First Post

Hello, and thank you for stopping by! I am social media’s own Mom for Gliberty. If you found me, you have probably been absorbing my bullshit in bite size morsels through various social media platforms (mostly just bluesky now @fakegreekgrill.bsky.social, nym explained below), and I thought what you could really use is an entire feast of my random thoughts.

I have been fortunate to have a few offers of guest posting on other people’s blogs, substacks, etc. (thanks especially to Ordinary Times https://ordinary-times.com/), but when writing for other people, I felt immense pressure to do a good job—be factually correct, site my sources, use the correct homonym—but when I write for myself, quality won’t have to be a concern!

I plan to use this as a blog in sort of the original “web log” sense, and my topics will basically be whatever thing I am thinking about that I need to talk about that is too esoteric to shout at people in real life. So it will be things like journalists and others misinterpreting charts, books that everyone read a decade ago that I am just getting around to, the politics I have inserted into whatever show/movie my kids are into at the moment, what to do about the Great Trumpian Menace, something I saw that was not technically accurate, etc. My goal is to publish something every Friday.

The origin of “fake greek grill” comes from the gamergate era. For those of you that are too young or were not online enough to know what that was, about a decade ago, an indy game developer named Zoe Quinn released a game called “depression quest.” The game received some good reviews, so Quinn’s ex-boyfriend published a long post about how the good reviews were a result of Quinn using her sluttiness. This assertion provided cover for mass harassment of women in gaming under the guise of “ethics in journalism.”

One offshoot of this movement was the accusation that any girl or woman who participated in gaming in any way was a “fake geek girl,” faking an interest in gaming in order to steal your penis or manly essence or whatever. Fake Geek Girl was already taken as a Twitter handle, so I went with Fake Greek Grill, which seemed really funny at the time.

Gamergate was a sort of seminal (get it?) online experience for me. Along with some experiences in ye olde internet Atheism, which culminated in elevatorgate (also very stupid and possibly the subject of another post here), Gamergate established what it was ok to say and where on the internet. It’s the reason I was too chickenshit to use the “feminism” tag on this very blog and a reason I am loathe to talk about gaming at all.

And despite the dampening impact on speech and the treatment of the central figures, Gamergate and other events never became part of the discussion around free speech norms that we’ve been having since the rise of the social media pile-on.

If the furor of Gamergate were about upholding traditional social hierarchy rather than upending it, it would have certainly been seen as the anti-free-speech movement it was, and the central figures would have been considered cancelled. But since this movement was left out of the canon, we never had our much needed conversation about what free speech norms should be in the age of social media. Instead, the dominant narrative assumed that the change in speech norms was some new brain disease that only liberals have and not a consequence of a new technology.

I have no idea why the left of center didn’t push back. My theory is that the left impulse was to argue gamer gate was wrong on the merits, where the right doesn’t want to support its most odious ideas on the merits and the free speech framing is easier. Perhaps both left and right have the same biases about who free speech is meant to be for. I don’t know. But I do think that if we could have had a productive conversation rather than a partisan one surrounding the new speech technologies, our political system might not be what it has become today.