The Weird 'World Of Warcraft' Trail To Steve Bannon

Trump might be done, but the engine that Frankenstein-ed him into office (and probably life) is still running. Understanding it might prove vital if we're to stop his goons from gathering all of his Horcruxes. To that effect, you might be surprised to learn the role World Of Warcraft has had in this mess. And no, this time Activision Blizzard had nothing to do with it.

Gold farming used to be a very profitable black market which consisted of rich assholes paying peanuts to highly efficient players from China to grind the game, then selling the resulting loot to western players who just couldn't be bothered to play the game they claimed to love. When it started to take too hard a toll, hard crackdown measures taken by Blizzard caused most of the industry to die out, but not before planting the weirdest of seeds. For a time, one of the big gold farming companies was operated not by a Chinese magnate, but by America's hottest bachelor, Steve Bannon.

Founding an exploitative company in an already evil market seems like what Bannon would do just for fun, but the truth is that he merely lucked into it. Bannon landed a role at Internet Gaming Entertainment, a company leading the charge in selling MMORPG players farmed goblin coins or whatever bullshit currency games were using. Bannon's rackett ended up crashing and burning, but not before he managed to get Goldman Sachs to invest 60 million dollars in the company, while allegedly also making the brilliant discovery that gamers can be a hateful bunch. One whose hatred could be farmed even more easily than fake gold. That knowledge proved very useful when running Breitbart, as the site then used it to feed various fake-ass crises such as gamergate, which weaponized the idiocy of angry white dude against marginalized groups.

While reports that 4chan was the main driving force in getting Trump elected are no smarter than the 4chan mem(b)ers who wrote them, there's no denying that gamergate and Breitbart created a solid base of young people that right-wingers had previously been unable to use to their benefit, and one we still don't how to bring back to the real world.

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