Contemporary "Gatekeeping"

Discussion about gatekeeping is currently all the rage online. It is important to define what it is and point out what it looks like before delving neck deep into its contemporary influences, and how gatekeeping is being reshaped, both virtually and physically. At its most basic level, gatekeeping is the process used – arbitrary or not - preventing an individual or a group of individuals from accessing or becoming part of one organization or community. Often, but not always, there are certain standards to follow, unless it is lottery-based or follows another “random” method. It is not a tangible phenomenon. There is not always a black-and-white line between what is and is not gatekeeping. Nor is it something that is intrinsically good or bad, and both have differing consequences. For instance, not letting someone join your tabletop game group for whatever reason is gatekeeping. Perhaps they might make the experience worse, or perhaps they might enhance it.

Some institutionally religious examples are faiths that accept someone as long as they proceed to accept certain basic tenets, compared to more complex and lengthy processes, or blocking them off to people not part of that group entirely. On a sliding scale, “Unitarian Universalism” is open to everyone, even people who proclaim another faith, though many critics debate if it even qualifies as a religion. Christian churches have varying levels of acceptance for one to join them, where one is part of it after accepting a few basic tenets, or they might need to go through a longer process such as catechism that may take months or some years. Judaism, another Abrahamic religion, tends to be more stringent, and often has a longer and more rigorous process, depending on the branch and other factors. Who is seen as Jewish sometimes is in disagreement between Jews, often dependent on the beliefs about ancestry over a specific profession of faith. In Zoroastrianism, practitioners who are more traditional tend to believe conversion to Zoroastrianism impermissible, and that it comes from parentage, while reformist believers generally allow outsiders to convert.

Associations may also gatekeep by only allowing athletes of a certain caliber to enter, or assessing someone’s intelligence other kind of ability before they are allowed in. Immigration control is also a form of gatekeeping. The topic of history of religion and “gatekeeping” could easily fill several libraries on its own, and while it has certain has been moulded throughout history through various factors, my focus is on other things. These examples are merely to illustrate that “gatekeeping” is a rather abstract and nebulous concept, and someone could easily make any argument that any sort of barrier to accessibility is gatekeeping.

 Being told that you are not allowed to be a part of a certain club does not always mean no, as there are “soft” barriers. If you are bad at a video game and want to join an e-sports team, you may be able to improve to the level to join them one day. Or, perhaps you cannot afford suitable hardware for gaming. Generally speaking, most decent gaming equipment or hardware is monetarily accessible; there are cheaper but viable options for almost everything. There are “hard” barriers as well, which are out of the person’s control. For example, someone who is missing a leg will not be able to have the same athletic ability as a top professional sprinter, prosthetics or no. At least, technology has not made prosthetics capable of enabling that to happen, for the time being. Or, as in the previous example, if someone wants to be a professional gamer but has, say, poor eyesight or nervous system damage, they may find it much more difficult to reach that goal.

Now that gatekeeping is defined, more or less sufficiently, we can delve into the mechanics and processes of gatekeeping themselves in the modern world. There are three key barriers involved in gatekeeping: physical, mental, and financial.Online, one regularly sees rhetoric such as we need to gatekeep this, don’t gatekeep that, why gatekeeping is good or bad, healthy or toxic, and so on. “Gatekeep your hobbies!”. You’ve likely thought before, that some people who seem to be part of your virtual “community”/hobby are annoying or even bad people and it would be better off that they were not a part of it. I know I have thought this.

Actually managing to gatekeep hobbies used to be feasible before the dominance of the internet. It would be easier to tell someone who wants to join your Dungeons and Dragons group “no”, them not having played it before. Maybe they’ll find someone else to play with, maybe not. Joining a metal scene in the 80s or 90s meant getting to know its fans and people behind it, and if you were a “poser” who only masqueraded as having common interests, you would usually be told to fuck off, and they would go sulk and whine about how bad those guys are. Now, you may be able to stop a person from joining your individual club, but it is much harder to stop a person from joining a hobby, particularly if it can be done virtually. You or a group can ignore or shun them, but they can find other ways to enter it. The person can easily find another D&D group online, another can find other metal group to hang out with online. Moreover, they’ll probably complain about gatekeeping being an issue. Some individuals will take it even further and try to impose their own standards on the rest of the “community”, and move on like parasitical lifeforms from one to another. What can you do about it? You can try to bully or harass someone to go away, or send a mob against them potentially, though I observe this happens more with people who are “victims” of gatekeeping that the ones trying to enforce it. But rarely does it actually work, unless someone gets bored or sick of the community, for one reason or another. It may even because they joined the community, made it worse, and now refuse to lie in the bed that they vomited all over.

Why does this happen? Because you are removing the physical barrier of gatekeeping by mechanism of a virtual erosion. The financial barrier can also be removed somewhat by virtual means. The physical barrier includes aspects of the real world, like being able to go to a place, having a certain ability to do something with your own body – e.g. physical fitness. It’s a rather broad category. Time is also a key aspect of the physical barrier, because time is part of the physical realm, and we do not have infinite time at our disposal. This one is the hardest for humans to affect, and we cannot do it directly, though many things are now more efficient than they used to be, thus allowing for more time to do said things. Admittedly, I am not the first person to think of the concept of the virtual eroding the physical, nor am I the most eloquent person to explain it.

Paul Town, if you are familiar with him, has written at length about the “psychic” replacing the physical. I am not sure if he is the first person to come up with such a concept, but to put things in very broad and simplified terms, he explains how the growth of the internet and media makes many previously crucial aspects of the physical realm obsolete. This is a selective process, as some people are keen enough to figure out how it works and prosper, and others will not and suffer. It is a much more broad and integrated theory – as I see it – though it is quite similar to what I am saying in regards to gatekeeping, which is of a much smaller scope. Out of potential interest of the reader, I will link to his books.¹ I do not receive any kind of financial support to promote this, I simply think that they are interestingly written, and the reader can understand a perspective they might otherwise never even consider. In case the reader might think there could be a conflict of interest, I will disclose that he has sent me a couple of digital copies of his books for free a few years ago.        

The “psychic” realm is similar to my idea of the virtual, though I do not understand it well enough to say it is synonymous. It more likely is a major facet of it, in Paul’s theory. What they do both have in common, is that there is a shifting, or even destruction of standards in the physical realm. Say a military wants to lower the standards to admit more women into the military, as objectively, men are significantly more athletically capable than women are on average. This not only changes the bare minimum to let women who otherwise would not be able to join, as there but to a lesser extent, it also affects weaker men who would not pass the normal standards as well. On one hand, you have a larger active force, which in very specific scenarios may be necessary. On the other hand, you lower the overall average quality of the armed forces. However, when it comes to special operations, these standards usually remain quite strict; they are not very malleable. This is what is going on now on a much larger scale. The masses in many respects are suffering a deterioration of quality of life due to the failure of gatekeeping to upkeep certain standards. I did say gatekeeping is not intrinsically good or bad, but for virtually everything, there need to be standards higher than complete and utter anarchy, in every sense of the word.

Using the internet is like playing with a bioweapon. It can make you sick, and you can pass on that sickness to other people, even willingly. It can lower your individual barriers, them being your immune system, rather than just that of a community and infect you mentally. Most people are hyperconnected to everything online, exacerbating this. The mental barrier of gatekeeping includes intelligence, sanity, how one’s brain works in general. It includes aspects like conscience and emotions as well. You really have to see it for yourself to see how the internet makes people behave, and nearly anyone who has used the internet for any significant amount of time has seen it. The erosion of the mental barrier alone is not enough to explain everything; as I said it is more like an immune system. When it is weakened or gone, things start working incorrectly, the “body” – which can be both you the individual, and a community – starts attacking itself or not responding to intruders at all. It doesn’t extend to things like merely fooling around or doing a bit of trolling online. It extends to sociopathic behavior, neuroticism, browbeating people into accepting insanity and an unhealthy environment.

When people try to gatekeep this behavior and people who act like this, as ineffectual as it usually is, by acting like jerks or doing things to shock other people, it is often mistaken for mental erosion or the person is just being a toxic asshole. In fact, it is more like a defense mechanism. This extends to the real world and online. It is the same when a human body has inflammation; it is your body causing this as a response to something. Alternatively, it is a like an bee stinging a creature that it feels is threatening it. That person/group of people are seen as a threat and someone who would try to ruin you given the chance, you have to try to do what you can. “Poopoopeepee” is a fairly niche example which some people familiar with 4chan know. People would post grotesque images of Pepe the Frog engaging in fecal, urinary and sexually deviant acts to attempt to repulse the deluge of “normalfags”. Did it work in the short run? Perhaps, I am not quite sure how you would gather data on that. In the long run? Definitely not. In any case, they were trying to repulse people who they saw as invaders any way they could. You cannot act upon something going on virtually in the physical realm, unless you started hunting down people who visited a website in real life and told them to “get off my board”, so this is a mental battle in the virtual realm. There are many more specific examples, but the gist of this is that it is very common for people to engage in browbeating, coercion, threats behind the scenes to gain control of the main hub of a community, and communities either try to resist this how they can, or they capitulate within a heartbeat.

The final barrier is financial. It is relatively straightforward in concept, but is quickly rising in importance with the dominance of the virtual realm. Opportunity cost is something that exists both in real life and online, although opportunity cost need not always be monetary in nature. Staying connected online has a monetary expense associated with it. Cryptocurrency is also associated with this, but it is more than just that. People who have money, are more capable of controlling the flow of information online, and that is indeed what they have been doing. Initially, the internet destroyed many physical barriers, and still has. It has made many things more accessible and even affordable. However, money and expenditures come into play online in ways your average person does not really think about. Server maintenance, hiring staff, electricity costs, and more, all of those expenditures come into play for many websites, especially larger ones that receive heavy traffic and activity. There are also investors that pay companies and individuals working for them, sometimes to make them money, but increasingly to push a certain agenda or perspective. They can be political, social, back a certain candidate, and the like. It can be transparent, but also happens behind the scenes without disclosure. It figures then, that those who have money, are the ones who are more capable of pushing their interests online. Thus, they often have a vested interest in pushing the erosion of physical and mental barriers. It is no accident. Lowering said barriers will facilitate their interests in the other sphere. I would not say those investors are solely responsible for the condition of “gatekeeping”, but they certainly have accelerated it. Mind you, it is not their interest to destroy gatekeeping in its entirety. Those people who have money to burn until they get their way, gatekeep themselves, and hold themselves to different standards than everyone else. You don’t affect their social sphere. They affect yours.

All of these barriers, and their erosion, are tightly integrated and affect each other. For all intents, this is simply a summary of this phenomenon to define it and demonstrate the interplay between gatekeeping and how it is being reshaped. This is not meant to be a comprehensive overview addressing every single facet of it in detail. What you ought to take away from this is that virtual is a force that reconstructs and razes barriers. It is not so important if it is by design or not. The fact is that is that certain people and groups with interests have only now started to figure out how to manipulate it.  

1. https://www.amazon.com/P-T/e/B07VRZR9BJ/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1