Games are microcosms. They are small, self-contained worlds wherein you as the player are free to roam. The limits on just how much you can roam varies from game to game, but in general there are several ways to get things done. Which one you choose at any particular time might depend on your mood, intention, level of roleplaying or, indeed, skill level.
You are never free to roam as you wish. No game is ever without limits, and if you keep at it for long enough you will encounter these limits. In some games, such as tic-tac-toe, the limits are brutally visible: the 3x3 grid contains everything that will ever be. In more complex games, the limits might not be as visible, but they are still there. And you will encounter them, given time.
As your skill level grows, you will gradually become more and more hemmed in by these limits. What can reasonably be done has most likely already been done, and the temptation to go for the impossible grows with unreasonable speed.
When confronted with this unreasonable impossibility, there are two ways to keep on gaming. The one way is to impose certain limitations on what one can and cannot do during gameplay, in order to increase the difficulty level. These limitations include such things as not using healing items, not saving, never being hurt, not killing anyone, collecting every single gold star whilst doing all these other things, and so on and so forth. The more you selfimpose, the harder it gets, and the more impressive it becomes once it's done.
The other way is to go in the opposite direction. Ditch any pretense of limitations and abuse the underlying game mechanics until they break. Squeeze every single possible bit of utility out of the rules, and unleash it upon the gameworld. Find the edge conditions that give you unlimited money, then use this money to conquer the world. Find the loophole that lets you get all the super items, then get two of them. Find out where rule one and rule two combined produce strange results, then base your whole game around abusing these results.
One day, the island nation of Ryukyu shall rule the earth.
Here's the thing, though. It is very possible to frame a game in such a way that those who takes delight in pushing the limits and abusing the mechanics are every so subtly trained in the art of thinking in very particular ways. The limits are not so much limits as roadmaps, and pushing the limits leads not to freedom but to a very predetermined endpoint: to becoming a subject who thinks in certain terms, values certain things and sees certain things as both possible and necessary to do. The game games you as much as the other way around.
The game will not tell you this, of course. It will only ever give you the rewards it is programmed to give you: extra skill points, extra achievements, fancier armor, lemons, whatever. Extra trinkets to keep you playing along, happy that your progression is on the right path.
Looking for the ways in which you as a gamer is gamed requires you to think outside the sandbox. It requires you to ponder such things as whether or not the game you're playing actually makes sense - a question that is surprisingly often overlooked. What kind of character are you playing? Is the implied narrative actually relevant to anything you do? Is there some sort of meta-fictional context that would help explain why things are the way they are? Why is the graphics the way they are, and are there references to other visual arts to be found? Could the game be different?
These are not easy questions. They are also not the kind of questions that can be answered using the vocabulary of gaming. Mega Man might be able to navigate the world using the two all-encompassing actions of jumping and shooting, but if jumping and shooting are the only things you as a human being are capable of performing, then you are deficient in more ways than you know.
You could of course impose limitations upon yourself. Refuse to read about art, politics, ideology, feminism, psychology, history or anything else, and steadfastly keep trotting along the predetermined path. Or you could game the game as it tries to game you, and find that there is more than meets the eye.
Your move, player one.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Psychoanalytical muffins
There's a lot of psychoanalysis about. As in, wherever you look, there it is. Mostly it ignores you, but sometimes it looks back at you, with an unreadable smile and knowing eyes.
It's uncomfortable that way.
Now, I imagine that many of you are reacting to these words in a similar fashion as an atheist would react to someone mentioning the bible. "It's nonsense" and unscientific and bullshit and all the rest of it. Which, to be brutal, is utterly beside the point. The point being that an idea that has had significant impact on culture, art, criticism and just about everything worth mentioning is worthy of being understood for the very reason that things don't make sense without it.
No disrespect to power dynamics and geopolitics, but the Thirty Years' War needs a portion of theology to be understood. (Which, also, warrants me to say this: do not respond to this with comments like "psychoanalysis is wrong". Do point out that I'm wrong about psychoanalysis, however.)
Thing is, it's mostly not understood. It's taken at a surface level and left there. Which leaves everything in a strange state of things, with biological family dynamics as the place where it's at. A not unimportant place, to be sure, but not the whole story. The family is the metaphor, but it won't carry if you throw out the baby with the bath water.
The pun is the point.
To recap some of the basics: the psyche consists of three parts, the id, the ego and the superego. The id is the primal urges we all know and love - eating, sleeping, fucking, appreciation of bad action movies. The ego is the "you", if you will, the thing that thinks and ponders and suffers soulcrushing anxiety and all that jazz. The superego is the internalized norms and values, and is the prime source of what we call "conscience".
Now, these three parts all interrelate in different ways. For instance: the id might want something, but the superego might insist on that something being Morally Wrong, leaving the ego in a delicate state of wanting the forbidden. Possible wanting it even more because it's forbidden. Thing is, no matter what the ego does, there's bound to be repercussions from the id and superego: if the ego gives in and indulges, the superego will act by affecting a bad conscience. If the ego abstains, the id will keep wanting the thing it wants, and won't let the ego forget it.
Life is suffering, as the saying goes.
The thing to ponder here is that none of these parts are inherently good or evil. One might assume that the id is evil, but it isn't - it doesn't have sufficient underlying intentionality for that. It just wants to eat a muffin because it tastes good, and that's the whole line of reasoning. It's a beast, but it's a simple beast. Conversely, the superego is not good just because it's associated with conscience. In fact, it's positively anal and sadistic in what it punishes the ego for - even the slightest thing can provoke it into a guilt trip worthy a Christian saint. It only ever wants the ego to follow the rules, even if these rules border on the ridiculous. Any deviation is punished, and any remorse is outsourced to the ego.
The ego, thus, is ever in a bind. And will be until death does the parts apart.
The dynamic between the parts works as thus: giving in to either the id or the superego won't give the ego any long term advantages. The ego will want another muffin soon after the first one is consumed, and the superego will become ever more fine-grained in what it considers to be adherence and deviation the more you allow it to dictate your moves. Giving in won't make them go away - it will only make them go further, give them incentive to keep going.
There are things to be said about Freud's use of the notion of energy. There's an economy to what gets energy and what doesn't, and there's always a limited amount of it. Some of it is seized by the id (GIMME DAT MUFFIN), some of it is appropriated by the superego (in order to punish you better), and some of it is wrested by the ego in an effort to withstand it all. Or, indeed, to do anything in need of doing. Depending on what has the most energy, and in what proportions, the ego has lesser or greater scope of manifesting its will.
Much to the chagrin of the id, a person cannot eat muffins all the time. Not for lack of wanting, but due to the brutality of social existence. There's things that has to be done, and no slack is given. There's also things that are forbidden to be done, and anyone wanting to do these things will have to find other outlets for this wish.
Freud calls this "sublimation". The most widely used example is the horny artist who only ever wants to have sex, but due to lack of sexhavers has a whole lot of pent-up energy, and uses this to paint works of art instead. The energy must flow, and if it can't flow directly it will have to find some indirect way. What blocks the direct way might be the superego, societal norms or literally anything - if there's a will, there's an indirect way of manifesting it.
It's at this stage the family comes in. Freud uses the Father, Mother and Child as metaphors for the things that shape the dynamic between the parts. What actually happens in reality might involve the family, but it might as well not - it's not the point. Father as rulemaker stands in for any particular thing that creates the rules the superego proposes; Mother as caretaker stands in for any particular thing that comforts and provides; and Child is a subtle pun, making us remember that no one is as mature as they'd like to pretend to be.
To be sure, one's family (in whatever form it happens to have taken) is an important aspect of an individual's history, and knowing about it helps putting everything else into context. But what actually happened isn't as important as that which continues to happen, and more specifically as how a person treats what they remember. Memory is not passive retrieval, but active processing, and there's bound to be subtle clues and cues in how a person chooses (or is dynamically forced) to relate personal events.
The same goes for dreams: what happens in the dream isn't important in and of itself, but the way a person tells it and how they interact with the dream stuff is - pardon the pun - telling.
There's no way to actually know what happened in family history or dreamspace. What a person says could very well all be lies and on-the-fly inspirational improvisation. How the person says it, however, especially over extended conversational sessions, is harder to fake. It reveals things about the internal dynamics, and how id and superego makes life hard for the ego.
This is, as a sidenote, somewhat related to Freud's insistence that people promptly pay for their therapy sessions. Not only as a way to keep afloat economically, but to keep the conversations on the level. It ensures a certain dynamic to the conversation, as it were.
As you might have gathered, there's a subtle distinction between theory and practice here. On the one hand, there's the theory (superego and all that). On the other hand, there's practice, as in what to do when one has a living, breathing and (hopefully) talking person in the room. It is quite possible to understand the one without having a clue about the other. Theory is not praxis, and there's a reason many practitioners chose to deviate from being pure Freudians.
As with all things humans do, someone is bound to find a better way to go about it. And wonder why others don't see why it is better.
Enter Lacan, who paradoxically moved away from Freud by returning to his writings. To make a long story very short, he had misgivings about psychoanalytic orthodoxy as it had developed institutionally, and sought to return to basics. Which, as you might imagine, didn't go as well as he'd think, and he went off doing his own thing. The same thing, but his own, nevertheless.
Which replaces id/ego/superego - familiar as they are - with the more nebulous real/imaginary/symbolic. It's still a triad, and in many ways the same triad. The Real being, at its most basic, the existing world, and a person's experience of it, unfiltered through language. The symbolic is this language, and also the ideas and ideologies and structures that exist within it. The imaginary, being an analogue to the ego, is the attempt to merge these two: the idiosyncratic synthesis of experience and language into something, anything, that makes sense.
To illustrate: MUFFINS TASTE GOOD. This is the unmediated experience of the world, #nofilter as it is sometimes called. Thing is, humans filter just about everything we do, and nothing is ever just what it is. Thus, the eating of the muffin translates into discourses about fitness, diets, health and what it means to be a self-disciplined person. The Real morphs through the Symbolic, and the ego/imaginary is left to make sense of the amorphous mess that is left over.
This is, incidentally, a case for reading philosophy: it makes for a better imaginary experience.
The imaginary, like the ego, is where it is at. The mumbling, jostling confusion of experience and discourse, and fragments of both comingling into a traumatic experience that can only be described as endured. The muffin tastes good, but there's a lot of buts, but there's also other things to think about, distractions, other symbolic structures to go about experiencing. A muffin is only a muffin, but there's a lot to think about before and after nomming it.
The symbolic makes sense. It is sensemaking, in a sense. It's the order of things, the ordered world that mere mortals can only hope to one day comprehend. We might compare it to a Platonic ideal, if only for the connotations that brings: there is a way things are supposed to be.
This returns to the subject as the experience of the Big Other. There is an idea of how things are supposed to be, and this idea is watching you trying to do that very thing, judging you. The Big Other knows what you are doing, and it knows the thoughts leading you to do what you're doing, judging all the way. You might pass with flying colors, or you might be left with a feeling that you didn't do enough - either way, judgment is passed.
Or, put another way: What would people say?
To exemplify: "real [category] don't eat muffins". You know it, and the big other knows you know it. Your relation to the muffin, and the eating of said muffin, is colored by this. Whether you eat it or not won't change this dynamic - you're still in a situation where you know it knows. But it will affect your approach to this category. Whatever it might be.
If you've ever felt you're not really a part of something, this is it. Especially if that something is "academia".
If you've read a book or three, you might recognize some of these ideas. There's any number of parallels to Foucault, Butler and other social writers of the 20th century. Ideas never spring from nowhere, and there's always someone else who has done it before. There will, indeed, always ever be. The letter always arrives.
I want to end this post by mentioning that I've written most of this from memory and sudden inexplicable inspiration, and have become ever more aware of just how much I've forgotten about all of this. Thing is - it makes more sense as a blog post than as a general memory, and is more useful as something written than as something remembered. I am all too aware that the Big Other has objections, but it will always have. And thus, the choice:
Do it anyway, or let myself be symbolically unrealed?
It's uncomfortable that way.Now, I imagine that many of you are reacting to these words in a similar fashion as an atheist would react to someone mentioning the bible. "It's nonsense" and unscientific and bullshit and all the rest of it. Which, to be brutal, is utterly beside the point. The point being that an idea that has had significant impact on culture, art, criticism and just about everything worth mentioning is worthy of being understood for the very reason that things don't make sense without it.
No disrespect to power dynamics and geopolitics, but the Thirty Years' War needs a portion of theology to be understood. (Which, also, warrants me to say this: do not respond to this with comments like "psychoanalysis is wrong". Do point out that I'm wrong about psychoanalysis, however.)
Thing is, it's mostly not understood. It's taken at a surface level and left there. Which leaves everything in a strange state of things, with biological family dynamics as the place where it's at. A not unimportant place, to be sure, but not the whole story. The family is the metaphor, but it won't carry if you throw out the baby with the bath water.
The pun is the point.
To recap some of the basics: the psyche consists of three parts, the id, the ego and the superego. The id is the primal urges we all know and love - eating, sleeping, fucking, appreciation of bad action movies. The ego is the "you", if you will, the thing that thinks and ponders and suffers soulcrushing anxiety and all that jazz. The superego is the internalized norms and values, and is the prime source of what we call "conscience".
Now, these three parts all interrelate in different ways. For instance: the id might want something, but the superego might insist on that something being Morally Wrong, leaving the ego in a delicate state of wanting the forbidden. Possible wanting it even more because it's forbidden. Thing is, no matter what the ego does, there's bound to be repercussions from the id and superego: if the ego gives in and indulges, the superego will act by affecting a bad conscience. If the ego abstains, the id will keep wanting the thing it wants, and won't let the ego forget it.
Life is suffering, as the saying goes.
The thing to ponder here is that none of these parts are inherently good or evil. One might assume that the id is evil, but it isn't - it doesn't have sufficient underlying intentionality for that. It just wants to eat a muffin because it tastes good, and that's the whole line of reasoning. It's a beast, but it's a simple beast. Conversely, the superego is not good just because it's associated with conscience. In fact, it's positively anal and sadistic in what it punishes the ego for - even the slightest thing can provoke it into a guilt trip worthy a Christian saint. It only ever wants the ego to follow the rules, even if these rules border on the ridiculous. Any deviation is punished, and any remorse is outsourced to the ego.
The ego, thus, is ever in a bind. And will be until death does the parts apart.
The dynamic between the parts works as thus: giving in to either the id or the superego won't give the ego any long term advantages. The ego will want another muffin soon after the first one is consumed, and the superego will become ever more fine-grained in what it considers to be adherence and deviation the more you allow it to dictate your moves. Giving in won't make them go away - it will only make them go further, give them incentive to keep going.
There are things to be said about Freud's use of the notion of energy. There's an economy to what gets energy and what doesn't, and there's always a limited amount of it. Some of it is seized by the id (GIMME DAT MUFFIN), some of it is appropriated by the superego (in order to punish you better), and some of it is wrested by the ego in an effort to withstand it all. Or, indeed, to do anything in need of doing. Depending on what has the most energy, and in what proportions, the ego has lesser or greater scope of manifesting its will.
Much to the chagrin of the id, a person cannot eat muffins all the time. Not for lack of wanting, but due to the brutality of social existence. There's things that has to be done, and no slack is given. There's also things that are forbidden to be done, and anyone wanting to do these things will have to find other outlets for this wish.
Freud calls this "sublimation". The most widely used example is the horny artist who only ever wants to have sex, but due to lack of sexhavers has a whole lot of pent-up energy, and uses this to paint works of art instead. The energy must flow, and if it can't flow directly it will have to find some indirect way. What blocks the direct way might be the superego, societal norms or literally anything - if there's a will, there's an indirect way of manifesting it.
It's at this stage the family comes in. Freud uses the Father, Mother and Child as metaphors for the things that shape the dynamic between the parts. What actually happens in reality might involve the family, but it might as well not - it's not the point. Father as rulemaker stands in for any particular thing that creates the rules the superego proposes; Mother as caretaker stands in for any particular thing that comforts and provides; and Child is a subtle pun, making us remember that no one is as mature as they'd like to pretend to be.To be sure, one's family (in whatever form it happens to have taken) is an important aspect of an individual's history, and knowing about it helps putting everything else into context. But what actually happened isn't as important as that which continues to happen, and more specifically as how a person treats what they remember. Memory is not passive retrieval, but active processing, and there's bound to be subtle clues and cues in how a person chooses (or is dynamically forced) to relate personal events.
The same goes for dreams: what happens in the dream isn't important in and of itself, but the way a person tells it and how they interact with the dream stuff is - pardon the pun - telling.
There's no way to actually know what happened in family history or dreamspace. What a person says could very well all be lies and on-the-fly inspirational improvisation. How the person says it, however, especially over extended conversational sessions, is harder to fake. It reveals things about the internal dynamics, and how id and superego makes life hard for the ego.
This is, as a sidenote, somewhat related to Freud's insistence that people promptly pay for their therapy sessions. Not only as a way to keep afloat economically, but to keep the conversations on the level. It ensures a certain dynamic to the conversation, as it were.
As you might have gathered, there's a subtle distinction between theory and practice here. On the one hand, there's the theory (superego and all that). On the other hand, there's practice, as in what to do when one has a living, breathing and (hopefully) talking person in the room. It is quite possible to understand the one without having a clue about the other. Theory is not praxis, and there's a reason many practitioners chose to deviate from being pure Freudians.
As with all things humans do, someone is bound to find a better way to go about it. And wonder why others don't see why it is better.
Enter Lacan, who paradoxically moved away from Freud by returning to his writings. To make a long story very short, he had misgivings about psychoanalytic orthodoxy as it had developed institutionally, and sought to return to basics. Which, as you might imagine, didn't go as well as he'd think, and he went off doing his own thing. The same thing, but his own, nevertheless.
Which replaces id/ego/superego - familiar as they are - with the more nebulous real/imaginary/symbolic. It's still a triad, and in many ways the same triad. The Real being, at its most basic, the existing world, and a person's experience of it, unfiltered through language. The symbolic is this language, and also the ideas and ideologies and structures that exist within it. The imaginary, being an analogue to the ego, is the attempt to merge these two: the idiosyncratic synthesis of experience and language into something, anything, that makes sense.
To illustrate: MUFFINS TASTE GOOD. This is the unmediated experience of the world, #nofilter as it is sometimes called. Thing is, humans filter just about everything we do, and nothing is ever just what it is. Thus, the eating of the muffin translates into discourses about fitness, diets, health and what it means to be a self-disciplined person. The Real morphs through the Symbolic, and the ego/imaginary is left to make sense of the amorphous mess that is left over.
This is, incidentally, a case for reading philosophy: it makes for a better imaginary experience.
The imaginary, like the ego, is where it is at. The mumbling, jostling confusion of experience and discourse, and fragments of both comingling into a traumatic experience that can only be described as endured. The muffin tastes good, but there's a lot of buts, but there's also other things to think about, distractions, other symbolic structures to go about experiencing. A muffin is only a muffin, but there's a lot to think about before and after nomming it.
The symbolic makes sense. It is sensemaking, in a sense. It's the order of things, the ordered world that mere mortals can only hope to one day comprehend. We might compare it to a Platonic ideal, if only for the connotations that brings: there is a way things are supposed to be.
This returns to the subject as the experience of the Big Other. There is an idea of how things are supposed to be, and this idea is watching you trying to do that very thing, judging you. The Big Other knows what you are doing, and it knows the thoughts leading you to do what you're doing, judging all the way. You might pass with flying colors, or you might be left with a feeling that you didn't do enough - either way, judgment is passed.
Or, put another way: What would people say?
To exemplify: "real [category] don't eat muffins". You know it, and the big other knows you know it. Your relation to the muffin, and the eating of said muffin, is colored by this. Whether you eat it or not won't change this dynamic - you're still in a situation where you know it knows. But it will affect your approach to this category. Whatever it might be.
If you've ever felt you're not really a part of something, this is it. Especially if that something is "academia".
If you've read a book or three, you might recognize some of these ideas. There's any number of parallels to Foucault, Butler and other social writers of the 20th century. Ideas never spring from nowhere, and there's always someone else who has done it before. There will, indeed, always ever be. The letter always arrives.
I want to end this post by mentioning that I've written most of this from memory and sudden inexplicable inspiration, and have become ever more aware of just how much I've forgotten about all of this. Thing is - it makes more sense as a blog post than as a general memory, and is more useful as something written than as something remembered. I am all too aware that the Big Other has objections, but it will always have. And thus, the choice:
Do it anyway, or let myself be symbolically unrealed?
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
New media, old class
One of the things I've written least about is that I'm brutally conservative. As in, I don't think things have changed all that much the last decades. Or, rather, things have not changed as much as they'd seem when looking at what people have said about how much things have changed.
Let's take an example: crowdfunding.
Now, I'm the first to say that it's all well and good that people can create alternative ways of financially supporting good things. There are too many good ideas not realized due to the lack of funding, and too many ideas are subverted by crony corporate funding. Getting away from that is unequivocally a good thing.
However. There's a distribution as to which things gets funded and which does not. And this distribution has striking similarities to old lines of class, gender, ethnicity and all that jazz.
The net result is not the abolition of these factors, as some cyberutopians have suggested, but rather a slight shift as to the conditions under which they operate. Which is visible not least in the case of Sarkeesian, who indeed got funding, but also a whole slew of other things to go along with it. Things that are not explained (away) by the net, nor caused by it. Merely amplified by it, moving along the path of same old same old.
We might also assume that not everyone will get a $55k potato salad.
Now, to reiterate: it is a good thing that crowdfunding exists. But there's virtue in not overselling just how much of a difference it will make. The new world is still the old world in many respects, and even more so in its lack of respects. -
Let's take an example: crowdfunding.
Now, I'm the first to say that it's all well and good that people can create alternative ways of financially supporting good things. There are too many good ideas not realized due to the lack of funding, and too many ideas are subverted by crony corporate funding. Getting away from that is unequivocally a good thing.
However. There's a distribution as to which things gets funded and which does not. And this distribution has striking similarities to old lines of class, gender, ethnicity and all that jazz.
The net result is not the abolition of these factors, as some cyberutopians have suggested, but rather a slight shift as to the conditions under which they operate. Which is visible not least in the case of Sarkeesian, who indeed got funding, but also a whole slew of other things to go along with it. Things that are not explained (away) by the net, nor caused by it. Merely amplified by it, moving along the path of same old same old.
We might also assume that not everyone will get a $55k potato salad.
Now, to reiterate: it is a good thing that crowdfunding exists. But there's virtue in not overselling just how much of a difference it will make. The new world is still the old world in many respects, and even more so in its lack of respects. -
Thursday, August 28, 2014
The blog post the trolls don't want you to read
You have met them. The trolls. The persistent trolls. The trolls that absolutely just have to talk. With you. Constantly. A lot. About everything.
They come in waves. Sometimes they are very active, and want to say a great many things as fast as possible. Sometimes, they seem to have forgotten all about you. But, like so many tax-related issues, their return is preordained.
They are also wavelike. As in, they say just about the same things every time they wash over you, in the same manner, with the same underlying patterns. Which is good, since we during their downtime can describe and predict how their next wave is going to turn out. As in, say, a blog post such as this.
This is not an attempt to out those who suffer from the condition of being trolls. It aims at being useful for them and those in their close vicinity. Partly as a kind of self-test - are any of these things applicable to things I'm doing? And as a kind of manual to those who are at the receiving end of a troll wave - how can it be contextualized and understood? And, lastly, as a kind of reference point - it is always good to be able to point somewhere and exclaim "look, you are so predictable that there's even a blog post written about you and what you're doing, read it!".
But enough ado. Let's roll.
1. They are functionally illiterate when it comes to things they don't agree with
It might seem mean to call them functionally illiterate. But the alternative - that they are literate but actively choose not to understand even the simplest of texts -would be even meaner. Let's exemplify this: feminism.
The Wikipedia article about feminism has this to say: "Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, cultural, and social rights for women." Which seems straightforward enough - an umbrella term for various movements that strive for equality in various ways. Not one thing, but many things, united by a general tendency to strive in the same overall direction.
Show this to a troll, and what they read is this: "Feminism is a unified movement whose enslaved and hive-minded minions want to kill all men and mankind as we know it, and establish a matriarchy where the Ur-Mother has absolute authority."
Should you attempt to kindly point out that the text does not support such a reading, you'll wish you didn't. One might assume that a quick look at the table of contents, with its explicit mention of all the various kinds of feminisms, would be sufficient for the task. It should be sufficient to everyone with a modicum of literacy - but, alas, the troll will only get mad for being talked back at. And thus commences the troll rage.
Whereby feminism (or, indeed, any other phenomenon whatsoever) continues to be regarded as a unified object. Even though basic literacy would suggest otherwise.
2. Those who happen to be literate don't know about libraries, or how they work
It's one of the strangest things about libraries. They are free, they are loaded with books, and anyone can use them. Literally. If you're interested in something, you can just stroll over there and peruse the books to your heart's content. It is as strange as it is marvelous.
Yet, for these people, it would seem that even the most accessible library is situated on the top of a large mountain. Figuratively. The trolls can walk around for years and years and say the most outrageous things, things they would stop saying if they took the time to read just one singular book on the subject. Whatever the subject.
Now, you might object that they are not interested enough to do such a thing. Thing is, in order to become the subject of this post, they'll have to be trolls, which must be said to be interested in the things they are trolling about. They are interested, but they are not able to combine their interest with the notion of a library.
This, sadly enough, makes literary and academic references meaningless to them. The mountain is insurmountable. The libraries are free and open, yet impossible to reach.
Which is a shame. One book would have sufficed. And the libraries are legion.
3. They know that you are wrong. About everything
Quite literally everything. There is no room for compromise. There is no common ground. You are wrong, and they will neither cease nor desist until you have confessed this. In public. Repeatedly.
It goes without saying that it is hard to dialogue your way to a mutual understanding and a sharing of common ground between you and them. No matter how receptive, conciliatory and understanding you try to be, they won't reciprocate. Their only tactic is aptly named "scorched earth". And the only ground good enough to scorch is yours.
According to them, you are always wrong. You are never right. About anything. Ever.
4. Details are always more important than context
As a result of 3, you will be wrong ever when you're right. An ordinary way to assure this outcome is to zoom in on some detail you might not be absolutely 100% confident about, and exploit this lack of completeness to the fullest extent. They will at length point out how wrong you are about this one minor detail, and then force you to admit that you were wrong about it (with or without your participation). They will then zoom out and apply this admission to your whole argument, and/or your whole person. Without mercy.
5. They have acute difficulties with rhetorical figures, such as synecdoches, exemplifications and enumerations
A synecdoche is an expression where the part gets to represent the whole. Such as when "the crown" is used to represent a monarchy and its institutions. One might assume that a reader would understand such shorthands. but alas - you are wrong! Either literally, in such a way that a monarch has other regalia (spires and suchlike), or even more literally, in such a way to suggest that the crown as a physical object does not have any authority in and of itself, and that you are both foolish and wrong to say such a thing.
Trying to provide examples of general phenomena is received the same way. Whatever example you provide is not read as an example, but as all examples, the entirety of the phenomena (and, indeed, of discussion). Which immediately proceeds into a fine-grained discussion about cases where the things you mentioned are in fact not examples of the phenomena in question. Or that it is a bad example (see 4).
One might think that mentioning a whole host of examples might disarm this tactic. But no, you are still wrong, and your examples are either incomplete (as in, you forgot something, and must now explain why), or one of the things you mentioned was wrong in some other way, and you must now explain why you were wrong in this regard. No further discussion will be allowed until this wrongness is resolved.
The common theme for all these examples is the inability or unwillingness to assume anything for the sake of argument. That would be giving you the benefit of the doubt, and that won't do, since you are undoubtedly wrong about everything. Whatever you say, however you say it.
To exemplify: the sky is not blue. It's azure.
6. They will read everything you say in the absolutely most belligerent way anyone can ever read anything
Let us say you write something about kittens. It includes cute pictures of kittens. It is all about how cute these kittens are. You mention at one point that you want a kitten, due to cuteness.
One might assume it impossible to read this belligerently. But in their eyes, it becomes a declaration of war. Something evil. The evilest thing they have seen in years. A declaration of war against the many things that are hunted and eaten by cats. You have just told the world how much you hate cute small mice that never hurt anyone. And you have additionally told them that you plan to use your own home to breed and train predators whose only reason for being is the extermination of cute small mice. And every other innocent being that cats are wont to hunt.
You are a threat to the ecosystem, and if you had your way you would flood your surroundings with cats. You are evil and must be stopped. Without delay.
This might seem far-fetched, but all this follows from 3. You are never right, ever. Not even about kittens. No matter how cute.
7. They will have no qualms ascribing you attributes and intentions as it suits them
Did you know that you had full knowledge of the situation and knew exactly what you did before you did what you did? Did you also know that you did it with full knowledge of exactly what would happen, and intended things to happen just as they happened? Did you know that you, unlike the rest of humanity, have an uncannily complete knowledge of how complicated systems interact in order to accomplish maximal harm to everyone involved, and actively strives to accomplish this very harm?
Probably not. But the trolls know. And whenever something goes wrong in your vicinity, this wrongness can easily be expanded according to 6. Suddenly, you have superhuman superpowers, but abuse them. Because you are wrong. In every way.
Should things go your way, on the other hand, these superpowers are nowhere to be seen. Strangely enough. Things went your way despite of you, not because of you. And things would have gone even better had you not been there. Because you are wrong even when you're right, no ifs or buts.
8. They will point out that you abuse your position
It doesn't really matter what position it is. Or if it is a formal or informal one. If formal, then there's always something. If informal, then you're a bad role model. It doesn't really matter what you actually do - it becomes wrong, regardless. Whoever you are, this will be used against you.
9. They think you focus on the wrong things
But why are you not writing about this? Or this? Or this? And why nothing about this? But what about this?
That the answer is that you are a human being with limited amounts of time, energy and possibility to communicate coherently doesn't matter. The world is huge, and there's always lots and lots of other things than the one that you are actually doing that is both important and in need of doing. It doesn't help that no matter how thoroughly you do something, there will always be something you missed, some elaboration you didn't do.
There's always more. And the trolls will ever always remind you that it's your fault that you didn't manage to save the entire world all by yourself.
10. They think you have more important things to do
A variation of 9. If you ever do something that is not completely focused on the most important goal - something like, say, having fun - the trolls will immediately complain that you have more important things to do. You are after all a human being with limited amounts of time, energy and possibility to communicate coherently, and should prioritize accordingly. As in, doing what's important rather what isn't.
The words "vacation" or "rest" or "recuperation" means nothing. There are more important things to do.
11. They will forget the good things you've done.
See 3. If it can't be ignored, see 7.
12. Nothing from your past is too old to be resurrected, as long as it is bad. Which it is
A popular pastime among trolls is to dig up dirt on you from times long long ago. So long ago that it is wholeheartedly behind you, either by process of forgetting or convalescence. So long ago that it really doesn't matter any more, other than when someone actively remind you of it.
Guess which troll will actively remind you of it. Do not guess whether they will add their own spin to it or not. They will.
13. They think you were better back in the olden days, before you deteriorated
If you've been around for a while, then people have known you for a while. And since people grow and change, you grow and change. You learn things, realize your mistakes, and generally get better at what you do. Such is the human condition.
Change can also be read as deterioration. And when someone wants to read you in a belligerent manner, the words change and deterioration become synonymous. You haven't learnt anything, you've only gotten worse. You could become a better person if you turned back time and became your own self again. Maybe. Unless it's too late for that.
The people saying this are your biggest fans. They never tire of reminding you of it.
14. They agree, but
But they don't. Since you're wrong. They won't put it in those terms, though. They will instead put it in such a way that they agree with some minor thing, and they proceed to but everything else into a discursive pulp. Without any possibility of a common ground. It might seem like an indirect approach, but you'll know it when you see it. Such as when republicans agree with democrats, and then proceed to say they should become republicans instead.
15. They think you do too much
Congratulations, you made it all the way to the end! May the trolls fear to tread under the bridges you frequent!
Originally published May 1, 2014
They come in waves. Sometimes they are very active, and want to say a great many things as fast as possible. Sometimes, they seem to have forgotten all about you. But, like so many tax-related issues, their return is preordained.
They are also wavelike. As in, they say just about the same things every time they wash over you, in the same manner, with the same underlying patterns. Which is good, since we during their downtime can describe and predict how their next wave is going to turn out. As in, say, a blog post such as this.This is not an attempt to out those who suffer from the condition of being trolls. It aims at being useful for them and those in their close vicinity. Partly as a kind of self-test - are any of these things applicable to things I'm doing? And as a kind of manual to those who are at the receiving end of a troll wave - how can it be contextualized and understood? And, lastly, as a kind of reference point - it is always good to be able to point somewhere and exclaim "look, you are so predictable that there's even a blog post written about you and what you're doing, read it!".
But enough ado. Let's roll.
1. They are functionally illiterate when it comes to things they don't agree with
It might seem mean to call them functionally illiterate. But the alternative - that they are literate but actively choose not to understand even the simplest of texts -would be even meaner. Let's exemplify this: feminism.
The Wikipedia article about feminism has this to say: "Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, cultural, and social rights for women." Which seems straightforward enough - an umbrella term for various movements that strive for equality in various ways. Not one thing, but many things, united by a general tendency to strive in the same overall direction.
Show this to a troll, and what they read is this: "Feminism is a unified movement whose enslaved and hive-minded minions want to kill all men and mankind as we know it, and establish a matriarchy where the Ur-Mother has absolute authority."
Should you attempt to kindly point out that the text does not support such a reading, you'll wish you didn't. One might assume that a quick look at the table of contents, with its explicit mention of all the various kinds of feminisms, would be sufficient for the task. It should be sufficient to everyone with a modicum of literacy - but, alas, the troll will only get mad for being talked back at. And thus commences the troll rage.
Whereby feminism (or, indeed, any other phenomenon whatsoever) continues to be regarded as a unified object. Even though basic literacy would suggest otherwise.
2. Those who happen to be literate don't know about libraries, or how they work
It's one of the strangest things about libraries. They are free, they are loaded with books, and anyone can use them. Literally. If you're interested in something, you can just stroll over there and peruse the books to your heart's content. It is as strange as it is marvelous.
Yet, for these people, it would seem that even the most accessible library is situated on the top of a large mountain. Figuratively. The trolls can walk around for years and years and say the most outrageous things, things they would stop saying if they took the time to read just one singular book on the subject. Whatever the subject.
Now, you might object that they are not interested enough to do such a thing. Thing is, in order to become the subject of this post, they'll have to be trolls, which must be said to be interested in the things they are trolling about. They are interested, but they are not able to combine their interest with the notion of a library.
This, sadly enough, makes literary and academic references meaningless to them. The mountain is insurmountable. The libraries are free and open, yet impossible to reach.
Which is a shame. One book would have sufficed. And the libraries are legion.
3. They know that you are wrong. About everything
Quite literally everything. There is no room for compromise. There is no common ground. You are wrong, and they will neither cease nor desist until you have confessed this. In public. Repeatedly.
It goes without saying that it is hard to dialogue your way to a mutual understanding and a sharing of common ground between you and them. No matter how receptive, conciliatory and understanding you try to be, they won't reciprocate. Their only tactic is aptly named "scorched earth". And the only ground good enough to scorch is yours.
According to them, you are always wrong. You are never right. About anything. Ever.
4. Details are always more important than context
As a result of 3, you will be wrong ever when you're right. An ordinary way to assure this outcome is to zoom in on some detail you might not be absolutely 100% confident about, and exploit this lack of completeness to the fullest extent. They will at length point out how wrong you are about this one minor detail, and then force you to admit that you were wrong about it (with or without your participation). They will then zoom out and apply this admission to your whole argument, and/or your whole person. Without mercy.
5. They have acute difficulties with rhetorical figures, such as synecdoches, exemplifications and enumerations
A synecdoche is an expression where the part gets to represent the whole. Such as when "the crown" is used to represent a monarchy and its institutions. One might assume that a reader would understand such shorthands. but alas - you are wrong! Either literally, in such a way that a monarch has other regalia (spires and suchlike), or even more literally, in such a way to suggest that the crown as a physical object does not have any authority in and of itself, and that you are both foolish and wrong to say such a thing.
Trying to provide examples of general phenomena is received the same way. Whatever example you provide is not read as an example, but as all examples, the entirety of the phenomena (and, indeed, of discussion). Which immediately proceeds into a fine-grained discussion about cases where the things you mentioned are in fact not examples of the phenomena in question. Or that it is a bad example (see 4).
One might think that mentioning a whole host of examples might disarm this tactic. But no, you are still wrong, and your examples are either incomplete (as in, you forgot something, and must now explain why), or one of the things you mentioned was wrong in some other way, and you must now explain why you were wrong in this regard. No further discussion will be allowed until this wrongness is resolved.
The common theme for all these examples is the inability or unwillingness to assume anything for the sake of argument. That would be giving you the benefit of the doubt, and that won't do, since you are undoubtedly wrong about everything. Whatever you say, however you say it.
To exemplify: the sky is not blue. It's azure.
6. They will read everything you say in the absolutely most belligerent way anyone can ever read anything
Let us say you write something about kittens. It includes cute pictures of kittens. It is all about how cute these kittens are. You mention at one point that you want a kitten, due to cuteness.
One might assume it impossible to read this belligerently. But in their eyes, it becomes a declaration of war. Something evil. The evilest thing they have seen in years. A declaration of war against the many things that are hunted and eaten by cats. You have just told the world how much you hate cute small mice that never hurt anyone. And you have additionally told them that you plan to use your own home to breed and train predators whose only reason for being is the extermination of cute small mice. And every other innocent being that cats are wont to hunt.
You are a threat to the ecosystem, and if you had your way you would flood your surroundings with cats. You are evil and must be stopped. Without delay.
This might seem far-fetched, but all this follows from 3. You are never right, ever. Not even about kittens. No matter how cute.
7. They will have no qualms ascribing you attributes and intentions as it suits them
Did you know that you had full knowledge of the situation and knew exactly what you did before you did what you did? Did you also know that you did it with full knowledge of exactly what would happen, and intended things to happen just as they happened? Did you know that you, unlike the rest of humanity, have an uncannily complete knowledge of how complicated systems interact in order to accomplish maximal harm to everyone involved, and actively strives to accomplish this very harm?
Probably not. But the trolls know. And whenever something goes wrong in your vicinity, this wrongness can easily be expanded according to 6. Suddenly, you have superhuman superpowers, but abuse them. Because you are wrong. In every way.
Should things go your way, on the other hand, these superpowers are nowhere to be seen. Strangely enough. Things went your way despite of you, not because of you. And things would have gone even better had you not been there. Because you are wrong even when you're right, no ifs or buts.
8. They will point out that you abuse your position
It doesn't really matter what position it is. Or if it is a formal or informal one. If formal, then there's always something. If informal, then you're a bad role model. It doesn't really matter what you actually do - it becomes wrong, regardless. Whoever you are, this will be used against you.
9. They think you focus on the wrong things
But why are you not writing about this? Or this? Or this? And why nothing about this? But what about this?
That the answer is that you are a human being with limited amounts of time, energy and possibility to communicate coherently doesn't matter. The world is huge, and there's always lots and lots of other things than the one that you are actually doing that is both important and in need of doing. It doesn't help that no matter how thoroughly you do something, there will always be something you missed, some elaboration you didn't do.
There's always more. And the trolls will ever always remind you that it's your fault that you didn't manage to save the entire world all by yourself.
10. They think you have more important things to do
A variation of 9. If you ever do something that is not completely focused on the most important goal - something like, say, having fun - the trolls will immediately complain that you have more important things to do. You are after all a human being with limited amounts of time, energy and possibility to communicate coherently, and should prioritize accordingly. As in, doing what's important rather what isn't.
The words "vacation" or "rest" or "recuperation" means nothing. There are more important things to do.
11. They will forget the good things you've done.
See 3. If it can't be ignored, see 7.
12. Nothing from your past is too old to be resurrected, as long as it is bad. Which it is
A popular pastime among trolls is to dig up dirt on you from times long long ago. So long ago that it is wholeheartedly behind you, either by process of forgetting or convalescence. So long ago that it really doesn't matter any more, other than when someone actively remind you of it.
Guess which troll will actively remind you of it. Do not guess whether they will add their own spin to it or not. They will.
13. They think you were better back in the olden days, before you deteriorated
If you've been around for a while, then people have known you for a while. And since people grow and change, you grow and change. You learn things, realize your mistakes, and generally get better at what you do. Such is the human condition.
Change can also be read as deterioration. And when someone wants to read you in a belligerent manner, the words change and deterioration become synonymous. You haven't learnt anything, you've only gotten worse. You could become a better person if you turned back time and became your own self again. Maybe. Unless it's too late for that.
The people saying this are your biggest fans. They never tire of reminding you of it.
14. They agree, but
But they don't. Since you're wrong. They won't put it in those terms, though. They will instead put it in such a way that they agree with some minor thing, and they proceed to but everything else into a discursive pulp. Without any possibility of a common ground. It might seem like an indirect approach, but you'll know it when you see it. Such as when republicans agree with democrats, and then proceed to say they should become republicans instead.
15. They think you do too much
Congratulations, you made it all the way to the end! May the trolls fear to tread under the bridges you frequent!
Originally published May 1, 2014
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Boombox politics
Politics is a game of possibilities. It's more about what someone might say or is likely to have said, than what they're actually saying. Even more so, it's about what people can say without losing face.
As the ancient saying goes: it is very possible to paint oneself into a corner.
This might all sound fancy and highbrow, but it works like this: a politician can't say that it would be a good idea to slaughter every existing baby seals and burn their baby fat in enormous bonfires. Somewhere between these bonfires and the statement that kittens are cute, there's a boundary between proper and improper. It's all about keeping oneself on the right side of this boundary.
Another limit to what one can say is what has been said before. If your position for a hundred years has been that lowered taxes are the best thing since politics was invented, it's a hard sell to suddenly propose higher taxes. There are expectations to fulfill. Being true to your (public) self is one of them.
Between what is proper to say and what is expected to be said, there's what's possible to say. You gotta be true to your public self, and you gotta avoid slaughtering baby seals.
This range of possibilities is rather limited. It is, to a certain extent, possible to predict what's going to be said, and it takes considerable time to widen the scope of possibilities. Which is good for voters (since they know, to a certain extent, what they can expect), and for the working environment of those doing the communicating (being creative at all times takes its toll, and that cheat sheet works wonders). Continuity is predictability.
But.
This range of possibilities also contains things that one would rather prefer not to say. They conform to what has been said before, they are not about baby seals, but they are uncomfortable. Since they are things one very well might say, and are thus very hard to backpedal. (There's that famous corner again.)
The Yes Men are experts at exploiting these possibilities. They act as if they speak for organizations with reputations of being less than saintly in their actions, and say things that these organizations would never say on their own. But very well could say, and thus cannot easily backpedal from.
Such as when they pretended to be Dow Chemical (of Bhopal chemical spill fame), and proclaimed that the company would provide substantial aid to the hundreds of thousands of people afflicted by the accident. Which was cause for rejoice when the word got out, and cause for anger when the real Dow backpedaled by saying that they were, in fact, not going to provide any aid at all.
Politics is more about what's possible to say, than about what's actually said.
Which takes us to the real subject of this post. The latest, mostest and everest bid from the (Swedish) Moderate party. They pulled no punches and spared no efforts when it came to this one. They went all in, with a big
BOOM
It's a stroke of genius. They have expanded their range of possibilities enormously. There's almost nothing they can't say after this. All they ever have to do is say
BOOM
followed by whatever. Whatever the subject, wherever they are, whenever something needs to be said.
But they can't say everything. They will, for example, have a hard time time insisting that they are more fit to rule than the opposition, and that they are the Serious Alternative. Because boom. [The picture says: BOOM! Our opponents will actively seek to sabotage our defensive capabilities if they win. We rule.] And it's hard to backpedal from this, just like it was hard for Dow to backpedal with a rhetorical "eh, guys, we were just kidding."
But. Being a pirate, I cannot but offer to help them along. Thus, you are very likely watching this very large, very inspired picture, which was made possible only because of their boomboxing politics:
Originally published August 14, 2014
As the ancient saying goes: it is very possible to paint oneself into a corner.
This might all sound fancy and highbrow, but it works like this: a politician can't say that it would be a good idea to slaughter every existing baby seals and burn their baby fat in enormous bonfires. Somewhere between these bonfires and the statement that kittens are cute, there's a boundary between proper and improper. It's all about keeping oneself on the right side of this boundary.
Another limit to what one can say is what has been said before. If your position for a hundred years has been that lowered taxes are the best thing since politics was invented, it's a hard sell to suddenly propose higher taxes. There are expectations to fulfill. Being true to your (public) self is one of them.
Between what is proper to say and what is expected to be said, there's what's possible to say. You gotta be true to your public self, and you gotta avoid slaughtering baby seals.
This range of possibilities is rather limited. It is, to a certain extent, possible to predict what's going to be said, and it takes considerable time to widen the scope of possibilities. Which is good for voters (since they know, to a certain extent, what they can expect), and for the working environment of those doing the communicating (being creative at all times takes its toll, and that cheat sheet works wonders). Continuity is predictability.
But.
This range of possibilities also contains things that one would rather prefer not to say. They conform to what has been said before, they are not about baby seals, but they are uncomfortable. Since they are things one very well might say, and are thus very hard to backpedal. (There's that famous corner again.)
The Yes Men are experts at exploiting these possibilities. They act as if they speak for organizations with reputations of being less than saintly in their actions, and say things that these organizations would never say on their own. But very well could say, and thus cannot easily backpedal from.
Such as when they pretended to be Dow Chemical (of Bhopal chemical spill fame), and proclaimed that the company would provide substantial aid to the hundreds of thousands of people afflicted by the accident. Which was cause for rejoice when the word got out, and cause for anger when the real Dow backpedaled by saying that they were, in fact, not going to provide any aid at all.
Politics is more about what's possible to say, than about what's actually said.Which takes us to the real subject of this post. The latest, mostest and everest bid from the (Swedish) Moderate party. They pulled no punches and spared no efforts when it came to this one. They went all in, with a big
BOOM
It's a stroke of genius. They have expanded their range of possibilities enormously. There's almost nothing they can't say after this. All they ever have to do is say
BOOM
followed by whatever. Whatever the subject, wherever they are, whenever something needs to be said.
But they can't say everything. They will, for example, have a hard time time insisting that they are more fit to rule than the opposition, and that they are the Serious Alternative. Because boom. [The picture says: BOOM! Our opponents will actively seek to sabotage our defensive capabilities if they win. We rule.] And it's hard to backpedal from this, just like it was hard for Dow to backpedal with a rhetorical "eh, guys, we were just kidding."
But. Being a pirate, I cannot but offer to help them along. Thus, you are very likely watching this very large, very inspired picture, which was made possible only because of their boomboxing politics:
Originally published August 14, 2014
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
The biggest leak
Sometimes, I'm asked about what I think about Assange. Julian Assange. To avoid any confusion on the subject.
Let me make myself as clear as possible, without any preambling or disclaiming:
Let him rot.
In the grander scheme of things, what matters is the possibility of people whistleblowing again. Not that any one singular person is able to whistleblow, but the institutional possibility of anyone at all to do it again.
It's nothing personal. In fact, it is the explicit opposite of personal.
Let's reverse it. Let's make it personal. What if there was only one hero? What if there's only one person (or a few persons) that possess the ability to get information moving? What if our hope lives and dies with a defined cast of characters?
Then the defenders of the status quo have an easy task ahead of them. Just find these people and make them disappear. All close up and personal.
Game over.
Thing is, though, that it isn't personal. It's the opposite. Anyone can become a whistleblower. It's not a ting based on virtue and predestination, but of the institutional order of things. If one whistleblower disappears, there's thousands more, by virtue of how organizations need to document their actions and reactions. Documents that can, indeed, be leaked. By anyone.
Game on.
Let me make myself as clear as possible, without any preambling or disclaiming:
Let him rot.
In the grander scheme of things, what matters is the possibility of people whistleblowing again. Not that any one singular person is able to whistleblow, but the institutional possibility of anyone at all to do it again.
It's nothing personal. In fact, it is the explicit opposite of personal.
Let's reverse it. Let's make it personal. What if there was only one hero? What if there's only one person (or a few persons) that possess the ability to get information moving? What if our hope lives and dies with a defined cast of characters?
Then the defenders of the status quo have an easy task ahead of them. Just find these people and make them disappear. All close up and personal.
Game over.
Thing is, though, that it isn't personal. It's the opposite. Anyone can become a whistleblower. It's not a ting based on virtue and predestination, but of the institutional order of things. If one whistleblower disappears, there's thousands more, by virtue of how organizations need to document their actions and reactions. Documents that can, indeed, be leaked. By anyone.
Game on.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Let those who are without sin buy the first debt
Debt has become a strange thing these last few decades. While the concept of debt is as old as social relations themselves, the new conception of debt isn't. And it is as new as it is strange.
It used to be a rather straightforward thing. Someone gave you a sum of money, and until you returned it (and a little extra for the hassle), you were in debt. For the longest time, this was the gist of it. A relation where one part owed the other some amount of money. With the implicit social understanding that this amount should be returned sooner rather than later.
A two-party system, if you will.
Then it expanded into a three-party system. As capitalism became a thing, and as regular people were expected to buy ever more expensive things, a system arose for the facilitation of purchases where the buyer couldn't actually afford the thing sold. Which might sound strange, until you remember that houses are both expensive and rather useless if no one actually lives in them.
Thus, home mortgaging arose.
Now, people had bought houses since the dawn of buying and houses. What happened (mostly in the US, but also elsewhere) was that the notion of owning your home became a propaganda hit. Everyone should own their place of residence, the proclamation went, and this sparked a great surge in market demand. The demand was, in fact, greater than the amount of people who could actually afford to buy.
Which, to be sure, is good if you want to sell the one singular house. But everyone wanted to buy one, and soon the supply of people who had enough money to buy one outright diminished. And it takes a long time to earn such amounts of money with honest work. Longer than anyone - buyers and sellers both - had the patience to wait. Especially the sellers - unsold homes are the opposite of profitable.
Thus, the three party debt system.
The one part is the buyer. The other is the seller. The third a bank. The bank lends the amount of money required to buy the house to the buyer, who then buys the house. The seller gets the money, and the buyer is indebted. Not to the seller, but to the bank.
The advantage of this is that it speeds up the buying/selling process. Profits happen faster for those who sell, and housing happens faster for those who buy. The latter will, of course, have to pay off this debt over time, but they will at least have somewhere to live during the process.
This does two things. First, it speeds up the rate of consumption. Buy now, pay later! - whatever the bought thing might be, and how long "later" might be.
Second, it transforms debt from a social to a legal relation. It's still debt, but it's also something stranger than it used to be. You still have to pay it, but you're not paying it to someone. You're paying it to something. Mostly a bank, but it might be hard to tell at times.
Being (re)paid a sum of money each month is a stable way to make a profit. Stable, but slow, and predictable. And being predictably slow is something you do not want to be these days. So banks got their institutional thinking caps on and started to ponder - how can we speed up the moneymaking process, and thus avoid being predictable, slow and boring?
At some point, the notion of selling the debts emerged. There might, after all, be someone else out there who wanted slow predictable, and if they could be persuaded to buy these debts from us, why not? We might not get as much money, but we'll get more money to use now, and more money now means faster profits - which is the same thing as more profits.
Thus, there are mortgages for sale. Buy now, payments later!
No longer do we see the three-party system we've grown used to, but rather a confusing polypoly party system where it can actually be quite tricky to find out just who you're actually paying your debt to. It might be the bank you once went to to get a loan, but it might also be someone or something else entirely.
Again, it's not a social relation. It's a legal relation. Which enables you, with a bit of bureaucratic legwork, to do something very strange: to buy your own debt.
There might be some implicit social understanding that frowns upon this maneuver. Something about the inherent value of paying one's debts. But, and this might sound strange:
Why not?
It used to be a rather straightforward thing. Someone gave you a sum of money, and until you returned it (and a little extra for the hassle), you were in debt. For the longest time, this was the gist of it. A relation where one part owed the other some amount of money. With the implicit social understanding that this amount should be returned sooner rather than later.
A two-party system, if you will.
Then it expanded into a three-party system. As capitalism became a thing, and as regular people were expected to buy ever more expensive things, a system arose for the facilitation of purchases where the buyer couldn't actually afford the thing sold. Which might sound strange, until you remember that houses are both expensive and rather useless if no one actually lives in them.
Thus, home mortgaging arose.
Now, people had bought houses since the dawn of buying and houses. What happened (mostly in the US, but also elsewhere) was that the notion of owning your home became a propaganda hit. Everyone should own their place of residence, the proclamation went, and this sparked a great surge in market demand. The demand was, in fact, greater than the amount of people who could actually afford to buy.
Which, to be sure, is good if you want to sell the one singular house. But everyone wanted to buy one, and soon the supply of people who had enough money to buy one outright diminished. And it takes a long time to earn such amounts of money with honest work. Longer than anyone - buyers and sellers both - had the patience to wait. Especially the sellers - unsold homes are the opposite of profitable.
Thus, the three party debt system.
The one part is the buyer. The other is the seller. The third a bank. The bank lends the amount of money required to buy the house to the buyer, who then buys the house. The seller gets the money, and the buyer is indebted. Not to the seller, but to the bank.
The advantage of this is that it speeds up the buying/selling process. Profits happen faster for those who sell, and housing happens faster for those who buy. The latter will, of course, have to pay off this debt over time, but they will at least have somewhere to live during the process.
This does two things. First, it speeds up the rate of consumption. Buy now, pay later! - whatever the bought thing might be, and how long "later" might be.
Second, it transforms debt from a social to a legal relation. It's still debt, but it's also something stranger than it used to be. You still have to pay it, but you're not paying it to someone. You're paying it to something. Mostly a bank, but it might be hard to tell at times.
Being (re)paid a sum of money each month is a stable way to make a profit. Stable, but slow, and predictable. And being predictably slow is something you do not want to be these days. So banks got their institutional thinking caps on and started to ponder - how can we speed up the moneymaking process, and thus avoid being predictable, slow and boring?
At some point, the notion of selling the debts emerged. There might, after all, be someone else out there who wanted slow predictable, and if they could be persuaded to buy these debts from us, why not? We might not get as much money, but we'll get more money to use now, and more money now means faster profits - which is the same thing as more profits.
Thus, there are mortgages for sale. Buy now, payments later!
No longer do we see the three-party system we've grown used to, but rather a confusing polypoly party system where it can actually be quite tricky to find out just who you're actually paying your debt to. It might be the bank you once went to to get a loan, but it might also be someone or something else entirely.
Again, it's not a social relation. It's a legal relation. Which enables you, with a bit of bureaucratic legwork, to do something very strange: to buy your own debt.
There might be some implicit social understanding that frowns upon this maneuver. Something about the inherent value of paying one's debts. But, and this might sound strange:
Why not?
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