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Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.

The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.

On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention. 

How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the concept of algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.

I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do. 

So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.

She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did. 

I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.

Pink Gears

Lego makes no pink gears.

I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?

I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.

This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork. 

In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:

On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.

On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.

For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement. 

You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money. 

Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.

Breaking Patterns

I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.

The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it. 

I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them. 

And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.

People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial. 

It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay. 

Market Mercenary

You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.

Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.

As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum. 

This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else. 

Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!

A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’t want something that looks like a motorcycle. 

Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes… I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve. 

I needed some Nerf weapons for a tabletop game I DMed recently (long story), and it gave me an opportunity to try a bunch out. Compared to most Nerf weapons, I’d actually say the Rebelle line contains much less stuff that is vestigial to its core function. The mechanical, 90s-punk design is foregone in favor of a sleeker, ergonomic build, replacing all the boxy fake mechanics with airy aesthetic choices (compare Nerf’s Thunderbow to their Arrow Revolution). If we’re criticizing non-gun elements slapped on for gender appeal, we should be more offended by all the fake pistons and bolts that line most Nerf weapons to make them more “manly”.

The stigma around pink stuff stems from the fact that - in many cases - it is a legitimately inferior product. When people become too dedicated to the idea that ”pink is for girls”, it means companies can market an inferior or overpriced product and people will still buy it if there is nothing better being sold “for girls”. The reason I’m praising Rebelle so much is because it takes the feminine design and fucking delivers. Not only do the weapons have seemingly equal quality to Nerf’s other products (at least from what I’ve seen), but those two bows I linked up there are sold at the exact same price point. 

Last Christmas, while preparing for a family gathering, I continued the long and arduous process of ensuring every child in my extended family is raised exactly the way I was: surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of Legos.

The children had aged a lot since I first began my endeavor to produce clones of myself. I had already upgraded them from the larger, colorful blocks to the more advanced models and it was getting time to take that next step into functional things with working mechanical parts. For the boys, this was easy: there was no shortage of complex machines with a variety of versatile pieces, marketed to look more action-packed and enticing than a backhoe has any right to be. For the girls, though, I was faced with a different problem entirely.

On one hand, I didn’t want to have the little girls open their presents and think I had accidentally given them something meant for their brother. It’s bad enough that I had forgotten all these children's names and solely referred to them by their height and hair color; I didn’t want to make it look like I had forgotten their genders too. Not to mention if they just ended up trading the presents to a sibling, I would have failed in my attempt to create clones of myself.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to enforce gender roles on these small children. If you look at the Lego products that are marketed toward girls, they’re not very… Lego. They have a strong focus on characters and accessories, and any actual building is typically limited to very simple tables, countertops, and other elements of interior decorating. Something with building versatility or actual mechanical functions was completely out of the question - the closest you got was this “inventor workshop” that was ultiimately little more than a doll representing the concept of invention. 

How do the chemical vials and microscope relate to her mechanical work? Who knows. The math on the chalkboard isn’t even actual math; it’s just “A+D = C”. It’s the concept of algebra. This might be more excusable if it wasn’t coming from Lego; while boys are marketed actual robotics kits, girls are effectively marketed a toy of a toy.

I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My parents got me Polly Pockets and stuff right alongisde my action figures, and it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned about that implicit divide between “girl activities” and “boy activities”. I didn’t want to start pushing these kids into strict gender roles just by trying to get them a gift that was clearly for them, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do. 

So, I consulted a Lego Store employee on the matter.

She suggested I get something gender neutral for the girls. While everything mechanical and functional was very explicitly marketed toward boys, she pointed out to me that their Creator line was much more neutral. It had the pieces to build colorful houses and animals and stuff. If the girls liked it, maybe they’d eventually move on to the more advanced things in spite of the masculine marketing. That’s what she did. 

I wasn’t entirely happy with it, but it was the best I had. I went with some gender-neutral-yet-overly-childish-looking animal-building kits for the girls, and some running cars and machinery for the boys. The presents went over well; as usual I was totally the cool relative who made everyone else’s presents look lame. The experience was something that stuck with me, though. It was the first time I really came face-to-face with this curious absence not just in Lego’s product line, but in the market in general.

Pink Gears

Lego makes no pink gears.

I mean, yeah, sure, girls don’t have to like pink things. They’re allowed to shop in the whole toy store, not just the Fabled Pink Aisle, and there are plenty of gray and black gears out there should they choose to play with them. But why is there this necessity to sideline femininity if you want to explore these things?

I read an interesting piece recently by a game writer who made the rather poignant statement that sexism comes at her from two directions: in the male-dominated technology field she was expected to pretend to be “one of the guys”, while in the female-dominated publishing field she was expected to be a “proper woman”. I think this highlights the important point: sexism does not favor men or women, but dichotomy - the real losers being the stereotype-breaking people whose interests don’t cleanly fall into either the male/female category. We don’t do much to recognize those who straddle the divide, and this means we get no pink gears.

This is pretty silly, though. There is nothing explicitly masculine about engineering or robotics. In fact, it has some very traditionally feminine elements that I think you could play up into a brilliant marketing angle. Machines can be delicate, intricate, and beautiful. An action-packed piece of boxart showing a fast car skidding across a muddy highway is just as representative of mechanical creation as an elaborate piece of clockwork. 

In fact, watch, I’ll come up with a Lego product line right now:

On the low-price end, I went for a hummingbird. I figure it’d come with alt instructions to rebuild it into a dragonfly or butterfly or something, and basically be playing up this idea of turning circular motion from a crank into up-and-down motion to animate wing flapping. Maybe it could even make that conversion twice: a cable going up the stalk being pulled back and forth would be converted back into gear rotation, which would then power the wing flapping. It’d entail enough small parts that you could make some cool stuff with it.

On the mid-tier, I went for a kitten. I figure it’d be built around a pouncing function, its associated muscles rigged up with rubber bands. You could wind it up (maybe an excuse to use a worm screw?) and then hit its tail or something and it could probably clear at least three feet of air. Throw in some alt instructions for a turtle or something that can use the same spring principles for a wind up engine that makes it turtleflop across the ground.

For the highest priced bit, I’d go for a panther. Swap in green gears for pink to make it more special, have lots of sparkly green parts to accent the black. I’m envisioning this being motorized - large felines have a very iconic walk cycle, and I think the right parts could simulate it pretty well. Heck, depending how good its designer is maybe you could even have a secondary motor that will bend its midsection and shift its weight to the side so you can actually steer its movement. Alt instructions would probably be a dolphin or something; instead of a walk cycle it’d just be on wheels and animate its fin/tail movement. 

You could market these things in an extremely feminine way. Like, go full Lisa Frank on the fucking box art. They’re pretty and they play up an angle to robotics and creation you don’t see in toys much. And not just that, but it goes all the way up - it’s not just some gateway drug to get girls to buy the trucks and racecars, but rather a whole line of robotics that plays up traditionally feminine elements. Girls could buy it without feeling like they’re sacrificing their femininity to experiment with these interests. Boys would uncomfortably buy it and defend its awesomeness to their friends. It would make so much money. 

Companies are apparently afraid of money, though, since this hasn’t happened yet. Well, maybe the truth is a little more complicated than that.

Breaking Patterns

I frequently refer to myself as an Overglorified Fanfiction Author because it’s funny. There’s a lot of humor in the fact that I’m best known for writing a story based off an eight-year-old video game, and calling it “fanfiction” highlights the sheer ridiculousness of the entire situation. When you get down to the specifics, however, the stuff I write isn’t fanfiction - it’s parody.

The distinction is an important one that a lot of people miss when they try to undertake similar projects. There are tons of people who try to do Elder Scrolls-inspired stories that very accurately or realistically chronicle their experiences in the game, yet such stories quickly fade out of existence without you ever hearing about them. Sometimes it’s even by people who really love the source material, but they’re simply not saying anything about it. You saw the same phenomenon in the Homestuck fandom at its apex: hundreds of people coming up with their own “Sburb Groups” of internet friends and chronicling their adventures into the Medium. They saw a formula that worked, and they struck out to imitate it. 

I think this is sort of the same mentality that drives gendered marketing. People know it works - products that hit every stereotype of masculinity have an audience among men, and products that hit every stereotype of femininity have an audience among women. So, creators make fanfiction that tries to capitalize off these successes, showing reverent respect and homage toward the companies that have sold better than them. 

And you rarely see that proper sense of parody toward these things. Like, you don’t see that drive that makes a creator simultaneously imitate and attack something. It’s baffling, because when this does happen it’s often wildly successful. Who would’ve thought to take the traditionally masculine concept of monsters and zombies and build a line of fashion dolls around it? Who would’ve thought to build a setting and adventure cartoon around traditionally feminine palettes and iconigraphy? These are ideas of parody - attacking the problems or monotony of a concept while simultaneously paying it homage, and it’s something that can generally only be created through a conscious effort to do just that.

People who just try to ignore gender stereotypes alltogether often fall into them anyway. Like a fantasy author who insists his story isn’t just Star Wars with dragons, people tell themselves that they're not going to play their work into gendered stereotypes, but then do it anyway simply because they’ve come to view it as how things work. To make things worse, they don’t even call the resultant work “masculine” or “feminine” - they play into the stereotypes exactly but give it names like “serious”, or “pro-social”. In an attempt to be progressive with their language, they make an implicit statement that women are frivolous and men are antisocial. 

It’s something I think you can only really circumvent through intentional parody. You need to find that middleground that sexism attacks and openly start dancing around in it. Mock the work of others; acknowledge the established rules and violate them anyway. You need to be a beacon or weirdness that spurs other people to stand along with you, until in time you have created a bastion where your unconventional tastes are Just Plain Okay. 

Market Mercenary

You don’t defeat ideas by criticizing them. You defeat them by outcompeting them.

Far too few people recognize that criticism is a means to an end: you isolate the problems with something so that you can eventually render it powerless or irrelevant.

As I established at the beginning, Lego’s approach to gendered marketing left me without a satisfactory solution in my attempts to build a clone army. I’m probably not the only one who feels this way. There is an untapped money mine here while creators continue to pick away at the long-hollow ridges at each end of the gender spectrum. 

This isn’t just something that affects big companies. If you’re a creator, stop making fanfiction and start making parody. Be honest with yourself - no matter how original you think your work is, you’re paying homage to something you like. Recognize this, and poke a little fun at it instead. Address your biggest criticism. Combine it with something else you like. Do something no one else would ever think of doing. Don’t think it will work? Well it’ll definitely work better than a straight-up rehash of something else. 

Credit where credit’s due: in the years since writing this, Lego has branched out their female-targeted product lines and now holds about as much real estate in the Pink Aisle as any of the heavy-hitters. They’re still not really pushing advanced mechanical models or selling things so cool that even boys want them, but they have some solid adventure- and superhero-based themes. There are entire sets that don’t contain a single piece of furniture!

A stronger shoutout goes to Nerf’s Rebelle line, which has really come into its own since 2013 when I wrote this. Early on it was just a handful of standard Nerf designs spruced up with pink and flowers, but it’s since moved into having a strong focus on bows and smallarms, some of which have rather neat designs that are not available on any other current product (see: the CornerSight, with at least one review boasting that the recipient’s brothers were now jealous). This isn’t just a matter of “girls can get cool things too” - it’s an opportunity for companies like Nerf to explore elegant and specialized designs that would be difficult to market under the traditional “safety orange and mechanical” look. I mean, let’s be honest: the sort of boys who are into bows probably don’t want something that looks like a motorcycle. 

Like I emphasized in the original post, the creation of products like this isn’t just about gender equality: these things make money. Whether you’re talking about gender in toys, or genre in games, or structure in fiction, the fact is that very few people are completely satisfied with the current “norms”. There will be girls who want to pretend they are Katniss without looking like they’re carrying a motorcycle, just like there will be RPG fans who love RPGs but wish they could try exercising diplomacy with the monster tribes they’re mowing down, or fantasy fans who can identify the elements of the Hero’s Journey so fluently that the entire structure has become dull. While all the proven formulas are certainly proven, everyone has a certain way they want to see them broken. In many cases, people might not even know how much they want it until they see it in front of them, making the little girl look at the Lego box and say “yes... I want to build that goddamn robot cat”. Except without the “goddamn”, because she’s twelve. 

I write a lot of posts here about anonymity.

One one level, it’s because I just really enjoy the concepts and ramifications anonymity - which by extension makes me one of the disconcertingly small number of creators who can maintain a positive relationship with 4chan and the other Anon Cultures. On another level, though, it’s a professional interest: anonymity is very important to anyone who deals with crowds, public opinion, and data gathering. Statistically speaking, the responses people give when others are watching and judging them tend to be very different than the responses people give under the veil of anonymity. 

However, the other thing I like to talk about on this blog is social manipulation. In all my discussions of anonymity, there’s still one topic I haven’t really touched on very much: how do you control anonymous people?

Anonymity as a data gathering tool is well and fine, but one of the big fears people have of 4chan and similar cultures is their seemingly uncontrollable, chaotic nature. With 4chan in particular, popular culture knows them largely by their external actions - 4chan raids, 4chan harassment, 4chan hacktivists, etc. Content creators especially seem pretty clueless when it comes to actually exhibiting control over anonymous figures - which is strange because, like I’ve said before, it's not complicated. It’s really kind of confusing how people can be so bad at it.

So, in this post I’m going to more or less just talk about how to control anons. To understand the techniques, though, we have to get into a bit of psychology and history.

Put on your psychologist scarves, kids. We’re gonna talk about brains.

Crime and Punishment

Before I get into the thick of this, the first thing you have to understand is the difference between reinforcement and punishment.

The concept is pretty simple. The idea behind reinforcement is that someone receives a reward for behaving in a certain way, which encourages them to behave that way more frequently. It can be a positive reinforcement (giving them something they want, like a cupcake) or a negative reinforcement (taking away something they dislike, like an annoying singer), but in both cases it leaves them better off than they were. 

Punishment is the opposite. Someone faces consequences for behaving a certain way, and this discourages them from doing it again. Like with reinforcement, punishment can be either positive (someone sings annoyingly until you leave) or negative (they take away your cupcake). The common trend is simply that it leaves you worse off than you were before. You fear the punishment happening to you, and this causes you to act a certain way.

Our culture has a very large emphasis on punishment. On some level, this is an institutionalized thing we recognize and accept - we know and approve of the fact that people get charged money for driving recklessly, or will be locked away from people if they physically harm someone else. There are a lot of other types of punishment that are used to control behavior, though, which we tend to overlook.

For instance: social ostracization. We have very strict and complicated rules governing everything from eye contact to the appropriate progression of discussion topics. If someone violates these rules, it’s not a crime, but we still try to make them get hurt a little. For things like inappropriate conversation progression or eye contact, they’ll be accused of obsession with a topic, or their sexuality will be called into question in a way that makes them uncomfortable. In more serious cases of someone violating norms in a way we disapprove of, we will inflict viral misinformation against them - this is where you see stuff like slander and decontextualized quotes used to harm someone’s reputation or career. At this point, you’re usually not trying to discourage that person’s behavior - you’re trying to make an example out of them, and show others the cost of violating your beliefs of how people should act. 

Rape is another punishment that is pretty widely accepted in our culture. If you go to prison, for example, it’s taken for granted that you’re going to get raped. People don’t complain about this a lot, probably because they recognize that prison on its own looks like a pretty good deal for a lot of people - it’s a warm place to sleep and three state-funded meals a day. The fear of rape is regarded as one of the things that makes prison an effective punishment. You also see this fear of rape used in politics - any time a conservative politician uses the classic “it was her fault for dressing that way” line, he’s establishing rape as a de-facto punishment someone incurs for violating what he sees as an appropriate dress code. It’s effectively an attempt to weaponize rape as punishment.

Even death is a pretty common punishment in our culture. Like, even outside arguments of capital punishment, we are taught that you simply don’t walk certain places at night, or reach into your pockets in the wrong way, or make any sudden movements when a cop pulls you over, or things like that. We recognize that, yes, if you do these things then you're probably going to die. Like rape, it’s also something that’s been politicized in the past - if you’ve ever read the beautifully dated “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, the comic’s whole premise is that if you’re gay you will die. It’s not used as a statement of “we should do something about HIV”, but instead as a political statement that you really shouldn’t be gay. In general, our culture is pretty okay with death as long as the person was doing something we disapprove of.

And like… sometimes, I just like to think about how fucked up and dangerous our entire culture would seem to an alien visitor. 

Anyway, the point here is that our culture is utterly terrifying. Outside of the written rules, we have a complex web of social standards and personal beliefs that are enforced through vigilante justice. Good and bad are irrelevant - you just can’t piss off the wrong people, or they’ll come and get you. However, there’s always been one defense to this: anonymity.

One of the earlier forms of this was confessionals in the Catholic church. People who committed a mortal sin would confidentially tell it to a clergyman who offered them ways to seek absolution without the clergyman judging or hating them. Later on, you also saw the concept of anonymous crime tipping emerge - letting people report a crime in a way that the criminals could not trace it back to them. In both cases, anonymity was being used as a way to encourage positive behavior by inhibiting problematic people who would enforce punishments on it. The tipper or confessor could still be rewarded with the positive feelings of making amends for their wrongdoing or inhibiting a crime, but they were less likely to be punished for it. 

In some ways, this had a dark side: it’s where we got things like the magazine-clipping ransom letter. In other ways, it got romanticized: we saw fiction stories of superheroes concealing their identity so that criminals could not attack them or their families at home. In all cases, though, anonymity came about as a defense against punishment. 

With the advent of the internet, it became easier than ever to conceal your identity. You might be a lowly fry cook by day, but by night you were just a name on a forum like everyone else. At school you might get beat up for being a nerd, but at home you were a Level 50 Paladin in your MMO guild. Nobody could hurt you for what you were or did while wearing a mask.

On top of this, people discovered that they could have their identity completely concealed to the point of not even having a persistent online name, and it would still be psychologically rewarding to interact with people. Under complete anonymity, people could act and take chances without even the fear that their beloved Level 50 Paladin would be punished for it in their stead. 

In a hostile and punishment-driven world where you could have all your career aspirations permanently destroyed by holding a conversation topic for a sentence too long, people realized that they could be invincible. They just needed to put on a mask.

Fighting Faceless

As long as there is punishment, there will be anonymity. The very act of punishment gives people two options: they can meet the punisher’s demands, or they can learn to defend against it. Anonymity represents the latter: people weakening the effectiveness of punishment. For better or for worse, an anonymous individual can act without personally suffering negative consequences.  

This, I think, is where most people falter in their attempts to fight anons. Anonymity is a defense against punishment. They are still susceptible to everything else. 

For a lot of people, this can be a kind of disconcerting experience as they realize exactly how much they rely on threats and coercion to control others. Sometimes, this is a very big sign you are doing something wrong - if you rely on bullying or slander to control others, you will have a very hard time controlling an anon culture. Other times, it’s a bit more innocuous - if you rely on institutional laws like DMCA, the inability to punish people in an anon culture who violate it can be frustrating. 

External punishments still affect them. You can threaten to hurt someone an anon cares about, or destroy something they love - all the standard villain tactics that work against masked superheroes also carry over here pretty well. Of course, this is also a really stupid thing to do, since it provides them with positive reinforcement in the form of moral justification. 

This highlights an important point, though: moral justification does affect them. Feeling like they made a positive difference affects them. Heck, any kind of positivity or reward affect them.

Like I mentioned above, anonymity is a defense against punishment, and everything that isn’t punishment is fair game. You can reinforce positive behavior, evoke feelings of righteousness, reward them with things they want, and even influence them with empathy and camaraderie. You can control them or stop them or anything like that, and it’s really not that hard. Most people outside of me wouldn’t even call this “manipulation”. It's kindness. They’re incredibly susceptible to it. 

The Big Twist

So, you know all that stuff I just wrote about controlling anons? It also works on normal people. In fact, it works better than coercion.

Like I mentioned earlier, we often don’t recognize the degree to which we rely on fear and punishment as a culture. We’re accustomed to it, and those of us lucky enough to be born with social aptitude can navigate these complex interpersonal relationships with relative comfort. Someone’s reactions and strategies in their first encounter with an anon culture can be a telling indicator of how much said person relies on punishment - or even the ways in which they rely on punishment. It can be a humbling experience, having a branch of manipulation tactics suddenly cut off from you, but you become more powerful because of it.

Anonymity and similar defenses against punishment are an ingrained part of our culture that will not be going away any time soon, and your success these days will largely depend on your ability to adapt to them. Services like Steam, for example, are viable in the modern age because they try to combat the unpunishable forces of piracy by providing better service than the pirates can. They rely on reinforcement rather than punishment, and it works. Meanwhile, companies that try to enforce punishments slowly dry up and die. 

And not only is it economically non-viable, but a reliance on coercion can be dangerous and self-deceptive. As I said at the very beginning, the opinions people present around others differ from the opinions they present under the veil of anonymity, and their actual habits are better reflected by the latter. Someone might share your political beliefs when they see how you treat people who disagree with you, for example, but you have no idea what that person is doing when they enter a voting booth and gain their anonymity. If they are siding with you out of fear, you can bet they’re secretly fighting you when consequences are removed. Thanks to the very existence of anonymity, all coercion does is obscure your knowledge of who’s on your side and who isn’t. When the masks are on, the rules are different.

I think that’s what makes anon cultures so interesting to me. For all their depravedness and hostility, they largely represent a place in which punishment is less effective. The cultural differences that emerge from that are neat - not entirely positive, nor entirely negative, but certainly different. I think the world would benefit from more people learning the techniques to effectively control anons, because they carry over into about everything. People in an anon culture are no different from normal people, other than being more resistant to the cheapest of manipulation strategies. 

That’s not to say I think anonymity creates the end-all perfect culture or anything like that, but it’s definitely an interesting step that is worth learning from. In particular it’s important to know how to respond to it, since elements and effects of of anonymity are only becoming more prevalent as time goes on. 

Anonymity and the idea of consequence-free social interaction might be be scary, but as long as you understand how it works, it’s relatively harmless and there’s nothing to be afraid of. If nothing else, it’s simpler and safer than the world you’re living in now.

Like I explain above, our culture relies very heavily on social punishments. We often get people to do what we want through threats of ostracization, threats of placing derogatory labels, or even threats against someone’s employment status or social connections. However, anonymity exists as a defense against punishment. When anonymity is granted, punishments cannot be executed against the anonymous party, and the threat of punishment therefore carries no coercive value. If anything, the attempted threat may lead the anonymous party to act against the manipulator out of spite.

Places like 4chan are an example of what happens when you build an entire culture around anonymity, but anonymity exists in many other places to a lesser degree. A very important one we tend to forget about is public elections. 

I live in a guaranteed blue state. I’ll readily admit I voted for Jill Stein this election because 1.) I agree with her political views and 2.) my state’s ten electoral votes are going to the democrats either way, so the only way my vote can make a difference is by trying to help my favored party get the 5% they need for federal funding. The only thing I could’ve done to further influence this election was write a guide on how to control anonymous people, which I did. If you tried to influence people’s voting decisions using the sort of tactics that anonymity provides a defense against, a failure to adequately influence those people is your fault. There is no other way to put it. 

Something being your fault isn’t bad. It means you have control over it, and that - even if you use that control poorly - your decisions can make a difference. Yet already, I’m seeing a lot of people blaming the election outcome on things completely outside their influence. They’ll say Donald  Trump won because the US had a massive, undefeatable horde of racists going out to vote, or because too many people voted third-party (really guys, if you looked up how the voting system works, maybe we’d get that 5%). Too few people are willing to accept that this outcome is largely because the Democratic party used tactics that do not work in an anonymous environment. All the people who said they’d vote for Hillary Clinton out of fear of being labeled a bigot and gave us those polls estimating her at a 90% chance of victory went out and voted against her as soon as anonymity was granted. Heck, a lot of your friends who are lamenting Clinton’s loss probably actually voted for Donald Trump. As a worthless greenie who writes about the importance of anonymity and makes a point about not judging people for their political views, people admit their votes to me. And you wouldn’t believe some of the people who are lying for the sake of their personal safety and friendships. 

It’s okay to be upset if you did not get the outcome you wanted, but it’s also important to start thinking ahead for 2020. People are already falling into attacks and stigma mechanics against Trump supporters, further biasing their own data and inhibiting their ability to isolate where rhetoric is most necessary. Not only that, I already see a lot of people operating under the assumption that Trump’s presidency is going to be so bad that the democratic candidate is going to win 2020 by default. In the event that his presidency is not that bad, it’s going to decimate the credibility of many people opposing him (and with the amount of doomsaying going on, “not that bad” is a very easy bar for him to surmount). And don’t forget, with the level of stigmatization from the left surrounding Trump support, further stigmatization makes it increasingly unlikely that Trump supporters (or even undecideds who fell on his side) are going to flip. Discovering your tactics to be ineffective is not a good time to double down on them, and assuming disaster should not be your sole plan for victory.

A friend was talking to me earlier and noted how strange it was that stuff like death threats are considered a bigger deal than things like slander/misinformation. Her rationale was that slander was a direct action intended to harm someone’s career or livelihood, while a death threat was just a threat that someone would probably not act on. Most people are not in a position where they could take legal action against a defamatory claim, or they lack the social reach to counter it, making it pretty much guaranteed harm. In cases like that, someone might see counterharassment as the only way to discourage an aggressor and defend their own wellbeing. Would that be morally (if not legally) justified as an act of self-defense? I’m honestly not sure.

I guess my personal thoughts are “I’m glad I’m popular and connected so I don’t have to worry about this”, but I dislike the fact that those words even come up in my head. 

That said, a lot of the people acting out have a complaint/fear that is going unrecognized because it is itself a ludicrous complaint. See also the guy fussing at Bioware about their lack of support for “the straight male gamer” a while back. That guy’s complaint was just plain stupid. It was nonsensical. It did not need to be recognized or acknowledged or addressed; he just needed to grow the fuck up and stop expecting the world to always be entirely about him.

Ludicrous complaints are often the easiest to address! I mean yeah, sometimes you’ll run into someone who just completely disregards anything that would suggest they are wrong, and in cases like this you might have no choice but to move on and seek better vectors of change. With a lot of people who hold positions like this, though, they’re just straight-up misinformed, or come from a cultural/educational background that colors their opinion. 

I don’t know the exact Bioware complaint you’re talking about, but it sounds like the guy is one of those people who is just really inwardly paranoid that he’ll be playing the game and might get into a gay relationship. Like, this is a legitimate fear some people have, particularly if they were raised in a setting where homosexuality was something they were expected to show disgust toward, possibly with social consequences if they don’t. He probably just needs to be reassured that, no, this gay relationship is something you have to actively work toward in-game, it won’t happen by accident.

I just realized it totally might’ve come across as me saying that (and here I was, so proud that I had written a Tumblr post without an hour of proofreading). For the record, I didn’t mean there was a level of harassment or abuse that should be accepted within the industry, but rather that there is a level of harassment that has to be recognized as normal, especially if you’re going to try to improve things.

In addressing a problem like harassment, your first step is to figure out the causes. With something as broad as “harassment”, there are going to be a lot of different causes all contributing to one quantifiable output. When you establish a baseline that is essentially “normal” for someone in a particular position, you can work to isolate isolate specific behaviors or attributes that affect the harassment they receive.

The harassment that was brought up in that Hateful Boyfriend post, for example, is tamer in both content and harshness than what I get on about a daily basis. At the same time, though, I’m a bigger name than its author was - I’m inclined to say that our harassment is both pretty expected for our relative popularity levels and it’s hard to draw conclusions from it. The harassment received by someone like Zoe Quinn is probably greater than mine - but from what I’ve seen, about on par with someone like Andrew Dobson. One attribute both Zoe Quinn and Andrew Dobson have in common is a general hostility toward critics, and I’m inclined to say that the “solution” to their harassment is to either place blame on them for handling their audience poorly or to promote positivity and understanding toward people who don’t want to receive criticism. Either one works.

The key here, even if you’re addressing something pervasive like general misogynistic attitudes in the gaming community, is that you need to address it from the inside. You need to be able to understand a community, see what is causing the misbehavior, identify the people who are perpetuating it, and get them to stop. It’s a very social thing and ultimately, the only way you permanently win is with the collaboration of the people you disagree with. 

The thing you don’t want to do is rush in and start attacking people, since they’re not going to just go away. The thing you really don’t want to do is rush in and start attacking people for the wrong thing, since people who act out are usually doing so because they have some complaint/fear that is going unrecognized. Dealing with situations like this is a delicate thing, and someone can’t just barge in and expect the same treatment from mass audiences that they would get from friends in an artist-circle. I would like to see things improve, but I’m not going to have pity for someone who expects that hurt feelings will be enough to solve problems. 

The article you're referring to with "Useful Idiots" is this Slate one right? http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/10/how_to_end_gamergate_a_divide_and_conquer_plan.html