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Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.

The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.

Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs

speech in the most extreme manosphere groups on Reddit, known as subreddits, was far more hateful than the speech of a random sample of Reddit users, and more on the wavelength of fringe far-right hate groups like those that frequent the social network Gab. And it’s getting worse. Over time the toxicity score has risen across all manosphere forums.

I also learned a metric crap-tonne about how online communities of angry young nerd dudes function. Which is, to put it simply, around principles of pure toxicity. And now that toxicity has bled into wider society.

In a twist on the "1,000 true fans" principle worthy of Black Mirror, any alt-right demagogue who can gather 1,000 whining, bitter, angry men with zero self-awareness now has a self-sustaining full time job as an online sh*tposter.

Social media has been assailed by one toxic "movement" after another, from Gamergate to Incel terrorism. But the "leaders" of these movements, a ragtag band of demagogues, profiteers and charlatans, seem less interested in political change than in racking up Patreon backers.

digital age technology, which now allows for the psychological torment that used to be confined only to school to be relentless and omnipresent

They felt like they could do it because everybody does it. A good portion of our media culture is now based on prurient voyeurism and a constant invasion of privacy. The public disclosure of a person's most intimate secrets and moments is no longer considered shameful or condemnable -- it's just called entertainment. Why wouldn't a couple of college kids turn their classmate into an unwitting reality TV star? It's basically the same toxic horseshit they grew up watching on MTV, VH1 and E! For all they knew, maybe Tyler Clementi would've loved the mainline of notoriety. If the dipshits on Jersey Shore don't have a problem mining their most repugnant traits in the name of 15 minutes of fame -- if anyone can go to YouTube and post video of a guy complaining about how there are rapists in his neighborhood and suddenly turn that guy into a viral sensation and his complaints into a catch phrase -- why the hell can't two Rutgers freshmen live-stream a roommate in bed with a man? This is the age of the unauthorized sex tape. This is Bentham's Panopticon come to fruition on a global scale. You're always being watched. You're always on camera. You have no expectation of privacy. Clementi should have known that, right?!

anyone he personally feels deserves it and he and his website are at the forefront of America's culture of shameless voyeurism and a constant, irrepressible invasion of privacy. It's because someone like Perez Hilton has spent the past few years making himself rich by indiscriminately circulating images of Miley Cyrus's crotch to the world that the two teenagers who tortured Tyler Clementi likely didn't think that what they were doing was a big deal.

I'll press your buttons here by positing that if "we" (humankind) are too dumb to self-regulate our own childbirth output, too dim to recognize that we are polluting ourselves and neighbors out of sustainable existence, we are, in fact, a ridiculous parasite on this Earth and that the planet on which we live will simply slough us off—as it well should—and will bounce back without evidence of we even being here, come two or three thousand years. Your thoughts (in as much detail as you wish)?I would recommend reading my "the next 50 years" piece here. Basically I think that
 climate change, which in this case genuinely is caused mostly by humanity, 
is just one part of the environmental problem. Overfishing, toxification of 
the seas, pesticide use, weedkillers, prescription drugs in water,
 fracking, continued air pollution, toxicity in food, destruction of animal
 habitat, attrition on bee colonies—all this is converging. And we'll be 
facing the consequences for several hundred years.

I believe humanity will
 survive, and it won't be surviving like Road Warrior or the Morlocks from The Time Machine, but I think we'll have some cruelly ugly social consequences. We'll have famines the like of which we've never seen before, along with higher risk of wars—I do predict a third world war in the second half of this century but I don't think it will be a nuclear war—and I think we'll suffer so hugely we'll be forced to have a change in consciousness to adapt. 

If there were any lessons to be learned from Gamergate — from how to recognize bad faith actors or steps on how to protect yourself, to failings in law enforcement or therapy focused on the internet — the education system doesn’t seem to have fully grasped these concepts.

It’s a problem that goes beyond just topics specific to the gaming industry, extending to topics like feminism, politics, or philosophy. “Suddenly everyone who watches Jordan Peterson videos thinks they know what postmodernism is,” says Emma Vossen, a post doctoral fellow with a PhD in gender and games. These problems with students are not about disagreements or debates. It’s not even about kids acting out, but rather harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon. Many educators can’t grasp that, says Vossen. “This is about students who could potentially access this hate movement that’s circling around you and use it against you,” she says. “This is about being afraid to give bad marks to students because they might go to their favorite YouTuber with a little bit of personal information about you that could be used to dox you.” Every word you say can be taken out of context, twisted, and used against you. “Education has no idea how to deal with this problem,” Vossen says. “And I think it’s only going to get worse.

An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.

Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.

Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.

Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”