In early September, Warner Bros. released a teaser for A Minecraft Movie, the studio’s new film based on Mojang’s nearly 15-year-old sandbox game. Directed by Napoleon Dynamite helmer Jared Hess, it was, frankly, very goofy. Jack Black was Steve; Jason Momoa was sporting maybe the worst hairdo he’s ever had. Everyone involved, even the animated creatures, seemed to think they were in a different movie.
But that wasn’t what the trolls latched onto. Instead, they fixed on the fact that a Black woman—Orange Is the New Black’s Danielle Brooks—was in the Overworld.
As the trailer racked up dislikes, right-wing influencers like Elijah Schaffer and Nick Fuentes posted Brooks’ image next to disparaging comments and made references to “forced diversity” and “woke” Hollywood. It was Gamergate 2.0—a reimagining of the decade-old harassment campaign aimed at rallying against diversity, equity, and inclusion—but aimed at a kids’ movie, rather than a video game.
According to Wendy Via, cofounder and CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which just published a report looking at the far right’s racist comments about the trailer, the response comes from a new, and also quite old, playbook. “Large-scale campaigns against trailers specifically are a relatively new phenomenon, but attempting to frame ‘wokeness’ as an invisible enemy infiltrating the entertainment industry is not,” Via says.
Via points out that back in spring of 2023, the far-right X account End Wokeness made similar noise about a “Protect Trans Kids” flag that appeared briefly in the trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The goal of these campaigns is to target “spaces where young, white men are influenced,” like sci-fi movies and video games, which appeal to younger audiences, Via adds. “Providing racist and homophobic commentary on popular franchises through large social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube serves as an effective means to propagandize and recruit young people to hate movements.”
Take, for example, The Acolyte. Earlier this year, the Disney+ show found itself the target of fan backlash while star Amandla Stenberg was subjected to racist comments online. So, too, was Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in the most recent Star Wars movie trilogy. The minimizing of her role in the last installment, The Rise of Skywalker, perhaps emboldened diversity detractors further.
Reception of The Acolyte seemed, almost, to be a solidification. Fan unrest in the Star Wars universe is a cousin to, if not a direct descendant of, Gamergate, and since former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon harnessed the energy of that movement and used it to fuel the then burgeoning so-called alt-right, influencers have used similar tactics to convince aggrieved men that their games, their shows and movies, and their country are somehow being taken from them.
By the time the Minecraft Movie trailer dropped, the script was already set. Influencers just had to pick which lines to say.
Whereas 2014’s rallying cry was a more broadly misogynistic, racist one, the Gamergate of 2024 seems focused on the idea of the “DEI hire”—a woman, LGBTQ+ or BIPOC person who ends up blamed for “ruining” something. Pundits used this language to attack Vice President Kamala Harris. Right-wing talking heads pointed the finger at female Secret Service agents for not fully protecting Trump during the July attempt on his life. Fans have lobbed it at the inclusion of a Black samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Campaigning against diversity in games came into particular focus earlier this year when Sweet Baby Inc., a Canadian consultancy, became the focus of a group of players upset at what they viewed as the “wokeification” of video games. Online harassment of the company’s employees hit new heights last winter when a Steam curation group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected popped up purporting to list all the games the company had advised on, giving people an easy way to boycott certain titles or post bad reviews of them. Even though the company hadn’t touched several of the games, and as founder Kim Belair told WIRED this winter, the company “[doesn’t] want forced diversification either,” the harassing comments continued for months.
On September 4, the same day the Minecraft Movie trailer went up, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against two employees of the state-backed Russian news network RT, in which it alleged that they had secretly funded the right-wing influencer network Tenet Media. The DOJ accused the company of posting content full of Kremlin-approved talking points, though individual influencers working for Tenet say they knew nothing about the ties to Russia and are not accused of wrongdoing. A WIRED analysis of Tenet’s videos, since taken down by YouTube, found several frequently used three-word phrases. Among them: “Black Lives Matter,” “diversity equity inclusion,” and “Sweet Baby Inc.”
Into this firestorm landed Minecraft. As Adrienne Massanari, an associate professor at American University’s school of communications and author of the forthcoming book Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right, points out, Minecraft (the gaming platform), already had some right-leaning fans. Its creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, who sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, has sent some dumb tweets about race, and Minecraft “has a reputation for being connected to the far-right pipeline,” Massanari says. Being based on a game connects the Minecraft Movie to Gamergate-like responses in some ways, but it’s also possible that a movie based on “this particular game,” she adds, has activated a certain kind of fan.
Back in August, Deadline reported The Acolyte would not be getting a second season. It was, Stenberg would later say, “not a huge shock” considering the response online. Other reports claimed it didn’t get a second season because it was expensive and didn’t attract a huge viewership. Regardless of the reason, Via says the far right saw it as a victory of the “go woke, go broke” narrative they’ve been pushing.
“Going after The Minecraft Movie may be an attempt to recreate this ‘victory’ and provide the far right with the opportunity to craft the narrative about a series or film themselves,” Via says. “If Minecraft were to perform poorly at the box office, they could point to “diversity” as a reason for its failure and justify petitioning for more media that excludes everyone but straight, white men.”
Loose Threads:
Everyone is freaking out over AI-generated podcasts. So, last month, Google introduced a new feature for its NotebookLM tool that lets users create AI-generated podcasts out of whatever research material they upload. Typically, they’re two hosts talking to each other about the topic they’ve been fed. In the few weeks since it’s been out, users have had a lot of fun playing with the tool, making podcasts to summarize school notes and just say “poop” and “fart” a lot. Last weekend, though, one particular bot-cast went viral, thanks to the fact that its two hosts discovered, mid-show, that they weren’t human. Whoever uploaded the podcast to Reddit eventually copped to the fact that they’d prompted the AI’s existential crisis, but that didn’t mean that host was any less sad to discover that no one answered when he called his wife.
Someone is Shazaming songs played in San Francisco’s Mission District. Riley Walz had a cool idea: Put a solar-powered Android phone in a box on a pole in the Mission District and set it to Shazam all the songs it hears. Then, put all of those songs on a web site. The result is called Bop Spotter, a riff on the gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter, it’s been listening to music for days already, keeping a tally of San Francisco’s eclectic music taste. Yes, someone has already Rickrolled it.
AI artist Jason M. Allen says not being able to copyright his work is costing him money. Remember that piece of art that won a prize at the Colorado State Fair but couldn’t be copyrighted because it was made with Midjourney? Now the artist behind it is saying that people are stealing his work, causing him to lose money.
Here’s a baby dancing to the Halloween theme. Happy Spooktober!
