Let It Snow(den), Let it Snow(den), Let it Snow(den)

Holiday greetings from Santa Marx, Santa Adorno and Santa Susan

Snowden delivers a timely holiday message.

Also, the children of Syria have this message.

Criminalizing the Planet, II

Well, the plutocrats have struck again. Myriads of videogame play-throughs are being taken down from Youtube due to a recent copyright crackdown. Many of these play-throughs are monetized, meaning the commentator gets a small payment in return for attracting a large audience. This is a reasonably fair exchange, since creating quality videogame commentaries which will attract and maintain a large audience is hard work. (Don't believe me? Just try it sometime.) The videogame company isn't hurt by this, because play-throughs are free advertising and help to sell more games.

But now a flood of copyright claims have basically shut down all the major commentators. Commentator GhostRobo explains the details here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaJF0-BkXRg
Reviewer Angry Joe has also weighed in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQfHdasuWtI
Also, see Darksyde Phil's daily coverage of the entire fiasco (the link is to day 3): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctoniQ7Y-C4

As you might expect, the fan and player communities are absolutely furious about all this. What makes the corporate greed-grab especially despicable is the fact that such tiny amounts of money are involved. Even the most prolific Youtube posters don't make more than a couple thousand dollars per month. It'll pay your rent, but not much more than that.

To their credit, many videogame companies have publicly stated they will never prosecute players for uploading play-throughs (the honor roll includes super-heavyweights Mojang, Ubisoft, Capcom, Naughty Dog, Deep Silver, and Blizzard). But it seems others, who shall remain nameless for the time being, have chosen to be greedheads.

Two years ago, none of this would have mattered. One year ago, only a few game geeks would have cared. But today, there are literally hundreds of millions of videogame fans who are beginning to discover that neoliberalism is a jail cell -- and that the time has come to break down the walls.

Updated December 13: Folks have assembled a helpful list showing which developers are fan-friendly and which are not. Please patronize the developers listed as YES on the list, and help shame the remaining holdouts (including one very large publisher who should really know better) into doing the right thing:

http://letsplaylist.wikia.com/wiki/%22Let%27s_Play%22-friendly_developers_Wiki

Yes, the Neoliberals Are Still Criminalizing the World

Way too busy, but an important story: Wikileaks and the fine folks at the EFF uncover the mainstream media's attempt to criminalize the Entire. Freaking. Planet. Not exaggerating - read it and don't weep, resist.


Neoliberalism wants a world of 7 billion slaves, owned by 700 billionaires. Not even the doomed, demented Assadists could come up with something this evil.

Personally, I've had it with every single mainstream media oligopoly - radio, TV, film, and console videogames, they're all pond scum. Nothing but a bunch of democracy-wrecking, plutocrat-enriching, culture-destroying pigopolist vermin. From now on, it's Steambox and open source for me.

Paging Austin

In my former hometown, Alexis Tsipra explains the battle against the europlutocrats. Way too busy to post more.

Sic Transit Caribbeanna

Been busy with a move to Miami. Lots of projects are cooking, texts and media are on the way.

Geopolitics: please donate to Amal Project and Maram Foundation. Follow Racan to keep up with the Syrian people's epic struggle against the twin monsters of Assadist state fascism (slowly being defeated) and jihadist neo-fascism (still a minority of the anti-Assad opposition, but urgently needs to be confronted and defeated).

In other news, Russell Brand nails neoliberalism to the floor.

In aesthetics, the real Arab Spring begins -- mesmerizing works from women artists around the Arab World.

Jail the Thieves

Senators Warren, McCain, Cantwell and King (two Dems, one Rep, one independent) unveiled the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson lucidly explains why it is excellent legislation.

One Planet, One Justice

Solidarity from the people of Syria:

Planetquake

Anyone who read this blog regularly over the past two years knew it was coming: the planetquake against neoliberalism which was going to make the protest wave of 2011-2012 look like the prologue it indeed was. And now it begins.

Mass protests from Gezi Park to Rio Janeiro.
 Global dissidents are revealing that neoliberalism is nothing but the freedom of the 0.1% to put the 99.9% in a planet-sized prison.

Economists demolish the plutocratic swindle of euroliberalism.

The women of Planet Earth will not be silenced by Third World ethno-fundamentalists or First World petro-fundamentalists.

It's our planet.

And we're going to take it back.

Feed by feed, blog by blog, pixel by pixel.

And the Children Will Lead Us...

Egyptian school-child explains Tahrir 2.0, in a performance which puts most sociologists, mainstream journalists, pundits and politicians to shame.

Still Kicking...

Busy with summer teaching, media will be done when it's done. 

Reason 4,949,127 that I study videogame culture: Gordon Freeman is on the loose.

Zombie Pigs

Dave Zirin buries the 3 in this instant classic of sports journalism.

As a long-time resident of Illinois, I can confirm that Chicago leads the world when it comes to the sheer brazenness of its elite looting. Most famously, Chicago sold off its parking meters to banksters for a song, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred from city services to the pockets of the 0.1% (read Hal Dardicks' excellent and devastating expose of the scam). Now Mayor Rahm has decided to shut down more than fifty elementary schools as part of the plutocrat's open war on public education - schools that just happen to be 90% located in African American communities. Sheerest accident, that. While the schools are being destroyed, His Greediness the Pharoah Rahm-ses I is shoveling $100 million of public funds into a shady sports arena.

Billions for despicably evil, stupid plutocrats and their Roman circuses, all at the expense of our children.

But enough carping. The time has come for action. It's time to topple the neoliberal Pharoahs, from Cairo to Chicago. The forces of resistance are on the march, and unlike past rebellions, this time we, the 7 billion working people of planet Earth, have powerful digital tools at our disposal. It's the 7 billion against the 700 billionaires, and I know which side I'm on. Do you?

To The Fans

Are you tired of crappy, overpriced corporate media?

Have you had it with the nauseating lies of the plutocrats?
 Do you regularly have to resist the urge to throw your cable TV box out the window?

Friends, you are not alone. The time has come for change. Not the fake kind brought to you by corporate executives, their NGO quislings, or their stooge politicians.

No, the real kind of change begins at home. You -- and me -- must do this together.

Instead of paying evil, ruthless corporations for access to media monopolized and censored in advance by evil, ruthless corporations interested only in becoming more evil and ruthless -- it's time for us to to fight back, by supporting our favorite digital artists.

Buy only from producers who respect your hard work and labor, we fans, players, consumers and audience-members.

It's easier than you think.

The hip hop artists of the middle-income nations pioneered the art of building digital audience networks to support digital artists (e.g. Gazgolder).

Ross Scott's "Freeman's Mind" series has been delivering comedy platinum since 2007. Visit Scott's site, hit the tip jar, buy a T-shirt.

Meanwhile, in friendly neighborhood BRIC country Russia, Roman Samtsov, Andrei Mankiewicz and a group of volunteers are creating a live-action fan series called "Freeman's Days", based on the Half Life 2 universe. The first episode is out, and it's astoundingly good. You can contribute to the team via their Boomstarter site.

It's time to learn from Kratos: fight the Hades of Media Plutocracy with its own hell-forged weapons!

To the Artists

You have one mission, and one mission alone.

To create.



If you put your heart and soul into your art, if you put everything you have into your art - not everything the market tells you will sell, not everything the academics tell you is tasteful, not everything your social milieu tells you is acceptable, but everything you have been and are on the way to being, everything that speaks truth, everything which honors the least of us and does justice to all of us... That. Is. Enough.

Because it can seem that noone appreciates or understands what you are saying. That no work of art can survive the blast-zone of reification, ranging from the sniping of insider clubs who reject anything they cannot monopolize for themselves, all the way to the saturation bombing of neoliberal media corporations who want to turn the planet into a copyright jail. 

Don't listen to their lies. This is what is true:
 Someone you don't know will run across your work of art.

Someone you don't know will hear it.

Someone you don't know will see it.

Someone you don't know will play it.
 Someone you don't know will read it.

And somehow, somewhere, at the deepest core of the smallest of all things, you will make the impossible... possible.

Resistance

...sometimes comes down to a single word.

This word, and no other.

This word, not the words which cite other words.

This word, not the sentences which cite paragraphs, the essays which cite volumes.

This word.

There is no other.

Shadowland

Daily life in dying empires is like one long survival-horror videogame. Only there's no save button.

If you survive -- and survival is now a lottery, determined more by sheer luck and preexisting familial-cultural capital than by education or talent -- you become a pack rat.

You can buy nothing. So you collect every random artifact you come across. Might be useful, later.

You have no power. So you dodge the terrifying monsters of the total system. They hunt us ceaselessly.

Everything once comforting and familiar becomes strange and distorted.

Your taste in music, literature and aesthetics narrows to what will replenish your energy-pack.

Baroque ornamentation gives way to annealed silicon, symphonies give way to hip hop, films give way to pixels.

No respite. No sanctuary. Just survivorhood.

May Day

May Day, festival of the 7 billion.

Though I'm not feeling festive these days.

In fact I feel pretty atrocious. Depressed on account of the depression.

Who has better teeth / blood or the stone.

Bits of myself are disappearing. Raw, down to pulp. Nothing takes its place.

Nothing.

The Arab Spring and Iraq

The crimes empires commit are ghastly enough. But then there are the crimes they outsource to their proxies. Case in point: post-invasion Iraq, a country destroyed by a criminally insane US invasion and then an equally criminal neoliberal occupation which enriched Halliburton and Boeing, while sparking a three-way sectarian war (Kurds versus Sunnis versus Shiites) which destroyed Iraq for a generation.

But when the children of the Iraqicide, scarred by US bombs and sectarian butchery, finally grew up, they did not pick up guns. They watched the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya go out into the streets and overthrow tyrants. Then they went into the streets themselves. In 2011, numerous ordinary Iraqis protested in the streets against government's inability to reign in corruption, lawlessness and general social instability. The Kurdish community had its own protest wave (the 2011 Kurdish protests), while Iraqi Shiites demonstrated in sympathy with the democracy movement of Bahrain, where a majority Shiite population is ruled by an autocratic Sunni monarchy.

More recently, peaceful Sunni protesters have campaigned against the Maliki government's sectarian policies in Sunni-majority regions of Iraq. On April 23, government soldiers opened fire on unarmed protesters in Hawija,  a small town near Kirkuk in central Iraq, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. If you didn't hear about this grisly war crime, it's the rough equivalent of the Syrian Clock Tower mass murder of unarmed protesters in 2011 Homs by the evil and dying Assad regime, which triggered the Syrian civil war.

In response to the Hawija massacre, large numbers of Sunnis are mobilizing into militia and citizen armies, threatening a return to the horrendous carnage of the 2005-2007 civil war. You won't hear a word about this in the US mainstream media, because the US empire is still officially backing Maliki's government. The NY Times, that perennial tool of empire whose smooth apologetics for imperial crime almost makes you nostalgic for the straightforward falsehoods of Pravda, whitewashed the Hawija massacre this way:

"The fiercest fighting was at the encampment in a town called Hawija, where Sunni gunmen fought government forces throughout the day."

This is in accord with a long-standing unwritten rule of imperial journalism, namely that massacres happen only to white people, and even if they do, they're never committed by US-backed regimes.

Of course, the last thing Iraq needs is more violence or a return to the days of the civil war. What is needed is a transition to some sort of democratic regionalism under a federal umbrella. Iraqis have a strong and well-developed sense of national identity, and there is plenty of oil money to rebuild the country. But if the Maliki government does not deliver justice, there will be no peace.

You can follow the Iraqi Spring here and here.

From Occupation To Resistance

Where did the energies of Occupy go? They went right here: Chicago's young people are fighting for a better future, against Chicago's horrid and despicable neoliberal political machine (second in viciousness perhaps only to its NYC analogue). And this is just the beginning...

Half Life: The Petersburg Chronicles

Gordon Freeman, in the flesh... or rather, in the independent Russian fan video, Freeman's Days Part 1. (English subtitles are available by clicking on the caption bar).

Fantastically well-done, on almost no budget.

We are approaching a moment in history when we fans have the digital tools and networks to create and distribute our very own media, free from studio moguls or neoliberal pigopolists.

Wisely done, Mr. Freeman!

Freedom on the March

For ineluctable historical reasons (colonial legacies, postcolonial tyrannies, neoliberal immiserations, etc.) Syria is having the bloodiest revolution of the Arab Spring. The people of Syria are paying a terrible price for their freedom, but this is also the reason that their revolution has produced some of the most amazing citizen journalism, independent media, and innovative forms of democratic mobilization in the entire Middle Eastern region. Case in point: Malek Jandali's proposed post-revolutionary anthem. Such a strange paradox, that we human beings are sometimes at our best precisely when we're at our worst.

We Are All Syrian

Read the profile. Follow the twitter feed. If you are one of the lucky few with some extra currency-units handy, these folks need your help.

New Webcast And Kojima's Latest

Webcast 25 is up.

Also, be sure to watch Kojima's latest stunner of a trailer: Metal Gear Solid 5. (And just how cool is Kojima's trailer? It's so cool, it has ridgebacks. Yes, ridgebacks - look carefully at Snake's shoulder-patch near the end of the video. We're talking a level of coolness normally found only in the ice-mountains of Neptune.)

7 Billion Stories

Uplink 28 (HTML version or PDF version) explores videogame criticism, CD Projekt Red, and Nokia's travails. Happy reading!

The Transitive of Occupy Is Educate

The fine folks at Network for Public Education are fighting back against the plutocrats' war on public education.

Never heard of neoliberalism, a.k.a. the oligarchic enrichment of the wealthiest 0.1% at everyone else's expense? Want to know how greedy plutocrats are destroying the schools and trashing the lives of millions of children? Check out educator Diane Ravitch's indispensable blog.

Learning From the BRICs

Between 1999 and 2011, the combined GDP of the US and the EU -- the heartlands of Wall Street neoliberalism and Wall-Street-wannabe euroliberalism, respectively -- plummeted from 58.9% of world GDP down to 45.5%. During the same period, the BRICs share of world GDP went from 4.1% to 19.3%.
The BRICs didn't succeed by imposing austerity on the majority of their people. They grew by ending austerity and by investing heavily in education, science, health care, and infrastructure for all.

We can end the Great Downpression tomorrow, my fellow Americans and Europeans. Junk austerity, spend on people instead of bombs and banksters, and voila -- 99% of our problems go away.

Walk This Way

"The Rebellion begins as an urban promenade. Against the traffic regulations during working hours. The streets belong to the pedestrians..." -- Heiner Mueller, Hamletmachine (1977

Digital Artists Who Deserve Your Support

I'm completely broke, but if you can help, here are some of the most amazing creators at work today. These are all 100% non-commercial, not-for-profit, community-based projects. Visit their sites, chat with their communities, pitch in any way you can, because they are all making digital history:

Ross Scott (Accursed Farms)

The Freeman Chronicles (web series)

Freeman's Days (Russian Half Life fan series)

The Worm Has Turned

We're still pinching ourselves. But it looks like starvation and homelessness will no longer be  problems, that productive scholarship awaits, and that Uplink's airship has finally found a safe berth.

First, a moment to breathe.
 
*Breathe*.

Yarrr. Onwards to plunder!

Depressions

Are depressing.

That is all.

In Case You Were Wondering...

...why these posts are so infrequent.

Because I'm broke and my country is broken.

Because I'm too tired to even be depressed.
 Because I'm in indescribable amounts of debt which I can never repay.

Because I survive on subminimum wages which fall every year.

Because the middle-class jobs are vanishing and never coming back.

Because the plutocrats get richer while we get poorer.

Because the US and the USSR are a single geopolitical suicide.

So I triage.

This much energy for teaching.

This much energy for writing.

This much energy for research.

This much energy to hug the nearest and dearest.

If you came looking for hope or shining ideals

I have none.

All I have is resistance.

Resistance in words, in concepts, in constellations.

So to hell with the neoliberalism which has turned the planet into a living hell.

But love and respect to the youth of the Arab Spring
 love and respect to every human being who puts need ahead of greed

shouts out to the developmental states of the world, fortresses against neoliberalism

In the planetary night of Capital, we must all become the bearers

of the digital dawn.

Sharpen Those Digital Swords

Nintendo, Square Enix and Blizzard created magnificent role-playing videogames in their day, but the time has come to pass the torch to the next generation of innovators. CD Projekt Red steps up to the plate and hits the ball out of the park. The Witcher 3: the hunt for neoliberalism!

Uploads and Downloads

The first of many webcasts is live. More are coming, though intermittently, because I'm (1) completely broke (everything is being done on a low-end 2008 Macbook with obsolete software), (2) surviving on subminimum wage labor, and (3) finally starting the Metal Gear book.

It's time to take videogame studies to the next level of the game.

2013: The Year of the Transnational Audience

The avalanche begins. CD Projekt released a trailer for their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 and we should see the first unveils for The Witcher 3 pretty soon. Further down the road, Irrational's Bioshock Infinite arrives February 26, Naughty Dog's atmospheric The Last of Us is coming May 13. Finally, there's this little gem. Yaaarrr!

Ushering In the New Year

Now up: a new and original translation of Adorno and Horkheimer's ground-breaking essay on "The Culture Industry", available here. The existing translation has been showing its age for some time, but has become especially urgent due to the new forms of collective, non-commercial cultural production being unleashed by today's digital commons.