The Servitude Economy

"Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power."

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science, #13

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"[France's rich] employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring."

 

Thomas Jefferson - letter to James Madison, 1785

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"don’t worry. I’ve been a junior yacht designer three times in two lifetimes. It’s my destiny! Surely it can’t end here!"

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc.

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"For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste!"

 

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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"in our society, there seems to be a general rule that the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. [...] Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized 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"

 

David Graeber - August 2013 Article in Strike, later the basis for Bullshit Jobs

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I once leafed through an old almanac which included, in even older reminiscences about the interbellum, a story about shoeshine boys in a busy city. Shoe-shining (much like its younger cousin windshield-wiping) being one of those minor unofficial income sources, it didn't exactly come with an officially posted and enforced price tag. Nevertheless, as such things do, it had a mysteriously agreed-upon going rate which all were expected to somehow... *know* by default, without being either warned or corrected. Those customers giving less than the *known* amount were called "stingy" behind their backs by all the rag-armed gaggle of toerags in the business. For those who gave more than the going rate, the not-quite-beggars had a harsher epithet:

"Sucker."

 

Human nature recognizes no benevolence. Only servility and predation.

 

I once worked under a brown-noser I've always mentally named "the caddy" who played out, to the point of caricature, an '80s managerial pamphlet brought to life. He'd find little pretexts to assert his authority enforcing arbitrary rules, kept his hair carefully clipped and his shirts carefully bleached, took credit for good ideas and shifted blame for even potential mishaps in advance, kept his office chair elevated so guests had to look up at him from a small stool -

- and while speaking rested his elbows widely on his desk arranging his fingers in the "triangle of power" and was in fact a go-between for our actual boss who only bothered setting foot in our department about once a month. But the real reason I remember him as "the caddy" is that on my first day on the job I walked into the office for the first time to meet him regaling his lowly underlings with tales of how he'd caddied for such-and-such billionaire at such-and-such exclusive golf club, as they all went "oh, hmm, yess, oh wow, uh-huh" nodding along or half-turning away from him toward their desks hoping he'd take a hint and fuck off.

 

I don't doubt that schmuck has usurped three of his bosses and been gifted his first ten million by now, and burned it on alimony payments and a yacht he never sails. He knew his place, and how to abuse it. While getting nothing done. One of that immortal caste of flappers carrying the plantation master's whip all throughout history.

 

I remember a professor complaining about his ideas being dismissed without consideration by his collaborators on a project. I pointed out that as he was providing field data to more informational/computational/permutational researchers, he was by default filling the lower social stratum of hired help to those who need not get their hands dirty. He was a faulty, over-active Caddy. He was their Sucker. Giving too much, doing too much, being too useful to be respected. He should've stuck to complaining about his students instead.

 

I've cited Jefferson's letter above in my last post of last month as well, for its willingness to criticize without kneejerk contrarianism, for its apt timing four years before the French Revolution would prove the instability of the system he so concisely described, yet here more specifically for the observation that the servant caste is "not labouring" which is to say not producing anything of value no matter how thoroughly they shine the fifteenth set of redundant silverware. The proliferation of such caddies presages societal collapse in every case, be it provincial bureaucracies in China, Roman military bloat, Ottoman slave dependence, "let them eat cake" or Soviet-era overstaffing to claim zero unemployment. It is not driven by economics but by the innate plains-ape need for status and servility. The industrial and information ages have not changed that because they have not changed the human ape, only its circumstance.

 

Sewing machines, assembly lines, inkjet printers, chatbots copy-pasting sitcom scripts, in the end labor-saving devices matter far less than they should. Those who think a lack of need for labor will improve equality do not understand the nature of slavery. The work a slave performs is useful, sure, but that is not his primary function. The purpose of a slave is to suffer that his master may feel superior. He must be starved so that he will beg and debase himself for his daily bread. His work must infuriate, exhaust, efface and utterly crush his will, so that the perceived value his master extracts from that toil may taste the sweeter.

 

Now tell me again how annoyed you are at your Starbucks barista mis-spelling your name on your drink cup. A modern service economy operates on the same principle. The work you do exists to feed the self-importance of others. You shuffle papers so that your manager can claim one more worker in her department than the bitch sitting next to her in the meeting her boss called to call one more meeting this week than the bitch across the hall. And, ultimately, after fifty degrees of Kevin Bacon, you will inevitably discover that your existence's only meaning is enabling Jeff Bezos to build himself five more palaces. Or Pope Francis. Or Andrew Carnegie. Or Sultan Suleiman. Or Emperor Nero. Even with a fully robotic workforce, the centralization of wealth will see you spending your every workday marching and singing hymns to The Dear Leader, not because it's necessary but because it's empowering. To someone. But hey, at least you in turn get to take your rage out at the 17-year-old manning the drive-through window, for not serving you well enough.

 

So am I supposed to feel sorry for you? You keep voting to give them more money, more power over you. Hordes of mindless reactionaries refuse to tax wealth and bristle at the mention of a universal basic income or even universal subsistence or health care, because they want charity not assured and impersonal, but handed out in exchange for supplication before icons religious or social. They want to beg and be debased. A slave doesn't want to be free; he wants slaves of his own. Let me remind you those bootblacks' sneering at largesse illustrates what you already know, that this mentality springs from the bottom up. It permeates everything. You can go into any online game and take a bullet for another player who will immediately turn around and call you a loser for having more deaths than him. Designers have even been officially enforcing the "sucker" mentality, as in League of Legends grading you down if your allies score higher than you, actively punishing you for helping them.

 

Do you imagine the old wage-slave mentality has not been adapted to the internet's attention economy? How many YouTubers will betimes drop a pointed or obtuse hint that 'I can't discuss topic X or this video will get demonetized' or they can't even say a word like 'porn' for fear the megacorporation will deplatform them, as I discovered when I abruptly stopped showing up on Google searches for a couple years. So they play the game. They talk about what the rich want them to talk about. They spit-shine whatever golf balls they're told to. Leaving aside the rest of this blog's topics, my game commentary is both more honest and more articulate than that of most professional game reviewers, and I have no trouble saying that because I've seen their junior high term paper level of buzz-wording. But you're willing to pay them money and attention precisely because you know they are in publishers' pocket. Because they're caddies. They are aligned with a monkey higher in the relevant tribal ranks, thus register as worthier of your supplication. Contact with power makes you feel empowered, even if the contact is a boot grinding your face into the pavement, unto eternity.

 

Does it matter to you whether before writing this I respectfully greeted a suited superior behind an oaken office desk so that she will permit me to scribe these words for your perusal? Can you honestly say no? That is why there is nothing left to do but find enough games to play until the caddy breed burn the world down. Because you really do salivate at their stories about serving the rich.

Inkulinati

"Liber scriptus proferetur

In quo totum continetur"

- one of the world's most endlessly sampled tunes

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It's a meandering monastic menagerie mêlée! 

How the hell has Daedalic Entertainment stayed in business so long? Well, I guess their development studio actually hasn't, and my various complaints about Blackguards 2 might points to reasons why. Even as publishers though, they seem to work with tiny start-ups with big dreams but little expertise or inspiration. To be fair, I haven't outright hated the likes of Iratus or, say, Valhalla Hills, but they've tended to desperately imitate bigwigs' industry standards and end up cluttering their gameplay with pointless "features" until it all washes out to mediocre offerings. (Lending the skeleton's catchphrase from Iratus a bit of meta-humour.)

 

So Inkulinati proved a pleasant surprise. (And I could do with a couple of those after Bloodlines 2's shit-show.) Budget TBS. The basic mechanics are nothing new: squad management with individual combats placed on a lattice of possible encounters inspired by roguelikes and the like-like. It relies on its artwork for most of its appeal, imitating medieval illustrations. Though resigned to cheap two-dimensional, 2FPS animations, it manages to own their goofy, awkward, primitive yet expressive (dare one say "iconic") antics. So if besting St. Frankie in a scribble contest with the power of bean gas and bunny butts is one of your life's dreams, well, have at it. The basic pretext is that you're medieval scribes battling it out on paper using the resource of "living ink" to summon armies of beasties. I do think they took it one step too far by having a human hand interpose to do the actual drawing.

I am so gonna knock Hilda's holy pussy!

Nothing so human should taint my alternate reality. But maybe that's just my lingering FMV trauma talking. It also falls prey to so many designers' impulse to stick some twitch-gaming element into everything (cf. Gemini Rue's gunfights or the old Oregon Trail rapids sequence) by making you click to time your attacks as the pointer oscillates among damage numbers.

Thankfully it's not too overwhelmingly twitchy, but still interferes nonsensically into an otherwise completely turn-based system. The writing, ironically for a game played on manuscripts, is barely there, just a bit of random nonsense. And it's not like FTL didn't demonstrate such a game can benefit from flavor text. 

 

Aside from that though, Inkulinati takes some of its best cues from the previous decade's good surprises like Darkest Dungeon or Into the Breach. Combat is linear with extra levels thrown in connected by ladders, and force-moving units offers both collision damage and one-shot kills if tossed off the page. Hazards are plentiful and varied, status effects deceptively difficult to work around (I just lost a match against monkeys because the headaches they caused prevented my melee-heavy team from moving and attacking in the same round) and resource scarcity weighted just enough to make you value an extra drop here and there. A fatigue mechanic encourages you to switch things up without completely blocking you from favoring your favorites. Minor differences between the various beast squads combine into new experiences.

 

Look, I'm not praising this thing just because they made the wolf a support caster! It's basically what Iratus or Darkest Dungeon 2 could've been without the tacked-on timesinks and other filler. Though limited in scope, this brand of thoughtfully interweaving mechanics and honest charm are exactly why we keep holding out hope for indie gaming.

 

 

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P.S.: Why the infernus did it take me four tries to find even a half-decent English translation of Dies Irae of all things, one of history's most famous pieces of music? Can't you just hum along if you don't know the Latin? Why do "conservative" segments of society feel the need to reinvent their own supposedly sacred culture until its texts are unrecognizable? I may be an atheist but it's my cultural heritage too; quit fuckethin' with it, William Josiah Irons!

 

P.P.S.: And if you think the fart jokes are a bit much, no, they are perfectly apt, you've obviously just never run across that wagon wheel thing in The Canterbury Tales.

Your Own Personal Larry

"Out comes the sun

Never had no chance

Nowhere to run"

 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Spitting Off the Edge of the World

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"Ahem. Happy Christmas, Yuletide, Chanaka, Ramadan, Kwanza, winter solstice, ho ho ho and have a merry Y2K. Did I forget anyone?"

"What about the atheists?"

"Oh? Have a nice day."

 

a '99 iteration of a popular holiday joke

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"When things are loved, they become more than just an object."

"Right, like anyone is going to be emotionally attached to a pair of socks."

Immaterial page 67

(oooh, so, so close to a "things are loved" page number pun) 

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I spent a rather contemplative winter solstice. Maybe I should've installed a new RPG and made myself a druid character as symbol of rebirth, make that into a yearly tradition. Instead, as I've done increasingly often the past years, I woke while it was still dark this Sun-day, Ishtar gleaming bravely opposite a hint of dawn as I walked to my car, and drove out to a small nearby forest for a walk among nature at a time of renewal in the cycle. And if the calories I burned tromping about and scaring Bambi and Thumper at -8 centigrade aren't a good enough offering for old Cernunnos, well, he can go suck a wagon wheel or whatever. That's as much winter ritual as I'm willing to observe. I suppose I could also dangle some glass balls off this thing:

This dragon plant, though it may not look it, has been with me for most of my life, about thirty years now. It was originally bought when my parents moved us across the ocean, along with a pothos and dieffenbachia as standard low-maintenance urban greenery. When we moved after a couple of years, it did not fit among the rest of the cargo, so while throwing it out we snipped off its top. Maybe if we replant it, it'll live. It did. Then a couple years after that we moved again. Repeat. Then again. Then... I forget how many times total. Some years ago when my mother was about to throw it out for good, I took the traditional cutting for myself. But I made the mistake of letting it get too tall as a single stem, so now it'll be getting bonsaied again... maybe from about a third of the way up if it can still split that low? And the tip will take over my cactus' old pot.

 

Is this a tradition? A personal or a family tradition? Should I build it a little shrine? Maybe I could have one of these made out of glass.

I snapped a few shots of this at Herculaneum. You can find it referenced easily enough as one of two such shrines in the skeleton's house. Lararia were apparently expected in respectable Roman houses, shrines to the family's ancestors as guardian spirit(s)(?), though I'm not sure how seriously you can take a "lar" as supernatural benefactor. "Larry" sounds like a wacky '80s sitcom character, ALF's uncle with a bad hip or the Great Gazoo's pot-smoking cousin that's somehow even more annoying. I liked the mosaics on this one in particular for some reason.

The sea theme with waves, swells, foam gets complemented with actual seashells.

Most of these would appear to have fallen prey to octopus or snail drilling? Never mind, beside the point. It would've made a nice, cozy abode for the family's lares. 

These would've been represented by statuettes sitting in that niche. The custom was ubiquitous, but the individual lares and lararia each look slightly different to me around the central themes of bounty, offerings, luck, etc. More figurative, more geometric, carrying slightly different symbols, bigger spaces, bigger statues, more paint, more mosaic, whatever. Of course the Orient has always had its own multitudinous versions of house shrines, whether it's to kami or some variation on Shiva or everything in between. Even Catholic/Orthodox home altars and icons, albeit far more sparse and stilted, will often display some feature of the owner's taste.

 

So can I stick my dragon plant on one of those altars? It means a lot to me. It's been with me through ages of family life and solitude, failure and recovery. If I claim to be an animist can I pass off a few dead Dracaena leaves as holy relics? Me and mine have rebirthed the damn thing enough times to make Osiris jealous. Is this a spiritual connection? If you tore it to splinters in front of me, would I be at pains to maintain my stoic composure like that chick from Dogville? And what would I claim of yours in retribution for your sacrilege? Where exactly is the all-important dividing line between scripture and script, between sermons and life lessons, cult and culture?

 

Being a '90s teen myself I was thoroughly amused by Shaenon Garrity's comedic summaries of X-Files episodes, Monster of the Week, and am quite disappointed to see she's already taken them offline. The one for Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, unusually philosophical for an X-File, stood out for dropping much of the humor in favor of Garrity's admiration for the episode's writer, Darin Morgan. In fact, though she sold original MotW prints, the listing below this merely read "Unless you’re Darin Morgan, this strip is not for sale." I don't mind admitting it warmed my heart to see a second line appended when I re-read the strips a year or two later, reading merely "Sold." The anecdote made it into a conversation with my family last year. Though not fans of either The X-Files or webcomics, my parents had booked a trip to Belgium, including the museum where hangs the painting by (maybe) Pieter Bruegel the Elder referenced in the poem by W.H. Auden which I had read in passing in one of my high school literature textbooks, referenced by Garrity in satirizing a TV series about alien abductions and also the occasional vampire.

 

Anyway, ho, ho, ho, merrrrry something.

 

Here in the States, one of our fondest Christmas traditions is listening to hicks complain about a "war on Christmas" to the great confusion of everyone hearing the word shouted at us from every corner of both media and society, having to wade through tinsel knee-deep everywhere we go and hearing nothing but the same idiotic jingles piped through every single speaker in existence to the point even Big Brother would be jealous. Every single year since Y2K, for a quarter century now, they've foamed at the mouth playing the martyr for somehow being prevented from celebrating. Christmas is dead, it's been murdered, it's been violated, Santa's been sodomized with reindeer horns! And everyone else shrugs and asks "wutchoo talkin' 'bout Clevon" as every TV network fills with movies and very special episodes about Christmas like they've always done and the superstitious then all go on to have all their church services just as they always have and even online games shoehorn in Santa's village as a playable location and the U.S. government ignores its own separation of church and state to massage their egos with tax-funded religious babble, until next year when all the fundies yet again and again rave and rant about how Christmas is dead-dead-DEAD!!!1 repeating the whole insane dog-and-pony show over and over and over again.

 

Admittedly, I'm little more fond of those nouveau-Bolsheviks who try to force the issue by artificially policing language, rattling off the whole litany of winter holidays in every office memo on the off-chance there may be a Zoroastrian hiding behind the geraniums, and who force terms like "before current era" instead of "before Christ" in measuring history. I don't think I'm fighting a war on them either by insisting on calling this Nivose a December*. Trying to unmoor society from its historical ontogeny is itself a form of brainwashing, if not quite on the scale of religion. Like it or not unless you can change the calendar to commemorate some other event or figure, you are counting your years from the (supposed) birth of Rabbi Yeshua he of the vertical lounge chair, and the reason you have these specific days off work is because of Christians' clout in demanding celebrations for their particular deity, so frikkin' admit it, deal with it and shut up already. I bothered myself for a symbolic communion with nature on the solstice for its more universal meaning, which was indeed at the core of most of these winter celebrations including the invented birth-date of Jesus which was just stapled onto those older traditions. I'll be raising a glass with my family tomorrow evening over vid chat and telling them "Merry Christmas" even though they know very well I don't believe a word of those two words, especially the merriness. I won't do it for you but I'll do it for them. And I ain't doin' jack shit today for Festivus.

 

Historical reality is one thing. Superstitious pretense is another. All of the above discussions can be carried out in the real world. There can be reverence in the appreciation of a painting, of a poem, of an unusually good TV script, of an apt homage; the symbolism thus invoked can memetically link a cartoonist, a lycanthrope and his retiree parents. One's ancestors may be acknowledged whether sitting in a shell-encrusted alcove in Herculaneum or invoked by the same carols they used to sing a century ago. Maybe Santa Claus really will be abandoned someday, as have innumerable other lars and other spirits of good fortune inhabiting mantels or chimneys. Not outlawed. Abandoned, willingly, by a population which has outgrown them. One can only hope against all evidence.

 

The real point of course is that traditions reflect in-group cohesion, and every holier-than-thou caveman desperately needs to make a display of fervor in complacency to outdo one's neighbours, must be more like the herd than the rest of the herd. We are told that society would fall apart without such obeisance, that our psychology absolutely requires the sense of continuity and community it provides. No different altars for every family's ancestors, just a single mass-produced Jesus by decree. But does it really have to be the same continuity for everyone? I've killed a lot fewer people with W.H. Auden and a dragon plant than your average Abrahamic fanboy has with his prayer mats and funny caps or whatever. Conformity is not religion's benefit to society; religion is just one tool of conformity beneath tyrants. We could rehash historical examples, but one need only look to the current Christian Nationalist takeover of the U.S. government.

 

After a year of sending masked thugs to toss children into the backs of vans, imprisoning its own citizens without trial on suspicion of owning a foreign electrical adapter, refusing the foreign aid which had once bought them so much goodwill so cheap, the Republican Party has dropped deeper and deeper into farce with the pettiness of its gratuitous impositions, like bitching out fat generals or renaming the Gulf of Mexico. More recently, and who could've seen this absurdity coming, a war on fonts, not for causing harm but merely for fear it may cause good. This is the same crowd wailing about a war on Christmas, not because they are prevented from celebrating but merely for the existence of others who do not bend knee to their psychoses. It's always petty, and cruel, and pointless, and meant only to inflate their own self-importance. They're not opposed to political correctness. The church ladies have just been at the same game longer. The real tradition they're defending is tyranny, and any Santa, any personal Jesus, any font and any market fad will do as pretext.

 

 

 

 

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* And I damn well will fight them on calling women "people who menstruate" 

AoW4 Factions, 4

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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These guys were unexpectedly fun, though I only played them a couple of times. To get the most out of their culture bonus to adjacency and their support units' AoE, I ended up splitting them into a couple of tercios every fight. Like all the early factions, the bio was written years after, when I was apparently in a parochial mood.

Bloodlines 2.04 - The Game of Your Dreams

"Loving you was like loving the dead

Was like loving the dead

(Was like fucking the dead.)"

 

Type O Negative - Black No. 1

 

 

Not sure if I'll even bother finishing Bloodlines 2 for the moment. Since six years ago I preordered the expanded cowpie with extra plop, I may as well return to it in a year after the ensuing contents trickle out. But I do think it's worth pausing for a bit to address the artistic side of things. I've seen at least one developer trying to turn the blame around on either the publisher's branding or on customers for having over-inflated expectations of a Bloodlines sequel. And sure, some lacks (no moving vehicles, no interactable objects, limited mob models and behaviors) can be blamed on a lack of budget or time budget. Such things do happen.

 

But that's not all we're complaining about by a longshot. It's that the content they did include comes across as cheap and lazy and uninspired and just... lame. It fails to stand on its own merits. Here's one example: snatching guns from across the room with telekinesis. Cool action movie gimmick? Sure, okay. Going a step further and hovering them in mid-air firing them telekinetically... still a cool action movie gimmick?

Well, when Magneto did it with fifty guns at once in the first X-Men movie, hell yeah, badass! Doing it with exactly one gun though, even if it leaves my hands free to climb around, just looks like my character forgot how to use his fingers for some reason, especially since it still replaces your autoattack! And if you think that's as stupid as the over-reach gets: 

For a basic fetch quest, you're sent to click a supposedly important package in a dumpster. Can you "interact" with the dumpster to lift its lid? No. It must be activated telekinetically to dramatically rip the lid off and send it flying across the alley. Wow! What an ostentatious display of supernatural might... this would be, if I weren't still just standing in an grungy back-alley performing magic tricks like a toddler flexing his muscles for an audience of one bum who can't even be bothered to look over at my godlike display of AWESOMAH POWAH because apparently I'm too stupid to operate a lid without magic. Thank Caine I haven't run across any childproof caps!

 

The funniest thing about Bloodlines 2 would have to be its launcher link to a deep dive video series. It's damn near impossible to find any facet whatsoever of this game that anyone would call "deep" even down to basic wording. I'll freely admit I make constant typos and occasionally misuse terms myself, and when I charge people $90+ to read my blog, we can argue about that. But with a hundred pairs of eyes in your writing/production/voice/testing crew looking over your shoulder I should think someone, at some point, would point out your classy Ventrue man about town Fletcher should possess better functioning vocabulary than to send you chasing after "graffitos" - congratulations, you've managed to conclusively demonstrate that two wrongs make a wrongo. And then there's Ysabella, whose voice actress accomplished two even more crass back-to-back mirrored fuck-ups:

Hawt nostril shot, babe.

First she pronounces "craven bow" as in 'bow-and-arrow' which I might've been inclined to chalk up to some weird west-coast dialectic foible inverting the tendencies of those other clahwns frahm Bahws'n except she then immediately flips to pronouncing Lascaux as "lass-cow" or something until you're holding your head and moaning 'owe' and could someone please give this heifer's third-grade teacher a slap across the face? Even more hilarious because Yzzy's a Toreador. Even if she knew nothing else, would anyone in the world be more partick'ler about her French than a supernatural art snob?

 

I'm unwilling to chalk such flubs up to deliberate irony on TCR's part either (some meta-commentary on Seattle's flimsy upper-crustiness?) considering the utter lack of awareness in the text that they should be flubs, and how well they suit a cast filled with nothing but Svengoolie-grade horror* and shoujo-grade characters designed around simplistic emotional cues. Even Redemption, the previous V:tM adaptation before the original Bloodlines, while a far weaker, painfully cheesy script, managed to maintain an overall feel for vampires as inherently monstrous even as they struggle to retain their humanity, beings of dangerous power and even more dangerous appetites.

 

Here though? How many of Bloodlines 2's vamps truly act like creatures of the night? Like raveners beyond the campfire, consumed by ambition and power-lust as much as by bloodlust? Is it the cringing self-help fashion victim at the auto shop? The romance novel audience surrogate shrinking violet incapable of cold reason that's supposed to also somehow qualify as a brilliant scientist? The twink spymaster that spends all his time mincing and lisping instead of providing any useful intel? The imbecile headsman trying to play Superman? Well over half the cast are nothing but needy, whiny, preening pissants swooning at compliments and microaggressions. I suppose at least the wintertime setting is apt enough to be littered with snowflakes. If you want a case-in-point, look at what they did to the Nosferatu.

Hello, kitties.

Better yet look first to their clan's namesake. Max Schreck's leathery make-up and gaunt, insidious features with exaggerated ears/nose were imitated in previous V:tM adaptations for their intrinsic monstrous interpretation via our neoteny-focused social instincts. But in keeping with the modern need to champion social causes or make some if you can't find 'em (much like Baldur Gate 3's demonspawn) Bloodlines 2's crew apparently decided nossies must be pitied and cooed over. So they're nothing but helpful**, are given rounded, small-limbed childlike proportions plus diffident, servile speech patterns, and of course their pug faces are rounded out to infant chubbiness. One doesn't even bite. Requisite sob story pining for his human wife included, to legitimize him as servile toward the unfairer sex.

 

It's tempting to point out the usual "man bad, woman good" routine. The badass fitness chick bodyguard sends you to kill man after man and the one-vampire justice brigade's targets are either men who've sinned against women, or, for a bit of oh-so-risque alternative, a couple of women who've sinned against... also other women.

Won't somebody please think of the thinkers of children?

Would you feel less justified in murdering a female car thief as punishment for emotionally inconveniencing a man instead of a woman? Obviously yes, and any writer worth his salt would've made you face that incongruity instead of padding your conceit for extra comfort. Then there's the pregnant damsel in distress for extra pathos. But honestly, I'll admit they did try to include some female villainy. No, it's the triteness of the writing, its flimsy emotional cues and limited congruence with playable content that will annoy you more than any active insults. That unimaginatively conventional morality I foresaw from A Machine for Pigs' plot hits in... whatever the opposite of narrative force is.

 

It's dull.

 

The three varieties of random mobs spawning on rooftops fail to entice. You end up breaking the masquerade repeatedly just to flip off the cops so something happens. Your haven offers nothing to do. Sexualized suckery ends up neither edgy nor enticing. (I'll admit I did let Mrs. Thorne tempt me. Don't judge.)

The scent trails looked promising during the first mission when you're reconstructing Fabien's day before you absorbed him, with his various stops contextualized as plot-relevant actions. After that though, tracking gets relegated to a pretext for cross-town timesink runs. While breadcrumbs are still an improvement over Skyrim HUD-marker chasing, every time I'm simply encouraged to rush ahead I can't stop thinking of the wasted opportunities to tell a story about your various victims and maybe tie it into a thumb-up or thumb-down judgement at the end of the quest. Apparently my target stopped while traversing various back-alleys to climb a shipping container inexplicably parachuted into the middle of Seattle. Okay. So? No matter since you'll just be one-shotting your victim and running away.

 

In between every step of the main quest you're handed a new set of three side-quests as blatant filler. One kill, one stealth kill (which you don't technically need to stealth) and one fetch quest of the dullest variety, where you literally walk over to the marked location, click The Thing and walk back. Among all this, the main quest does stand out as superior storytelling, but I'm betting that's largely for borrowing its central theme from Amnesia: Rebirth which handled it better.

 

I've seen enough to discern the main issue. Paradox wanted to technically fulfill delivery of the "RPG" for which it had cashed in preorders, The Chinese Room probably got a bigger payout from those preorders alone than it would have for whatever small-name project it actually had planned, and the only people who got screwed over were the customers, which is fine, that's how business works, like, duh. But gradually you do begin to see the actual work they'd originally intended under the timesinks and other padding. It was to be a traditional, linear, narrative, light puzzle-solving adventure game about a supernatural detective, much in the spirit of Amnesia. One cannot escape the realization that Fabien's flashback dreams are more carefully plotted and scripted, more detailed and far more relevant to the plot than your own character's adventures which mostly consist of an RP-lite, perfunctory XP-grinding, MMO-inspired runaround to feign the trappings of class-based role-playing. And the sad part is that derailing TCR's effort fruitlessly into all that "kill ten rats" nonsense also left that better adventure game underneath underdeveloped in itself.

 

The worst is that like Wasteland 3, like Baldur's Gate 3, like countless other hacks, they try to cover their world-building and character design inadequacy with pandering. Vamp romance novel self-insert heroines falling in love with dashing ancient lords, vamps who love their sisters, vamps who love their wives, vamps who love vamp mommies who love their vamp babies, vamps who love playing caped crusader and the women who love them, etceteree, etceterah. Catering to the lack of taste of infantile, narcissistic overemotional cripples is not something you get to blame on a lack of funding, and certainly not on high audience expectations. Quite the opposite. Those expectations offered you a far better chance to build a world aiming higher than shallow emotive mutual masturbation with Facebook teens. 

 

Well, we'll see what another year's worth of DLCs brings, but I'm not holding my breath. 

 

 

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* Ohh, couldn't it be lice instead of leeches... thirty years later, yes, apparently it could, in the form of these insignificant bloodsuckers. I normally try to steer clear of in-jokes, but there's one for all you upper-Midwest forty-something local cable fans out there.

** Ironically if you think back to the original Bloodlines, the Nosferatu, while nasty customers in general, actually treat you as an equal more fairly and consistently than other vamps. Is there not more value in that more dignified approach, giving the devil his due, than in infantilism?

I will wear my thermal pants or not, as the mood strikes me, whenever I choose! (I'm very ambi-chausses.)

What grabs you by the pussy?

"I don't need you anymore

I can't use you anymore"

 

Garbage - Deadwood

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"I love the enemy, my love is the enemy

They say they don't want fame but they get famous when we fuck"

 

Marilyn Manson - Slutgarden

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"I went to Mother and asked her, “What do they do in the boygroups?”
“Perform natural selection,” she said, not in my language but in hers, in a strained tone. I didn’t always understand Hainish any more and had no idea what she meant, but the tone of her voice upset me; and to my horror I saw she had begun to cry silently."

 

Ursula K. LeGuin - Solitude

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"Another 'sister'? This is a jail, not a harem, Captain Butler." 

Gone with the Wind

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Though Disco Elysium dutifully toed the "man bad, woman good" party line, it did insert a couple of easily ignored sotto voce counterpoints, like Measurehead's entourage.

Measurehead himself (the lummox on the extreme right*) is hired muscle for the mob, a pseudointellectual, devoted and all-consumed racist justifying his views (per the moniker) to a large extent by phrenology. It feels entirely natural for him to be supplied with an estrogen brigade puffing up his ego non-stop.

 

An article caught my attention a couple months ago, questioning the social impact of Russia's returning troops from its invasion of Ukraine, especially given its recruitment of prison inmates, illustrated by the case of a wife-murderer set loose by the authorities only to kill his new girlfriend after his glorious return from the front. But here's the thing: he had a wife. He had a girlfriend. Sadistic hired muscle has no trouble attracting mates. To me, such cases routinely recall that Andrea Dworkin, whose name may not be dropped much these days but whose bigoted demagoguery during the '80s and '90s became the mainstream, anti-sexual "all men are criminals" feminism of the past couple of decades (and became encoded into law via her co-conspirator MacKinnon) backed up her murderous screeching by the street cred of having been a battered wife herself in her youth. Except she wasn't some twelve-year-old child bride sold by her parents to a man she'd never met. Dworkin was an adult in her early twenties when she sought out and shacked up with a Dutch rebel as per female ape instinct to latch onto an overtly combative rising star who could challenge the system on her behalf and raise her through the social ranks by proxy. So the groupie act didn't work out for her. But that breed of violent, domineering male was her choice of mate and countless groupies breed ever more such males per their own choice, with every passing generation.

 

Of the many sound bites he's provided "grab 'em by the pussy" gets repeated by Trump's detractors more than most for the unquestioning shock value it elicits as "rapey" but it only takes two lines of context to realize the conversation was something slightly different.

 

Trump: "You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
Bush: "Whatever you want."
Trump: "Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

 

Yes, when you're a star they let you do anything. And much as I hate him, in that lowest-common-denominator assessment of human nature Trump was absolutely right. Was it supposed to be news to anyone that women throw themselves at high-ranking men? At dominant men? At men who fire others? At men who kill, abuse and enslave? At Measureheads? Moreover, why are we still treating as a shocking revelation the truism that dominance contests among men are enforced by women for their own sexual gratification?

 

I've gone over this before, but it's damn near impossible to think of any "romance" content aimed at women that does not hinge on displays of wealth and power and power-games, from softcore porn video series to romance novels to the more ridiculous Hammer Horror themed "romantasy" variety to stories written by and for heterosexual women about male characters dominating and raping each other. But even those who find themselves scandalized by such fads tend to treat them as... well, fads of the internet age, ignoring the underlying issue that only the explicitness of the sex is new. (edit: even the goofy romcom schlub who seems worthless next to the decoy love interest of higher rank must explicitly out-do his rival in some way by minute 80) It would be harder to find action/thrillers from past decades in which the hero is not required to gun down other men by the dozen before he is favored with a chaste little kiss of feminine approval ahead of the boss fight. The hallowed fields of folklore and myth and past centuries' literature were themselves replete with men butchering, dueling or buying and selling each other before the designated hero, at last victorious, is deemed worthy of the princess' attention. That they never porked was somewhat beside the point, as per female instinct watching men attack, abuse, demean and dismember each other IS sexual, being in fact the way animal females in general select their mates by relative fitness. At least now, after billions of reads on stories about Snape topping Harry or whatever, can you not admit that where there's that much smoke there might just be some underlying fire?

 

When women claim to want honest, decent men, they are flat-out lying. They want dictators. They want murderous thugs. They want avaricious robber barons, and the entire feminist movement has lied on their behalf for centuries by feigning innocence among the unfairer sex every time they're handed more and more political power yielding no decrease whatsoever in warmongering or social inequality, because the men overtly perpetrating such acts have themselves been women's obedient and carefully selected instruments from the dawn of time.

 

Yes, Ursula, those brutish men out there, tossed into the wild beyond the protective circle of women's community "perform natural selection" - for your damn benefit. So you don't have to, and so you can mate with a winner. And if you have any doubt about that, imagine how easily the reverse could be true: that if women decided today they prefer to fuck losers, by tomorrow men would be terrified of winning!

 

 

 

 

 

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* Ugh, and I just realized the anarchist graffiti artist and the proponent of neoliberal economics are situated at the extreme "left" of the same playable area, opposite Measurehead and the strikebreaker. Maybe that's accidental, but I wouldn't put it past them to have arranged the political wings on purpose.

Making you work for it

Bloodlines 2.03 - Power up your ass

I've felt monumentally unmotivated to continue my Bloodlines 2 run, but luckily I tend to jump back into games I hate all the faster just to satisfy myself that I've gotten my money's worth and chuck them into the Bozo bin. So after cleansing my palate with a strategy campaign (that'll be faction #24 if anyone's keeping track) I waded back into the bloody morass and ground my way through the next few in-game nights. Which mostly consisted of grinding blood points.

Mmmm. Scaaaarf. D'oh!

The new resource system is... odd, and not particularly satisfying. Instead of a blood pool, each individual skill has to be charged with blood, and most can be charged at the same time in 1-3 feedings,* including bleeding your stunned enemies dry in the middle of combat. (Technically not diablerie if they're ghouls? Except you also drain vamp bosses? Not sure.) As feeding also heals you, you'll polish off your last victims each time by draining them. As a result, you rarely or never actually need to replenish your blood mini-pools outside of combat. Instead, feeding is crammed back into the system by MMO-inspired farming of melancholic/choleric/sanguine blood (yes, I heard it too; quit that spinning, Galen) as currencies to buy spells from your trainers, which you can then enable with XP. 

I have a lot of problems with this whole crap'n'kaboodle.

1) The idiotic pinball scoring for your humors, seen on the left-hand side. It seems impossible to get less than ten points per tick of sucking, or spend less than ten, but they just had to inflate the numbers to impress... whom, exactly? Second-grade dropouts that can't divide by ten?

2) Each flavor of human comes with its own minigame, with the goal being to get them out of sight into some dark alley where you can bleed them undisturbed, by chasing them, making them chase you angrily or having them follow your sexy ass. Decent bit of fun in itself, but it comes with zero skill application or dialogue. Hit the talk button and the chase triggers. So after a lot of repetitions (each skill requires ~5-15 humans, depending on cost and how completely you can drain them without a Masquerade violation) it still becomes a chore.

3) Randomized spawns. They just pop up on your map as HUD markers. There's hints of a more interesting dialogue-based system where you'd sniff out incipient victims and somehow encourage their humors to unbalance... or something(?)

- but currently it does nothing and appears to have been replaced with the ready-made HUD spawns halfway through development.

4) Homogenized demands. Talk of the four humors sounds like a prime opportunity for roleplaying, expressing your own character's personality via your favored flavors, but you'll just be asked for preset quantities by various NPCs. While each skill has different requirements, they even out to irrelevance overall. A flaw largely inflicted by:

5) Worst of all, what I mistakenly took for a Lasombra skill tree in my first post turns out to be the skill tree. For everyone. Your clan merely makes various skills cross-class in XP cost. Except cross-class availability only works when other aspects like spells or weapons remain wholly separate to lend each class some personality. Otherwise, in what sense is this still a clan system? Even if you work it into the plot "I'm so special that I don't even need a personality!" is a terrible, terrible self-insert fanfiction idea for a protagonist, subverting the setting all for snowflake narcissism.

6) As a bonus, even within a relatively limited and homogenized skill selection, several seem redundant as implemented into the slap-happy combat. You're got a couple of super-punches, that Earthshock stun plays out as a Greater Magic Missile counterpart to my Arms of Ahriman knockback/root, and I'd guess the Toreador/Ventrue's many brainwashing abilities don't play out very differently either. At least BL1 was honest about "upgrading" powers. And given you don't need any general stats or support skills, by the fourth(?) night I've already hit max power.

7) Zero noncombat skill integration. (At least for your actual protagonist; your Malkavian alter-ego is all noncombat.) And to think I specifically cited the original Bloodlines as ahead of its time among cRPGs in this regard.

8) XP grinding. You get ten (or multiples-of) points for every feeding or killing, and need them by the thousand for each ability point. (Pinball numbers again.) Quest completion does award far more, but once again, I've explicitly cited the original Bloodlines' positive example in downplaying the grind. Here though, the lack of inventory, crafting, resource pools, base customization or other ways to reward adventuring between quests forced them to re-institute it.

 

It's a bit telling of the skill system's superficiality that the second and third boss fights... don't require it. They revolve around one-two-pimp-slapping endless chains of weak adds, either not requiring or outright turning off your vampiric abilities. Out in the city, things spice up slightly once anarchs start spawning randomly on various rooftops (and finally start getting better guns) and again when Sabbat ghouls join them for rooftop firefights, but this is still a paltry amount of mob/combat diversity. And given they leash pretty close to their spawn points, you can cheese most fights by running away and returning to "stealth" kill freshly unaware mooks, Skyrim-style. But that's an old routine. Hell, despite unlocking half a dozen spells, my most entertaining moment came when I realized I could stand a street away and just lasso mooks to their deaths off ledges using my infinite free-cast telekinesis.

telekillnesis

Luckily "it's raining ghouls" doesn't count as a masquerade violation. (Man, Seattle's got some issues.)

Behold my wondrously deadly vampiric power! - of... magnets...

*sigh* I guess making more use of physics is at least one marked improvement over a title from twenty years ago.

AoW4 Factions, 3

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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My next couple of factions were heavily defensive tactically, with this one working best as trench warfare with healers shuffling behind it. Weirdly, strategically it's one of the more aggressive since order/materium lacks many of the others' freebies, thus needing to establish itself, and benefits from a wide vassal pool for rallying. It's not easy for me to get into the Lawful mindset, or at least to treat it as anything but evil, but I like the affirmation here, and the call-and-response dynamic rapidly establishes a leader at the podium.

It Can't Happen Here

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water--all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip." 

 

 

There's a book I've been quote-mining recently, and you can expect me to keep doing so for a while longer. That's not due to its trenchant futurology or its lyrical virtuousity. Not that it's terribly written, but Sinclair Lewis' style is decidedly prosaic and strained a bit too hard to interweave It Can't Happen Here with both the middlebrow diction and jargon of 1935 and real-world references or analogies which have somewhat dropped out of public consciousness in the intervening ninety years and counting. Purely as a dystopian vision, it measures poorly against the field's defining works like 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World. It lacks the same grandiose sweep, the same universal insights. But, weirdly, all of the above can also be seen as its strong point.

 

I can't remember how I ran across the book, but its central villain's rise to power has tracked eerrily in every description and plot point that more modern phenomenon of Trumpism, from a lack of even casual acquaintance with the truth to blatantly insane campaign promises to fickle political alliances, to the blatant idiocy deliberately ignored by his supporters, to even the artificial folksiness and crass, casual dudebro mannerisms which should rightly shame any public figure out of the public eye. But don't.

 

Described from the viewpoint of a small-town New England newspaper editor, instead of dropping you in medias res into a dictatorship already established, this alternate America's rapid crash into fascism lays out the venal or delusional psychological tricks by which commoners allow or collude with their own descent into helpless subjects of a despot, during each step of heightening restrictions, privations and terror. As such the story falls into that rarer subgenre of an apocalyptic procedural, outlining day by month the personal impact of social decline, every social nicety you lose, every right you never knew you'd miss, every tiny vanishing luxury, every fresh insult piled upon injury.

 

But others surely have done all that better. The novel's true strength lies in the flip-side to its lacking universality, because it is indeed a vision of how it can happen (and is currently happening) here, in Anytown, U.S.A. Lewis captured facets of small-town yankee psychology which the more ambitious or flamboyant dystopias miss. The distinction is a white-collar vs. blue-collar one drawn elsewhere between, say, the Addams Family with their old-world manners and obscure tastes and The Munsters with their more limited appeal to the "meat&potatoes" 'Murican baseline, but also one of shallower social structures. I've said before that it's damned hard to find the traditional European gemeinschaft represented anywhere in American life, or, as a result, in their artistic output, except in stories about backwater dregs like Winter's Bone. Thus, while for example a previously discussed description of social decline in Il gattopardo might center on customs whose origins lay forgotten in the mists of time, ancestral homesteads, generational debts, restrained manners and privilege and art and millennial institutions like The Church, the cast of It Can't Happen Here inhabit a looser milieu of social clubs and college sports teams and puritanical frigidity.

 

Lewis manages to drive home the point that Americans' more confused loyalties in no way insulate them against a fascist takeover. Sure, the demographic friction might be a few centuries shorter in the making, but "niggers" 'n "kikes" nonetheless made acceptable targets of opportunity for profit-minded yankee rabblerousing. Instead of a few gigantic levers of traditional grievance which a European dictator might pull, a fascist takeover in the States must press a myriad tiny buttons, but these are still open enough for the pressing and less protected by a self-respecting bourgeois intelligentsia available overseas. All it takes is a few slogans, a few marching songs, a bit of folksy babbling about the good old days (whatever those might be) and the ever-useful harnessing of envy against one's neighbours, and up spring the gulags in Vermont as surely as they do in Siberia.

 

In may not be the most artfully penned world classic, but it's one everyone on this side of the pond probably should have read fifteen years ago.

Smeagol shot first.

The Surrender of Social Capital

"a well-run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy"

Robert A. Heinlein - Friday 

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"What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if THEY are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here, 1935

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"The property of [France] is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, & tradesmen, & lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? [...] Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, & to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

 

Thomas Jefferson - letter to James Madison, 1785

(note he was writing this shortly before Malthus provided the counter-argument to simply letting the rabble stake infinite claims for their infinite progeny) 

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Lookin' to get my culture on (as one does) I tried watching Das Lehrerzimmer, which turned out to be one of those movies every professional critic feels obligated to praise because if it's 'tackling issues' in a rudderless and stilted manner, it must somehow contain deep truths. While I'd normally welcome more criticism of modern interpersonal bureaucracy, that won't be found in a work which can itself manage no more than a tepid "careful now" as it merely confirms the existence of topics. Worse though, in order to advance such a plot without anyone playing the villain, all characters are forced to instead play the fool, making deliberately moronic choices at every step which fit neither into a realistic portrayal nor into the more consciously exaggerated old absurdist theater mold. It's hard to empathize, much less sympathize, with a bunch of clowns derping around worse than even your stupidest coworkers while the visuals and audio push you to feel invested and even anxious about their plight. I don't. I feel firing-squady about their plight.

 

One could, however, credit the flick with at least one brilliant impression on later reflection: that through that entire hour and a half of discriminatory implications and polite hand-wringing, nobody in the zimmer actually gets lehrered a single damn thing. Whatever's happening in that school, it ain't math, science and reading comprehension. And, as anyone who's met a GenZer can attest, that's all too realistic a depiction of past decades' cultural downshift.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Bill Maher continued his descent from "tell it like it is" comedian to political mouthpiece recently with a New Rule attacking New York's newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rest of America's few Democratic Socialist politicians. Now, granted, the U.S. only acquired a semi-official socialist movement in the past ~15yrs and much of what you hear from them resembles less a valid political platform than the same idiotic virtue signaling and moral purity tests which have already sapped the (supposed) left wing's credibility. It is also true that Mamdani will either prove a Trumpish charlatan with no intention of fulfilling his ludicrous campaign promises or an imbecile whose effort will crash and burn spectacularly in a year or two, as the changes he's promised cannot be effected at a metropolitan level, either because New York is too big or too small. Taxing companies and parasitic billionaires might work for a large, powerful country leaving them less room to run with the loot, but not when they can simply move their office half a mile outside city limits. Rent control requires a shitload of ancillary subsidies and regulation to ensure apartments are actually livable. As for fully free public transit? I don't know what the hell that is, because we didn't even have it under a literal communist regime! It works well for small towns with light and predictable demand, but for a metropolitan clusterfuck? For just one problem, how many extra cops do you plan to pay to kick all the hobos out of their now free dormitory cars?

 

But none of that explains why Maher felt a need to lie in conflating socialism with totalitarian communism (especially as he himself spent decades' worth of shows outlining the differences for idiots) and pull an argumentum ad North Koream, except to virtue signal as anti-socialist to all the redneck imbeciles still obsessing over the Red Scare.

 

Funny thing: when phrase searching that Jefferson quote above, for the second hit down I got "was Jefferson a socialist?" which, given he was writing three or four generations before it even became an issue, I'm gonna call a bullshit question. How about: he was smart enough to note the absurdity of infinite wealth accumulation and the needless cruelty of enforced poverty and six and a half years later the French Revolution more than proved his point. But the only question relevant to the average moron is that of tribal affiliation: was Jefferson an "us" or a "them" either a dirty godless commie or a filthy decadent capitalist pig and should we mindlessly attack or mindlessly defend him while never bothering to understand what he said?

 

It's easy to forget that communism did originally address quite real imbalances of power like the 19th-century robber barons, sadistic fucks like the Carnegies that kept their workers under a slaver regime and could order a bought-and-paid-for private or state military to violently crush any dissent. So what will you do to prevent sadistic fucks like Bezos and Musk from starving the population to death on a whim? And what name will you append to such worker/consumer protection and individual rights measures other than socialism? Because there is none more fitting.

 

Now, of course once socialist protection measures advanced to communist state ownership - of everything - those states themselves even more thoroughly crushed the populace, because ANY human element, once allowed to reign unchallenged, will be a tsar, will be a khan, will be a Nero and Caligula and Torquemada, will gleefully bathe in the blood of innocents, will rehash every flavor of sadistic oppression soon leading to collapse. When it comes to the real-world game of civilization, if anyone wins, everyone loses.

 

But then we may simply be under an illusion that these sociopolitical transitions ever represented a discursive trade-off between publicly accessible ideologies, and that brings us back to schooling. The past couple centuries' industrialization created a demand for skilled labor and middle-class invention which forced rich investors to tolerate the lower classes' education in the interest of... interest. But they've always strained to restrict education solely to the skills needed to operate their machinery and the information age makes tighter control possible again, promises unlimited surveillance and forced consumer spending. The rise of copy-pasting artificial "intelligence" offers the rich an alternative. No longer must an educated middle class be tolerated to lead, entertain and indoctrinate so long as such functions can be automated by 1984's "versificator" and no longer need competent scientists be recruited if massive processors promise to brute-force technological solutions.

 

Thus public education must die a living death, so that the world can once again return to the perennial ape-friendly pattern of masters and slaves, and nothing in between. Kill phonics, kill multiplication tables, kill universities most of all, devote more hours to football, inculcate identity politics instead of reasoned social awareness, argue about capitalism vs. socialism while the rich get richer off corporate socialism, pick an ideology to make yourself feel big by participation and champion it to take over all of society. Crush any who would oppose your shibboleth. Much as in The Teacher's Lounge, this idiotic plot would never hold together if all the actors weren't bending over backwards to lobotomize themselves toward their primordial utility:

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"The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'"

 

George Orwell - 1984