A long time ago I was weary of the gatekeeping in geek and nerd culture in regarding to things that I was passionate about, and figured that a larger fandom would mean better support for the particular thing. These days I recognize how absolutely wrong that line was.
Gatekeeping is necessary because of a cycle that I see way too often occuring:
>Outside group feels excluded from this now, relatively, popular, or growing in popularity activity, that has it's own sub culture revolved around it.
>Outside group forces the sub-culture to accept them and allow them in, often through coercive measures (public shaming, accusations of "isms" or "phobias").
>Once in, while simultaneously being mostly half-heartedly committed to the new sub-culture (after all, they aren't there because they are passionate about the medium, they are largely there because they felt excluded), the former outside group begins to demand gradual changes to the medium to better suit them.
>Because there is an often economic (and social) incentive that drives these mediums and the sub-cultures around them, the demanded changes begin to get implemented, with the hopes that the new group, would commit economically.
>These changes are often poorly received by the old-inside of the sub-culture, often removing or subverting the very things that made the inside group be so committed in the first place.
>Any resistance to the changes are deemed as one of the isms, or phobias, and the old group is gradually kicked out, or no longer as passionate about the medium.
>This creates a cycle, a looping effect: The dedicated whales of the sub-culture, the ones that invest economically into the medium gradually are being removed from the sub-culture, simultaneously, the new-guard (the former outside group) is not yet fully dedicated, often hardly dedicated at all. As the profit margins for the medium begins to start going down, the knee-jerk reaction is to appeal to the group that is the least dedicated, with the presumption that the whales will keep on spending. More and more changes get implemented to get better commitments out of the new-guard, while it inevitably is pushing out the old. And because of the "quarterly cycle" of our economy, long term thinking is a bit discouraged.*
>At a certain point the medium enters a threshold that it is no longer able to keep up with the economic drop offs, and you start seeing a dwindling amount of money coming in. This is the phenomenon that is often seen as "Go woke go broke".
>As the medium begins to gradually die out, the old-guard begins to latch unto something new, once again creating an inside and outside group dynamic. The new guard, which, often, comes into the sub-culture because of a desire to be part of the in-group if nothing more, also begins to exit in droves, and once again the cycle is repeated.
For the medium, a fork in the road happens around this time. Do they milk whatever is left of the sub-culture, or make a painful attempt to get back to the roots of what made the sub-culture so dedicated in the first place.
We've seen this dynamic happen time and time again with not just industries, but fandoms as well. And the larger the industry the longer it takes to reach the fork in the end, but do not mistake that it will happen.
Sub-Cultures are not something to be dismissive of either. Fandoms are not just little clubs that have little meanings. And it is not at all absent to anyone that looks at sub-cultures with critical view to understand that they function, whether intentionally or not, often like an actual larger societal cultures. With it's own set of social rituals, it's own set of languages, phrasings, aesthetics. Fandoms are a sub-culture within a sub-culture and it also has it's own set of rituals, language, aesthetics. All of these things drive to reinforce an identity of the inside group, and differentiate from the outside group. In a way. It's your tribe. Your tribe may share a pantheon with other tribes, but your tribe's totem (Dr. Who) takes precedence over the other tribe (Star Trek), yet you both can socially get along over a lot of things (love for sci-Fi) and can share and partake in each other's cultures.
In the more music-scene orientated sub-cultures, the term "poser" is often used for the outsider that isn't really part of the inside group but is pretending to be for social clout. They aren't dedicated to your totems (goth, synth, punk music), they just like a fragment of it (the aesthetic), while dismissing much of the rest of the elements (DIY, alternative-lifestyles, existentialist focus, etc).
In relation to Gamergate what you saw was in a way, a group of posers (game journalists) who were only partially dedicated to the medium they claim to be part of (games), starting to get called out for their lack of commitment (in a broad sense), and recognizing that being banished from this tribe means economic and social devastation, responded with the only weapons they knew would resonate extremely well with broader society, and the economic engines that drove those subcultures (the isms, the phobias).
It is no surprise to me that this began roughly around the time of the worst parts of our economic downturn in the early 2010s. Many of these journalists didn't want to be in the sub-culture, but they didn't have many prospects outside of the sub-culture, so they were economically and socially dependent on the elites of sub-culture, but not enough to be as dedicated. For them being called out, means that there is a direct social and economic risk to their livelihoods.
It also didn't help that this emerged around the time of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, a movement who's goals were an abject failure, but who's very existence scared the shit out of the wider-societal elites. The societal narrative rapidly changed from economic devastation, to social-justice revolved around identity politics. The "isms" and the "phobias", were extremely potent weapons.
In hindsight, I don't think people recognize how large of a societal impact Occupy and Gamergate on broader culture as we know it – and how it manifested itself even years after it was done with.
Locked
