Actually somebody said, oh my God, Lin-Manuel Miranda liked your dancing. I was more surprised about that than anything else, but people just started ... Are you aware that this thing has gone viral? I was not aware. People just started telling me and then I looked on Bleacher Report and I thought, wow, there's like hundreds of thousands of people were looking at this. It kind of makes me laugh because I'm not like this beautiful model and I'm in my ladder sixties and just kind of makes me laugh the whole thing.

Soon, Dance-Cam Mom was everywhere. ESPN, ABC, all the news outlets wanted a piece of Dance-Cam Mom. Robin started being recognized on the street. All sorts of people came up to her asking for selfies, senior citizens, small children, she even started putting makeup on before she went to the grocery store. "That part was fun", she said. She started an Instagram account where she has over 45,000 followers and still post videos of herself dancing. She's getting more into hip hop dance moves now.

I've tried to think what is making this popular? And I think because I really don't care what anybody thinks. I just get up there and just have fun. So, I think it's kind of that image of just not caring. I'm doing what I wanna do and if you don't like it, that's too bad.

This is Claire Evans and you're listening to You, the podcast about the intersection of technology, humanity, and identity, brought to you by Okta. Today, we're examining two sides of the same coin, Internet fame and Internet shame. What does it mean to go viral and what happens when virality turns ugly and you suddenly become the target of hate and disgust?

It seems to be vacuous, not really meaningful. When I think of Internet fame, I think of people like the Paul brothers, who I'm not quite sure what it is that they do or what's so appealing about them, but they've got a tremendous following and somehow they've been able to turn that into commercial success in some way that I don't quite understand.

It means being recognizable on social media, I guess. And then people recognizing you off of social media.

Sometimes going viral is important, especially if it's just like say, recall on a toy or recall on a food product, then going viral is really important, 'cause we get the information out there quickly. If it's something that's, say tragic, like a storm coming, that's important, but a lot of times things going viral aren't really even important.

I've been online for a pretty long time and I've seen my share of virality and semi-virality. There's always been a sense that one could become famous on the Internet, but that meant something different I think in 2002 than it does today. I think if you've got famous on the Internet in 2002 the odds that you'd receive unsettling personal threats were probably a lot lower. I think maybe that's a consequence of the fact that online life and offline life have kind of coalesced into one indistinguishable mass. Everyone is online, so all the good and all the bad of public life is consolidated into one thing. Sometimes this experience takes a dark turn and sometimes it isn't just onscreen, because nowadays online fame and shame have pretty much become inseparable from offline fame and shame. Even for something as innocuous as one mom's amazing dance moves at a basketball game, with virality often comes backlash and that backlash is rarely contained within a computer or a phone screen. For example, Gamergate, the sexist widespread harassment campaign against the number of prominent women in gaming that began in 2014. Our guest today is someone who was able to survive it and emerge on the other side turning the entire terrifying experience of Gamergate into something positive.

My name's Brianna Wu. I am a software engineer. I was the founder of Giant Spacekat, a game studio making games for women and I'm also a candidate for Congress in Massachusetts district 8.

How did you get into creating video games?

Well, it really all goes back to 1985, my parents made the terrible mistake of buying me an Nintendo entertainment system that Christmas and my grades absolutely plummeted and I gave up the world around me to enter video game world, and yeah. I was just wildly addicted from the get-go, but I did have a problem with games. I could see even as an eight year old and that was that there weren't really many women that were the main characters in games. I remember when Super Mario Brothers 2 came out and Princess Peach was a playable character and I was like, finally our industry has changed, women are gonna be included.

It was over 20 years before Nintendo put her in another core Mario title. And the truth is our industry ships very violent fantasies by men for men. So, Nintendo did a study in the late eighties and they found out that women were only 8% of gamers. In 2008, when the iPhone came out, that number had skyrocketed up to a little bit north of 20% and then by today women are well over 50% of gamers. The average gamer is actually a middle aged woman. So, what has happened is there is an increasing distance between the people that make games and the people that actually play games. And I just think that's a shortage that needs to be addressed.

How would you sort of characterize gamer culture? Who ... I mean beyond who plays games, what are the sort of identity politics of the gamer world, if you will?

Yeah, I think it's actually very similar to what's going on in the United States politics today. Something simmering right there in gamer culture is a kind of open resentment towards the rest of the world. And I find it very interesting that men that are in their forties and fifties now still feel very resentful, like people are gonna make fun of them for playing games today or how it's somehow makes them uncool.

It's interesting to think about it as a subculture that has kind of ballooned into becoming a mainstream culture, but hasn't really forsaken it's subcultural markers or signifiers. There's this sense of this is our thing and it's gonna be taken away from us even though it's at this point now more mainstream than many other forms of subculture.

Absolutely. There's a feeling that the media is looking to cheat gamers and all the reviewers are bought off by the giant corporations. There is a feeling that the mainstream companies that make these games just don't love gamers enough, when in fact here are a lot of really harsh economic realities about our field, but the predominant response to those just rage. Our industry's really based on taking what we see as like the ideal consumer, which is a 12 to 15 year old boy, and granting their every whim, whether that's very sexualized women all around them, whether that's violence and wild empowerment to problems being the answer to everything. And as a result of that, we've been doing this for so long that when you try to talk to gamers about, well maybe it's time that women in our products aren't wearing bikini chain mail and we have a few games that are made for people that aren't like you. That feels to many people in our field like they're having something stolen from them. They feel cheated. They feel angry, because even though women have been here the whole time, they sense it as those feminists coming in and stealing our culture.

Yeah. That's a really remarkable thing and I think there's not a real ... There's not much of an analogy in other fields. Maybe in like comic book culture as well or kind of geek culture writ large, but this sense that if somebody wants an equal stake or at least to be represented in the medium that they are somehow taking away from the absence of it.

Right. The absence of privilege feels like oppression to the average gamer.

Given what it became, some people might not remember how GamerGate started, but it's important that we do. In 2014, a man named Eron Gjoni wrote a lengthy blog post detailing his alleged relationship and eventual breakup with the independent video game developer, Zoe Quinn. The post was full of salacious accusations against Quinn and was quick to go viral on 4chan and other popular online forums. Quinn was doxed, her private information shared online. She received thousands of death threats and had to leave her home and anyone who came to her aid was given the same treatment. GamerGate went on to become one of the most highly covered examples of extreme online and offline harassment, but despite endless and terrifying abuse, its victims persevered. Quinn went on to write a book about the experience called Crash Override and every GamerGate target fought back in their own way, including our guest, Brianna Wu. Here's her perspective on it.

So, let's move on a little bit to GamerGate and your experiences. I mean, I know, I'm sorry.

No, it's fine.

For an outsider, I mean I read a lot of it closely, but I still feel like I don't understand a third of what was going. It was so convoluted and confusing and strange and horrible. Can you just sort of walk me through what happened in terms of your experience, your perspective?

Sure. The long and short of it is this, GamerGate was a organized hate group that targeted women in the game industry, arguing for more inclusion. It started with a jilted ex-boyfriend of a woman in our industry named Zoe Quinn that wrote a blog in an attempt to destroy her professionally. Now, if a man in our industry had an ex-girlfriend that did this, she would have been called every name in the book, she would've been discredited. Nothing would have happened. Well, what happened here is their industry caught on fire, because you had Reddit and you had 4chan and you had the darkest parts of our industry that took that mission seriously and they decided to destroy Zoe Quinn and it wasn't just her. They found a playbook about how to go after women in our field and to shut them up and this was the playbook.

You would find a woman, you would come through every bit of her past online until you found something you could attack her with. Maybe it was true, maybe it was a distortion, but you'd find something and then you and a troll army would dedicate every second of every day to try and to destroy her. They use this playbook on woman after woman after woman in our industry.

Why do you think there was so much resistance to taking it seriously?

I think the men in the game industry don't see issues affecting women in the workplace as their problem. I think they see it as a chick problem and the chick need to go fix it. I think they just don't care. I mean, the industry is created from the bottom up to serve men. You've gotta understand, a lot of people see GamerGate as a problem about the players in our field. That's not the way I see it. I see GamerGate is a symptom of an industry that is so wildly sexist that we don't have language to talk about it. So, it starts with the producers and then from the producers, it filters through the studio heads and then from the studio heads it filters down to who gets hired, the kind of games we make, the protagonist that we have. So, this industry is built from the ground up to kind of show women you can be the sexy side kick or you can be the chirpy comic relief, but this is really about us. And that attitude extends to journalists.

When did you realize that you were one of the targets?

I'll never forget this. It was a very difficult day. I had just finished shipping our studios first title and I was trying to take a well deserved break. You've gotta understand, I had been working crunch for a year at that point.

For sure.

And this was when Zoe Quinn first found herself targeted and I kept speaking up about this and eventually my Twitter started blowing up with really uncomfortable comments. I'm used to getting threats, but this was next level weird. And I started to look around and see what was happening and I had never been on this site called 8chan before. Just to give your listeners some background, 4chan has two rules, you cannot talk about child pornography and you can't talk about GamerGate. And 8chan was a free speech shoot off of 4chan where they could talk about GamerGate. So, I saw what was going on there and these people decided to target me next. I saw them going through and they started researching everything about my life and my husband's life and my game studio and my employees and I could watch this thread happening on 8chan, where they get my address, they get my employer, they get where I've lived, they get all this amazingly personal information about me and they start doxing me and putting together the plan to destroy me.

I knew at this point I had a choice to make. One way women in our field who avoided being targeted is they had just decided to stay silent and what would generally happen here is GamerGate would scream for a few days and then they would go away. So, I closed my laptop and I had a really deep conversation with my husband. I said, I can keep speaking out here or I can just be quiet and do what's best for me and my studio. And I told my husband, I don't think I can live with myself if I choose to sit this one out and he said, I will stand by you if you do that, and I came back the next day and I tweeted out, "You know what GamerGate, FU. Come after me if you want to. I'm not going anywhere."

Wow.

And they did. Moments later, that's when I got the threats that were so serious the FBI would eventually find themselves involved and that was the moment that I left my home, fleed my home and got the FBI involved. I was shaken to my core, but I knew that no one else was going to tell the world what was happening to women in my field. So, when the Boston Globe called me and asked me to tell my story, I said yes. When MSNBC called, asked me to come on and tell my story, I said yes. When the Guardian, when the BBC, when media around the world called me and asked me what's going on with women in the game industry? I said yes. And as a result of that, I really see this is the moment this turned around and GamerGate stopped being a story about ethics in game journalism.

Oh, my God.

And became a story about targeting women that work in technology.

I think that's, I mean, good Lord. I mean, what a terrifying ...

It was horrible.

Thing. I'm so moved by this idea that you taking ownership of it and you sort of claiming your space and claiming your identity as someone who is not just a victim, but someone who is speaking for other victims and standing out for other victims sort of was something that was ... That allowed the tides to turn.

I think that people, especially in this day and age, can be a lot bolder with online harassment and I think it can very quickly take a turn for the worst. I think it's hard to see how it's affecting others when you can't see them face to face.

I actually had to delete Facebook, because it was too stressful to get into confrontations with people that you don't know over your views on the current state of the country and the world. So, yeah. I mean, if you're talking with someone at a bar or a party, it's a little bit harder to get aggressive with them as opposed to if you're just writing a comment on the Internet.

I think the most recent presidential election has kept me from commenting anything on anything anymore, because I just ... It's not worth it to me to get into a fight with a 40 year old mom on Facebook. So, I just avoid any kind of ... I really ... And, it's a shame that you have to do that now that you kind of have to filter your opinion on the Internet, but it's just, to me, I'm always a fan of having healthy conversation and to me the internet is just really not a good place to do that anymore. It's just not a safe place at all.

So, how did Briana make it through to the other side? What pushed her to keep going instead of crawling into a hole and hiding from the world forever, something most people likely would have done in her shoes? What made her decide to fight? In her words, none of it was easy.

Can you talk a little bit about what it felt like to, in terms of your sense of self, to be thrust in the limelight in such a ugly way? Not for some wonderful accomplishment of yours, but for this horrible, vitriol against you?

Right. Well, I have worked very hard my whole life to become a software engineer and an entrepreneur. I've worked with ... That's a hard freaking field to be in. And it was very frustrating to have my entire identity boiled down to not being someone building a studio to make games for women, but someone that was just this feminist that got death threats. That hurts, because I had spent so much of my life working to become someone respected in my field. And until that happened to me, I didn't understand just how much that hurt, because the real Brianna Wu is honestly just a gamer girl who would much rather spend her Saturday coding than going to a party. That's the real me. But then there's the GamerGate version of me that's this habitual liar, fraud who sent herself her own death threats, right?

There's this wild conspiracy theory that comes out about you and it's really hard to recognize that, because the more people repeat that to you, you're going like 10% of your brain is, am I a terrible person? Am I the monster they think you are? They eventually go, no. They've gamified harassment and I just think it's so notable that for certain subsets of the gamer population, they don't go out and level up the World of Warcraft character. They go and level up harassing feminists and it's fun for them.

All of the skills that they have honed throughout years of playing games, repetitive, tedious activity sometimes are rewarded in this ecosystem of hunting down information and weaponizing it.

Absolutely.

So, how did all of this change your relationship to the Internet? That's a big question, I know.

Well, I mean it did give me a clinical case of PTSD. You can't have bricks thrown through your window, you can't have people showing up at your college trying to impersonate you to get your records, you can't have your credit card stolen, you can't get hundreds upon hundreds of death threats, you can't be ... You can't have so many threats in your life that former secret service personnel are escorting you to gamer events without it deeply affecting you. So, it certainly taught me to think three, four, five times before I said everything online, but it also gave me the courage to really fight for the things I cared about, because at the ... This is a hard story, but it's also a story of empowerment. In standing up to GamerGate, they gave me such a microphone that I find myself now in a very credible run for United States Congress.

They gave me a real ability to fight for the things that I care about. So, it was a blessing, but it was also a curse.

A trial by fire.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. It's interesting 'cause I have very limited experience with online harassment in the same, nowhere close to your level, but there is something about the way that it rewires your sort of pleasure centers. We're so used to getting positive information from the Internet. We're so used to getting positive affirmation from the Internet. Notifications, emails, messages, likes, all this stuff. The whole sort of infrastructure of social media is predicated on this idea that it feeds you positive treats, brain treats, and then when that all of a sudden turns into its inverse, where it becomes this sort of, this machine of pain and suffering, it breaks something.

It did. It did for me, but I wanna go back to something you said right then. You were like, well I haven't experienced that the same way you have. I wanna tell you, every woman I talked to says that exact same sentence to me and I just want you and every woman out there to know when you experience things like this online, you count. You matter. This experience matters to you. If it hurts you, your payments valid. Just because there's not an international story out there about you, that doesn't mean that what's happening to you isn't wrong. So, I wanna just really encourage you and every woman like you don't discount that. This needs to change.

Thank you.

Can I tell you something that's happened to me related to this?

Yes, please.

It's just, I think it's so fascinating, is I've had dozens of former GamerGater's reach out to me years after the fact to apologize to me.

Really?

About the things that have happened. I had one person that called me and begged to talk to me and this person had a crying, 20 minute long Skype session with me talking about how guilty they felt and how it was really about their own struggle with depression and how they were struggling to come out of the closet and their internal anger was focused at me. This is actually not an uncommon thing that I found, so I do think there's some people that look at this in retrospect and are filled with shame to have participated in that.

Wow. Do you feel like the measure of empathy that this has given you is sort of a two way street? I mean, are you able to take those apologies and see them for what they are?

Well, I mean it doesn't do me personally any good to hold onto that hate, and what I've learned as I've gotten older is taking a breath and trying to forgive someone, it's really not about them. It's about you, because it's not helpful to just feel seething anger towards people.

I think that online anonymity is dangerous in some ways. I mean, maybe it's good for those who want to express their opinions without personal ridicule, but it's also a great way for trolls to hide. People who troll the Internet, harass others on the Internet, they all have different reasons for why they do that, ranging from personal lack of self esteem where they're projecting their own feelings to other people or they just get a kick out of it.

Online shaming is a easy way for people to diss people without having to deal with the consequences, basically.

Nowadays, it seems like people, they do whatever they have to do to get wherever they wanna be, and even if it means walking over somebody or making them feel bad or look bad, and that's just the way the world is today.

When GamerGate first happened, I remember reading articles about it and just being horrified, but I was also blown away by the fortitude of the people that were experiencing it and their ability to communicate their point of view, even as they were being silenced. I found it to be unbelievable, frankly, and also beautiful. As someone who wasn't part of the gaming community, I remember also having this sense that there was a lot more going on with GamerGate than I could understand. I mean, I can identify male rage, but at the time I couldn't have identified the very specific type of rage that GamerGater's seemed to be expressing. This kind of gamification of rage. The way they were working together to solve the problem of ruining someone else's life and bringing a game like approach to it with a sort of joyful nihilism. All of that was lost on me. I couldn't understand how people could be so desensitized the consequences of their actions, like how much the Internet had broken people's brains.

I think it was also one of the earliest moments where the mainstream public began to understand that Internet harassment was something that was not separate from real world harassment, that Internet harassment in and of itself, even if it never leaves the screen, is something that has serious traumatic effects on people on a physiological level. That it gives people PTSD 'cause it's so awful and that it touches the real world. Let's go back to my conversation with Brianna Wu and how her experience with GamerGate opened a door for her to make change at a higher level.

How did Gamergate change your opinion on, if at all, about sort of online anonymity?

Well, I do believe that we need online anonymity. An example that comes to mind is what if a child is looking for information on LGBT issues or young woman is looking for information about an abortion and if we didn't have anonymity, it would be very hard to Google those things. So, I don't think online anonymity is a really easy solution to ... It's not just like we turned the switch and everybody's public online. We have that policy in China and I think it's had some very destructive consequences for free speech. So ... But a place I do feel we could do work on is, I don't think that major tech companies should be in a position of supporting that hate speech.

Facebook has failed at this and Reddit has failed, but I do think you see major tech platforms cracking down on this and I think that's good. I think that when a white supremacist group is using PayPal to collect donations to keep that white supremacy going, I think it's very fair for that tech company company to say, you know what, you can do business, but it doesn't have to be with us and show them the door.

Can you tell me a little bit about the choice to go into politics and I can imagine for some people going through what you went through, you don't wanna just check out from public life entirely and become a librarian in a small beach town or something, but you went for the opposite. Why?

Well, as gamery, it was kind of dying down and I was getting back to my life, this was 2016 election and a lot of people have drawn the analogy between the rise of Donald Trump and GamerGate. When we look at these right wing conspiracies like Pizzagate, it follows the GamerGate playbook. When you're looking at Steve Bannon and the alt right behind the rise of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon was one of the first cheerleaders and instigators of GamerGate over at Breitbart. So, to me, it felt like the GamerGate playbook had infected our political system. It was not enough to use my platform for just women in tech anymore. I knew women all across the country needed a fighter

And a survivor.

A survivor. Yeah.

You mentioned earlier that sort of your moment of reckoning with GamerGate where you sort of decided to step up, it was also a moment where the tide's began to turn in your opinion in terms of the way the movement was organizing itself. Do you feel like that same tendency can be put into effect in your political run? Like you know if there is a parallel between Gamergate and sort of the ascendance of the outright and Trumpism does the same level of sort of self ownership and self power and choice that you're making, do you think that's gonna have the same effect as it did?

I do. I think if you look at the outcome of the midterms, we saw a lot of women step up and run for office. So, I think you see a very energized democratic base. I could say in my hometown, we saw women behind the scenes organizing calls, canvassing, gluing our communities together. The unsung heroes that didn't get any press this time around were all the 40, 50, 60 year old women working behind the scenes and credited to help us win. So, I think that a lot of us understand the stakes are very high and our voice needs to be heard.

Are there sort of tactics that you picked up through the GamerGate experience that you think are gonna make you particularly resilient as a politician?

I think so. I mean, it's hard to rattle. [crosstalk 00:31:52]. I'll never forget the other day. We got another death threat. It was so serious I had to send it to my contact with the FBI. Just a really serious death threat. And I put down my phone after I sent the email and I went and made dinner and I remember sitting there telling myself someone just threatened to splatter movie murder you. You should be feeling something, and I just didn't. And maybe that's good. Maybe it's bad, but it's almost like fear is a muscle and it's been so overworked that it can just do nothing else at this point.

So, you're fearless?

I guess so, but maybe not in the healthiest way sometimes.

Well, I mean being a politician is something that I think you have to be a little bit fearless.

Yeah.

Maybe in a little bit of an unhealthy way, if you're gonna get through it. I mean, it's dark.

I find it interesting that people believe that. I really have not found that to be true at all.

That's comforting.

What I have found is running for office requires a fearless and honest inventory about who you are. I'll give you a really good example. I'm an engineer. My ideal afternoon is sitting there reading Unreal Engine 4 documentation and learning to do something new that I've never done before. That's a very self focused task. What I found when I decided to run for office is it required me to get off the computer and go meet the people that lived on my street. It required me to find ways to connect with people that were nothing like me. It required me to care about problems that were not my problems, and what I thought was so interesting is over years of doing that, I found it really does make me feel happier. It makes me feel more connected to the world. So, maybe in a way, this roundabout way, I feel like GamerGate forced me to find a better part of myself.

That's beautiful. This is You, and this is me, Claire Evans. Thank you, Brianna Wu and Robin Schreiber for joining us. We'll be back next time to talk about biohacking, life extension and the human desire to sidestep death. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.