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Is the internet real life? The courts don’t seem to think so. But a little-known case hints at a way forward.
A Washington state trial court recently awarded video game developer Bungie almost $500,000 in damages from a “Destiny 2” player who subjected one of its employees and his wife to a barrage of racist, abusive and otherwise alarming calls and messages.
The culprit is a so-called hate raider — which means that he makes a habit of coordinating with fellow racists to spam players of color with bigotry until they shut down their gaming streams. This time, he chose as his target a “Destiny 2” community manager who had the gall to share a Black fan’s tribute art.
“I was wondering if you could add a [n-word]-killing DLC to my favorite video game?” he inquired in a voice mail, using an acronym for downloadable content. Then a text to the wife’s personal phone: “You’re a fat bitch and [the community manager] is a limp wristed homo. … ADD A [N-WORD] KILLING DLC.” After that, he sent a pizza to their door.
This sequence of events may seem more distasteful than dangerous … if you don’t spend much time on the internet. To the extremely online, the details are terrifying. The trick is bridging that gap.
If you’ve never heard of Bungie, and you’ve never heard of “Destiny 2,” maybe you’ve never heard of GamerGate — a year-long campaign by angry, misogynist, mostly male computer nerds and forum-dwellers to heckle and threaten feminist members of the gaming community out of online existence.
Of course, that most people have never heard of any of these things is part of the problem.
GamerGate remains the most obvious, most mainstream example the country has seen of how easily random trolls can turn into a unified mob — and how that mob can turn up at a target’s door, ready to bang down the brittle walls between online behavior and offline consequences. This isn’t entirely figurative. Two women involved in the episode, fearful for their safety after a doxing attack revealed their addresses, were forced to leave their homes.
GamerGate today is treated as a cautionary tale, yet it never really ended. Instead, the episode represented merely the biggest and loudest version of a phenomenon that keeps happening every day. Writer Amanda Hess summed it up in the title of a viral essay almost 10 years ago: “Women aren’t welcome on the Internet.” Plunge into the cesspool, and you’ll see that neither are Black people, or LGBTQ+ people, or, or, or.
The trouble is, the offline world has never taken any of these online abuses all that seriously. Internet culture is so suffused with irony that anything could be just a joke, and the very worst things could be clumsy attempts to look cool. These are kids, the thinking goes: meme-makers and pranksters. Most of all, none of this is happening in real life. It’s only happening on the internet.
Just look at the Supreme Court justices presiding over a recent case in which they ruled 7-2 to reverse the stalking conviction of a man who’d sent extensive threats to a stranger via Facebook. “Staying in cyber life is going to kill you,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. quoted from a message, before quipping, “I can’t promise I haven’t said that.” Ha, ha?
Of course, this view is uninformed. What’s happening on the internet is happening in real life. The Bungie case does a beautiful job of proving that by describing just how ugly online harassment can be.
There is plenty awful about the slur-stuffed communiqués in this case. But the key to the case, it turns out, was the pizza: a “virtually inedible, odiferous” $50 monstrosity that the respondent ordered to the petitioner’s doorstep. His instructions were explicit: “Knock at least five times. I’ll probably be wearing headphones.”
The true message was that the sender knew where the receiver lived. The hammering on the door simulated what he warned could come next: so-called swatting, making a prank 911 call that sends gun-toting cops to the victim’s address. Swatting can get people killed.
The delivery tactic was, as Allison Nixon of the investigation agency Unit 221B explained in her expert testimony, in keeping with “predictable patterns” of online harassment that can, and do, end in physical violence. The pizza fit into the final, horrifying stages of one of these patterns.
The upshot is this: To the average analog Joe, the pizza was just a pizza — nothing to get worked up over. Yet to the perennially logged-on, the pizza was a believable threat. Crucially, the judge accepted this.
The case, the victorious lawyers point out, matters in part because it allows an employer to recover for harassment of an employee, and harassment victims usually don’t have the resources or wherewithal on their own to hire crack representation plus a team of digital detectives to track anonymous scofflaws across the internet.
That’s what Bungie did with the internet-savvy team at KUSK Law as well as Unit 221B, whose sleuths managed to identify the perpetrator from among millions of online menaces in a mere 14 days, including by securing an international subpoena.
Plus, the decision recognizes that workplace injury is still workplace injury, even when the workplace is the web.
That cuts to the crux of the case: Too many of the people in high office will never stop seeing the internet as a foreign realm. They’ll also never really be able to speak the language. But victims, advocates and anyone arguing on their behalf can prove that the line between online and offline life isn’t just thin. It barely even exists.
Is the internet real life? The courts don’t seem to think so. But a little-known case hints at a way forward.
A Washington state trial court recently awarded video game developer Bungie almost $500,000 in damages from a “Destiny 2” player who subjected one of its employees and his wife to a barrage of racist, abusive and otherwise alarming calls and messages.
The culprit is a so-called hate raider — which means that he makes a habit of coordinating with fellow racists to spam players of color with bigotry until they shut down their gaming streams. This time, he chose as his target a “Destiny 2” community manager who had the gall to share a Black fan’s tribute art.
“I was wondering if you could add a [n-word]-killing DLC to my favorite video game?” he inquired in a voice mail, using an acronym for downloadable content. Then a text to the wife’s personal phone: “You’re a fat bitch and [the community manager] is a limp wristed homo. … ADD A [N-WORD] KILLING DLC.” After that, he sent a pizza to their door.
This sequence of events may seem more distasteful than dangerous … if you don’t spend much time on the internet. To the extremely online, the details are terrifying. The trick is bridging that gap.
If you’ve never heard of Bungie, and you’ve never heard of “Destiny 2,” maybe you’ve never heard of GamerGate — a year-long campaign by angry, misogynist, mostly male computer nerds and forum-dwellers to heckle and threaten feminist members of the gaming community out of online existence.
Of course, that most people have never heard of any of these things is part of the problem.
GamerGate remains the most obvious, most mainstream example the country has seen of how easily random trolls can turn into a unified mob — and how that mob can turn up at a target’s door, ready to bang down the brittle walls between online behavior and offline consequences. This isn’t entirely figurative. Two women involved in the episode, fearful for their safety after a doxing attack revealed their addresses, were forced to leave their homes.
GamerGate today is treated as a cautionary tale, yet it never really ended. Instead, the episode represented merely the biggest and loudest version of a phenomenon that keeps happening every day. Writer Amanda Hess summed it up in the title of a viral essay almost 10 years ago: “Women aren’t welcome on the Internet.” Plunge into the cesspool, and you’ll see that neither are Black people, or LGBTQ+ people, or, or, or.
The trouble is, the offline world has never taken any of these online abuses all that seriously. Internet culture is so suffused with irony that anything could be just a joke, and the very worst things could be clumsy attempts to look cool. These are kids, the thinking goes: meme-makers and pranksters. Most of all, none of this is happening in real life. It’s only happening on the internet.
Just look at the Supreme Court justices presiding over a recent case in which they ruled 7-2 to reverse the stalking conviction of a man who’d sent extensive threats to a stranger via Facebook. “Staying in cyber life is going to kill you,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. quoted from a message, before quipping, “I can’t promise I haven’t said that.” Ha, ha?
Of course, this view is uninformed. What’s happening on the internet is happening in real life. The Bungie case does a beautiful job of proving that by describing just how ugly online harassment can be.
There is plenty awful about the slur-stuffed communiqués in this case. But the key to the case, it turns out, was the pizza: a “virtually inedible, odiferous” $50 monstrosity that the respondent ordered to the petitioner’s doorstep. His instructions were explicit: “Knock at least five times. I’ll probably be wearing headphones.”
The true message was that the sender knew where the receiver lived. The hammering on the door simulated what he warned could come next: so-called swatting, making a prank 911 call that sends gun-toting cops to the victim’s address. Swatting can get people killed.
The delivery tactic was, as Allison Nixon of the investigation agency Unit 221B explained in her expert testimony, in keeping with “predictable patterns” of online harassment that can, and do, end in physical violence. The pizza fit into the final, horrifying stages of one of these patterns.
The upshot is this: To the average analog Joe, the pizza was just a pizza — nothing to get worked up over. Yet to the perennially logged-on, the pizza was a believable threat. Crucially, the judge accepted this.
The case, the victorious lawyers point out, matters in part because it allows an employer to recover for harassment of an employee, and harassment victims usually don’t have the resources or wherewithal on their own to hire crack representation plus a team of digital detectives to track anonymous scofflaws across the internet.
That’s what Bungie did with the internet-savvy team at KUSK Law as well as Unit 221B, whose sleuths managed to identify the perpetrator from among millions of online menaces in a mere 14 days, including by securing an international subpoena.
Plus, the decision recognizes that workplace injury is still workplace injury, even when the workplace is the web.
That cuts to the crux of the case: Too many of the people in high office will never stop seeing the internet as a foreign realm. They’ll also never really be able to speak the language. But victims, advocates and anyone arguing on their behalf can prove that the line between online and offline life isn’t just thin. It barely even exists.
