I recently read
cakestick's excellent piece, "
My Saddest Consumer Experience, Ever."
A reply to one commenter got so long I realized it was a diary entry, cleverly disguised.
From time to time, another political neo-victorian grabs precious air time to lecture us about the evils of sex and violence (and, to be sure, sexual violence) in the movies and video games and rap music and so forth.
In response to these episodes many liberals have come to reflexively deploy the "I-know-the-difference-between" chestnut, as in, "Everyone knows the difference between screen violence and real violence." Yeah, it feels propitious, in a progressive sort of way, to say it. We have faith that it will keep the Values Squad at bay. And it seems to sort of work, like a magic spell. Though that could be a false positive; it could be that the non-response from the petit demagogues reflects a reality that they don't actually care that much. They really just did it to get a little politically functional press.
Well, I want to revisit this a bit, with a couple of stories that I hope will help illustrate that the "I-know-the-difference-between" line may need to be chucked out. It may turn out that, for powerful, significant reasons,
we're the ones--the progressives, I mean--who need to look at this very, very hard to find a more meaningful response to this issue. It may have humanitarian repercussions that require serious effort to face and resolve.
Stretch your mind a bit to get back in touch what it meant to make that transition from being viscerally affected by even the slightest personal involvement with symbolic violence to learning how to accept it in a video simulation.
Consider this stunningly primitive--but, to me, very close to home--example: When I was a high-schooler, back in 1970, when most computers were still big, clunky mainframes, our school had procured a teletype with paper tape input and an 300-baud acoustic ("sucker cup") modem, and an account on a very remote mainframe computer.
The system was basically a simple command set hybrid of system operation commands and BASIC language entry commands.
You could save a program (for that online session only!) with the "SAVE" command. If you wanted to remove a program, the command was "KILL."
I distinctly recall having to get over a kind of emotional hump--having to inure myself--to type the letters K, I, L, L, then press the ENTER key.
Think about that.
If you do give it a bit of consideration, you can see what I'm getting at. The "I-know-the-difference-between" argument is insufficient for addressing that example. It's not about the loss of rationality ("I'm not an unreasonable person; I know the difference between..."). It's about the displacement of irreplaceable, warm, human feelings by rationality; the imposition of rationality into a special part of who we are that's capable of transcending reason and being truly compassionate.
Nothing's 100%, black and white, all or nothing. I'm not saying that systems that induce people--via the promise of fun or learning--to displace a bit of their compassion turn nice people into monsters. I would, however, point to a drumbeat one hears in progressive cyberspace; that progressives, try as they might, just can't seem to fathom how it can be that people around them are insensate to "the obvious," which ranges from internalized acceptance of official lying, to acceptance of gold-plated bungling incompetence, and finally on up to the moral crisis which is the roiling, slow-motion train wreck that is Iraq. Progressives keep asking why, but the answer is simple. People have inured themselves, just as I inured myself so I could type "KILL" into a pathetic TTY machine back when I was a whiskerless 15 year-old. It's really the same thing.
Believe it or not, I have one more amazing tale that raises the stakes by showcasing a pointed, market-driven effort to blur the line between virtual and very, very real violence.
Back in the 80's, I had friendly relations with a couple of guys who ran a software company. One did the tech work, the other ran the business side. The tech guy, I will aver to this day, was probably the greatest computer programmer I have personally known. He and I got on better than the business partner and I did. I think I know why, and I think you'll know why in a minute.
Back in those days before cheap hardware floating point and rendering on video cards, these guys developed and released a cutting edge flight simulator. The high quality gave them immense popular demand. The advanced technology eliminated competition. These two factors combined to garner them a lot of money, very quickly. The plane model being simulated was a real-world, up-to-date fighter plane of the time.
These guys moved to nicer office digs, a bit out of my way, so I was out of touch with them for a while. Then the first Iraq war hit.
I was in a bookstore, browsing the magazines. I pulled a gaming periodical off the rack, found my buddies' company in the ad index, and flipped to their ad.
What I saw horrified me; it was like I was a kid again, fighting the revulsion so I could type "KILL." Their ad trumpeted a fantastic new feature: Simulated Iraq terrain and missions. The ad copy was shamelessly pitching the opportunity to put in your punches for "freedom," if only virtually.
So: You say you can tell the difference between real violence and virtual violence? Then this ad was screaming, "Well, we can fix that...".
I was furious. Should I have been? It's not like these guys were my sons and made me question my parenting skills. A week or so later, I was in their neck of the woods. I dropped by the new office, but they weren't in. I left a bitter, sarcastic pen-and-paper note, which included a racist image from Kurt Weill's "Oil Song;" "Fucking apes in drag, anyway..."
I did see them later. The business partner and I exchanged terse but pointed pro- and anti-war argumentation, though the sense of resentment was leaking around the edges. The tech guy was (in a way) more savvy; he headed me off by deflecting the issue to a market demand angle; "People have an addiction, and I'm just a pusher; I supply them with the drugs they want."
What's the point here? I guess there are two points, and they seem to fit together fairly well:
- The issue isn't a purely rational one. It concerns the rationalization of behavior which hurts our affective selves.
- We may be able to tell the difference between virtual and real experiences, but marketers are continuously looking into ways to bridge that gap from their side of the equation. Is it because there's money in it? I can see why CNN would do it--thinking of their coverage of the first Iraq war: They have a stake in selling the real violence of war as virtual in order to ride the same wave the government's riding; to be on the same page as our political masters to foster a comforting, market-stabilizing illusion of objectivity. But why a small software gaming company? Did doing that significantly enhance the competitive edge they already had? Or was it a kind of paean to Bush H.W.; a tip o' the hat from one pusher to another? It doesn't matter. They did it. They said, "Please, give us money so we can help you accept more and more of your real world violence by making it virtual...and bitchin' good fun!"