Sometime around when I was five my family got a Nintendo for Christmas and I began my lengthy love affair with electronic distractions. Little did I know at that time that I was on the cusp of a global phenomenon. A whole society of people vigorously training themselves to deftly maneuver through the tight hallways of this new circuitry with plastic controllers in their hands. At five and amidst the crushing isolation of rural Mid-Michigan I didn’t think anything of it.
As Megaman I spent hours storming the mind-numbingly perilous labyrinth of Doctor Wiley’s elaborate mechanical death traps wantonly killing every moving robotic delight I crossed without blinking an eye only to get to the end and hopefully kill one of my own kind for doing his own thing down in some cave I invaded and kill him, too. What else is one to do with a gun for an arm and only one direction to move?
I formed a very unusual relationship with the space that was provided to me in games which evolved into a survival mechanism and a source of great comfort.
When I grew older I made friends based largely on playing video games with them. We would inevitably meet at Garrett’s house to play video games there or go down to the college library to play on the computers in the basement using Jake’s mom’s access codes because they had the fastest connection in town. At the time Counter Strike was our game of choice and every fraction of a second counts when it comes to the fast paced world of shooting people in the heads in a constant international battle of who had the fastest coordination (and internet speed) on the www.
This introduced me to the world of social gaming in which one either cooperates or competes and was a hallmark of my integration into a technological society, albeit a kind of beta version for what exists now.
It wasn’t until I was deployed that I was forced out of my comfortable marriage to gaming for an extended period of time. But in that time something funny occurred which caused me to think very critically of this technological indocrination that had occurred to me.
As many people know I was deployed to a detention facility during the war and this detentions facility ran on a computerized system. Every bit of information that was necessary for daily operations was stored in one big program and thanks to spending a majority of their lives out in the most abysmal written off plots of land running field exorcizes most of the senior enlisted personnel and officers didn’t know how to use these new fangled glowing boxes. So they looked to the units out in the camp and they made a call for all the nerds, and low and behold I was transferred unto the Detention Operating Center to be a part of their new batch of computer monkeys. This unrestrained access to the neurology of this insane place gave us, as underenlisted and hardly professional soldiers, a kind of authority over many of our superiors because although we answered to them, they were still forced to answer to the computer in the end, and we were the heralds that brought forth the computers message.
All of this turned in me a great deal of distress and I found myself irresistably turned towards Dystopian science fiction and its eery predictions that all feverishly warn of the worst than apocolyptic futures could lie hidden behind the false promise of a technologically perfect utopia.
Being at least partially academic in spirit I found myself thirsting after some kind of hardened academic response to the rise of geek culture and its strange position in the military industrial institution but found the subject lacking any serious attempts to address the issue. In fact, the most serious source of video game culture is the online community itself, which is renowned for not being a credible source of academic information for very good reason. On the broader subject of the advancement of a technologically based society there was one voice which posed the important questions that were starting to arise in me. Herbert Marcuse captured in his “One Dimensional Man” the framework of the paranoia that was building in me. I would like to try to follow in his footsteps and begin a series of essays which may begin a more thorough critique of the modern era of technological advancement in our society with the soul goal being to try to contribute to a lacking philosophical deconstruction of how technology has come to alter our lives, changing us each fundamentally as human beings.
The Paper Trail 