AOC invokes McLuhan with “Tax the Rich” Gala dress

Last week congresswoman and media-discourse-lightning-rod Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked off a firestorm of hot takes by wearing a ball gown emblazoned with the message “Tax the Rich” to this year’s Met Gala. The annual super-exclusive social event and big money fundraising soiree typically attracts buzzing commentary over its dramatic displays of eye-catching haute couture. The buzz over AOC’s dress hinged on the fact that she tied her fashion statement to an explicit political statement.

As is common in our highly-polarized sphere of social media discourse, reactions to the dress tended to fall on either end of a spectrum from adoring commendation to cynical derision. On subreddits that are more favorable toward AOC users posted images of the dress with comments that she was “staying true,” remarking that she “had the balls” to wear the dress, and calling her “the hero we deserve”. More critical users commented on the perceived hypocrisy of brandishing a class-conscious message at an ultra-elite event. Commenters on a TrueOffMyChest post called the dress “cringey asf” and the “definition of cringeworthy.”

So what to make of the “Tax the Rich” dress? Is it based or cringe? AOC herself weighed in with an Instagram post of the dress. The accompanying text begins with the statement: “The medium is the message.”

The invocation of McLuhan’s immortal dictum led me to consider just how exactly AOC was conceptualizing “the medium” in this instance. Is it really, as much of the online reaction seems to suggest, all about the dress?

For the past year I have been teaching a course titled Media and Consumer Culture, and some of the most interesting case studies that have come up in class discussions are from the world of fashion. Students are particularly interested in the symbolic exchange value of designer brands and in the world of fashion more broadly as a salient but oft-overlooked aspect of the media-consumer-culture continuum (students have also evinced a strong interest in sustainable or eco-fashion initiatives). In this case, however, AOC’s dress is not a consumer good, but rather a one-off fashion item. It would be another thing altogether if we were discussing a commercially-available mass-produced article of clothing that was branded with “tax the rich,” and it is likely that not nearly as many people would be talking about it at all.

So clearly the “medium” in this case cannot be separated from the public persona of AOC herself and the particular context of the Met Gala. First, regarding AOC’s personal “brand,” she has become the face of what constitutes the “radical” or “progressive” arm of what passes for leftist politics in the United States. In this sense, the “tax the rich” message is decidedly “on brand” for the political identity that AOC has established for herself. It goes without saying that most people’s intrinsic reaction to the Gala dress will inherently be colored by any preconceptions they hold regarding AOC.

Beyond the predictable ad hominem attacks directed toward AOC, many critical comments focused on the affluent and extravagant context of the Met Gala itself. The Gala is designed as a spectacle, both for the elite attendees and for the general public via the circulation of images in the media (in some sense the mediated aura of the gala and attendant commentary has become an annual event in its own right). The mediated nature of the highly publicized event thus affords a prime opportunity for an image event, something that AOC obviously understands and is likely alluding to in her citation of “the medium is the message.” The complete picture of the Gala as “medium” is therefore entangled with its extended mediation through social media images, shares, and comments.

I think the notion of “medium” in relation to the AOC Gala dress is legitimately complicated and entangled with issues of media spectacle, political celebrity, and modes of online discourse. The divisive reactions to both the dress and its wearer displayed the sort of performative indignation that characterizes the contemporary attention economy, and the debates over whether AOC was being righteous or hypocritical by wearing the dress at the event eluded engagement with the “tax the rich” message. The larger and looming question seems to be: just what is the appropriate medium and channel for addressing class inequality?

Some online commentators asserted that the copious amount of social media discourse that the dress generated proved that AOC’s message had succeeded in its ultimate goal of bringing attention to wealth disparity and taxation policy. This is a dubious proposition: as I already mentioned, the vast amount of online chatter that the dress prompted stayed focused on the surface level or “optics” of the spectacle. But the notion that the virality of the dress images serves as self-evident proof of the message’s success offers another potent parallel to McLuhan’s legacy. The continued circulation of McLuhan’s adage -- independent of its original meaning or explanatory context -- is a testament to its own truth: the aphorism, the sound bite, the fragment, the meme, etc., is the primary unit of informational currency in the electronic age.

The medium is the message.

Thoughts on Nomadland and the 2021 Oscars

I finally got around to watching Nomadland this weekend, just ahead of the film’s anticipated Oscars triumph. My viewing was belated for a number of reasons. For one, the fact that the film was only available to stream on Hulu, necessitating that I create a Hulu account, made it easy to avoid. Secondly, I am generally ambivalent toward any films generating concerted Oscar buzz (this year I watched Mank and Minari despite my usual reservations...Mank was bad, Minari was just OK, and both films had baffling endings). My reluctance to see such films is heightened when the picture in question is reputed to carry social significance or is otherwise considered a “message movie.” The Oscars has a notoriously iffy track record when it comes to awarding Best Picture out of allegiance to some cause célèbre or to course-correct for the Academy’s diversity deficit through performative virtue signalling.

So I didn’t expect much of Nomadland, and what little I knew about the film only served to bolster my skepticism. I recently read a review that suggested the film’s warm reception was mostly carried by Frances McDormand’s acting prowess and abundant images of beautiful sunsets. Based on this appraisal and my own reckoning I anticipated that Nomadland would offer a shallow engagement with contemporary labor precarity dressed in the trappings of prestige filmmaking and wrapped in compelling cinematography.

Having seen the film, I can say that my expectations were subverted in some sense. For one thing, the cinematography is not compelling or even notable. Yes, the film does feature many “beautiful sunsets,” but their beauty lies in the intrinsic grandeur of natural spectacle, not in how they are presented or photographed. The film is often visually captivating because the desert and American West are inherently visually captivating, and Nomadland employs an abundance of on-location shooting to capture these landscapes. There is not much in the way of artful or creative approaches to the cinematography itself. I can’t help but compare the photography in Nomadland to Paris, Texas, another film that I wrote about recently. Paris, Texas features similar landscapes and traveling scenes as Nomadland, but Robby Müller’s evocative cinematography presents dynamic and engaging uses of lighting, staging, and composition in nearly every shot of that film.

To be fair, Nomadland takes a decidedly documentary-style approach to its mise-en-scène that I found very effective. Throughout the film I was often unsure whether the characters in a scene were unknown and amateur actors reciting naturalistic dialogue, or if the filmmakers had candidly captured casual conversations. Ultimately this distinction was a trivial curiosity: the various monologues that provide background on the characters’ lives seemed undeniably authentic and true to someone’s lived experience; whether these accounts had been lived first-hand by the person on screen or were merely informed by someone else’s narrative didn’t really matter, because the veracity resonated regardless.

The documentary-style presentation and obvious real-life inspiration is effective, but the film’s navigation of real world issues also introduces some ambiguous messaging that muddles the ideological overtones. Early on in the film the main character Fern goes to work at an Amazon distribution center. I was rapt throughout this entire sequence. The establishing image of the Amazon-branded warehouse looming over arriving workers felt portentous and vital. From my seat on the sofa it seemed like a glimpse of the Real underlying our current social arrangement; a sudden confrontation with one particular manifestation of the vast infrastructural assemblage that has helped to sustain supply lines and maintain a sense of societal continuity during the pandemic, as well as the ominous economic behemoth with which we seem so inextricably implicated.

I cannot help but consider the PR optics of Amazon’s participation in Nomadland, especially in light of the company’s recent high-profile social media campaigns (and widely-publicized social media gaffes) in opposition to employee unionization efforts. It appears that the company allowed the filmmakers to stage scenes inside an actual distribution center, and ostensibly include actual employees. And why not: the image of the company as conveyed by the film is one of cleanliness, safety, and friendliness. Fern sums up her experience of working for Amazon in two words: “Good money.” If anything Amazon’s participation in Nomadland seems like free publicity for its seasonal employment programs.

And the seasonal aspect of Amazon’s representation is a key component in the film’s murky messaging. Amazon is portrayed as regular and dependable: at one point Fern reassures her concerned sister by stating that she will be going back to work at Amazon in a few months. The Amazon warehouse reappears near the end of the film; its recurrence is presented as part of the rhythm of the nomad lifestyle, an indicator of the migratory cycles and seasonal hirings that shape the nomad’s cartographic course throughout the calendar year. In this way Amazon comes across like an essential component of America’s social infrastructure, a reliable source of employment that is ready to provide for those in need. Amazon comes to represent what passes for a social safety net in contemporary America.

This is where the film’s stance toward Fern’s nomad status becomes ambivalent, particularly in regard to its treatment of structural forces versus individual agency. The film offers some glancing engagements with capitalism early on: introductory text briefly establishes context for Fern’s sojourn by referencing how the closing of a factory had effectively eliminated the ad hoc town that grew up around it, and nomad figurehead Bob Wells is introduced giving a speech about the travails of worshipping the almighty dollar and a corporate culture that exploits laborers unto their death. Yet immediately following Wells’ speech we hear stories from assorted nomads present at the gathering describing the personal circumstances that led to their lives on the road. The common thread across these accounts is that the nomad or vandwelling lifestyle was a personal choice rather than a situation they felt forced into.

I recognize that the dialectic between structural factors and individual agency is complicated; that acknowledging the powerful effects of structural and systemic forces should not preclude consideration of personal autonomy and accountability; that even when our options and actions are determined or constrained by impersonal or impenetrable machinations, we may rationalize or narrativize our experiences through a lens of personal choice. Yet Nomadland frequently casts vandwelling as a personal predilection or act of empowerment in a way that not only elides meaningful engagement with class consciousness and precarious labor under neoliberal capitalism, but also underserves Fern’s characterization.

At several points in the film Fern rebuffs various characters’ offers of assistance. Family and friends offer her accommodation or point her toward charitable organizations. In each case Fern turns down the offer in a way that suggests resentment that her resolve and tenacity would be underestimated (she also pushes back against being labeled “homeless.”). I’ve never been unhoused, and my exploration of vandwelling has never progressed beyond conceptual contingency planning. However, in the past several years my life has been uncertain and austere. I have been profoundly moved by generous offers from friends and colleagues: to sleep on someone’s couch; to live in someone’s basement; or simply being welcomed into a friend’s social contact circle so that I wouldn’t have to endure pandemic lockdown in isolation. Regardless of my intention to accept any of these invitations, the offers deeply affected me because I knew the generosity was genuine, and I recognized how desperately I craved compassion. Fern’s responses to similar offers in the film lacks a sense of vulnerability or gratitude in a way that seems to bolster an implicit conservative critique of welfare in general.

There is a notable exception in the film’s treatment of vandwelling as lifestyle choice. Later in the film Fern attends a backyard cookout at her sister’s house. Her sister’s husband explicitly casts Fern’s nomadic existence as a personal choice and even privilege, saying that “not everyone can just chuck everything and hit the road.” Fern bristles as the assessment: “Is that what you think I’ve done?” The point is not elaborated on further, but Fern’s sister interjects, romanticizing Fern’s nomad existence as carrying on the proud tradition of America’s frontier pioneers.

The film ultimately seems overly long in light of its modest ambitions. In what was perhaps intended as a metareflexive approximation of the restless and perpetual movement of road life, the film drives past three suitable ending points and just keeps going. The first potential ending point comes just after Fern has left Dave’s family’s home, spurning his offer to live in the guest house. Fern stops her van along the side of the road, on what looks like a stretch of coastal highway in Oregon. She dances on a cliffside overlooking a stormy sea. I expected the film to conclude with this visualization of Fern’s commitment to unfettered freedom and life on the edge of a precipice. But the film keeps rolling and Fern keeps driving, back to the desert gathering of vandwellers. The assembled nomads sit around a campfire, tossing stones into the flames in remembrance of a recently departed comrade. Bob Wells casts a rock into the fire and intones: “See you down the road.” The camera pans up, tracing the rising red embers against the black night sky. This is a second ostensible ending but the film continues. 

Fern travels to Empire, the now deserted factory town from which she had earlier been displaced by the caprices of capitalism. Glimpses of a road sign with the town’s designation of “Empire” recalls Ozymandias’ ominous admonition. Instead of trunkless legs of stone sunk into the sand we see abandoned playgrounds and empty lots dusted with snow. Fern returns to her former house and walks into the backyard. The camera stands fixed to capture the backyard view from the house that Fern had described earlier in the film: the small yard is enclosed with a low chain link fence, but beyond it a vast and uninterrupted expanse stretches out to a horizon of mountains. This shot would offer another suitable conclusion for the film, and I think it would’ve been particularly poignant: the impressive landscape more than lives up to the images conjured up by Fern’s earlier description of her backyard view, and the vista compellingly conveys how the meaning of home or the specialness attributed to any particular place can often be attributed to the frame it offers us on the wider world.

The film gives us one more shot after the backyard view: Fern’s van back on the road, driving on the points unknown. I liked Nomadland more than I expected to, and it does offer a lot to appreciate. Ultimately the film never matched or recaptured the visceral fascination I experienced watching those early scenes at the Amazon warehouse. As the credits rolled I couldn’t help but think of Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy. That 2008 film has a lot of thematic similarities with Nomadland: the eponymous Wendy lives in her car with her dog Lucy; on her way to Alaska to seek work in a cannery the car breaks down in Oregon. The film presents the often harrowing and heartrending challenges that Wendy faces as she figures out how to continue her journey while being unable to afford the necessary vehicle repairs. In my estimation Wendy and Lucy offers a much more compelling dramatization of precarity through one woman’s navigation of life on the road. Reichardt’s film manages a nuanced characterization of Wendy that honors her spirit while avoiding an outright romanticization of her plight. It was also released right in the midst of the Great Recession, an era that Nomadland briefly name-checks but seems otherwise disconnected from; Nomadland is set in 2011 and 2012 (the timeline sometimes seems inconsistent) which makes it feel further distanced from contemporary issues and current events.
Ultimately I think Wendy and Lucy is a superior film to Nomadland that covers similar thematic (and geographic) territory. The comparison of the two films exacerbates my disappointment that Reichardt’s First Cow was completely overlooked at this year’s Oscars. That film received ample coverage a year ago because its March 2020 theatrical release made it one of the few Oscar hopefuls to be screened in theaters prior to the pandemic. It seems a shame that it didn’t garner a single nomination. I have to wonder how Nomadland’s fortunes would have fared without a renowned actor in the leading role.

Virtual Horizons & Futurology for 2021: Žižek on The Great Reset

With much ballyhoo and bellyaching about the absurdly miserable year of 2020, our collective calendars have finally turned to 2021. The year-end was marked by effusive declarations of relief and hope, even though these admissions of optimism were often tinged with cynical self-awareness reflecting the continuing complexities of our current moment (i.e. coronavirus vaccines are officially being rolled out, although infections are currently exploding in the U.S., and a new strain of the virus has been discovered; and it remains likely that Trump will leave office soon, despite ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election outcome, and nevermind what sort of policies we can reasonably accept from a Biden administration). 

In an essay published on New Year’s Eve by Jacobin, Slavoj Žižek considers the prospects of the immediate future in terms of a dichotomy between a socialist reset and a corporate “great reset”:

“When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.”

The phrase “great reset” has proliferated through think-pieces and professional publications to describe the ways in which the effects of the pandemic will shape social reality and rearrange policy priorities for the foreseeable future. It is also the title of a proposal by the World Economic Forum for how the global economic recovery should be directed. The proposal thus represents the dissemination of managerialist and technocratic visioning statements on the behalf of an aristocratic elite who assume the mantle for guiding civilization’s progress. Žižek addresses some of the most visible exemplars of this group:

“The human face of this ‘leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity’ are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our ‘commons,’ our shared social space in which we move and communicate.”

[...]

“We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.”

[...]

“So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.”

The distinction that Žižek makes between relying on science and delegating agency to techno-scientific forces is a crucial one. This past November I participated in a workshop organized by the Communicative Cities Research Network on the topic of urban communication in the pandemic era. My brief contribution to the proceedings comprised my musings on urban responses to the pandemic in light of prevailing trends in “smart city” policies. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed to reinforce ways of envisioning cities and urban space that characterizes “smart city” urban imaginaries. The propagation of smart city frameworks, particularly those promoted by corporate firms and technology vendors, has been characterized as a “techno-utopian policy mobility” and expression of a “technoscientific urbanism” in which infrastructural packages are sold to beleaguered municipalities as technical “solutions” for intractable urban problems.

One of the problems with these approaches is that by foregrounding technological formulations of urban life, these programs function to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. The smart city imaginary of transposable technical solutions as promoted by technology vendors has emerged from the conditions of entrepreneurial urbanism and neoliberal policy approaches. The technoscientific tenor that characterizes many smart city discourses is especially amenable to neoliberal applications as it addresses urban problems through a veneer of objectivity, neutrality, and ideological agnosticism. These technocratic approaches attempt to depoliticize what are in actuality politically charged development and governance programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need for science, technology, and engineering to solve urban problems and maintain quality of life. However, it is crucial to be wary of the ways in which a technocratic veneer obscures the ideological underpinnings and inherent value judgments that direct policy programs, as well as the ways in which technocratic imaginaries limit the scope of our potential urban futures.

Žižek concludes his article thusly:

“Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.”

In regards to urban futures and imaginaries, my response to Žižek’s distinction between the possible and impossible draws on a particular notion of virtuality understood not as absent or imaginary but as the potentiality for change, as the as-yet-unrealized. 

The emancipatory potential of virtuality in urban imaginaries is deeply implicated in the Lefebvrian right to the city. Lefebvre's call for a "right to the city" extended beyond access to housing and public space to advocate for spontaneity, sociability, and the utilization of urban environments based on use rather than exchange value. While the formulation of “the right to the city” is effectively an empty signifier, it signals the struggles of urban denizens to exert influence over the shaping of their built environment, to exercise autonomy in their communities, and to realize the use value of public space as a common good in the face of homogenizing capitalist development that aims to render and remake space only on the basis of exchange.

A common rejoinder to urban rhetoric invoking the “right to the city” is to ask for examples of cities or communities that have successfully realized the right. While the phrase has been adopted as a by various activist groups, and has appeared in certain government policies, there are no obvious examples of how the right has been actualized. Yet the virtuality of the right to the city is essential to its continued functioning as a rallying cry of radical urban politics.

The right to the city represents a virtual horizon of urban life and a radical vision for the city to come. Lefebvre’s call has been taken up by urbanists and activists as a rallying cry for expanding urban imaginaries beyond the actual to the possibilities offered by invention and processes of becoming. The right to the city therefore renders the realms of imagination and virtuality as key battlefields for urban struggles. Among the many crises facing cities today - ecological catastrophes, yawning social inequality, infrastructural breakdown, etc. - we might accordingly refer also to a crisis of imagination.

The Soul in Cyberpunk: Consciousness, Higher Selves, and the Tarot of 2077

“The tarot will teach you how to create a soul.”

- Jodorowsky, The Holy Mountain

Cyberpunk 2077 released last week, and like so many others I’ve been exploring the game (to the best of my ability considering the performance issues on my console hardware...but that’s currently being discussed ad nauseum across the Internet, and I am not interested in filing consumer reports). I’m still in the early stages of the narrative, and so far the game has delivered the aesthetic re-mixing of cyberpunk cultural influences in a neon-streaked metropolis run amok that I was expecting. But there have also been some more compelling surprises that get at a deeper level than the standard sci-fi trappings and veneer of Blade Runner pastiche.

Very early on in my time with the game I was frequently having to pause and investigate the various menu screens to get a handle on the mechanics and inventory systems (as well as to adjust the graphics settings in an attempt to optimize performance, but I already said that we’re not going to get into that). Among the inventory options I noticed a greyed-out/non-selectable tab labeled “Tarot.” This immediately piqued my interest. What did this reference to Tarot portend? Were there going to be collectible tarot cards scattered throughout the open world? Was there going to be some sort of Tarot minigame, similar to the Gwent card game that the developer included in their Witcher series? And, much more tantalizingly, what thematic resonance might the Tarot have for this futuristic cyberpunk story? Whether considered as a forerunner to traditional playing card decks, a tool set for divination and cartomancy, or simply an enduring example of medieval symbolism and Western archetypal images, the typical associations with Tarot seem incongruous with the cyberpunk universe populated by rocker boys and netrunners.

These musings were not idle for long. One of the first significant locations you encounter in the narrative is Misty’s Esoterica, a sort of spiritual emporium or New Age bookshop tucked away on a Night City sidestreet amongst various other storefronts. The shop’s proprietor, Misty herself, seems clearly modeled on the final appearance of Daryl Hannah’s replicant character Pris from Blade Runner (Misty goes lighter on the eye makeup). In initial dialogue interactions Misty will lament the diminishment of spiritual connection that she sees in the world. The storefront advertises chakra harmonization and the shop interior is filled with books, statuettes of vaguely Vedic deities, and one can only imagine the crystals and associated paraphernalia on hand; you can practically smell the incense burning. And Misty seems to always be handling a certain deck of cards.

At the end of the game’s first explicit tutorial section the trainer character evaluating my performance said something like “you have mastered the way of the fool.” I wondered whether this was another nod to the Tarot, and then shortly afterward I unlocked my first achievement in the game. The notification bore the name of the achievement: The Fool.  Not long after that the second story-related achievement unlocked: The Lovers. The game was clearly tying the major arcana to its main narrative, and what I had been considering a mystical Tarot subtext was quickly becoming just plain text.

Themes of higher consciousness and spirituality remained prevalent even in the game’s ephemera and environmental set dressing. Religious iconography is omnipresent on Night City’s streets in the form of billboards and pedestrian garb. A scrap of lore text that I encountered in the open world offered thoughts on bio-augmentation and cybernetic implants from the perspective of a Buddhist monk. And some mysterious entity keeps texting my character’s phone with obscure messages like: “the only opposition to capitalism is uninterrupted meditation.”

Needless to say, I have found this incorporation of Tarot specifically and spirituality more generally to be one of the most compelling aspects of the game so far. In what follows I will broadly explore how similar themes manifest in notable examples of cyberpunk fiction, as well as the role that these considerations play in the cyberpunk genre.

Questions of Consciousness in the Cyberpunk Genre

Let me clearly state at the outset that I am not proclaiming authoritative knowledge of the cyberpunk genre (such as the true defining elements of cyberpunk fiction, or whether such-and-such example really qualifies as cyberpunk under certain requirements), nor am I invested either way in efforts at gatekeeping genre boundaries. I am also not going to attempt an explanatory history of cyberpunk ideas or artworks. The examples I cite below are drawn from my personal experience with cyberpunk literature, and I believe they are sufficiently representative for my purposes.

While it is possible to quibble over the definitive features of the cyberpunk genre, such as whether cyberpunk fiction is necessarily rooted in a particular political ethos (i.e. is it distinctly anarchist or merely anti-authoritrian?, etc.), I will argue that one of the central themes in cyberpunk fiction is the question of what it means to be human in a world transformed by technology. Prominent exemplars of the cyberpunk perspective typically explore this question via two main routes: consideration of quality of life in the material world, and more philosophical investigations into the nature of consciousness. We might further categorize these two aspects as complementary poles on an axis of outer life and inner life.

1. The World

Cyberpunk fiction seems inseparable from urban sprawl. For example, much of the action of William Gibson’s Neuromancer takes place in the virtual matrix of the Net, yet equally integral to the setting is the Sprawl, a vast conurbation stretching the U.S. eastern seaboard from Boston to Atlanta. The external environment of sprawling metropolis and city-without-end is not simply a futurist projection of civilization’s inevitable course, but is intimately connected with the genre’s concern with exploring inner states of consciousness. A central insight of urban literature, from Baudelaire to Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, is that alienation is experienced most acutely (if not exclusively) in the midst of the crowd. Travis Bickle can only experience himself as “God’s lonely man” amongst the teeming masses of Manhattan. Being alone should not be mistaken for loneliness, and vice versa. So just as the frontier settings of Western literature tie the genre to primal themes of brutality and lawlessness in the project of “civilization”, the metropolitan settings for cyberpunk stories are linked to themes of alienation and dehumanization beneath the surface level aesthetic affordances.

Cyberpunk aesthetics remain closely associated with the 1980s era in which some of the most prominent genre exemplars emerged, and this is further represented by the particular perspectives of postmodern globalization that continue to predominate. The bustling market streets - whether in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles or Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City - portray the postmodern collapse of traditional metanarratives and distinct cultural cartographies via a polyglottal potpourri of floating signifiers (these two examples also share a strong orientalist aesthetic, a relic of 1980’s anxieties over Nipponese economic influence that the latter has merely inherited from the former [although 2077 updates this with Sino-corporate representation). Yet even the prominent appropriation of Japanese cultural markers in Western cyberpunk is ultimately window dressing for larger concerns over corporate capitalism. Corporations are the dominant powers in many cyberpunk stories - more so than nation states or any particular government agencies - and the symbols of their status dominate cyberpunk skylines through various corporate logos, advertising icons, and assorted sigils and glyphs of contemporary consumer culture. The denizens of this multicultural melting pot may lack a common language, but everyone understands the meaning of the golden arches.

The unremitting urbanization and caustic commodification that typifies cyberpunk worlds is often also correlated with destruction of the natural environment. This may be inferred or explicit. Natural degradation is often implied in the lack of vegetation or green space in the cityscape. Blade Runner establishes the scarcity of natural-born animal life, and even the artificial specimens are quite expensive. When Agent K takes a shower in 2049 an automated announcement states that this is “99.9% detoxified water”; this film also broadens the extent of ecological extinction to include living trees, making natural wood a rare commodity. Often this seems to function as an implicit critique of unchecked capitalism: food, air, and water having been irreparably poisoned as collateral damage of the profit motive. It furthers the question of what it means to be human in a world made uninhabitable to organic life. What place is there for biological organisms in an entirely artificial environment? It also further suggests the imperial conquest of the world by corporations. The domination of corporate entities is evident by their omnipresence in the built environment, their commodification and destruction of the natural environment, and even their near-monopolization of the semiotic landscape, the symbolic environment. In Cyberpunk 2077 Johnny Silverhand -- terrorist anti-hero (?) and rocker boy anarchist -- wages a crusade against what he terms “corporate colonization” of the lifeworld. In one optional dialogue interaction he roots his hatred of the corporations in their encroachment into the inner world, their colonization of the soul. This leads us to the second element of cyberpunk’s inquiry into the nature of humanity: the question of consciousness.

1. The Chariot

So far we’ve delimited two central avenues through which cyberpunk literature interrogates the essence of the human experience: elaboration on transformations of the outer/material environment, and investigation of inner experiences of consciousness. The body is the nexus between these two worlds. Thus the corollary to the outer-directed question “what does it mean to be human in an artificial environment?” is the inner-directed question “what does it mean to be human in an artificial body?” One of the well-worn topoi of cyberpunk fiction is the distinction between hardware and software. Applying this metaphor to the human organism, hardware corresponds to the physical or material body while software refers to the spookier, more metaphysical aspects of the human experience. Cyberpunk characters regularly experiment with altering their hardware through augmenting, implanting, and replacing their body parts. They also often leave their body altogether by inserting their consciousness into some sort of virtual construct, typically via a bio-technical interface provided by their augmented bodies.

In a sense, the science fiction trappings of cyberpunk fiction employ new metaphors to explore very old questions. Emerging technologies merely provide instigation for revisiting well-trod philosophical ground. For example, take the Ship of Theseus (Wikipedia link): this ancient thought experiment posits a hypothetical sailing ship that undergoes repairs and replacement of parts over time. Eventually every component, every single plank of wood, has been replaced: nothing on the ship is original. The philosophical query thus posed is: is this the same ship as it was in the beginning, or is it an entirely new ship as a result of the total transformation? A similar notion is explored in Ghost in the Shell (I refer here to the 1995 anime, I am not familiar with other entries in the franchise). The central metaphor alluded to in the title hits upon the aforementioned cyberpunk distinction between hardware and software (ghost = software/consciousness, shell = hardware/body). The protagonist, Major Motoko, seems ambivalent and even alienated from her augmented shell body. This itself raises questions about the continuity of consciousness and personal identity across physical transformation. A key issue at the film’s conclusion concerns transformations within consciousness itself, and the degree to which the self is changed through encounters with others.

Ghost in the Shell also features the distinct cyberpunk trope of uploading one’s consciousness into a virtual space, a sort of neural interlinking with the Internet. William Gibson popularized the term “cyberspace” in Neuromancer, and that novel also concerns one of the other great engagements with consciousness in cyberpunk fiction: Artificial Intelligence. Part of the core plot of Neuromancer involves A.I. that are seemingly sentient, having achieved self-awareness. These A.I. develop their own volition, hatching plans and experiencing desires that are beyond (and oftentimes in conflict with) those of their creators. A.I. thus introduces another wrinkle in the cyberpunk exploration of consciousness: what does it mean to be human when consciousness is no longer the privileged domain of human beings? How does our understanding of humanity change when artificial beings (i.e. our technological creations) claim sentience? This question is of course at the heart of Blade Runner, one of the most singularly influential entries in the cyberpunk canon.

1. The Hanged Man

What is Blade Runner about? Renegade replicants on the run in the dystopian urban landscape of Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future. Replicants are artificially created humanoids, a sort of biological A.I., with enhanced physical capabilities designed to make them more efficient laborers. Yet some replicants are not satisfied spending their entire lives as humanity’s disposable workforce. A group of replicants escapes their off-world colony and infiltrates L.A. in order to petition their creator -- the head of the Tyrell Corporation -- for more life. They are not seeking immortality, mind you: merely an extension on their programmed four year lifespan. Rick Deckard is an LAPD blade runner assigned to track down and kill the replicants (blade runner = assassin, i.e. someone who draws [runs] a knife [blade]; I’ve seen so much confusion about this simple point). As the narrative unfolds the lines between cop/killer and human/replicant blur to the point of indistinction. Deckard carries out his grim task with a palpable sense of ambivalence, except for in cases when his life is immediately threatened. His moral position toward the replicants is further complicated when he becomes romantically involved with Rachel, another Tyrell replicant. And the replicant leader Roy Batty commits cold-blooded murder, but also quotes poetry and expresses profound compassion for his companions. Even the replicants’ central quest is eminently understandable: who could blame them for wanting to escape servitude and seek to preserve their lives?

So Blade Runner engages the core cyberpunk question of “what does it mean to be human?” at multiple levels. The most obvious concerns the status of replicants as human beings. Are they human? Does their status as artificially created beings preclude them a priori from the full spectrum of the human experience? Essentially the question is: Do the replicants have a soul? (Blade Runner 2049, despite being a film I greatly enjoy, bluntly makes this point with a lack of nuance or poetic subtlety that typifies much of that production). Beyond posing a mere metaphysical thought experiment this question raises immediate ethical dilemmas for the fictional world of the film: if replicants are sentient beings like humans, then how can society justify condemning them to short lives spent in servitude in dangerous slave labor? Obviously this conundrum poses an ethical challenge for our real world, not just the fictional universe of the film: how can we justify condemning sentient beings to short lives spent in servitude in dangerous slave labor? The affluent societies of the so-called “developed” or “first” worlds are sustained by such exploitation. Indeed, human civilization has always been sustained by systems of slavery, savagery, and the instrumentalization of human beings as fuel for the fires of “progress.” (There are many other issues raised by the film that I will not be getting into for the purposes of this essay; one particularly pertinent thread that I will leave un-pulled for the time being concerns the notion of consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and not necessarily organic matter but even so-called “dead” matter; this idea could be understandably anxiety-inducing from a human perspective.)

This ethical dilemma begins to get at the deeper levels at which Blade Runner questions “what does it mean to be human?” Past a certain point, the question of the replicants’ sentience is irrelevant. By all outward appearances they are identical to human beings: they communicate, they form bonds, they pursue self-preservation, they express fears, they show compassion, they laugh, they love, etc. Any speculation about the presence or absence of a replicant soul is an empty exercise in theological theorization. But more than that, focusing on the issue of the replicants’ humanity misses the larger and much more profound question of humanity itself. The world of Blade Runner (in many ways an archetypal cyberpunk world) depicts the visual markers of environmental degradation and dystopic urbanization, yet the broader theme to be discerned is an attendant dehumanization. Deckard, like the replicants, is in his own way also instrumentalized as a tool by the larger systems that depend on exploitation, subjugation, and various structures of control. The question is not, “what does it mean to be human?” but rather, “what do we mean by human?” In other words, the important issue is not whether replicants have souls, but whether we have souls, and the broader implications of even positing the existence of a soul in the first place. To put it yet another way: the question is not “by what criteria do we demarcate human life” but rather “what is the value of human life?” What does it mean to be alive, and how do we attain to the higher notions of spiritual being that seem stubbornly recalcitrant in the face of banal drudgery and inevitable entropic encroachment in daily life? The debate over whether Deckard is an authentic human being or a re-programmed replicant with implanted memories represents a step in the right direction but ultimately misses the greater point. It doesn’t matter whether he is secretly a Tyrell creation or not: in what way does his daily existence as presented in the film display an essential humanity beyond what is demonstrated by the replicants? And more importantly, what does this ostensible acceptance of the “facts” of human existence reveal about the limits of our imagination when it comes to answering that abiding cyberpunk inquiry: what does it mean to be human?

1. The Lovers

I’ve already suggested some of the ways that Cyberpunk 2077 is engaging with the aforementioned genre tropes of cyberpunk fiction. And I’m still in the early stages of the central narrative, so it remains to be seen what new topoi may be incorporated into this particular story. But I am far enough along in the game to have a handle on one major element (this isn’t really a spoiler, by the way, as it has featured prominently in marketing materials and the overall promotional campaign): the incorporation of the Johnny Silverhand character as a virtual personality construct within the player character’s mind. This situation is presented as a case of dueling psyches: V (the player character) is said to be experiencing two distinct personalities in their mind simultaneously. In terms of gameplay this mostly manifests by the Johnny figure randomly materializing within V’s field of vision to comment on whatever is transpiring at the moment, and engaging in dialogue with V that none of the other characters are able to hear. This aspect of the narrative overlaps with many of the cyberpunk themes and topoi already discussed: biological augmentation, speculation on the nature of consciousness (to what extent can this virtual engram or simulacrum of Johnny Silverhand be considered to be an actual personality? Johnny’s physical body is long gone, so is this his soul? Is he a ghost?), and the blurry boundary lines between hardware and software. V is told that the implantation of the Silverhand construct is irreversible and terminal: slowly but surely the Silverhand personality will override V’s psyche, his own personality will be erased and Johnny will for all intents and purposes be resurrected inside V’s body.

OK, so let’s get back to the role of the Tarot in Cyberpunk 2077: just what might the game be trying to get at by prominently incorporating the major arcana into its science fiction action-adventure story. Is it simply a cosmetic contrivance, just one more example of the game’s profligate plundering of existing iconography and pop culture references to fashion its fictional world? I don’t think it is mere window dressing, or “cool for cool’s sake” like so much of what has come to define the popular imagination of cyberpunk as a visual aesthetic. I am being generous toward the developers here (a somewhat unconventional, almost contrarian position considering the current state of Cyberpunk 2077 discourse online). Rather, I think the incorporation of Tarot and other allusions to esoteric spirituality is part of a good faith effort to meaningfully engage with the philosophical undercurrents that have always undergirded the best examples of the cyberpunk genre.

We’ve already covered how the inclusion of the Johnny Silverhand virtual construct correlates to perennial cyberpunk ideas and themes, so how might it relate to this overarching consideration of consciousness and the notion of the soul? In a sense, the characters’ souls are precisely what is at stake: Johnny has been resurrected from the dead, and now his only hope for a new life rests in V’s body. V is understandably reluctant to surrender himself as a vehicle for the consciousness of a long-dead rocker boy. In another sense Johnny seems to fulfill the role of a spirit guide: he is incorporeal, and can only be seen or heard by V. He offers V guidance, even though he often seems to be pursuing his own agenda. The relationship between Johnny and V, a struggle played out internally within V’s mind, also offers a metaphor for personal struggle and self-overcoming. Johnny could represent a lower self, the more base aspects of the psyche or personality that must be brought into awareness and under conscious will. Alternatively, Johnny could be correlated with a Guardian Angel, or a notion of a higher self to be integrated rather than transcended. Ultimately Johnny’s intrusions into V’s waking consciousness may be as inscrutable or open to interpretation as the reimagined Tarot images that appear throughout Night City: just one more shadow on the path.

1. Judgment

I am curious to see how the spiritual themes and symbolism of Cyberpunk 2077 unfold as I progress in the game. Thus far I have appreciated how the designers have incorporated the esoteric as well as exoteric elements of cyberpunk fiction, the consideration of both outer and inner worlds. Irregardless of any technical limitations the game may be suffering at the moment, the overall design of Night City certainly captures the visual aesthetics and dystopic tone that one would expect from a cyberpunk environment. 

Each day our waking reality seems more resonant with the speculative realities dreamed up in cyberpunk fiction. This year we have witnessed the desertification of cityscapes in the wake of global pandemic, eerie scenes that evoked imaginaries of urban apocalypse so familiar from pop culture portrayals. In our isolation and atomization we interface ever more with virtual spaces. Corporate colonization of the lifeworld, of both physical and virtual spaces of daily living, has exceeded previous hypothetical horizons. Longstanding issues of economic disruption, labor precarity, and housing crises are likely to only be exacerbated by the fallout of coronavirus. In such times the central question posed by cyberpunk stories remains one of the most worthwhile to ask and answer: what does it mean to be human?

Watch_Dogs: Legion, part 1: Open Worlds

I love the Watch_Dogs franchise. Or rather, I want to love it. I certainly love the overall concept. The distinguishing features of the series incorporate some of my favorite elements from video games in general, as well as more particular niche interests. For one thing, the games  are set in contemporary urban open worlds that can be experienced in “sandbox” style, which is one of my personal favorite video game genres. The game worlds are also based on real world cities, which is another plus for me that I will talk more about later. The second defining feature of the  Watch_Dogs franchise for me is the thematic focus. The game's primary thematic concern, as indicated by the franchise name, is technologically-enabled surveillance in modern society. The narrative and gameplay address obvious concerns surrounding intrusive technology in terms of the erosion of privacy. A related major component, particularly in the first game, involves urban infrastructure, as well as how the implementation of emerging technology for city management produces augmented spatialities and governmentality. Now, as I said earlier I definitely love the concept, but how the games execute these concepts can be more difficult to ascertain. I have looked forward to the latest entry in the series, Watch_Dogs: Legion, for the past couple of years and have enjoyed playing it over the past month or so. Now that I've had some time to think about the game, I wanted to offer some thoughts before my scant video game time becomes occupied with Cyberpunk 2077 next week. I am going to organize my thoughts and comments around the two themes I have already identified that appeal to me most about these games: the urban open-world play environments, and the thematic engagement with the issues of surveillance capitalism and imaginaries of resistance.

Open Worlds: Exploring Virtual Spaces

My love of open world games, and in particular urban sandbox style games, began with Grand Theft Auto 3. Driving around the three islands of Liberty City sowing discord while listening to Chatterbox FM was unlike any video game I had ever experienced.  Nearly 20 years later, open world exploration remains my favorite video game pastime. Self-directed exploration of a virtual environment provides me with a surefire circuit for relaxation, recreation, and escapism. I have thus far been focusing on the particular sub-genre of urban open world games, although I certainly have great appreciation for other varieties as well. For example, my experiences exploring the worlds of Oblivion and Skyrim remain pinnacles of fantasy role-playing. 

Now, even when limiting our purview to the subgenre of modern city environments, we can distinguish urban open worlds in video games between those that are based on actually existing cities, and those that are wholly fictional or imagined. I enjoy both types for their unique qualities and appreciate them in different ways. For instance, an entirely fictional virtual city offers the potential to explore an environment that is totally unknown and surprising, largely free from the baggage of preconception and expectation. Furthermore, a virtual city created from scratch is not necessarily bound by the constraints of real world geography and can therefore endeavor to prioritize a game space optimized for play and creative mobility. An example of this category might be the city of Steelport from the Saints Row series, although clearly even this fictional city bears evidence of association and allusion to real-world urban centers. Another example that comes to mind is the setting of the Crackdown games. In this case it is an extremely generic near-future urban environment; I don't even recall the name of the fictional city from the first two games... Port Town? Star Union? Megalopolis? However, the game world is designed to accommodate what for me is the key feature of the Crackdown series: bounding from rooftop to rooftop collecting power orbs, increasing agility stats so that you may reach increasingly higher peaks. Indeed, I was always somewhat taken aback to be walking or driving along a street in Crackdown-town and notice all of this superfluous level of street level detail that the designers had included, such as signage for shops and other businesses with punny names as if this was a Rockstar game. 

Speaking of Rockstar, the Grand Theft Auto series provides a perfect point of interconnection between the categories of fictional virtual cities and those based on real world locations. The aforementioned Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto 3, for example, is a fictional city: the name suggests a link to New York by evoking one of that city's greatest landmarks, yet the design of the game world itself does not incorporate much in the way of specific iconography or virtual re-creations of specific places. Vice City, the subsequent game in the series, declares a setting in Miami of the 1980s beginning with its titular allusion, yet that is only the beginning. This game furthers the funhouse-mirror-view-of-America-as-seen-by-Brits-through-the-lens-of-American-popular-culture that began in Grand Theft Auto 3. Yet in addition to drawing from gangster films and other pop culture of that era the game also incorporates limited recreations of iconic Miami locations. San Andreas represented an even further evolution, not only further in time to the 1990s where the game draws heavily from pop culture and media depictions of Los Angeles from that era, but also to the scale of the environment and the degree of verisimilitude attempted in its recreation of real world cities. Grand Theft Auto V extends this trajectory to an exceedingly ambitious simulacrum of Southern California that is simultaneously a parody of contemporary America, a condensed impressionistic depiction of Greater Los Angeles, as well as strikingly accurate recreations of actually existing locations. Of course, the metropolis of GTA V is Los Santos rather than Los Angeles, because while the game dips its toes in nearly simulation level depictions of LA, it's other foot remains firmly planted in the satirical and cartoonish Grand Theft Auto alternate universe. 

Further along the spectrum of realistic video game depictions of actual cities we find more grounded portrayal of real world sites. Some of the best examples come from the Assassin's Creed series, where some of the great cities of the world are recreated based on previous historical eras. Now, one of the reasons that I love accurate representations of real world cities is that they provide a novel way of interfacing, in a mediated and imaginative way, with an existing location. This offers rich benefits whether you have personal experience of the place, or if you have never actually visited. When you are familiar with the place depicted you can test the designed world of the video game against your personal knowledge and memory. You can, for instance, go seeking for a particular location or landmark to see if it has been included in the game world, and if it has been included you can compare the accuracy with your own experience or recollection. However, a detailed re-creation of a real city can be a wonderful means of learning more about that place. This is why one of my all-time favorite video game cities is the re-creation of Manhattan in True Crime New York City. The play space of True Crime NYC is a GPS-accurate block-by-block re-creation of the Manhattan grid. Because the game was released in 2002 it obviously does not offer the level of detail or graphical fidelity that we are spoiled by in more recent video games. However, True Crime New York City does offer the distinct pleasure of being able to race along every Avenue on the island of Manhattan while crossing every real-world street and encountering none of the real-world traffic. One of my favorite things to do in True Crime NYC was to think of a prominent building or other landmark, look up the cross streets on a map, then go to that intersection in the game to see if the landmark was included. Most of the time I found that it was. I remember playing the game after returning from a brief visit to Manhattan where I had stayed in Midtown for an academic conference. In the game I was able to re-create the route of my daily walk from the hotel to the conference venue, finding satisfying details such as the inclusion of a church right on the street corner where it had been during my stay. I also discovered landmarks that had been previously unknown to me, and learned things about New York City history from playing the game. For instance, one time while racing down 3rd Avenue I was stopped in my tracks by the appearance of a massive building with an attached tower. I brought my virtual car to a screeching halt in the intersection to face this distinct structure. The building stood in such contrast to the more generic streetscapes that fill in the spaces between more customized locations in True Crime NYC that I felt compelled to look up the cross streets online to discover whether this was indeed a re-creation of a landmark that I was not familiar with. It turned out that this structure was the mosque and minaret of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. Yet another time I was speeding along through lower Manhattan. As you are driving in True Crime NYC, the names of streets that you are crossing are displayed at the top of the HUD. I saw in quick succession the street names “Duane” and “Reade” flash by at the top of my screen. I went back to confirm what I had seen, and upon further investigation learned that the Duane Reade convenience stores which are so ubiquitous in Manhattan are indeed named for the location of the company's original warehouse which was situated on Broadway between the streets of Duane and Reade. Moments like these are a large part of why I continue to feel such fondness for the New York City presented in the True Crime series even after so many subsequent games have presented more dynamic representations of the Big Apple. 

Watch_Dogs’ London: Virtual Horizons of Urban Life

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion straddles the boundary line between realistic representation and fanciful imagination by virtue of its near-future setting. The city is unmistakable, rendered with a plethora of recognizable landmarks and significant amount of granular detail. However, the London-as-we-know-it is also augmented by certain science fiction trappings: landmarks such as Big Ben and Tower Bridge are emblazoned with massive holographic projections indicating a general threat level for terroristic activity along with the logo of the private military company overseeing local security. The other major deviation concerns traffic through the city, both at street level and in the skies above. The road traffic consists of an assortment of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, along with iconic London vehicles like black cabs and double-decker busses. These more familiar conveyances are joined also by fleets of autonomous taxis or self-driving ride-share vehicles (the in-game lore establishes that all personal vehicles are legally mandated to have autonomous driving capability). One gameplay change that this introduces is the ability to commandeer vehicles on the move without “stealing” the car and inconveniencing a driver. The autonomous taxi vehicles in fact have no separate driver compartment or steering wheel, and are instead designed like a commuter train passenger carriage with two benches of seats facing each other (they are incredibly similar to the autonomous taxis featured in the execrable third season of Westworld).

Self-driving cars represent one element of the near-future technological projections featured in the game. One of the other major additions (and more significant in terms of gameplay impact) is the ubiquitous drone presence in the city. Above the ground traffic buzzes a constant stream of autonomous drone vehicles, flying quadro-copters that largely follow the terrestrial street routes. Drone devices are mostly confined to a number of vehicle categories: delivery drone quad-copters ferrying packages; slow-moving cargo drones hauling crates and construction materials; CToS surveillance drones hovering around to monitor goings-ons in the city; news drones filming footage for GBB reportage (the in-game alter ego of the BBC); and assorted anti-pursuit and riot control militarized drones. The constant stream of drone traffic adds a distinctly cyberpunk element to the city (while also resonating with contemporary culture and directions of technological evolution), but it also introduces one of the most substantial gameplay innovations into the Watch_Dogs formula. One of the fundamental gameplay elements in Watch_Dogs has always been “hijacking” security cameras, i.e. “hacking” into them with your mobile device to gain a new perspective on a particular location, scout enemy positions, and leapfrog from camera to camera to solve puzzles (as long as you have line-of-sight you can progress along a chain of CCTV installations). I’ve always appreciated this aspect of the Watch_Dogs gameplay loop in part because it is (usually) not reliant on combat encounters and offers novel approaches to platforming segments. In Legion, if you are struggling to get line-of-sight on a particular CCTV position or need to gain access to a harder to reach area, you are often able to hijack a passing drone, grabbing it out of the sky and piloting toward your objective. As you gain proficiency with this practice it affords some creative platforming and puzzle solving, as well as emergent approaches to clearing enemy encampments.

The London of Watch_Dogs: Legion is often quite beautiful; it is also often buggy, glitchy, and bizarre looking, owing to a host of persistent graphical issues. Yet at its best, when all the environmental elements are working in concert, you can get some dynamite scenes of Regent Street illuminated by a late afternoon sun, or a magisterial Westminster across the Thames (the Thames, on the other hand, is real rubbish: the river traffic is a ridiculous procession of pop-ins and low-texture polygonal watercraft). Aside from the near-future aesthetic embellishments the Legion designers largely leaned in to a realistic re-creation of London. The game’s map and designated districts bear close cartographic correspondence to its corporeal counterpart. I last visited London in 2016, and I have successfully recreated certain walking routes from that trip in Watch_Dogs’ London (as is my custom in these sorts of games...it may seem silly, but it’s how I prefer to play). Crossing the Golden Jubilee Bridges from Charing Cross to Southbank, or walking from the base of BT Tower to BBC Broadcasting House, provide pleasing pretensions of previous perambulations. While we’re on the subject of pedestrianism: One of the other street-level innovations that I think is worth mentioning is the addition of building access doors that open onto the sidewalk. These are one-way portals (you cannot use them to access a building interior, and indeed the only interior space that can be glimpsed through one of these open doorways is a black void), but they allow NPC figures (perhaps we should designate these PPCs...potentially playable characters?) to step out onto the street. It’s a neat feature that adds to the sense of a busy, bustling streetscape and adds to the immersive illusion of navigating a densely populated city sidewalk.

(A brief sidenote regarding transportation options: the Underground system is well represented throughout the map in the form of tube stations that function as fast-travel transit nodes. There are no functioning, ride-able metro trains, which is understandable [the Tube is wonderful but not really known for the excellent views it offers] while also a bit of a disappointment [I’m a sucker for functioning public transit in games...I rode every inch of rail track in GTA IV and V, and thoroughly appreciated views of the Chicago skyline while riding the L train in the original Watch_Dogs]. Also, while acknowledging the technical limitations and risks of feature creep or bloat, bicycles would have been a wonderful option for engaging with the rich cyclogeography of London  [maybe even for limited, dedicated courier activities?])

OK, so London is (mostly) beautifully rendered, but how can you engage with the game space? What opportunities are provided for exploring and interfacing with the environment through gameplay? Watch_Dogs: Legion is a bit of a letdown in this area, as the presence of environmental activities seems to have been scaled back in comparison with the earlier games in the series. This will surely be a trivial concern for some players, but I really enjoyed how side activities were embedded into the game world of the original Watch_Dogs’ simulacra of Chicago. You could encounter a shell game on a busy street corner; play chess in a coffee shop or have a drinking contest  in a bar. There were various augmented reality activities such as timed platforming challenges or fantastical virtual reality battle modes. My favorite side activities in the original Watch_Dogs were the QR code puzzles: portions of QR codes were painted along the sides of buildings throughout the city, so that viewing the completed image required a combination of exploration, platforming, and CCTV hijacking in order to discover a vantage point from which the code could be viewed from the right perspective. 

As I’ve already mentioned, the availability of side activities in Legion seems greatly scaled back. There are pubs where you can drink beer (triggering temporary audio-visual distortions) and play a game of darts (which I have found to be far too tedious and aggravating to be worth the effort). Most pubs also feature slot machines, but unlike the first Watch_Dogs where slot machines functioned as a playable gambling minigame, in Legion slot machines are hackable (meaning you can siphon a small amount of money with the push of a button) but are not playable. There are Parcel Fox delivery missions, which are OK: assorted A-to-B courier assignments with varying prerequisites for success, such as a countdown timer for parcel delivery, limits to the amount of “damage” a package may receive en route to the destination, and degrees of “wanted level” that will activate police pursuit of your contraband cargo. These activities are decent and provide a fun way to explore alleyways and other alternative routes around the city, particularly as you try to avoid automated checkpoint stations that will alert the police force to your location.

The other substantial environmental exploration activity is represented by “paste-up locations”: particular spots dotted across the city where you can apply a large-scale wheatpaste poster. These are typically located above street level (sometimes quite high up on a rooftop) and therefore require some figuring out how to reach the location.  I found this to be a fun diversion for a while, but the novelty wears off rather quickly. They are nowhere near as fun or satisfying as the QR codes from the first Watch_Dogs. The available designs or “stencils” that you can apply are limited to the point of feeling monotonous once you’ve used them all, I was extremely frustrated at the lack of a “checkmark” icon or some other signifier on the game map to indicate when a paste-up location had already been completed.

That leaves collectibles. There are hundreds of collectibles scattered across the game world. Seriously, there are just so many. I’m familiar with the general criticism of Ubisoft’s approach to open world design, that it offers exhaustive and repetitive collecting, but I don’t play many video games so I don’t have much firsthand experience with this phenomenon. I get it now. Look, I played all three Crackdown games solely for the joy of bouncing around the cityscape hunting agility orbs. This element of the Crackdown experience provides a wonderful “mindless” gameplay loop where you can just put on some music or a podcast and bounce around for dopamine hits and scratching the completionist itch. In Watch_Dogs: Legion this translates to commandeering a cargo drone that you can (slowly) ride around the city picking up collectibles one by one. It also lends itself to a similar experience to the above mentioned Crackdown approach, but after a while it is agonizingly tedious. I also appreciate having loads of content in a game, but Legion takes this to the point of absurdity. The amount of collectibles across the map seem self-replicating and endlessly proliferating. I’ve nearly maxed out all the available tech upgrades: how can there possibly be so many tech point icons on my map? Ultimately the most rewarding outcome of this gameplay experience are the aerial vistas it affords and the new areas of the city that you can discover while hunting for easter eggs (often leading me to research particularly interesting locations to discern the degree to which they were inventions of the designers or faithful re-creations of London locales).

There are some further notable examples of environmental storytelling that contribute to the overall atmosphere and accord with my personal experiences of London. For example, visible homelessness is pervasive in this virtual version of London. This is not an innovation in urban open world design (the Grand Theft Auto series has had unhoused NPCs since at least GTA 3...oftentimes these have been deployed as jokey “bum” characters or as exemplars of urban eccentrics [GTA IV had some notable examples of the latter], although GTA V adds a sharper political edge to these depictions with its frequent allusions to economic recession and the pointedly politicized Dignity Village encampment), but these depictions feel like an integral component of Legion’s world rather than isolated dioramas or window dressing. This is accompanied by explicit activist installations and political slogans (some have more teeth than others). The game also directly addresses Brexit and broader issues of immigration and refugee populations. An arena in the game’s Lambeth borough (I think the closest real world analogue is London Stadium, but I’m not sure...incidentally, I have particularly enjoyed the inclusion of baseball stadia in the previous series entries...the first Watch_Dogs begins in a baseball stadium during a night game [although it doesn’t resemble either of Chicago’s real world major league ballparks], and Watch_Dogs 2 features a fictional San Francisco ball club with its own stadium based on Oracle Park) has been re-purposed as a deportation detention facility called the Eurpoean Processing Center. 

These more politicized elements of Legion’s London lead us to a consideration of how the game engages with the ideological dimensions evoked by its thematic trappings. In the second part of this commentary I will focus on this aspect of the game, in particular how Watch_Dogs: Legion gamifies class solidarity and commodifies culture jamming.

Mind-controlled exoskeleton opens World Cup; AI will crash the stock market; Cortana's personality

• The 2014 World Cup kicked off yesterday with a futuristic twist on the opening ceremonies. A paraplegic kicked a soccer ball using an exoskeleton designed by the Walk Again Project:

The exoskeleton -- a system comprising a helmet implanted with a microchip that sticks out from the underside; a T-shirt loaded with sensors; metal leg braces; and a battery worn in a backpack -- is set in motion when the user envisions himself making the kick. The chip translates those electronic commands to a digital language that powers the skeleton, which then moves accordingly. The T-shirt vibrates to enhance the user's sensation of movement (and eliminate the need to look at his feet to see if he's stepping forward).

• Unfortunately, as io9 reports, the moment was not well-covered by TV networks:

Talk about dropping the ball. Earlier today, Juliano Pinto — a 29 year-old paraplegic — successfully kicked off the 2014 FIFA World Cup by using a mind-controlled exoskeleton. But sadly, most TV networks failed to show it.

After months of hype, the official broadcast of the opening ceremonies showed only a fraction of it, while some TV networks missed the event altogether. Commentators criticized the organizers for casting aside the moment in favor of performing acts. 

• Thomas Frey at the Futurist Speaker blog forecasts the coming AI crash wars:

The invasion of high-frequency trading machines is now forcing capitalism far away from anything either Adam Smith or the founders of the NYSE could possibly find virtuous. 

We’re not about to let robots compete in the Olympics, driverless cars race in the Indianapolis 500, or automated machines play sports like football, basketball, or baseball. So why is it we allow them to play a role in the most valuable contest of all, the world wide stock exchange? 

With crude forms of AI now entering the quant manipulator’s toolbox, we are now teetering dangerously close to a total collapse of the stock market, one that will leave many corporations and individuals financially destitute.

• Microsoft has announced their version of apple's Siri virtual assistant. coming to Windows smartphones: Named Cortana, after the AI character from the Halo video game series, she is coming to Windows smartphones, and as Brad Molen at engadget reports, developers programmed her with a distinct personality:

Confident, caring, competent, loyal; helpful, but not bossy: These are just some of the words Susan Hendrich, the project manager in charge of overseeing Cortana's personality, used to describe the program's most significant character traits. "She's eager to learn and can be downright funny, peppering her answers with banter or a comeback," Hendrich said. "She seeks familiarity, but her job is to be a personal assistant." With that kind of list, it sure sounds like Hendrich's describing a human. Which is precisely what she and her team set out to do during Cortana's development; create an AI with human-like qualities.

Microsoft's decision to infuse Cortana with a personality stemmed from one end goal: user attachment. "We did some research and found that people are more likely to interact with [AI] when it feels more human," said Hendrich. To illustrate that desired human-machine dynamic, Hendrich pointed to her grandmother's experience with a Roomba vacuum: "She gave a name and a personality to an inanimate object, and it brought her joy." That sense of familiarity is exactly what Microsoft wants Window Phone users to feel when interacting with Cortana on their own devices.

Graeber on labor and leisure; the perils of hipster economics; and the educational value of MOOCs

• Following last month's post of David Graeber's views on "bullshit jobs," this Salon interview with Graeber discusses the failed forecast of universal leisure time:

Right after my original bullshit jobs piece came out, I used to think that if I wanted, I could start a whole career in job counseling – because so many people were writing to me saying “I realize my job is pointless, but how can I support a family doing something that’s actually worthwhile?” A lot of people who worked the information desk at Zuccotti Park, and other occupations, told me the same thing: young Wall Street types would come up to them and say “I mean, I know you’re right, we’re not doing the world any good doing what we’re doing. But I don’t know how to live on less than a six figure income. I’d have to learn everything over. Could you teach me?”

But I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ‘60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse. I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better. I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.

• In an article for Al Jazeera, Sarah Kendzior surveys the politics of gentrification and the perils of hipster economics:

Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it "cleaned up the neighbourhood". This is often code for a literal white-washing. The problems that existed in the neighbourhood - poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services - did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.

That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.

In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout - and accompanying racial privilege - to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighbourhood is "cleaned up" through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in "urban life" - the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit - while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.

Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.

• At Mute, Dominic Pettman writes about the rise of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) in higher education, and how commodification affects the value of learning:

In the pedagogic trenches, MOOCs are considered a symptom of wider economic patterns which effectively vacuum resources up into the financial stratosphere, leaving those doing the actual work with many more responsibilities, and far less compensation. Basic questions about the sustainability of this model remain unanswered, but it is clear that there is little room for enfranchised, full-time, fully-compensated faculty. Instead, we find an army of adjuncts servicing thousands of students; a situation which brings to mind scenes from Metropolis rather than Dead Poets Society.

[...]

For companies pushing MOOCs, education is no different from entertainment: it is simply a question of delivering ‘content.’ But learning to think exclusively via modem is like learning to dance by watching YouTube videos. You may get a sense of it, but no-one is there to point out mistakes, deepen your understanding, contextualise the gestures, shake up your default perspective, and facilitate the process. The role of the professor or instructor is not simply the shepherd for the transmission of information from point A to point B, but the co-forging of new types of knowledge, and critically testing these for various versions of soundness and feasibility. Wisdom may be eternal, but knowledge – both practical and theoretical – evolves over time, and especially exponentially in the last century, with all its accelerated technologies. Knowledge is always mediated, so we must consciously take the tools of mediation into account. Hence the need for a sensitive and responsive guide: someone students can bounce new notions off, rather than simply absorb information from. Without this element, distance learning all too often becomes distanced learning. Just as a class taken remotely usually leads to a sea of remote students.

[...]

Marshall McLuhan was half-right when he insisted that the electronic age is ushering in a post-literate society. But no matter how we like to talk of new audio-visual forms of literacy, there is still the ‘typographic man’ pulling the strings, encouraging us to express ourselves alphabetically. Indeed, the electronic and the literate are not mutually exclusive, much as people like to pit them against each other.

• Pettman also quotes Ian Bogost's comments on distance learning:

The more we buy into the efficiency argument, the more we cede ground to the technolibertarians who believe that a fusion of business and technology will solve all ills. But then again, I think that's what the proponents of MOOCs want anyway. The issue isn't online education per se, it's the logics and rationales that come along with certain implementations of it.

TV still sucks, we should still complain about hipsters, your job shouldn't exist

• In an article for Salon, Alexander Zaitchik assails the current "golden age" of television, and the resultant binge watching, spoiler fearing, TV-obsessed (pop) culture we're living in:

None of this could be happening at a worse time. According to the latest S.O.S. from climate science, we have maybe 15 years to enact a radical civilizational shift before game over. This may be generous, it may be alarmist; no one knows. What is certain is that pulling off a civilizational Houdini trick will require not just switching energy tracks, but somehow confronting the “endless growth” paradigm of the Industrial Revolution that continues to be shared by everyone from Charles Koch to Paul Krugman. We face very long odds in just getting our heads fully around our situation, let alone organizing around it. But it will be impossible if we no longer even understand the dangers of chuckling along to Kia commercials while flipping between Maher, “Merlin” and “Girls.”

• Zaitchik's article name checks pertinent critics and theorists including Adorno's "cultural industry," Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and even Jerry Mander's "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television." Where this article was discussed on sites like Reddit or Metafilter commenters seemed angry at Zaitchik, overly defensive as if they felt under attack for watching "Hannibal" and "Game of Thrones". I thoroughly enjoyed Zaitchik's piece, even if it doesn't present a fully developed argument, because the perspective he presents strongly resonates with many of the philosophical foundations that have shaped my own views on media, particularly the media ecology tradition. A large part of Zaitchik's argument is that even if television content is the highest quality it has ever been, the form of television and its effects are the same as ever:

Staring at images on a little screen — that are edited in ways that weaken the brain’s capacity for sustained and critical thought, that encourage passivity and continued viewing, that are controlled by a handful of publicly traded corporations, that have baked into them lots of extremely slick and manipulating advertising — is not the most productive or pleasurable way to spend your time, whether you’re interested in serious social change, or just want to have a calm, clear and rewarding relationship with the real world around you.

But wait, you say, you’re not just being a killjoy and a bore, you’re living in the past. Television in 2014 is not the same as television in 1984, or 1994. That’s true. Chomsky’s “propaganda model,” set out during cable’s late dawn in “Manufacturing Consent,” is due for an update. The rise of on-demand viewing and token progressive programming has complicated the picture. But only by a little. The old arguments were about structure, advertising, structure, ownership, and structure, more than they were about programming content, or what time of the day you watched it. Less has changed than remains the same. By all means, let’s revisit the old arguments. That is, if everyone isn’t busy binge-watching “House of Cards.”

It’s been something to watch, this televisionification of the left. Open a window on social media during prime time, and you’ll find young journalists talking about TV under Twitter avatars of themselves in MSNBC makeup. Fifteen years ago, these people might have attended media reform congresses discussing how corporate TV pacifies and controls people, and how those facts flow from the nature of the medium. Today, they’re more likely to status-update themselves on their favorite corporate cable channel, as if this were something to brag about.

• In a blog post, Nicholas Kerkhoff lays out why we should still complain about hipsters:

The entertainment demands of the 21st Century seem (apparently) bottomless. We’ve outsourced much of our serotonin production to the corporations which control music, sports, television, games, movies, and books. And they’ve grown increasingly desperate to produce the most universally acceptable, exportable, franchisable, exciting, boring, money-making pablum possible. Of course that is not new either… yet it continues to worsen.

Various alternative cultures have been attempting to fight it for decades. The beats, hippies, punks, and grunge kids all tried… and eventually lost. But the hipsters have avoided it altogether by never producing anything of substance except a lifestyle based upon fetishizing obscurity and cultivating tasteful disdain. A noncommital and safe appreciation of ironic art and dead artists. No ideals, no demands, no struggle.

Rarely has the modern alternative to pop culture been so self-conscious and crippled. The mainstream has repeatedly beaten down and destroyed a half-century’s worth of attempts to keep art on a worthwhile and genuine path, but now it seems the final scion of those indie movements has adopted the: ‘if you can’t beat‘em, join‘em’ compromise of creative death.

• In an interview for PBS, London School of Economics professor David Graeber poses the question: should your job exist?

How could you have dignity in labor if you secretly believe your job shouldn’t exist? But, of course, you’re not going to tell your boss that. So I thought, you know, there must be enormous moral and spiritual damage done to our society. And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs? They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at teachers. They don’t get angry at school administrators, who actually make more money. Most of the problems people blame on teachers, and I think on some level, that’s resentment: all these people with meaningless jobs are saying, but, you guys get to teach kids, you get to make cars; that’s real work. We don’t get to do real work; you want benefits, too? That’s not reasonable.

• The interview references Graeber's article "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs":

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

Žižek on post-U.S. order, Harvey on Piketty, Rushkoff's new job and doc

• Writing in The Guardian, Slavoj Žižek  considers the capitalist global order in a world without superpowers:

The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests.

In politics, age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. Our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. Perhaps the very survival of humanity depends on resolving this tension.

• Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century has received widespread media attention, and enjoyed so much popular success that at times Amazon has been sold out of copies. It seems natural then that David Harvey, reigning champion of Marx's Capital in the 21st century would comment on the work, which he has now done on his web site:

The book has often been presented as a twenty-first century substitute for Karl Marx’s nineteenth century work of the same title. Piketty actually denies this was his intention, which is just as well since his is not a book about capital at all. It does not tell us why the crash of 2008 occurred and why it is taking so long for so many people to get out from under the dual burdens of prolonged unemployment and millions of houses lost to foreclosure. It does not help us understand why growth is currently so sluggish in the US as opposed to China and why Europe is locked down in a politics of austerity and an economy of stagnation. What Piketty does show statistically (and we should be indebted to him and his colleagues for this) is that capital has tended throughout its history to produce ever-greater levels of inequality. This is, for many of us, hardly news. It was, moreover, exactly Marx’s theoretical conclusion in Volume One of his version of Capital. Piketty fails to note this, which is not surprising since he has since claimed, in the face of accusations in the right wing press that he is a Marxist in disguise, not to have read Marx’s Capital.

[...]

There is, however, a central difficulty with Piketty’s argument. It rests on a mistaken definition of capital. Capital is a process not a thing. It is a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money often, but not exclusively through the exploitation of labor power.

• At the 2012 Media Ecology conference in Manhattan I heard Douglas Rushkoff explain that he had stopped teaching classes at NYU because the department was not letting him teach a sufficient number of hours, all while using his likeness on program brochures. Well, Rushkoff has just been appointed to his first full-time academic post. Media Bistro reported CUNY's announcement :

Beginning this fall at CUNY’s Queens College, students can work their way towards an MA in Media Studies. Set to mold the curriculum is an expert responsible for terms such as “viral media” and “social currency.”

• Lastly, this news made me realize that I completely missed Rushkoff's new Frontline special that premiered in February: Generation Like, which is available on the Frontline web site.

Video mélange: David Harvey, Antonio Negri, and Saints Row IV

• David Harvey has a new book out, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. In this video Harvey speaks about the contradictions of capitalism (approx. 19 mins):

• I recently stumbled across this nearly hour-long documentary on Antonio Negri, titled The Revolt that Never Ends:

• Lastly, this video from Errant Signal considers Saints Row IV as celebration and example of kitsch (and makes me wish he'd dedicate a video to GTA V):

Technology, hyperemployment, and femininity

• Ian Bogost devoted a recent Atlantic op-ed to the subject of hyperemployment, his term for new economic realities introduced by technology and the proliferation of smartphones and online services:

If you’re like many people, you’ve started using your smartphone as an alarm clock. Now it’s the first thing you see and hear in the morning. And touch, before your spouse or your crusty eyes. Then the ritual begins. Overnight, twenty or forty new emails: spam, solicitations, invitations or requests from those whose days pass during your nights, mailing list reminders, bill pay notices. A quick triage, only to be undone while you shower and breakfast.

[...]

Often, we cast these new obligations either as compulsions (the addictive, possibly dangerous draw of online life) or as necessities (the importance of digital contact and an “online brand” in the information economy). But what if we’re mistaken, and both tendencies are really just symptoms of hyperemployment?

[...]

Hyperemployment offers a subtly different way to characterize all the tiny effort we contribute to Facebook and Instagram and the like. It’s not just that we’ve been duped into contributing free value to technology companies (although that’s also true), but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies. And even calling them “unpaid” is slightly unfair, since we do get something back from these services, even if they often take more than they give. Rather than just being exploited or duped, we’ve been hyperemployed. We do tiny bits of work for Google, for Tumblr, for Twitter, all day and every day.

• Bogost's essay is reminiscent of Dallas Smythe's notion of the audience commodity; near the end of his article Bogost warns that leisure time may disappear leaving only work time, while Smythe declared thirty years ago that all non-sleeping time should be considered time spent laboring.
• Karen Gregory at the Digital Labor Working Group blog responded to Bogost's article in a post about digital labor, feminized labor, and use of the term "hyperemployment":

Bogost writes, “hyperemployment offers a subtly different way to characterize all the tiny effort we contribute to Facebook and Instagram and the like. It’s not just that we’ve been duped into contributing free value to technology companies (although that’s also true), but that we’ve tacitly agreed to work unpaid jobs for all these companies.” This tacit agreement, however, extends beyond social media and e-mail and is really a form of housework and maintenance for our daily lives. In that regard, I wonder if calling the cozy arrangement between digital technologies, data economies, and invisible labor “employment” runs the danger of side-stepping the deeper (gendered and racialized) antagonisms inherent in the distinction between what is considered labor and what is considered “care.”

• At the Cyborgology blog Robin James continued the dialogue by further relating hyperemployment to femininity:

For more than thirty years, Marxist feminists have been arguing that women’s unpaid labor–housework, reproduction, etc.–is a prerequisite for capitalist wage labor, surplus value extraction, and profit-making. Capital can extract surplus value from waged labor only because the wage laborer is supported by (extracts surplus value from) unwaged labor, mainly in the form of the wife. Gregory’s argument is that what Bogost is pointing to isn’t a new phenomenon so much as a reconfiguration of an ongoing practice: we are all our own wives and moms, so to speak. Indeed, as Bogost’s example suggests, our smartphones wake us up, not our moms, just as emails accomplish a lot of the relational work (scheduling, reminding, checking in, etc.) conventionally performed by women.

• Finally, Katy Waldman summed-up the conversation so far and pondered whether smartphones will kill femininty:

So does technology relieve the burden on women to perform certain traditionally feminine tasks? Sure! If your husband scans the news on his iPad, you no longer need to collect the morning paper. If your kids have SpongeBob SquarePants for company, you are free to leave them bathed in television glare while you check Twitter/wallow in 21st-century guilt. On the other hand, assigning a task to a computer doesn’t necessarily make it go away. Wageless work may now be more evenly distributed among men and women, but someone still has to send the reminder emails and program the vacuum bot. We haven’t escaped the reality of unpaid labor; we’ve simply spread it around.

Inside Korea's gaming culture, virtual worlds and economic modeling, Hollywood's Summer of Doom continued, and more

• I've long been fascinated by the gaming culture in South Korea, and Tom Massey has written a great feature piece for Eurogamer titled Seoul Caliber: Inside Korea's Gaming Culture. From this westerner's perspective, having never visited Korea, the article reads almost more like cyberpunk fiction than games journalism:

Not quite as ubiquitous, but still extremely common, are PC Bangs: LAN gaming hangouts where 1000 Won nets you an hour of multiplayer catharsis. In Gangnam's Maxzone, overhead fans rotate at Apocalypse Now speed, slicing cigarette smoke as it snakes through the blades. Korea's own NCSoft, whose European base is but a stone's throw from the Eurogamer offices, is currently going strong with its latest MMO, Blade & Soul.

"It's relaxing," says Min-Su, sipping a Milkis purchased from the wall-mounted vending machine. "And dangerous," he adds. "It's easy to lose track of time playing these games, especially when you have so much invested in them. I'm always thinking about achieving the next level or taking on a quick quest to try to obtain a weapon, and the next thing I know I've been here for half the day."

• As a cyberpunk/hyperreality aside, the city of Hong Kong has put up a blue-sky backdrop for when the real sky is too smoggy for tourist photos.

• In yet another cyberpunk dystopian tangent, I recently came across Chris Rogers' site Fragments of a Hologram Rose: Re-seeing Blade Runner, with an assortment of content and analysis relating to the film.
• And one final cyberpunk diversion: this video is the first part of a lecture by University of Michigan professor Eric Rabkin covering cyberpunk, postmodernism, and beyond:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kue_gd8DneU&w=420&h=315]

• Writing for The New Economy, Aaran Franda examines how the virtual economies seen in games like EVE Online provide valuable perspectives on real world economic activity:

Creation and simulation in virtual worlds appear to offer the best domain to test the new ideas required to tackle the very real problems of depravation, inequality, unemployment, and poverty that exist in national economies. On that note the need to see our socioeconomic institutions for the games that they really are seems even more poignant.

In the words of Vili Lehdonvirta, a leading scholar in virtual goods and currencies, the suffering we see today is “not some consequence of natural or physical law” it instead “is a result of the way we play these games.”

• Jon Evans at Tech Crunch looks at jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality, and you:

The global economy seems to be bifurcating into a rich/tech track and a poor/non-tech track, not least because new technology will increasingly destroy/replace old non-tech jobs. (Yes, global. Foxconn is already replacing Chinese employees with one million robots.) So far so fairly non-controversial.

The big thorny question is this: is technology destroying jobs faster than it creates them?

[...]

We live in an era of rapid exponential growth in technological capabilities. (Which may finally be slowing down, true, but that’s an issue for decades hence.) If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is qualitative, not just quantitative. It’s like comparing a leisurely walk to relativistic speeds.

• This recent episode of Radiolab focused on talking to machines:

We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.

• This video shows a demo of using Google Glass for interactive augmented reality:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCwaaactyY&w=420&h=315]

• A recent Guardian article by Juliette Garside warns that our digital infrastructure is exceeding the limits of human control:

"These outages are absolutely going to continue," said Neil MacDonald, a fellow at technology research firm Gartner. "There has been an explosion in data across all types of enterprises. The complexity of the systems created to support big data is beyond the understanding of a single person and they also fail in ways that are beyond the comprehension of a single person."

From high volume securities trading to the explosion in social media and the online consumption of entertainment, the amount of data being carried globally over the private networks, such as stock exchanges, and the public internet is placing unprecedented strain on websites and on the networks that connect them.

• In an "anti-videogame manifesto," Keith Burgun argues for intrinsic rewards and against grinding in videogames:

What I want is systems that have intrinsic rewards; that are disciplines similar to drawing or playing a musical instrument. I want systems which are their own reward.

What videogames almost always give me instead are labor that I must perform for an extrinsic reward. I want to convince you that not only is this not what I want, this isn’t really what anyone wants.

• This video from PBS Digital Studios' Off Book looks at the rise of competetive gaming & e-sports:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpO76SkpaWQ&w=560&h=315]

• Will Luton at GamesIndustry International writes about the celebrification of game developers:

This 'celebrification' is enlivening making games and giving players role models, drawing more people in to development, especially indie and auteured games. This shift is proving more prosperous than any Skillset-accredited course or government pot could ever hope for. We are making men sitting in pants at their laptops for 12 hours a day as glamorous as it could be.

Creating luminaries will lead to all the benefits that more people in games can bring: a bigger and brighter community, plus new and fresh talent making exciting games. However, celebritydom demands storms, turmoil and gossip.

• The ongoing survey of Hollywood's Summer of Doom continues with Isaac Chotiner's New Republic article, Hollywood is in trouble and we're all going to pay:

Spielberg's theory is essentially that a studio will eventually go under after it releases five or six bombs in a row. The reason: budgets have become so gigantic. And, indeed, this summer has been full of movies with giant budgets and modest grosses, all of which has elicited hand-wringing about financial losses, the lack of a quality product (another post-apocalyptic thriller? more superheroes?), and a possible connection between the two. There has been some hope that Hollywood's troubles will lead to a rethinking of how movies get made, and which movies get greenlit by studio executives. But a close look at this summer's grosses suggest a more worrisome possibility: that the studios will become more conservative and even less creative.

• Finally, video of Slavoj Žižek and Paul A. Taylor discussing the difficulty of conveying philosophical ideas in today's media:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4mDNMSntlA&w=420&h=315]