"What I wrote was sexist," says Rachel Moss, "I will admit this."
The University of Wisconsin-Madison grad student is referring to a photo essay she posted in late May on the widely-read online humor forum Something Awful. Attending the annual WisCon feminist science-fiction convention held at the Concourse Hotel over Memorial Day weekend, she shot photos of various con attendees with a focus on obese participants, and combined these with negative commentary to assemble a salvo that touched off a particularly nasty online controversy last week.
Here's how Moss started her troll: "If you are unfamiliar with this con, it is like any other sci-fi con, except that well over half of the attendees are female, about a third of the panels are political, there is no gaming, and absolutely everybody is a huge bitch."
Comments on the post rapidly followed, uniformly piling on the original mocking of WisCon and its participants. It also drew almost immediate condemnation from WisCon attendees and sympathizers. Many took issue with what they saw as a major betrayal of trust by Moss, who paid $45 to attend a convention considered by participants as a safe space to writing, identity politics, and the worlds of science-fiction and fantasy in a social setting.
Shortly after publishing the post on Something Awful, Moss requested that it be removed, and her wish was granted. But it was already too late. Using cached versions of the original thread, a Something Awful splinter group reposted her photos and commentary, kick-starting a whole new round of personal attacks. Indeed, it was in this second round that the most misanthropic and bigoted comments were made about the convention and its attendees.
"This incident, unfortunately, is not unusual," wrote one Madison woman singled out by Moss. "Fat people hear negative comments, see the disgusted looks, and feel the drawing back of people around them…Unfortunately, these messages can be internalized. So not only do you face the challenges of dealing with society but you tell yourself that you are ugly, worthless and disgusting. So it becomes a radical act when you choose to live your life and love yourself despite the negativity that we swim thorough every day." Many others shocked by the post had plenty to say about it, accusing Moss of being homophobic, trans-phobic, anti-fat, anti-disabled, and a virtual rapist, among other things.
Meanwhile, a few persons upset with Moss and her trolling started posting her personal contact and medical information that they had found online, spreading these details through blogs and forum posts. Others called for supporters to Google bomb her name, and she began to receive threats through email and at her office, with unidentified individuals threatening to render her unemployable. Moss filed a pair of police reports, one with the MPD after receiving what she describes as "vague physical threats" and another with the UWPD after somebody entered her campus office and left behind "a negatively-themed note scribbled on the back of a page ripped from the WisCon programming booklet." For their part, WisCon organizers responded by requesting that its participants and sympathizers refrain from making any threats and to stop passing around her personal information.
For a furious few days following Memorial Day weekend, Moss' post and the reaction that followed became a widely-discussed topic on numerous online personal journals. It was particularly discussed by supporters of the fat acceptance movement, and rapidly hit the blog mainstream with a nod on Jezebel by mid-week. This was no standard fanboy kerfuffle or typical partisan political flamewar, though. Throughout the echo chamber of the Internet, just about every negative accusation imaginable has been thrown around at anyone who has even dipped a toe into the ruckus.
Something Awful has a global membership numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and exerts a tremendous influence in online culture. Most of those funny internet phenomena you've laughed at recently -- everything from Lolcats to Rickrolling to that cleverly photoshopped image being touted as proof of one conspiracy or another -- trace their roots back to these online forums, particularly Something Awful and its spin-off imageboard 4chan. Their bread and butter also often includes targeted mockery of convention-goers and various other niche groups. Some of it is good-natured, but some of it goes well over the line of what most would consider malevolent.
Back in January, Wired examined one facet of this targeted online mockery, detailing the practice of "griefing" in online gaming and its connections with the Goons of Something Awful. "[Griefing is] designed to push users past the brink of moral outrage toward that rare moment -- at once humiliating and enlightening -- when they find themselves crying over a computer game," explains Julian Dibbell in the story. "Getting that response is what it's all about."
This culture of pranks and mockery can easily spill out of worlds like Second Life and into real-life, though, leading to trolling posts like the one by Moss and the subsequent snowball of personal insults and photoshops. When one happens to strike the fancy of the masses, it's a sure-fire way to get your words or pictures spread far and wide. That's the allure: starting a minor flamewar and watching it spread is a way to gain some level of virtual power and fame, however piddling and fleeting, from the comfort of your own computer. Countless individuals, groups and locations have enjoyed their moments of online glory or shame as a result of these episodes.
At the center of this particular episode is Rachel Moss. While the controversy was ongoing last week, she published multiple short apologies for the post, most notably one regretting her comments that targeted a child whose parents attended the convention. All of these, though, have since been taken down or removed from public view.
"I was venting against a group of people who I do not think are approaching the existing problems in a reasonable way," says Moss about her motivation for publishing the post. "I do not believe that having a convention where you have to pay $45 to even be a part of the wider conversation is going to be productive towards tackling real gender inequalities."
It's likely she couldn't have known just what level of backlash her writing would elicit --and that's the catch. It's growing ever more impossible to remain anonymous on the Internet, and the perceived freedom to say whatever one wants online has started to backfire, sometimes spectacularly.
Take the experiences of Emily Gould, for example, as recently detailed in a self-authored essay published in New York Times Magazine over the same weekend that the WisCon flamewar unfolded. An editor for the media gossip website Gawker, Gould was also a prolific personal blogger before and during her gig at the blog network flagship. She wrote a lot about her private life, publishing often deeply personal anecdotes about herself, co-workers, and close friends, living more and more in a self-directed public eye until she eventually became a target of the snark that was her stock-in-trade. In the prevailing online culture, many are inclined to tell-all, believing that the electronic barrier will protect us and our loved ones from harm.
We're learning, often the hard way, that this is rarely the case. Our everyday lives are increasingly being recorded, photographed, and shared not only by ourselves, but by others too. Most of this is relatively legal. What's at issue here is etiquette, and what our reasonable expectations of privacy and reactions to perceived breaches of it are.
"Many of these people want to be both invisible and visible at the same time," says Moss about the WisCon participants. "They claim they want what they have to say heard, but then they are extremely vindictive for being exposed by someone who doesn't subscribe to it. They want their names/photos private -- which, at the time, I thought I was respecting -- but then as a group they condone harassment of me by my full name and job, and many of them condoned violence against me."
Moss' criteria for her post were based upon drawing laughs, meanwhile. "There was plenty about the convention I appreciated as far as the political panels," she says, "which I did not mention in the silly post because, honestly, it wasn't funny." Only, in this case, what was funny to her -- and to the people who piled on the mockery -- was extremely hurtful to others.
"The problem reaches beyond just what Rachel Moss did," Other convention-goers and observers had plenty to say as well:
And now this specific incident centering on a three-decade-old Madison tradition has rippled out to various obscure niches of the ether and has spread interest and outrage to vast numbers of otherwise unrelated people and communities. You didn't know about WisCon before? Now you do. Hadn't heard of "fat activism" or "griefing" prior to this? Now you have. And tomorrow will bring some new bit of slang, fetish, political intrigue, scientific breakthrough, or dog riding a skateboard.
The furor over Moss, her post, and the storm that followed has died down, and by the time you read this, the episode will be ancient history in terms of Internet time. It lives on, though, well-archived online and in memories. Rachel Moss and the people who were the brunt of most of hers and others' snide comments are not likely to soon forget what happened after this year's WisCon.
