I’ve rather considered myself a fervent traditionalist, for somebody who was born into the computer age, despite the glow of electronic devices pretty much dominating my time: I work IT. I’m a consummate forum troll. I’m rarely more than two hours away from a computer if I’m awake.

But I only just now got a cell phone, eschew the 3G network, maintain a personal library of more than two thousand books – as in the physical objects, not the digital feeds – and hate Web 2.0 with every fiber of my being. I’m friends with people who prefer personal contact and live performances to networking and recordings, and who keep LPs not just for the fidelity but for the social protocol as well.

The reason for this is as simple as it is distressing: I feel that we’re replacing a medium with new one that does not offer everything the former one did. We’re losing something. And not just the displaced jobs – else I’d be a neo-luddite – but something far more intrinsic; fundamental: We’re losing intellectualism.

I mean, sure, there’s already a lot written out there about how, with the decline of newspapers being able to afford foreign offices and investigative reporters, we’re deluged in a wave of amateurs, but that was always the case with the internet. This is a blog. This isn’t my first blog. I know the score. But perhaps I’m a skylarking idealist whose hope that the original precepts of the internet – a frank and open exchange of ideas – would be born out.

I remember in college lauding the internet for being what is essentially a printing press in every living room. The flip side to that is, when printing presses came out, what kept the presses running were not peer-reviewed periodicals and papers of record, but handbills and tawdry literature: The equivalent of “Obama is a Secret Radical Muslim” and Dan Brown potboilers.

How the concept of journalistic integrity came out of this cauldron, I don’t know, but we appear to be, with this shift in dynamics, losing it. It was inevitable, to be sure: What was the wild west of the electronic frontier would be tamed and, eventually, monetized, but short of that right now what we get is not exactly WalMart and not exactly anarchy but instead Abu Dhabi: Two or three big players with their own spurious agendas and a lotta unpaid laborers.

And in the fray we’re reading less (yet owning more “books”), not paying attention to what we read, and care not for the truth but the domination of the message. What matters is not what happened but who’s shouting loudest – in school we denigrate the Soviet Union for their reliance on propaganda to opiate the masses, but our current system of dueling propaganda isn’t exactly better.

Fox excuses itself by saying the NYTimes is a liberal rag and thus we need “balance.” Democrats lament that Republicans are pulling the debate to the right by catering to their extreme, and then turn around and suggest the solution to that is to do the same, reversed. The news is only too happy to “report” on both, which is to say they’ll take quotes ad verbatim and play on the salacious and scandalous attention rather than the veracity of the claims.

What matters is not whether a statistic quoted is correct, but how soon that statistic will become a meme before it is corrected. The Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place lost the media battle the moment Sarah Palin called it a “Ground Zero Mosque,” which it is of course neither, and only in the op ed pages do columnists report on the “error.”

Stephen Colbert reported on the “truthiness” of the current cultural zeitgeist: Nobody reads into anything, so everybody is duped by any ruse that plays to their pre- and mis-conceptions. I think the internet must take its fair share of blame, here. Rather than being the great egalitarian library – the forum (in the original sense of the term) of a new age – it’s instead done the exact opposite: Reinforced ignorance, hyperbolized public sentiment, and self-served prophecy.

We’re looking at ourselves through a funhouse mirror and calling it the world. We’ve become lumpen-sophists, in the ugliest form of the word. Perhaps we should take a step back and figure out what parts of this new electronic age really work and what clearly do not.

Andrew Leonard makes a rather tongue-in-cheek article about how Apple fanboys are railing against Obama over a speech he recently made at Hampton University, in which he says,

“Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”

Leonard ends his article by clarifying that Obama is, after all, pointing out the difference between educating oneself on the world and filling one’s free time with the hyper-grapevine New Media has become. Hey, it’s a valid point and Leonard agrees with it. Which is why Salon titles his article “Obama’s self-hating iPad attack” and gives it a picture of Obama’s laser-beam eyes blowing up an iPad.

Thereby proving Leonard’s and Obama’s point. Irony.

as art?

A very chipper Kellee Santiago at the University of Spoiled Caucasians says yes. Roger Ebert says no. Santiago replies. I’m inclined to side with Ebert’s logic, thought that puts me at odds with the established computer gaming writers. Fuck them.

Personally, however, I subscribe to Scott McCloud’s rather inclusive definition of art, being any activity not essential to survival or reproduction. Of course, this definition almost completely blows away any attempts at qualifying the term, but quite frankly anybody who attempts to elevate their particular interest with said term is guilty of at least some form of masturbation.

Another point of fact I find myself at odds with the gaming writers is with Ubisoft’s DRM (again), now that a collective called SkidRow have torrented a sort of Crack For Dummies of their latest DRM iteration, for everyone who wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to use the server referral loop the previous cracks depended on. Shamus Young suggests to Ubisoft that they go one further: Don’t put just some content online, make all content online, making each end-user a mere client on a “cloud” gaming platform, each “purchase” a mere fee for entering into a subscription.

The concept is abhorrent to me. I’m sure all companies would love to just have a direct connection to my credit card info, regardless of whether or what they produce and when, how or even if I partake in their product.

Sorry, did I say “product?” I meant “license,” abridged, qualified and revocable at any time.

Somehow the right to free enterprise became a moral obligation for consumerism, lest we be accused of “not supporting” our creative types (when they themselves are just as often thrown out when inconvenient). Somehow copyrights became the new feudalism. However, I’m not in the habit of allowing purveyors with such unvarnished, abject hostility to their patrons to have their cake and eat it too.

The Times put out a “report” that “rates” the iPad (which still sounds like an Apple Tampon) that distinguishes between “techs” and “normal people.”

I think by “normal people” you meant “luddites,” Mr. Pogue.

There was a time in the 90s when I was sure that computers and the internet would drive people to be more active and engaged in the flow of information – that TVs would become more like computers. Instead, it would appear more that computers have become more like TVs – no longer tools but mere consumer toys.

“But it’s not the same market!”

At $700 a pop, they sure as hell ARE the same market as laptops.

Of course, far more crazy is the fact that the apocalyptic christian militia caught last week planning to kill a cop and subsequently bomb his funeral plead Not Guilty in their hearing; their lawyer cited as saying, “This is going to be a free-speech case.”

Uh, no. “I hope he dies” is barely covered as free speech (and arguably not if you’re, say, propagating such speech as a public figure in retaliation for a congressman voting one way). “We’re going to kill him next Friday at 7″ is most certainly not protected. But what gets me is that another Michigan militia helped turn them in. That’s right: Even crazy has standards.

1) This shit would not have occurred had Modern Warfare 2 had dedicated servers.

2) Anybody else find it somewhat disturbing that the producers of a game have the power to ban people who have paid for the game from the game, for any reason?

3) Since when was modding verboten in a multiplayer FPS? Oh right, when Infinity Ward wanted to up its profits by selling what modders used to make for free.

And this is why PC gamers look down upon the console crowd. It’s a barefaced marketing tool wherein the product and its distribution is under total control at all times by its purveyors. By buying a console you are locked in as a captive audience to whatever arbitrary rules the company allows, including forcing you to convert your money to Disney Dollars, selling what used to be free, and strictly controlling the environment under which you can play.

Just like what Bank of America does to its debtors, making sure your target market stays in debt to the company store is fantastically profitable, but it’s ultimately a losing proposition.

Evan Narcisse of the Atlantic rather adeptly illustrates science fiction’s ability to make poignant political and cultural statements when written well; in this case in the first two iterations of the Mass Effect trilogy.

It’s funny, considering the debates I’ve had with folks on the same topic, especially regarding the Krogan – basically, that even in hypothetical circumstances people are quick to accept the rationalization for the destruction of another race so long as it’s not them and to exploit the Other so long as it is always kept under one’s thumb.

They stick to the hardest line “they’re expendable, we’re not” colonialist attitudes with nary a thought to abstract the concept – The Sepoy Rebellions and their subsequent retaliatory crackdowns, for instance, or the Warsaw Uprising. Afghanistan – under the British, the Soviets, the Americans.

Even now we teach soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to fight a proxy war that they are likely never to win but gives us an excuse to leave. Our legacy as an empire is marked a great deal by how well we keep the death our policies cause at arm’s length, politically and socially. Heady concepts to stuff into a softcore sci-fi thriller, but that’s what the genre is for, after all.