View all notes
Of course, there’s irony to this, as well, because the whole of Inside is about getting outside, about escaping the facility that is the game you’re playing, and the allegorical game designers seem to be trying to help you do that, even though you’re not actually escaping anything, because it’s all just the game. To escape this—to make it more than a prepubescent meta-snort of postmodernism—you have to broaden your understanding of what escape might mean. If escape means distraction, then Inside fails as art, but if escape means enlarging the boundaries of the self, then it succeeds. In other words, Inside is not about whether the kid, or his sister, is dead or alive at the beginning or the end of the game, it’s about whether you are.
The much remarked-upon narrator of Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “Cathedral,” experiences such a moment as the story climaxes with a blind man helping him draw a church. “My eyes were still closed,” the narrator says. “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.”
At its most ambitious, Inside aspires to a similar feeling. Escape in art that is not transcendence is cheap, and if you can climb beyond the foolish puzzles and the Easter eggs and the hidden meanings, you can feel, for a moment, that you are not alone on your sofa with your phone, playing a game; rather, you are somewhere else—somewhere grassy, bathed in warmth by a ray of sunlight falling from above.
aw i like this
[...] Going at least as far back as Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad, which conjured the Macintosh computer as a revolutionary device, insurrectionary rhetoric has always been bruited alongside Silicon Valley’s reigning neoliberal credo of maximum return on investment. The relevant difference here is that, instead of staging a real revolution, the insurgent rebels of the Valley scene reject authority by innovating the old guard out of existence and becoming authorities themselves. There’s no risk in assuming the mantle of rebellion when it’s just another word for “disruption”—when you are, in other words, a rich white man in the tech industry.
whew
For Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA rented safe houses—referred to by White as “pads”—in New York and San Francisco. The more infamous of the two, the San Francisco safe house, was decorated with, as Marks wrote, “items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French cancan dancer, and photos of manacled women in black stockings.” Microphones were planted in the bedroom and an observation mirror was built into the wall. With Gottlieb’s blessing, White concocted the following plan: he would recruit sex workers to bring clients to the safe house, where they would give their clients LSD-laced drinks, and White would observe the effects of those drinks on clients. In return, he gave the women “chits,” each good for one favor. The next time a woman was arrested, she could give the officer White’s number to call and she’d be bailed out.
everything about this is so fucked up
[...] Now LSD has joined the ranks of green tea, Adderall, and various over-the-counter supplements as a mind- and life-enhancer. It has been integrated into a performance-obsessed culture that demands everything be done better and faster than it was before. The suburban kid cramming for his SATs, the startup employee faced with a weekend of coding, the wealthy stay-at-home mom managing three kids—these striving souls all want to be better, and all have the resources to achieve betterness. The tripping hippie and the venture capitalist are both trying to be better, too: one’s just sifting through time and the other’s sifting through investment proposals. The impact on America? Another rung of inaccessibility separating the commoners from the blissed-out bourgeoisie.
Over at the United Nations, whose member organization UNAIDS recently lost its deputy executive director Luiz Loures amid allegations that he sexually assaulted a female colleague, there is a similar official minuet of remorse and remonstration. Indeed, Newsweek reported in August that eight male complainants alleged that UN official Ravi Karkara sexually harassed them on the job. The quasi-Orwellian twist here is that Karkara heads up the agency’s iniitiative for the global empowerment of women—against, say, things like sexual harassment. Weary observers of the Western aid scandals can by now fill in the blanks themselves: promises to investigate, earnest assurances of better vetting to come, a pledge to bolster protocols of internal reporting, and similar refrains of collective reassurance ring through tense hallways frequented by grim-faced aid bureaucrats.
Like the organizations themselves, the recommendations for reform are thick with jargon, and billowing with vague talk of improved bureaucratic vigilance and executive transparency. All this will be carried out at great expense, and after a great passage of time—the sum of it all designed to drag out the underlying allegations until they’ve mostly been forgotten.
christ. i like the poetry of the last clause too
In this respect, aid work parallels the culture of abuse that has taken root within the private-sector world of military contracting, which also operates in a netherzone of blurry-at-best jurisdictional authority and agency oversight. And it’s long been true that the personality profile of swashbuckling Western male aid workers uncomfortably echoes that of their counterparts in the demimonde of global private soldiering—both kinds of aspiring Western savior figures share an unswerving faith in their own personal heroism and the superior virtue of their mission, while regarding the legal protocols of accountability in their host countries with a certain studied contempt.
"studied contempt" so good
Humanitarian aid workers are indeed deployed as the charitable equivalent of diplomatic “honest brokers.” Their broader social function is to connect those who look at catastrophe from the comfortable distance of the West and those everywhere else who must actually live amid its aftermath. The trucks full of food, tents, and medical supplies are evidence that the blessed of the world are “doing something.” In sending aid, Western governments and their citizens can feel a bit less embarrassed about their wealth and good fortune and assure themselves that they are indeed, still and forever, the “good guys.”
A function of this marketable cultural obsession with microcelebrity is classism, which Teen Boss doled out in large supply. It’s fair to say that young people from a range of backgrounds need to find work in order to support themselves, their families, their futures—often as a means of survival. Clearly, however, this publication was not for them; there is a reason it was titled Teen Boss and not Teen Worker, or Teen Paper Route, or even Teen Business: the term “boss” signals power, authority, and elite status. If this appears obvious, just imagine the number of alternative approaches Teen Boss might have taken: a more consciously useful text could have taught preteens about financial literacy, or placed greater emphasis on the kind of off-the-books work that fits into an after-school or weekend schedule. Rather than, say, indoctrinating them into an influencer economy.
lol
“It’s too bad because girls at the ages [Teen Boss] is targeted to, ages eight to eleven, are going through a really tricky developmental moment where they become more withdrawn,” said Melissa Campbell of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) when we spoke by phone in February. Campbell explains that a girl’s self-esteem often plummets around age nine. “A lot of that has to do with whether or not you see yourself as a fully embodied person who is creating something in the world [or] whether you are something to be consumed.”
It’s here—beyond its meme-like absurdity—that Teen Boss reveals its particular strain of parasitic nefariousness: it fed on the developmental vulnerabilities of its young readers. “A magazine like this is really insidious,” Campbell added, “because it makes you think that you’re building your power, because you have a vision, you want to carry it out, you want to make something of yourself—but really what you’re doing is monetizing your experiences [and] setting yourself up to be consumed, literally, through your videos and your content and your personality.” The turn represented by Teen Boss, Campbell concluded, is that it was “being sold to you [as if] you’re embodied and in charge.”
It’s easy to laugh about Teen Boss; to see it as just a passing meme or a joke. But what it represents about the way young people are failed by platform capitalism is a serious concern. The problems with Teen Boss will outlive Teen Boss, and they speak to a society-wide dereliction of responsibility with regard to the effects of predatory tech products on our culture, on our ability to meaningfully hear ourselves and others, and on our willingness to communicate in a way determined by social need and not the profit motive. Vulnerable populations are made more vulnerable under these conditions, including kids and tweens especially.
Capitalism has always exploited and deadened the imagination. Platform capitalism takes this a step further by repackaging this exploitation and selling it as empowerment. By encouraging young people and teenagers to become influencers, these companies push them into a commodified space filled with negative forces that run counter to their interests.
i like the phrasing