This fucking guy again?

The last time I wrote about Dr Disrespect¹ , the popular streamer who recently self-exiled after admitting to sending messages “that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate” to a minor, I relegated the following paragraph to the footnotes. It was, I thought at the time, a relatively inconsequential aside.

“For now, the story seems more or less settled(?),” I wrote, “outside of the question of how folks will respond when the streamer returns from his ‘vacation.’ The answer, freakishly, is that a lot of people seem totally ok with his behavior, and/or view it as grounds on which to advance their side’s position in the culture war, the lines of which mostly seem drawn around ‘Will the tweet I’m writing now piss off people I don’t like?’”

It turns out I was right! I can’t say I get any satisfaction from that.

On Wednesday, Dr Disrespect (whose real name is Guy Beahm) addressed the public for the first time since June 25, when he admitted to messaging a minor. (← Remember this last bit). The post, which bore no caption, showed an image of Beahm sitting at a chess board, moving chess pieces. The side opposite him is loaded up with checkers — a reference to the idiomatic expression “I’m playing chess while you’re playing checkers.” Beahm is still, despite his admitted transgressions, a major public figure at the center of one of the year’s biggest stories (for the video game/online culture beat, at least), so of course, tons of people — supporters and detractors alike — rushed to respond to his cryptic post.

Beahm didn’t engage much beyond posting the original image, but two of his responses hint at the transformation he’s undertaking to claw back his audience. (It bears repeating: He has to do all of this because he sent messages that “leaned” inappropriate to a minor; the first public allegation of misconduct levied against Beahm also accused him of planning to meet up with this minor at TwitchCon.) In response to one tweet referencing those allegations, Beahm wrote: “Good one she/her. The internet will never fix your real threat… depression.” Elsewhere, he responded with: “Little brainwashed woke boy putting out dragon ball z gfx with Kendrick Lamar lines… Got me big time.”

Listen. I know you don’t need an 800-word column to tell you that Beahm is not particularly bright. (In the image he posted Wednesday, for some reason he’s shown having made two moves against the person playing checkers, who hasn’t made any moves. I realize he’s making reference to the idiom, but it really does not translate visually. If you’re playing chess on the same board as a person playing checkers, you’re both idiots. If you’re playing chess on the same board as a person who actively is not playing checkers, well... The idiom just plainly does not refer to playing two different games on one board. This should be obvious. I have to assume Beahm has looked at the picture. How did he not notice this? I also don’t think the moves he’s made on the board make any sense. Did he move his bishop and then scoot his pawn back into its place? Can you do that? Is he cheating against a checkers player? Why? Why is he studying the game so intently? His opponent doesn’t even seem like they’re at the board. I’m not even going to get into the fact that he seems to be implying that messaging a minor, being forced to admit it, and then being dropped by the video game studio he co-founded was some kind of masterstroke. Who believes this? Idioms aren’t really meant to be translated into hyper-literal visuals, because they’re used to express a– ahhh, forget it.)

Still, I think it’s astonishing and worth noting how stupid he seems to think his audience is.

The references to wokeness and “pronouns in bio” (a common right-wing joke that’s got to be a decade old by now² ) are a clear signal of what kind of audience Beahm thinks he can pick up when he comes back. Apologizing is annoying. Dealing with criticism is hard. Putting in the work to demonstrate that you’ve changed is for saps. Instead, it’s much easier to virtue signal in the direction of the least discerning media consumers on the internet: people who, as I wrote earlier, architect their personality principally around “triggering the libs.”³

Beahm is doing what’s called “negative polarization” — i.e. enticing people to support him chiefly because he’s against the people they don’t like (the libs). I can only guess what goes on in Guy Beahm’s mind.⁴ Do I think this is some kind of insincere scheme? No, and it doesn’t really matter. Is he a genuine reactionary or just playing one online? Probably both! Truthfully, I don’t think Beahm has sincere or coherent ideological convictions, because he’s a streamer (pejorative). But negative polarization among his audience is nonetheless useful to him as a recently-canceled public figure: If being against the people you don’t like supersedes your other moral/ideological commitments, then it’s not that hard to logic puzzle your way out of taking a new comrade’s faults seriously. You can say, with a straight face, “Oh, maybe the minor was 17 years and 364 days old,” a real thing that real people have said in Beahm’s defense.⁵

I think this is all pretty shameful, and if you fall for it you’re a dope (though I’m relieved to note that the replies to Beahm’s tweet are overwhelmingly negative, and the balance of likes skews heavily in favor of tweets that are critical of Beahm’s action).

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how and why society seems to move on from news cycles so quickly. I’m sure there’s academic literature on this, and I bet smarter people have their own theories. But I think that hand-in-hand with negative polarization, people have developed a keener sense of “controversy literacy,” precisely because we’re exposed to a lot of bad behavior and controversy by dint of being online and seeing more “stuff.” The neural pathways for thinking through controversy and discourse online aren’t being etched anew anymore; people develop shortcuts for determining what they think about a person or situation (which involve factors such as ideological alignment, temporary political and social goals, as well as signals from other figures adjacent to the controversy who are viewed as important). Generally, though, all of this has the effect of phasing out the underlying issue and inverting the entire situation. The inciting problem becomes secondary to the reaction because it’s easier to model how you think other people in your orbit will react, and therefore easier to calibrate your own response.

I have no illusions about the impact of this genre of essay — the cathartically-mean “takedown” of a malign presence polluting the cultural waterways. Even so, I think sometimes it’s important to stake out a clear position on issues like this one, because [air quotes] we [end air quotes] move on so quickly, and because bad actors bank on that. “There’s a rich and powerful celebrity who euphemistically excuses his messages to a minor as merely leaning inappropriate. He’s brazenly trying to ride the mean-spiritedness of the crowd back to fame and profit. Should we abide his efforts to remain a public figure?” I don’t think we should.

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1. I’ve un-paywalled this post since I refer to it prominently here, but I’ve put it behind an email gate. You have to subscribe to the newsletter to read it.

2. This might explain why Beahm likes it so much lol

3. A lot of this was evident from the replies, where a lot of people celebrated Beahm’s supposed un-cancelation as a way to, again, trigger the libs. My hot take re: cancelation is that it doesn’t really matter whether you’re engaging with canceled artists or creators — nobody can police your behavior in private — but as soon as you turn that engagement into a public act you give yourself away as a bit of a weirdo lunatic.

4. I think if his brain were donated to science to study the effect of cosplaying masculinity in Call of Duty along with other guys who are not so smart (some in malign ways, others more benign), the results would be pretty grim.

5. This would mean, by the way, that this person is a high schooler, at best.