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I've spent a career working in tech as a software engineer. And I believe regulated markets are the best way to build and deliver innovative products.
In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.
The Democratic Party tends to have this hypereducated ruling-class mentality, and we need to realize that's not making us connect with a lot of voters.
The video game industry traditionally has been a very male-dominated field. You know, with the advent of the iPhone, the number of women gamers exploded.
Since Gamergate, many women I know are reluctant to speak publicly on gender issues, because they fear - rightly - that they will be targeted and harassed.
In some ways, the real damage of Gamergate is pushing the public's idea of sexism so far to the extreme, that changes in the professional sphere seem unimportant.
It doesn't matter how many women we get into game production. If the only people evaluating the work we do continue to be men, women's voices will never be heard.
Anyone can go to 8chan, a website entirely for Gamergaters. You can read what they post about me and other women. It's not just casual sexism, it's angry, violent sexism.
I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.
Obviously, whenever the government is getting involved with speech, it gives me a lot of pause. I have a background as a journalist, so that's something that I take very seriously.
The main thing Twitter needs to focus on are implementing its rules more uniformly. If outing a transgender woman is against Twitter's rules, that needs to be implemented every time.
I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and it took me getting out into the real world and understanding what I faced as a woman in my career to really open up my eyes.
Prosecuting Gamergate is not about justice for me or the women of Giant Spacekat. It's about introducing consequences into the equation for men that treat harassing women like a game.
The Internet has done so much for so many. It allows women and minorities to have access to education, training, and information that sometimes isn't available to them for whatever reason.
In 1999, I was running my first tech start-up and learning the Unreal Engine, the tool that would define my career as a game developer, when news of Columbine ground all work to a standstill.
Unfortunately, I have the equivalent of 7 PhDs in harassment on Twitter. As one of the primary targets of Gamergate, I've had hundreds and hundreds of threats to my life on Twitter's platform.
Facebook, Apple, Tinder, Snapchat, and Google create our social realities - how we make friends, how we get jobs, and how mankind interacts. And the truth is, women don't truly have a seat at the table.
For a hate group originally focused on video games, anger over a comedy movie for starring women might seem ridiculous. But at its core, Gamergate is about a toxic male sense of ownership over geek culture.
I work in the tech industry and my husband works in biotech. He's head of IP for a company listed on the NASDAQ. And we have a lot of discussions in tech and biotech about the role of unionization in our industries.
My mom bought a computer in the '80s to do accounting, and she was so smart at computers that we spent all our time with them. My childhood was sitting on the floor of her office and figuring out how to program with my mom.
I look at my own party, and I see that we've taken this technocratic, academic, elitist liberal class philosophy as far as it can go, and we got our butts kicked - and I don't know what else to do other than get involved myself.
For any prosecutor, a decision to show leniency in sentencing must be weighed against multiple factors. Do they show remorse for their actions? Are they a threat to the public and law enforcement? Do they intend to contribute to society?
Crises like the Mirai botnet can't be prevented by vague calls to protect our cybernetworks or platitudes about working with private industry. We need to be able to force recalls on consumer devices with massive security vulnerabilities.
For most of 2016 and 2017, I would say probably 90% of my Twitter feed was automated bots sending repetitive messages at me. Someone would basically pay bots to send me messages over and over and over again. It made Twitter nearly unusable.
My big lesson from Gamergate is asking the men in charge to do the right thing does not work. So we need women, we need people of color in positions of power not just in the game industry but at social media and tech companies and in Congress.
I am the head of development at Giant Spacekat, a Boston-based studio that's an industry leader in making games for women. We are passionate about creating narrative games for the avalanche of new consumers who don't fit the old gamer stereotype.
There's a common misconception about running for office. People think it's dreadful, morally compromising work. But I've found the opposite is true. It made a better person and a better feminist. It forced me to take a hard look at my shortcomings.
It's not like I'm advocating that we ban 'Call of Duty' or anything silly like that, I'm asking is for companies to look at their hiring practices, to hire more women... and make sure they portray women in their games in a socially responsible way.
Something that's hard for me, I remember being a child in the '80s and looking at this field. It was a field I wanted very much to go into, but I didn't see people who looked like me working in video games. You can't really be it if you can't see it.
There's a common personality type to software developers - one I certainly fall into. We're more comfortable staring at a screen than staring into someone's eyes. Engineers can be brilliant in the workplace, and something less-than-brilliant everywhere else.
The first game I remember being ridiculously passionate about was Super Mario Bros. 2. It was the first game where you could play as Princess Peach. It wasn't just a game where the boys had their adventure. Peach was in the game and she was so powerful there.
The truth is, the sexist behaviour that really holds women in games back doesn't come from the moustache-twirling cartoon villains of Gamergate. It's the sexist hiring practices of our journalistic institutions. It's the consistently over-sexualised designs we see.
Growing up as a queer child in Mississippi, I got my Nintendo in 1985, and I've been lost in this world ever since. When I was scared because my church said people like me were going to burn in hell, 'Final Fantasy,' 'Dragon Warrior' and 'Super Mario' offered a lifeboat.
With my company, Giant Spacekat, I was very angry about the lack of games that portrayed women positively in the video game industry, so I launched my own studio, gave a lot of very talented women jobs, and we made some of the most awesome, empowering games in the business.
The truth is, you cannot run a political campaign like a tech startup. Technology is a field that fetishizes disruption. The old ways are suspect, and we place an almost irrational trust on new tools. That's fine for developing games, but it was a failing playbook for politics.
Gamergate is ostensibly about journalistic ethics. Supporters say they want to address conflicts of interest between the people that make games and the people that support them. In reality, Gamergate is a group of gamers that are willing to destroy the women who have invaded their clubhouse.
Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.