Let's Play... Capitalism

Capitalism
Interactive Magic, 1995

originally played on PC

There’s a certain joy when things work right and plans can be seen appropriately to their conclusion. A leveraged predictability, as it were. Much like its namesake, Trevor Chan’s Capitalism (1995) involves the appreciation of the beauty in systems which manifest the will of their designer when adroitly administered. The North American protestants were correct: it is in money that we find God.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with capitalism, and one which I am still trying to properly navigate. For a short while as a youth, I was able to realise a small capitalist fiefdom in the comics trade, at least in my home town of Thunder Bay where the population was low enough that you could easily be the best at something if you just paid sufficient attention. Two of my friends from childhood had followed this advice all the way to the Olympics, although they didn’t end up placing in their competitions. From grade five through grade seven, one of them was in a small group of playground vengeance justice seekers with me and a girl named Brie Gibson. I loved Brie a lot, my first real crush in fact, and we were together often before she died in grade six under mysterious circumstances related to her asthma and possibly to her violently abusive father. Like every other playground, ours was one which demonstrated elements of the market dynamics we were going to learn to love as adults with tendencies toward social democracy. At times throughout our youth, especially around the fifth and sixth grades, friends and I were bullied for lunch money or the comic books we were reading or because the day was a little cloudy with a potential for rain later so what the fuck. A piece of shit two or three years older would come out of nowhere, push one of us down or catch somebody in a headlock, and make demands with insults. Being reasonably athletic ourselves, we weren’t often targets. But as with bully plots in cartoons and plenty of videogames – I’m thinking not only of The Adventures of Willy Beamish (1990) but of course Bully: Scholarship Edition (2008), Rockstar’s tenderly satirical entry into the topic – even the good guys have to face the music some of the time. Frankly almost every game with a bad guy (or girl) falls into the bully category, as bad guy behaviour often amounts to pushing the player and/or other elements of the gameworld around in order to realise some nefarious desire or other.

Not to invoke the Freud I don’t really believe in, but bullies are the manifestation of certain impulses within all of us. An id unencumbered by reason or morality, which seeks no other absolution but the realization of its own pleasure. Role-playing and strategy games often deploy the bully motif in their ultimate bad guy. Taking all of the land's resources for themselves or stealing a king's power. Theft and intimidation through force is childish and everyone knows it, but the trick involves knowing what is possible to improve the situation. In our playground days, intimidated for sport or lunch money, we decided to band together and act as a ramshackle anti-bully brigade. Trevor was learning how to box, Brie was pretty good with Judo and told us she was going to learn kickboxing next, and I was good at taunting, distraction, and hit-and-run tactics. Combined arms were impenetrable, we thought, as we patrolled the school yard looking to end trouble. We took down three of the worst people at our school, miserable metalhead fucks with long greasy hair and black leather jackets with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest patches and ripped Adidas hightops who had stayed at least a year too long past the eighth grade. That was probably what made them the angriest – seeing their friends graduate while they stayed behind. It was the Maiden and Priest patches which pissed me off the most about them, even more than having been beaten up several times. I loved those bands and hated being beaten up by those idiots.

in the virtual world, women have an equal shot at being CEO

Trevor Chan’s Capitalism is an economic simulation with a clean interface and solid game mechanics. You set up a department store and a supply chain with distribution, manufacturing, and resource extraction in place, sell the whole thing with some advertising, and hope for the best. Of course, this hope is guided by a thorough grounding in the principles of finance mathematics, and understanding the volumes of data offered to players is key to success in the game. In every way the game invokes the kind of nerdy entrepreneurial DIY aesthetic best exemplified by the small business and adult learning documentaries produced by TVOntario and PBS: the bright arpeggiated synthesizers, the clean Euclidean graphics, the friendly narrator who sounds like some unholy cross between Donald Sutherland and everyone’s Dad. Full confession: I have an inescapable nostalgia for low budget business and technology public television documentaries from the 1980s and early 1990s, such as Bits and Bytes (1983) and The Computer Chronicles (1983 – 2002); admittedly, both of these examples are computer related, as I cannot for the life of me remember the names of any of the financial shows and a five-minute search online has not allowed me to recover TVO or PBS broadcast schedules from the 1980s. Much like these shows, Capitalism presents itself functionally before it worries about its aesthetics, resulting, of course, unavoidably, in a significant and interesting aesthetic. I'm certainly not alone in loving those arpeggiated synths.

life as a modern industrialist

Capitalism has gameplay elements from strategic builders and resource exploitation games such as The Seven Cities of Gold (1984), Sim City (1989), and Sid Meier's Civilization (1991), as well as trading games such as Elite (1984), The Patrician (1992), and Merchant Prince (1993) and economic simulations such as Air Bucks (1992) and Sid Meier's Railway Tycoon (1990) – perhaps we can collect these seemingly disparate games under the generic nomenclature of ‘managerial’ games, in which the purpose and pleasure of play is the optimization of a logical system of economic administration. The system is easy: buy low, sell high. Make sure that the supply lines are economically sustainable and consistent in their operation. Advertise so that everyone knows about and buys your product. Isn’t capitalism easy? Actually, Capitalism is not at all easy, unless you cheat and keep giving yourself free millions. That being said, I was usually able to turn a steady profit in this game and other economic simulators. Kind of like how after concluding most role-playing games, you end up with far too much money to spend on yourself. Lacking charitable options in nearly every game in existence except Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1986), you end the game a millionaire with no power for consumption.

buy low / sell high / eat well

If only my actual life reflected such financial ease and capability. My childhood comic book enterprise was successful until adult capital priced me out of the market. Having taken a tip from the uncle of a BFF (which ended up not being so F) to buy as many copies of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics that I could, I entered the playground of capital with a small hole in my pocket but with the knowledge that would carry me through anything. The Turtles are going to be the next Cerebus, he told me, confident with a cigar and his arms crossed over stacks of porn magazines, both lines of merchandise also being sold in his book store. Buy now, hold onto them for a while, then sell when the going’s good. Like many things related to both capitalism and Capitalism, it was a supply and demand issue. The first few printings of the comics were horribly mangled by the publisher and sold at discount to retailers. As a result, these issues were limited to only a few thousand copies. Precocious and willful, I had convinced comic book stores all over the city to order copies in for me to buy. In the end, I had a copy of the 1^st print of #1, two #2s, and multiple copies of other valuable issues as well. I sold most of them for immense profit at the height of the mass popularity of the Ninja Turtles, that period when they turned from indie comic darlings into a steaming pile of mainstream shit pushing pizza and videostore coupons and appearing in costume on talk shows and printed on pyjamas and bath towels and moulded plastic in play-doh. Hyped beyond almost anything else in the comic book world, the new corporate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were supposed to be amazing. Of course I had continued to collect the original black and white comic series and all of the spin-offs and one-shots. As DIY independent publications, indie comics were often forums for their authors to voice their opinions. Dave Sim famously went either nuts or misogynistic or both as Cerebus matured and many readers lost interest. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the creators of the Ninja Turtles, spent month after month telling us about how excited they were about the coming toy lines, about how great the TV show was going to be, how there was a movie on the horizon. They never did talk about the tens or likely hundreds of millions of dollars which they were going to be making as they quite literally sold out their independent DIY comic book idea to a major corporation seeking a transmedia entertainment property on which to balance a slew of industrial properties and licensing opportunities. 

computer gaming: a nice way to relax from the horrors of the office

I was eleven when the Ninja Turtles went mainstream and I was expecting a faithful adaptation of the comic books, not an easy prospect for an exceptionally gory and violent martial arts title which often featured swearing and sexual themes not allowed in mainstream comics. The marketing machine behind the newly commodified Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sanitised everything about them, and in the process made everything lowest-common-denominatordumb. All of their characteristics were specifically tailored to cover the entirety of commercial youth demographics, from the stoner rejects of California and midwestern jocks to the east coast elite school wannabes and videogame nerds. Everything interesting about the original Turtles had been stripped away for mass market consumption, a bastardization best reified by the turtles’ newfound focus on pizza. Even the character of April O’Neil had changed, losing her feminist self-determination and computer programmer career and becoming simply another whining female sidekick, often an obstacle or prize for the machinations of the male characters in the narrative. Girls can’t be computer programmers, says capitalism. Girls have girl jobs like news reporting and being beautiful on TV. Gross, new Ninja Turtles. I fucking hated with a passion the new Ninja Turtles brought to me by capitalism. At least the arcade games were fun.

Selling Ninja Turtles comics for so much money – $1,150 for one issue, so much money for a thirteen-year old boy that I still have never told my parents about my comic book business; they thought I was just trading issues back and forth with friends – allowed me not only to purchase some musical equipment and follow another career path (itself later decimated under capitalism, but that’s another story) [update], but also try to up my game in the comics business. I used the money I made from believing in Ninja Turtles before they became something not worth believing in to invest in other comic book series which weren’t being offered for sale in stores in Thunder Bay and try to sell those books to the stores on commission. My friend Mark's older sister – a newwave icon for my entire childhood – clued me into a book called Love and Rockets. The whole operation was dependent on my knowledge of the books coming out which might be interesting. This is what made me believe in capitalism for the short delusion which is childhood. Success comes through skill and hard work. No problem, I thought, as I knew more about comics than a lot of people in my town and I was good at working hard. Knowledge is a skill, and I knew how to work to improve knowledge and understanding. But then I learned the truth about capitalism, an argument also expressed in Thomas Piketty’s book Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. Namely that capital wins itself. That knowledge in and of itself is meaningless in the face of capital. Those who have money earn money, while those who do not have it do not – the most simple truth in all of human creation. Once a few of the adults picked up on what I was doing, they used their significantly greater fiscal assets to entirely push me out of the market. They didn't know anything about comic books, they just had more cash than I did. Within two weeks of my most successful sale I was pushed out of the ‘industry’ completely and lost both my purchasing and my selling clients. No deals on buying, no deals on selling. Just another plebeian. Game over, as they say.

of course capitalists have taken control of the media

If only my ability to earn money IRL could begin to match the mastery I can demonstrate in virtual economies. Wall street gets to play fake, why can’t I?

and now a word from our sponsors...

Obviously I don't have a single sponsor. It is important to support companies that are doing good work, and performing their function in a manner that doesn't cause a greater harm than good.

Fashion is the first step. It's something that most people take for granted, as in: "that shirt looks nice, it's cheap enough, i'll buy it". There is a larger framework for the manufacturing and distribution of that item of clothing that needs to be considered. Did the workers who made it get paid a fair wage? Are chemicals, such as bleach, used in the production of the fabric and/or item that do environmental harm? Will it really look cool?

Thinking about purchases is the start of an ethical life. Don't just buy whatever is most convenient.

This is becoming an even bigger issue for drinks than clothes. Coke has a history of violently intimidating its non-union production staff, most notably its bottlers in South and Central America who are trying to unionize. Every time you buy a Coke product, and they are legion, you are supporting that particular manufacturing practise, ie: violently oppressing an impoverished workforce.

That being said, when you go to a corner store or restaurant these days, it becomes apparent that Coke has a virtual monopoly on drink distribution. Many convenience stores stock only Coke products, presumably because they then get to use the drink fridge for free.

So what is a good citizen to do? Well, try moving on and finding a drink that doesn't have such attrocious political baggage. Water is free in most public places (although that will change over time I'm sure), so why not give that a try?

consumptive fantasies

Once again, my naivité has allowed me to become engaged in conversations that most people would ignore...

I was in Toronto today to see the Massive Change exhibition at the AGO - a separate post will give some of my opinions on that. I exited and composed my thoughts, as any good bullshit artist should do, while I walked to Yonge St. My particular reveries of a solitary walker led me down University ave, and past the American consulate, where an anti-US protest was underway. The issue was of course American involvement in Iraq, with a particular regard for the atrocities currently being committed against Muslims in the area.

So I’m paying attention to the guy with the megaphone, who proved himself a less than capable motivational speaker, when I catch up to a woman in her mid-thirties responding to her young son’s questions about the protest. Since I’m a nosey bastard, I couldn’t help but overhear.

“...why we had to go there. People in Iraq were being murdered, and now they can begin to experience freedom and start building their lives again.” Before I could respond she rattled off “I support the president. I voted for the president,” to which I had to ask which one she was referring, as there were several thousand presidents in the world, and that the one which leads her country should not be referred to as “the president”. That semantic game went nowhere fast.

Again, I’m a nosey bastard, so I asked her what freedoms she felt came from a military occupation. “Well, we ended all of the rapes that were happening.” was one of her many answers, along with the threat of WMD and the rest of the line items we all heard from the American government in 2003.

Interestingly enough, none of the people of Iraqi descent who I have met ever complained about the widespread rape problem.

She told both me and her kid that “Some wars are good.” The kid replied “So guns can do good things?” to which she said “Sometimes you have to kill bad guys to get things right.”

I asked her if she thought all 100,000 civilians that the Lancet estimates have been killed by the US invasion to have been bad people; Iraq might ultimately see the good to come of such barbarity, under the terms of her own logic.

“Fewer people have died from this war than did in Vietnam. We’re doing a better job.” Using one barbaric imperialist war to justify the ontology of another is indeed the way to go on this one...

Anyhoo, I told her kid to look it up for himself on the internet, as while his mother might love him very much, she might not have all the facts about American foreign actions. That pissed her off, and she quickly disappeared into a random office supply store which I’m sure had exactly that which she needed.

Still, I wasn’t really satisfied.

Going back to the American consulate, I began to talk to the few dozen Americans sitting out front watching the protest across the street. Here’s the stats:

12/15 people I talked to thought that Iraq possessed nuclear arms technology, which has been proven false by every reputable source, including the CIA.

7/15 thought that Canada had sent troops to Iraq to fight alongside America, which it did not.

3/15 thought that widespread raping and murdering occurred while Saddam Hussein was in power, which contradicts what most international observers and Iraqis themselves have ever reported; you can see some results for yourself here.



13/15 thought that America was right to invade a country and impose “freedom”. [As of this writing, with Operation Lightning we are about to witness the largest deployment of security forces in Bagdad since the war began. The city is being cordoned off from the exterior, and is being cut into several security sections along the lines of the ghetto projects of the second world war. Let’s hope this is a better event than it looks to be.]

7/15 thought that Muslim extremism was caused by the tenets of the religion, and could not be overcome. Interestingly enough, 6/7 of those people, when asked about the dangers of Christian extremism, did not believe such a thing to be possible.

9/15 thought that violence can solve more problems than it creates, when used “effectively”. I almost got punched by 4/15 people when I asked if the individuals who caused the 9/11 tragedy had a justification to their actions, from their point of view.

And here I was thinking that the Americans who were visiting Canada were the enlightened ones who wanted to get away from their despotic leader. Looks like the election of 2004 really did provide a legitimate mandate to the intentions of the White House.

another thing about North America is...

I found a copy of the Turkish magazine Skylife from April 2005. This is an industry mag for Turkish Airlines, and like many of these complementary publications, it exists largely to transmit advertising to an otherwise captive inflight audience. Lifestyle obviously plays a big part of ad culture, and Skylife is no different. Where it does differentiate itself is in its cultural content, and not for the reasons which may seem obvious.

A quick flip to the section on music reveals that the indie music scene has a larger profile in Turkey than it does in North America. First page: a profile of an electronica festival featuring Amon Tobin, Peaches, M83, and the Tied & Tickled Trio, among others. Apparently, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art, who are principle organizers of the event, have their fingers a hell of a lot closer to the pulse than do mainstream art organizations on this side of the Atlantic. With the notable exception of the inclusion of Jaga Jazzist at last year's summer concert series at the Docks in Toronto, I have not seen an equivalent conflation of independent and mainstream audiences.

So I turn the page, and what lies in front of me but line profiles of Boom Bip, Tobias Thomas, Electrelane, Nicola Conte, Jason Moran, the Notwist, and the Kitbuilders. Now, none of these acts is on the pristine cutting edge, but to see them in a magazine which is aimed at the general public is fairly impressive -- and in an industry mag, no less.

Equally impressive is the section of film, which looks at Vera Drake from the UK and Samaritan Girl from South Korea, alongside some rep cinema favourites.

From this, can i assume that the average urban dweller of Turkey, or at least of Istanbul, has a higher level of cultural awareness than the typical suburban dweller in North America? After all, our mainline magazines seem to focus on J-Lo, 50 Cent, or Kelly Clarkson whenever they need to fill a section on music. Typical print copy centres not on their music, but rather their lifestyles and other nuggets of personal gossip, thus successfully avoiding that fact that none of these "artists" actually has anything to say.

Film over here tends to focus on how much money the files in the top 5 made. No merit is given to artistic quality or authorial intention. If the total is higher than say $15 million for an opening weekend, then it was a success. It's like all the mainstream imprints received Playschool Kids' First Aesthetics and Criticism sets when they started to write about art. Art = money, otherwise nobody has any fucking clue.

I think the public actually wants to consume legitimate culture, as evidenced by the success of some relatively cutting-edge television shows and films. The real problem as I see it is accessibility. Most people simply do not have the time (or, more insideously, the motivation) to seek out alternative forms of media content. Instead, they just let what washes over their senses by mainstream media be counted as "my culture".

So what happens to a culture which wants good music, but continually indulges market instincts for the promotion of a culture. J-Lo wins the music race because the company behind her spends millions marketing her sounds and image to the population. Lacking any real alternatives to MuchMusic/MTV or broadcast radio, people come to accept J-Lo as a normative force in music, rather than the aesthetically useless noise that it is.

But hey, who am I to judge. Go ahead, waste your time with crappy hollow songs that you think highlight your life. What does that say about you? :P

american sense of self

I am continually amazed by the reach and subtle power of propagandistic discourse. It's even more fun to watch how the present state of consumer capitalism has rendered propaganda as a standardized formula, and a means by which such ideologies enter into daily life. Fascist Italy was hindered by the need for monolithic depictions of the leader. In the modern culture of consumption, the god-head of fascism is replaced by the negation of the self among citizens through advertising. Instead of wall-sized murals of Hitler or Mussolini, a carapace of the citizen-subject is rendered in order to be destroyed by inadequacy in relation to the product offered.

This process can have funny consequences. A 1948 Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of Hitchcock's Spellbound was introduced by show producer William Keighley:

"While most people think of motion pictures as typically American, it is nevertheless true that our neighbours overseas have contributed much to their development: new ideas, new technical approaches, and new stars."

"I was talking to [European actress Alida] Valli... and one of the things that impressed her on arriving in this country was the abundance of everything. From motorcars, to good soap flakes. And to millions of people, good soap flakes mean Lux. Which reminds me again how much we take our luxuries for granted. While in many other countries, housewives must rely on any kind of soap that they can get, here they are always sure of the safe and easy care of precious washable fabrics by saying Lux."

No wonder America developed an isolated sense of itself. An insular approach to identity is always-already fostered throughout mass culture. Perhaps this inward gaze was fostered as a reaction to the gesture beyond oneself which lies at the heart of many of the communications technologies that were developed over the course of the 20th century. God only knows what will emerge as computer technologies continue to mature.

don't you throw that piece of shit Swiffer in the trash

This past summer, a friend told me that the $69 DVD player which he had purchased a little over a year prior had died. Naturally, this petit mort occurred about a month after its warranty had expired. I told him that he should get it fixed anyway, as the motor required to fix the loading tray couldn't cost more than $50 to install. That kind of thinking was absurd to him, as he could just pick up a new player for another $69, and that spending about $69 a year on DVD players was actually a pretty good idea. "It's like leasing a car," he admitted.

I tried to argue that there was more at stake than the cost of the player, as electronic components are not easily recycled on the consumer end of things. If Canada were to landfill, say, 200,000 DVD players every year, then we would quickly learn the value of keeping these things around for a while at an increased purchase cost rather than continually disposing cheap models. Then there's the fact that consumers are currently working too much as it is, and such product disposability would quite literally mean throwing away the labour required to earn the money to pay for the shitty product in the first place. Surely consumers would not put up with the illogical nature of an accelerating pace for product disintegration as our technological ability increases.

The first company to prove me wrong was Disney, which announced this summer that it would adopt the disposable DVD system of Flexplay, er, "Technologies". Flexplay thought it would be a good idea to produce DVDs that would self-destruct 48 hours after being exposed to air, thus rendering them effective pay-per-view options for all of us lazy bastards who find it hard to return films on time. Instead of bringing the film back, you toss the DVD in the garbage. Purchase price: $5 - $7 per film, roughly equal with high-end video rentals. Long term cost to the environment: rising logarithmically with trends in human stupidity. One of these trends would be the proposed introduction of these disposable DVDs into every fast food lid you ever purchase, from pop cans and cups to pizza and burger boxes. It should be noted that this trend was inaugurated by AOL's decade-long bombardment of our landfills with tens of millions of unsolicited CDs.

The recall of 175,000 Swiffer vacuums should further demonstrate to us the irrational redundancy of badly produced consumer items. There is simply no reason in contemporary technological terms that an item as benign as a vacuum could betray the owner in so widespread a manner. Companies like to make things as cheap as possible . And yet at the same time it is ungodly to think that we cannot simply make a vacuum and that would be the end of it. I mean by this that the vacuum you have would stick around for a while longer than Proctor & Gamble wants it to. But then in all honesty, no one purchasing a battery-powered vacuum would concern themselves with permanence.

The Swiffer rag came to prominence by confusing the public into thinking that things weren't clean unless you actually made more garbage than you had in the first place. Now you are expected to throw away your entire electrical cleaning system after a limited number of uses. Proctor & Gamble understands well that the foundation of the company's business is the production of garbage, and so they fetishize this act in their commercials. Nice ass you say, as the TV mom dances the dust into her garbage can, along with a Swiffer product. That paid actor sure looks happy now that her prop house is easily cleaned every day. In order to demonstrate the apparent ease with which you clean your house, the production of garbage is glorified by literally getting the cleaning supplies you used out of your life, kind of as though they were never there to begin with. I do hate to state the obvious here people, but those reusable rags that we all used to use before 2000 still work wonders.

We can indeed see these moves to complete disposability -- planned obsolescence, as those marketers like to say -- as demonstrating the end of consumer culture in a logical sense. I mean by this the fact that, in general, production comes pretty easy to us. The economic structures which provided so much personal, technological, and cultural development are currently operating in a field of hyper-production. Industrialism was the growth spurt which has allowed us to realize many benefits for individuals and society as a whole. Yet once grown, it should be time to put away childish things, or at least put them into their proper context. Now that we have demonstrated the capacity to provide for many, it is time to provide a degree of permanence to our possessions. Sustainability is adulthood in this context.

It is time for populations through government to stand up to the market whims of companies and force them to accept that which they have continued to regard as externalities: the cost of cleaning up the shit which they produce. This cost is deferred to future generations. Some US lawyers have even gone so far as to argue that this process amounts to taxation without representation, a position which would ultimately undermine the authority of the present government. We are, after all, in this together, and polluting the earth is to pollute ourselves. Do not kid yourself about involvement with environmentalism (to appropriate Lenin's comments on politics). We cannot allow companies to pollute the earth just because it interests them economically. This is a form of warfare, and perhaps the definitive Orwellian omnipresent-conflict that was heralded to consummate the 20th century. What we call economic logic in the present day is usually a euphemism for totalitarian greed and a tyranny for power which is antithetical to democracy. Ecology is democracy in its most primal and universal form.