Mammon Machine

1. Assuming People are Idiots is Funnier, But Assuming They Are Smart is More Interesting

In the games industry, a lot of very powerful people make decisions so obviously wrong, self-destructive, blithely prejudiced, and stunningly uninformed the temptation to assume the worst in terms of their intelligence is strong and I would not blame anyone for it.

Except, these same people seem to be so good at other things—level design if not writing, pronouncements about community behavior if not interpersonal relations—that they’re clearly not stupid all the time. Usually it’s because they’re coming at things from a perspective they don’t understand, or applying what makes sense in a context they understand to another they don’t.

Or, a lot of times, it’s not that people are idiots so much as it’s our own perspectives that are skewed. Take the 2DS, for example—yes of course this would be a pretty silly product if it was intended even in the slightest capacity for the audience that was complaining about and refusing to buy it. But it wasn’t, and looking at it from a perspective that’s not your own can be good for understanding how a lot of decisions are made—I kinda wish more gamers would think for a second about what people who don’t share their exact history and identity might think for a second you know?

“Interesting” in the above though often also means terrifying, grotesque, like the legions of young people who are being raised to systemically ignore and misunderstand structures of oppression even as they are being groomed and educated to take leadership roles in our society. In the glittering sunny wastes of Silicon Valley, a hive of savants with lethaly incomplete understanding of how culture functions are pouring all of their resources into creating a utopia that will offer nothing but erasure and horror for 99% of the human race and they don’t even know it. (That was a joke, do you see what I mean about how funny it is to be mean?)

Less exaggerated: some geniuses with tons of money have ideas that would literally destroy the world and they’d know better if they read like two more books not written by Ayn Rand.

They’re not dangerous because they’re stupid, they’re dangerous because they’re ignorant and smart, so smart that they think that it’s the same as being informed. Your average commentator is the larval form of these poor deadly sods.

No happy end here. 

1. Anger is not Abuse, and Abuse is not Anger

I’m not a person who was raised to really be into “having emotions” but I have learned that anger is actually an okay thing to have. Anger can be a begrudging friend in that when I’m with her I tend to then do something about my anger, which is usually to write, and the writing I do with anger is some of my work that, even if I don’t think it’s the most beautifully written or perfectly argued, best reaches people. I hope that it helps somehow.

Expressing anger isn’t violence—it’s telling truth. The truth is that we were hurt, and the hurt was not just, and there is a wound now in the world that must be witnessed, not matter whether or not the world wants to see it. The harassment we receive as a result of exposing controversy in the games community—this tiny, insignificant corner of our culture—is from just saying some challenging things about how pop culture relies upon and supports those structures. The harassment isn’t intended, most of the time, as genuine conversation. It’s meant to silence that witnessing. Speaking truth that challenges and destroys structures of power is not violence, though people who invest in those structures perceive it as violence.

But just as anger isn’t violence, violence isn’t anger. And I’ve seen community violence—exclusively that of marginalized people against marginalized people—that justifies abuse as an expression of anger. Setting up ridiculous hierarchies of privilege in order to “prove” who the abuser and abused is, as if actions had nothing to do with it and interpersonal violence was impossible.  But of course abuse never has to be anger just as anger never has to be abuse. Anger can make lashing out more understandable, certainly, and perhaps more forgivable—but it doesn’t make it any less destructive or violating of safety and trust. Angrily speaking truth is not the same as harassing someone or poisoning the waters of their community over interpersonal arguments, and no dynamics of privilege can excuse this toxicity. It’s not a mathematical function of who has the most privilege that determines who’s being an abuser in an interpersonal situation, it’s their individual actions and whether or not they are speaking to truth or to destroy.

So I’m going to say, me myself I, just this one lil Bee over here, am totally done with violent rhetoric.

Anger is understandable of course, and everyone is entitled to their feelings, but no one, for any reason, is entitled to use their feelings as a justification to hurt others. This is not the same as using those feelings to attack structures of oppression and I don’t believe there’s anyone who can’t tell the difference. Surely I will be accused of making excuses to protect oppressors: so like, obvs I don’t care about those jerks. I would say be as unreasonably, cruelly mean to them as you possibly can and I wouldn’t shed even a tear.

Except, I guess what I’ve seen in the last year is that no one in the world can be trusted in even the slightest capacity to use that cruelty responsibly, can they? It’s a contest to see who can best appropriate the language of social justice to legitimize their status as victim and their rival’s as oppressor. Suddenly, the other imperceptibly more privileged queer person is as deserving of cruelty as the sickest oppressor and the shift will happen so fast you’re drawn and quartered by both ends of your community before you can blink because two people can’t get along and they don’t know how to resolve arguments without turning the vast machinery of social justice onto each other as if marginalized individuals were as logical a target for this rhetoric as the vast hegemonies they were invented to dismantle.

So I’m basically not going to trust anyone who uses that language to resolve a community or interpersonal conflict because I don’t know! What else to do. But I suppose I will just have to trust myself because I quite instantly know when the line has been crossed.