If you don't mind sharing what was your first (appreciative) engagement with media/internet content that was explicitly political? You paint a great and relatable picture of this era, your phenomenal engagement with the political weirdness of the early 2010s seems like one i could easily have gone through under different circumstances and I wonder how much has to do with the contingency of how you're exposed to these internet communities (first encountering the 'sjw' phenomenon as that one weirdly combative user on your otherwise apolitical gaming forum vs creating a tumblr account at age 13 etc). Mine was neither but discovering 'the daily show' and 'the colbert report' because it was on the comedy central website for free made up a huge amount of my earliest internet use and while i like to think I've gone on a reasonable journey from that starting point it undeniably shaped the form that journey would take.
This is where the genre has its come to Jesus moment on cultural appropriation. Identity politics is central to the debate. Then there’s Gamergate in 2011 which sees the pejorative emergence of SJW.
The original 2023 version of this post mentioned gamergate and the inability of anyone in the last ten years to form a satisfactory account of what exactly happened there, but when I re-edited I decided it was a little too much.
If you don't mind sharing what was your first (appreciative) engagement with media/internet content that was explicitly political? You paint a great and relatable picture of this era, your phenomenal engagement with the political weirdness of the early 2010s seems like one i could easily have gone through under different circumstances and I wonder how much has to do with the contingency of how you're exposed to these internet communities (first encountering the 'sjw' phenomenon as that one weirdly combative user on your otherwise apolitical gaming forum vs creating a tumblr account at age 13 etc). Mine was neither but discovering 'the daily show' and 'the colbert report' because it was on the comedy central website for free made up a huge amount of my earliest internet use and while i like to think I've gone on a reasonable journey from that starting point it undeniably shaped the form that journey would take.
This is really great! Just wish it was longer ;)
Thank you!
From a genre fiction perspective, everything comes to a head in 2009 on LiveJournal with RaceFail:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709
This is where the genre has its come to Jesus moment on cultural appropriation. Identity politics is central to the debate. Then there’s Gamergate in 2011 which sees the pejorative emergence of SJW.
The original 2023 version of this post mentioned gamergate and the inability of anyone in the last ten years to form a satisfactory account of what exactly happened there, but when I re-edited I decided it was a little too much.
Fair enough. As you say in the post, there were multiple ignition points. RaceFail was the one that made me sit up.