Jay Smooth’s new The Illipsis video for Fusion on rioting in Ferguson was so powerful a debunking of a common racist trope, I felt compelled to transcribe it in the hopes more people would read it, quote it, and pass it on.

Take it away, Jay.

Jay Smooth:

So, I want to talk for a minute about human beings and about riots.

This past Monday night, while we were all sitting there waiting for that blow that we all knew was coming and hoping that we might be wrong just this one time, I said on Twitter that, “The fundamental danger of a non-indictment is not more riots, it is more Darren Wilsons.”

The fundamental danger of a non-indictment is not more riots, it is more Darren Wilsons.

— jay smooth (@jsmooth995) November 24, 2014

That thought struck a chord with a lot of people; it was linked to more than any tweet that I’ve ever made. But later on that night, we saw some things happen in Ferguson. We saw some unrest, we saw things you could call rioting.

And when that happened, a bunch of other people on Twitter were delighted by the idea that that heartache and grief and rage gave them a social media “gotcha” moment.

“So who’s the real danger now, Mr. Social Justice Warrior? You see all those thugs out there? You see how you people act? What do you have to say now?”

Well, here’s what I think now: I believe what I said. Now, more than ever.

And if you think what happened on Monday disproves what I said, you didn’t understand what I was talking about.

I wasn’t happy at all about what happened Monday night. I hate to see people pushed that far. I hate to see people’s community, family businesses destroyed. I hated seeing that.

But I’m also clear that if you ask me to weigh one against the other, we are weighing the destruction of property against the loss of a life. And if you value some people’s property more than the life of a black child, we’re not on the same team.

And regardless of that, for us to even discuss caring about one or the other is presenting a false choice because they’re not in opposition to each other. One is a byproduct of the other.

That unrest we saw Monday night was a byproduct of the injustice that preceded it.

This is not a choice, this is a cause-and-effect relationship. If you’re worried about the effects, you need to be thinking about the cause.

Riots are a thing that human beings do because human beings have limits.

We don’t all have the same limits. For some of us, our human limit is when our favorite team loses a game. For some of us, it’s when our favorite team wins a game.

The people of Ferguson had a different limit than that.

For the people of Ferguson, a lifetime of neglect and de facto segregation and incompetence and mistreatment by every level of government was not their limit.

When that maligned neglect set the stage for one of their children to be shot down and left in the street like a piece of trash, that was not their limit.

For the people of Ferguson, spending 100 days almost entirely peacefully protesting for some measure of justice for that child and having their desire for justice treated like a joke by every local authority was not their limit.

And then after those 100 days, when the so-called “prosecutor” waited until the dead of night to come out and twist that knife one last time, when he came out and confirmed once and for all that Michael Brown’s life didn’t matter, only then did the people of Ferguson reach their limit.

So when you look at what happened Monday night, the question you should be asking is how did these human beings last that long before they reached their human limit?

How do black people in America retain such a deep well of humanity that they can be pushed so far again and again without reaching their human limit?

How do we keep going through this same cycle? Because that’s the thing, it’s not just these 100 days. It’s the 100 times this cycle played out before Michael Brown.

The thing about that tweet I sent out Monday night? That tweet wasn’t really from Monday night.

The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George ZImmermans.

— jay smooth (@jsmooth995) July 13, 2013

I made the exact same tweet a year and a half ago about Trayvon Martin. The exact same tweet, word for word, all I did was switch out the name.

And that’s how sick, that’s how predictable and sick this white supremacy Groundhog Day is that we live in. You can literally, word for word, have the exact same conversation, year after year, and just switch out the name of the black child we lost.

There is nothing more exhausting or more inhumane than black America’s eternal cycle of being shocked but not surprised.

When you have to go through your whole life with all your muscles tensed, waiting for the same blow to come again and again, knowing it will hurt a bit more each time precisely because you always know it’s coming. And then you have to teach your children how to go through the same cycle.

That’s the definition of torture. Those are not fit living conditions for a human being.

So when I see President Obama say he has “no sympathy” for people who destroy a car? I’m sorry, but I do have sympathy for them.

I’m not happy to see them doing it, but human beings have limits.

When I watch that footage of Michael Brown’s mother out there crushed and heartbroken and I see her family talk about burning this thing down, I’m not happy to see that, but I don’t think we should be making excuses for that. I don’t think we should be explaining that away.

I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of. That is real life. That is what happens when you treat human beings this way.

So if you hated what you saw on Monday night, if you hated seeing those human beings pushed past their limit, you need to do something about the government, the justice system, and the institutions of policing that do not treat them like human beings.

If you watched the news Monday night and didn’t like the effects, you need to do something about the cause.

You, I, we need to go out there and make this country into a place where black lives matter.

Liked this? Go follow Jay Smooth on Twitter and go watch everything he’s ever made. It’s time well-spent.

Tucked quietly into the 4am slot, Adult Swim occasionally broadcasts a segment listed simply as “Infomercials.” Most of these have been parodies of late-night infomercials, but for the last week, they’ve aired something a little different.

Have you ever watched something, and knew as it unfolded that you were witnessing the birth of a cult classic?

Please allow me to introduce you to everyone’s favorite late ’80s sitcom, Too Many Cooks:

Finished? Good.

Some things you might have missed (spoilers):

• The credits appearing over each character are their real names. The IMDB page is suitably nuts.
• If you slow the end credits, nearly every character’s last name is “Cook.” Also spotted: Cooke, Van Cook, O’Cook, McCook, Bake, Broil, and B6-12.
• The stalker, credited as “Bill” on IMDB and “Featuring William Tokarsky” in the credits, appears in the background many, many, many times before he’s officially introduced. Watch it again.
• Hardest to spot? The serial killer appears in a background oil painting.
• Lars von Trier as “Pie,” who has his own badge.
• The dad, Ken DeLozier, is the patient infected with “Intronitis.” His face is replaced by William Tokarsky’s as soon as the final photo’s taken.
• Katelyn Nacon aka “Chloe Cook” is the teen daughter introduced third. She’s introduced again around the dinner table, and looks bored to tears.
• The magazine read by both grandmas is called “Magazine: The Magazine.” The cover promises “Pages Inside” with words and paper.
• The creator, Casper Kelly, also writes Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, a live-action workplace comedy set in Hell.
• Vulture and EW both interviewed Kelly about the film, which was in post-production for over a year, and they did a Reddit AMA.

Like meta-TV intro credits humor? You may also enjoy this inferior One for the Road, a MadTV sketch with a similar starting premise, USB’s Hart and Home, and Adam Scott’s The Greatest Event in Television History series.

Rush Coil released a ridiculously great chiptune cover:

Two months ago today, actor Adam Baldwin was the first to use the #Gamergate hashtag on Twitter, solidifying a name for the movement that’s dominated all conversations in gaming since. Depending on where you sit on the issue, it’s either a widespread campaign of harassment against women or, actually, about ethics in videogames journalism.

Anyone who’s mentioned the #Gamergate hashtag in a critical light knows the feeling: a swarm of seemingly random, largely-anonymous people descending to comment and criticize.

I’ve been using Twitter for eight years, but I’ve never seen behavior quite like this. This swarming behavior is so prevalent, it got a new nickname — “sea lioning,” inspired by David Malki’s Wondermark comic.

I wanted to understand #Gamergate, how its proponents and critics behaved and the composition of both audiences.

So I wrote a little Python script with the Twython wrapper for the Twitter streaming API, and started capturing every single tweet that mentioned the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags from October 21–23.

Three days later, I was sitting on 316,669 tweets, along with a bunch of metadata for trying to understand the composition of both sides of the #Gamergate movement.

Why three days? It was a manageable and consistent slice of activity, taken at a time when the hashtag wasn’t trending and no major news was breaking, reducing the number of confused newcomers, bots, spammers, and other opportunists.

In the process of collecting the data, I posted a couple innocuous charts on Twitter and was predictably flooded with critical comments, many questioning my motives.

Without question, I have a strong anti-Gamergate bias. I co-organize a festival called XOXO that invited two frequent #Gamergate targets to speak, Anita Sarkeesian and Leigh Alexander. I backed Anita’s project, and I think they both do great work. I’m also friends or acquaintances with a few dozen independent game designers, developers, and journalists, most of whom have come out publicly against Gamergate. I think the whole thing’s pretty awful, and that it has critically wounded the public perception of videogames.

That said, I think the numbers below accurately and objectively reflect the data, and the analysis I’m doing is very straightforward. You could reproduce everything with a copy of Excel or Numbers.app. I included a dump of the complete dataset at the end of this post, and I encourage you to double-check my work.

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Most of the posting activity to #Gamergate and #NotYourShield is retweets. (From here on, I’ll refer to both hashtags as just “#Gamergate” for readability’s sake.)

Out of 316,669 total tweets, 217,384 of them (about 69%) were retweets.

The remaining 99,285 (31%) were original tweets— 46,826 weren’t directed to anyone, 39,622 replied directly to another user, and 12,837 publicly mentioned one or more users.

In total, 38,630 user accounts posted to the two hashtags in those three days. Excluding retweets, that number drops down to 17,410 users.

With that out of the way, let’s look at who’s posting to #Gamergate.

Account Age

Gamergate is unusual in one respect: many of its proponents are using newly-created, often pseudonymous, accounts.

The chart below shows every tweet charted by the month that user signed up for Twitter.

Roughly 25% of all Gamergate activity is coming from accounts created in the last two months.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting these accounts are bots or sockpuppets — one person controlling multiple accounts — but simply that these accounts are new to Twitter.

As Gamergate supporters were quick to point out, many of them joined Twitter simply because that’s where the debate was. Some created anonymous accounts to avoid being tracked and identified, while others joined only after being turned away from other forums.

Is this distribution unusual, though? For contrast, I tried another hashtag for a similar length of time, the #kashmirfloods hashtag used during last month’s tragic floods that ravaged northern India. The distribution is much closer to what you’d expect: evenly distributed, roughly following Twitter’s rise in popularity.

The Retweet Network

As you’d expect, there are two large communities contributing to the #Gamergate hashtag, and who they choose to follow and retweet are very, very different with little overlap.

There’s little overlap between communities.

For example, in this three day period, 1,673 users retweeted Anita Sarkeesian, while 2,240 users retweeted Blocker (aka Mr. Fart), one of the most prolific Gamergate tweeters. (Yes, the most retweeted person in #Gamergate is named “Mr. Fart.”) But only 79 users retweeted messages from both accounts.

Contrast that with the 1,138 users that retweeted messages from both Blocker and Gamergate proponent Milo Yiannopoulos in the same time period.

The top RTed users are pro-GG, the top RTed tweets are against.

The list of most retweeted users is dominated by Gamergate proponents, with only a couple critics in the top 20. Former NFL player and gamer Chris Kluwe pops up in #2 after a string of popular anti-Gamergate rants, but even Anita Sarkeesian only appears in 15th place.

The most retweeted tweets, however, look very different. The top 10 is entirely Gamergate critics and satire, with only five pro-Gamergate tweets in the top 20.

Why would that be? One obvious reason is the sheer number of #gamergate-tagged tweets being posted by supporters, while critics tend to post far fewer, possibly to avoid getting sea lioned.

Gamergate supporters use the #gamergate hashtag more often.

For example, the top five most-retweeted Gamergate critics collectively had 87 of their #gamergate-tagged tweets retweeted within the three day period. The top five Gamergate proponents had 811 tweets, nearly ten times as many.

Averaging Gamergate

We can use retweet behavior as a rough proxy to group like-minded individuals together. As we’ve established, those who retweet Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn tend to fall in the opposing camp of those who retweet Milo Yiannopoulos, Internet Aristocrat, or Christina H. Sommers.

I grouped together the 3,022 accounts who retweeted Milo Yiannopoulos, Internet Aristocrat, or Christina H. Sommers, and the 1,694 who retweeted Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn. With that, we can draw some rough demographics for Twitter usage.

The median Gamergate supporter has 67 followers, follows 134 accounts, has posted 1,194 tweets, and joined Twitter a little over two years ago.

The median Gamergate critic has 144 followers, follows 234 accounts, has posted 3,765 tweets, and joined Twitter four years and three months ago.

Naturally, this is skewed by the large population of relatively newly-created Gamergate accounts.

Gauging Sentiment

On Saturday, Newsweek partnered with a social media monitoring firm called Brandwatch to publish their own analysis of the Gamergate hashtag using half a million tweets sampled from September 1.

They ran sentiment analysis on tweets directed to several prominent Gamergate critics, and found across the board that around 90% of the tweets were “neutral.”

Newsweek interpreted this to mean the tweets were neither positive or negative, but I’m fairly sure Brandwatch simply meant they couldn’t make an automated determination for 90% of tweets — sentiment analysis using less than 140 characters can be challenging.

Digging into the actual text by hand, it’s clear that these tweets are anything but neutral.

In my three-day sample, there were 1,171 tweets that mentioned Anita Sarkeesian’s Twitter username, 485 for Brianna Wu, and 338 for Zoe Quinn. I put the text of all of those tweets, without user information, in this spreadsheet so you can see for yourself.

Roughly 90–95% take a clear side either in favor or against Gamergate.

A quick manual classification of a sample shows the numbers to be closer to 75% negative, 15% positive, and 10% neutral or undetermined, very far from Newsweek’s automated attempt. I’ve reached out to them to see if they’ll publish a clarification about renaming “neutral” to “undetermined.”

Update: Mike Williams, a data scientist at Brandwatch, confirmed that “neutral” should be “undetermined.” This morning, October 29, Newsweek published a clarification, but left the charts as they were, despite missing sentiment data for 90% of their tweets.

Worlds Apart

With the help of Gilad Lotan, chief data scientist at Betaworks, we grabbed the social graph for everyone in the dataset and visualized it using a fantastic open-source package called Gephi.

We used that information to map the universe of people who contributed to #Gamergate, clustering them into groups based on their relationships.

While there are hundreds of small communities represented by this visualization, it’s clear they group into two major groups: on the left, pro-Gamergate. On the right, anti-Gamergate. In the middle, a handful of controversial people engaging both sides. And on the margins, a constellation of isolated people unrelated and disengaged.

This network visualization is as good a metaphor as any for #Gamergate. Two massive, impenetrable hairballs of people that want little to do with one another, only listening to their side and firing volleys across the chasm.

Is it over yet?

The Data

Update: Originally, I was hosting complete downloads of the data here for anyone to play with, make their own visualizations, or simply fact-check my work.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, distributing the contents and metadata surrounding tweets is a violation of section 6b of Twitter’s Developer Policy. Twitter politely asked me to remove the downloads without sending lawyers, and I very much appreciate that approach.

My guess? This policy exists to protect the privacy of their users. Any downloadable dataset could include information that was subsequently deleted or made private by its owners, or removed by Twitter.

Pursuant to their guidelines, I’ve replaced the original dataset with a much more limited one, containing only the tweet ID and user ID. You can download it as a 9MB CSV or a 3MB ZIP.

I know this is far from ideal, but you can use this information to reconstruct the original dataset by using Twitter’s statuses/lookup API method, 100 tweets at a time. With their API rate limits, you should be able to grab up to 10,800 tweets an hour. Reconstructing the entire dataset would take around 29 hours.

Sorry, everyone.

(Note: This piece was originally published in The Message on Medium.)

Dave Fothergill’s Maya crowd simulation is hilarious and hypnotic:

But it’s missing a soundtrack, don’t you think?

Here, I made one for it over on Tilde.club.

We’re posting every XOXO talk on YouTube, one every weekday in speaker order, and we’re a little over halfway through. There’s some really amazing stuff in there already, it’s hard for me to even pick favorites. Jonathan Mann and Gina Trapani are personal highlights.

The most popular talk we’ve ever had, by a decent margin, is Anita Sarkeesian talking about the tactics used by sexist jerks to discredit her and other women online. Go watch it. There’s an interesting behind-the-scenes story there, but maybe another time.

I just posted Justin Hall’s talk today, and it’s pretty great.

When he gets onstage, you can see he’s visibly shaken. That’s my fault. Before I introduced him to the stage, I told the audience that his site was the inspiration for teaching myself HTML in 1995. I told him I’d followed his life online for over 20 years, he opened my eyes to ways of using the web I’d never considered, and that he deeply influenced the way I thought about technology.

I made Justin Hall cry. And then we cut out my intro from the video, making him look like a big crybaby. Whoops!

There’s so much I love about Justin’s talk.

In 1995, starting at age 19, he started spilling the most intimate details of his life online, from his father’s suicide, the drugs he was taking, and the interactions he was having with friends, family, lovers, and long-time partners.

He wanted everyone to experience this, so spread the word in person and on TV and on roadtrips, an evangelist for the web as a personal communications medium. A Johnny Appleseed for HTML, trying to use technology to generate empathy.

It didn’t play out quite like he expected.

It takes a profound sense of self-awareness to realize the flaws in your deepest-held beliefs, talk about them publicly, and do the work to fix them.

“We’re all scientists of our own lives. We’re all constantly running experiments, every day. And what the web allows us to do is to share our data. What are we learning about our experiments, about what it means to be a good person and be connected?

We can use the web to share those truths with each other and evolve them, because we don’t know!

Let’s learn together until we’re dead.”

Sounds good to me.