Fancy Wigs And Talking Skulls
“I’ve always had a bit of a distaste for skulls-as-iconography. It always seemed to be too tryhard and reeked of teenager-who-REALLY-doesn’t-want-to-go-to-bed.
I was less than impressed when I saw a Youtube video by some random man calling himself MundaneMatt and hiding behind a picture of one as his digital avatar making the rounds and being brandished by the same people trying to get me to kill myself. The video uncritically repeated all of the gross accusations made by my ex, and then tried to make it about something more, claiming one of the people I was accused of cheating on Eron with had written about my game because I’d slept with him.
Another man, one calling himself Internet Aristocrat and hiding behind a poorly cropped image of a blue-eyed man in a powdered wig this time, took up the cause and made some videos as well, expanding on the skull dude’s accusations and starting to spin up theories about who else’s junk I might have touched. His videos were complete with a mock opening of a spooky tv show about corruption, yelling about sex for favors.
More and more Youtube personalities like this jumped on the bandwagon, essentially creating their own two-minutes hate directed at me instead of Big Brother. Without fail, if you browsed the rest of their videos, they were universally angry at feminists or other progressives. The only content they were producing was of how loudly and visibly they hated this woman or that woman.
Hate is their brand, and they have alarmingly large fanbases ready to eat it up. Some of these people have hundreds of thousands of followers, and dozens of people they’ve sicced them on.
Some of these videos were over an hour long and had decent production value. Serious time and effort had clearly been dumped into lovingly crafting these exposes of my fictional sex life. Charts were made of my network of shadowy kiss conspirators to get good reviews for my free game about mental health, and I was angrily accused of all kinds of breaches of ethical video game journalism.
Somehow, none of them seemed to check if this review they were all so upset about ever existed in the first place.
Somehow, none of them seemed all that concerned with the fact that I am not a journalist.”
Online abuse is a booming cottage industry. This chapter will profile some of them, their role in the lives of those they harass, how they direct the hordes of angry internet jerks looking for an excuse to go after someone, and how they monetize this behavior. One such duo makes $16k a month off a documentary they’re filming by stalking women online, calling it “The Sarkeesian Effect” after their primary target, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian.
The mobbing that came from the leaderless masses of the internet before all this seemed like it would pass in a few weeks. We had no idea that people who had made an entire career built off of riling up and directing these mobs even existed. Their entry into this mess took things to a whole new level.
Drawing on the information in the previous chapter, I will illustrate how these figureheads who are capitalizing on and preaching to the teeming masses mentioned in Troll Food combine to become a dangerous mechanism of online hatred.
Once these personalities entered the fray, things came to a boiling point for me. I decided I had to make a statement of mine own, despite everyone except Alex telling me to keep my head down and stay silent. Together, we crafted a statement and cued up Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”, unsure of what would follow when we spoke out. The post went live, and it felt better to finally be doing something instead of just sitting and watching this all happen and feeling helpless.
Half an hour later, my post was hacked, replaced with my home address, my phone number, information from inside several of my accounts, and my father’s home address and phone number.
