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[justjasonhere]

Course Post 8: When the Cloud Bursts

https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18124282/killer7-remaster-steam-pc

When I read through The Private Eye in time for our final week before our presentations, its themes of information, privacy, and identity brought a number of other thematically similar works to my mind, including Metal Gear Solid 2 which I wrote about in an earlier post, and another video game which I’d recently played through, Killer7, developed by Goichi Suda, otherwise known by his alias, Suda51.

Similar to The Private Eye, the world of Killer7, released in 2005, is that of one in which the Internet no longer exists, though rather than being a result of it collapsing due to sheer information overload, the Internet in this game was deliberately dismantled -- alongside aerial travel -- by the United Nations, ostensibly to put an end to terrorism worldwide, but in reality in order to control and manipulate the flow of information more easily. Despite the similar backdrops and general settings however, Killer7 has a much different approach to its political themes from The Private Eye that I believe makes for an interesting analysis in its own right as well.

Whereas it can be said that The Private Eye focuses on the effects of a world stripped of the Internet and its information on a wider scale and the larger sociopolitical effects of it, Killer7 gives a more precise examination by giving more piercing, specific examples of how the more things change, the more things stay the same, with many characters and elements drawing clear parallels to the state of the world, not only at the time of the game’s release but also resonating with today more than ever.

The game draws a bit of a grim yet uncannily accurate portrait of the state of the world. Its most pointed sociopolitical commentary is in a fictional school in the state of Washington that part of the plot is based around called Coburn Elementary, which is revealed to have been ordered to be created in 1780 to indoctrinate its students with the “virtues” of capitalism, and by the modern day, the school’s function had been slightly shifted so that the purpose of the indoctrination would be used to manipulate and steer the results of presidential elections as the upper echelons of the world saw fit.

Killer7 also provides commentary on the state of America culturally. Much reference is made to its abusive and exploitative immigration system, as exemplified in one of the game’s antagonists, a man named Curtis Blackburn who used his position as an agent of the Self-Defense Department to cover up his endeavors in organ trafficking and child abduction, which he was able to carry out due to his connections to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and pardoned by the American government so long as he carried out assassinations on their behalf. Perhaps the most pointed critique of American culture that resonates most strongly today is the following chapter’s antagonists, a group of fictional comic book superheroes called “the Handsome Men” who seem to become real and carrying high-profile assassinations that are flawlessly predicted by the Handsome Men’s comic series, written by author Trevor Pearlharbor, who believed himself to be controlling them, until it is revealed that the Handsome Men were in actuality acting at the behest of the American military, and were never truly under Pearlharbor’s control, even killing him in the end too. When compared to the real world’s culture of comic book figures, it can be easy to draw parallels with how comic book heroes never truly belong to the individual who created them, but rather the corporation as a whole, and even co-opted on occasion by the US Department of Defense to subliminally insert military propaganda in films such as those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In other words, in a media, capitalistic landscape like this, not even seemingly esteemed creators have any degree of control over their own intellectual properties.

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 7: Everything Changes and Stays the Same

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/09/should-cars-drive-like-humans-or-robots-tesla-forces-the-question.html

Our discussions over Speculative Everything in class got me thinking about the way in which technology evolves, and as it becomes more commercialized and domestic, the way in which society -- socially and in its architecture -- evolves to accommodate it as well. What particularly stuck out to me was the quote about inventing the car, a revolution in the field of transportation, and the inadvertent creation of the traffic jam as a result.

I always tend to come back to him, but there’s just always something going on with Elon Musk and Tesla that it’s not hard to when we talk about rhetoric and the technological future. In particular, the aforementioned quote about cars and the problems that arise with them brought to mind the innovations that his Tesla brand cars promise. In particular, I remembered a few months ago when drivers had trouble getting into their own cars at the height of the snowstorms over Winter; since Tesla cars tend to have flush mounted door handles, you can’t just pull a door open. Rather, you push on these handles and slide them open, but this only makes the doors more susceptible to being essentially frozen shut. While flush point door handles do have some good purpose for making the car more aerodynamic, it only makes pre-existing problems more apparent without doing anything notable to fix them. If you can’t even open the car in the event of extreme ice as easily as a normal car, then how is it really better in the long run? In other words, this practice can be described as forcefully moving into the future without fully fixing the past.

The link above however focuses on another problem; the highly advertised autopilot feature, notorious for being rather faulty in practice, as there have been many reports and incidents in which the autopilot computer misreads the road and ends up swerving off the road and hitting pedestrians. Considering his similar approach and attitude regarding space colonization and population trends, it really shouldn’t come as any surprise that Musk has little regard for the lives of others, no doubt viewing them as stepping stones if it means he can spearhead the future of humanity, whether it’s ready to move into the future or not.

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 6: You Are Not Immune to Propaganda

https://kotaku.com/metal-gear-solid-2-retrospective-be-careful-what-you-w-1842714771

And now for something completely different.

Though not directly related to our recent readings in The Acoustic City, the idea it put forward of being surrounded by sounds and noises, highlighting the differences between the two, and how there are so few places in the world completely devoid of noise these days, got me also thinking about how we have the same problem with an overabundance of information in the modern age as well.

In 2001, video game designer Hideo Kojima released Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which received a polarizing reception upon release for its off-putting, avant-garde approach, but in the following decades, it has come to be regarded as a leading example of video games as art, and perhaps one of the first “postmodern” video games. And with its warnings and fears of society becoming polluted with an influx of junk information, post-truth politics, and the dangers of the unregulated Information Age, many have come to regard it as prophetic in its predictions.

There’s a lot to get into in regards to how Metal Gear Solid 2 subverts the expectations of its own series, but even by itself, divorced from its connections to a wider franchise, the way in which Kojima’s real life anxieties have all come to life almost exactly as he predicted in the game is nothing short of uncanny. We live in an era in which information pertaining to any topic imaginable is readily available with just a few taps of our devices, but one has to wonder if humanity was ever really meant to process so much information in our lifetimes, let alone how much data we probably process in just a month.

Just as you can find some self-aware, mocking posts on Twitter saying as much, how much time do we, as individuals or as a society, spend so fixated on the personal lives of celebrities, their scandals, and their products? And even when we do learn something more important to the wider world like politics, we can only ever realize that we are individually powerless and impotent, unable to do anything to stop the terrible things outside, and so, we retreat into our own private pods where we choose to curate and customize our flow of information, not just in which truths we receive, but also the truths we choose to believe. We’ve come to subject ourselves to a state of “self-censorship” in which we can decide, in our own minds, what is true and what is not, and shift the facts in our favor. In other words, post-truth politics. It seems Kojima was warning us about the likes of Trumpian politics and fake news 15 years too early; isn’t it an uncanny coincidence that he uses the President of the United States as a primary instigator of fake news and misinformation?

But even with this discouraging rhetoric, where does that leave us? Though Kojima imparts upon us the anxieties that would come with an overload of information, he also ends his story with a hopeful, if not uncertain note; maybe there is no such thing as absolute truth, but rather the truth that we can only see with our own eyes. We can be told anything, but it is us who chooses what to believe, what to do with the information we are fed, and forge our own path going forward. Whether or not anyone can realize this and use this power for good remains to be seen, but that’s the thing with kids these days. You just never know what they’re capable of.

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 5: Live, Breathe, and Consume

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/16/22937210/disney-residential-communities-storyliving-cotino-planned-town

A few weeks ago, Disney unveiled its new project, called Storyliving, which is essentially intended to be a residential community in which people can actually live in, themed entirely around Disney’s many intellectual properties so that its residents can, quite literally, breathe, eat, and consume Disney forever without end. So far, there is only one community in development right now, based in California’s Coachella Valley, with 1,900 housing units planned.

Bearing in mind the sheer power that the Disney Corporation owns today, the mere notion of it wanting to build a community themed around its own IPs can only be seen as unnerving, reminiscent of something one could only see in a satirical dystopian story in which corporation has explicitly become more powerful than perhaps it was ever meant to. When such a company is able to open up a place meant exclusively for the purpose of making sure its inhabitants are able to perpetually consume nothing but its own products, one can only feel the need to take a step back and wonder if this was the best-conceived idea to begin with.

Historically, this is not the first time Disney has attempted a project like this, referring to the “Epcot” project that was intended to be a “city of the future” spearheaded by Walt Disney himself. In a way, perhaps the fact that the idea of a corporation themed living community has been in the cards since the 1990s makes the idea of Storyliving all the more dystopian and unnerving. The mere notion that, given the opportunity, corporations can and will lure you into a brand name paradise where you can endlessly consume its products and make sure to milk your wallet as much as it can has become a very real possibility, and it begs one to wonder, how far will corporations go, with no limits placed upon them, to make the populace into single-minded consumers? Especially when one considers Disney, as it stands, already dominates the public sphere with the brands under its belt between Marvel and Star Wars alone, just how much power over the populace is too much power?

This is, after all, a telltale sign that we have already delved into the forewarned dystopian future that every cyberpunk and sci-fi story warns of; a place in which corporations have a greater hold over people than their governments, and is that any way to live? To be a walking cash cow whose sole objective in life is to forfeit all wealth and possessions to the corporation, in return for corporation-approved and produced products?

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 4: Monkey See, Monkey Do

https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/55461/1/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-chips-trails-killing-monkeys

I’m sure at this point, I must sound like a broken record harping on the same general broad subjects every post, but there’s just always something new in regards to the antics of the ultra wealthy, and how it speaks to the future, that are too significant to ignore.

For all the reactionary concerns and crackpot theories that the COVID-19 vaccines will plant tracking chips into our bodies, those same people entertaining those theories are no doubt simultaneously all too excited for Elon Musk to openly put “Neuralink” brain chips into them. Musk has been using monkeys as test subjects for his Neuralink project for the past few years, intent on “allowing people to communicate over the Internet via a chip in their brain,” but following an investigation from an animal rights group that has just come to light, it turns out that putting chips in animals’ -- let alone people’s -- brains is dangerous, as a shocking fifteen monkeys have had to be euthanized due to unintended side effects of the chip, ranging from skin infections to self-harming behaviors.

The fact that this Neuralink device is intended to be planted into people is appalling, but whereas one could say it is to be expected in a depressing way that a rich elite would try something like this, perhaps the more astounding thing is the idea that Musk has cultivated such a cult of brand and personality that people can read these kinds of news and still walk away saying regurgitated phrases like “sacrifice is necessary for progress,” and still wait eagerly with bated breath for Musk to chip them, regardless of any potential, terrible consequences.

In terms of the bigger picture, this kind of subject all brings to mind, is this truly what the future has in store for us? People often speak of a paranoia of being tracked and monitored everywhere we go, but whether they realize it or not, we already are being monitored everywhere we go. There is no need for the government to plant tracking devices in us through vaccines, not when you have a smartphone tracking your every move already, and yet, when it is a personality that the masses look up to openly stating he will chip them, with promises of a more advanced future, they are all too happy to surrender their bodies and freedoms.

In other words, has humanity already reached a point where we are all too happy to willingly, without pretense of otherwise, let ourselves be chipped and tracked if it is a brand or personality we look up to? And from that lens, is there any line someone like Elon Musk will not cross if his cult of personality continues to encourage him across every step, no matter how many who or what he has to hurt to do so?

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 3: Capitalism Classes

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvndja/amazon-paid-for-a-high-school-course-heres-what-they-teach

This recent article from Vice I discovered a few days ago speaks of how, in 2019, Amazon paid to have a specialized course be taught in a California school with the intention of preparing students for warehouse work. Supposedly, part of the curriculum included units on labor unions, business ethics, mergers & acquisitions, and management, among many other units. In other words, it was described as a very “pro-business” class. Another unit of the class also focused on the Amazon company itself, as well as its history and vision, as well as its intent to motivate “students to participate in this exciting and growing field of e-commerce.”

To say nothing about how transparent this move is with what its true intentions must be, I can only feel a degree of disdain for this. The specific wording of “preparing students for warehouse work” that I copied is, in particular, worrisome. A class like this smells like propaganda to me personally, especially with its unit on the Amazon company itself sounding to me like they intend on presenting a sanitized version of themselves in order to be more appealing to young people, and simultaneously egging the youths of our generation to aspire to be no greater than warehouse workers for the capitalist overlords. If nothing else, as a warehouse worker myself, it should hardly need to be said that warehouse work should not be the height of one’s personal aspirations, as it can be very demanding depending on your assigned position, from demanding a great deal of physicality (one that cannot be maintained the older one gets) and a high stress threshold to keep up with the never-ending incoming and outgoing shipments of mail every single day.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that all the same, a move like this is merely the next step in late-stage capitalism. In an age where many people feel like there are no job prospects, with STEM majors facing intense competition with each other while every other major is left to fend off disdainful sneers from others, corporations have begun to swoop in and reap what society has done to the youth, hoping to capitalize on the latest line of worker bees who have been conditioned to not aspire to anything greater. Perhaps it is especially fitting to describe this as the next step in propaganda, bearing in mind how an Amazon paid class must surely do everything in its power to make itself as appealing and presentable as possible in an attempt to counter the growing surge of social and economic unrest, which has been especially exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that started a mere year after the course had been rolled into the school.

So, it all leaves one to wonder, is this a move that we can expect to be seen in other schools as well? In an era where regulations of the system hold no power over hush money and lobbying, can we truly say that it is unrealistic to imagine a world where schools will prioritize classes focusing on business and commerce over classes over history, humanities, and sciences?

After all, we’ve already reached the point where school boards and politicians don’t even want us learning about the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement.

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 2: Wow! Cool Robot!

https://www.cbr.com/gundam-creator-space-colonization-bad/

Not to sound like a broken record after my last post, and my assigned go-to reading, The Privileged Have Entered their Escape Pods, but they’ve given me a lot to think about, and it all made me remember what other influential figures have said regarding the idea of space colonization.

Undoubtedly, Yoshiyuki Tomino is most remembered as being the mastermind behind the worldwide phenomenon, the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, one of the most popular anime of all time. Though most corners of the Gundam franchise are characterized by its harrowing messages about the horrors of war, Gundam has also understatedly opened a dialogue about what will become of humanity when we abandon our home planet and begin colonizing outer space itself.

Though the Gundam franchise has many different timelines across different TV series, many of them follow the same basic backdrop of a far future where humanity has left Earth and begun living in space colonies. However, it is in the first Gundam timeline, written and developed by Tomino himself, that is most explicit about the politics and implications of a humanity that has abandoned its native soil for outer space, as Tomino -- speaking through his characters -- communicates that in this far future, much of the Earth’s natural resources have been used up and exploited to near death, causing the wealthy and privileged to flee into outer space to continue living prosperously in their colonies while the poor continue to suffer on Earth. Tomino’s foresight on that front is undeniable, especially when one considers he had written these dialogues no later than 1985, as best exemplified in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, the second ever Gundam series.

So, with that very specific line of thinking Tomino has established, it should come as no surprise then that in the modern age of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos vying to become the pioneer of space colonization, Tomino himself has stepped up to express his skepticism of such sentiments, criticizing the idea of space colonization not only in a practical sense (how space colonies would be sustainable in the absence of natural oxygen and water, for instance), but also commenting on how such extreme attempts to reach space have in fact played a large part in polluting Earth as well, akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy; for all the wealthy spend on reaching space, it is precisely because of their efforts that space will be the next haven for the chosen humanity.

Indeed, there is a perverse irony in how Bezos’s design drafts for his space colonies bear a striking resemblance to the fictitious colonies designed by Tomino for his Gundam franchise as well, as pictured below. If there is only one person in the world who can say life imitates art, perhaps it is the man who created Gundam indeed.

[justjasonhere]

Course Post 1: To Eat or Feed the Rich

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/15/elon-musk-surprised-if-were-not-landing-on-mars-within-five-years.html

After reading “The Privileged Have Entered their Escape Pods,” by Douglas Rushkoff, it got me wondering once again, as I had in the past before, about the disconnect between the common, ordinary person, and the one-percenters, the privileged elites. Though we occupy space on the same planet, it is clear that both parties live in completely different worlds, or rather, the elites wish to live somewhere else, a place where the concerns of those beneath them would cease to bother them.

I am loath to be pessimistic about the state of the world, but it is undeniable that, in many ways, Earth is a deteriorating place. Things like climate change threaten to affect the entire world, to say nothing of human ills such as economic and social disparity, in which people continue to be persecuted for who they are or die off because of their inability to even feed themselves. The privileged elites, most of whom were -- in all brutal honesty -- born into their wealth, could easily solve such ills by putting their money into alleviating such woes, for it would only cost such an insignificant amount of money for billionaires to effectively end things like homelessness, crippling debt born of medical care or education, and so on, but they simply refuse to. Instead, they look at the decaying world before them and -- just as a child unable to cope with their problems -- decide to devise ways to escape the world they were born into, in hopes of colonizing another world where no such baggage exists yet.

For all Elon Musk boasts that we will be colonizing Mars within the next five years as linked above as an example of what Rushkoff wrote about, to say nothing of whether or not such a statement is realistic, it speaks to the elites’ character that instead of working to fix the world we currently live within, they would rather look to other worlds to escape from their problems instead, leaving the rest of the 99% below -- nearly all of us combined still less wealthy than someone like Musk -- to fix matters by ourselves, if we are even able to.

To further connect this to Rushkoff’s writing, of course, this urge to look away from one’s own problems, to put it broadly, is not exclusive to the elites as well, but also to those dependent on them by circumstance, or willingly complicit in their cult of personality and brand, taking Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire for example, who has only grown more powerful in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and has also begun planning his own venture into space.

It is here then that we must ask ourselves; if we begin adopting the habits of the elites and also begin to seek escape from our problems, what does that hold for the future? Just as society becomes more dependent on the services and technology employed by Amazon and Tesla in order to fund egomaniacal trips to space, goods that make it more and more viable to live in our own homes without stepping outside like our own personal pods, we must ask ourselves one thing.

If we allow things to continue as they are, do we even have much of a future to look forward to?