Then here's a serious answer. You want to know what GamerGate's done in the last six months?
It's existed.
That's all it has to do. The hashtag is largely dormant, true. It spins up in activity when there's a happening, or something pops up that's worth responding to. Stuff like revealing that several high-profile members of the socjus clique–high-profile enough to land cushy anti-harassment and safety positions in prominent tech companies–actively take part in the very practices that they're paid to prevent. At times like this, assuming you can be bothered to get off your ass and actually raise your voice via email or customer contact, GG can get things done. Any inroads GG makes are immediately dismissed as "oh, GG didn't really do it," or "that person doesn't really count," but it doesn't change the fact that GG is often supplemental or instrumental in getting things done. The aftereffects aren't so easily tracked, but they're most important of all. Can you imagine a major publisher in 2013 getting away with openly snubbing an outlet the size of Kotaku or Polygon? Do you have any idea how many people involved in this over the years have thought themselves a lone voice of dissent in a sea of compliance, only to find that the socjus in the industry is, ironically enough, a few small people behind a few large megaphones?
Are you upset that Intel canceled their actual-diversity program to fund their surface-diversity program? Are you upset that Twitter put together a "trust and safety council" whose sole purpose is the suppression of inconvenient dissent? Are you upset that an online shipping company would feel the need to shell money out for an internet harassment expert? You're not the only one. And GG, and those affiliated with it, are constantly on the lookout these days, holding these shit-stirrers to their own holier-than-thou standards. When they break their own rules, it gets catalogued. It gets archived. It gets spread. And, the more it happens, the more the people with actual power–employers, decision-makers, higher-ups–have to come to terms with the fact that they are feeding their resources into incompetents at best and blatant scam artists at worst. The sooner those decision-makers are forced to come to terms with that fact, the sooner they're faced with either cutting the cancer loose or going maximum Kool-Aid and watching their stock price pull a Twitter.
This has been going on for two years. Pretty much everyone who was willing to listen with an open mind and buck their peers if necessary has done so. Does anybody seriously think that the editorial staff at RPS or Gamespot or Destructoid is going to suddenly sit up in their chairs, realize that they've been acting like a bunch of hypocritical cunts for the last two years, and commit themselves to straightening up, flying right, and treating the hobby they cover as something more than a source of clickbait? At this point, GG's big victories are coming in the form of watching the titans of game journalism, with a decade of resources, momentum, and market share on their side, tilt and creak and collapse as outlets more attuned to their audiences move in to fill the void. From Youtube to Steam forums to Twitch chat, more and more, it's becoming acceptable, even popular, to shit on shit outlets. It wasn't just some random user from Holla Forums making videos mocking Polygon's incompetence with the new Doom, it made all the rounds.
Every time that the journos have to curb their own excesses, every time that they actually have to worry about COIs, every time that they have to attach a disclosure to an article, GG wins. As long as the core of dissent that GG hammered together remains, Gone Home cannot happen again. I just need to show up, depending on the day, with either an email client or a salt shovel, and GG wins. And no amount of hand-wringing anons telling me that my efforts are in vain, that it's all pointless, that nobody's listening can stop me. Because they have been telling me that nobody's listening for years now. They told me I was dead, and I was over, and I didn't have to be their audience anymore. And, at the risk of spoiling the ending of Sunset, they turned out to be full of shit all along. Why should today be any different?
