Chapotraphouse

Briefly in 2015 I stumbled upon a blog that covered human biology, and then a couple more interlinked. Kinda got a bad feeling after an hour of reading it, kept on hate-reading it for another few days, realized "yeah, these are racists, bye". Went back to the Wokemon fedbook page and anarchist online spaces.

When Gamergate was happening, my biggest concern with games was "all the people with the best stats are the ones who can afford better PCs and premium subscriptions and other ingame store items". Not having a predictable income to amply support myself made me start to radicalize through my online gaming experience. I think it was on a gaming forum that I was linked to Capitalism and other Kids' Stuff.

I only had access to the internet from 2014 onwards, and during my first few years online, I didn't have much time because I shared a computer with five siblings. I actually spent most of my time watching Naruto episodes on YouTube, in terrible quality and with each episode split into ten videos. internet contracts were far too expensive for my family before 2014. That's probably why I didn't notice any of this. Thank god.

I came across SomeOrdinaryGamers after watching a LEMMiNO documentary about the deep web. I was interested in the deep web and found Mutahar's deep web series. I started watching him because I found him funny, and later I enjoyed his LSD Dream Emulator series, his Linux content, his creepypasta/nosleep reads, and his other computer related content. I don't consider myself to have fallen into the pipeline, though. I was already exploring alternative economic systems and systems of government at this time after being appalled by the repeal of net neutrality. I was becoming more socialist each year, and listening to SomeOrdinaryGamers and other creators talk about yet another tech right being stripped away from us by the US left me more tired and frustrated with my material reality. I stopped watching SomeOrdinaryGamers and various other creators once I became full-on communist and I realized they were anti-communist, were spreading CIA propaganda bullcrap, and did some things that lost my respect for them.

I think I dodged a lot of bullets over the years. Most of this stuff I've never even see once, unless someone like Hasan was talking over it. H3, though, that was a regular fixture in the house for a while. The goofs and gaffs started to dry up around the time they were going after Ryan Kavanaugh. It consumed so much air time, and at times it became funny, but the bits would just be ground into dust quickly. The nights they were not doing a show though, we were watching Hasan, and then eventually Leftovers. By that time, I was already very interested in learning about socialism and communism. Once those topics started getting more air time on Leftovers, it was obvious to me that Ethan wasn't someone who cared to learn anything. They specifically had an episode that was, to my recollection, pitched as "Hasan explains Socialism to Ethan", which actually was "Ethan plans on trying to win the debate about socialism against Hasan". That seemed to be the turning point for the show, and it definitely solidified my dislike for the whole H3 thing pretty quickly. Naturally, the fallout from Oct. 7th killed the show and made it even more clear that Ethan was a chud. That might have been the last time we watched any H3 content regularly. By then we were to busy being parents to keep up with either, but would catch Hasan videos on YouTube. I discovered channels like Second Thought and The Deprogram from there, and eventually that landed me here.

However, to say any of these people really played a huge role in the rise of leftist thought in my mind would be an exaggeration. That started with the 2008 housing market collapse, the release of the Bitcoin white paper shortly after, and eventually Occupy Wall Street, which, even though I wasn't on the ground, the surrounding messaging got its hooks in me. I remember all the discussions about turning the internet into a public utility, the "internet blackout" protests against the SOPA and PIPA laws, the death of Arron Swartz, all getting my gears spinning. Eventually, it was the Sanders 2016 fuckery, Hillary Clinton replacing him, Trump winning the election, BLM, Covid, Biden, Oct 7th, the Kamala campaign losing to Trump, and now. That all played, a much more significant role in my radicalization than any of these YouTubers. If anything, I ended up a Hasan watcher because of these events, and not the other way around. I remember, after the Sanders thing and Trump winning, having discussions with friends at the time, where I was the only one who seemed to think these events could only lead to some kind of violent event. That the natural trajectory of Trump coming into office would eventually be some form of armed rebellion. Obviously, I was only half right, as the Jan 6th stuff was really more akin to a coup attempt and petty bourgeois revolt than anything else, but at that time I was still pretty uneducated.

Regardless, that was informed by the events of BLM, and the rhetoric coming out of that movement. I remember seeing an interview of a black woman next to a boarded up CVS, so angry she was in tears, telling the camera "You killed us in the streets … We played your game and built your wealth for 400 years, and when we built our own wealth in Rosewood, you dropped bombs on us, you came in, and you slaughtered us … so fuck your Hall of Fame, fuck your Target. As far as I'm concerned, I could burn all this to the ground, and it still wouldn't be enough. They are lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge".

I think the only reason that I didn't fall for it with Oneyplays is because DD&J would largely mock him for it, though he and Zach had already curated anti-sjw audiences with sleepy cabin so that's just a thing I get be aware of any time smiling friends comes up.

I had pretty liberal views during that time, it wasn’t until 2020 that I really became involved in Marxism and leftist spaces but it was a pretty quick process once I did.

I just met someone who made me question my beliefs. That’s all it took really. I had already been disillusioned by my right wing family and had been spending my entire life rebelling against them anyway.

I was in the orbit for a while, came close at times, but never quite there. I was very much into transgressive and edgy humor, all the bad stuff, but it just gradually fades away when one realizes that these topics are serious, that the people making these jokes believe them and aren't just being ridiculous and absurd. At the end of the day, I grew up with egalitarian beliefs and love, I was simply ignorant of political news and struggle until adulthood.

Luckily for me, I wasn't very interested in gaming, could not care less about GG and ignored almost everything about it. By the way, there are still active GG discussion groups way out in the trash heaps of the internet. What a waste of human life.

I had near misses but I came away mostly fine and with a good set of friends. One of my co-workers, on the other hand, had a former-friend at school try to groom them into fascism, they got close to the edge before seeing what the future holds for those freaks and gtfo'd of the pipeline.

I didn't like how they talked about trans women

I was 35 in 2015 and was already firmly an ancom and hated the anti-SJW bullshit

Fell into it in around 2017 I’d say, I got recommended a video about the pewdiepipeline (going off memory, noncompete?) From 2019, I huffed so much copium regarding Bernie and Corbyn, it’s still painful to look back

Despite my trash-tier politics for much of that timeframe, I didn't fall for the anti-SJW pipeline because they're just an offshoot of G*mergate and I didn't fall for G*mergate because:

1. I actually played Depression Quest before the controversy. The controversy is nonsense when you realize Depression Quest is a free-to-play Twine game that took an hour to play. Whether the review is biased or not is less important than the fact that the entire game cost an hour of your time at most and that people who don't like VMs would only waste like 5 minutes. You didn't even need to run an .exe file since you could just play it online.

2. Speaking of game made from Twine, the talking point of pre-G*mergate g*mers was how VMs and walking simulators like Dear Esther weren't real games^TM^. All that talk about VMs being fake games went out the window when a certain Twine game got involved because suddenly g*mers would look really fucking stupid to mald about games that aren't even real games^TM^.

3. Game journos being shitty at playing videogames and corrupt isn't remotely news at that point. There's Nintendo Power being glorified ads for Nintendo games. There's game journos defending the crappy color endings of ME3. But perhaps the most infamous of all was Jeff Gerstmann getting fired from Gamespot because he gave Kane & Lynch a mediocre review. So of course, it's sus as fuck when the straw that broke the camel's back was a positive review of a free online VM that took only an hour to complete instead of journos shilling for AAA slop that cost people real money.

Could never be me, the aesthetics are too unappealing.

My college education included some philosophy, So aside from the blatant fascism, it always made me cringe that the alt right was convinced that philosophy meant you could just say whatever with conviction and that was "your take on philosophy" pure anti intellectualism, Jordan Peterson was a pioneer on this shit and he ruined a generation across the isle.

I have always considered Social Justice Warriors to be reformist libs to my right and attack them only on those grounds.

I've had (and have) all sorts of bad ideas but this isn't one of them. Was too busy organizing IRL during gamergate to know about it. Had the vague impression that there was something going with sexism in video games, correctly surmised it was fash in origin/trajectory. It was in the context of a larger misogynist resurgence that I had personally been aware of for over 10 years prior so I saw in that context, rather than in the online context as others here. I've had to watch/listen/read multiple "explainers" to now have a grasp on the story there.

I probably could've fallen into the anti-sjw thing because I did think they were cringy but it was always the same joke and I always felt that even though they were cringy they at least meant well so I didn't see the point in watching a dumbass sjw cringe compilation.

i went into a pro sjw arc because they had cooler hair