I'm actually reading this book right now. About 60% of the way through. It's interesting stuff, though only tangentially related to Gamergate. If anything, it's a warning to both sides that internet 'shaming' is a dangerous and capricious beast. We (meaning the internet) have a tendency to envision ourselves as doing the right thing because we only consider the short range impacts of our attacks, which are usually aimed at doing good. The problem seems to be when you do consider the potentially life crushing power the internet mob has in these days of social media, and how easy it is to see our targets as fundamentally different then us when they are people just like us who usually have just made one stupid mistake.

The main lessons I've seen so far, as relates to Gamergate is in the Andrea Mitchell/Dongle-gate section. In this, some guys were making dumb in jokes about 'Forking the Repo' at a tech conference at a bad moment, the lady in front of them decides their mocking the presenter who's presenting on women in STEM, so she takes their picture and complains to her 10k+ twitter followers. Upshot is the one guy loses his job, and 4chan retaliates, getting the lady fired.

The point of interest here is how the guy, who got hired somewhere else, talks about how he's had to essentially treat female programmers differently, and he has to treat them distantly for fear of upsetting them accidentally and can't really develop a sense of teamwork with them.

Meanwhile, the lady in question literally says he deserved to be fired for being a privileged white male, and complains that the guy posted on a computer news site stating he'd been fired, which in turn made her look bad and ultimately caused the backlash that got her fired, which is unfair because she's a Jewish black female.

I think the lesson here is about proportional response. Yeah, she may have been uncomfortable with that joke, but in that case you turn around and say 'Hey, be professional and knock that off.' You don't escalate by tattling to ten thousand people on the internet. In that sense, I think that the message is we in Gamergate need to ignore people calling us names and rather focus on the stuff that needs to be brought to wider attention, like that the consumer journalism around indie video games is a cronistic cesspool that borders on outright fraud.

Oh, and in the end, the guy in the previous anecdote talks about how he figures the lady was probably not a bad person, just someone who got upset and dealt with it poorly. The lady in question says she has no remorse for the guy, and that while she does have empathy, it doesn't extend to guys like that.

Honestly, I do recommend picking up this book and reading it. Jon Ronson isn't another one of those pop-science authors. He's really impressed me with how he's conveyed that this whole thing is a clusterfuck, that sometimes the prejudging he does is completely wrong and how hard it is to make sense of it all.