i think you're all crazy for getting rid of your optical drives: notes from a technophile luddite

asking around, it's clear that almost nobody has optical drives around their home anymore, unless they have a blu-ray player or a game console attached to a television. young people in particular simply do not have access to an optical drive in their life. in truth most people don't seem to care and won't miss them, convinced that streaming provides a convenient and inexpensive push-button, remote-control access to everything that matters. the removal of bulky optical drives from laptops makes them thin and sexy, because the market has been repeatedly convinced by Apple Computer that thin and sexy is the best thing for laptops to be. and look at that – Apple has a streaming store, one of the first big ones on the internet. how convenient that for almost ten years now they haven’t allowed their customers the choice to have an optical drive in their systems

forget the fact that independent media productions are almost universally locked out of the streaming services that people actually use (except youtube, a platform on which the only way to make any money at all is to be immensely popular). ignore the ability to trade media with friends or like-minded communities, to borrow media from libraries, purchase titles from around the world, or sell media on used markets when the user is finished using it. nevermind the fact that streaming services in fact have only a very limited archive of media currently available, and almost universally present little depth or breadth to their available media: no controversy, no history, nothing which is too weird or hard to understand, nothing from other times or other countries. just the same collection of corporate material found on walmart shelves and gas station discount bins three for five dollars. these are inconveniences, certainly, but the more significant reason that i think everyone should keep an optical drive around is control

it is important to recognise that tangible benefits do exist for media streaming, not the least of which are environmental in nature. while streaming services use more electricity than Netflix, Apple, or indeed almost everyone would like to admit, over a period longer than ten years optical media have a tendency to end up not on the shelves of domestic or public libraries but rather in landfills, and at many times in their lifespan their physical presence signals the expenditure of gasoline for shipping. it is encouraging that optical media are able to be industrially recycled, but since doing so costs money which municipalities are not paying, only the most dedicated and wealthy consumer would ever worry about the environmental footprint of their optical media use and take the time to expensively ship their garbage discs to recyclers. furthermore, from the point of view of media users it is far more convenient to select a film from a streaming archive than to go to a store or shop online for an optical disc. streaming services also allow access to a more broad community of users, as geographical isolation tends to cohabitate with media isolation. with access to streaming services, rural communities are less dependent on the habits or economic realities of their local retail store owners, for example. the immediacy of the archive provokes a false sense of media expertise, of falsely enjoying a position of privilege and control. “i’m no sucker,” says the Netflix streamer. “i am more in control over my media experiences than anyone ever before”

however, it is not likely that Netflix will ever pick up that interesting bela tarr film people sometimes write about. those interesting Iranian films from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s which poetically blended fiction and non-fiction into potent political allegories are not likely to be bought by streaming services, given the chameleon nature of geopolitical happenstance. inspired by a friend’s recent binge of japanese underground cyberpunk films of the 1990s, a search online only leads to disappointment when learning that no current service offers even Tetsuo the Iron Man, which is a million times more visible than any of the other weirdo films mentioned by that friend. in fact Netflix has nothing at all approaching sections for art and experimental films, silent films or the early hollywood studio era, european modernism, Bollywood musicals, or guerilla documentaries from the margins of latin american and african post-colonialism. due to competing licensing concerns, Netflix isn't even the best place for blockbuster films, as the studios are slowly trying to each have their own smaller netflixes, presenting a future in which fans collect apps instead of movies or music

while Spotify is smart enough to have licensed weirdos such as :zoviet*france: to their platform, the business model they offer to artists (aka no money at all) will not allow the next weirdo band to emerge, unless those weirdos happen to be independently wealthy. my guess is that if they are still around in twenty years, Spotify will be a frontend for Top40 artists whose new licenses give them copyright access to the archives of recorded music history for free 'as a service to their fans'. sure, weirdos and independent media could set up their own websites to allow consumers access, but the reality is that those attempts rarely work. as any independent media person could tell you, the vast majority of people simply will not go out of their way to access your independent media. in the early days of the internet david bowie and prince offered fans a direct sales model which in addition to music and video material also provided email and music licensing services, but not too many people used them. it is definitely tough for artists to sell to fans directly, however with optical drives at least there remains a possibility for such an exchange to occur. randomly go to a bar and be impressed by the band to the point where you buy a disc – it can be played in any optical disc player. some random street vendor in taipei is selling local music on disc – it can be played in any optical disc player. for a long time profits in the music industry were sustained by artificially inflated compact disc prices, and consumers were rightly pissed at being asked to pay $15 for 74 minutes of crap to hear the 5-minute song they actually wanted to purchase. but streaming and downloading music does not sabotage the profits of the record industry, whose artists are essentially multinational media investments backed by sufficient financial capital to use 'songs' and 'music' as advertisements for fan participation in a celebrity 'experience'. music fans who don't pay for music are not 'striking back at the industry'; they are failing to provide artists who aren't superstars with a revenue stream on which they can tour and produce music, rent an apartment, and buy food

now that optical drives are increasingly not owned by media consumers, the vast majority of optical disc content not transferred to streaming services will remain arcane mysteries except to the most dedicated of media scholars, existing as a hazy ‘there-be-dragons’ cloud of bytes locked behind an artificially antiquated viewing practice. after all, in both cases the viewing practice is the same; what has changed is the means of distribution, with new forms of distribution falling under the control of an increasingly smaller elite of corporate entities. after a number of years teaching film and media studies classes, it is clear to me that media content which is not immediately clickable simply does not exist for the streaming generation. content is somewhat secondary to convenience of access: students will click and watch a maya deren film on youtube, but will not watch an older version of Star Wars on DVD. perhaps such is inevitable, and the media consumption of the masses has always been of concern to media scholars, but i understand the termination of access to physical media as signalling something else, something a bit more consequential. not quite the tired end-of-history talk common to end-of-media discourse, but worry rather about a more precisely prescribed history to come

the point i wish to make here is much less about what is available on streaming services than what is made unavailable by the loss of optical media drives. as a Netflix subscriber myself – for the tv shows they produce – this article is not intended to convince anyone to drop their subscriptions. rather, i want people to reconsider the loss of an optical drive from their lives. optical drives are relatively open standards, whereas online streaming protocols are not. anyone incorporated or not can freely produce material (granted, within the confines of national obscenity laws) and distribute it to media consumers who have a technical platform capable of reproducing it. of course there exist a number of methods to restrict access to the optical disc as an open platform, most notably the numerous digital rights management (DRM) methods implemented for the protection of copyrighted materials. while optical drives attached to computers provide the greatest amount of flexibility for reproducing the contents of optical media, consumer optical devices such as compact disc, DVD, and blu-ray players are also relatively open platforms when the inexpensive and often freely-available protocols they use are adhered to. in other words, any musician, individual, or company may produce and sell any audio signal they want knowing that disc will be reproduced properly for all listeners so long as the disc conforms to the ‎IEC 60908 protocol for audio reproduction (also known as redbook audio for compact discs). currently there exists millions of individual media titles on optical disc formats and all of them can be reproduced by all users of optical disc drives. the paradoxical point here being made is that in practice optical drives are more open as a media distribution standard than is a digital network connection

no such analogy as independent music exists with streaming services. let us put aside the false binary of physical and non-physical media, for streaming services and file sharing and every other computational medium is a complex articulation of silicon chips, magnetic and electrical storage devices, network hardware, software protocols, and financial assets which all manifest as physical ‘things’ whose physical use and ownership have physical and non-physical implications on the media they deliver (the ‘internet of things’ is really just ‘more things on the internet’, the continued application of the physicality of networked computation to an increasing number of ‘things’). i watched as friends sold off their disc collection after ripping their music and movies to hard drives. after all, why keep the disc when it can be sold and my friend can keep watching their rip? consumers empowered by optical disc rips enjoy a false mastery over the consumer market however, as over the long term – say longer than ten years or so – that rip and sell strategy does not work unless my friend has a professional data management plan in place, ensuring yearly backups to new hardware with file integrity validation procedures. hard drives crash, operating systems and user activity often fail to keep data intact, and magnetically-recorded bits can flip polarity (1’s become 0’s and 0’s become 1’s) over time, and unless a person has expertise in long-term film management or is paying someone else to have that expertise for them it is almost certain that they will lose access to their data at some point, and probably much sooner than they expected. much as many users lost access to the files they kept on floppy disks but did not transfer to a hard drive before purchasing a computer lacking a floppy drive (Apple users who in the late 1990s purchased the first iMacs as perhaps the most famous example), users who expect permanence to their files often forget that those files exist as physical instantiations, with access requiring a performative interpretation by a specific hardware architecture. as this truth renders computational media highly volatile and fragile, it is best to embrace open rather than proprietary standards. the point, and one which for many readers will perhaps be overly belaboured, is that optical drives represent a significant open standard which we should not be so quick to abandon

that being said, it is indeed possible to discuss some issues related to a changed physicality. it is not possible to ‘lend’ or ‘sell’ streamed media after use, and it is not possible for content to be shared between services or with users who have not subscribed to any service, or with devices incompatible with the service. for example, for DRM purposes Netflix currently requires computer users to have very specific processor and operating system architectures in order to stream 4k video, chipsets so specific in fact that computer users who are not official ‘Microsoft Insiders’ as part of the Windows 10 operating system subscription model are not able to stream 4k content. Apple mac users cannot officially stream Netflix in 4k and are forced to either hackintosh a workaround or limit themselves to 4k selections in iTunes. streaming is a tenuous network of gardens walled by proprietary protocols and DRM efforts and held together by legal and financial discursive practices, whose commercial existence precludes any function as a stable personal archive or cultural repository. here's the thing about streaming that media consumers aren't considering: all those streams exist on servers owned by companies which are guaranteed to either 1) go out of business at some point, or 2) be acquired by a larger media conglomerate. when either of these eventualities happens, the licensing arrangements media consumers previously made with companies become null and void. long story short, consumers get to purchase their media access all over again, and in the process it is guaranteed that specific titles will become lost in the legal shuffle, unavailable once a user has reset their subscriptions

while this process (of legal ‘censorship’) occurs with formats previous to optical media (witness for example the loss on home video media due to music licensing arrangements of many sequences from the originally broadcasted episodes of WKRP In Cincinnati), but this process is exacerbated by the ease with which streaming services and other media companies change their relationships with their customers. for example, Netflix periodically removes content for reasons related more to marketing concerns rather than licensing issues. another example involves the digital game series No One Lives Forever (NOLF), well-produced parodies of James Bond and the 60’s spy tv show fad with a solid female protagonist and released by Fox Interactive on computers between 2000 and 2003. as the copyright for the series is enmeshed in a complex history of corporate mergers, bankruptcies, and acquisitions while the companies involved are not allowing anyone to license the game for sale while not themselves selling it (despite the games’ first-person action mechanics remaining commercially viable in 2018), the only way for anyone to currently play NOLF is to purchase a retail copy of the game on the collector’s market. while the game is neither easily nor inexpensively acquired, it is possible to do so only as long as one has access to an optical drive. more to the point, if you have an optical drive i can lend you my copy

drives remain quite inexpensive but are no longer as ubiquitous a retail presence as they were only a few years ago, and as computer optical drives and stand-alone consumer optical disc devices disappear from stores the inexpensive acquisition of an optical drive is going to change faster than optical media fans such as myself are probably prepared for. small companies, especially in the audiophile market, will continue to service optical drives for niche markets, but those niche markets will have to pay a luxury price for their rejection of the mass market. we laugh at the weird names of craft beer companies started by bearded millennials and then get mad at the expensive results (re: the PC of ontario 'buck a beer' electioneering promise), but as the mass market quickly abandons optical media over the next seven years the same trend will apply for currently-obsolescing media forms such as music, films, and software on optical media (and magazines, newspapers, and books in print media). at that point, it will be increasingly difficult for media to be shared among people without passing through one of the corporate media streaming keyholes, controlled by shareholders who do not wish controversial media content to affect their bottom line, even if some consumers are willing to pay extra for the controversy. at the inception of its streaming service, Netflix was notorious for censoring much of the content it was distributing. while the Blockbuster chain of video stores was known to have censored some of the films it offered for rental, viewers could readily acquire media from other sources and play them on the same video device as used for watching videos rented at Blockbuster; furthermore, they were able to purchase unedited versions of films – otherwise known as the standard retail release – directly from Blockbuster itself. there was no way for Blockbuster’s corporate interests to limit a user’s ability to use their device; equally, there is no way for Netflix, iTunes, or any other streaming service to keep users from watching other streams. media consumers are however limiting themselves to the contemporary business arrangements of a very small number of corporations when they chose hardware incompatible with previously-established open standards such as optical discs. in short, gilles deleuze was correct in describing a 'control society' in which lives are voluntarily mediated by access rights

while desktop and laptop computers could eventually alter sufficiently to the extent that they are no longer useful as media consumption devices (looking at you, phones), it is likely that whatever happens to computers as work and leisure tools most homes will incorporate servers into their structure, much as they incorporated other once-separate technological functions such as delivering water and regulating heat. as a person is no longer likely to purchase or build a house without a furnace or central plumbing, future homeowners will likely view home servers as mandatory components of their domestic lives. given that such servers would likely follow developments from present server technologies, optical drives will indeed have a place in such computer platforms, if people want them to be there

do not ditch your streaming service subscriptions, but equally do not rush to ditch that bluray drive under your television, or choose a laptop, tablet, or other computational platform with no ports to attach external optical drives. for myself, it’s media apocalypse bunker time: next time i build a computer, i'm going to buy four or five extra optical drives and put them in storage. a drive lasts about ten years (smoke-free environments are key to the lifespan of electronics...), and properly stored those drives should keep future generations happy that we have been outlived by our libraries of media

[image from Wasteland 2 copyright inExile Entertainment]

Let's Play... Pool of Radiance

Pool of Radiance

SSI, 1988

originally played on Commodore 64, Amiga

I hesitated before starting this one again. Just look at the simultaneously beautiful and hideously atrocious box cover art and you’ll quickly understand what I mean. The beauty is perhaps less obvious: a classic Clyde Caldwell fantasy painting, an artist well-known to all Dungeons & Dragons tabletop fans, depicting a standard male power aesthetic found all over the best and worst of fantasy art and culture. Metal and man-hair shine with equal precision. The sword half-poised like a cock. The dragon oddly feminised. Taken as a whole, these elements betray both a nerdy powerlessness and a strangely appealing masculine power trip fantasy, one which fully grabbed hold of me as a precociously impressionable twelve-year old. Of course, like all infantile compulsions the negative connotations specifically associated with ‘heroic fantasy’ iconography fully outweigh any sense of aesthetic pleasure derived from what is at best a skilled technical ability which readily evokes a sense of perpetual nostalgia within a certain kind of game consumer and a certain kind of revulsion from most normally everyone else.

an early-game encounter

Interestingly enough, my own experience with this box cover art was not enabled by consumption, at least not in its official capacity. My father brought Pool of Radiance (1988) home one day, copied from a physician friend at work on the basis of the game program being the largest ever released for the Commodore 64: four double-sided 5 ¼” floppy disks. Game piracy was of course not exceptional behaviour in the 1980s. Games were passed around with friends at school on a nearly weekly basis. At this point in the computers-as-pedagogical-tools debate, school computers were entirely misunderstood by teaching staff who had obviously never been trained to use them, so any use by students was viewed by teachers as an appropriate display of computer science aptitude. Friends and I would sit at the back of the classroom copying and playing games and receiving straight A’s.

The more official procedure for our family (i.e.: condoned by parents) to acquire games was to go through ‘The List’, a document dozens of dot matrix computer-printed pages long. My brother and I would select from The List the games we would want to play. My dad’s physician friend would then charge according to how many disks were used, not how many games were copied. I’m not sure whether he actually owned all of the games that were on his list, but he had a whole lot of them. Marriage and kids had not stopped this workaholic emergency room doctor from acquiring a large library full of games. My father brought me over there a few times, and I was instantly amazed by the bookshelves which housed games to the ceiling in nice-smelling oak with brass and silver accent lighting. Treated like a fine library, the doctor’s game collection was my projected masculine fantasy. He must have been buying fifteen games a week for the three different computers set up in his study. On each of the few times I was there, I was allowed to rifle through the boxes and play some of the games released only for IBM and Apple ][, systems far too expensive in the 1980s for my family. Distinct from game consoles, home computers allowed full access to media production technologies such as disk creation. In fact, the early history of home computing was almost entirely informed by a culture of software sharing and copying, as many of the computer clubs functioned essentially as game swap meets. Over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, the industry had to educate consumers to convince them not to copy their floppies. As a barrier to piracy, a lot of the games employed off-disk copy protection in the form of manuals, maps, charts, printed graphics, and code wheels which were often creatively integrated into gameplay. With the doctor, of course, these materials involved additional fees. Ancillaries, he called them. In addition to using four double-sided disks, Pool of Radiance required two large manuals full of expository text and information about the gameworld, and a code wheel. Needless to say, the game was quite expensive to copy.

educating the masses about the dangers of software piracy

The SSI gold box games were particularly important to my formative videogame habits: extended play sessions, meticulous procedures for backing up save files, attention to detail with a forensic and autistic focus, a logical strategization of progress, and meticulous documentation – admittedly a skill developed playing other RPGs which habitually required players to create their own maps and log narrative and quest information. Ultimately, as a result of the cost of pirating complex games such as CRPGs, and the fact that by the age of twelve I was in receipt of a fairly regular income stream, I purchased a copy of every other gold box game I played. From age seven I had been delivering newspapers, and by twelve I had begun to make a profit buying and selling comic books, a bedroom industry in which I thrived until adults started paying attention to comics as investments and by 1992 had priced me out of even trying. Before Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989) and the other gold box games, however, it was Pool of Radiance which captured everything I could call my attention. My father brought the game home, showing off the disks and wondering in amazement about “where it will all end”. Of course, he meant computer technology and wasn't challenging me to complete the game before he did. As a kid I didn’t think my parents played games, maybe due to the fact that they would sometimes get mad when my brother and I played games instead of doing “something outside”. My mom certainly never bothered with them, and it wasn’t until I was older that my father admitted to having enjoyed Douglas Adams games Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984) and Bureaucracy (1987) and strategy games such as Ocean Trader (1983), Trader Trilogy (1982), Starflight (1986), and Elite (1986). So he came home from work and was immediately excited that I was immediately excited by the game. In retrospect, this enthusiasm made sense. A few months prior, my religiously-inclined mother and I had gotten into a huge fight after she had found my first-edition copies of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide and Deities and Demigods. Fuelled by a trend in religious hatred against D&D quite popular at the time, my mother had decided to destroy an admittedly satanic-looking book and one which quantified the gods of world religion along with their occult rituals, which I had recently acquired from a friend’s older brother as part of my transition, along with every other D&D player my age, from Dungeons & Dragons to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I never forgot the look on my father’s face as he watched my mom tear the pages out of the books, and it was this look which later made me think that he knew what he was doing when he brought home Pool of Radiance, the first official adaptation of D&D for home computers.

glorious tactical, turn-based combat

Having recently completed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate (1988), another game I had purchased on my own with four-and-a-half weeks of paper route money, I learned Pool's interface very quickly. Enraptured by the character generation screen, among the more advanced for CRPGs at the time, my brother and I spent the entire first night with the game making characters and printing them off in case we wanted to use them in tabletop D&D adventures. Admittedly, I think these characters were only used once in an actual D&D session, but as every RPG player knows that is entirely beside the point. Affect in role-playing games involves fetishising a numerical matrix which qualifies a character within the game world. The numbers tell the whole story of what can be accomplished in the game; the actual narrative or plot is entirely secondary.

perhaps the first game which allowed LGBT characters 

role-playing options add narrative complexity

This being said, Pool of Radiance deploys a rather complicated narrative form for its time. While not exhibiting the narrative depth or complexity of text adventures, Pool utilised a fair number of narrative text passages which guided an admittedly wholly pedestrian and routine fantasy RPG plot. But as with many media texts from the early days in a medium’s history, we must properly contextualise what the game actually accomplishes rather than dismiss it for the many things it does not. At several points in the game, players can make choices which branch the narrative slightly or bestow useful items. While certainly not demonstrating the narrative significance or complexity of Balder’s Gate (1998) or The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings (2011), Pool of Radiance does experiment with the hack and slash mechanics which characterise a significant portion of gameplay. And what mechanics these are. The game presents a complex tactical combat system modelled on actual D&D rules and with elements not only from SSI’s previous RPGs such as Wizard’s Crown (1986) and the Phantasie (1985 – 1987) series, but also from the company’s many legendary war and strategy game series. Almost anything that you could think of doing could be accomplished in the Pool of Radiance game engine, or so it seemed to us at the time.

encounter with the end boss

While slow, the advanced, turn-based combat presented players with (at the time) a rather extensive amount of tactical possibilities. Unlike most of my friends, I was a dedicated computer game player who didn’t have a console at home except an old Atari VCS and an entirely ignored Odyssey 2. For the entire height of the Nintendo boom in the late 80s, most people I knew made fun of me and my family for not having a NES at home. My brother rectified this situation in 1990, but before that my NES time was limited (admitted not quite the right term in this context, as this was the time of extended weekend sleepovers) to time spent at friends’ houses. I took their abuse in stride because I knew that there were things that computers could do in games that consoles simply could not do. Because of piracy, computer gamers always had access to far more games than even rich kids with consoles. The much greater memory capacity of most home computers allowed a far greater complexity to programming code and resultant game design while allowing greater graphical prowess. Most importantly, computers had floppy disks and cassette drives used to save information. As a result, many computer games were designed around gameplay ideas necessitating the tracking and deployment of player data, be it as a record of gameplay behaviour or outcomes or to save a player’s progress. They often presented a different framework for gameplay and presented entirely different ideas to players than did the infinitely more popular console games, extending over weeks or months instead of single sessions, and adjusting themselves to player activity and altering their worlds as a result of player behaviour. Additionally, computer games could utilize highly advanced control interfaces and control interactions allowed by keyboards in addition to console-standard joysticks and trackballs. As fewer people had access to computers in the home, these games tailored themselves to niche rather than mass markets. Some genres such as strategy and flight simulation didn't even appear on console games until very recently.

Accordingly, I used to love showing off to my friends aspects of computer games that console games simply couldn’t do – the personalization and content creation functions, the extensive graphics and gameplay options. Many of these differences existed with Pool of Radiance. Players have control over the appearance of their characters throughout the game. Hundreds of different inventory items are available, allowing for extensive customization. One of my friends was absolutely amazed that enemies could be killed to the point where they were cleared out of an area in the game, and then the game machine could be switched off and the game resumed later with these same areas still clear of enemies. Two months later, he convinced his mom to buy him an Amiga; although Pool of Radiance had not yet been released for that system, rumours were that the best version of the game would be for Amiga but he would have to wait and in the meantime he had Hillsfar (1989), Heroes of the Lance (1988), Defender of the Crown (1986), Blood Money (1989), Dungeon Master (1988) and every other game that was completely amazing on Amiga. Indeed, this minor procedural detail of housekeeping enabled by player data save technologies is the entirety of Pool's plot: clear an area of the city before moving on to the next one and ultimately defeating the end boss, who in this case is a rather fearsome dragon not unlike the one which graces the cover art. Essentially, players are the city's cleaning service; gameplay is precisely a record of this process of 'cleaning'. Despite a few superficial RPG aspects, there was simply no way for console games such as The Legend of Zelda (1986) or Dragon Warrior (1986) to operate in a similar manner. Code passwords weren't the same. No matter what you did on the consoles, the monsters always came back.

exploring the city, Amiga version

obviously

More to the point, however, this style of gaming was not only appealing to math-heavy, idiot-savant youth such as me and my friends, it was also very practical in terms of being a group gaming activity. Playing the game in a large group of people, individuals can make their own choices about a character, and the visual presentation makes everyone feel as though they are hovering around a digital boardgame instead of a computer monitor. Strategic decisions are complex and variable, allowing numerous opportunities for partnership and disagreement with other players as they think through their party’s situation. While I did end up finishing Pool of Radiance alone at home after several months, I also played a significant portion of the game with five friends at school as well as each other’s houses. As the game allowed six characters in the party, everyone got to create and play their own guy (please note that no girls were included in this group of twelve-year old CRPG fans, either in real life or in the game). Everyone had a copy of the save disk, and disagreements would break out when someone would play alone at home without input from other players, thus disrupting our collective progress. Complex social interactions emerged from our play, but I'll leave such observations to researchers more qualified than I in anthropological study.

sweet tactical combat on the Amiga

We didn’t finish the game together, but we did manage about half of it before everyone got distracted by other things in their lives, or maybe other games, I choose not to remember.

Technology In Practice -- comprehensive exam -- 24-hour essay 3

TECHNOLOGY IN PRACTICE

Question Answered: #2 Do what are described as ‘new media’ technologies entail ‘new theory’ to account for their possible effects? Describe the extent to which ideas of the ‘posthuman’ inform this debate.

Early studies into communications systems centred upon the transmission models developed by Lasswell (1948) and Shannon and Weaver (1949), which positioned message senders and recipients in relation to a medium enabling communication. Messages, consisting of signs operating within a language of connotation, are encoded onto a medium by a sender to provoke specific ‘meaning’ when successfully decoded by the recipient. Encoding is informed not only by the intention of the sender, but also by the nature of the medium. In a manner akin to Norbert Weiner’s (1948) conception of cybernetic machines, the unsuccessful receipt of messages, manifesting as noise, is accommodated by the system in order to improve the chances of successful communication. Existing as both a linguistic (semantic) process and a material instantiation, media of transmission thus involves both the technological and the institutional within themselves. Robert Babe (2000) recognizes this duality as reflecting a distinction between the arts (cultural studies) and the social sciences (political economy) (18-19). Conceptions of media originating with Stuart Hall begin to displace these earlier models. Hall’s concern was to expand the potential for agency on the part of message recipients (audiences). Audiences were not passive vessels into which the content of communications processes was poured. Hall argues that the traditional conception of the communication process as a loop is limited due to the linear simplicity of its constituent feedback systems. Instead, he offers a model, based in Marx’s Grundrisse and in Capital, which conceives of communication as a “process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction.” (1980 128). Hierarchies of meaning relative to what Hall calls the “dominant cultural order” may be invoked at each stage in this process, and are neither “univocal nor uncontested” (134). Thus, the process of communication between sender and audience involves a discursive relationship in which the decoding or reception of an encoded message is a spectrum of consensus which provokes “social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.” Reception of a message, therefore, involves performative rules “which seek actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another” (134). Hall’s examination of television in “Encoding/Decoding” (1980) illustrates this idea. While institutional structures inform the production of television shows, the system of audience ratings foundational to commercial television serves to position the audience within a hierarchy of relational strategies which both enable and disable the degree of agency they can express within this system.

Fundamentally, ‘new media’ challenge older conceptions of media due to the technologies which enable them. Old media can be understood to adhere to older understandings (i.e., theory) of their operation for the simple reason that such understandings reflected the technologies which enabled them. Print and broadcast media are both defined by the systems which create and distribute their ‘content’. Printing is a physical configuration of equipment for (re)production whose demands – for example, capital to purchase printers and the space necessary for their operation, the size and weight of the machinery itself – orient the medium around a hegemony of interests which can be understood as ‘sender’. Likewise, the cost of ‘content’ creation for broadcast media such as radio and television orients these media around sites of production and reception, whose “crucial ratio between them” will foster, according to Richard Dienst, “intense competition between interests, sometimes of outright class struggle” (1994 7). The printing (or broadcasting) house can be controlled, manipulated, and censored by means of the discretion and the interaction of these interests. The technical nature of these media (specifically, the exact manner in which electromagnetic frequency modulation is exploited to produce a signal which may be received) further substantiates the transmission model for communications media. New media, on the other hand, can be seen to fundamentally alter the manner in which sites of (re)production come to alter and inform the significations produced through communication (i.e., the ‘meaning’ of the message). Social media – as well as redeployments of ‘old’ media such as television and film – as enabled by digital mobile telephony signals a relocation of the printing house, as it were, into the site of media reception. The relocation alters the ontology of any notion of subjectivity, itself admittedly undermined by post-structural theories which do not figure ‘subjects’ to be either unified or coherent entities.

Video and computer games signal the most obvious need to develop the critical tradition in a manner not fully anticipated by older models of communication theory. Most importantly, the relationship between game designers, players, and games does not fully accord with models centred upon sender, receiver, and medium. Despite this fact, it is possible to trace a continuation of the distinction in the study of media into humanistic and empirical methodological approaches in contemporary criticism of videogames. The ontology of digital gaming centres on a player’s performance of a role as represented by their screen avatar (Waggoner 2009), regardless of whether or not this performance is explicitly rendered into a narrative (Galloway 2006, Aarseth 1997), within behavioural rules imposed by the game designers (Barr et al 2007). This process of player anticipation of the roles expected with the game is described as ritualistic by Gazzard and Peacock (2011) and others (Harviainen 2012, Harviainen & Lieberoth 2012). Depending on the nature of a particular game, this role can be as simple as staying “alive” or performing some other task abstracting the will of the player into the procedural confines of the game mechanics, or it can involve participating within a broad fictional narrative. In this latter instance, a good game can be defined as one in which both the game mechanics and the story are loved more or less equally. This relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the avatar is the game interface itself (strategy, puzzle games). As a hybrid between the interface for interaction with the medium and the principle site for the generation of player affect, the avatar is the means for instrumentalising the player’s will at the same time as it is itself often an object for the player’s affections (Wolfendale 2007). Simultaneously illusion, instrument, and interface, the avatar conflates the various conceptions of representation in digital media as defined by Lev Manovich (2001). It is in the capacity of information to be figured as an embodied virtuality that videogames and other ‘new media’ can be rationalized. Videogames are thus ultimately defined by player agency, which is itself determined by the spectrum of possible player activities allowed by the set of rules governing the activities made possible by a game world and the procedural interactions thus allowed and provoked. Indeed, the very nature of videogames as an interactive, computationally-bound medium ensures that players contribute to the significations generated by a game. However, this agency must be understood with the proper perspective. While the capacity for agency differs between games as player activity is restricted relative to the game rules, the affect which players feel toward the game world reflects their capacity to inflict their will upon it in a manner contingent with the procedural logic established by the game’s fiction and understood within the technological limitations which enable a game. Arguably, the ‘message’ of a game play event is not the ‘meaning’ of the event, but rather the affect produced in and among players.

In this capacity, it is easy for critics schooled in the close reading strategies typical of ‘old media’ to be misled by the superficial content depicted in videogames. ‘Violent’ videogames such as the Grand Theft Auto and Doom franchises, for example, are often condemned for the nature of the actions available to players.[i] While such criticism often implicates ‘violent’ games in the social problems they depict by desensitising audiences to actions contingent with those problems, this line of thinking ignores what Manovich describes as the variable, iterative, and transcodable nature of digital media (2001 27). The process of transcoding is illustrated by the adaptation of the shooting/killing mechanic from ‘violent’ videogames into other functions. Such games use the affect produced by game mechanics commonly associated with ‘violence’ – firing a weapon at an enemy in order to remove it from play – to provoke different significations relative to the affective relationship. For example, the Christian game Catechumen (2000) utilizes game mechanics consistent with the ‘first-person shooter’ genre, but alters the representational result of firing a gun from ‘killing an enemy’ to ‘saving a soul’. Similar substitutions manifest in Team Fortress 2 (2007) which, in certain instances, replaces all representations of violence with ‘cute’ versions (instead of blood and gore, exploding bodies are full of candy and ballons, for example), as well as Portal (2007), in which the player’s ‘gun’ transubstantiates (re-embodies) the player him- or herself into the role of the bullet in order not to ‘witness’ killing, as it were, but rather to solve problems involving spatial geometry and Newtonian physics, and the ‘dubstep gun’ in Saints Row IV (2013),which causes enemies to dance uncontrollably in time with music positioned as simultaneously diegetic and non-diegetic. In each instance, the affect produced by player activity is substantively the same despite antithetical representational differences between games. Communication theories which model ‘messages’ sent and received do not properly account for these differences.

Ian Bogost forwards a model in which video games can be rationalized in terms of the forms of the procedural rhetoric which they present to players. In Unit Operations (2006) and Persuasive Games (2007), Bogost presents a model for understanding videogames which merges the material and the symbolic. Grounding his thought in the mathematical philosophy of Alain Badiou, Bogost figures ‘the message’ of digital media to consist of a fundamental multiplicity centred upon processes of quantification and calculation. Unlike traditional communication models, this conception seeks to understand digital interactive media not in terms of broad systemic relationships but rather by means of the small procedural interventions which, viewed as an aggregate and in relation to each other, come to govern larger systems. Rather than being a relatively stable object whose meaning is causally informed by the recipient’s relation to the sender, digital media such as videogames operationalize this relationship in a dynamic manner. Audiences may respond in a capacity fully expected and thus invoked by the designer – ostensibly signalling the successful uptake of a message. However, as Michael Nitsche (2008) and Jesper Juul (2005) have elaborated, players may engage in actions not at all anticipated by game designers. Indeed, the very nature of digital media as interactive and iterative renders them as “systems open for transgressive, emergent gameplay” (Nitsche 28).The multiplicity of possible responses to a given digital ‘text’ suggests to Bogost that absolute meanings cannot be encoded into digital communication processes in the manner suggested by earlier communication models. Instead of invoking encoded meanings, “procedural rhetoric is particularly devoted to representing, communicating, or persuading the player toward a particular biased point of view” (Bogost, Persuasive Games 135) within the framework of a spectrum of possible player responses, the meaning of each response being conditioned by the relation of that response to the overall pattern of responses enabled by a particular operation.

Thus, it might seem natural to view the programming code produced by videogame designers as a quite literal manifestation of Hall’s communications model: a sender encoding a message which is received in a multitude of ways by an audience negotiating a hierarchy of dominant meanings. However, this interpretation does not allow for the reciprocal creation of videogame ‘messages’ among game producers and players. Many games, either formally or not, allow players to modify and create game elements which can, in turn, be objects for consumption by other players or cooption by the game’s ‘official’ designers. This activity can effect changes at both the ‘textual’ level (an object produced in a game may alter symbolic relations structured in/by the game) and the meta-textual level  in which the player operates (an object produced in a game can be sold for material value, i.e., money, in the ‘real’ world). Also, there are numerous instances where audience ‘misreadings’ – player activity which transgresses the manifest intention of game rules or willfully creates new gameplay activities unintended by game designers – have been subsequently incorporated as ‘official’ elements of the game. Espen Aarseth (2003), for example, outlines the manner in which the “rocket jump” – using the negative damage feedback produced by an exploding weapon to positively assist player mobility and enable access to areas within the game otherwise unavailable to players – was adopted by game designers as an ‘official’ characteristic of the ‘first-person shooter’ game genre after emerging from unanticipated player activity. Mia Consalvo (2007) examines the manner in which instances of purposefully-transgressive player activity indicate patterns of agency within a virtual space of value generation which she describes as “gaming capital” (4). In this capacity, cheating serves to reorient the relationships between games, game designers, and players. An incident often cited (Aarseth 2007) in this respect occurred when a programming bug in the multiplayer online game Ultima Online resulted in a player being able to murder the ruler of the game’s fictional world, a character who was controlled by the game’s principle designer and who served as an interface mechanic by which players were motivated toward specific goals and forms of gameplay; rather than punish the player for transgressing the established rules, the game designer chose to integrate this event into the game itself. Furthermore, some games are structurally enabled by player participation, or even the polyvalent interactions among numerous players in relation to each other, and do not present signification, as such, as distinct from this activity. As Castronova (2005) notes in relation to the economic effects of virtual economies, procedural rules highlighting the player generation of activity are especially prevalent in online games which involve thousands of players simultaneously. Not only do such games allow for player-generated sources of value generation, but the economies which have emerged in parallel with such games can be seen to structure and inform both gameplay and games themselves. Finally, game designers modify their output relative to feedback in terms not only of commercial market forces and players expressing their opinions, but also through the quantification of game play through the capturing of player activity from within the game itself, data which Normoyle et al (2012) refer to as player metrics. Indeed, despite the liberatory potential inherent to interactivity, videogames – and digital media, more broadly – enable a level of user surveillance only dreamed of by the hegemonic interests, such as television advertisers, foundational to the production of ‘old media’. This capacity for surveillance, coterminous with the processes of digital mediation, betrays the altered subjectivities which ‘new media’ present in challenge to theories of communication which predate their emergence.    

A degree of accord can be seen to exist between the medium of videogames, and ‘new media’ more generally, and conceptions of post- or transhumanism. Arguing in How We Became Posthuman (1999) that “the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman” (4), Katherine Hayles postulates that computer simulation best instantiates the “embodied virtuality” which she presents in contradiction to the de-materialization of information fundamental to transmission theories of communication. Grounding her thought in Friedrich Kittler’s notion that “technologies of inscription are media when they are perceived as mediating” (26) and Donna Haraway’s conception of informatics as “technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development” (29), Hayles adheres to the technological determinism of transmission theories while rejecting their linear and rigid structure. She presents a McLuhanesque argument in which the dematerialization of information – indeed, of all matter into information – is a partial illusion invoked by “an epistemological shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence”. The illusory nature of such processes of dematerialization obscures the impossibility of material reconstruction from disembodied information and minimizes the dynamic relationship between agents within a communication process. In other words, theories of communication which dematerialize information deploy incomplete models of the totality of relations between entities positioned within and acting upon an event of communication. This notion of pattern and randomness, echoing theories from quantum physics concerning the fields of probability which determine the material existence of the world, “fundamentally alter[s] the relation of signified to signifier” (30). Unlike the ‘message’ of the transmission model, informatics construct the signifier as a multitude, a “chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes” in which “[a] signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level” (31). Access to the codes of signification, which Hayles describes as “pattern recognition” (39) whose literacy is enabled by “credentialing practices” (40; see also Stiegler 130), conditions and is conditioned by the technologies constituting the media environment. The development and interplay of these technologies mutually structures all entities within what Kittler’s (extrapolating from McLuhan) terminology could be described as a “media ecology”, including those individuals or agents which participate in the creation and consumption of media.

Hayles’s conception resonates with other invocations of posthuman subjectivity. By positioning the human subject in a determinate relation to the technological means by which phenomena exterior to unassisted perception are brought forth (in a Heideggerian manner) into human understanding, Don Ihde (2002) expands the realm of visuality to include all phenomenological events mediated by technological processes (43). In a manner similar to the interactive user participation foundational to ‘new media’ such as software and videogames, Ihde’s model for mediation inserts the observer into the syntax of the observed (60). Invoking Bruno Latour’s examination of instrumental subjectivity as stated in “On Technical Mediation” (1994), Ihde thus involves the interplay between technological determination and human agency in terms of a third space generated by the cohabitation of the two agencies (2002 93-95). This third space can be further described by Haraway’s conception of cyborgs as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991 149). Like Ihde and Latour, Haraway seeks to avoid understanding identities in essentialist terms. Identity can be understood, in a sense, as itself a cyborg hybridising agency and determination by exterior forces (161ff). ‘New media’ centred upon computational procedures also invoke an examination of the posthuman subject inaugurated by McLuhan’s (1994) conception of the media functioning as extensions of the human nervous system. Stiegler (2009) argues that such processes of exteriorization “constitute the industrialization of memory at all of its levels” (99). This externalized memory functions in thrall to developments related to speed. By eliminating delays and inefficiencies, the boundaries which interface processes of technological mediation from that which is mediated are dissolved as information becomes “inseparable from its organization” (107). Valuation of information in this context is informed by systems of access, which in turn constitute as subject those individuals or agents which create a ‘circuit of access’ with the information in question.

Paul Virilio’s (2000, 1997, 1989) notion of the contraction of the modern subject into patterns of communication quantised and defined by a society which increasingly internalises and normalises military functions traces the manner in which quantification serves as the vehicle for the realization and production of truth. While Virilio’s reliance on phenomenology disavows for him the authenticity of virtual worlds, other scholars (Hansen 2006, Fors & Jakobsson 2002, Murray & Sixsmith 1999) have successfully adapted phenomenological methodology to the study of virtual worlds and ‘new media’. Numbers are the principle tools by which subjects come to understand and love their own bodies and those of others. Bodies are measured and rationalised in order to improve weaknesses and maximise strengths, and to define subjects within a social and political hierarchy. For Virilio, quantification is a means of visibility which reveals the truth of an object or event to be nothing more than the tautological result of a logistical apparatus (the processes and technologies of rational humanism) which instrumentalises such information into functions allowing possession and control. Predictions about the future can then be made based on a linear extension from these numerically-constituted entities, a process which Virilio equates to a gun sight targeting the destruction of an enemy in the future (1989; see also Crogan 2008, 158-9). In this capacity, processes of quantification and calculation can be understood to extend a haptic character to vision and visibility. Calculation grants visibility to the invisible as unknown data – future events, probable outcomes, ‘hidden’ truths – is extrapolated from what is known for the purposes of administration and control. This conception of visibility originating as a military technology enabled by calculation has direct parallel with digital gaming, which often fetishises and quantifies representations of violence and often deploys military conquest as a gameplay mechanic. For Virilio, synthetic optics enabled by computerization and calculation permit “the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual” signaled by “the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality principle already largely contested elsewhere” (1994 60).

As a conclusion to this present brief examination, the example of computer role-playing games (CRPGs) will serve to tersely illustrate the manifest synergy between human and interface for the creation and reception of media which have come to define the ‘posthuman’ as described above. CRGPs require the player to process and manage a significant amount of information, as the representation of nearly everything in the game – objects, the abilities and descriptive statistics of non-player characters and enemies, behavioural patterns – is quantified not only to allow the computer to execute game rules, but for that numerical representation to be presented to players who interpret this information to “numerically optimise” their avatar’s progression through whatever goals the game presents to the player. Extending Jenkins and Fuller’s (1995) suggestion that game avatars function akin to cursors in conventional computer interfaces, merging the will of the participatory user with the disembodiment of materiality into its virtual form as information, numerical representation can be understood as not only embodying the virtualized agents which it replaces but as mirroring the development of subjectivity within technological society. The conception of an embodied camera/interface, described as an apparatus by Morris (2002) and defined largely in terms of its virtuality rather than by the hardware components which allow player interaction (Jørgensen 2012), is best exemplified by games which use a first-person perspective and thus combine control of the representational output presented by the system with the means of interaction in a manner embodying an otherwise absent avatar. In this regard, the game interface of CRPGs is itself a self-referential component of play, acting somewhat like Manovich’s embodied virtual cameras in digital games, in which “cinematic perception functions as the subject [of games] in its own right” (2001, 85) by placing viewing and perspective functions under the player’s control. Avatars in CRPGs embody the player in a dual manner: visually onscreen, and through a numerical matrix which operates in a manner made explicit to the player and enframes in procedural terms the reified instantiation of the will of the player into the fabric of the medium in both material and immaterial terms. This conception of virtual embodiment, readily applicable to the theories of ‘new media’ informed by the posthuman subjectivities as outlined above, ably illustrates the manner in which the technologies which enable ‘new media’ serve to challenge traditional conceptions of communication processes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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---

[i] See, for example, Cassie Rodenberg, “Grant Theft Auto V makes it cool to pick up – even kill – prostitutes” published 27 December, 2013 in The Guardian.

theorizing time and the social network

fellow scholars, let's think socially

over the past few platform updates, it appears to my eyes that FB can increasingly be seen to push for "immediacy". they seem to want to make the history of one's activity on FB increasingly obscure. i can only hypothesize that such is the monetization of FB -- in twenty years, people will have to purchase their photo albums and diary-like conversations from the FB company in neatly-packaged and reasonably-priced retail packages. all of that free content provided by users will be sold back to them as the nostalgia they so desperately need.

i'm thinking about time, money as the guardian of "en recherche du temps perdu", and the digital network

am i just mad because i can't find my links, or is there something about how Facebook is monetizing our identity that needs to be critically vocalized?

Canadian ISPs begin to shake down their users during economic downturn

After reading Steve Arnold’s article concerning Cogeco’s new fees [Hamilton Spectator, April 2009], I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Mr. Arnold is either naive in his research or was hoodwinked by Cogeco’s PR efforts. Not only are several factual problems evident, but the tone of Mr. Arnold’s article suggests a degree of contempt for any Cogeco customer who voices dissent over the new fees.

First, some corrections are in order. Movie downloads are not 4GB each (except for some pirated DVDs). Standard definition films are typically 700MB. He is correct that many hi-def films are around 10GB in size. Importantly, I have to challenge Mr. Arnold’s suggestion that the only “heavy” internet users are those who download films for two reasons. There are many other net usage profiles that use similar bandwidth. I cannot help but wonder whether movies were singled out as the media continues to debate film “piracy”.

As an instructor at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, I have a degree of access to digital trends and usage profiles. Mr. Arnold claims that most customers are using less than the 60GB cap contingent with Cogeco’s average data plan, as it is sufficient to view “1.25 million web pages or ... 6 million emails.” There are indeed some users who use the internet of 2009 just as they did in 2000, when video hosting and telephony were relatively non-existent and file sizes were smaller. Yet, many webpages in 2009 contain streaming video content; for example, the average bandwidth for YouTube is roughly 150MB per hour. Furthermore, one can easily purchase more than 60GB per month in video and audio files from services such as iTunes. If a user wishes to upload video or photographs to an online hosting service such as flickr or vimeo, they will instantly become what Mr. Arnold calls a “heavy user”; I know of one artist who uploads at least 100GB of photographs from her home every month. Finally, education is rapidly deploying online through protocols such as WebCT. I can speak from experience that my students exchange many GBs of data for school projects.

The internet in 2009 is used for a great deal of legal software distribution, and file sizes rise nearly equal to the exponential rate of Moore’s law. It is not uncommon for modern software to be many GBs in size. The Windows OS downloads many MBs of updates every week. If I chose to purchase Adobe CS4, the download is over 10GB. Computer and console games are rapidly moving from a retail purchase model to an online distribution model, and most games are between 2 - 15GB in size. Finally, many computer users know that sometimes computers crash and software must be reinstalled. In the online distribution model, reinstalling means re-downloading. Frankly, I cannot believe that a family with two or more children online will ever be able to remain under the 60GB limit.

I am fully aware that there is no such thing as unlimited internet. Some software, especially bittorrent, does need to be shaped so that overall net traffic can flow smoothly. However, I am offended by Cogeco’s subtle association of net usage with environmental responsibility, as evidenced by Marie Carrier’s suggestion that the new fees will “make the customer responsible for their usage.” In a time when responsible usage of electricity and natural resources such as gasoline have entered into the public discourse, the “responsible usage of the internet” is a cynical and damaging marketing ploy.

The reason that the Canadian Internet experience is beginning to slow down is not that more people are downloading. The problem is that companies like Bell and Cogeco have used their monopolies to increase their profitability by limiting investment in new technologies. It is for this reason that Canada has slipped from the top three to the bottom twenty in terms of international ranking of broadband speed and service. I wonder how happy Cogeco customers will be with their 60GB cap if they were to learn that customers of other cable ISPs get much higher caps. Comcast in the States, for example, has recently imposed a 250GB cap, which is infinitely more reasonable than 60GB. Japanese customers get to use their internet for ten times cheaper per MB than Cogeco customers. If Cogeco faced competition, then we would have a higher download limit in Canada.

There is no technological reason for the discrepancy. For example, in 2000 I routinely used 100-300GB per month and Cogeco never complained. Now they say that they must limit downloads so that the net doesn’t slow down for “average users”. If my downloading 300GB per month ten years ago didn’t slow down the net, why is it a problem after ten years of computer hardware developments? The reason is that as broadband access multiplied and more Canadians switched to broadband, companies like Cogeco banked the profits and didn’t invest in expanding their infrastructure. Where, for example, is the fibre optic network promised years ago?

forward to the future

One day soon, computer AIs are going to datamine things like email, and discover interesting patterns of "structural" anxieties manifesting through email forwards.

I received the first copy of this email in December of 2000, shortly after the first Bush election. I then received a whole bunch of emails with slight variations on this text shortly after the 2004 election. Suddenly, in early 2007, this forward returns to my Inbox.

you can tell that this text is a response to an election by the date given for "Come-Uppance Day", which is November 2. The presidential elections are always in the first week of November, and the 2004 election was nov. 2. Weirdly enough, this latest round of circulation doesn't follow any American election, save last november's midterms which saw the Democrats take back the House and Senate -- a move slightly antithetical to this email's call for "Revocation".

The attribution of this letter to John Cleese is what I find most interesting. This little addition opens the door to all kinds of theories. The reader is granted an authoritarian vindication for the sense of enjoyment they gain by reading the email, thanks to a more credible satirist. A desire for Empire, represented not only by the British history invoked in the email, but also by the legal framework and interpellative process by which the forward is structured (the reader is interpellated as an Imperial subject), suggests an unconscious and reflexive application of guilt on the part of Americans who are against Bush's policies, and yet do no further political action than send dispirited emails to each other at work. Furthermore, by invoking Cleese, a "friendly" subversive (Cleese was the most conservative member of Monty Python), the email is an impotently nostalgic return to the radical culture of the sixties -- a culture which was instrumental in realizing the most important anti-war measures of the late twentieth century.

That last point begs reflection: can a degree of political agency be realized by the citizenry? The most America seems to be able to do is send email and get its wishes vetoed by the President.