Nathan Grayson is the co-founder of Aftermath, an independent, worker-owned website about video games and internet culture. Prior to co-founding Aftermath, he worked at The Washington Post, Kotaku, and other publications. He covers labor, livestreaming, and is writing a book about streamers. Grayson talked with Minus World about how things have been going since launching Aftermath, the current state of journalism, and whether the latest round of gamer outrage is deserving of the moniker “GamerGate 2”.
MW: You’ve been writing about Helldivers 2, and I just need to know what are some of your favorite stratagems?
Grayson: I got really hooked on Helldivers 2 for a couple weeks. And then I didn’t really have time to play it afterwards. And those were also the couple of weeks where the servers were barely working. So I did not get to play that much. My character is only like level ten or eleven, somewhere around there. So I don’t have every stratagem. I like the turret though. I like to just be able to toss down an auto turret. That and any number of various explosives you can call down from the sky, napalm and stuff like that. Good for wiping out nests.
MW: So how has it been going with Aftermath in terms of your expectations whenever you all decided to found this company together, and the reality of what’s played out? I know you hit a goal recently that would allow you to maybe start doing some freelance stuff with people externally.
Grayson: Like you said, we recently hit a goal. We also just mapped out our goals, which is a thing that I had wanted to do for a while. And we ended up launching that as part of a theme week, which was Inside Baseball Week. And I was just telling a bunch of stories about things that you maybe wouldn’t get on other video game websites, things that are a little bit too, as people would say inside baseball that went really, really well. People loved that. We gained almost 400 subscribers during that week alone, which is a wild thing to have happen this is far removed from launch. And so that was a big “lesson learned” moment for us because we were like, “Well, we need to do more stuff like this in the future. It works.” But in general, as how things are going, I think when we set out, we looked at it as, “Okay, this is going to go one of two ways: Either it’s going to be a smash hit success, and we’re going to be set or we’re going to have a clear idea of how things are going to play out. Or it will fail immediately and horribly.” And then we’ll be like, “Well, at least we tried.” So we thought of either immediate success or immediate horrible failure. We did not really plan for the third outcome. Which in hindsight was the most likely, and the path that we’re now on, which is a slow build. We had a really solid launch month and the holidays hit and subscriber numbers in terms of like new ones coming in, not in terms of the ones that we already had, kind of dropped off. We realized, “Okay, this is the kind of thing where you just grow it over time.” Despite it being kind of a nontraditional business model, it is in that regard, like any other small business, you just have to stick out the early goings and try to hit a point of sustainability as time goes on. The upside is that is the direction we’re trending in. Our goal right now is still to hit a point where we can pay ourselves all full time salaries. It is looking like we are going to get there, which cannot be said for every venture, and especially not every venture like this one. So it’s really a matter of just staying the course of this plan.
MW: You’ve worked for Kotaku, and you’ve written for some very big publications. I was curious, was doing something like this in the back of your mind while you’re at those places, was it a pipe dream, or did you feel more so you were forced into this situation?
Grayson: Definitely in the back of my head. I think it entered my mind toward the end of my time at Kotaku, when a lot of things in media were already collapsing, albeit not to the extent they have now. And Kotaku especially, was this place that was absolutely ruined by poor management. It’s hard to exist somewhere like that and not think, “Okay, well, what if we just did it ourselves, and we didn’t have these people who don’t know anything breathing down our necks all the time?” What a wonderful thing that would be. And of course Kotaku was the sister site of Deadspin, and Deadspin had its big exodus that formed Defector. So you see a thing like that happen and succeed, and you’re going to be like, “We could just do the same thing but for a different purpose.” But at the same timecoming off of working at Kotaku, I was still like, “ A) I’m not a business person, and B) I don’t know if I have enough experience yet to try to launch my own thing.” That’s a lot of work, and a lot of lessons I still need to learn how to do. I’ve never been an editor. I’ve never done any other role than writer and reporter. And so I took the job that I then had at the Washington Post, and my plan was to be there for five years or something. Then maybe go and try to do my own venture. With the idea in mind that I would accumulate some of those skills in that time. And then I got laid off and I was like, “Things aren’t looking too great out there in the larger job landscape, especially not in journalism.” And what do you know? A lot of people that I used to work with are also either jobless right now or in the case of Luke, quitting. And so it was actually when Luke quit that I said it’s now or never, because the team is there and if the people are interested. We may as well give this a shot. Worst case scenario, we can say that we tried. And then go take jobs that are less fulfilling, but frankly probably pay a lot better. So the stars aligned, and circumstances made it make sense to say let’s try this out.
MW: How do you interpret the emergence of sites like Aftermath and Remap, and the general rise of crowdfunded media? Would you say it’s just that media that is always changing, it’s always evolving. Or would you say it is more of a sign that things are not going well? Would you say there are many more people who don’t have the good fortune of trying to start their own thing and it doesn’t take off? As someone who’s worked in this industry for a long time, how are you feeling about things like what you’re doing now?
Grayson: To preface I think that traditional media is dying. We’re witnessing an extinction level event. I would say in the next 5 or 10 years, the only major publications that survive are like The New York Times, and maybe The Washington Post, though they’re horribly mismanaged and keep hemorrhaging people. So we’ll see how that works out. That’s also a place where Jeff Bezos could just cut the cord any day. He could be like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” And then it’d just kind of be over. So yeah, media is dying and a lot of the reader funded sites that are emerging are a direct response to that. They’re a direct response to that, both monetarily and that the ad market is failing, especially for media. It’s just not a good way to fund sites via those means anymore. Also because everyone who worked under that model, now that the times have gotten tough, are realizing that that model never made any sense, that the people running the media companies that own these publications they’re just a waste of money, they don’t do anything. They don’t do anything important. And when they make major decisions, they’re often uninformed because they don’t talk to the people doing the actual work. They don’t care what those people think, and they make catastrophically poor decisions to harm everyone and result in layoffs and downsizing and restructuring and pivots to video and pivots to AI, none of which are actually successful. All of which just lead to a degradation of quality of work over time. And so coming out of Kotaku I think that’s a story for a lot of people who are starting their own publications. You just look at that. You look at that devastation and you say, “Man, there’s got to be a better way. Why are we not just doing this ourselves?” It’s not that difficult to start a website, you know?
MW: Yeah. The democratization of the tools that allow you to put stuff out there, it’s just finding the eyeballs to look at it, and the people that want to pay you to do that work.
Grayson: Yeah, and to answer your question about the proliferation of these sites; they have their pros and cons. I think if you are somebody who’s established, or somebody in a group of somebodies who are established, then you can do it. You can start your own site and you already have an audience and at least a portion of that audience is probably willing to pay. That’s really cool and gratifying and great, especially when they all come together to support you like Aftermath’s has. Especially I think when we first started it, we were like, “This can’t be real. All these people are way too nice.” And coming from working on the internet, you’re like, “When is the other shoe going to drop? When are they going to harass us and try to destroy our livelihoods instead of contributing to them now?” But on the other hand, if you’re not somebody who’s established, there’s not really a viable way to do any of this. If you’re new and coming into the scene, if you’re somebody who is younger and wants to write about games or just graduated from journalism school. God forbid, you should not go into journalism school right now. It’s a horrible idea. You won’t get a job. But let’s say you are. There’s just not really a way to do this. And most of the sites that are coming out of this moment are pretty small and don’t have that much in the way of funding. Defector is the exception, but even then Defector is like 30, 35, maybe 40 people. And compared to, again, the New York Times, that’s still really small, and they’re very selective about who they hire. They always will be. And so then you go further down the chain, to sites like Aftermath or even 404 Media, getting a job with any of us right now is impossible. We don’t have the money to hire anyone. On one hand, it’s cool that these sites exist at all because it’s better than the alternative that this form of journalism just goes away and also that journalism, as it currently exists in an institution, slowly but surely goes away. But it does have its flaws. It’s definitely still finding its footing. And I’m not sure that any of these publications will ever become so large as to replace previous major media conglomerates. But at the same time, maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because some of those major media conglomerates had a lot of really terrible issues. Look at the way that the New York Times handles issues like Palestine and trans people.
MW: Have you been following the saga with Mark Kern AKA Grummz? This whole Gamergate 2 or 1.5 or whatever you call it. Is it just a dying gasp of these people? I feel like he’s just a grifter.
Grayson: Oh, he’s definitely a grifter.
MW: He’s just trying to make money off of people’s outrage.
Grayson: So in that regard, even calling it a Gamergate of any sort is giving it too much credibility. It is suggesting that it’s bigger and more potent than it actually is. When in reality I think it’s a few things because it came out of all the Sweet Baby stuff, which I reported on when it was first happening. When I first reported on it, I was like, “Well, it’s a big enough phenomenon to make it newsworthy, to make it worth going into.” Not as a means of meaningfully debunking anything they were saying because you can’t convince conspiracy theorists. They will always just contort what they believe into another shape to fit the conclusions they’ve already reached in their heads, but more to basically say, “Okay, here’s how these things work,” to explain to people when you see this, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. The motivation and incentive structures people are acting on. Here’s how these platforms facilitate this, etc… And so I think that Grummz and everything he’s doing now and the crowd that he’s attracted are symptomatic of what Twitter has become. They’re not the cause. They’re not emblematic of some larger movement. Instead, what has happened is that Twitter under Elon Musk has allowed a bunch of 4channy bullshit into its system, and those people get to rule the roost now. So as a result of them having outsized influence over one platform that a lot of us use, it feels like they are suddenly big and powerful and important when they’re actually not. They’re just big fish in a small pond that has now allowed them to proliferate instead of kicking them off like it probably would have before.
MW: A pond that’s becoming gradually infested with Nazis.
Grayson: He had the Sweet Baby thing at first and then people sort of stopped giving a shit about that, at least major content creators and whatnot stopped talking about it because it stopped getting them views. Then he moved on to other targets, and he’s been haphazardly plucking out new targets. Now his people are caring less and less and less. I think that’s something that doesn’t portend anything good for the future. If you look at this, and then you look at all the conspiracy theories that were happening around Kate Middleton around the same time Sweet Baby first emerged as a thing that people are freaking out about. And like several other cycles of conspiracy-mongering since like, the internet is now just a rickety ladder made of conspiracy theories. And that’s how people communicate. And in a lot of cases, they do it to share what they feel like is information that’s valuable. The way the internet is structured makes conspiracy theorizing fun. It’s a thing people do to create community and hang out together. But in the absence of trustworthy sources of news or what they feel like are trustworthy sources of news, this is how they get all their information. And so we just have this entire web of information now where people are just spreading bullshit constantly based on vibes, and that’s it. Because journalism is collapsing there is no other more reliable information highway or whatever.
MW: How do you even counter something like that?
Grayson: That’s the question, right? And I think that given the way the internet is currently structured, given what companies like Google and Meta and Amazon have built very intentionally as a means of making money, I don’t know that there is a way to counter that, because they control it all, and they have no interest in trying to ensure that the flow of information is good and useful. They just want it to be profitable for them.
MW: It’s a little bleak.
Grayson: It’s a lot bleak. It’s also the perfect seedbed for fascism. If you’re somebody who’s like, “Yeah, I want to install a fascist government”, it’s like, “Oh, this is perfect. This fucking rules. It’s never been better.”
MW: Hold tight. Give us another six months. You also, you cover labor stuff, right? There’s been this trickle of organization that’s been happening within the game industry. For example, Microsoft recently recognized a QA union.
Grayson: 600 people.
MW: Yeah. Do you think you see that trickle turning into more of a flood as things progress forward or what do you see happening with that? Do you talk to any of these labor leaders within the games industry and about how they’re feeling? And is it optimistic? Or are they taking it one day at a time?
Grayson: I think and hope that, yes, it will turn into more of a flood. If you just compare how things are now compared to even where they were last year, It’s already a pretty marked difference. We also just had the Sega union get recognized, and win a contract, which was the first in North America despite Sega doing some really shady stuff beforehand in terms of trying to lay off substantial portions of the bargaining unit and things like that. The Sega workers still got it done and got a really good contract. I think especially given how many of the things they got in that contract that you hear game workers talk about all the time in terms of wanting. Like consistent crediting if you worked on a game at all, things of that nature. These long standing issues and they just got it, and now it’s there in perpetuity. It’s contractually obligated. I think people are going to look at that and say, “Yeah, we should definitely do that too.” And we can if you’re at Microsoft, especially because Microsoft has pledged neutrality on that front, it’s already recognized by a lot of people. And the nice thing about that too, is that a company like Microsoft, the more people who are unionized, the more people they can then add to the union, and talk to you and bring a board. And so right now, it’s 600 people. But at Microsoft, under all of their various video game arms, it’s potentially around 10,000 people.
MW: It could potentially become one of the larger unions in the country.
Grayson: Yeah, and we’re seeing a wave of union unionization in other industries. I think in general acceptance or popularity of the idea of unionizing is on the upswing. These things take time. Organizing is not easy and it’s not fun, and it takes so many meetings. Having been in multiple unions, I did some volunteer work for the Richmond Vale Fund for a while, which was another kind of consensus based organization. What that means is that everything’s always got to go to a vote, and you’ve always got to do all these little presentations of why you want to take a certain action or do a certain thing. Then you’ve got to meet about it and talk about it for hours and hours and hours, and then get people to agree with that thing. It’s not easy work and it’s not fast work, but it’s worthwhile work. I think people are seeing that and I think they’re going to get there even if it doesn’t happen overnight.
MW: I grew up in a very pro-union family. I worked union construction for a year. My dad was a union construction worker his entire working life, so I grew up in this bubble where my dad, all my uncles at one point had worked for the labor local. We’re a very pro labor family. And it wasn’t until I got older that I realized some people really hate unions. Some of that was self-inflicted, right? Getting involved with the mob, and stuff like that. But the demonization of unions by Reagan, you have to wonder where would labor be right now if we hadn’t had two terms of Ronald Reagan?
Grayson: Yeah, I mean, where would a lot of things be if we didn’t have two terms of Ronald Reagan?
MW: I think about that all the time, anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Is having a dedicated group of people who hate you online as rewarding an experience as I imagine?
Grayson: Which dedicated group are you talking about there?
MW: Oh, any of them. I found out that there is a Gamergate Wikipedia site after I Googled your name.
Grayson: That’s not surprising.
MW: I can’t imagine having that many negative feelings towards someone that I have never met or interacted with in real life. What is that like to be named the target of a hate campaign?
Grayson: There are a few things to it. For one, when the original Gamergate was at its apex it went after other people much more than me. I was the ostensible respectable reason for it doing what it did. But I was not the actual main target. That was people like, you know, Zoe and Anita Sarkeesian and Leigh Alexander, and folks like that. A story that’s been told time and time again but is still worth repeating. I did have a fair number of people come after me. Milo Yiannopoulos really wanted to fuck with me for a while and definitely tried to.
I think that at the time I learned a lesson that everyone has learned by this point, but that at the time didn’t really make a lot of sense to me intuitively, which is that you just can’t be earnest online or you can’t engage with these people earnestly. They will take whatever you say and use it against you and turn you into a meme, and laugh at you. They will laugh at you and mock you and try to find your personal information, and do all sorts of terrible shit. So you just can’t engage them in good faith. You can’t engage them in ways that betray that you are hurting or scared or whatever else. That’s what they want. That’s especially true with the first Gamergate. The new one, which again, I still contend is not even a Gamergate. It more just wants to fuck with people. They have no teeth. The original Gamergate,, within a week of it kind of coming to be, people showed up at Zoe’s house, tried to get into their building. They hacked Phil Fish’s bank account. Just fucking wild. Doxed everybody they possibly could, were calling people’s parents, it was some pretty nasty shit. This one just doesn’t have anywhere near that level of capability or of militarization. So I learned all of that. Then over time I think back when it first started happening, I never imagined this, you get really really numb to it. You get so numb to it that it just doesn’t fucking matter anymore. You get so numb that you see other people now engaging with this new thing that looks kind of like a Gamergate and getting emotional about it and being like, “How? How do you feel anything about this? How do you not just look at what these people are saying and and think, this is so fucking stupid, I’m just not going to pay any attention to any of you.”
MW: This is beneath me. This is not even worth my time.
Grayson: “It’s beneath me”, I think has this implication of being better than or whatever. It’s not even that. None of this matters. It’s all so stupid. It is also comically dumb, and it’s all staged around things that barely matter. There’s a small contingent of freaks on the internet who are extremely worried that women in video games are not sexy enough or whatever anymore. It’s that meme of somebody saying all this bullshit and then it’s just like a normal person, “Hey, what’s up?” That’s how it actually is. Like, all these people need to fucking touch grass. Everybody in the games industry could stand to touch grass a little bit more. Normal people just don’t give a shit about any of this. None of it matters.
MW: Have you had anybody that has apologized to you or has anyone tried to make amends for being shitty?
Grayson: Yeah various people at various points. Usually you’ll get a pretty quick apology out of somebody if you just engage with them for a bit. If they’re in your DMs saying a bunch of bullshit and you’re like, “Hey, here are some thoughts and ideas.” Or, “Respectfully, blah, blah, blah.” Then they’ll be like, “Oh, I never thought you’d reply. I’m sorry. My tone was really bad. I was just emotional.” The most notable one, and I haven’t told that many people about this, I’m not sure if you know the name because he’s been dead for a handful of years now and was not that big of a content creator compared to how big they get now. But, TotalBiscuit, kind of marshaled early gamergaters behind a veneer of being a moderate or being a centrist, but in that way where it definitely helps those ideas gain mainstream acceptance. I had talked to him for a story that I was doing at Kotaku probably a year or two before he died. And, he was like, “Yeah, obviously things in the world have gotten a lot worse since the Gamergate days, and I think that, you know, we were all kind of naive and, you know, took it all a little bit too far.” He apologized in a very roundabout way. And I was like, “You know what? That’s as good as I’m going to get from you, I’ll take it.”
MW: Do you have anything that you’d like to plug or tell the audience about?
Grayson: Aftermath.site Subscribe if you can. It’s $7 per month to start at the base tier, which is the cost of a nice cup of coffee or a bad sandwich. And that’s it. You get multiple blogs per day. We often break news. We write about things from a perspective that I don’t think you’re going to get elsewhere, and we have a cool little community. If you pay for the $10 tier, then you can be on our discord, and you can comment and stuff like that. And honestly, I think that’s one of the biggest perks of being part of all of this. Our community is just really good and really chill and really cool, full of smart, interesting people who like video games and who don’t talk about them like freaks on Twitter. They’re just like, “Hey, this game is cool and having fun with it. And maybe I want to engage with its deeper themes a little bit.” That’s it.
