The 2014 GamerGate movement represented a unique collision of hegemony, anger, and user-created Internet communication. Considering GamerGate through the lens of ideas from early 20th-century Marxist writers Antonio Francesco Gramsci and Walter Benjamin shows their works to have many implications about the spread of information and the organization of self-promoting hegemonic groups. Their ideas have a combination of prescience and misjudgment, as some of the aspects of GamerGate are well-anticipated by Benjamin and Gramsci, but the affordances of Internet communication manifested in ways contrary to some of their views: similar to the commerce-driven collapse of the domains of the labor and leisure spheres warned of by deWinter et al. (2014), the Internet can easily collapse the political and social domains into a single medium that encourages oppressive communications.  I will first summarize key ideas from Gramsci’s “Formation of the Intellectuals” (1971) and Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Lestov” (1936), then consider how their ideas might be useful to interpret GamerGate.

Summaries of Benjamin and Gramsci

“The Storyteller” is a discussion of author Nikolai Leskov’s short stories, but also serves as a platform for Benjamin to explore concepts of communication, immediacy, and the transformation of mental space in the post-industrial era. Benjamin claims that the “art of storytelling is coming to an end” (p. 362): not only have people increasingly begun to lose the ability to tell a good story, in his view, but the powerful stimuli of shocking “overexperience” brought by industrialized urban living, mechanized warfare, and the simple immediacy of modern media have robbed people of the capacity to listen. The rapid change of industrial society, he suggests, renders the very idea of stories from the past meaningless.

As stories have given way to raw, quickly-delivered information “[which] lays claim to prompt verifiability” (p. 365), Benjamin finds that people lack even the opportunity for boredom, which he considers a required initial state in preparation for hearing a complex story. “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (p. 366), he writes, imagining that the relationship between storyteller and listener requires a space created by boredom to flourish. He goes on to place the existence of the novel as only being truly possible in this modern era and space, in a nexus of industrialized immediacy, the bourgeoisie’s access to leisure time, and the urge to distance oneself from direct experiential communication. As successors to the traditions of storytelling, the novel and news media replace that interpersonal connection with an onslaught of information that readers consume in isolation. Benjamin praises Leskov as still having access to the almost primeval gift of storytelling because he is “rooted in the people” (p. 373), connected to both citizens from non-industrial settings as well as craftspeople whose lived experiences create fertile ground for authoring and consuming stories. He concludes by comparing storytelling to a humble form of craftmaking itself, implicitly juxtaposing it as a medium of the peasantry in contrast to the ruling classes’ media of mass publication and journalism.

Gramsci (1935), writing in the Prison Notebooks during his incarceration in fascist Italy, describes society and culture on a more abstract plane without regard to a specific author or work. In his chapter “Formation of Intellectuals,” he argues that each “social group” or class produces its own intellectuals.^[1]  He identifies two types: “organic” intellectuals, generated by a group in a self-aware process that contributes to homogeneity and self-identity within the group; and “traditional” intellectuals that appear within historical groups such as clergy or aristocracy, and fill roles predetermined largely by the ruling class.

Per his analysis, an intellectual is not limited to the stereotypical notion of a scientist, academic scholar, or business leader: particularly within the context of the “organic” type, the ranks of self-identified intellectuals could include skilled industrial workers, members of a political party, or even high-ranking military officers, who are able to join an “uninterrupted historical continuity” of their group’s intellectual social complex, typified by a simultaneous self-perception of autonomy and “esprit de corps,” or enthusiastic shared group membership (p. 138). An intellectual maintains their role through ideological dominance (i.e. closely maintaining their group’s identity and suppressing non-dominant viewpoints) but also through a kind of active evangelism that sees to the growth of the group ideology, as “[a] constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader,’ and not just a simple orator” (p. 142). This places them as “deputies” within the group who preserve social hegemony and political purity (p.145), acting in a sense as agents of the ruling class, and maintaining both the group’s identity and its ability to function within (or even support) the status quo. He concludes by observing that as part of an industrialized society, the expansion of the intellectual social complex has led to a kind of differentiation or stratification among types of intellectuals within a group, ranging from “creators” to those who are merely “administrators” or evangelists of accumulated intellectual wealth (p. 146).

Summary of GamerGate

The events or movement eventually termed “GamerGate” began with the 2013 release of game designer Zoe Quinn’s game titled Depression Quest (Aghazedeh et al., 2018, pp. 179-181). The text-based game portrayed the experience of depression and recovery. Within several months, the game received positive reviews from game critics; however, online commenters from the gaming community began to complain that the game only gained this recognition because of politicized media efforts to be “more inclusive” by highlighting a non-male designer creating a non-mainstream game.

But by early the next year, these online complaints escalated into harassment against Quinn across multiple social media platforms, culminating in threats of violence against Quinn themself along with journalists and critics who offered support.^[2] Speakers canceled public engagements after bomb threats, and Quinn along with some supporters were forced to leave their homes after their addresses were posted online. While not all online posters reached the level of violent threats, a recurring theme among even non-violent posts insisted that the anger was about a perceived issue with “ethics in video game journalism,” and arose from left-wing efforts to shame male game players, game designers, and those with right-wing political views (Johnston 2014). The GamerGate movement never had a single identified individual group or leader, although it did have prominent individual voices, and accordingly never had an official end, though the threats and law enforcement involvement subsided by 2015.

Considering GamerGate Through Benjamin and Gramsci

Benjamin (1936) described storytellers as keepers of a nearly-lost, people-driven art in contrast to the modern ideology-driven media apparatus, which operated as a function of the state and ruling elite (even if not directly run by those actors).  Ironically, the participants in GamerGate seemed to cast themselves as working in opposition to a perceived media narrative of male-blaming, casting themselves as victims even as the yawning absence of hostility and implied violence stood in juxtaposition to the terrible behavior of some within the movement.  By claiming to act on behalf of authenticity in game production, consumption, and journalism, they essentially called for a return to hegemonic normalcy, where their chosen discourse dominated the games and journalism they consumed.

Moreover, with the immediacy of Internet communications, an echo chamber of Tweets and web posts allowed GamerGate participants to encourage each other and trade information on how to intimidate or even harm the movement’s targets (Aghazedeh et al., 2018). This places the GamerGate posters not in the role of Benjamin’s storytellers, but in a space of user-created media that self-generated and self-verified information. By collapsing the personal connections that Benjamin deemed so vital, the Internet allowed GamerGate to swiftly dehumanize and threaten its targets.

One key difference that Benjamin did not account for was the role of rage, especially as it supplanted (or augmented) boredom. Benjamin saw boredom as a fertile mindspace allowing room for the creation of interpersonal connections and stories; in its absence, he claimed, capacity for consuming media such as novels opened up. In a cruel twist on this idea, GamerGate saw creative and communicative energies used to attack others; a key catalyst of the movement was a blog post that falsely claimed Quinn’s game received positive reviews from a reporter she had been romantically involved with (Aghazedeh et al., 2018). GamerGate trolls devoted countless hours to creating hate-filled content across multiple social media platforms. The resurgence of boredom, or perhaps boredom-free mental space, paired with the Internet to reinforce hegemonic discourse in a way that Benjamin did not foresee.

Gramsci’s analysis of organically-formed intellectuals within social groups (1971) is stunningly accurate when applied to GamerGate participants. No leader or council appointed individual speakers for the movement, or designated specific duties to particular Internet trolls. Instead, the group as a whole represented a self-appointed intellectualism, maintaining a hegemonic membership through strict boundary setting (and a self-identifying #GamerGate hashtag) together with exclusion of those with moderate or opposing viewpoints. GamerGate posters seemed to self-organize into a spectrum of intellectuals, with (male) game creators and critics in the roles of  “highest level” intellectuals, while those whose content creation was limited to sympathetic comments or tweets filled subordinate but still-contributing roles as “lower” intellectuals  and “divulgators of pre-existing, traditional, accumulated wealth” (p. 146); it was their duty to defend what they saw as the best kinds of games (and game designers), their desired status quo, from the threats of those who would change the identity and ideology of the medium. .

Gramsci did not envision, though, how the Internet could permit angry intellectuals (and non-intellectuals) to target the oppressed and reinforce hegemony. Gramsci observed that the attitude of the peasant (or non-intellectual) towards the intellectual is “double and appears contradictory” (p. 149), a combination of respect for structure and authority with envy and anger at exclusion or disenfranchisement. He perhaps envisioned this as the seed of class struggle that would one day result in uprising and the supplanting of the ruling classes. However, he did not imagine that these contradictory impulses could be split: respect could reinforce the “esprit de corps” of the dominant  group, while anger could express itself against external targets as punishment and exclusion; nor did he foresee that the Internet would enable the availability of both impulses to the enthusiastic members of self-designated intellectual groups.

In conclusion, Benjamin and Gramsci both provide tools to critique modern social movements such as GamerGate, with their apt descriptions of the power of communication and group dynamics, and their suggestions of the roles these play within class and power dynamics. However, the technological singularity of the Internet is something they did not anticipate: although events like World War I and the rise of fascism broadened their areas of concern, the future potential for online entrenchment of hegemonic discourse and group identities escaped their inquiry. The speed and anonymity of the Internet simultaneously remove barriers of social stigma and empower rapid radicalization and self-grouping (Heron et al., 2014). As formerly distinct domains collapse within structures of technology and capitalism (deWinter et al., 2014), society will continue to experience conflict.

^[1] Gramsci’s translators observe in a lengthy footnote (p. 134) that Gramsci deliberately chose the term “social group” instead of the more traditional Marxist term “class,” possibly to avoid censorship. However, the more expansive term “social group” is actually well-suited to describing the participants of GamerGate, as I will discuss later.

^[2] Quinn has indicated that they prefer the pronoun “they” (2019).