Interview with the Chicago Tribune
Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!).
There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner's inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, "We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games." Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.LinkWe have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We've really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before.
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We need a new internet phenomenon, Untitled 1 is growing too large. I vote next open thread be titled Funny Thing, and be accompanied by a broken link.
you're talking about copyrights?
Sorry, you lost alot of credibility with me when you claimed in the comments in a 8/2 post that the super mario bros. quilt was not trademark infringement when it appeared to be obvious infringement of nintendo's trademark.
I'm a 2005 Virginia Tech graduate. I was there for the memorial service the day after the shootings. I knew one of the victims, and several of those who were shot at, but survived. It's fair to say that I've followed the entire matter very closely. And this is the first time I have seen any mention, by anybody, under any circumstances, that the shootings had any connection to violent video games.
Waldo,
That's because you've been following the matter closely. The people who say things like that are people who don't actually follow the matter or know anyone involved, but just use tragedies like that to support their prior pre-conceived notions. I suspect a quick Google search will bear Cory out on this.
Cory said, “Piracy is definitely a problem where it is part of a general trend toward disreputable law. In general, there's a certain amount of piracy that just represents law that hasn’t caught up with technology.”
I’m not clear about this issue, but I'm not allowed to talk about it any more. Unless Antinous wants to explain it to me. Please Aunti-Antinous...?
Waldo Jaquith: My condolences for the friends you lost.
As to the articles you've mentioned you've never seen:
MSNBC: Were video games to blame for massacre?
Now, if you read the article it mentions things like this:
"Meanwhile, by Tuesday, The Washington Post had posted a story on its Web site stating that several youths who knew Cho said that in high school he'd been a fan of violent video games, especially "Counter-Strike.""
and this:
"Meanwhile, the members of Empire Arcadia — a grassroots group dedicated to supporting the gaming community and culture — have been so incensed by the recent attempts to blame video games for the Virginia Tech shootings that they've begun planning a rally in New York City with the assistance of the ECA."
In the first paragraph, I wonder if that video game text ever made it to print. If so, I'm sure less than 5% of that story's readers ever saw the redaction. The second paragraph does mention that there was some discussion whether or not video games were involved.
Incendiary, misleading headlines like MSNBC's and some scroll text on Fox News or CNN is all you need for people to connect the dots, even if there's no basis in fact for that connection and it was brought about by a disgraced Florida lawyer (whose name I won't even mention).
What makes you think it's a trademark violation? Hint: trademark isn't the right to stop others from using your mark in commerce; it is the right to sue people for *deceptively* using your mark in commerce.
A while back Starbucks filed a suit against a Michigan coffee shop because they used a green circle in their logo. So, Starbucks claimed that this would confuse people (because we’re all fooled by that sort of thing in MI). There was not a Starbucks in that town, so there was no way to say that business was taken through deception. But the shop’s owners changed their sign because it was less costly than having to hire a lawyer to defend against the mega-greedy-mega-company. And that’s just another reason not to support Starbucks.
I think the point I want to make is that the social construction of reality is nothing new... but certainly most people are oblivious to it."
To paraphrase Nietzsche, we cannot gain much insight into human nature by studying people as they are now; instead we must examine by what evolutionary process they came to be this way.
The hemming in of adolescence is just the latest iteration in an entire series of events stretching back through all of human history.
Alexander the Great conquerored most of the known world (to the ancient Greeks) by the time a man today would graduate high school -- unable to legally drink beer or rent a car in the USA.
Yes it is, Zuzu. All you have to do is look at the Prelinger Archives and the difference between high school films of the 1930s and 1940s and the ones of the 1950s and 1960s when the concept of the teenager was fleshed out. Pre-1950s, high school student films showed them as, essentially, little adults. They wore suits, they went to very formal dances, etc. In the 50s, they were wearing jeans and drinking at the soda fountain.
And today, 30-year-olds play Nintendo and frisbee golf.
What concerns me, as vanguarded in Japan, is the imposed infantilization of adults. That we can't handle our booze or our fireworks or our healthcare or retirement. Including a culture where the boss, company, or government plays the role "parent" for our "adult" lives... forever submitting to arbitrary authority figures who, unquestioningly, "know best". As if most people are nitwits who would try to look down the barrel of a loaded rifle if given the opportunity.
I worry that the "strange bedfellows" of social conservatives and (big-P) Progressives in the act of social engineering tacitly agree on one important aspect: That large masses of people who are individuals with the freedom of adults liberated from the education system but without the crushing responsibility of raising a family and working 40-80 hours a week to pay for it all, will eventually, undistracted, in the 15 years between 20 and 35 years of age pierce the veil of the social order and demand some genuine answers to their highly skeptical questions about who is really orchestrating society and for what purposes.
That scares the shit out of our faceless masters. The best slaves are the ones who do not even realize they're enslaved. But hey, American Gladiators is on...
p.s. I find this video of Danah Boyd relevant to this "hemming in of adolescence" discussion as well. Children and young adults need as much autonomy as they can handle -- and they can handle a whole lot more than most parents, teachers, and bureaucrats realize. Where art the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?
This is the fault of people like Jack Thompson the people who beleive his lies and bluster. Right after the VT shooting Jack Thompson came on to some major news network (I don't remember which) talking about how the guy "probibly trained on Counter-Strike".
Pertinent to the quote, tomorrow's Penn & Teller "Bullshit" is going to be about the overprotection of children from imaginary threats.
I hope they got the story of that kid who finds his way home from random places in New York City.
Or to put it in Foucauldian terms, the point of discipline is not to force someone to do what you want them to do, but to make them want to do it, and to do it in a way that you want them to.
For me, the most interesting point of Doctorow's interview was his identification of technology as disciplinary mechanism of sorts - that the more alienated people are from technology, the more they are forced into servitude - into obeying the laws of the machine.
In very many ways, I agree with his thesis, insofar as the increasing sophistication of technology - be it cars, computers, etc. - has separated the presumably elementary relationship between person-machine. Once upon a time, I could pop open the hood of my malfunctioning car and at least pretend that the gasket is leaking. Today, I have to bring it into the shop so they can hook a laptop to it and the car can tell them what's wrong with it.
Still, I don't know if things today are really all that different from before. For example, I don't know that this feeling of alienation is restricted to the microchip era, but probably goes back to when humanity, generally, decided specialisation is better than being generalists.
This isn't me, however, saying to just go with it. Institutions are a fact, and if hacking/piracy/technological malfeasance is a way to re-claim some lost power (power we've never had or gave up a long time ago, at any rate), then power to the them. But for the masses generally, I think the hax0ring (did I spell that right?) probably has to be complemented with something else.
Thebus, that article references exactly two sources: Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson, and goes out of its way to disagree with them. there's no broad media consensus that this was spurred by videogames. That was Columbine.
Re: Starbucks
There's also this little case down in Galveston, Texas of a little guy taking on the corporate suits:
http://www.starbockbeer.com/