Join us for a conversation with David Wolinsky about “The Hivemind Swarmed,” on March 6 at A Room of One’s Own

The oral history explores Gamergate and its implications far beyond gaming.

Tone Madison is excited to welcome oral historian and journalist David Wolinsky to Madison on Thursday, March 6, for a discussion about his 2024 book The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations On Gamergate, The Aftermath, And The Quest For A Safer Internet. The event, at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore, 2717 Atwood Ave., starts at 6 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

At the event, Tone Madison publisher Scott Gordon (that’s me!) will interview Wolinsky about this long-in-the-works oral history book, and the work leading up to it. The Hivemind Swarmed draws on hundreds of interviews to bring together a multitude of perspectives about Gamergate, an online harassment campaign, which started in 2014, and targeted women and minorities in the video gaming world. But it goes far beyond that episode, exploring the depth of its impact and implications for the wider world of culture and politics in the ensuing decade. (As the collapse of social media plays out in 2025, part of the mourning should involve passing the mic to gamers, who sounded the alarm over a decade ago.) Renowned documentary filmmaker Ken Burns blurbed the book, writing: “Out of the transient and ephemeral effluvia of the internet comes something ivied, revelatory, permanent. Bravo.”

I’ve known Wolinsky since 2008, when we both worked at The A.V. Club, and he’s also contributed to Tone Madison, including a 2017 report about the local game-development world. Wolinsky, who is based in the Chicago area, has focused for more than a decade on independently holding up a much-needed mirror to the video game industry as a whole. His Don’t Die oral history series has gathered long-form interviews he conducted to surface conversations across a kaleidoscope of fields, contrasting a wide array of game developers and player perspectives with those of journalists and other cultural figures. In 2016, he self-published a series of in-depth reports on labor practices in the games world. (Full disclosure: I edited that series.) This was ahead of the curve: at the time, not a lot of publications were interested in this kind of reporting. Today, unions are a much more prominent force in video games. And it’s become more common to find great journalism about labor in games, both in legacy media outlets and small upstart publications like the mighty Aftermath. One of the pivotal developments happened right in our backyard, when workers at Middleton-based Raven Software successfully organized a union in 2022.

So, we’ll have plenty to talk about. Even if you don’t pay much attention to video games, chances are you’ll find the conversation about online subcultures and their sometimes frightful, outsized power interesting. (Especially if you’ve been concerned about questions like, “What is the internet doing to us?”) We hope you can join us. For now, if you’re curious to learn more, you can also listen to Sara Gabler’s October 2024 interview with Wolinsky for WORT-FM’s A Public Affair.