Elevatorgate and the Death of Franz Ferdinand

What was Elevatorgate?

As we draw closer to its tenth anniversary, the question could be asked – who gives a shit?

Well, I do, and this is my platform. But you should as well because, for all it may sound hyperbolic, Elevatorgate was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the last ten years of Internet culture.

No, I hear you saying, that was GamerGate. Pah! I spit on GamerGate. If you want the real originator of the pile-up of ideology, autism, self-aggrandisement and grifting that characterises the culture wars online you need to cast your mind back to ElevatorGate.

The story begins with new atheism. Wake up! I see your eyelids drooping at the mention of the term. But in 2011 it was still a “thing”. The unprecedented atheism boom that had been launched by the clumsy polemics of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in the mid-noughts had been revived by the development of YouTube and blogging.

Awkward loudmouths seeking to achieve some kind of intellectual notoriety had given themselves names like “The Awesome Atheist” and were recording videos in which they yelled about creationism. More media savvy bright young things were carving out spaces in a market where nerd culture met intellectualism.

One of these was Rebecca Watson, lead author of the Skepchick blog and co-host of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. “Skepticism” was the cousin of atheism, and had grown in popularity because its themes were more diverse. There were only so many ways you could affirm your disbelief in a higher power - especially if you were unwilling to read up on the philosophical background of the debate. Skeptics had targets that ranged from homeopaths, to creationists, to conspiracy theorists, to anti-vaxxers, to nutritional kooks. Touchstones in the phenomenon were James Randi, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and something called “Skeptics in the Pub”.

Yet in the centre of this colourfully-haired, frequently bespectacled, dubiously bearded phenomenon was a gaping hole where values should have been. Skeptics liked logic and empiricism. Fine. They liked Dr Who and Douglas Adams. Nice. But what did they think about how the world should function? According to science, perhaps, but that legend of skepticism David Hume maintained that one cannot squeeze an “ought” out of an “is”. Something had to give. The “skeptic” bubble was about to pop.

Watson was popular but she also had a passive aggressive tone and a supercilious streak. She attracted ire as well as admiration. So, people were interested when she told a little story in a video about a man asking her back to his hotel room in the inauspicious environment of the hotel lift:

I was a single woman, in a foreign country, at 4 a.m., in a hotel elevator with you—just you—and don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I have finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.

Frankly, I think this was fair enough. It must be a little disconcerting to be propositioned in a lift by somebody you barely know – and annoying if you have just discussed disliking such behaviour.

But this was just the beginning. It was often claimed that this video caused Elevatorgate. Not quite. This is where things get complex. Stef McGraw, a student, wrote a blogpost claiming that Watson had overreacted to the man’s sexual interest. Watson criticised McGraw in a public speech in which she accused her of “parroting...misogynistic thought”. People criticised Watson for attacking McGraw. Blogger and biologist PZ Myers defended Watson for being “willing to stand and deliver the goods”. Richard Dawkins waded in with this blancmange-thick sarcasm:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and ... yawn ... .don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep 'chick', and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so...

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

Things, if you can believe it, devolved from there. Soon, two camps had developed: a community of leftists gathered around PZ Myers’ network FreeThought Blogs and a vague subculture of liberals, libertarians, conservatives and reactionaries orbiting a forum called “the Slymepit”. The former skeptics wrung their hands over -isms and -obias. The latter – more often than not being devotees of Christopher Hitchens – defended edgy humour, libertinism and political incorrectness. They wanted atheism and skepticism to be a matter of laughing at kooks and causing deserved offence. The FreeThought Bloggers had higher, more pious aspirations.

A great deal of abuse was sent screaming back and forth.

To be fair to the FreeThought Bloggers, it is true that atheism was a silly thing to build a subculture around. It is without content. Nietzsche and Marx were atheists. How much did they have in common? It was a blogger called Jen McCreight who came up with “Atheism Plus”:

We are...

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

McCreight may not have wanted to draw battle lines but she did so anyway. Richard Carrier, atheist author and blogger, celebrated the chance to “cut free the dead weight so we can kick the C.H.U.D.’s back into the sewers and finally disown them.” “I will provide...intellectual artillery,” he declared.

FreeThought Blogs, throughout the Atheism Plus era, was a petri dish for trends that would become more prominent in modern progressivism  One sensed the encroachment of politics into the family when FreeThought Blogger Alex Gabriel used his platform to call his grandma “snobby, controlling and contemptuous” and to tell his mother “your behaviour frankly disgusts me”. One could see the sacralisation of sexual identity when Richard Carrier used his blog to “come out” as polyamorous after cheating on his wife, and began using the platform to solicit dates. (Carrier, I should mention, became more tolerant of people who disagreed with him after he was accused of sexual harassment himself. He ended up trying to sue PZ Myers for suspending his blog over alleged “persistent, obnoxious sexual behavior.”) There was the obsession with eliminating enemies, which culminated in the farcical creation of the “Block Bot”.

Their opponents, who might now be called “anti-SJWs” were also a ragtag bunch. The Slymepit was characterised, not especially unfairly, as “4chan but obsessed with a very small number of people.” It was the home of the original “Godfrey Elfwick” satire of modern leftists, which itself spawned the “Titania McGrath” character. If its denizens had an ideology it was that of the Beastie Boys – you’ve got to fight for your right to party. Here, though, the “party” largely involved making naughty jokes and hitting on women at atheist conventions. If they had an aesthetic it was Ricky Gervais doing a Christlike pose on the cover of the New Humanist along with the caption, “You have the right to be offended, and I have the right to offend you.” Their style and obsessions were an important influence on GamerGate and on the “skeptic community” on YouTube – which shifted its focus from creationists and anti-vaxxers to SJWs, but, suffering from the same ideologically amorphous nature of its predecessors, soon imploded in a disagreement over whether or not it was keen on race science.

How many of those details matter? Almost none. I just wanted to open my skull and tip out a big pile of memories from a time when, with nothing but time, I morbidly followed eccentric online subcultures.

Still, perhaps there are some lessons we can draw from these sad, strange, rather funny events. One is the radicalising nature of conflict. No doubt, ideological disagreements about offence, equality, and the endpoint of reason had been stewing under the surface of the atheist movement – waiting for some kind of dumb controversy to release them – but choosing one side in an argument made people many times more committed to them.

The absurd nature of the events that can provoke such conflicts is also interesting – though perhaps unsurprising given how the First World War erupted from the point of Gavrilo Princip’s pistol. Of course, they could erupt from some other event instead. The potential for conflict already exists. But it is still interesting to see fire burst from a spark. In his essay “The Toxoplasma of Rage”, Scott Alexander wrote about how such bizarre online disputes flourish:

What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see.

But this does not quite reflect the evolution of conflict – the accumulation of bizarre grievances as Andy says X, Bob criticises X, Craig criticises Bob’s criticism of X, Duncan criticises Craig’s criticism of Bob’s criticism of X, and so on. Was Elevatorgate about the man in the lift, or Rebecca Watson’s reaction to him, or Stef McGraw’s reaction to her, or Watson’s reaction to McGraw, or Richard Dawkins’ reaction to Watson? All of these and none. Once a chain reaction of responses is set in place, there is almost nothing to be done to stop it bursting dams that hold back disagreement and breaking bridges between people. If accord is valuable then it must clear the dynamite before the spark is lit. If it is not then, well – bring on the fireworks.

Finally, Elevatorgate was one factor in my slow evolution out of the earnestness that I thought people interested in politics had to embody. Of course, I still think that politics – as well as culture, and philosophy, and religion – is a serious matter. But there is no point pretending that the manner in which we conduct ourselves while navigating that seriousness is not seething with irony and farce.  One has to be thoughtful, and principled, and honest. But one cannot always do so with a straight face. Otherwise one is a bright balloon of pretension – taking off towards the skies and getting stuck in a tree.