The secret, sneaky message hidden in computer games

By playing such games as Dishonored and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I have learned a thing or two about sneaking. One of these things is that it is of vital importance to know the terrain before you try to be stealthy in it. After all, no amount of stealth in the world helps you when you suddenly find yourself in a brightly spotlighted alleyway surrounded by hostile people with very loaded guns.

I've also learned that the best way to gain information about the terrain is a five-step method that looks like this:

1. Arrive at a place where sneakiness is required.
2. Save the game.
3. Kill any and all enemies in the place, in any way. Do not be stealthy about it.
4. Gain information about the terrain. Be sure to take note of any helpful features.
5. Load the game. Use you newly acquired information about the terrain to great advantage.

I have this nagging suspicion that this might not be the best way to go about being sneaky in the real world. And, moreover, that this might not be the only computer game strategy that works wonders in a game setting while being utterly dysfunctional in any kind of real setting.

If you are worried about kids becoming violent, don't fret about the computer games. What they learn from them is that you want a save point before you do anything important, and that it is precisely those moments that don't have a save point where you have to be the most careful. And that if you are not careful, all is lost.

Stop and think. Gather information first, but be safe about it. Then act.

What you should be worried about is the rest of the world that the kids are inhabiting. For one thing, it does not include the option to save the current state of affairs. For another, it does include a whole range of situations that actively tries to teach them that violence is indeed the answer to problems. And - as is the case with the war on terror - that violence is indeed THE answer to the problem at hand.

Leave the computer games out of this. They are positively pacifistic, in comparison.

Wifi ethnography

Every now and then, I check up on the status of wifi networks in and around my apartment. This for two reasons. The one being that I'm kind of lazy when it comes to moving files around, and if it can be done without me actually having to move actual things around, then I will prefer that option. The other being that it is interesting to see what kind of names people assign to their networks.

So far, two things has revealed themselves to me. One is that there's a definite increase in the number of networks around here. Two is that there is less randomness in the naming than one might expect.

There are, of course, the default names. The "we never bother to name our network, so now you know what router o mobile phone we use" names.

The name name. A name that's also a name. Sometimes combined with the above - especially when it comes to phones, where the resulting name is a variant of the [name] [device] formula.

The family names. The x family. Often with an added explanatory word, like "network". Just to make sure to both family and neighbor friends that it's indeed a network that is indeed belonging to the family.

The local entrepreneur, who uses their company name. (If they are smart about it, they don't bother with passwords. Free is good advertisement.)

The local wannabe hacker, with the leet skills and the üb3r1337 haxxor name.

The local real hacker, who comes around to ask you to please stop trying if you show up too many times in the logs.

And, of course, there's always IPREDIA. Which is shorthand for "yarr! welcome, pirate friend!". A clear example of how legislative efforts sometimes backfire into more of the unwanted behavior, and of countercultural reactions to perceived threats to their way of being. -

From the basis of this, I feel as if it might be warranted to suggest that there might be more to the naming of wifi networks than one might initially think. That there might be more things to say if one but takes the time to invest them with discourse.

Who's up for it? Who's with me in thinking that wifi ethnography is a thing?

The theory of social media in practice

If you've seen the spoof on social media experts that the Onion recently made, then we share a certain thought space. If not, then by all means do go on and watch it. I'm going to refer to it later on, and it catches the general drift of a certain critique of social media experts that is all too common these days.

Go ahead. I'll wait until you return.

If you're more of a reader than a listener, then this article by Wasserman makes a fairly good job of explicating things in text form. Once again, I encourage you.

Are we on the same page? Good. Let's get down to business.

I do have to agree that most of what social media experts - both in terms of experts and "experts" - provide is old hat. Their ideas are, in fact, less new than one might imagine. The "experts" mostly copy found advice commonly occurring just about everywhere on the net these days, which may be curated in ever so efficient ways, but at the end of the day it's a slightly more advanced version of copy and paste. The experts, in their part, don't have anything new and original to say either.

This is where I will have to disagree with both the Onion and Wasserman. It's not that social media experts don't have anything to contribute to the world - on the contrary. It's just that just about everything they are saying was formulated back in the days of the ancient Greeks, and what the social media experts are doing is to apply the ancient wisdoms to the problems of today.

Not being new is not the same thing as not being useful.

Wasserman makes a case for the irrelevancy of social media expertise by pointing out a well known fact about consumers: they will crawl over broken glass in order to get a better deal. He may not have used those particular words, but a certain CEO of Ryan Air did. And as you might well know, the business model of Ryan Air is to make everything as difficult as possible for the consumer in order to make things cheaper. If anything can be outsourced to the consumer, it will be outsourced to the consumer - and for as long as the price is right, the consumers will remain consumers.

When it comes to a certain group of costumers, price is the one thing that matters. And, indeed, social media maneuvering won't make these people budge an inch in any one direction what so ever.

Enter Aristotle.

In his famous work on rhetoric, he goes on to define rhetoric as the art of finding the means of persuasion suitable to any situation. In some situations, these means are words and verbal actions. In others, it's a price tag.

Or, rephrased: sometimes, what you need is someone like the CEO of Ryan Air. Sometimes, a social media expert. Most times, you need both doing their separate things in parallel - the one making sure your business is competitive pricewise, the other making sure that those people who actually are affected by social media are affected in a positive way. So that both those with hard noses and those with sensitive browsers will take notice of you. And for the rest - well, if you can't make people pay attention, they're not going to pay anything else anyway.

As you can see, this is not a new insight. Aristotle has been around, so to speak, and while we may not want to take him at face value on all matters (things have changed somewhat over the last two thousand years), we do want to acknowledge that not everything is new under the sun. The rhetorical situation is still rhetorical, as it were.

Which does put those social media experts on the spot. If they don't provide anything new, what do they provide?

Mostly, something useful. Especially if an organization really don't know the first thing about being present on the internet, and needs someone to bootstrap them into existence. Even if what they are given is the most standardized and formulaic of unimaginative solutions, it's still way better than going about it blindly and hoping for the best. Sometimes, the most useful thing is also the least innovative.

Again, that difference between newness and usefulness makes itself known.

If there is to be made a case against social media experts - and, to be sure, the "experts" as well - then it is more fruitful to base it on the general lack of theoretical backing. There's a whole lot of running around in circles going on in social media circles, most of which could be avoided with a quick application of ancient Greeks. Yet the practitioners insist on reinventing wheels which the rest of the world has happily used for thousands of years.

I'm looking at you, dark social.

Social media experts need to be reminded that they are part of the same world as everything else, and that ancient wisdom proven through the ages has not simply disappeared only because internet phenomena such as lolcats has made an appearance. While there is much to be said about the workings of the discursive modes of production that enable lolcats to be a viable social strategy, these modes of discursive production were not invented by the internet, and the understanding of these should not be based on the assumption that they were.

In short, the whole notion of "it's all new, and the newer the better!" has to be replaced with something a tad bit more useful. Go back to basics, do your homework and read up on the Ancients. You'll be surprised about how much they really have to say about social media, once you really get to know them.

Like this.

The criminal mingling of DeLanda and Deleuze

I am now going to commit a crime. I am, moreover, going to commit it at you.

Congratulations. You are now on the recieving end of an act of filesharing. Enjoy!

News and old profits

The purpose of newspapers is to sell customers to the advertisers. The ad buyers buy ad space, and as a part of this purchase they expect the newspapers to do their outmost to make sure that as many people see these ads. This by making themselves readworthy, and by process of mass distribution transforming the ads into profits. You, the readers, are the product, sold to the advertisers. For profit.

This is what newspapers is about. This is the one thing they do as a channel of communication.

I suspect someone might want to make some objections to this. Objections such as that the newspapers constitute a watchdog function on the public sphere, that they inform the public about important current events in in business and politics, that local newspapers serve to keep geographical regions coherent by discussing local affairs, that they provide citizens with an arena for debate and dialogue -

One could raise quite a few objections to the reduction of newspapers to a purely economic function. One could even make a case that the purely economic functions are of secondary importance to the vital social, societal and political functions that newspapers provide.

I concede this point.

With that said, isn't it time that we start talking about file sharing in the same way, without constantly getting stuck in this economic reduction to absurdity?

Originally published June 7, 2012

Is theory useful?

If you come from the position that the function of a university is to produce people ready to make difficult things happen, then an answer to this question is very fast to imply itself. Theory is useful in so far as it produces usefulness, and above that it is either contingency planning or wasteful.

There's nothing wrong with having a clear telos. But, as Zizek is wont to point out - if the purpose of education is to produce people ready to solve predefined problems, then that is the death of both ideology and theory. If the overarching goal is usefulness, then the subtler points of reflection and perspective can be sacrificed without any loss. We know what to do, the only thing standing in our way is the lack of manpower to make it happen.

This might have been true if the world was threatened by something undeniably acute, like a huge asteroid approaching the Earth at terminal velocity. When survival hinges on one single factor, then focusing all attention to that one thing is a useful thing to do. There's really no need for theory - just look at the size of that thing! Now go help build the large ass gun that's going to save us all.

Spoiler alert: there's no huge asteroid approaching the Earth at terminal velocity.

Likewise, if the world is going to end, it's probably not going to be because of one single thing. It would rather happen because of the unexpected intermingling of a number of factors. Some of them obvious, some of them not. Most of them needing applied theory in order to be made sense of.

The thing about theory in the absence of huge asteroids is that one never really can tell if it's going to be useful or not. There's no if-then statements that can be made, other than the one that sounds the most useless of them all:

Given enough theory, people will act differently than they would have otherwise.

This goes for all kinds of theory. Rhetoric, comparative literature, political science, philosophy, sociology - the whole gamut of things one can know that are not directly tied to making something happen. You can learn it without at the same time learning to do any one thing in particular, and thus being disqualified from learning anything "useful" - yet you will also see the world in a new way, and approach it in new ways.

Is that useful?

You can paint yourself into all kinds of corners trying to make use out of sense. With enough theory, you will eventually tear down the fourth wall and realize that there is no asteroid, and that you therefore are free to do pretty much whatever you want without it having to be useful. That the world is larger than the scope of one singular task, and that the usefulness of a life is - as of yet - still to be determined.

Mark my words - and deal with them

Some time ago, I did something I am wont to do. I ranted on the Twitter. In the course of the ranting, the thought occurred to me that I could do shout outs to various random thinkers of the ages, making extremely bad jokes along the way.

If you've followed me for any length of time, you know this is my default mode. Get an idea, go for it, enjoy the bad jokes that results.

The result this time was #heythinker, with me giving a go at a whole range of thinkers I've read or read about during the course of my life.

Turns out there's quite a number of them. So quite, that I got reactions on it. Some smirks, some "okay, now you're just showing off", and some "hey, stop being elitist you serialtweeting prick."

Smirks I can do. Being called elitist - not so much.

I never got an answer to my followup questions as to where the elitism lies. It's not due to any attendance to expensive universities - living in the socialist utopia of Sweden, higher education is free. I don't make any claims to being smart, either - my general outlook on the world is that you know more than me. To a fault, at times. I just read a lot of books back in the days and can count on half-remembering the gist of what these people was about.

I suspect it has something to do with the use of these names being a marker for social class in and of itself. To commit the sin reflexively: it is what Bourdieu would call cultural capital, and displaying it publicly is akin to buying an expensive car and slowly walking it through the neighborhood, just to make sure that everyone notices that the car is indeed expensive and indeed yours.

(It is indeed possible to walk a car. If the guy on the sidewalk outwalks you, you're doing it right. If you get a parking ticket, you're doing it even more right.)

So, if I walked though your virtual neighborhood: sorry 'bout that. My bad.

But the thing is - I don't gain anything by pretending I didn't read all them books all those years ago, and you don't either.  Sure, it's not the most fun experience to see people throw around a name that means nothing to you, but everyone starts out that way. With enough Wikipedia time, you'll get the gist of it before anyone knows it.

Hey. With enough Wikipedia time, you'll eventually find out I'm not a smug bastard flouting my superiority after all. Rather, you'll find out that I'm just wrong about things. All the time.

I can live with being wrong. But only as long as you point it out to me.

Deal?