Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 271 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Zoe Quinn.

She's the creator of the popular text game Depression Quest, and her writing has appeared in

publications such as Vice and Cracked.

In 2014 she became the first target of a massive internet hate mob which came to be called

Gamergate and in response she founded the Crash Override Network which helps provide resources

for other targets of online abuse.

And we'll be speaking with her today about her new book Crash Override,

how Gamergate nearly destroyed my life, and how we can win the fight against online hate.

And now here's our interview with Zoe Quinn.

All right, so we're here with Zoe Quinn and welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, so your new book is called Crash Override. So tell us about why you wanted to write this book.

Basically, I wanted to write this book because both as someone who's been the target of

massive online harassment for going on three years now and as someone who's been working to help other people targeted by the same for about two with people like the biggest names in tech and law enforcement and governments and whatnot.

I thought that, you know, I'm still an engineer at heart, so if I can automate conversations

that I keep having to have, I find myself keep having to have, it sort It seems like a good opportunity for me.

Plus I feel like I just have learned so much from the experience about how to

effectively fight back, what we can do as people to look after each other and sort of be better digital

citizens as well. So it's like rather than writing just like a book about you

know bad things that happened to me that didn't really interest me I wanted to use what had happened to me and a lot of other people

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