There's a technicality that might matter here. Eris is Discord. Mythologically, Eris might be a descendant of Chaos, and an avenue for the influence of chaos, but Chaos itself is something else.
I think of Gamergate as having been a warning shot. Gamergate was mostly a LARP of real political conflict. (The main consequences were just people getting fired, people getting horrible threats (even if they were also the sort of people who could have exaggerated the majority of them), somebody (my headcanon: Arthur Chu) calling in a bomb threat to disrupt some interviews that might otherwise have become the thin end of the wedge for the mainstream media coming to understand where Gamergaters were coming from, and (later) one of Zoe Quinn's other headgame narrative control abuse victims committing suicide.) If "we" (mostly the other side; noblesse oblige) had understood where the discord was coming from and what we were doing wrong, and corrected ourselves, we might have handled the subsequent much more destructive situation of discord powering the alt-right and Trump much better. Nothing I know of the Discordian experience of Eris suggests that this kind of influence would be out of character for her, even including inspiring Quinn to take her name, given how the dominoes from Quinn's relationship with Eron Gjoni were already set up.
On a semi-related note, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the two most popular group conversation platforms are called "Slack" and "Discord", corresponding to the two half-joke religions SubGenius and Discordianism. There's an additional irony in that, so far as I understand, Slack is used more for workplaces (and perhaps organized activism?), and Discord is used more for gaming and subcultures, rather than the other way around.
One interesting thing about the Helldivers game is the player character faction "Super Earth", which is a parody of political cultures that justify their abuses by wearing the flag of Democracy. I'm not sure whether to expect political consequences I like or ones I dislike from part of a generation worldwide getting used to treating the idea of democracy as something whose political sacralization is just an ongoing joke. I suppose a Discordian attitude towards jokes does plausibly correspond to what it would take to reclaim the idea of democracy, once it's been so abused.
Notably, part of the package of ideas associated with the game is that Super Earth practices "managed democracy", and disvalues "unmanaged democracy". This is not so far from the influential dissident-right critique of modern democracy as having had all its free genuine power invisibly hoarded up by a self-appointed moral aristocracy subculture which has been driven mad by runaway cultural involution ("purity spirals", but also addiction to the political spoils from electorate dilution strategies), ungrounded by personal stakes or consequences: what could be called the Cathedral, or the Blob, or the professional-managerial class, or the human rights and development legitimacy clerisy, or the media-academic-government complex.
Also, and this is reaching slightly, but the term on Somethingawful for the style of post where someone makes a long explanation of all the wrongs someone supposedly did, which Eron Gjoni's post there qualified as, is "helldump", which starts the same way as "Helldivers".
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branchandroot
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Date: 2024-03-18 09:04 pm (UTC)I think of Gamergate as having been a warning shot. Gamergate was mostly a LARP of real political conflict. (The main consequences were just people getting fired, people getting horrible threats (even if they were also the sort of people who could have exaggerated the majority of them), somebody (my headcanon: Arthur Chu) calling in a bomb threat to disrupt some interviews that might otherwise have become the thin end of the wedge for the mainstream media coming to understand where Gamergaters were coming from, and (later) one of Zoe Quinn's other headgame narrative control abuse victims committing suicide.) If "we" (mostly the other side; noblesse oblige) had understood where the discord was coming from and what we were doing wrong, and corrected ourselves, we might have handled the subsequent much more destructive situation of discord powering the alt-right and Trump much better. Nothing I know of the Discordian experience of Eris suggests that this kind of influence would be out of character for her, even including inspiring Quinn to take her name, given how the dominoes from Quinn's relationship with Eron Gjoni were already set up.
On a semi-related note, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the two most popular group conversation platforms are called "Slack" and "Discord", corresponding to the two half-joke religions SubGenius and Discordianism. There's an additional irony in that, so far as I understand, Slack is used more for workplaces (and perhaps organized activism?), and Discord is used more for gaming and subcultures, rather than the other way around.
One interesting thing about the Helldivers game is the player character faction "Super Earth", which is a parody of political cultures that justify their abuses by wearing the flag of Democracy. I'm not sure whether to expect political consequences I like or ones I dislike from part of a generation worldwide getting used to treating the idea of democracy as something whose political sacralization is just an ongoing joke. I suppose a Discordian attitude towards jokes does plausibly correspond to what it would take to reclaim the idea of democracy, once it's been so abused.
Notably, part of the package of ideas associated with the game is that Super Earth practices "managed democracy", and disvalues "unmanaged democracy". This is not so far from the influential dissident-right critique of modern democracy as having had all its free genuine power invisibly hoarded up by a self-appointed moral aristocracy subculture which has been driven mad by runaway cultural involution ("purity spirals", but also addiction to the political spoils from electorate dilution strategies), ungrounded by personal stakes or consequences: what could be called the Cathedral, or the Blob, or the professional-managerial class, or the human rights and development legitimacy clerisy, or the media-academic-government complex.
Also, and this is reaching slightly, but the term on Somethingawful for the style of post where someone makes a long explanation of all the wrongs someone supposedly did, which Eron Gjoni's post there qualified as, is "helldump", which starts the same way as "Helldivers".