Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Dec. 22nd, 2010 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI guess everyone has seen this video of Glenn Beck trying to explain Operation Payback to his viewing audience:
[Sorry, I can't find a transcript. I am going to do my best to post transcripts for any video I post; consider it a New Year's resolution.]
The thing that gets me, beyond that Glenn Beck has not heard of D&D, is that the entire narrative framework here is so over-the-top. I mean, just look at the players: Assange (Chaotic Neutral*, and ripped right from the pages of the Millennium Trilogy), Bradley Manning (Lawful Good turned Chaotic Good), 4chan (Chaotic Neutral turning into Chaotic Good before our eyes), and Beck (Lawful Evil. I want to say Chaotic Evil but his utter irrationality is not actually relevant in this particular conflict.) The conflict here is at a global level, a life-and-death struggle, both for individuals and for nations. But at the same time, let's admit it, it's a bit cartoonish, you know?
Meanwhile, just outside the centre of the empire, my life is pretty stable, so it makes reading the news a bit surreal. Everything we conspiracy theorists on the left have speculated was true actually is, everyone is finding out about it, and—like I've always said about the conspiracy narrative—not doing anything about it.
I just read one of those insufferable books about the future (The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason), which seems hilariously outdated less than three years after its publication. It predicts a hypercapitalist libertarian utopia of youth nanocultures that will somehow result in a fairer, more just world. I think the idea of nanocultures has actually come and gone. Meanwhile, I edited a book last weekend that started out as a grim dystopia marked by paranoia and omnipresent surveillance, and it seemed less like a cautionary tale and more like a story about present-day London.
The things we thought were kind of silly two years ago are accepted fixtures of reality now. Think of Bruce Schneier's TSA contests; many of the hilarious security measures that readers proposed are now in place in American airports. Howard Beale's sociopathic clone is allowed on TV to rant, and, like his less-colourful fictional counterpart, is ridiculously popular amongst the sorts of people who still watch things on the TV.
Goddamn it, I know I've made this complaint before, but won't someone think of the near-future dystopic fiction writers? We can't write that fast.
* He'd get a promotion to Chaotic Good were it not for the rape accusations. It is totally possible to be a hero in one area and a villain in another. I mean, Gandhi slept naked with 13-year-old girls and was penpals with Hitler.
[Sorry, I can't find a transcript. I am going to do my best to post transcripts for any video I post; consider it a New Year's resolution.]
The thing that gets me, beyond that Glenn Beck has not heard of D&D, is that the entire narrative framework here is so over-the-top. I mean, just look at the players: Assange (Chaotic Neutral*, and ripped right from the pages of the Millennium Trilogy), Bradley Manning (Lawful Good turned Chaotic Good), 4chan (Chaotic Neutral turning into Chaotic Good before our eyes), and Beck (Lawful Evil. I want to say Chaotic Evil but his utter irrationality is not actually relevant in this particular conflict.) The conflict here is at a global level, a life-and-death struggle, both for individuals and for nations. But at the same time, let's admit it, it's a bit cartoonish, you know?
Meanwhile, just outside the centre of the empire, my life is pretty stable, so it makes reading the news a bit surreal. Everything we conspiracy theorists on the left have speculated was true actually is, everyone is finding out about it, and—like I've always said about the conspiracy narrative—not doing anything about it.
I just read one of those insufferable books about the future (The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason), which seems hilariously outdated less than three years after its publication. It predicts a hypercapitalist libertarian utopia of youth nanocultures that will somehow result in a fairer, more just world. I think the idea of nanocultures has actually come and gone. Meanwhile, I edited a book last weekend that started out as a grim dystopia marked by paranoia and omnipresent surveillance, and it seemed less like a cautionary tale and more like a story about present-day London.
The things we thought were kind of silly two years ago are accepted fixtures of reality now. Think of Bruce Schneier's TSA contests; many of the hilarious security measures that readers proposed are now in place in American airports. Howard Beale's sociopathic clone is allowed on TV to rant, and, like his less-colourful fictional counterpart, is ridiculously popular amongst the sorts of people who still watch things on the TV.
Goddamn it, I know I've made this complaint before, but won't someone think of the near-future dystopic fiction writers? We can't write that fast.
* He'd get a promotion to Chaotic Good were it not for the rape accusations. It is totally possible to be a hero in one area and a villain in another. I mean, Gandhi slept naked with 13-year-old girls and was penpals with Hitler.
