The Playstation Generation

A couple of weeks ago my Facebook page was defaced with a youtube video of the new Ghost Recon game's portrayal of American troops fighting a war in Peshawar, naturally I put on both beard and my shalwar kamis in a frenzy and made the decision to go outside and burn a few star spangled banners in a show of sporting appreciation. Okay so none of that really happened, but I was offended and for once I found myself siding (at least on the surface) with the resentful bearded fascists whom I needless to say tend to distance myself from. The youtube video itself became a troll fest with the "modern camp" versus the "barbaric anti-western camp".


One side seemed profoundly pleased that their city had been given the publicity it so clearly deserved in a game that people will play across the world, the other saw it as politically incorrect. I am not going to try to reconcile the two I'm merely going to tell you why the cool modern crowd is extremely disillusioned.


1) Peshawar has seen enough violence, the last thing anyone wants is for American troops to be fighting a war there, it is unlikely you will be able to empathize with me on this point unless you've actually lived through the worst period in the city's history. Taking the strained nature of Pak-US relations into account it is completely inappropriate for people to rejoice about a Peshawar being portrayed in such a light.


2) The Playstation Generation lacks remorse, when sent to war people who have grown up playing virtual representations of war see each kill as just another point in a deathmatch. Whether you choose to admit it or not children will grow up playing this game, one day they will join the army and they will be more than ready to invade Peshawar. To those of you who think this is conjecture. I'm sure you're all familiar with the famous collateral murder video (go watch it).


Yes it's JUST A GAME but games are political, the enemy is always dehumanized  and I don't appreciate the opinions of people who are so desperate to appear modern and liberated that they start celebrating when they see something that should upset them. On a side note the game is a clear gears of war clone they've even copied the needlessly disorienting crotch zooming camera when you move from cover to cover.

Os justi meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua ejus loquetur judicium.

So piracy is stealing right? Wrong! It's just another piece of Orwellian doublespeak that you've been brainwashed *ahem* I mean socialized into accepting. This isn't to say that I want to bitch-slap every poor soul who happens to read this with a painfully stiff hardback edition of the communist manifesto, I simply don't have the energy but what I will say is that the words Read in the name of your Lord who created you contain an implicit obligation not to read Twilight.

Say you go out and buy a loaf of bread (yes you're a boring hypothetical person and you often decide to buy things that reflect your own lack of character) you pay for it because at any given moment there are a limited number of loaves out there, in paying for your loaf you deprive a bunch of other hypothetical bread enthusiasts of their prize. You walk out of the store with your head held high because YOU alone are entitled to this loaf; you can now go home butter it, have sex with it, or put it in some sort of pretentious display cabinet. In any case the bread is no more, it is either in your stomach, censored, or covered in the fungus of your own bourgeois bread enthusiast tendencies. Wonderful!

Here's where things get complicated, the thing with data is, in all honesty it's made of zeros and ones, the mp3 you're listening to, the movie you're watching, this godforsaken blog they're all just zeros and ones. The thing with zeros and ones that makes them a bit different to bread is that they can be replicated infinitely at no cost whatsoever. You can refresh this page a million times and other people will still be able to see it, you can download as many mp3s as you want (they won't run out). So what we have in essence is an infinite supply in our world of limited loaves of bread and resource wars we have something that can be spread over the internet ( mankind's collective consciousness) for free! The net is truly vast and infinite.

"Hang on a second!"

Says the record company boss, "You've been paying me (way too much) to produce physical media for decades now, just because I'm as obsolete as the clichés I sell you doesn't mean I'm not going to lobby for intellectual property laws that create ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY".

But you're not going to be satisfied by such inane banter NO! You're going to leave your loaves of bread behind and call for pirates to be stopped because you care for artists and inventors those wonderful people who have over the years created things that have made your sad life easier. Except true art isn't something that people create for remuneration, the reason we get the same banal bullshit over and over, the reason Justin Bieber was born is because mainstream "art" is simply a cash grab. Companies know what people want or what they've been conditioned to want, and that's exactly what they give them. 

The internet is opening avenues for people to self publish and self produce and while a small subculture of online pirates can be tolerated anybody who dares shift the balance between creative individuals and their all encompassing production companies must be stopped. That's right they must be eliminated at all costs! Even if it means cooperating with governments all over the world to arrest some yacht owning dot com fraud in New Zealand. This is what happened to the fat bloke who owned Megaupload.