Oh, this fucking guy.
He's not rocking the boat in any way or breaking any new ground here: We all agree that sending crazy death threats is pretty unacceptable. Where I think he's entirely off base is how he's saying this is an entirely new phenomenon, rooted on the internet, which primarily affects the game industry. Anybody involved in dealing directly with public reactions in even moderately high profile positions will be able to confirm that unhinged people exist everywhere and lose their shit at pretty much anything.
Where the internet comes in is that it makes it extremely visible to people like Orth, who would otherwise have those opinions and reactions filtered. It's an organic feedback machine that you can view in realtime and that comes with both good and bad. To Orth's credit, he did admit that he was the cause of all his problems - losing his job, losing pending job offers, basically killing his career. He glossed over it, but he did admit it.
The thing is that he glossed over it and moved on to showcasing his theory on internet toxicity....without mentioning at all how he contributes to that. His tweet was "toxic" the second he uploaded it, and, as will often happen, people took that to mean shots have been fired, come out guns blazing. It's one thing to put forward a reasonable argument and then be surprised when unreasonable responses come back in return, it's entirely another to be an asshat and then write an entire presentation on how society has devolved based entirely on the asshat responses you've received.
A slide from the presentation he did works out like this: NEGATIVE OPINION + ANONYMITY + INSTANT PUBLISHING + GLOBAL AUDIENCE + ZERO CONSEQUENCE = TOXICITY
This is essentially a needlessly expanded version of Penny Arcade's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but the interesting thing is that it describes his initial tweet to a tee and quite frankly, as nice as it would be to look at his presentation as an unbiased analysis of how social interactions on the internet work, and specifically the treatment he received as evidence of the combative nature of internet communications, you're not getting the full picture unless you look at that first communication and realize the environment was already "toxic".
The age old adage of public relations seems to hold true here: Don't be an asshat when visibly dealing with the public and things will go easier for you.
As a side note, I actually think that an unfiltered feedback stream like this can be a very good thing for society as a whole...to a point.
