and so on. Some of the actors are even the same. This data could be invaluable to sociologists, technologists, and historians alike. However, due to the extremely personal nature of this information, the details of how it’s obtained, who obtains it, and what is done with it must be well thought out.

Moving the focus away from the perpetrator and onto the actual effects not only allows the journalist to report on the issue at hand just as it would if they gave press to the abuser, but it grants additional context and truth that would be otherwise lost. It pulls the issue out of the hypothetical by putting the harm to faces and names and lives, and allows people to feel the reality of it instead of getting lost in jargon, theory, and debate. It avoids the cognitive backfire effect that comes along with signal boosting lies to refute them by properly contextualizing disinformation and harm. Beyond that, there’s wisdom, strength, and resilience to be found in the stories of people impacted by hatred and living in spite of it that you won’t find spilling out of the mouth of disingenuous ratfuckers. We don’t just hear about the abuse or the hate, we hear about what comes next and what we need to do to move beyond it.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power.

After a few months of giving each other space so we could each do our own soul searching, I got a text from him asking if I'd like to smoke weed and go to a Hello Kitty art exhibit. How can you NOT reconcile with someone in that environment?

While online abuse can happen to anyone, it is by no means an equal-opportunity occurrence. We're dragged the same sort of cultural baggage that we live with offline into online spaces like a gross piece of toilet paper stuck to our shoes.

As a queer, feminine person making unconventional games in an industry known for being at best oblivious and at worst overtly hostile to women, I've had to make games while tap-dancing through a political minefield over my identity, occasionally falling face-first onto explosives.

My romantic rejections of industry veterans have severely hurt my career—saying no to the wrong man has led to exclusion from professional events, lost contract gigs, my name's removal from my own work, and worse.

So do you go to the police or not? Well, if you don't, people will claim that the abuse wasn't real because theres no police report about it. If you do enter the system, you have to accept that all of what I've detailed in this chapter is what you're facing; be willing to sign up for the years-long process in the event that case actually goes to trial; know you have little chance of seeing justice because legislation and law enforcement have not yet caught up with the pace of online crime; and, even if you re successful, accept that a court order may not do much to stop an obsessive abuser.

In some situations, the attempts to "do something about this" can directly stress the person being targeted or make their situation worse. One example from my own experience is that people frequently screenshot and send me something horrible someone has said about me to give me a "heads-up" when I have purposefully reorganized my life to keep that stuff as far away from me as possible.

...when someone comes to me who possesses any traits that stray from what might appear in an American i950s-era sitcom, their identities are part of their abuse. They are targeted by certain people who want them to suffer for existing.

Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that's a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white.

I don't care if he posts about what he had for lunch sometimes; I want to know why that somehow gives him a free pass to post death threats on your service.

How do you tell someone that the people who could have stopped it saw what was happening to them and, even though you fought tooth and nail, were determined not to care?

Our creative genius is the fountainhead of originality. It fires our compulsion to evolve. It inspires us to challenge norms. Creative genius is about flying to new heights on untested wings. It is about the danger of crashing. It is amorphous, magical, unmeasurable and unpredictable…But we need our genius to bail ourselves out of the messes we continually get ourselves into. So, individually, we must override the cartel, set aside our herd longing for security through sameness and seek the help of our natural genius. Yours and mine.

Therein lies the most common trap we fall into when trying to make the internet a safer place: framing it as a war of good people versus bad people instead of looking at acceptable and unacceptable ways to treat each other. 'Good people' get off the hook for doing bad things, while 'bad people' aren't considered worth understanding or empathizing with and aren't encouraged to progress, evolve, and do better. The question isn't 'What the hell is wrong with those people?' It's 'What the hell is wrong with us?' Or even 'What the hell was wrong with me?

I thought I was the good guy. It might sound unbelievable, but most people in mobs believe this, even while they’re doing horrible things. In all my time as an activist, I’ve never seen a single instance where the people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they were the “bad guys.” There is always a righteous undertone. Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a “villain” provides the attacker with the chance to be a “hero.” You can rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something much larger than either of you.

When so much of online abuse is driven by a failure to empathize with someone on the other side of the screen, turning those who are abusive online into some unknowable, unstoppable force of nature is a damaging mind-set. If we don’t try to understand them on a human, personal level, then we are moving forward in the dark. By dubbing them “those people,” we are also explicitly setting ourselves apart as if we aren’t one of them and thus can’t be part of the problem. Therein lies the most common trap we fall into when trying to make the internet a safer place: framing it as a war of good people versus bad people instead of looking at acceptable and unacceptable ways to treat each other. “Good people” get off the hook for doing bad things, while “bad people” aren’t considered worth understanding or empathizing with and aren’t encouraged to progress, evolve, and do better.

Even if you stick mainly to mainstream sites, you've probably seen glimpses of the internet's underbelly in the comment section at the bottom of news articles. The article could be about local man saving a box of kittens from a burning building, but no matter: the comments will accuse him of hating dogs, setting the building on fire in the first place, and secretly being Barack Obama's Kenyan uncle.

For every community of angsty kids who pretend they are secretly vampires, there are seven different forums of white nationalists who sincerely believe that Jewish people are secretly vampires. For every Kiki and silly toy collectors community, there are forums full of dudes collecting upskirt photos of random women and girls who had no idea that they were about to become porn.

They shared elaborate fantasies about raping and murdering me, discussing the pros and cons of each. They talked about how to break into all of my accounts to try to find more ways to invade my privacy. They bragged about victories like flooding my game's page with hatred and nude photos of me and went so far as to create guides to share tactics on how best to ruin my life. They even orchestrated plans to donate to various charities specifically to make themselves look like concerned citizens and not a mob of people trying to get me killed. They build friendships and bonded with each other by reinforcing their dedication to the righteous cause of taking me down, reminding themselves at every turn but they were the good guys.

They start coordinating strategies to accomplish their goal, Sharing the information they've been able to glean and formulating plans. Attacking you becomes a participatory Game in which people try to one up each other in terms I have who can get to you the most. That first night, I was struck by how many of the threats or disgusting remarks sent my way we are made so publicly, lowercase while tagging other people. The ones that were especially vicious were rewarded (in social media terms) with likes, shares, and people joining in on the abuse.

A mob has more tools at its disposal then individual actors do. Popularity—the quantity of clicks of use on any given time is tracked and exploited by algorithms online, and a mob is a critical mass. If thousands of people are linking to something about you, that will quickly become the first thing people see when they google your name, regardless of whether it's a fact checked news article or SmegmaDan69's video about what a bitch you are.

Mass reporting a common tool to try to make the legitimate sites belonging to targets of online abuse vanish as many systems our automated to react to a large volume of reports. Law-enforcement agencies and government bodies like the IRS have online reporting systems that can also be manipulated this way by a mob.

The detective assigned to my case told me that restraining orders turn to work out one of two ways—either the paper is good enough to scare off your abuser, or they double down and never stop unless they are thrown in jail. Unsurprisingly, Mine turned out to be the latter type, using the restraining order itself as an excuse to market his crusade against me to entirely new hate groups online.

The mob was engaging in a performative group activity.

These pundits are community leaders of the sort—they validate feelings and provide guidance. Internet Inquisitors position themselves as authority figures and truth tellers; they confirm the mob's hatred, paranoia, and insecurities and directed towards the nearest combustible witch on their radar. They serve as morale boosters, assuring the mob that they are correct, that their path is righteous, and that it's the world that's wrong (or in this case, the person they're offering up as a sacrifice).

As I'm sure you can imagine, it's profoundly dehumanizing to listen to a virulent the angry stranger shout about how horrible you are to people who are primed to hate you.

You can make a career from online abuse.

Generally speaking, the bigger the following someone has, the less interested a service is in banning them. Platforms like YouTube thrive on traffic, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe get a percentage of the funds raised. The incentives for these companies to remove abusive uses or not as compelling as they should be. I want to believe that it's not intentional, but it's hard to understand why episodes of Game of Thrones are wiped from places like YouTube within nanoseconds well chronic abusive users are allowed to flourish.

The less you look and sound like a 1950s sitcom dad, the more likely it is that you'll find yourself where I did—having your life torn apart by neo-Nazis.

Internet Inquisitors harness this fandom to make money. Multiple websites have been set up since the beginning of GamerGate to pander to this audience, gaining ad revenue and a following. YouTube, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo, Patreon, and other money-making platforms are leveraged by the more opportunistic among them.

Online mobs tend to be equal parts vicious and erratic.

The stock market crash of 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression of the United States, came directly from wild speculation which collapsed and brought the whole economy down with it. But, as John Galbraith says in his study of that event (The Great Crash), behind that speculation was the fact that “the economy was fundamentally unsound.” He points to very unhealthy corporate and banking structures, an unsound foreign trade, much economic misinformation, and the “bad distribution of income” (the highest 5 percent of the population received about one-third of all personal income). A socialist critic would go further and say that the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable, and blind to human needs. The result of all that: permanent depression for many of its people, and periodic crises for almost everybody. Capitalism, despite its attempts at self-reform, its organization for better control, was still in 1929 a sick and undependable system. After the crash, the economy was stunned, barely moving. Over five thousand banks closed and huge numbers of businesses, unable to get money, closed too. Those that continued laid off employees and cut the wages of those who remained, again and again.