The other day, someone gave me a link to a half-hour vlog from a Gamergater, which can really only be described as someone having an epiphany induced breakdown. Have a look if you like, but it's a bit disturbing.

It's hard to find the appropriate language for describing exactly what Gamergate is. You can describe it as a /pol/ op, but no /pol/ op has ever run for this long, or so consumed the lives of its participants. You can describe it as a hate group, but that's a little redundant since it's a coordinated effort between people who, for the most part, already belong to several better-established hate groups. You can call them terrorists, but the term has become so racially charged even the FBI doesn't like to think white kids can be terrorists, unless they start flying the flag of Isis. More controversially, you can call them a cult. That last term certainly feels most appropriate when watching this.

Think for a moment how a cult tends to operate. The organizers, who tend to legitimately hold some rather extreme views, but don't necessarily believe their own dogma, and the specific beliefs they teach their followers tend not to be what causes concern for people. It's all about how totally new recruits eventually commit themselves. When you join a cult, by design, it becomes your entire life. You are actively cut off from your friends and family, the cult's teachings consume your thoughts, and it's really drilled into your head to treat your fellow members as your new family, who you have to trust over anyone else.

As that Hulk essay explains, GG wasn't set up to be a cult, and has no physical recruitment centers, but it did luck into all the necessities for cult-like followers. Aside from the various amoral monsters up at the top who just play the crowd for money and attention, like Milo Yiannopoulos, the average GGer seems to come from this same bleak profile again and again. Somewhere between 20 and 30, often still living with their parents, clearly lacking a proper network of friends and family to keep them grounded, and with nothing better to do than spend an unhealthy amount of time focusing on GG, whether it's browsing KiA (or 8chan) for the news of the day, Sending Those E-mails, pestering people over twitter, whatever. The guy in the video here has a son you can constantly hear coughing in the background, but he admits that he's totally been consumed by this, and he clearly isn't sleeping right.

I'm not sure what, exactly, lead up to the posting of this video, besides an awful lot of stress, but the gist seems to be that this is someone who was absolutely convinced that there were thousands of people in GG, all like-minded individuals, independently researching things, contributing their unique opinions and perspectives, and finally realized that same handful of people were just talking to him through dozens of sock puppets, creating the impression of this huge consensus. Having finally pulled back the veil, he now is, rightfully, doubting what is and isn't real. It's scary to look at, and I sincerely hope it's enough of a wake up call for him to step back, put the whole thing behind him, focus on raising his kid, and in time, ease back into a normal life where he isn't constantly gas-lighted.

I don't know that everyone in GG is in that deep, but even a relatively casual involvement has to have a terrible toll at this point. The things they pretend to believe, the things they actually believe, and the things they refuse to believe just keep piling up, just as a natural outgrowth of their operating behavior. I can't picture someone who really believes all of it. There's too much obvious self-contradiction. At the same time, I have a very hard time picturing someone who doesn't believe a good chunk of it. Even the most pure and lucid, the ones who are just outright transphobes, seeding stories to prompt attacks against random innocent bystanders who happen to be trans, or the ones who don't claim any real cause beyond attacking those who criticize GG in a weird self-sustaining cycle. The ones who knowingly admit they fabricate everything. Something has to motivate them. Some deep-held belief that their targets are deserving, somehow.

The thing of it is though, it must be impossible to keep it all straight. By design, really. Early on, a GGer introduced the slogan "listen and believe" to the moment. It came from one of their many efforts to paint a target as irrational- Pretending a piece of advice on how to keep rape victims from being discredited like some religious proclamation. The strange reinterpretation is that "the enemy" refuses to believe anyone from "their own side" could ever lie to them. As is the standard approach, a good chunk of GG opted to demonstrate the ridiculousness of this "mantra" by living it. If a GGer says it, treat it as truth. Never fact check, just pass it on.

There's no reason to bother evaluating anything. If it's true, it definitely needs spreading. If it's false, you should still spread it around, because that's what "the enemy" does, isn't it? So internally, there's no real way to fact check anything. At a certain point, a given GGer will be with with a massive litany of sins about a target, to which they "listen and believe." If even half of them are true, they seem like a total monster, who must be destroyed at any cost. A perfect reason to start fresh rumors about them, and so it continues. Particularly if your involvement is casual, it's not possible to keep it all straight even if you tried. All a given GGer can really do is shrug and accept it must be a mix of truth and lies, and to keep a clean conscience, assume at least the bulk is probably true, rationalizing the rest as a justified attack.

Rationalizing their attacks is a huge part of what GG does. Really, it's the core of any /pol/ op. You begin with some terrible strawman idea of your targets. A vile cartoon villain, completely disconnected from reality and using their nonsensical believes to make the world a worse place. The next step is to breathe life into that straw man, setting up a fake account to espouse those ridiculous views. Like "Sapphic Maria" here:

It's laughably transparent, and in some cases intentionally so. If it's obvious and real "SJWs" fall for it, it proves they really are as stupid and ridiculous as they say after all. If it's sufficiently infuriating, you might also trick other GGers, a fun prank among friends, right? And of course, one of the best ways to create your own ridiculous sock puppet is to find someone ridiculous to quote and befriend. Someone else's sock puppet is always going to be a great source of those. Yours being followed by someone else's "proves they really believe this stuff" and of course you can then point the whole group out and claim they represent whoever you were trying to vilify. And so it goes.

Getting back on point, picture yourself as a GGer. You've been neck deep in this elaborate fiction for over a year. You know some of it is made up, but some of it MUST be real. Think how terrifying that must be, really thinking any of this is true. It's not that hard to imagine when they insist "the other side" is just as bad. So just picture everything GG throws at its victims coming in at you, and your friends. Imagine hearing Eron Gjoni was about to speak before the United Nations and turn the whole world against you. That would be terrifying. You can see how the militant mindset sinks in.

Now, imagine realizing you've been lied to about a good chunk of that. The majority of your friends don't really exist. Half the people you've been told are trying to destroy you are fictional characters, one of your other friends created. The news stories you've been passing around as proof of some massive crisis are pure propaganda, pumped out by the same people surrounding you with this fictional cast that's drawn you into some weird culture war for a year. I don't know that the human mind is built to be able to handle that, and this video here shows what happens.

What's sad is, I believe the most likely result of this breakdown is going to be this guy being pulled back into the fold. If GG is as much of his life as it seems, the "real friends" he'll turn to for support are still other GGers. He'll trust them even more, and I'm sure they'll reassure him that "anti-GG" has just been gaslighting him somehow. He'll just move further away from reality, and less trusting of evidence to the contrary. It's sad.

The only real fix I can see is to treat these people like cultists. Friends and family have to pull them aside, make them come up for air. Reintroduce them to grounded reality, and slowly, carefully, try to explain the fictions they've been living.