Crash Override by Zoe Quinn

Author:Zoe Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

They overcorrected by posting the entirety of the chat logs publicly, pretending they had nothing to hide and claiming I was making things up. It backfired—the logs proved to be even more damning than anything I had posted. One person pointed out that they’d used my name over 2,000 times, and “ethics” 87 times. GamerGate scrambled, trying to avoid further criticism by referring to me as “Literally Who,” a term indicating that they didn’t even know who I was, so they could talk about how much they weren’t talking about me while obsessively stalking me and anyone close to me. It gave me a bit of satisfaction that I had made them avoid saying my name. It started to feel like we could actively push back instead of always playing defense.

Folks whom I had heard of through internet lore reached out, almost always starting their story with something like “I feel like you’re the only person who might understand what happened to me.” The particulars of their stories varied, but the rhythm of how their harassment unfolded was always the same. Some original “sin” was attributed to them, a mob seized on it, strangers profited off it, things escalated, family members got dragged in, culture warriors used them as talking points, and their lives were destroyed. The points of failure in the systems set up to help us were the same, too: cops were useless or tools of the mob, tech platforms didn’t care, disinformation ruled everything, employers were cowards, nothing would stop. It became apparent that there was a pattern here.

After Alex and I had successfully helped a bunch of people, we decided to branch out and formalize a network that could help others like us. We named it after the cheesy “hacker” name from the movie referenced in Adam’s comment in the bar that day: Crash Override Network.

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 from attempts by abusive people to trick us. The first principle, then, was obvious: consent. Nothing should be done to help someone without that person opting in. So we established a process for people to come to us instead of us trying to police the internet or butt in to the lives of stressed-out people who weren’t interested in our help.

But what if someone came to us in bad faith? We had to make sure that we couldn’t be used as a tool against others, so we would focus only on helping people defend themselves and would never use abuse to fight abuse.

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