Caffeine

I had a coffee this evening and now I'm jacked up and can't go to bed. It triggered a manic state. I watched a political documentary and my head was filled with Utopian ideas and then I played guitar for a bit and felt like the world was good and this is our time. Maybe it is. I also know I'm going to wake up tired and depressed. The dehumanizing morning commute will pit me against faceless steel beasts all vying for some arbitrary winning position, everyone racing to their despised jobs. Well ok I'm projecting a bit but still.

Caffeine does that to me. But I fall for it every time. I do feel pretty good right now. My head is racing with memories and I long to connect. Though I'll probably contract again at least until the work week is over. Every weekend I have fleeting glimpses of beaches and sunshine. I'm partially free for a bit and its over. The memories flash past like strobes. Their fragmentation and incompleteness and near-fulfillment make my heart ache.

Caffeine is a drug. It made me high. It is permitted because it allows us to work better or something like that.

Everyone goes by the coffee maker every morning at work and gets high. And then works like manic hamsters to fulfill some meaningless task. Well not everyone. But probably a majority. Then they go home and plug up their gaping holes with TV. By god consumerism is madness!

Maybe we know that everything is coming apart in slow motion. But still want to live as if it isn't. That's ok. Human nature and all that. Hopefully we don't get to a point where everything dead is in suspended animation, ready to liquefy past a certain point. I think Poe has a story about this.

I'm betting we manage to evolve before the liquefaction. But it's just hard right now. That's ok too I guess. Hopefully sleep soon.

PS: What a dreadful post! But I'm really in a better mood than my writing conveys right now.

PSS: For example - what this political documentary articulated was all the political mistakes we've made. How the powerful have tried maniacally to control every aspect of existence, and how the powerless have tried violence and tyranny to break people free of Capitalist ideology, and how it has all miserably failed. And really all that's left to do is relate to each other on a human level. All of the solutions tried thus far have relied on endlessly contrived political philosophy and alienating violence...all acts of radical separation that have made things worse. The answer is simple and it lies in how we relate to ourselves: openly with trust and compassion. Of course, the practical matters to work out are another thing entirely. Though I feel we can do this. I feel strongly about this, and translated those strong feelings to guitar. So usually when I play guitar, it is somewhat playful but also mechanical to continue improving articulation. Practice routine and all that. But every once in a while, when infused with the emotional sentiments that come with the celebration of life, the music takes on life itself. This I think is what leads to good music.

A Quick Note on Something I Dunno

Now this idea is muddled and vague, as it was formed in that no-man's-land between consciousness and dream state as I passed in and out of sleep.

But say the ideas you traffic in and the emotional way in which you interface with these ideas can translate to your interactions in the material world.

Let's say you hold a certain position, a dogmatic religious position, such as a specific religious doctrine. Well we can imagine the shape of your thinking self as that of a square: it is sharply delineated and it takes on a very specific shape that is only compatible with other similar ideas. And so if you come across another individual idea or even an opposing idea, those rigid delineations clash with one another until either the opposing side yields or you both become more rounded.

I conceptualize it like this because square-like shapes in the material world behave this way when they are placed together. And I don't know much about audio engineering, but it seems to me like the signals that are designated as "square" produce tones that actually sound like they have an edge.

And so it follows if you allow for more nuance and flexibility in your intellectual positions, you will end up a more rounded, organic shape that doesn't clash as harshly with the other ideas to be found in the world.

Of course, squares are perfectly okay in the world of objects, but then when it comes to people it is probably a better idea to not be grinding each other into dust all the time.

Eh, okay. Something to build off of later.

See This is What I'm Talking About

My ambition for working with video games took a long, slow death. It began to accelerate when I tried to write about them professionally, which was a time that happened to coincide with the fact that the largest game publishers had consolidated their power and were engaging in more and more abusive, monopolistic, anti-consumer practices. That and their monopoly power was suffocating the creative powers within the culture, filtering out the truly innovative ideas (or only co-opting them when they proved their worth in the market within a smaller project) and pumping out derivative sequel after sequel. 

The anger was there. You'd think pieces on these developments would be highly resonant and popular and attract traffic for the media site, but I was told we had to be "sensitive" for the advertisers and the companies we had to contact for the scoops. Such is the corrupting logic of money: when the larger attractors that money flows in and out of are corrupt entities, the surrounding activity (which must be powered by monetary infusion) must take on the qualities of the entities that provide the resources. This is exactly what has happened to corporate media. It is not that these media outlets generate propagandistic news consciously (well maybe some of it is) but that in order for the news to be refined to a state in which the corporate media organ can accept it (advertisers are ok with it and it doesn't anger the entities the news is covering) the news media itself has to be reduced down to a specific, stylized message pleasing to power. Which happens to be a useless source of information to anyone without power. Which is a lot of people now. 

But then the question arises: What about the developers? For example, what if I fought my way to an influential writing/directing position where I had the power to produce video games with these messages? Of course, some do get through. But the low probability of reaching such a point...is it worth trying? Forget undertaking an ambitious, creative project in some large risk-averse corporate studio. Given the nature of centralized, organized video game development, all of the means of production have been consolidated and owned within a single central entity, causing the costs to skyrocket (along with the increased demands in technology and expertise due to the increasing complexity of video games of course). And these risk-averse businessmen won't have anything to do with something that isn't guaranteed to turn massive profits. Of course   there's the growing indie games sector (which is wonderful) which was probably partially produced because of the climate I've described, but then there is always the chance that those projects themselves are co-opted. You always hear about studio owners selling their studios to larger companies, which end up appropriating the development team to simply keep pumping out the material that was so successful, ignoring any further creative innovation. Or the franchise itself is bought and now some corporation earns all the rights to it. 

And what are the chances that one can make it in such an environment? We of course need some sort of income, and many of these endeavors require great financial sacrifice. And given the chances of actually making it out there, who wants to play the lottery with their life? Employment is tenuous and the US state provides the most pathetic economic safety net in the developed world. Good luck finishing that game if you get sick and don't have health care. But now I'm starting to ramble on past my original aim of this post, which inspired the screed in the first place. What about the developers? The workers so to speak? 

We can sit around all day complaining about the abusiveness and greed and coarse taste of the large companies, but what is happening to the workers beyond their iron curtains? At least above and beyond what we can infer? Well there's a good article on Gamespot (that really surprised me) that discusses this. And also to my surprise, the comments are encouraging (sites like these are notoriously full of petty, deluded, spoiled child-like people that are repulsed by earnest talks like this). 

This article is why I'm writing in the first place. Of course the article doesn't go far enough with a solution. But then why should it? Unions are no longer a serious answer to these problems. Our economy - across every sector of production - is dominated by corporate entities whose very nature is to accumulate profits and grow and conquer. We are left with a multitude of growing private imperial powers. And to gain control of one of these powers, one has to virtually be a sociopath. These power structures inevitably corrupt the individuals that seek to operate them. 

We are left with people like Activision CEO Bobby Kotick telling investors: "I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression." 

Now I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the language of a Machiavellian dictator. This is an autocratic power telling investors (people who know nothing of and care nothing about video games other than their profit-generating attributes) not to worry because their employees are scared and motivated out of fear to produce quickly games that will make a lot of money. Translate this economic language into the political and you have a serious problem, a dangerous attitude that is actually quite pervasive among the powerful in this country and really the rest of the Capitalist world at this point. This is the language of the tyrant. And this attitude is everywhere.  

Every work of culture and material product is reduced to an artifact to be produced that must be produced in such a way to generate great wealth for a small group of disinterested people. To hell with the workers. To hell with the fans. As long as we get ours. And unions! As if unions can counteract this vast economic power. A power that when left to itself, further consolidates and displaces those opposed to it. It has always been an uphill battle and it always will be, so long as we think like this. We are not a society of individuals whose dangerous selfish desires must be counteracted with opposing forces. We are not in eternal competition. We are not to fight each other over every aspect of our culture production. No, that is because we are all vastly interconnected far beyond anything we can understand logically at this point. We are essentially one. We've seen this theme come up again and again and when will we learn? Why treat ourselves this way? 

Well, at this point I have to throw up my hands. It is easy to grow angry anew over every fresh insult, but really this system is so fundamentally corrupted, not even indignation will put it back together. This is why thinkers around the country are more and more interested in not a revolution or dramatic reform, but the slow deliberate construction of a parallel, alternate society.