Somebody needs to do a Guide to Gamer-Gate for Old Farts (like me.) I don't have the slightest clue what it's all about, and I keep reading allusions to it, which makes me worry that it's something important that I should care about.

I've seen people hounded to suicide by online interactions. (Well. It's quite possible, I suppose, those people would have found another reason to commit suicide. Still.) Maybe because things one's read on line seem to originate inside one's head and so seem oddly intimate? I don't really know. But I do know the peculiar power of Internet flames has to do with the nature of the medium somehow more than the actual words.