Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

The cautionary tale in this regard is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people. From this spectacularly ill-advised premise Nagle makes the inevitable but even worse conclusion that the obvious thing to do is for the left to abandon all commitment to identity politics (except maybe feminism which, as a white cis woman, Nagle has at least some time for). This brings us to our second relatively uninteresting question, which is what to do about the alt-right. In this case the answer is even easier and more obvious than the first: you smash their bases of power, with violent resistance if necessary. If you want a more general solution that also takes care of the factors that led to a bunch of idiot racists being emboldened in the first place you drag all the billionaires out of their houses and put their heads on spikes.

“Our genuine red pill is not ready for the mass market. It is the size of a golf ball, though nowhere near so smooth, and halfway down it splits in half and exposes a sodium-metal core, which will sear your throat like a live coal. There will be scarring.”15 I want to be clear, with all possible sincerity, that I love the braggadocio here. I want what he is selling. Yes, Mencius, savagely tear away the veil of lies with which I cope with the abject horror that is reality and reveal to me the awful, agonizing truth of being. Give me the red pill. The problem is, once we get our golf ball-sized reality distortion pill home, put on some Laibach, and settle in for an epic bout of Thanatosian psychedelia, we discover the unfortunate truth: we’re actually just huffing paint in an unhygienic gas station bathroom. Jesus, this isn’t even bat country.

Actually, Moldbug’s impressively discursive style makes it difficult to identify a moment that one could point to and call “the red pill.” There’s nothing like Yudkowsky’s primer on Bayes that one looks at and thinks, “OK, that’s quite a good explanation,” and no iconic argument that serves as a hook. Generally speaking, however, the awful, searing truth with which Moldbug believes we cannot cope is that liberal democracy is pretty shit. Moldbug puts a genuine effort into selling this truth, arguing that there exists a de facto conspiracy of, as he puts it in the Open Letter, “mainstream academia, journalism and education”16 that he calls the Cathedral, as it constitutes a de facto state religion that means that democracy is secretly an Orwellian mind control process. And to be fair, Moldbug really sells it, essentially spinning a vast historical conspiracy theory in which the Roundheads of the English Civil War have secretly controlled the world for centuries via the false rhetoric of classical liberalism and the Enlightenment. But it’s hard not to notice that this is basically crap.

The problem, Moldbug concludes, is one of chaos. Democracy is endlessly compromised by progressivism, which moves it eternally leftwards with its eternal mantra of change. This is chaotic; Moldbug prefers order. Indeed, he values order for its own sake. As he puts it, “The order that the rational reactionary seeks to preserve and/or restore is arbitrary. Perhaps it can be justified on some moral basis. But probably not. It is good simply because it is order, and the alternative to order is violence at worst and politics at best.”18

With this, we have a genuinely tricky moment, simply because of the sheer and unbridled number of unexamined assumptions going on here. In many ways they form a knot too thick to unpick—you can’t just isolate, for instance, the idea that a precise and unambiguous metric for how well the government is performing is a desirable concept in the first place from the bizarre and unspoken sociopathy of a view of government that’s utterly unconnected to any motive based on the well-being of its population. But to my mind the most compellingly fucked up thing here is the basic idea that turning a profit is an inherently desirable act. Actually, this underlies a lot of what’s wrong with Moldbug. It’s not that I doubt that he has answers to the obvious question of why turning a profit is a good thing; I’m sure he does. Rather, it is that he does not consider this question obvious enough to bring up and answer alongside his assertion. And this really is stunningly weird in the context of all his red pill rhetoric about the corrupt horrors of liberal democracy. Because while there are a great many obvious critiques of contemporary society, “there’s just not enough respect for profit” really doesn’t feel like one of them.

It is here we finally turn to the notion of accelerationism alluded to at the outset, and set opposite the decelerationists we ostensibly don’t give a shit about. See, the eschatological search that drove Land mad was not merely a matter of personal curiosity and excessive amphetamine usage, but an explicitly nihilist effort to bring about whatever eschaton necessarily awaited capitalism. This was, for Land, a distinctly different project than, say, the utopian project of Marxism—a project that, unlike Moldbug, Land actually understands. Whatever their critiques of what Land would eventually, following Moldbug, call the Cathedral, his colleagues retained hope for the existence of some alternative setup that would actually work well. Land believed no such thing existed, and that there was nothing to be done but get it over with as quickly as possible.

And yet in the end the same preposterous and futile arrogance that fuels Yudkowsky and Moldbug is in full effect. Land may be more committed to a materialist view than Moldbug, and he may do better at actually basing his conclusions on the evidence than Yudkowsky, whose literary Bayesianism leads him to equate gut intuition with actual numerical probabilities, but for all that he talks about worshiping at the black altar of undeniable reality, he’s still falling for the old philosopher’s trap of triumphantly proclaiming that he’s got one weird trick to solve everything. Sure, his question is “How do we destroy the world?” instead of “How do we save it?” and that does deserve points for style, but let’s face it: the claim that the bunch of racist dingbats that make up the neoreactionary scene are the fastest ticket to capitalist apotheosis is scarcely better than King Jobs. This sort of “the world can be saved if only everyone listens to me” narcissism belongs in the genre of fiction, where it can accomplish something, and not in the visionary manifesto, where it only reveals its own impotence.

Rather it is the larger neoreactionary discourse—the myriad of blogs, subreddits, and Twitters that exist to endlessly spit out neoreactionary memes, evangelizing over and over again, generally to each other, but with especial vigor whenever they find anyone who expresses the slightest skepticism about the red pill’s effects. The tone of these engagements is brilliantly satirized by David Malki’s famed “The Terrible Sea Lion” comic, in which two women remark on how much they dislike sea lions only to be chased around by one for two days repeatedly demanding that they provide sources to back up their assertions34. This constant restatement of an idea defined by the fact that it only needs to be expressed evokes Eve Sedgwick’s observation of the conspiracy theorist’s obsession with telling and retelling the story of their preferred conspiracy, as though they believe that if only their testimony is understood by the right person everything will be OK35.

Tellingly, though, the “fun” of the red pill is based in part on its exclusivity. What’s fun is seeing reality from the outside—in other words, watching all those silly little people who aren’t clever enough to understand the red pill. Which is a fairly large problem: for the red pill to work, it requires that the neoreactionary have a ready supply of deluded people. In other words, neoreaction’s sense of legitimacy is existentially dependent on systematic public deception.

So what is the program of action? It’s not, to be clear, putting Steve Jobs in charge; that’s Moldbug’s wish, but he isn’t actually proposing it as a plan of action. Actually, Moldbug is being refreshingly realistic here, trying to come up with a program that can be enacted on an individual level. As he conceptualizes it, the idea is to be “political engineers” designing a backup system that will kick in when American democracy inevitably goes south. And the first step of this backup system is, as he puts it, becoming worthy, by which he means the embrace of a doctrine he calls passivism. He describes it thusly: “The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG38 implies absolute submission to the Structure.”

He wants desperately to be a revolutionary, but because he wants to rebel against the entire process of historical progress he has to forswear “demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at non-profits, assassination, ‘tea parties,’ journalism, bribery, grant writing, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable.”40 He abandons the term “citizen” in favor of “subject,” accepting the irrevocable yoke of slavery. No wonder he’s in terrified agony.

Moldbug got here by having too much time on his hands and self-educating on American history entirely via primary source documents while stoned. Land, on the other hand, had a complete fucking breakdown. If someone took the proper red pill, it was Land, who clearly stared into some conceptual heart of darkness and was transformed by the strange and alien light within. But either way, we’ve been through this patch before—what’s key about the neoreactionary right to exit is that once again we realize at the last moment that we are too scared to take it.

The first and most straightforward weird premise is one that Yudkowsky establishes through some intense contortions of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is a belief that one ought treat any copies of one’s self that exist in any possible future timelines not only as real, but as really being one’s self to the extent that one should actually care what happens to them.

The second and more bewildering premise is actually something of a locus of related premises, all of them having to do with the idea of perfectly predicting someone or something’s behavior.

But for better or for worse (well, for worse, as Roko is about to demonstrate) Yudkowskians believe both fervently, which again makes sense from an external perspective in that it allows them a form of communion with their desired futuristic AI.

The logic here is that a friendly AI that wants to save humanity from itself would want to make sure it comes into being, and so would try to ensure this by threatening to take anyone who imagined its existence and then failed to bring it about and torture a simulation of them for all eternity, which, due to the Yudkowskian interpretation of the many-worlds hypothesis, is equivalent to torturing the actual person. And so upon thinking of this AI you are immediately compelled to donate all of your income to trying to bring it about.

The truth is that the guy who says that he knows what God wants is never a bad bet in terms of who’s going to be running things.

The obvious truth of horror philosophy is that there’s an aesthetic; one based on a tightrope balance between the initial “yes” that one is fleeing from and the eventual “yes” that interrupts the series of “nos.” Tzvetan Todorov, in theorizing the genre of the Fantastic, describes a specific iteration: an extended ambiguity between the possibility that the protagonist is mad and the possibility of the supernatural.61 The story balances between the horrors of madness and the Other, drawing out the act of settling on one of the two available “yeses.” But the specific chasms on either side are in the end less important than the awful and sustained gravity of them. That’s the point of the horror story. And by just taking as hard a negation as possible, which is what the bulk of actual neoreaction amounts to, one largely fails at this aesthetic.

Over and over again, Moldbug insists that order, law, and the concept of goodness are interchangeable synonyms, whereas chaos is inherently a force for evil and indeed the very definition of evil. In one particularly florid passage of a minor blogpost he goes so far as to flatly proclaim that “Satan is the Lord of Chaos and the Father of Lies,” which is a pretty impressive bit of vitriol from an atheist.73

Miéville writes at length on the distinction between two modes of horror: the hauntological and the Weird.83 The former, epitomized by the figure of the ghost (which Miéville adamantly separates from the monster as a category), is linked to the Gothic tradition. The threat is dead, buried, or repressed, and calls into question the integrity of the present, revealing it to be eaten or succumbing to the awful inescapability of the past. The Weird, on the other hand, is not old so much as ancient—not buried but lost, forgotten, or, ideally, never really knowable in the first place. Its true nature, however, is outsideness. Hauntology comes from within us; the Weird from outside.

the great one-liner critique of Mencius Moldbug: he’s exactly what you’d expect to happen if you asked a software engineer to redesign political philosophy.

As Thacker notes, every philosopher begins by rejecting a commonly held article of truth, and Ligotti’s is a whopper: the idea that, as he puts it, “being alive is all right.” In his view, consciousness is an evolutionary misstep best corrected by voluntary extinction. His central problem with consciousness is not unlike the one of language that Fish identifies in Milton: it can’t actually do its job. Just as language transgresses against God by asserting itself, consciousness exists in constant and anxious opposition to the knowledge of its own inevitable death. To be conscious of one’s existence is to have all of the biological impulses for survival common to life but to be aware that these impulses are doomed.

Ligotti’s position is not anti-humanist, but rather anti-existence. In his view, nothing is self-justifying, and thus everything is in the end, as he repeatedly puts it, “malignantly useless.”

Land’s “biological factuality of the Caucasian sub-species” is nothing of the sort; its non-existence is as settled science as the anthropocene extinction. More broadly, the entire idea of scientific racism (and neoreactionaries, with their deep ties to the technolibertarian/“rationalist” tradition, are deeply “scientific” in their racism, with “human biodiversity” being their current code word of choice127) is a preposterous house of cards consisting of people desperately trying to bludgeon science back into supporting discredited Victorian ideas about why black people are inherently less intelligent than white people. This ends up being a sort of Goldilocks-style farce in which various scientific definitions of “race” are tried on only to, without exception, either divide populations too finely to actually make the desired generalizations or to create categories so broad as to be genetically meaningless. Race, as employed in the colloquial sense, is a clumsy attempt to classify people based on general patterns of physical appearance (most notably melanin levels) correlating to geographic distribution during the period where Europe was mapping/conquering the world.

It is not that there is no relationship between geographic ancestry and genetic makeup—the Wikipedia article you’re looking for is “Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup”—but the genetic differences across haplogroups are of negligible significance in any direct “some people are inherently less intelligent” sense even before you even get to the massive eyebrow raise that is the statement “intelligence is accurately measured by IQ tests,” upon which most of these claims depend. In practice any correlations emerging from haplogroups are dwarfed by those emerging from environmental factors such as lead exposure, childhood nutrition, and economic development. (For a sense of how useless the claims of scientific racism are, the supposed couple point IQ difference that exists between black and white people is vastly smaller than the IQ difference between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.128 Even Moldbug ultimately admits this is a load of crap, and he thinks black people make good slaves.)

Rather, it’s to point out the practical scariness of white nationalists: their presence ensures that an intelligent or productive discussion of race is always going to be poisoned by a bunch of dipshits chiming in to rant about human biodiversity.

Because, of course, the other way to describe whiteness instead of being not-seen-as-nonwhite is simply as being seen as “normal.” And the idea that appearing at first glance like someone who probably has European ancestry is “normal” is a concept that emerges out of historical systems of power that emerged from Europe—systems of power, notably, that include both Moldbug’s beloved monarchy and hated dissenters. Simply put, it was Europe that finished the task of mapping the world. European culture became the first global and near-universally known culture; it was the first memetic global pandemic.

But what’s key about it is that it involves turning free will into a sort of self-prediction. To engage in Timeless Decision Theory is to create a dual consciousness, simultaneously looking at one’s self as the person making a decision and as a person who evaluates your decision-making process externally. Indeed, to truly embrace Timeless Decision Theory as a form of rationality—a way to interact with the world—is to live in a self-imposed panopticon, making every decision as though one is deciding the predictions of an imaginary being that can perfectly predict you. One can imagine the dual consciousness that weighs on a Timeless Decision Theorist, wondering what their Predictor thinks of every little decision they make; their shoes, their job, their masturbation habits. But crucially, that’s the point. That’s why this leads to Roko’s Basilisk. The whole reason Yudkowsky is doing this is so that he can be in constant communion with the AI-god he aspires to live forever as a process running on. And indeed, given that, the usual relationship between someone and a Miltonian God looks a lot like dual consciousness as well. And the underlying implication—that religion creates dual consciousness—makes a certain intuitive sense, in that religion, like race, is based on metaphysics and mythology.

Anyway, there’s a larger implication in Yudkowsky’s line of thought. The central perversity of Timeless Decision Theory is that it replaces the illusion of free will with the illusion of the Predictor’s constant companionship. But the way that Yudkowsky can make this surprise conflation of individual consciousness and the alien brain parasite that will be riding within it for all time is through the idea of predicting someone else’s actions. Indeed, the act of prediction would seem to be central to the whole idea of dual consciousness. To be dually conscious is to endlessly predict the response of an outside observer and moderate one’s own actions to influence them. These are also the tools the AI uses to make Yudkowsky an immortal simulation, and for that matter the tools it uses to get out of the box.

The obvious umbrella term for this is “empathy,” and that word leads to most of the other implications, as it’s one that comes up in a lot of critiques of neoreaction and of the sorts of people who like to call themselves “rationalists.” But before any of that comes up there’s a very big philosophical statement to make, which is that Alan Turing suggests that the fundamental nature of thought and, by implication, of humanity is the capacity for empathy, in much the same way that enlightenment liberalism suggests that it is free will and Ligotti suggests that it is consciousness.

The concept of empathy is particularly interesting, however, because it manages to be a key that opens every lock. All three of our main thinkers fail in key ways to grapple with empathy.

Land’s engagement with empathy is for the most part a conscious and mindful rejection of it.

Land overplays his hand, acting as though empathy is just horror as opposed to something that is, among other things, scary. As a result, he ends up siding with a bunch of racist morons just because those are the other people who are as terrified of the outside world as him. And yes, there’s something genuinely compelling about that turn, but it’s ultimately just that it’s pretty clear that turn was a consequence of his going mad, and madness and horror go together well. And, look, not to put too fine a point on it, but the major lesson to take from Land’s madness is not that any of the concepts he was working with were mere inches from some devastating red pill, it’s that you shouldn’t take so many fucking amphetamines. In other words, however deliberate Land’s rejection of empathy is, it’s still his biggest flaw.

As for Moldbug, the problem is subtler, in that he has an almost pathological disinterest in the notion.

So when he indulges in philosophy as Moldbug he does it badly in two regards. Not only does he mistakenly believe that he’s good at it, the things he tries to do with it are fundamentally malformed, twisted beasts. That’s what’s at the heart of his most singularly bizarre declaration, that the purpose of government is profit. Its main appeal isn’t even that it’s a good idea—although he gloms onto a libertarian intellectual tradition that supports it. No, its real appeal is simply that it lets him objectively measure how well a government is doing, which makes it a lot easier to come up with a clever design for one. And that’s the heart of everything that’s dumb about Mencius Moldbug’s ideas—the problem that leads to his first facepalming idiocy. The reason Mencius Moldbug likes the idea of a king is simply that it represents an efficient and elegant design. That’s what his fundamental and absolute dedication to order over chaos is, really. And it leads him to look at slavery as an efficient design that just presents a couple of implementation challenges.

Which leads to the real problem, which is that Yudkowsky thinks of empathy in terms of peering into black boxes, and as a thing that is done. The result of this approach is that Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such. And this proves to be a major problem when you’re proclaiming yourself a visionary genius of rationality. (Ironically, the LessWrong crowd talks at length about this sort of error, the Typical Mind Fallacy. As with many fallacies, they’re much better at identifying it than avoiding it.)

But the real takeaway is the idea of vilifying emotion and empathy. Which is a common sentiment among the sorts of people who like writers like Yudkowsky and Moldbug. Nick Land, for instance.

But it’s also visible in the besieged attitude of white nationalists as well as other ugly corners of the Dark Enlightenment like “Men’s Rights Activists” who decry the “irrationality” of women, or chan culture’s vocal and explicit hatred of empathy. There is, throughout this corner of the world, a deficiency of empathy that is not merely lack or failure, but an active, conscious disdain. Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy—they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.

At last, then, we have a credible answer to the most stubbornly worrisome of neoreactionary arguments—that Malthusian limits will eventually reassert themselves and tribal affiliations will reign supreme anyway, so you may as well give up on diversity before it’s too late. Perhaps they will, and a historical period of war is inevitable given current conditions. But if so, “values empathy towards outsiders” is just as effective a tribal delineation as any, and probably a fair bit more effective than DNA haplogroups. Put another way, maybe the neoreactionaries are right and we’re going to have to shoot some people; if so, let’s shoot them first.

While the fascination with who to blame is wholly uninteresting (and the answer of “the Jews” idiotic), the underlying pathology has potential. It suggests a weakness in white culture so deeply embedded as to be functionally inseparable from its basic nature. This forces us to consider white culture as a set of perpetual ruins—as something that has always been lost, and that can only be apprehended as a tenuous and incomplete reconstruction. But more to the point, it resolves one of the fundamental idiocies of white nationalism. Obviously just one; anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are just as disqualifyingly idiotic as scientific racism, after all. But it’s hard not to admit that anti-Semitism is a more complex sort of moronic racism than “black people are inherently unintelligent and were better off as farm equipment.”

Neoreaction as terminal restlessness, the most brutal aspects of western civilization’s material engine firing blindly into the onrushing black, both figuratively and, as with George Zimmerman, literally.

In this regard it’s worth thinking in shorter historical terms and recalling that just a few decades ago the reactionary fad was not technofetishism but social Darwinism, with the unchecked excess of capitalism justified as “survival of the fittest.” The selection of technology as the analogous process to history as opposed to biology, then, is clearly a substantive cultural move. To some extent it’s just a generational thing, much like using anime characters as your Twitter icon. This is simply the face of eschatology in the decade after cyberpunk, Y2K, The Matrix, and Starcraft. Those wishing for an interpretation more rooted in macro-history might simply note that the most short-term Great Filters are those originating in the industrial revolution while society itself reels in the early wake of the digital one. The combination makes techno-eschatology irresistibly on-point.

Fueling this is a particular vision of technology—one that, we really ought stress, is a fantasy not just in the way it imagines a particular and improbable sequence of technological developments, but in the way in which it imagines technological development as something with a teleology in the first place. There is, crucially, no particular reason to assume this. There’s barely a reason to assume that scientific knowledge is something with a teleology, and the equivocation of science and technological development is just as dubious a leap. But the techno-eschaton does so, presuming blithely that artificial intelligence is something that is advanced towards, as opposed to a weird idea. And it’s worth noting, it really might just be a weird idea from some science fiction stories like FTL drives or time travel; a piece of magic that is in fact entirely distinct from advanced technology. Just as we could not entirely rule out the possibility that we are Turing machines, the possibility that the Turing Test actually cannot be passed by a digital computer still cannot be definitively rejected through means other than faith. (Nor can its more unsettling counterpart—the possibility that a Turing-complete computer might be capable of imitating a human female more persuasively than an actual human female.) But the singular vision of their Singularity is not so much the point as that they believe in any Singularity—that there is such a thing as a historically necessary interaction b...

But Land shares Yudkowsky’s basic problem: unlike Moldbug, neither of them know a damn thing about building technology. They’re both technology fans as opposed to engineers—self-educated dilettantes who read a lot of science and technology articles, both general and specialist. But they have opinions on how computers will develop. Neither of them make them. It’s not that this is a problem, of course; users are people too. But it gives their thoughts on the techno-eschaton a particular flavor that, say, an actual software engineer’s musings lack. Indeed, the flavor is not entirely unlike that of a software engineer attempting to reinvent political philosophy to someone with any actual expertise or training in the humanities.

What’s striking here is the degree to which, in his vision of this incorruptible replacement for the University, Moldbug has become a techno-eschatologist whose favored technology is political philosophy, contorting himself to believe in the necessary existence of some straightforwardly and self-evidently correct answer to the general problem of what should be done.

what’s really notable here is Moldbug’s doe-eyed certainty that such a thing as an absolute truth service could be built; that there is a general plan of action so self-evidently compelling that if he only expressed it properly everyone would immediately flock to his side. In short, after thousands of words railing against the Cathedral for secretly being a religion, he’s accidentally reinvented religion. And then lost the holy text. You couldn’t parody it better.

The instinctiveness of this defense is revealing, in the way that people’s paranoias often are. How you assume people will organize against you is naturally indicative of one’s own tactical instincts. And so within a culture where identity is an aggressively unfixed property it’s hardly surprising that default tactics and worldview are that everyone is constantly misrepresenting who they are and what they want.

And while Gamergate usually doesn’t have a product to sell in quite the same literal way, it’s worth noting how, for instance, two doors down from them is someone like Stefan Molyneux, whose output amounts to 30-60 minute PowerPoint presentations consisting of a by-now familiar sort of low-content dissembling, and whose business endgame is literally a cult. We might also think back to Andrew Auernheimer identifying Gamergate as a tool for white nationalist recruitment. But the difference between Gamergate and a free samples scam or a cult is as significant as the comparison. There are plenty of pro-Gamergaters pulling healthy profits making this crap, Sargon among them, but for the most part it’s not really all that profit-focused, nor that celebrity-focused. It’s cultish and scammy, but the “-ish” and “-my” matter there. Yes, Gamergate stokes its members to spend hours upon hours every day tending their garden of Twitter sockpuppets and spreading dank memes about raping Anita Sarkeesian, but what’s surprising is the extent to which they manage to sell ideological gratification as its own reward. (I mean, the Russians have to actually pay people.) Vox Day’s “Gamergate will save western civilization” claim is the most grandiose version of this, but it’s striking more in its apparent indifference to how ridiculous it sounds than in its extremity. This has been a feature since the beginning, with the bewildering inflation of Zoe Quinn’s alleged infidelity into a vast web of c...

And it’s in this context that we can finally understand how something as self-evidently harmless as Depression Quest can somehow be viewed as an existential threat. It is, after all, a manifestly unthreatening game. Even the poison pen of Vox Day visibly struggles to find much of an angle on it, ultimately having to settle for the fact that it’s not trying to technologically compete with AAA releases that have multimillion dollar budgets and that it’s not fun, which, let’s face it, would be a pretty weird thing for a game about depression to aim for. Even if one is pathologically opposed to lo-fi art games that are actively disinterested in providing a nice cozy Skinner box for their audience, portraying them as a large-scale threat to western civilization is downright bizarre.

But looked at from within the context of Gamergate’s specific paranoias, the stakes become altogether clearer. Fundamentally, Depression Quest is a game about validating identities and making human connections. Its goal is to communicate the lived experience of Zoe Quinn’s depression to players and to facilitate empathy and understanding. It is an exaggeration to even call this identity politics. Sure, it has potential implications for the treatment and stigmatization of mental health, but these aren’t foregrounded in the game. It’s simply a game that says, “this is what it’s like to be me.” But to a worldview that depends on the assumption that individual identities are fundamentally disingenuous and exist only as props to craft larger cultural narratives, the act of saying “I exist; this experience is real” is a genuine threat.