The twitter hashtag
'StopGamerGate2014' has been approved for retro kitsch status by the
London-based Worshipful Company of Hipsters. Experts claim that it is
now mere weeks away from mainstream re-acceptance and appearances on
cheap British Home Store cushions, where it will be merged with the
equally passe expression - 'Keep Calm and
Carry On' - to form the new slogan: 'Keep Calm and
StopGamerGate2014'.
The hashtag, which was
created by Social Justice advocates in the late summer of 2014,
captures the baseless, wide-eyed optimism of a movement who blithely
assumed the war they had started with hardcore gamers would be over
within weeks.
“I was told that we had
heavyweight mainstream media outlets like The Guardian and New
Statesman on our side and that Gamergate would be finished by
Christmas,” says Social Justice Warrior (SJW), Lyle Pulleymane.
“We assumed, wrongly as
it turns out, that gamers would recognise us as their social and
intellectual superiors and would impotently mumble any words of
dissent into the tattered necklines of their soiled, slept-in
T-shirts while we ruled over them like gods.
“By the time December
rolled around, all I wanted was for Santa Claus to hold me in his
arms, press my reddened, tear-stained cheek against his coarse,
tobacco and clementine-scented beard, and whisper in my ear that
Gamergate was really dead this time and that everything was going to
be alright.”
Fellow SJW and
self-ascribed non-gendered entity, Brianette W/hh said:
“In common with the
numerous over-funded kickstarter campaigns I have been involved in,
absolutely nothing came of #StopGamerGate2014. By late March, 2015,
me and some of my fellow Social Justice Templers were beginning to
wonder out loud whether the hashtag might be obsolete. We were
soundly chastised by our online community for expressing this opinion
in public and I have spent the past weeks deleting the offending
posts from my social media accounts and issuing grovelling apology
after grovelling apology in an attempt to claw my way back into
everybody's good books.”
W/hh refused to add any
further comment, informing our reporter:
“I find the tailoring of
your shirt triggering and equivalent to gang rape.”
Odious human piss carpet -
Jeremy Whetton – a man who has the gall to describe himself as a
Social Media Trends Analyst - has been monitoring the ups and downs
of the hashtag since its inception:
"There were a couple of
months at the beginning of 2015 when #StopGamerGate2014 was so
hackneyed and uncool that using the hashtag on social media or, even
worse, saying it out loud with accompanying air-quotes, marked you as
a pariah, hopelessly out of touch with youth culture - basically the
walking embodiment of everyone's parents.”
Whetton's analysis is
confirmed by a post made in February, 2015, on the social networking
website, Tumblr, by user Anneltte74:
“Yesterday my dad was
driving me and my friends to school which meant that we were all
exposed to 20 minutes of Mark Knopfler's most recent album. It was
either that or get drenched waiting for the bus. We pulled up at some
red traffic lights. My dad leaned over the backrest of the driver's
seat and said: 'You know, I think that we should all work together to
stop Gamergate in 2014'. Then he made a weird shape with his fingers
which I think was supposed to be a gang sign. I was mortified.”
Recently there have been
signs that the StopGamerGate2014 hashtag is ready to be co-opted by
hipsters and possibly printed on T-shirts as an ironic statement,
prior to being re-accepted back into the mainstream for its kitsch
value.
Gerald, a hipster from
Shoreditch, London, told MODE 5:
“My Apple watch alerts
me whenever a long-discredited piece of cultural ephemera is ripe for
reappraisal. Being able to home-in on forgotten trends before others
of my human sub-species is essential if I am to ascend the hipster
pecking order and gain mating privileges. I intend to consummate my
passions beneath my ultra-rare limited-edition Slint
'Spiderland' poster, under the ever-watchful monochrome gaze of
guitarists Brian McMahan and David Pajo.”
Magpie-eyed hipster
entrepreneur, Kent Option said:
“My friend Nigel is an
economics graduate from Reading University who, for some reason,
sports a thin 6-inch waxed moustache and dresses like a farm labourer
from 1910. Together we are planning to open an awful cafe based
around Social Justice principles. Customers will be served in reverse
order of their social privilege, which will also determine the items
that they are allowed to select from the menu. Ordering anything
other than a salad will result in you being accused of perpetuating
rape culture and your employers will be notified. Your food will
arrive two years late, if at all. Customers must pay in advance and
may be asked to leave at a moments notice with no refund. With the
exception of myself and Nigel no white males will be allowed in. The
entire venture will be bank-rolled by Patreon donations. These funds
will be bolstered by our claims of victimisation whenever anyone
posts a bad review of our cafe online, which I predict will be
often.”
Kent and Nigel are not the
only ones to have identified the commercial opportunities inherent in
the flagging anti-gamergate movement. MODE 5 was invited to watch
blue-haired SJW, Sophie Hussey, as she pitched her new Muhfeelz
fashion range to a panel of grimacing, sour-faced venture capitalists
on the popular reality TV show - Dragon's Den:
“Muhfeelz
is the safe space you can wear – a funky one-piece body suit lined
with kitten skin, housing a built-in wi-fi transmitter that texts
or emails your Patreon or PayPal details to any mobile device within
50 yards. I am asking for an investment of £15million in return for
a zero percent stake in my company.”
The rekindled fringe
interest in all things anti-Gamergate has not gone unnoticed by the
establishment, with rumours abounding that had the Royal baby been
male it would have certainly been christened 'Josh'.
Meanwhile, the UK
broadcaster, ITV, has announced a new pre-watershed sitcom titled
Literally Who's Coming To Dinner in
which a group of Social Justice Warriors move in next door to a house
full of Videogamers.
A
spokesperson for ITV said:
“I
can confirm that the first two episodes of Literally Who's
Coming To Dinner will be
broadcast at 8pm on successive Wednesdays – a time slot that has
become synonymous with high quality television. Subsequent episodes
will air on random days at some point between the hours of 11:30pm and
2:30am.
Commenting on the shifting
fortunes of #StopGamerGate2014, Twitter oracle, Sensible Ethel, said:
“While Hipsters are
essentially cultural scavengers with delusions of grandeur, they do
perform a valuable role in our society by telling us when its okay to
like things that have previously been cast aside on the basis that
everyone thought they were shit.
“It's very much the
circle of life, as was described by Elton John in the song of the
same name. Any hashtag or expression that falls into disuse has the
potential to re-emerge in a neutered form, forever divested of its
original meaning and intent.
“There was a time when
informing your peers that you were 'chillin' n' illin'' would
instantly mark you as a monumental bad ass – the kind of
unconventional human being whose propensity for holding objects
sideways in a gansta-style meant that they could not be trusted
around change purses or scalding hot mugs of tea. Now you can't move
in the aisles of Marks & Spencer for old ladies talking like
they're from Compton in the late 1990s.”
No comments:
Post a Comment