Crash Override Quotes

“Algorithms are not arbiters of objective truth and fairness simply because they're math.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“What they get wrong is precisely this false belief that online prejudice is easily compartmentalized or categorized into, say, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism when really it flows freely between these various bigotries.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“The Easiest Way to Fuck Everything Up Is to Ignore Black Women”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“The Easiest Way to Fuck Everything Up Is to Ignore Black Women”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Well-meaning writers who were looking to expose and condemn what he had been doing to me and to the dozens of targets he moved on to afterward wrote a bunch of stories about his shoddy reporting and social media harassment of abuse victims. The problem is that you fundamentally cannot shame someone who is proud of what they are doing. Press coverage doesn’t result in bans or removals from services; it gives bad actors and whatever private, sensitive, or fictional information they’re spreading about their targets a visibility boost to a new audience.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“It’s a shame that a lot of us use the internet only to talk shit in comments sections and check our email when we have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Every rose has its thorn, and every news story has its comments section.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“In all my time as an activist, I've never seen a single instance where the people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they were the 'bad guys'. There is always a righteous undertone.

Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a 'villain' provides the attacker with the chance to be a 'hero'. You can rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something much larger than either of you. That's the key ingredient in the magic trick that, in the abusers' minds, turns screaming at a game developer's father through a telephone into defending an entire artistic medium from censorship.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“I felt like if I could look at the worst humanity had to offer, I’d be prepared for anything and nothing could shock or scare me. I didn’t want to be pure; I wanted to go on adventures and roll around in the kind of filth that Oscar Wilde and Hunter S. Thompson had written about.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“Everything I have, everything good in my life, I owe to the internet’s ability to empower people like me, people who wouldn’t have a voice without it. All the garbage that is thrown at us is enabled by this broken machine, yet I firmly believe that the internet is also the best tool we have to address the problem. To the uninitiated, it might seem easy to blame the very things that make the internet great for the rampant abuse, but that reaction would be alarmist and simply incorrect. One might see the relative anonymity of the online world as something that allows people to do heinous things to one another without accountability, but anonymity is also what can give isolated teenagers like I was the ability to talk about their queerness without fear of being outed.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“Most of the activists and survivors I know... knew the loudest, most hyperbolic garbage will rise to the top if left unchecked. We knew enough people in charge either don't understand, don't care, or are part of the problem.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Seeing people who personally profited off the abuse against me being selected for Trump's cabinet scares the hell out of me. I don't know how to express to anyone the extremely weird issue of having your personal trauma wrapped up in international trauma.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Victims are told not to say anything about the proceedings, because talking openly about your case can annoy your judge and benefit the defence. Abuses are not really known for their ability to practice this level of self-restraint, giving them control over there narrative around your case—and since court cases are frequently considered newsworthy events, this can give them a whole new platform to recruit more supporters.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“In criminal proceedings, laymen might assume it's one person versus another, but it's not—it's the state versus the defendant. That means that you, the victim, do not have anyone on your side by default, while defendants have lawyers who are eager to tear into you from all angles. You are an asset to the state's case, not the other way around.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Maybe you'll express an opinion on a political issue and it will get noticed by that wrong person. Maybe you'll wake up to find that a company you once bought shoes from online was careless with security, and now your personal information is in the hands of anyone who bothers to look. Maybe someone who has a grudge against you is relentless enough to post and promote bogus information about you online—stuff that can never be erases. Maybe you're a member of a demographic that is constantly targeted—you're a woman, you're black, you're trans, or any combination of these or other marginalised groups—and someone who wants to get people like you off "their" internet decides to take it upon them to make your life hell. Online abuses target countless people every year for any number of arbitrary reasons.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“You cannot separate the concerns of a society from that society’s art.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“But going offline forever, leaving behind everything I’ve built, wasn’t an option I ever considered. When people ask me where I’m from, I usually say, “The internet,” and I’m only kidding a little bit. This is my home, and I wasn’t about to be driven out of the only place I’ve ever felt like that, even if it was a digital one. This isn’t a story about how we become evacuees. This is a story about how we become resilient.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Moving the focus away from the perpetrator and onto the actual effects not only allows the journalist to report on the issue at hand just as it would if they gave press to the abuser, but it grants additional context and truth that would be otherwise lost. It pulls the issue out of the hypothetical by putting the harm to faces and names and lives, and allows people to feel the reality of it instead of getting lost in jargon, theory, and debate. It avoids the cognitive backfire effect that comes along with signal boosting lies to refute them by properly contextualizing disinformation and harm. Beyond that, there’s wisdom, strength, and resilience to be found in the stories of people impacted by hatred and living in spite of it that you won’t find spilling out of the mouth of disingenuous ratfuckers. We don’t just hear about the abuse or the hate, we hear about what comes next and what we need to do to move beyond it.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“The benefits go beyond research and influence. We lack comprehensive historical records of internet culture and patterns of abuse. Those of us on the front lines tend to have institutional memory, but archiving this information would be extremely beneficial for tracking patterns and mechanisms in different settings. The kind of coordinated mob abuse that I went through was the same kind of abuse the women who exposed #EndFathersDay experienced was the same kind of abuse the infosec community instigated against Kathy Sierra in 2007 and so on. Some of the actors are even the same. This data could be invaluable to sociologists, technologists, and historians alike. However, due to the extremely personal nature of this information, the details of how it’s obtained, who obtains it, and what is done with it must be well thought out.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“We were cautious in how we set it up, because we were extremely afraid of creating yet another shitty institution that would fail to help people. The ethos had to come first, because our strategies had to come from the right place. The biggest thing we felt we’d lost when we were targeted was our sense of control—even when people meant to help, too often they’d do something that would accidentally end up making things worse. Furthermore, some of the offers of help we’d gotten were stressful, since they came from strangers and were indistinguishable”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“Normal people don’t want me to honestly answer the question “What’s up?” Not many people are equipped to handle answers like “A fanatical juice salesman who thinks his semen is literally magic spent thousands of dollars to hire a private investigator to hang outside my old apartment and dig through my trash because he thinks he might find something to get me arrested.” And it remains incredible that that statement isn’t hyperbole.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“I’d never coded before, and I’d always thought games were huge undertakings by thousands of people in a big studio. Little did I know that a major part of coding involves Googling to find documentation, code snippets, and communities that help people fix common problems. Free information and guidance aren’t limited to programming, either. The Open Source movement makes tremendous amounts of knowledge and resources available online for free, and some major universities are making classes available for free on the internet. It’s a shame that a lot of us use the internet only to talk shit in comments sections and check our email when we have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“When so much of online abuse is driven by a failure to empathize with someone on the other side of the screen, turning those who are abusive online into some unknowable, unstoppable force of nature is a damaging mind-set. If we don’t try to understand them on a human, personal level, then we are moving forward in the dark. By dubbing them “those people,” we are also explicitly setting ourselves apart as if we aren’t one of them and thus can’t be part of the problem. Therein lies the most common trap we fall into when trying to make the internet a safer place: framing it as a war of good people versus bad people instead of looking at acceptable and unacceptable ways to treat each other. “Good people” get off the hook for doing bad things, while “bad people” aren’t considered worth understanding or empathizing with and aren’t encouraged to progress, evolve, and do better.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“I thought I was the good guy. It might sound unbelievable, but most people in mobs believe this, even while they’re doing horrible things. In all my time as an activist, I’ve never seen a single instance where the people instigating abuse, even in the worst possible cases, thought they were the “bad guys.” There is always a righteous undertone. Dehumanization works its mental magic, and turning the target into a “villain” provides the attacker with the chance to be a “hero.” You can rationalize doing all kinds of things to a symbol that you would never do to a human. The campaign becomes a false battle between good and evil, and tormenting someone is seen as a struggle over something much larger than either of you.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

“My romantic rejections of industry veterans have severely hurt my career—saying no to the wrong man has led to exclusion from professional events, lost contract gigs, my name's removal from my own work, and worse.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“As a queer, feminine person making unconventional games in an industry known for being at best oblivious and at worst overtly hostile to women, I've had to make games while tap-dancing through a political minefield over my identity, occasionally falling face-first onto explosives.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“While online abuse can happen to anyone, it is by no means an equal-opportunity occurrence. We're dragged the same sort of cultural baggage that we live with offline into online spaces like a gross piece of toilet paper stuck to our shoes.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“How do you tell someone that the people who could have stopped it saw what was happening to them and, even though you fought tooth and nail, were determined not to care?”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate