Gamergate debuted in 2014 when a video-game designer's former boyfriend falsely accused her of having relations with a journalist to score a good review.

But Gamergate exploded when trolls at 4chan used the story as a jumping-off point to start attacking women and minorities over various things—from gaming to politics—with the results spilling out on Twitter, other social-media sites, and message boards, then eventually into mainstream news.

Internet harassment wasn't new when Gamergate hit, but the speed and size of the attacks were at a new scale, offering a playbook for the kind of bad actors who often dominate the web now. Disinformation campaigns are the norm, lies are truth, and weaponized anti-social media is the default mode for many who engage with these websites and platforms.

David Wolinsky has covered Gamergate for 11 years as a freelance journalist and author of The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet, whose paperback edition comes out in August. Wolinsky is also a dedicated archivist whose Don't Die project features more than 600 interviews with people from the gaming industry, the media, commentators, and more about the state of the internet in the wake of Gamergate.

For a deeper understanding of Gamergate, Wolinsky and Caitlin Dewey's Links I Would GChat You If We Were Friends Substack compiled "The Links x Hivemind Swarmed Reading Guide to Gamergate." This collection of articles will get you up to speed on the pervasive influence of Gamergate ahead of Wolinsky's visit to the Ann Arbor District Library's Downtown branch on Friday, April 25, from 6-7 pm for a panel discussion: "Swarmed: Gaming and the Social Internet’s Impact on Culture and Identity":

Inspired by The Hivemind Swarmed (Beacon Press, 2024), this panel explores the internet’s impact on culture, identity, and the human cost of “cool” jobs like making video games. Chicago author, and journalist-turned-oral historian, David Wolinsky joins experts in digital culture, gaming, and media to discuss how the internet has shaped modern bad-faith dynamics—and why gaming’s massive influence remains overlooked in journalism and public discourse. Featuring diverse perspectives, the discussion will examine how society prioritizes (or dismisses) cultural narratives, the real-world consequences of these blind spots, and the role of community-based storytelling in shaping better conversations. A Q&A session will follow, inviting the audience into this urgent conversation.

I emailed Wolinsky some questions ahead of his Ann Arbor appearance and his thoughtful, expansive answers are below.

Q: Were the media and authorities caught somewhat off-guard by how Gamergate exploded and the vitriol it exposed?
A: Yes, but not in the way people tend to frame it. There were early signals, like Amanda Hess’s piece, but nothing close to comprehensive coverage in the major outlets. There was no serious attempt to stitch it all together while it was happening. One of the few early exceptions was Deadspin. “What we’re seeing now is a rehearsal,” Kyle Wagner wrote in October 2014, “where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved.” He called it for what it was: not a fringe outburst, but a harbinger.

What that meant for the people affected by it was that years of coordinated harassment, dogpiling, turning people into symbols they never asked to be, and reputational attacks able to do real-world damage were met with silence, indifference, or outright dismissal. If you’re in the crosshairs—or are paranoid you might be—a single second living that way is stomach-churning, soul-killing hell.

It’s not the media’s job to fix this stuff, but the unwillingness to dignify and address it—that it didn’t even arouse curiosity—is something people in the profession ought to be introspective about. I don’t know how a whole profession seeks penance, exactly. That came up a lot in my interviews over the last decade—some kind of acknowledgment, or even just a sign that the silence around it wasn’t apathy. I’ve heard couples therapists say it’s the stronger person who apologizes first. It doesn’t need to be a competition, but that is something everyone can consider about the role they played. Getting square might not be realistic, but that doesn’t mean journalists shouldn’t reflect on what was missed. And it should make readers a little skeptical of what stories they’re not hearing today—not in a conspiracy-theory way, but just a recognition of what the internet gutting publications has done to what media can realistically choose to cover, and what they wind up pursuing.

There was one strange weekend much later where The New York Times seemed to backtrack and try to explain it in hindsight, 10 years on. But when did they ever report on it properly in the first place?

I came to this as a journalist, but over time it turned me into an oral historian, and my original goal was to ask the questions I didn’t see anyone else asking—in the hopes of pitching and placing articles at places that just would not give me the time of day. There was this brewing sense of danger, and no one seemed to want to touch it unless it could be flattened into a spectacle or dismissed as “internet drama” or “well, those gamers are up to it again.” I’m not saying I was the only one doing this work, but I was trying, and I guess if I got in somewhere to write some articles, maybe I would’ve gotten it out of my system. Instead, I kept having conversations and conducting interviews that eventually became The Hivemind Swarmed.

Gamergate wasn’t just about games, and it didn’t “invent” these dynamics—it exposed them. It was a canary in the coal mine. Like COVID did with healthcare and so many other systems around us, it showed us where there were already cracks—but in this case, the systems were narrative ones: whose pain is legible, what gets called political, what doesn’t.

There’s more coverage of all this now, which is good. There are podcasts, long-form pieces, academic studies. But awareness alone isn’t enough—it has to be matched with action. What I chose to focus on was the cost. The damage. The way this stuff reshaped the jobs and lives of the people who lived through it—not because video games are niche, but because they’re not. What happened there didn’t stay there. It set patterns—of how people organize, how outrage travels, how institutions flinch. It was never just gaming culture. It was culture. Now it’s everyone’s problem.

Q: Gamergate opened the floodgates to the awful online discourse that's still prominent today. Based on your research, is the chaos genie ever going back into the bottle, even a little, or is this collective de-evolution here to stay?
A: What is the bottle? Would you really ever want to use the toothpaste after it was put back in the tube? I feel like nine out of 10 dentists would be like, “What the fuck are you doing? Buy new toothpaste.” I don’t think the genie metaphor quite holds, because it suggests a stable “before” that we could return to. “Make America Great Again” is code for a lot of things, but that kind of tempting nostalgia is something we all carry. We need to re-examine it when it shows up in how we talk about the internet as it was 10 or 15 years ago—treating it as some kind of golden age. It’s just not accurate. That was one of the things that made my ears prick up about Gamergate—obviously everything going on with it was awful and indefensible, and there were so many institutional failures, but those failures didn’t calcify overnight. We’re still feeling the effects of the Civil War, aren’t we?

If the internet is just a place you go to be distracted from the status quo, then you’re not really thinking about how we should be striving for better. It’s okay not to be satisfied. But blame comes from crunching the numbers on what systems we’re being placed into, and who controls those systems. Sometimes we get our math wrong.

The internet has always had the potential for both connection and harm—it’s just that now, the design incentives and the way people have learned to behave online tend to reward the most harm. That said, I don’t think it’s hopeless. One thing I’ve seen across my decade-plus of interviews is that people are exhausted by this shit, have been for a long time, and there’s a real appetite for something different.

People often call these spaces “platforms,” but that suggests neutrality or passivity—and I think gives the illusion that’s what they are meant to offer. Like they’re just hosting what they bring to you. I don’t see it that way. I think of them more as a form of media, or astroturf. But we do need to re-examine the default to virality and start emphasizing communities that practice care, protect meaningful discussion, and understand that moderation is about responsibly shaping spaces and not censorship. The dominant systems may not change overnight, but the way we engage with them can—and already has.

That’s what I’ve tried to document—not just what’s broken, but the people who are sick of what the thing we built is doing to us, and who are trying to build alternatives, even in small ways—just by talking about it. We should want to do more than survive. We should want to make sense of this mess, so we can maybe imagine and have an internet that isn’t always—and doesn’t have to be—a vampiric force: one that survives by making everyone feel a little more alone, and grows stronger the worse we feel.

It’s not about getting the genie back in the bottle. It’s about asking why we keep building bottles that break this way.

Q: How have your online habits changed in the wake of all your reporting and research?
A: I think all of my interviewing was on some level really just a way of working through the fact that none of us fully know how to talk about the internet—or even what it is. It changes all the time, invisibly. Like skin cells regenerating: the internet of tomorrow—literally like the Sunday after a Saturday—looks a lot like it does today, but it’s never exactly the same. I spend a lot of time now reflecting on the fact that when we talk about “the internet” really what most people mean is five to six websites. That alone should set off alarm bells for everyone.

With Gamergate, part of what drove me into this work was trying to come to terms with the complicity of still being a fan of video games, even when it was obvious that doing so meant looking the other way. The companies in charge seemed helpless. It reminded me of the way we eat meat—trying not to think too hard about the suffering built into the system. Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say a system built around suffering. That’s not a glitch—it’s a feature. Everyone knows it.

What I learned is that many people inside video game companies really are afraid of their audiences—afraid of losing money, yes, but also of catching shrapnel from a kind of backlash no one really had seen before—but also that gamers shouldn’t be singled out as some kind of patient zero for internet toxicity. If anything, they understood what the internet was becoming better than most. Gamers don’t just reflect the internet—they predict it. There are plenty of ways that power has already been used for good, but that didn’t mitigate what happened with Gamergate and its aftermath.

Somewhere in all those years of listening, I think I started to work through the parts of the internet that disturbed me. Not to resolve the things I’d been circling without understanding—or even able to name—but to live alongside them. I started asking not just, “What is this thing?” but “How do I want to let it be part of my life?” And the more I understood, the more things disturbed me, too. But at least I understand a lot more now than I used to—I think?

Growing up with AIM and ICQ, I always assumed that when we got older, we’d stop needing to be constantly in rapid-fire touch. Like, it would naturally become part of growing up for all of us, people in my generation. There’s a Chris Rock bit where he says something like, “You never hear ‘I miss you’ anymore, because they’re always in your pocket.” I didn’t want that kind of life by the time I hit college. I still don’t. I prefer 1:1 conversations. My friends know the deal. My life now is a constant negotiation of: How far from your phone are the people in your life willing to let you be? I bailed on social media in 2015, and if you’re reading this, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble guessing why.

I also think I’ve made peace with a lot of the questions people are just starting to ask now. That’s not me saying I was early and deserve credit—there’s no prize for that. But I did spend years trying to understand what the internet was doing to us, and now that I’m making peace with some of the uglier parts—even the ones I still hope will change—I’ve been working to rehab my own relationship with it. These days, I like watching YouTube: birds dancing, cats being cats, a lot of nature things from all around the world, dumb things, food YouTubers, well-researched documentaries on British musicians. Everything is already out there if you know how to find it. But my go-tos are sincere, unguarded things that remind me of what my internet used to feel like—goofy humor, unexpected beauty, seeing through someone else’s eyes, and just soaking in what other people choose to notice and care about. Surprise, softness, and serendipity are more of what I want from the internet, and it’s on me to reclaim it.

We can’t individually fix its structural problems, but we can change the way we relate to it. I know using YouTube sounds like a small thing, but doing anything that isn’t work-related over the internet—tapping into lighter, brighter things—is, for me, a pretty major shift. The fact that I even want to spend time on the computer—when I don’t have to—is still pretty new. Not everything has to be so crushingly heavy all the time. It doesn’t have to be what it’s become—and there are still glimmers of hope, here and there, in isolation. Sometimes the internet feels like taking a sweater off after being in the rain.

I did join another social media platform recently, though I won’t say which one—because I’ve always preferred to stay a lurker. It’d be tempting to write everything off today, but I can’t help but stay curious. I don’t want one scarring event to sour me on the whole idea. But being there has made me think a lot about the bitterness that’s taken hold online. The sense that being decent to each other is somehow optional. That we shouldn’t have to care about how we make other people feel. It’s like we’re all slowly losing touch with our own feelings, and each other’s, too. I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want the internet bringing that to my door. I would rather think about how to be aware, protect myself, and embody the opposite. What’s wrong with the internet is as much on us as it is on it.

Q: After covering this for 11 years, are you still learning new things?
A: Was it Plato or Socrates who said we can’t actually learn new things, just be reminded of what we already know? I could Google it, but I’m done using the internet as an external brain. If I have a choice about whether to reach for my phone, I won’t.

I mean, the short answer is sure—I’m still learning things. But whether I understand them, or know how to explain them, or can even articulate them in ways that feel clear—that’s a separate question. Lately, I’ve had this recurring sense that the internet will, at some point, be forgotten. Conceptually. Think of how the idea of a “website” meant something totally different 30 years ago than it does to someone who’s 20 now. Generational shifts happen in ways we can’t predict. And we don’t talk enough about how fragile digital memory actually is—or about our shared digital ancestry.

Just by continuing to reach out to people through the internet to talk about this stuff—or whatever facet of it is making my brain itch—I get to better understand what the internet is doing to other people, how they see it. That’s when I reach for my phone. And I can’t help but notice it plants things in my own garden.

Another thing I keep circling is how we use language to summarize the internet in ways that flatten it. That’s probably the writer in me. But we’re so dead set on making the internet one thing—as if it were stable, rather than something barely held together that we’ve convinced ourselves we need in its current form. I think we need new vantage points. Better metaphors. More room for complexity to help us understand. The patterns we’re using to describe it might be the same ones keeping us from seeing it clearly. But also, those patterns help us survive. They let us go about our days. So … it’s not all bad.

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp. 

David Wolinsky hosts the panel talk "Swarmed: Gaming and the Social Internet’s Impact on Culture and Identity" on Friday, April 25, 6-7 pm, at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 South Fifth Avenue.