THE ME-TOO MENTALITY

The “Me-Too” movement had shaken up the entertainment industry to its core, and it had grown way bigger than what all the Public Relations departments could sweep under the rug.

I think it had mixed results, but it was something that had to happen; people in charge who could’ve had it resolved, gracefully have chosen to pass it down until it was forgotten, like they usually do, rather than fix their despicable behavior.

This month, I would like to address the recently surfaced news about the allegations and evidence of sexual harassment in the video game industry. In many ways, if it was not the movie industry, it would have been the video game industry.

The main difference is that the big wigs in the video game industry tend to be quite tech-savvy, and as such, can e suppress the information much more than their movie counterparts. The news from the video games industry is important, not only because the video game industry is now larger than the movies and music industries combined, but also because the video games industry has always been the vanguard of the latest money-squeezing schemes that companies cook up.

For the past 20 years, the news of worker abuse through crunch and constant use of working people, to complete and exhaustion to simply replace them with the next naive exploitable college graduate, have become commonplace. However, finally the dam burst, and more and more people have been coming forward with even more insidious allegations. Most recently from the French-originated video game giant, Ubisoft.

These have become so numerous and people have been coming forward with evidence. Recently, 3 top executives were forced to resign as a result. For those interested, I would suggest you view the most recent video report from a consumer advocate, Jim Sterling, a long-time, established independent journalist in this field, in a video titled: “Ubisoft spent years protecting mental and physical abusers.”

They are the same people who have been cutting themselves multimillion-dollar bonus checks while firing 800 people in the same breath. Under normal circumstances, these people would simply go unpunished as they are simply too big to fail. Thanks to their vast resources they can win the legal battle of attrition in court thanks to our “justice” system.

As more and more of these stories surface, it becomes harder and harder for these people to avoid punishment; eventually, the outrage becomes too great to suppress. Thus, where the court of law has failed, the court of public opinion begins to form.

As the public, we must also remain vigilant against, all false accusations and listen to evidence. As we have seen in the me-too movement, a lot of opportunists have come forward to accuse their rivals of a variety of reasons and this is equally unjust, and despicable and would only lead to real accusations not being taken seriously.