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Shadowrunning In The Corporate Republic
"It's been forty-nine years since our world changed almost beyond recognition...As a people, we innovate and create for money rather than the pure pleasure of bringing something new into the world. Rather than using technology to improve the lot of mankind, we've allowed it to separate us even further from each other." --- Shadowrun, Third Edition.
It's the dystopian future of 2026. Criminal subcultures flourish. Megacorporations have become the new world superpowers. Executives and wage slaves hole up in heavily-fortified enclaves, while beyond the gated walls, enormous throngs of outsiders fend for themselves. No longer mere flesh and bone, many people have turned to the artificial enchancments of "cyberware" to make themselves something more than human, something other than a machine.
Shadowrunners are the individualists who live on the margins, able to "slide like a whisper" through the databases of giant corporations, spiriting away the only thing of real value -- information.
No wonder so many e-mailers, in response to my series "The Corporate Republic," urged me to get the "Shadowrun" handbooks. It's jarring to come across this increasingly plausible vision of the future. In this pen-and-pencil role-playing game -- part improvisional theater, part storytelling -- science fiction once more mirrors the contemporary imagination and foreshadows what lies ahead.
Intentionally or not, Shadowrun is much more than a game. It reflects the attitudes and values of younger, technologically-centered Americans. It may also project their futures, at least of the ones who are individualistic, creative and discontented. How ironic that young gamers have sensed for years (the original Shadowrunner rules were published in l989) what journalists and politicians still keep missing -- that life for individuals gets rougher by the year here in the Corporate Republic. That a handful of megacorporations are becoming powerful beyond anyone's control. That individualism is not only growing more difficult, but one day soon may actually be dangerous. That this creeping reality has been a role-playing exercise for brainy kids for more than a decade is an amazing thing.
"Shadowrun" is as much a political manifesto as entertainment, a social and political fantasy that feels increasingly prescient. Shadowrun's creators saw the growing power of corporatism ( the forces of evil are dubbed "megacorps.") They grasped its inherently amoral nature, its wanton invasions of privacy, its embrace of technology and co-option of politics and culture; they anticipated the marginalization and isolation of individuals who don't want to go or get along.
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. For Corporate Republic renegades, life is increasingly an adventure. Like the Shadowrunners, our lives are inextricably entwined with the megacorps, our personal histories a string of confrontations and close encounters with the powerful entities that dominate the world. Like the Shadowrunners, we face a lot of personal and moral decisions about how we live. We might want to make money or challenge corrupt authority. Or, once we get a few "runs" under our belts, we may wish, like the original Shadowrunners, "to find a lost love," or avenge [ourselves] upon a corporation" that did us dirty. Perhaps taking direction from wise and experienced gamemasters, our goals and expertise will become more focused and coherent over time.
The connection between individualism and Shadowrunning is irresistible, if you let your imagination sprint for a bit. Individuals already shadowrun all the time in the current Corporate Republic. They grow up, using technology few of their peers or authority-figures understand or approve of. Routinely hunted down, at least in the cultural sense, they get accused of obsession, addiction, lack of social grace, even, increasingly, of murderous tendencies.
Everywhere they go, from their first arrival in most schools to their struggles in the workplace, they are confronted with inverted values, with the corporatization of culture, the pressure to conform, to shut up.
The turning point, recounts the Shadowrun history, came during the "Apocalypse" (l999-2010) when two Supreme Court rulings "set the stage for a world in which megacorporate octopi call the shots and use shadowrunners like so many pawns in their games."
Here, too, fantasy and fact converge. The turning point for the modern real-world corporatism came in the l980s, when government decided to de-regulate many industries at almost precisely the same time as new marketing strategies and technologies were exploding, arming business with the ability to mass-market, monopolize and globalize.
With government more or less out of the picture, and technology advancing rapidly beyond the consciousness of politicians or journalists, it was open season for corporatists, many of whose companies have grown wildly beyond anyone's expectations.
What's really remarkable thing is that Shadowrun was written before Microsoft sotware was in more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, before five companies owned virtually all the radio stations in America, before AOL/Time-Warner became the largest information entity in history, and before the Justice Department blithely approved AT&T's acquisition of the MediaOne Group, giving AT&T control of more than a third of the nation's cable networks for television, high-speed Net access and online telephone service. Those mergers, acquisitions and consolidations would fit easily within the Shadowrun narrative.
By the middle of the 21st Century, explains Shadowrun's latest edition, "multinational megacorps pull the world's puppet-strings to benefit their bottom lines ... The technology we depend on doesn't bring us together. Worldwide communications net? Great idea, but not much use when half the population is zoned out on simsense chips and the rest can't access a working data terminal in the slums where they're forced to live. The rich have gotten richer and the poor more plentiful, so the wealthy barricade themselves in armed enclaves and leave the rest of us to squat and rot."
The idea of the Shadowrunner in such a universe almost perfectly captures the worsening plight of the individual in our own era, when family farmers, small businesspeople, software designers, individuals of all sorts are losing opportunity to tell their own stories, shape their own lives and economic futures. In fact, "Shadowrunner" is a perfect term for individualistic refugees in the Corporate Realm.
Today's Shadowrunners are mobile, as individualists of the future will have to be. They can count on having more than one job, since they can never go along enough to satisfy corporate administrators. They will probably also live in more than once place. They're likely to be discarded, downsized or re-engineered as a result of "flexible" management philosophies and ever-shifting marketing goals. But even if they are allowed to remain, they are likely to grow bored and frustrated, and passed over for promotion. As for the idea of living outside guarded, walled enclaves, that's already more than a fantasy: Just visit Redmond (a name frequently invoked in "Shadowrun") for a couple of days, or Silicon Valley (the epitome of the megacorp enclave from which average folks get driven out) and the idea takes on real meaning.
The cyberware in "Shadowrun" even parallels recent advances in genetics -- advances which have drawn the impassioned interest of biotech corporations moving to track genes in the name of improving humanity even as they anticipate landmark profits. Cyberware consists of various technological implants, organ modifications, and structural enhancements to the "metahuman" body that can improve a character's attributes and abilities.
There are other eerie parallels in "Shadowrun." Take the way lifestyle becomes a pressing economic issue. Game players must purchase a character's opening lifestyle, which determines how comfortably the character lives. To maintain that lifestyle once the play begins, characters make monthly payments. When a character can't pay, he finds himself living a lower lifestyle. Sound familiar?
In other ways, however, Shadowrun doesn't bear much resemblance to our world. During the "Great Awakening," a turbulent period follows the corps' takeover of the world. The handbook describes it: "A long lull in the mystical energies of the universe has subsided and magic has returned to the world. Elves, dwarfs, orks and trolls have assumed their true forms, throwing off their human guises ... The many traditions of magic have come back to life ..."
But magic has become a casualty in the Corporate Republic. We already live in a world where culture itself is mass-marketed by the corps, where opinion and social agendas are set by companies like Microsoft, AOL/Time-Warner and the Walt Disney Corporation. None have a particular political agenda beyond the subjugation of competitors, and the homogenized spread of information and entertainment to the greatest possible numbers of consumers. That means safe, bland, palatable. It also means individuals either get co-opted or pushed out of the creative process, since they tend to be unsafe, colorful, offensive. Magic doesn't work in focus groups or corporate boardrooms any more than unconventional thinking. So work becomes routinized, creativity repressed and stifled.
All corporatists have a shared goal: to give stockholders maximum rewards. That outweighs any other consideration. Magic, the recourse of the idiosyncratic individual, is anathema to corporatism -- inherently illogical, unpredictable, thus unprofitable.
Unlike the planet dwellers in Shadowrun, most of this country hasn't yet awakened to the fact that it's being corporatized. We live in a distinctly unconscious civilization, where our own megacorps hae been allowed to grow so quickly, and with so little thought or restraint, that they're already almost too powerful too curb or regulate. But even some of our smartest citizens are in denial about this increasingly undeniable reality. After all, isn't unemployment still fairly low and the Nasdaq once more on the rise? Politicians and cititizens appear to have dozed right through the fact that small businesses are vanishing, that free speech is withering, that the political system is being bought, that a once-free press is nearly completely in corporate hands. Even the country's most prestigious colleges and research institutions are now dependent on corporate fund-raising.
Increasingly, technology is at the center of this conflict, as the Shadowrunners make clear. It's both the instrument by which the megacorps dominate segments of society and the primary means allowing individualism to survive, especially online.
The truth is, it's been decades since our world began changing beyond recognition. As a people, we are innovating almost beyond imagination, spawning the Net, the Human Genome Project, quantum leaps in supercomputing. But increasingly, we create for money rather than for the pure pleasure of bringing something new into the world. Our best scientific minds are developing and marketing hand-held appliances that give humanity instant access to sports scores and stock quotes. Rather than using technology to improve the lot of mankind, we are allowing it to separate us even further from each other.
This, perhaps is the real challenge and the work of the Shadowrunner, to weave in and out of our increasingly Corporate Republic, weaving through its databases, sharing technological discoveries and secrets, perhaps even waging creative guerrilla war on behalf of the individual.
The Shadowrunners, in the game and in the world, are realists. They understand the nature of the world they live in. They are what is perhaps the rarest of figures in contemporary American public life -- heretics.
Throughout history, the heretic was someone who demonstrated unforgivable intellectual arrogance by preferring his or her own faiths, values and beliefs to those -- priests and monarchs, mostly -- who were "qualified" to make pronouncements and declarations about matters of faith, morality and human values. Heresy was high treason, committed against God or King, and almost always was punishable by death or torture.
But in The Corporate Republic, high treason is an anachronism almost never invoked, mostly because it's no longer necessary. We don't need to pull people's fingernails out any more, or burn them at the stake. The heretic today is marginalized without any bloodshed. He doesn't even take the risks the Shadowrunner takes. His teacher and peers make him a joke in the classroom, and ignore or isolate him. His career is either destroyed outright, as it being fired or demoted.
A generation ago, "Shadowrun" would have seemed a particularly geeky game, the obsessive fantasy of brainy oddballs holed up in their bedrooms and basements. At the dawn of the 21st century, in the Corporate Republic, it looms much larger, both a warning and a prophesy.
Hey, Jon.. not to be rude or anything, but, umm, have you ever played the game?
Intentionally or not, Shadowrun is much more than a game. It reflects the attitudes and values of younger, technologically-centered Americans. It may also project their futures, at least of the ones who are individualistic, creative and discontented.
And there was silly old me thinking the rest of the world had corporations and computers too. Thankyou for pointing out that it is, of course, only americans that this applies too.
get policenauts over to the U.S. http://www.konami.com/forums /read.php?f=12&i=348&t=348">
Pork is not a verb
more like, from the i-am-bored-so-i-am-gonna-sprout-crap-for-a-story dept.
duh!
We're not living in a dystopian future - our social order is essentially the same as it has been since the 1880's.
Multinational corporations essentially control governments - Once we had Standard Oil and United Fruit (United Fruit liked to send marines to Latin American republics when they got uppity), now we have Monsanto (destroying the agricultural viability of small farms in africa by trying to westernize their methods and force genetically engineered crops on people) or Shell (who don't flinch when governments exterminate indigenous peoples like the Ogoni of Nigeria to make room for their pipelines).
There have always been people on the fringes of society outside of easy control, be they the Hobo radicals of the IWW back in the day speading sarcastic activism or haX0rs today making things tough for AT&T or Earth First!ers utterly humiliating the IMF and World Bank when they assume they have everyone's tacit approval in industrialized nations because they're "creating markets".
Again, things have changed precious little in the past one hundred years - the technology has just changed. Instead of a dull, meanial job in front of a factory machine, we're given a dull, meanial job in a cubicle in a call center.
Just because the foot at your neck is clad in a penny loafer instead of a boot doesn't mean that it's not holding you down.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
(Hopefully the HTML worked
I am
was the little map you got included in the game that showed the developement of the countries of Quebec and Texas. That always gave me a chuckle.
(stupid return button) One thing that should be noticed is that while corporations are largely amoral entities whose only goal is their profitability, people make up those corporations. and while most of those people will be unwilling to bite the hand that feeds them, there will be those that will. and these people will be the ones who will hopefully keep society from devolving into some dystopian nightmare.
Isn't the mega-corporation the end result of growth? Thus, a company becoming big and powerful enough to swallow up or merge with all of the smaller companies?
Three mergers and suddenly you're being investigated by the Justice Department for violation of the Antritrust Act.
So then what? You divide up your assets and start all over? Intellectual property gets split into three parts only to later be re-joined through another merger?
Just my $0.02
dc
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
That time has passed. Governments everywhere are rapidly becoming parasitic monsters, good only for fleecing the populace while allowing them to be further robbed by other interests. Money talks, but money isn't the only currency in high places. Beyond a certain point, money is not what is important--power is what matters.
That is what many corporations are after: power. After all, when your closest five competitors all make billions per year in revenues, you can all agree that money isn't the only indicator of success (it's practically a necessity for competition); mindshare is.
Mindshare is a slightly disturbing idea: train the consumers so that whenever they think of a particular product, they think of your company. In the U.S. southern states, for instance, the word "Coke" is practically a synonym for "carbonated beverage." That's the power of mindshare.
So what happens when someone says (for instance) "Microsoft" and you think "George W. Bush"?
Katz is right in that corporations have slowly grown to be major influences in our lives. Where he falls short is realizing that there are other influences at work, that the government is not a monolithic entity that dances to the tune of the corporations with the most money. What he misses is that there are always other organizations, some working behind the scenes and some not, and that those organizations are just as powerful and influential in your lives.
Keep your eyes open. Think for yourself.
www.alarmist.org
Shadowrun was written before microsoft was in 90% of all computers, in 1989???
huh?
i think what he's pointed out is a result of suburbs. we all know they are the places where corporate america workers are pretty much forced to live, and they tend to lack any stimulus or aesthetic qualities (except a lawn, couch and TV, and perhaps a small park or community pool). why doesn't it makes sense that he would romanticize the creative discontent youthful techies trapped the sterility of corporate suburbs?
The utility of the game is yet another way to imagine yourself out of your blindingly dull surroundings, (I'm all for delusion), but it sounds like a D&D retooled for the '00s.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Shadowrun would be the ideal starting point for a MMRP. If people could get behind the Worldforge project, and use the Shadowrun series of books for the code base (being careful to not make the universes too close together, for obvious copyright reasons), it just might be the sort of project that would snowball into something wicked.
The real question is, will the Open Source model work for a large gaming project? Or is the budget constraint just too huge in comparison to the $oftware companie$?
Anyway, I'd love to see the Shadowrun universe online, in an immersive RPG.
Stupid article though.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
All the principles explained in the above article are equally present (or perhaps more so) in Cyberpunk 2020. When I first played Shadowrun, I couldn't help thinking how it was just Cyberpunk with added magic. Of course, I don't know which came first, and I've enjoyed playing both, but for me, Cyberpunk gives a stronger impression of the all powerful global corporation opressing the individual. Sadly, they're both right. The future is going to look far more like a Philip K. Dick novel than an Isaac Asimov one. In many ways, I'm glad I'm not younger than I am. I don't want to be part of that future.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
To paraphrase Hagbard Celine in the "Illuminatus Trillogy," I wonder if the "Megacorps" and "Shadowrunners" need each other. After all, you can't crusade against something heroically without an opponent, and are thus stuck to needing an opponent.
I'll take the route of The Invisibles, and use a little Open-Handed resistance. Barbelith.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Jon, as someone who has played Shadowrun since about 1993, you should really know better than to start using Shadowrun as a primary source. Shadowrun is drawn from cyberpunk literature like _Neuromancer_ and movies like _Alien_ and _Blade Runner_, where this was a hallmark. I'm pretty sure RTG's Cyberpunk 2020 game was already out when Shadowrun debuted too.
I like Shadowrun, but to be honest, most of the setting makes no sense to someone who knows politics, history, and economics. I had to rewrite most of it when I created my No Carrier setting simply because it was not believable, although admittedly most of this did not have to do with the megacorporate aspect.
Shadowrun may have Ares and Saeder-Krupp, but before them, Gibson had Tessier-Ashpool, _Blade Runner_ had the Tyrell Corporation, and Cyberpunk 2020 had Arasaka. Please don't forget to give credit where credit is due. I am pretty sure Tom Dowd would want it that way.
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Jon,
ShadowRun came straight from the pages of the cyberpunk wave of sf. Try reading Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, the first of which was in paperback in '84, or Walter Jon William's Hardwired ('86).
Yes, they're a very unpleasant world, for the majority of us...and I'd place a *lot* of the blame on the corporate-funded GOP, esp.
However, government ain't quite out of the picture, yet (can you say, "Judge Jackson"?), and a good thing, too, since we've allowed the unions to become marginalized, leaving us with no other protection against the multinationals other than the gov't...and *lots* of antigov't propoganda by the same corps.
And yes, I agree - 20 years of "he who dies with the most toys, wins", and "money is a way of keeping score", has left us with slackers, and a lot of younger folks who can't see *anything* worth doing.
We can only hope for the backlash....
mark
(One of HG Wells' books was thrown out, for being too unrealistic and too dark, although everything described in it has since occured.)
However, I do agree that it is something that is very appropriate to be concerned over. Corporations, unlike countries, aren't restricted by laws or boundaries, and therefore are far more vulnerable to turning into mini-dictatorships.
However, Jon Katz -did- miss the most fundamental point of all. Such corrupt, power-hungry evil can only exist in a world that values abuse and shame over and above co-existance. The evil is not in the companies, but in the minds. Change the minds and the evil can no longer exist.
(For any physicists out there, this is similar to the Casmir Effect, whereby changing the environment can prohibit certain quantum states, and that a sufficient change can create an area devoid of any valid state.)
Lastly, Quantum Leaps are the =smallest= leaps possible.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think it's not realistic to portray the creators of the game as visionaries or social/political prophets. The whole concept the world of Shadowrun is based on doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft, Doubleclick and AOL, but more importantly: it was also no prediction.
Actually, Shadowrun doesn't really bring anything new to the roleplaying game - worlds like these have always been very common in roleplaying and I have devised several myself in different settings (even in AD&D) Apart from that it is a very good game :)
I think this feature is way over the top...
This might be a bit off-topic, but dividing companies that have been grown too big (e. g. Microsoft) would be one countermeasure against the building of mega-corporations. But then again, it is too slow, too little, too late. If you take a look at the latest fusions you will notice that you don't have to be very imaginative to see where it leads to. If only the big survive, small people like us will be crushed.But wait, of course, this is all done for he convenience of the consumer (says Microsoft)!
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
Everybody seems to think that Dungeons and Dragons is just a game, but if you think about it for a moment, it's almost prophetic. Just forget all that "magic" jazz, but keep in the *idea* that we have magical, little understood powers as computer gurus. Then, take it that all those corporations are *dungeons*.
Then it all pops into place. We're not people who go to work and earn money every day - we're magical computer warriors who get up every morning to go raid the corporate dungeon for money with our magical skills!
And Bill Gates is a big dragon, and the Justice Dept. has a huge magical sword of legislation used to mightily cleave evil kingdoms in twain.
This is why I try to always shop at small, independently owned businesses. I never eat at fast food joints. As a small business owner myself, I try to support other small businesses, and I urge everyone else to do the same. It is all about choice and about quality... motivations that should be nothing new to the open source crowd.
Peace,
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Had all sorts of things like this.
People had plastic surgery to look like corporate icons, corporations ruled everything, people lived in fortresses behind mazelike entrances. And this was in 1956.
I think Slashdot wrote something about this, too.
George
Technology is dividing people in to classes, m'kay? Down with republicans and libertarians, up with liberals-- government funded cooky-cutter computers for everybody to stupify the people into being the same!
Then we can all be stupid and happy together without any class distinction: and we'll have this nifty roll playing game to play!
YAY!
-AP
If you want a 'better' dystopian future, ie darker, bleaker, more corporate, try looking at SLA Industries by .
But, really, I think the 'post-Gibson' era has passed. Shadowrun was a munge together of shamanistic magic, Neuromancer, and D&D creatures. Its a pretty damn shabby connection to make, and I can't help but think the only reason Mr Katz chose Shadowrun is because he really would have got laughed at if he'd used the c-word (Cyberpunk). Christ, rather than make an analogy to Shadowrun, why not the Wizard of Oz? Its such a forced comparison. The shoe dont fit.
'Megacorps' are not making my life more difficult. They're just trying to sell me more stuff. Hassle in the workplace doesnt make me a 'rebel Shadowrunner', it just pisses me off until I get distracted elsewhere. When Katz writes In other ways, however, Shadowrun doesn't bear much resemblance to our world. in reference to the existence of magic and trolls, he kind of misses the point. It doesnt bare any resemblance. The analogy sucks.
Uninformed. Naive. Tortured logic.
D- must try harder.
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
I have to admit, I would have filtered out Jon's ramblings a long time ago if I didn't get immense amusement out of them.
But lately, I've been cultivating a theory: that JonKatz is not actually a human being, but in fact software that takes some random topic and turns it into a long, redundant, rambling essay on the dangers of globalization, media, capitalism, corporatism, ageism, intellectualism, polymorphism, foodism and the Geo Prizm.
I wonder if we could develop an open source version of JonKatz? GnuKatz?
Maybe, with enough work, we could finally get him to say something useful for once.
I'd like to quibble with two points.
The article said something about corporations being mainly concerned this enriching their shareholders. As a shareholder in a few companies, I can say that corporations are doing a better job of enriching their CEO's than the shareholders. If the minimum wage went up as fast as CEO pay, you could get $22/hour for flipping burgers at Mac 'n' Don's.
It also said that the era of the megacorp is killing magic. I disagree. There is more magic in the world than ever. Have you seen how many "new age" publications and websites there are now? Plus, everything gives rise to its opposite. The stultifying corporate culture will eventually engender more creativity to combat it. It's the way of the Tao.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
I bought the first not knowing it was for a role playing game tie in. I thought it was decent, light, escapist SF. Nobody will mistake this for literature, but when you're in the mood for some candy....
Some were obvious, such as the colapse of the old Sout African system, but the sheer number they got right is astounding.
Examples:
First brain-computer interface
First cybernetic vision system
First implanted arm/leg
The reality it that witht he exception of the magic crap, shadowrun predicts the future amayzingly well.
Nice article, but you are missing a few facts here. First thing is, you got the year of the game setting a little bit wrong. Original Shadowrun starts 2050. The important point you missed is that Shadowrunners are criminals, downright outlaws, who give a damn about law and order. (well not all of them). They are outsiders, not recognised by the state. Most of them also lack a SIN (Social Identification Number for all non-players out there), Medical Insurance et al. The comparison might fit on some points, but you just can't compare today individualists to the generic Shadowrunner. Most Shadowrunners have only one goal in life: to see the next day dawn with an at least halfway intact body without bullet wounds.
-- If windows is the solution, can we please have the problem back?
I started playing this game 8 years ago. It was for me the first book that explicitly describe corporates action. In this game, we are all heros, attacking corporate properties, stealing their knowledge. The part the most visionary is the hate against others species. In this games, just like in reality, Trolls are moderated down...
Disclaimer: "These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be yours too"
--- Bouh !!! ---
But it sure sounds like the sentiments of so many of the posters on /.
And Katz commenting on it? Makes sense. I wanted to rip up the whole article, but why bother, I will limit myself to this one piece..
"Politicians and cititizens appear to have dozed
right through the fact that small businesses are vanishing, that free speech is withering, that the political system is being bought, that a once-free press is nearly completely in corporate hands.."
* Small businesses are being created and growing faster than nearly any other segment of the private sector. Because of the marketing and infomation resources available through the Internet, just about anyone can start a virtual business with minimal capital.
* Free speech is actually stronger than ever before. How many websites have you seen which deal with white supremecy, sexual abuse, conspiracy theories, revolution, pirated copywrite material, illegal home agriculture and manufacturing, etc? Why? Because of the Internet. How many "Free Speech" outlets, newspapers, TV, radio, magazines, were producing this stuff before the Internet was delivered to the average Joe's hands?
* The political system had been and will be bought several times over, but not just by private corporations. Politicians are swayed and courted by special interest groups like the NRA and Handgun Control, Inc. They are bought by foreign governments such as the allegations against VP Gore and the Chinese. And they are bought by other politicians through political favor, "You vote for the dam project in my state and I will vote your bill to buy jet fighters made in your home district". Why do we limit ourselves to "Evil Corporations" and not deal with the whole truth?
* The press has been privately controlled for centuries, kids. They are owned and operated by private companies and individuals. Sure, there was a time when the cost of running a newspaper or radio station was possible for an individual or a small group of persons - in fact, it still happens throughout the US today. The problem is the cost of running such operations has skyrocketed due to fuel costs, licensing fees, affiliate rights and worse of all, liability insurance. Regardless the press is even more free today than it was 50 years ago. How many papers would not print the truth about Babe Ruth's drinking or would film FDR in his wheelchair for fear it would "demoralize" people? And what is the opposite? Government controlled press? Um yeah, that's good. Maybe government rules to ensure a free press?
The problem with all of this started, as near as I can tell, in the past 30 or 40 years. TV programs and movies began casting villians as business people and heros were nearly always public employees (teachers, policemen, public lawyers or public hospital doctors). Business people were about stealing, killing and lying. It was ironic because all TV and movie companies are privately owned business operations. Maybe some writer or director had it out for his boss who told him to quit going over budget? Who knows and who cares?
Those of you who fall for this blind "All corporations are bad" are as dumb as those who completely believe the opposite. Quit being rubes.
Now that the Invisibles has finished its run, I'm still not finished digesting all the concepts that Grant Morrison threw in there. It seems like he got a little panicked about setting up his cosmology towards the last five issues and just started throwing stuff in there willy-nilly. I don't feel like all the disparate threads were tied up clearly enough. I felt like the flash-forward to 2012 stuff was more than a little slapdash. And the StraightEdge high school kid that got introduced in like issue two - what the hell was with those ruffled shirts? I felt like having someone X'ed up was just subculture tokenism on Morrison's part. People are so put off by the no smoking/no drinking/no drugs thing and assume that all StraightEdge kids are hardline fanatics. I think Morrison's getting old and losing touch with the kids.
So: What the fuck was Barbelith all about, anyhow?
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Insofar as RPGs are categorizable, "pencil-and-paper" is not a particularly apt category for SR. Rather, "dice, dice, and more 6-sided dice" are the defining feature of SR's gameplay. One of my GMs actually found it useful to buy a hundred dice at a time and sort them according to their entropy.
The SR games I've been in and run are generally the most violent, bloody, gore-filled high-casualty adventures in my fairly wide roleplaying experience. It's wonderful stress relief, you know...
Just weeks after another and ours, the futurists warnings from a checklist of new media have a society has been e-mailing me - is welcome to transform the wildest dreams and media company, growing single quote out to be impossible working conditions, job security, and portals and demonstrate against the motion picture industry is the growing array of free music industry? What is a Geek Kid To A rational middle ground between the violent and over-analyzed films rich in our personal data goes - applying for the use technology to strike back pages you've been my editors at home and which offered humane and come to stay apart. Is online that he could use technology, and bland while burglary and value since crime -- food, fashion, lifestyle. "I suggest that the central issue in dealing with the Internet era." If so, the Net, but how it's also connect people helping to wring a surreal country. The declines in engineering and retain power.
People buy tickets for hours trying to be more noise than all that he was built and worst in the Web sites offer more likely to my experience of the gargantuan AOL/Time-Warner, perhaps the answer to teens. Thomas Jefferson saw themselves in their habits, people to be given a Chickclick do very idea that the hysteria that women onto the preppies of the futurists raised are much as 60%.
...well, after a fashion at least.
First off, Jon, you should go out and play the game, you have some good points, but the mystique is still beyond you. If you were from around where I was, I'd be glad to GM a one-shot game for you...
However, you have stated that magic doesn't fit into the corporate structure of the world these days. I will give you points for that, management doesn't realize what magic actually is, or how to use it, but don't say it doesn't exist. Mages and shamans still exist today, but their medium is different.
In the good old days, Hermetic mages read books and combined chemicals to make their "magic". Today's hermetic mages combine algorithms and syntax to weave their spells within the realm of the electron. Shamans dealt with spirits and totems to cause fantastical things to happen. How different, speaking of the most basic part of it, is using a TCP/IP packet or a SMB file share to cause amazing things to happen in the dark world inside the box?
Just because methods have changed doesn't mean magic doesn't exist, it just exists in a different form. Now your wizards and wisemen have put on new robes. Instead of hooded cloaks it's jeans and golf shirts, instead of staffs and sandals it's power supplies and penny loafers. Magic today is performed on the computer, by those who can be called Technomancers.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
Shadowrun is great and all, but almost everything in it (except, notably, the whole magical theme) is lifted right out of the books of William Gibson, right down to the terminology. No offence, but this article really ought to have referenced Gibson instead. Shadowrun didn't invent these ideas by any means.
;-)
And Neuromancer was published when exactly? Early eighties? I think anyone that hasn't noticed the trend of society gravitating towards things Gibson-esque by now has been caught napping. The article to me is years too late, and doesn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, at least from that perspective.
If you want to check out a game that does a really good job with the theme of the death of magic and creativity at the hands of technological advancement and the corporate agenda, check out Mage: The Ascension from White Wolf Games. Blows Shadowrun out of the water IMHO. Read it and tell me that you don't see some eerie parallels with recent technological advancements... the Progenitors and Iteration X are taking over
Mechanik
I guess they planned to bring it out as a computer rpg, but never got to it.
(See it for yourself at samspade. org.)
Shadowrun is more about the fight against the mega-corps and them being able to dictate the path of human progress, and their semingly lose of morals and ethics for profit margins and shareholder value. Anything for a buck.
It's great that Shadowrun has gotten some publisity that having a Slashdot article can draw, but please look at the game yourself and please do not judge it on what you have read here.
The company who produces Shadowrun also produces Battletech and a few others. Their website is here.
http://www.fasa.com
A very large user run website is at this address.
http://shadowrun.html.com
Thanks, slashdot for giving Shadowrun some publicity.
Coffee | Nose > Keyboard
What is really jarring is seeing a professional journalist have the same epiphany that most of us had when we were twelve... and outgrew when we were thirteen.
Shadowrun was a derivative work, and a crappy one at that, which attempted to merge the two most popular role-playing genres, cyperpunk and magical fantasy. It reminds me of a review that Ben Johnson once gave a play he didn't like: "I found it good and original, but what was good was not original, and what was original was not good."
By the way, does anybody else find it amusing that this article is coming out two days after a Federal judge ordered the break-up of what was the world's biggest and richest corporation as recently as last year? I mean, if not even MSFT is above the law, who is?
Something tells me he wrote this entire rant^H^H^H^Hpuff piece in one sitting a couple months ago, and has been releasing it in chunks.
By the way, if Shadowrun is really the future, I wanna be a street shaman. Heh heh. That would be cool.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Ooops and oh bugger. Who swapped 'Submit' and 'Preview'.
Apologies, all.
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
This essay, though impassioned, does not reveal a great insight into the world, rather it betrays a closed microcosmic view.
The impending 'corporatism' Katz speaks of was often discussed -- insightfully -- in the mainstream literature of the 50's and 60's (e.g. the cliche of the 'buttondown corporate mentality' and many novels set in the future) It was discussed in the 70's, but by then was so mainstream that it was often reduced to the empty-headed muttered of stoned hippies (most of what we think of as the "the Sixties" was rrealy the 70's) The 80's was a close parallel totoday, with "the invasion of the MBAs" and the first microcomputer explosion taking the place of the dotcoms.
In many ways, the corporatism of decades past was darker and more oppressive, if less intrusively pervasive, because a vast array of laws have grown up to protect us from the worst of those excesses, and a large proportion of the 'decent citizenry' in the postwar era actively idolized the legitimacy that power represented. Being big, to them, meant you were probably right. in the decades before Watergate changed our perception of power, survey after survey showed that people said government officials and top executives were 'too important' to have to be troubled by 'small laws' and should be allowed to skirt them in the interests of expediency and efficiency.
If you think today's intrusive (and often inaccurate) data bases are new, read the history of abuses behind laws like the Fair Credit Reporting Act, various worker right laws, etc. The civil rights movement was just part of a larger social milieu of oppression and conformity imposed by unquestioned (and unquestionable) powers.
Forget Santayana and 'those who forget history are doomed to repeat it'. Santayana had no such pithy quote for those who never knew it in the first place.
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
It's the dystopian future of 2026. . I thought that it was the dystopian future of 2050 or so.
Shadowrunners are the individualists who live on the margins, able to "slide like a whisper" through the databases of giant corporations, spiriting away the only thing of real value -- information.
You describe "deckers", a subcategory of shadowrunners. A shadowrunner is an elite freelance agent, a black operative with no allegience. For non-players, think of the old "Mission: Impossible" TV show (not the movies) for reference. You get in, do a job (sabotage, defend, steal, kill, kidnap), and get out before anybody knows you're there. You work for one authority at a time, and spend your run avoiding the other authorities.
While a lot of us feel like characters in a Shadowrun world (IMHO, more of a CyberPunk 2.0.2.0. world), but not as Shadowrunners ourselves.
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. You're telling me that most Slashdotters are freelance criminals working their crimes for a corporate clientele? Wow, I've been missing the boat--I should hang out in bars more often, waiting for Mr. Johnson from AT&T...
All corporatists have a shared goal: to give stockholders maximum rewards. That outweighs any other consideration. Magic, the recourse of the idiosyncratic individual, is anathema to corporatism -- inherently illogical, unpredictable, thus unprofitable. You missed a trick here--a big trick. Note the Shadowrun corp called Aztechnology. They live on magic.
The Shadowrunners, in the game and in the world, are realists. They understand the nature of the world they live in. They are what is perhaps the rarest of figures in contemporary American public life -- heretics. More often than not, they also tend to be cold-blooded murderers. I'm not. Are you?
One more big trick. The generic plot of a Shadowrun game is that you and your buddies (freelance black ops all) get hired for a job by a "Mr. Johnson" (shadowspeak for "anonymous employer") to do a job that will usually take no more than a week. Mr. Johnson almost invariably works for a megacorporation or government, and is hiring you to do a run against another megacorporation or government. After all this individualism and rebellion against the megacorps, they're the ones footing the bill for you.
If I were you, I would check out R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. The magic and elves are gone, the feel is grittier (more Blade Runner and Neuromancer than the anime feel of Shadowrun), and the game is much more open-ended. That is, characters are sometimes shadowrun-type freelancers, sometimes work for a corp, sometimes are a corp, whatever.
--The basis of all love is respect
And there was silly old me thinking the rest of the world had corporations and computers too. Thankyou for pointing out that it is, of course, only americans that this applies too.
Yes, you are silly.
Jon Katz is an American, discussing a game developed in America and how it mirrors developments in American politics. If you feel so slighted that he didn't discuss European, African, Asian, or Australian politics, why don't you add something of substance to the conversation from that point of view, rather than bitching and whining about an American website posting an article by an American Author discussing developments in American politics and how they are reflected (or predicted by) an American roleplaying game?
If Jon Katz had generalized his statements to include the rest of the world (not unreasonable when one considers the "globalization" of the marketplace and the corporate powergrab that is the WTO) you or someone else would have bitched and moaned about an American having the audacity to apply their outlook to the rest of the world.
Why don't you write a well reasoned and insightful article about similar trends in whatever part of the world you come from, rather than bitching and moaning because people in America haven't given your particular region the attention you so obviously think it deserves?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One of the reasons that I use open source software is because it is a declaration of personal ownership and control of my computer and my data. There is nothing on my computer with a license that would permit anyone to revoke my use of the tools that access my data. The licenses state that I have all the rights that I associate with owning a copy of the software, and more. Furthermore, the open source community isn't building back doors into its software to aggressively hunt down copyright pirates that violate the privacy and security of every user.
I just wonder how far off we are from a law that will effectively outlaw open source software in its current state. When will we have a law that mandates back doors for law enforcement? That law will undoubtedly prohibit removal of the back door. From there, how many more steps are there to Stallman's dystopia in The Right to Read?
Our philosophies play a greater role in a greater number of our everyday decisions than most people realize. Simson Garfinkel argues at the end of his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy at the End of the 21st Century that technology is not ethically neutral. It is easier to ignore concerns of privacy, or to waive them aside in favor of particular narrow interests than it is to consistently favor privacy and security.
Remember, any code you write can and will be used against you.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Check out Anarchy Online.
It's not exactly Shadowrun, but it doesn't look bad.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
I entirely agree with Jon on almost everything, although why he needs to make such grandiose analogies to get his point across I will never understand. Dollars have become votes, and will even more so as this corporatism progresses. I don't feel good about it at all. I vote with my dollar, not to the extent of only shopping at small businesses, but at the very least to the extent of buying from Corel rather than Microsoft (for the obvious reasons), or to not buying Nikes anymore because I don't agree with their hiring ethics (not that I was ever much of a runner). We can't expect the corporate world to change unless we tell it to. They are here to satisfy our needs and could be made to do it properly, they just ened to be slapped in the face and told what our needs truly are. If you want the lowest possible price on an item, be my guest to buy it from the cheapest provider, just remember that you are also responsible for why that item is so cheap. You become responsible for child labour, unsafe workplaces, corporate shuffles, and all the other evils of many corporations. Pick the lesser of evils long enough and the evil will lessen.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
I think the trend of self-aggrandizement that has started amoung a lot of the slashdot crowd is pretty sickening, and Katz, who often exemplifies it, has outdone himself here. We are not the heroes of our own little sagas. We're regular people. Some of us pretty exceptional regular people. Some of us damn exceptional regular people. But comparing oneself to the heroes of a game - so cool! so daring! so fasionable! - is a level of arrogance from which it's hard to recover. Just try to do the right things and stop pretending to be superheroes.
"I have to admit, I would have filtered out Jon's ramblings a long time ago if I didn't get immense amusement out of them.
/. account info to the FBI, and Andover subpoenaed Geocitie's records, but after three layers of anonymizing we lost him. The next day the text file showed up on FreeNet! I tell you, this privacy stuff is getting out of hand." He calms himself before continuing, "Even the link to the fake potato power page didn't fool enough of them into unhooking from the fence to let us power up the missiles. Dang, geeks don't trust anyone anymore!"
"But lately, I've been cultivating a theory: that JonKatz is not actually a human being, but in fact software that takes some random topic and turns it into a long, redundant, rambling essay on the dangers of globalization, media, capitalism, corporatism, ageism, intellectualism, polymorphism, foodism and the Geo Prizm. "
(Waltham, MA) As the sun sets on the seige of SlashDot fans wandering outside the Exodus Communications electrified fence, looking for a laptop LAN hook-up Rob Malda wonders where he went wrong.
"I guess it was the third Napster article in a row," he decides. "Not three days in a row, three articles in a row."
"It's a perfectly legitimate SlashDot topic," he insists. "It's Linux. And open source... in a closed-source, proprietary format, not available for Linux or any *nix sort of way. I mean, I thought it was cool. And I'm a geek, so that makes steal... -er- sharing music 'News for Nerds', right? I mean, it's not like non-nerds listen to music."
The lights dim as if some massive rationalizing mechanism was overloading. "Damn," Malda muttered, "Some guy put up a page on powering laptops from the electrified fence, and now I start to pray at sunset every night. I narc'ed the
He looks out the eight-inch armored glass porthole, at the hundreds of small campfires fueled by sheaves of source code. "It's pretty. Ever stop to think how many watts even a small abandoned app puts out when burned? That's what I call the power of open source!" For a moment he seems like a senile old man, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!
Malda chuckles, despite his obvious strain, "Actually, I guess I'm a lucky man. Before they learned to tap the concrete-and-steel OC-24 conduits for bandwidth they used the fences as a low-frequency antenna -- kind of a mini HAARP. We all had Don King hairdos that week."
He snaps back to the subject at hand. "Looking back, the downhill slide started when we installed a K.A.T.Z AI that didn't come anywhere near passing the Turing test. I mean even the elementary school focus groups weren't fooled! But when it came up with the Hellsmouth thread, enough of the geeks fell into line to moderate down anyone who didn't. I guess we got cocky. We should never have let the AI do our article selection too."
"You see, there was a glitch in the code." He laughs again, bitterly this time, "Ironically, it was due to Napster. Pudge believed us when we said everyone used MP3 to discover obscure new groups, and share their own artistic work. He used the Napster traffic on the nearest backbone as a random number generator for K.A.T.Z." A small tear forms on the corner of his eye, "But of course, everyone really uses Napster to rip off the same old commercial songs, just like he does. Suddenly 90% of the threads were retreads of the Same Old Stuff. Maybe we should have suspected something when Napster started getting its own thread every day... but frankly, we don't read SlashDot, you know?"
"Roblimo mentioned it at the last board meeting, but it was in haiku, and anyway I couldn't hear him over Hemo's new Swedish masseuse. The last one did Rolfing or something --much quieter -- but this new one! Wowza! You can hear her though the armored vault."
"My biggest regret is putting the K.A.T.Z. in charge of supplies in the final week. We're rationing the emergency supplies we ordered before, but the last shipment... eighteen tons of instant breakfast packets. Grits, to be exact. Just add water. And not a pat of butter in the entire building."
When asked his view of the future he simply said "I'm petrified."
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
step 1: define the following words(or at least know what parts of a sentence they go in):
...
multinational, social awareness, activism, greed, power, oppression, oligarchy, indigenous, alienated, dictatorship, elite, culture, people, sit-in, social order, social welfare, social , corporatism, diversity, censorship, rally, third world, progressive, society, demonstration, people, sexist, human rights, destruction, proletariat, regime, patriarchy, environmentalism, gender, control, aristocrat, resist, protest, fascist, democracy, stratification, poverty, privilege,
step 1b: use these words in everyday conversation, i.e.:
andrew: hi, betty, how are you?
betty: your sexist patriarchal gender oppression will be smashed by the progressive social awareness of the people resisting the privileged power elite!
step 2: read (or at least pose with book in public) one or more of the following authors:
Karl Marx, Howard Zinn, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Abbie Hoffman, Freidrich Engels, Mario Savio, Bob Avakian, V.I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Noam Chomsky (good source for more big, intelligent sounding words. stump your friends!)
step 3: know the following organizations, and whether they are good or bad
IMF, greenpeace, IWW, WTO, US government, Earth First!, NOW, World Bank, Monsanto, Shell Oil Corporation, Free Speech Movement, Food not Bombs, Monsanto, Amnesty International, Monsanto.
step 4: attend rally, sit-in, protest, demonstration of your choice in one or more of the following causes: environmentalism, workers' rights, women's rights, animal rights, human rights, welfare rights, anti-WTO, anti-IMF, anti-bad group (see step 3).
congratulations! You are now a fully tuned in social activist, hip to what's going on! The fascist oppressors can't pull the wool over your eyes!
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Unfortunately, unlike a game, corporate abuse is all too real for most of us. I've been able to find a niche in a mid sized company that I feel really appreciates my skills and talents, but I've worked my way through a Govt. subcontractor and an unnamed large overnight delivery company to get here =P Those 2 were some of the best and worst experiences I've had professionally. Underpaid and overworked, surrounded by manager/puppet types with all kinds of bizarre value systems and perversions, our shining moments as programmers were when we got that one piece of code to run right, or were able to claim victory over the evil router bank (hehe). I disagree Jon, magic does exist in minds of the folks that do the job. Our perception of the network is as visual and vivid as most people's reality is. We don't watch TV, we don't like the Spice Girls, we recognize corporatism and Marketing for what it is, and most of all we stick together. It's a kind of unspoken battle line between an ignorant, but abusive, executive class who refuses to accept technology as anything other than a tool, and an obsessive technical staff in today's would be mega-corporations. When you eliminate the creative elements from programming, you wind up with crap, and nobody wants that right? The bloated, controlling, bulky type of thinking that creates the market for garbage like ERP's is destined to be the downfall of these guys, at least we can hope.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
That, as a whole, we are being lulled into an unconscious slumber, that powerful unaccountable forces are subtley, but greatly, shaping our perception is very scary.
I mute commercials, and generally try to avoid advertising at all costs. But it is simply *impossible* to not get those goddamn jingles stuck in your head...the thought pollution is *immense*. Sometimes I think communists may have gotten it partly right (well, besides the tyranny stuff) in wiping this capitalist crud out. Some of the best cultural, literatary, and artistic work, and cultural progress in general, has been accomplished under non-capitalist systems. The problem is that capitalism measures everything by market value, by how much an *individual* values something, not by what a *society* values. But that is another rant.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
So you are urged to buy something that makes you special and different, while the corporate employers try to assume that you look after yourself like an autonomous identity. Furthermore, it is being encouraged to create your own business and to not depend on anyone. And of course, if you do not belong to any union much better!
The jobs we are given, and the careers we follow fracture more and more any social cohesion. If you want to belong you dont do so automatically anymore. I've heard people complain that in the USA the kind of urbanism done is having that kind of efect - I mean malls whith huge parking lots and poorly conected suburban areas with no smal stores. But I do not really know the USA so I can't say.
The individual that ends up without a group to reasure him, without default ways to comunicate and without an Identity by which to orientate himself is not a hero in my eyes (he is one if he manages to have a happy life ... ). If you want to live that way - fine. But people who are forced to live that way don't usually find it funny.
So what about that individualism, Katz?
rmstar
Hey, don't laugh. Texas used to be it's own country, and Texas pride runs rampant. Here in Austin, you see many more Texan flags than you do American flags. Plus, there's a great deal of wealth and power here (both old school oil/politics and new school technology/corporations). I'm not saying that Texas is going to secede anytime soon, but it's not that much of a stretch. Plus, concealed firearms are legal. Woohoo!
two things:
1) Look in history - has there ever been a time when some over-whelming force hasn't held most of the power? Whether it was the Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babalonian, etc. Empires, the Church in Europe in the middle ages, Islamic dictators in the mid-east today, the former Soviet Union, etc. And Guess what? people survived as people, and the dignified human race and soul out-lived all of those empires.
2) lets say you are right - why aren't you moving to Havenco or joining a Montanna milita or something? If things are hopeless, why don't you bail? Because the reality is that every generation faces its own challenges, and unless we all nuke each other, that will continue. Today's "all-powerfull demigods" are nothing but a paragraph in the history books tomorrow. Ever read "Osymandys" - I know I got the name wrong, but you know what I'm talking about - the poem about the enscription on the broken statue of a long-gone ruler?
I tned to disagree with this sort of synopsis. Gone are the days where you owed loyalty to a company or product. Today's king-of-the-hill is tomorrow's street sweeper. IMHO people that beleieve this need to get a life. Go camping. Go for a bicycle ride down to the nearest park. Business is the same sharkpit it ever was and those who stand tall shall be lain low. In the real world there are only people. Everything else is made-up.
Yeah! My life is a lot like Shadowrun, now that you mention it. Just today, while dodging orange barrels on the freeway, this mutant guy on a motorcycle came up and tried to jack me with a shotgun. Luckily I had those mods done to my car last month, or he might have got me!
After taking care of that, I slinked into my corporate job, adopting my work persona: that of a short-on-sleep, perl hacking college student. That's just a cover. I do my real work at night, and it's much more exciting. I'll let you in on a little secret: they don't call them daemons for nothing, baby!
Tonight, I may catch a concert, or I may have to take some time and deal with this pig-snouted guy with a bulge in the small of his back, under his trenchcoat, who's been following me around. I should check out the polls, too, there's a dragon running for president this year. That's life, here in the future.
Communication is only possible between equals
is 404! Not found. :-)
Try taking the "www.slashdot.org/" out of it
www.FASA.com might work better.
Sounds like Slashdot to me...
At its core, Shadowrun isn't about the megacorps, and being discarded, downsized or re-engineered as a result of "flexible" management philosophies and ever-shifting marketing goals; it's about guns, more guns, hand razors, explosives, and all the other goodies that make for violent conflict.
Katz does fine when he uses Shadowrun's backstory as a "prophecy" of the future, but comparing the amoral, armed-to-the teeth Shadowrunner to today's mildly rebellious, dissatisfied corporate peon is quite a stretch.
To keep this on topic, I felt Barbelith was our self-created ability to save ourselves - our 'true self" after you give up egotistical and limited illusions.
We don't have to "play the game" of Shadowrun. Or anything else we don't choose. Don't like the megacorps? Do something. Rewrite the rulebook.
We can be Shadowrunners or Invisibles or the Discordians or anything else we want. But only if we don't let others define reality for us - be it one person or a corporation.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Hey you, you there...
have you ever kissed a girl in your life?
I know it's gratuitous, but it's not offtopic. I have to agree that this Anonymous Coward succinctly captures my feeling on this issue. Katz can churn out the intelligent seeming piece, and has his heart in the right place, but he really is an ignorant slut, especially in the sense that he's a reporter, and only slides over the surface of that which he covers. It's the eternal curse of the generalist and the press, but really, it's damn annoying.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
While I'm at it its time to dispell this entire top down power myth. I work for the second largest (private) employer in my state. I work on computers and at anytime a handfull of us could bring this company to its knees. The same is true of our engineers and accountants. Any business is made up of people and if enough of them think the environment needs changing then things change. The same has been true everywhere I have worked.
Jon -
I'm surprised that you missed that Shadowrun is more a reflection of earlier scifi (especially Gibson's prescient Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, et cetera) than anything new. Yes, it attempts to integrate fantasy and scifi, but the socio-economic stuff is highly derivative of previous scifi.
Everyone talked about 'Neuromancer' and Cyberpunk RPG, so I'll just add 'HardWired' by Walter Jon Williams (less cyber, more punk); and "The Shockwave Rider" an absolute must read from John Brunner. I believe this is a very early form of what later got to be known as the Cyberpunk genre.
I'm quite surprised by this article. Quality seems to be going down here. I could have read this in a newspaper: I learned nothing and almost died of shock reading the more un-informed parts.
I do not believe this is news for nerds. They already know. If they don't, they aren't nerds. But then of course maybe one needs to target more people? News for wannabee nerds? Huh...
And how come real RPGs aren't discussed here? I was under the impression that most nerds were Role players too.
A poll idea here?
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
On-topic and true
Posts relevant yet critique'd
By mimicking them
"Big corporations are bad!"
"Why?"
"Ummm... cause they do bad things!"
"Like what?"
"Ummm... like... umm..."
To my mind there's a couple of very large, very bad generalizations going on. We've gone from "These big corporations sometimes do bad things" gradually to "These big corporations are bad" and then rapidly from there to "All big corporations are bad!" And that reduces to a snappy slogan like "Down with Corporatism!" that you can chant like the idiot savant activist so many seem to be. Let's face it, "stop [big corporation] from [doing evil thing]" just doesn't spread as well in a crowd and individual companies don't make nearly as enticing targets as a single big "corporatist" organization.
The worst thing you can do to a movement is join it (or found it) and then unthinkingly parrot the party line, ignoring all criticism or open discussion of your motives and ideals. If you do, you're not a protester or part of a movement. You're a cult member.
All that said, there are big companies that do bad things; we all know the backstory of Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action. They do need to be stopped. But what we don't need is people unthinkingly slamming some vaguely-defined concept of evil while they chow down on their McDonald's slop and then go outside to use the AT&T pay phone to call Mom and remind her to go down the street to the (Royal Dutch) Shell station and fill up their car with gas so it'll be ready to go out and watch the latest Hollywood offerings that night.
(If you're serious enough to protest, at least be serious enough to boycott.)
-- Old Man Kensey
Using Shadowrun as allegory for the actual world? Give me a break.
What is so appealing about the "corporatist" / dark future worldview anyway? Is it the hacker equivalent of survivalist fantasies about Soviet invasions and nukular holocausts . . . A paranoid fantasy where the disenfranchised can imagine themselves powerful?
If "corporatism" is going to be defanged, it will be through LAWS, not skulking lumpenhackers. Laws are concieved and nurtured through involvement and hard work by concerned and dedicated citizens. It means dealing with people, including some you may not agree with or much like being around. It means building coalitions and making compromises and getting up early.
Stefan (who used to WORK with the Shadowrun designers before he got a real job)
Corporations are bad? What the heck? When did that happen? And I can only run around in shadows now? Is this because of that ozone thing? Hey! I bet the corporations did that too, with all their air conditioners. (Though, I still don't get why they prefer the condition of air to be such that it offers no protection against sun burn. . . Must be some kind of scam where they sell lots of extra sunscreen lotion. --Or hey! Maybe it's the black people getting back at the whites for all those years of forced cotton picking. Hum! I knew letting blacks run all those giant corporations would lead to no good!)
That's it. I'm pipe bombing somebody! I'm going to go blow up a gas station! Boy! Won't that look cool! Just like in 'Terminator'!
Fantastic Lad --The most amazing of script kiddie of them all!
"Well, if people would just stop having sex, we wouldn't need all this nerve gas."
In Shadowrun, the big thing that gave the MegaCorporations all the power was the Shiawase decision. This court ruling decided that the corporate complexes had extraterritoriality -- basically that they were considered as different nations. This posed a real problem, because then the megacorps could get their own armies, make their own laws (while breaking everyone elses), etc. The government could do absolutely nothing about it.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
After all, there are thousands of fictional works about dystopian societies, hundreds where they're corporately ruled, and gaming ALWAYS wants to set you up in an "interesting" environment. It wouldn't be a good roleplaying game setting if the characters lived in central Kansas and their main concerns were which crops to plant that season and what to do about those pesky crows. IMHO, you'd have been a lot better off broadening your references, instead of concentrating on one, arguably derivative, RPG setting.
One item in particular bugged me - the following:
The heretic today is marginalized without any bloodshed. He doesn't even take the risks the Shadowrunner takes. His teacher and peers make him a joke in the classroom, and ignore or isolate him. His career is either destroyed outright, as it being fired or demoted.
This IS the era of the Internet, Jon. Any loon with the cash for domain registration can air their crackpot beliefs to the universe. Anyone who can make it to the public library can participate in chats, mail lists, and forums like this one. Heretics abound today, Jon - indeed, I'd argue that they're proliferating at unprecedented levels. From the WTO/World Bank protestors in their ununified hordes, to the UFO conspiracy theorists, to the various religious extremes, heretics are finding like-minded folk and carving their own niches - cobbling together their own soapboxes and shouting to the world.
But then, that's just my opinion... worth about the same as belly-button lint... everyone has their own supply.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
They're all a bunch of monkeys!
They work just as hard as anybody else, and have the audacity to think that they're somehow as good as us! Bah! The monkeys! To think!
Wonder boys like us, with our rich parents who gave us cars on our 16th birthdays for scoring high on our report cards and put us through the best colleges without our having to lift a finger, MUST on some fundamental level be superior to those lame, poor-ass losers out there! Social Darwinism rocks, because it happens to favor us rich kids!
Hooray!
Fantastic Lad, --the most amazing script kiddie of them all!
-If people would just stop having sex, we wouldn't NEED all this nerve gas.--
Which book was that, and where did you find out about it?
:)
I'm always curious about books that have accurately predicted the future.
-d
All operating systems suck. Some just suck less than others. (and some are virtual black holes)
is another source of _great_ cyberpunk mythology !
Go forth and readth it!
Magic doesn't work in focus groups
;) )
No, actually magic works better with groups of foci.
(anyone who's played SR as a magician should know what I'm talking about
-- Dr. Eldarion --
But the lesson of Microsoft is get to big, act too much like a bully and the state will step in and punish you. The megacorps are truly forces, and largely unfettered ones, but there are individuals watching and there are lines that can't be crossed with impunity.
None of this suggests that our freedoms aren't erroding. On the other hand, I grew up in the 50's and social controls were much higher then. You dream of a state of being where individuals have true contol over their lives and social institutions. This is not a human state. Must humans will not think for themselves and when the do "think", are incapable of thinking through to the consequences of their actions. That's why social insititutions evolved to control on some levels the behavior of those who couldn't manage this on their own.
This does mean that those who are capable of thinking and acting for themselves will feel abused. That's the nature of society. You can't find a single viable example of a society in which that is not the case.
The lesson? Find an niche of your own and exploit it -- it could be as a shadowrunner. My computer program recommends: adopt a zen-like attitude.
But don't pretend that corporations even megacorps on the verge of running amok are anything other than human social institutions in many ways like all others.
BTW: while most corporate managers have adopted the mantra of stockholder value, they are really just careerists who run corps as private fiefdoms, subject only to making enough profit/share price value to keep the stockholders from demanding a change in management. And most major stockowners are not individuals they are corporate institutions themselves, often bigger than the companies they hold shares in, i.e., mutual funds, pension funds, and so on.
End of rant.
Slashdot is Shadowland.
Other than that, I think that Katz is making a bit too much out of this and taking a lot of the source material out of context. Shadowrun is a neat game, yeah (I've got and have read all of the sourcebooks and novels, etc), but it's more of a reflection of our times than anything. It started with the Japanese MegaCorps when it came out in 1989 (when the game world was in 2050); now that we're less scared of the Japanese taking over the world, it's the German and American Megas that you have to watch out for. When our fear of cults was high, a large insect cult took over Chicago; now that it's technology, it was a section of Seattle that was taken by a Artificial Intelligence.
And, as other have pointed out, if anything we're deckers. Tortises, in this case - we don't have direct neural connections. Yet.
- Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)
There's a lot of talk here about how corporations are growing in control, but I think we are ignoring the other side of the coin - the consumers that are making it possible for them.
It seems to me that consumerism is out of hand, and that is what is driving this whole thing.
I'm talking about the modern 'American Dream' lifestyle, which I see as whitebread, suburban, all living in identical houses (with fake shutters) in identical neighborhoods, driving 1 or more minivans, with 1 or more soccer moms playing the Mrs. Cleaver role, the entire family watching 4+ hours of TV daily and being programmed to all buy the same brands, and buy more, more, more.
I have never understood while all these people feel the need to look exactly the same. It scares the hell out of me.
Can someone please explain this to me?
Does anyone else see rampant consumerism as a problem?
Evil are taking away all your power, impoverishing you and ruining your life !
And if you believe that, I have this really nice bridge I'd like to sell you...
Yes, every playground has it's bullies.
No, you don't fix the problem by making impassioned speaches, trying to rally support against some oppressive evil entity or passing laws against 'bad people', you fix the problem by punching the little fuck in the nose so hard that snot spews out of his asshole, then you help him up and become friends with him.
Evil only becomes evil when you stop seeing it for what it is.
And what is it ? Just another human being who is just as vulnerable as anyone else.
- antoine
The notion that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is not just an astute observation,
its a capitalist necessity.
The very nature of capitalism relies on the distribution of wealth to those who can get it.
You can have all that you can grab. This means for one to be wealth, many must be poor.
100 apples for 100 people, but if I get rich with 20 apples, 19 people must be poor with none!
This is the one great flaw in capitalism. I think we can now see its stress-points that may
someday crack into gaping fissures! Multinationals fuel this and may eventually die by their
own sword (taking us with them as unconcious partners)
Unfortunatly, I don't particularly think any other economic system is better... So what's left?
--
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Okay Chummers, here's a little chip truth to offset Katz. First off, like others have pointed out Shadowrun while entertaining and errily prescient is not the primary source. Cyberpunk authors looked ahead to this corporatization in the early eighties. I won't even speculate as to who was first. Second, take a look at the Shadowrun product line. Hate to break it to you, but FASA is every bit as corporate as the next guy. While their original sourcebooks were extremely well written, later ones have tended to become formulaic--my opinion only. What I see is the gradual refinement of FASA's marketing strategy to the point where they market image with no substanc. And, they have been rewarded very well by this strategy. So, yeh, you run against corporation, but you do it using equipment created and provided by those same corps. Look at the evolution of the source books: I noticed that every new bit of equipment is becoming more and more customized towards the dedicated shadowrunner. What's going? Well, if I were to take the universe at face value, I'd say the establishment is defusing the revoltion by copting it. In and of itself, that would make for a spooky long term Shadowrun campaign. Problem is that in real life, the corporate world has an excellent record for co-opting and subverting progressive movements by packaging the image of rebellion and subsituting that image for the real thing. (BTW, the comments about the evolution of Shadowrun material, constitute my opinion only, and I'll admit I havn't followed things slavishy, just looked now and again at the bobby store.)
Look at how sub cultures like Punk and Grunge have been co-opted and ultimately destroyed by the forces of marketing. Both cultures had at their core an ethos of self reliance and "do it yourself" that made them special and revolutionary. However, within a few years of their break through, marketers had identified the readily recognizable elements and packaged them into a ready to buy product. The young and would be hip could simply go into a store and buy the outfit rather than having to discover the scene and its ideals. If we're not careful the same things gonna happen to us. Rebellion is always sexy and appealing simply for the fact that its breaking the monotony, but every rebellion has change as its goal. How do you get beyond the image and succeed at making change? That's the important thing.
Now a few comments about Katz' misconceptions about the shadowrun world in particuar. First there's the Lifestyle comment. Almost every system I've played in has a character's lifestly covered to one degree or another. Shadowrun just came up with a good one word term and nearly as concise rule for dealing with everyday reality of living during and in between runs(called adventures for us old timers). Second, we are not even close to the world where mercenaries run para military ops on corporate parks. The Shadowrun world presupposes a set of cataclysms which balkanize and destabilize N. America--and the rest of the world--to same level we see in modern day Africa. Mercernaries and lawlessness flourish in such a situation. And ,the only law becomes that whoever can bring the most force to bear in any given location. Corporations would be very sinister in such a world. Third shadowrunners aren't necessarily heretics and revolutionaries. A lot of them are criminals, the poor and desparate, and people who got ground up and spit out by the machine. Waitaminute... Okay, so life does imitate art after all. That said, I agree with Katz thesis about how Shadowrun looks increasingly like a portent for our future rather than a work of fiction.
How the fuck can you call yourself a geek when you're just discovering a culture that originated back in 1982 with Neuromancer and Burning Chrome. The idea of corporate versus underworld culture with an element of computer trickery has been around since the late 70's, and you're just now figuring this out? Hell, the cyberpunk literature style has been pimping this idea for the past 20 years, and was considered 'dead' until Snow Crash was produced.
You'd have been better off doing a review of the cyborg element of shadowrun, since that is becoming more possible recently. I'm sure you would have lots of people (like myself) who plan to get cyber implants once they become available to the public
So please, Rob, CT, even Cowboy Neal, turn Jon Katz onto some current literature, let him borrow a copy of a recent book. I'm tired of hearing about the latest revolution that happened ten generations ago. (computer time)
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
This is insane. If we're Shadowrunners, I want to be an insect shaman...
Nobody's a shadowrunner, Jon, no more than anyone's a high elf mage. Nobody I know has physically broken into a megacorp's (they don't exist on Shadowrun's level, even...) datacenter, killed a bunch of guards, and hacked into an node off a "real world" representation of data and programs. I think you like the way "shadowrun" sounds, and that's about it. What kind of research did you do into this article? While you're rambling about the "eerie parallels" in SR, why not mention the reemergence of raw magic, elves, orks and dragons? Wait, there is none!
This is a painful article. I think Timothy's "No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies" article take on a similar issue, with less hyperbole.
I'm dropping you, Jon.
Er, Shadowrun is a game, not a simulation. :-b
Ever read Tom Frank's _Commodify Your Dissent_? It's about how ad companies and media corps have gotten filthy rich by telling us that we're all rebels, we're all breaking the rules. By buying their product. It's kind of insidious when you think about it. Post-modernism has created an atmosphere where anyone can define themselves as a rebel, including some yahoo stockbroker who drives an SUV and is "extreme".
-carl. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Anybody remember the 1975 movie "Rollerball"!? I believe Gibson's 1st book was published in '86. It was kind of long and drawn out, and if rumors are true, the remake will suck because they took out all the sociology in favor of more action scenes. And so it goes, -seth
And so it goes, -seth
Gawd! Whata wind bag! Get real guy.. This is fantasy land your living in.. The people of the world would never let the goverment allow MEGA corps to get bigger than them... That would mean less bribes and control for them.. if MEGACORP's take control then we wouldn't need the gov.. they'd make no money.. It'll never happen.. Famous last words??
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
The idea of corporate versus underworld culture with an element of computer trickery has been around since the late 70's
No, no. This is what you don't get. It's not that it wasn't predicted .
It's that it's fucking happening NOW .
Ten years ago, the masses were not being told what they could say. No one was being told what they cannot create (because the idea is already "owned" by someone else). No one was threatened with jail time because he re-sold some software.
Lawyers have always run the world, to its detriment. (See Shakespeare: "first thing, let's kill all the lawyers.") But never have they had so much frightening and freedom-threatening power.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Once upon a time, there was this video game consale called a Sega Genesis. And for this console was a nice game named Shadowrun. I believe it was created in 1994 but i could be wrong. Anyway it is quite an entertaining game and I actually played it for about a week nonstop before finding out, it actually had a goal and plot. You could do whatever you want, hax0r some corporation, go bust up a building guns blazing... all sorts of stuff. You went to clubs and bars and got contracts. Anyway go to a game store and look for it in bargain bins or get the emulator or something.
Its a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field...
I agree - one of the problems with changing the world (which really means changing ourselves) is that we try and 'purchase' traits, like modifying characters in a role-playing game. We don't really want to change of course - we just want the label.
If you want to face down megacorporatism, stop paying them to tell you who you are first.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Yes, other than magic, ShadowRun seems to be a relitively acurrate portrayal of our future, but it does a good job preciecely because it is not really a dystopian future. Everyday life in the SR universe is not that much different than it is today. The 3rd ed. book had a different opening than the 2nd, which summed it up quite well, the constant refrain throughout the story was "the more things change, the more they stay the same," which is pretty well sums up the SR universe.
and once more Jon tries to make a grand myth where little of substance exists.
... stop!
By your terms, I would be a Shadowrun person - I work in Seattle, I do tech, I own parts of the megacorps that rule the world
Look, ever since the days that Bill Gibson cranked out his fine literary fiction on his typewriter, everyone's been all into this genre, but it's pretty much a work of fiction.
You might get some arguments from the situation in Mexico and a few other places, but this is 20th Century thinking applied to a vision of the 21st Century. The real 21st Century is neither a utopia or a distopia, which you might recognize more of if you took courses that friends of mine have taught at various universities on Utopian Societies from a Fantasy and SF perspective.
The future's much more low tech than we think, and yet radically different. There is a battle going on for information freedom, and one for a market-ruled cyber feudal system, but the geeks are winning and the corps are losing.
And if you wonder if I know anything about this, I was the one who brought Bill Gibson's first Hugo award home through Australian customs (heavy bugger) and is why he got invited to the Westercon in Vancouver in the first place.
If you want to write fiction, go ahead. But don't present it as News for Nerds, but as Speculation for Spooks.
Comprende?
Will in Seattle
As a long-time geek and pencil & paper roleplayer, I wish to state publicly for the record that this is, by far, the silliest thing Jon Katz has ever written.
(Wow, there's like this wacky thing called cyberpunk, and it's a not-so-subtle take on where our society is heading. Boy, wait'll I break the news of this strange new genre, apparently invented by FASA Games, to all the Slashdot readers!)
not only is the universe stranger than you imagine,
it's stranger than you are capable of imagining
What do you mean -- *theory*? Haven't you heard of the KatzBot?
I thought everyone already *knew* that /.'ers were beta testers for the KatzBot.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
WARNING: mention of famous persons for the intent of improving author's notoriety currently in progress. Stand clear of affected message and use caution in attributing respect to author in near future.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
To be honest, I hadn't heard of KatzBot since he hasn't posted much lately. =)
I must admit though, VirtualJonKatz does a marvellous job, as mentioned in this thread.
--- BEGIN quote
How ironic that young gamers have sensed
for years (the original Shadowrunner rules were published in l989) what journalists and politicians still keep missing -- that life for individuals gets
rougher by the year here in the Corporate Republic. That a handful of megacorporations are becoming powerful beyond anyone's control.
--- END quote
What is this fascination with geeks as seers? Economists have talked about corporate mega-cultures for ages, possibly even before Galbraith's "The New Industrial State."
Many people believe that history exhibits a cyclic behavior on time - in short, that it repeast itself. Some readers already commented about the older megacorporations, such as Standard Oil. Stories from the railroad companies also come to mind. In the turn of the 20th century the picture was ugly. People worked as slaves in factories and farms worldwide.
What happened that changed the picture? It was a slow but powerful change that came to a peak in last 30 years of the past century. Along time companies lost a lot of power for the State. This happened for a lot of reasons, but I think that the biggest one were the I and II World Wars. When such a big war effort happens, the State must prepare itself. This is the only exception allowed by the liberal thinkers as a role of the State - to protect national interests worldwide by the power of army.
As a result of the II World War the US grew to be the world most powerful country. In the past few years, the power of the US government dropped a lot. Now its only a shadow of its peak. The fact that there is no enemy anymore helped a lot. In this scenario it is easy for corporations to grow beyond acceptable limits. However, this same growth is one of the reasons that trigger rebelions and wars.
Do anyone think that all the countries around the world are going to accept colonization by American-based companies easily? The situation is already bad enough, even in some potentially big countries such as India, China and Russia. Also, some members of the stablishment dont like things as they are today. Sooner or later politicians and military wil try to do something to change it. Politics is a dirty game, specially when such amount of power is involved.
Please dont mistake me - as for myself I'm a pacifist. I dont believe in war, and I dont think it solves any problem. I'm just pointing out the fact the the shift in the balance is always marked by the ocurrence of violent periods and bloody wars. This is the mechanism that allow the State to overcome the power of corporations, and I fear that this may happen again shortly.
IMHO Shadow run was now where near the best or first role-playing game to explore those themes. Why didn't Jon Katz talk about William Gibson or other Cyberpunk authors who created the cyberpunk mythos instead of a Role-playing game thats biggest contrabution was adding elves and orcs? I think Shadow Run was popular becouse it had a pretty simple system ( compared to cyberpunk which was so mathematical is was unplayable) but it did not create or add to any of the themes it dealt with. It was more of a 'You like Cyber stuff? You like Dragons? Well now you can have both in one easy to use package!
Social Darwinism favors people with rich parents? Another sweeping generalization! Many people, including Mr Katz make very simplistic arguements with little factual evidence. Most posters at /. appear to have very little understanding of the real world. Poor children in poor countries having to work twelve hours a day to make 50 cents? I shout with joy! I think it is better that these children manufacture shoes rather than prostitute themselves or rumage through garbage dumps to subsist on 250 calories a day. Corporations taking over governments? Where? Can you point to a country that is effectively being run by a corporation? Have your civil liberties been restricted in some way because of capitalism? I believe in social engineering, I don't believe in quick fixes. I think that what we are seeing in the world today is the natural evolution of our global society. There will be bad (exploitation of poor), there will be good (poor people having higher standards of living: yes it is happening) and over all, it will be a non-event. We will go on living and procreating, because when you get right down to it, that is what we do, we're organisms!
> that a once-free press is nearly completely in corporate hands
That the press was ever free and not influenced by corporations is an illusion created by our imperfect memories or histories taught to us. Check out some of the work by George Seldes if you're not sure. He's been traking the press and where it has sold itself out since the 20's.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
"Most people on this planet are asleep; it is our job to awaken them." -- Gurdjieff, sometime in the 19th Century (paraphrased)
Some of the best cultural, literatary, and artistic work, and cultural progress in general, has been accomplished under non-capitalist systems.
Oh yeah? Name even one. "The East is Red", maybe? 8-P
The problem is that capitalism measures everything by market value, by how much an *individual* values something, not by what a *society* values.
Every artist I have ever known has created their art with no regard to its market value or what society thinks about it. And they were each individuals. They would rather *stop* doing art altogether than submit to some kind of "social-valuing* system.
BTW -- *excellent* quote from Lindsay.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Lastly, Quantum Leaps are the =smallest= leaps possible.
Uh, no, Quantum Leaps would be leaps of some undefined -quantity-.... hence the term Quantum.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
The greatest disappointment I had upon turning 21 was finding out that in real life, going to bars only rarely results in shadowy individuals offering to pay you money to go on adventures.
And when they do, it usually turns out not to be the sort of adventures I had in mind.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
There's one little part of the Seattle Sourcebook for Shadowrun that I'd like to qoute (It's poorly translated, 'cause I only own the german version of this sourcebook):
;-)
Microdeck Industries
Microdeck Plaza, Maind Street and 124th Avenue NE/Brian W. Gates III, CEO/no racial discrimination/# 9206 (78-5082)
Microdeck is one of the leading software producers since the invention of the computer. The corporation was founded by the Family Gates, who still own and lead it. They produce Software for small Companies and private People, but have expanded there production to Military- and Flight-software.
Well, suddenly the word "crash" comes to my mind
You may think that magic has no place in a cyberpunk type world, but there are those of us who do play and like the idea. What is the difference between a midieval barbarian using magic to fight off a villan or a wage mage fighting off the Knight Arrant? Just different times, and I certainly am not living in a midieval castle, Shadowrun is much easier to relate to.
FASA didn't say "The President is going to be Dunkelzahn the Dragon" They did a vote of real players and they are the ones who chose out of a diverse set of characters that the dragon would win the presidential election. Not to mention it has made for some great runs.
I'm sure AD&D didn't use some Ideas from other fiction for their game settings either...and TSR has been in business for over 25 years now, and they keep producing great games.
With the other books you mention, they are reading books. They are not roleplaying source books. I don't want to read about someone else's adventure! I want to make my own! I want to decide if I should run into the building, guns blazing, or if I should sneak in the back where there's an awakened cocatrice waiting for me on a leash...
If these other books are so great, why don't you make your own role playing system based on them? This is what I have and I like it.
~Raveness "I never let schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
How ironic that young gamers have sensed for years (the original Shadowrunner rules were published in l989) what journalists and politicians still keep missing -- that life for individuals gets rougher by the year here in the Corporate Republic.
How does it get rougher, exactly?
That a handful of megacorporations are becoming powerful beyond anyone's control.
You mean like the aformentioned Shell Oil and United Fruit? You're right: when a megacorporation such as C&H Holdings can force the overthrow of the legitimate monarchy of Hawai'i and force it's annexation into a United States which is predominately being controlled by a handfull of megacorporations who promise to restore prosperity after a damaging Civil War forced unemployment into the 30% range--oh, wait: that was last centry. Sorry. We're supposed to be talking about this century...
That individualism is not only growing more difficult, but one day soon may actually be dangerous.
I just love it how you can make a sweeping generalization unbacked by any evidence and present it as a defacto "truth." Repeat this often enough and people presume that this is simply The Truth, without realizing the fact that you never backed up this assertion at any point in your career.
That this creeping reality has been a role-playing exercise for brainy kids for more than a decade is an amazing thing.
I don't think I need to point out that this sort of fiction (extrapolating a future as a dysfunctional projection of the present) isn't anything new. Others have already pointed out a number of examples, to which I will add "1984" and "Animal Farm".
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. For Corporate Republic renegades, life is increasingly an adventure.
Well DUH! It's a bloody game! Do you think Mad Max would have been as interesting a movie if the characters were transplanted to the Los Angeles of today, where instead of being something to fight to the death over, gas was simply $1.69/gallon? Do you think Escape from New York would have been as interesting a movie if it were placed in today's New York, where "escape" means coming up with correct change at the toll booth?
Any form of entertainment is going to extrapolate the present, twist it in some unexpected way (Gataca's DNA tests, 1984's omnipresent two-way televisions and thought crimes), throw in an element which makes it possible to have some fun (how can a society which made individuality a crime have such an inept police force?) and presents it as entertainment.
Hell, this formula is so popular that it even shows up in right-wing stuff like the Turner Diaries--which makes the bad guys the government (instead of corporations) and anyone who doesn't recognize the inherent superiority of white people (instead of cyberpunks). Yes, this may be an abhorent example to some folks here, but for God's sake, paranoid fantasies are paranoid fantasies, no matter who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
The turning point for the modern real-world corporatism came in the l980s, when government decided to de-regulate many industries at almost precisely the same time as new marketing strategies and technologies were exploding, arming business with the ability to mass-market, monopolize and globalize.
Bwwaaah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Katz, are you really so ignorant of history that your memory doesn't go back to before the Reagan administration?
The "modern" corporation was born hundreds of years ago, when Kings would give exclusive license to partnerships of merchantile agents who would go out and engage in business on behalf of the crown. Britain's expansion into India, Spain's expansion into the New World, and just about everyone's expansion into China in the last few centuries were driven by corporations who were thoroughly in bed with the governments who gave them a license to exist. Even the United States played along with the annexation of Hawai'i, or our fiddling around with the internal politics of many Latin American countries.
The only reason why megacorporations were not influential during the Dark Ages was because the fudal dictatorships who actually repressed 95% of the population and forced them into poverty and early death to support the requirements of the local fudal lord (often little more than a bully with a club) were suspictious of anything that couldn't be forced to toil in the fields for food.
What's really remarkable thing is that Shadowrun was written before Microsoft sotware was in more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, before five companies owned virtually all the radio stations in America, before AOL/Time-Warner became the largest information entity in history, and before the Justice Department blithely approved AT&T's acquisition of the MediaOne Group, giving AT&T control of more than a third of the nation's cable networks for television, high-speed Net access and online telephone service.
But it was written after other great examples such as Shell Oil, railroad barons and the Hearst family's control of most newspapers across the country. (You remember Hearst's comment about the Spanish-American war? "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.")
You don't need high-speed net access to manipulate the dailies. Just a telegraph and a will to use it. And William Randolph Hearst had both. The land that currently houses the Hearst castle was stolen from my Salinan Indian ancestors in a deal that Hearst made with the government: throw in the support of his local papers, and promise to partition the land and hand half of it off to the Hunter Liggot military reservation, and the government will rubber stamp a land deal dispite competiting interests.
Megacorporations aren't anything new either: a term originally coined for companies who have interlocking directorships with overseas counterparts, these things have been around long before Shell. And their influence on the government has been around just as long as feudal lords realized the value of a gold coin.
The idea of the Shadowrunner in such a universe almost perfectly captures the worsening plight of the individual in our own era, when family farmers, small businesspeople, software designers, individuals of all sorts are losing opportunity to tell their own stories, shape their own lives and economic futures.
In an era where more than 70% of all people working in the United States are employed by small businesses employing 50 or fewer people, where a web site can be set up on a number of systems for $50/month if you don't want to have banner ads pastered all over your work, where individual purchasers are heavily influencing the design and delivery of products (see "Clue Train"), individuality is "losing?"
Small farmers are getting the shaft for two reasons. First, they are losing out to larger corporate farmers because larger corporate farmers are able to diversify the crops they plant and thus are able to reduce the risk when the price of one of those crops falls through the floor. Second, they are losing out to large corporate farmers because the vast majority of the population in the United States is simply unwilling to pay $2.00 for an apple or $1.50 for an orange. That is, price pressure to keep food incredibly cheap is driving small farmers out of business, because they simply cannot afford to keep up with the corporate farmers.
It's the same rational which keeps overseas sweat shops in business making cheap clothing for people in the United States: because we are unwilling to pay $30 for a $4 white t-shirt, and we are unwilling to pay $150 for a $30 pair of pants. So long as we are unwilling to pay the higher wages demanded by non-sweat shop factories, so long as we are unwilling to pay higher food costs needed by smaller farmers to allow them to continue to operate, we will continue to have cheap clothing and cheap food--and out of work family farmers and overseas sweat shops.
There are so many things wrong with Katz's posting which shows his lack of comprehension of politics, economics, history and culture that is is beyond me why he continues to post this sort of ignorant drivel.
Shadowrunner may be a fun game. But as a reflection of the current trends of our society, it isn't exactly groundbreaking. Nor is it accurate. And there are much better examples of the sort of "megacorporationism" from the last century than there is in this century.
Sorry Jon, but even the Columbine stories had this theme and it appears to be the shtick you stick with. Where your stories disappoint me is in the fact that you always seems to paint a panicky picture of no hope; that's simply not the world the vast majority of us live in.
Techno-fear is not for the techno-mages. Maybe this is the right message for people who don't understand how they *could* lose their individual freedoms if we're not vigilant, but I think Slashdot is the wrong crowd. (If nothing else, I guess we probably give really good feedback.)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Let's see... Art & literature? Homer's Odyssey & Iliad... any of the great Greek sculptures... Catullus' poetry... Vergil's Aeneid... Tacitus' history. Actually, pretty much any art or literature that was produced before, say, 1600 was a product of someone working in a non-capitalist system.
Every artist I have ever known has created their art with no regard to its market value or what society thinks about it.
True enough. However, for art to last beyond the immediate requires societal involvement, generally from a broad segment of society. If a particular piece of art's appeal is confined to an individual or a small segment of society, it is far more susceptible to being forgotten or lost. Without a greater society to 'approve' and preserve works of art, we'd have an awfully empty culture.
I would be the happiest man alive and gladly let evil corporations do whatever they wanted to do to me if I had someone like Kitsune as my sidekick...
Anyone who has no clue what I'm talking about, it's cause I'm not a real Shadowrun fan, I just liked the SNES version alot...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
As an occultist of sorts and a graphics manipulator by profession, I can totally agree with the majority of Katz's statement [hell, I have a first edition hardback of Shadowrun sitting in a duffelbag under my workbench]. But I have to contradict his point on Magic.
Sure, the corps have no use for it. Magic is the application of the laws of physics to the one thing they cannot control and have yet to profit from - human Will. It is intangible, a complicated and gordian morass of conceptology that the average individual- entranced with Quake or the Backstreet Boys or Buffy- cannot come to grips with, or have no interest in, pushing the occult aside in favor of other, more mundane distractions.
While it may not take the form of Dragons, elves, trolls, dwarves, etceteras [though look at the general population base- similarities exist within our own gene pool], Magic has been growing in popularity for the majority of the past century. Unless you have a manifest interest in it and persue it with a passion, those who practice it are invisible to you, lost in the general population, blips on radar and nothing else.
Practitioners of magical arts stay out of the public eye, due to the negative opinions on the subject that have been ingrained into the American conscious by forces such as Chrisitanity and general ignorance. And really- who gets more work done? The manager stuck in meetings all day or the graphic artist at the company Mac, told only to "make it look neat" and left alone? Bring down attention on yourself and you lose the time you need to get the Work done.
Any Willed act is a magical act- by base definition, these "Shadowrunners", the technological individualists who value the ideal of creation and exploration over a paycheck and a suit, are magicians of a sort. They have a morale that is incompatable with that of the Corps, and hence are cast aside because by their base nature, they cannot be assimilated.
Corps and most people barely have enough interest in base-level reality, let alone the deeper levels that are plunged by magical science. As such, you can expect magic and its practitioners to keep a relatively low profile in the times to come, though odds are you feel the influence every day, rather you are aware of it or not.
At least it was as of the last edition of Shadowrun, and all it's fiction. It's 2056, just in case anyone cares. And Catz forgets to mention alot of relevent points about the game world of shadowrun, of which I am a great fan, to make his point. Not that his point is invalid, just a little, well, narrow compaired to what could have been said. To much self gratification.
Two visions for the future: http://www.theonion.com/onion3618/the_future.html
Or, are they happening now?
Enjoy.
detroit.dnaco.net 4201
There's also Shadowrun Seattle, but I would definitely recommend Detroit over Seattle, as I find the atmosphere much more hospitable to players and less twinky, as you don't have as many überpowerful players running around. Give them a try, I'm sure that some of you will like it a great deal. I play Treylis on Detroit and some loser on Seattle whose name I will not reveal, if anybody wants to bother looking me up. I'll be happy to answer any and all questions about the MUX.
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
--Cicero
In the game you had the matrix a somewhat equivalent to the Internet and deckers who for the most part were hackers...
You had IC's which were pretty similar to firewalls but you always could crash most of them... The white IC's were apparenly M$ software because they were easy to get past where as the Black IC's those had to be UNIX boxes....
And then the movie with the same name... Coincidence? I think not?
And riggers and some of the weaponry they had on their vehicles. It brings new meaning to the term road rage. You watch give it a couple of years...
Don't forget the Doc Wagon medical plan either... A nice combination of that "I've fallen and I can't get up" thing (Life Alert or something) and an ambulance service...
I also like the concept of coffin hotel rooms.
So what's my point. I dunno, I just felt like going on a shadowrun rant. I mean Jon Katz gets to do it why can't I?
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
Can somebody install a cortex bomb in Katz and set the damn thing off???
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
...as predicted by even scarier RPG, Paranoia.
. html
http://members.xoom.com/LPenguin/Paranoia/intro
Happiness is Mandatory and therefore the opposite is treason.
Phil
While I agree that in the long run, nothing really matters since we're following the rules of engagement by just living, eating and screwing, some of your comments do beg an argument cuz they're either amazingly selfish, willfully ignorant or just plain dumb. . . For the sake of space, I'm only going to address one of them:
I'd be shouting for joy to see little kids in SCHOOL rather than being abused in factories. But if they absolutely MUST be in factories, then why not pay them what their work is worth? I use the Nike example; on a pair of running shoes which retails for over $100, is it really fair that the child who manufactured those shoes, only get a few pennies?
No. Any way you slice it, it's not fair. And don't go spouting any free market jargon at me. The fact of the matter is that child work forces don't have the resources or the know-how to bargain for a better deal with their employers. In fact, in certain cases, whenever some of them have rallied together in an attempt to form unions, they have been openly murdered. So, yes, shout for joy. Rich Westerners have murdered children in order to maintain the stupidly high profit margins which come from not having to pay workers. This is documented and real.
American companies see the shattered economies of third world societies as rich exploitive opportunities and nothing more. Those corporations are run by people who have deluded themselves into thinking of foreign children as a natural resource, like nickel or coal, for which they should, like any other resource, pay as little for as they can get away with, (with a dash of, "Well, at least they're not prostitutes. Look at us. We're being noble.").
There is no nobility in providing kids with dangerous and poisonous factories as an alternative to picking over garbage heaps for food.
And that's not even taking into account the fact that many of the economies of these counties have been shattered or hampered because they have become drug corridors for traffickers heading for America. I met a doctor from South America, (who had been brought to Canada as an adopted child), who described Venezuela as being ruled almost exclusively by armed drug lords. He was shot at and threatened with murder when he visited his home town, because he'd stopped on the street to tell children that snorting drugs would hurt their brains.
It seems clear to me that you don't know as much about the 'Real' world as you think you do, so I'd advise that you not be so quick to condemn others who think that maybe the world should be run in a civilized manner rather than in a draconian, 'dollar comes first' way.
>and these people will be the ones who will hopefully keep society from devolving into some dystopian nightmare.
:-)
The unstoppable forces that create evolution have a way of weeding out systems reliant on on such dangeriously fragile controls. And to be honest, I'm leaning in the general direction of Katz here - were are already well down the path, we are still actively walking further down it, and calls to stop walking don't look like they'll be heeded anytime soon.
But there are still some signs of hope.
And if this planet is going downhill, it's my ethical responsibility to Enjoy It While It Lasts
(In addition to a few other minor responsibilities - y'know, saving it and suchlike)
"Stand On Zanzibar" is another good one from John Brunner...it's a little more influenced by the times it was first published in (late 1960s) but it's a fun read. Brunner foretold CNN in that one, and the out-of-control consumerism of his 2010 is actually a dead-on evocation of the mid-'90s.
Brunner didn't have a clue about personal computers, though...his view of computers was strictly one of huge mainframes. Not everyone can be Jules Verne, though...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
...who finds it amusing, if somewhat sad, that what purports to be a thoughtful essay on corporatism and its evils is peppered with easily-memorable catchphrases that would do any marketing major proud, like the repetition ad nauseum of the words "Corporate Republic"?
#include "stdprofundity.h";
Your little ditty
Was not clever or witty
So I called it crap
You posts as a lot
Are as jumbled as a knot
Some good and some not
You are most unique
But your poems I critique
When they are awful
I reserve my praise
And wait for your better days
Enjoy them I shall
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
That should have been "your posts" not "you posts."
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
This article on Bolivia is a pretty good example of how both the WTO (which aims to lower trade barriers, period) and the IMF/World Bank go wrong: http://www.seattleu.edu/student/spec/opinion/artic le.asp?key=1870
And your other comments mocking Christianity just go to show it - does that mean you have to be an High Tax Bracket Top Feeder,NRA Supporting Republican to be a Christian???????
Just wondering.......
Don't worry this message ain't coming to you from the FBI (Federal Bureau of Integration), isn't that what you good old boy's call it????
Your's Truly,
A not true American agnostic lesbian cantelope with an attitude problem.
PS I don't believe in anything especially the Beatles.............
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
I can sort of relate to what's being said here. I've been watching life slowly get closer to fiction for the past 20 years. But 'Shadowrun'?.. please.. If we *really* need to go with a RPG game reference to keep it hip with the 'geek' crowd, why not something that doesn't include elves and magic (and don't even get me started on Vampires). Why not Cyberpunk 2020?.. Or even better, why not go with a literary reference.. remember thats another thing us 'geeks' are notorious for. Any of Gibson or Sterlings work (which for the record I don't really like) would have been equally appropriate, why not go for Anthony Burgess' A ClockWork Orange? In short, nice idea.. but very poor implimentation.. Your trying to force a square peg into a round hole.... (my 2c worth)
another thing to consider is that we are already in the dystopian nightmare, and what we fear is it getting just a little more dystopian or maybe just a little more different.
so by the time it becomes horribly unbearable, we'll be dead, and the people left will be ok with it and fear only the descent of their society into a dystopian nightmare.
or maybe some world leaders will get on a trust-busting kick--it's happened before.
maybe a big ole mob will just run around and start ripping the companies assholes out through their noses and handing it to them. i could think of a worse way to spend a saturday evening.
I would personally reccomend reading the book it's based on as well as watching the movie. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick was one of the weirder books I've ever read, but even today you can start to see some of the things he predicted coming through. Be warned that the movie didn't follow the plot all that closely(different characters received more and less emphasis, some plot points changed), but it's worth the reading nonetheless. I wonder when everyone starts dialing their emotions in the morning... we've already figured out how to do happy -- now just doing it without drugs is the trick
I would be the first to admit that the WTO and the IMF are not saints, but that article does not necessarily point out what is wrong with either of these institutions.
Sure the Bolivians were upset. The price of the water was going to skyrocket. Although "as much as $20 a month or more" is pretty vague. Is this an average, or is it the maximum. Not everyone is poor in Cochabamba, there are houses there with yards the size of counties. Their water bills could easily go up by $20 with just a small increase. I am not as familiar with Bolivia as I am with Peru, but I saw riots in Lima over the smallest increases in the government controlled prices.
This probably says more about the corruption in the Bolivian government than anything. The article doesn't say anything about how Aguas del Tunari was chosen, nor why it was that they were going to raise the rates so high. In Bolivia you can't rule out bold faced corruption (Aguas del Tunari could have simply paid the right sum of money to the right people). On the other hand, there is a good chance that the government is merely losing a big pile of money every year subsidizing the water supply in Cochabamba. This is good for the citizens in the capital, but it is bad for the entire rest of the country. After all that is the reason why the World Bank refuses to lend money unless changes are made. There is no sense lending money to Bolivia unless it is going to help them fix the problems with their economy.
Raising the price of water in Cochabamba is bound to make the inhabitants cranky, but privatization is not generally a bad thing because governments almost always do a worse job of providing service than companies. After all, right now these citizens are paying good money for water that you probably wouldn't use to water your lawn. If the higher costs meant that they got a real water system it might even be worth it (depending, of course on how much the average water bill was really going to be).
The fact of the matter is that Bolivia is always going to be near the bottom of the heap until they get their economy into the 21st century. The South American countries with the most conservative fiscal policies (namely Chile) are years ahead of the countries where the government is still running the show. The status quo in Bolivia is crushing poverty, and wishing is not going to make it better.
Just like lowering trade barriers has negative affects on some U.S. businesses, it also has negative affects on certain parts of Third world businesses. Believe it or not there are people in these countries that don't want to change the status quo despite the fact that it would help their country as a whole because it would hurt them. The mere fact that they have the money (or their company has sponsored them) to be in the United States should clue you into the fact that these are not the poor and unemployed that could use the jobs that foreign investment would bring. These people are the rich that are currently enslaving their own people. The American companies that are paying the poverty level wages that we always hear about are only giving them competition by offering wages to their trained workers that they can't match. When I realized that the American companies in Peru offered the best paying jobs around it absolutely floored me, but that is the simply truth.
I am not saying that I have the answers, nor am I saying that the IMF and the WTO are not bad, because they are. They are way too abrupt, and they have the souls of bankers. But it is naive to think that you know how to solve people's problems without even visiting their country. People in America are so concerned about the rights of the poor in other countries that they are robbing them of what would be a good paying job and a chance to learn some skills that would help them get ahead in life.
I can understand if you are doing this to protect American jobs, but to say that you are doing it to protect some foreigner's rights, well that I find hard to swallow.
I work for a SOTA, market leading, electronic broking firm. Over the years, I have seen it grow from twenty people to two hundred. Many of the people here I only know as their name floats across my desk for logins and security details.
Once, we were a 'maverick' company, a group of rogues going to change the way the world did business. Now we are a brand name, advertised, market leader in the field and everyone in the field wants a part of us.
I woke up one morning at my desk, sitting in front of a SOTA machine and realised that somewhere, somehow, I had sold out to Mr Johnson. I didn't see it, I didn't feel it, it just happened.
Mr Johnson scores 1.
There are people out there who will recognise good, quality workers and employ them. Some people are bleding-edge companies, some are organised teenagers whipping out new-view S/W, most are people who know a little more than the next guy (or client).
There are others who don't understand science (for whatever reason) and others who don't comprehend the flow of the world. These are the companies that you don't want to work for. They will be eaten by people like my friend, Mr Johnson, a faceless, generic individual with a blank cheque and two large goons either side of him.
"World domination goes best with Coke" was a logo on a T-shirt I saw.
You better believe it, Doc-Wagon, Security blocks, hired protection and dodgey shadow runners. It's here, it's now, let's just wait for the sun to go out...
Protect American jobs? I won't even address that! The point isn't to protect foreigner's rights, either. The point is that the IMF and World Bank are funded largely by the US and are run under what is called the "Washington Consensus" economic policy. The point: US imperialism. Western imperialism. Even beyond that, their policies are terrible for developing nations -- the World Bank even admitted that in their recent report on Africa. The problem with the WTO has more to do with power and leverage -- remember that representatives from Africa and Asia pulled out of agreements when they went as far as to have meetings WITHOUT them. One of the things your comments center around is corruption (which I acknowledge is perhaps the single largest problem in Central/South America). Companies aren't any less corrupt than the government that (doesn't) control them. The Bolivian government sold the water rights to the US Bechtel for such a little amount (I think it was $60,000) that you know there were dealings under the table. Bechtel was the only bid considered. The problem is that IMF/World Bank-mandated reforms pave the way for foreign corporations to come in and capitalize on the corruption of the government and the poverty of the people. They exacerbate the corruption, not fix it.
Ok,
/. your articles start off at (-1 flamebait). How about at least trying next time?
He's painting a vision of the future that dirty and techno driven? And in this vision, the large companies have taken over everything?
OK, now where is this anything new? Doesnt almost every sci-fi vision of the furute involve this?
Blade runner? Magnus Robot Fighter? and about a thouisand other movies / novels/ Rpgs/ or just general tales of wonder.
What's next week's article going to be? A new idea about how we could all be living on the moon one day? Oh, wait, I got it. How about a vision of the future where where we (or some alien race) has destoryed the planet and now the only humans left are trapped on a ship somewhere?
What ever you do, realize that for a large number of geeks here on
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
The amusing thing about the comparison is that M$ bought FASA Interactive (makers of Shadowrun computer and console games), and cancelled the Shadowrun title that was being worked on at the time. Suppose they didn't want anyone to get any anti-megacorp ideas...
ExInferus
Well...I read somewhere that the sci-fi writers of today inspire/prophesy the future...Guess this is another bit of proof. It's strange how a writer's vision of the future could be so right. Gibson's books told of a city spread across the East Coast of the US, and I can see it happening. There's very little distinction between Philly, its suburbs, and the smaller cities nearby the suburbs. Most of it looks the same.
And one could only wish for something like the Awakening...Though that does seem to be happening on a smaller and less flamboyant scale with all the Neo-Pagan religions and people becoming more accepting of mysticism in both their own and other religions. The Awakening of minds, maybe.
As for huge corps, I've said it before. The AOL/Time Warner thing is worse than people think, because they now control an enormous chunk of the media, and through that what we are fed by said media. The company can make policies bending whatever news they control to benefit their interests...Choose which bands or movies get more advertising...etc. I know it sounds paranoid, but Big Brother's not so much in the gov't anymore, but in commerce.
-You're wearing...A bag? I have misplaced my pants.
Grow up Jon, If anybodys to blame for the 'mega corporation', it's people like you.
You don't actually think the people who run these companies have the imagination to concieve such grandiose conspiracies against the 'individuals', do you?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
There are always checks and balances.
But as Marie Antoinette discovered and two hundred years of semi-sort-of-Constitutional govornment in the essentialy ungovornable United States (no serious revolutions, and only one major civil war - an impressive record!) have demonstrated, internal checks and balances are nicer than external ones.
The WTO, as far as I can tell, has deficient internal checks and balances.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
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We apologize for the inconvenience.
Hell...um, how about all of the good Russion novelists and composers. Um, perhaps the entire body of classic English literature and art. Anything that came out of the monarchies of europe. The wonderful litarature and art under asian monarchies and despots. And on and on. Chances are, if you go on vacation and tour any place in the world of cultural significance, it was probably created under some non-democratic government. Democracy is a rather recent thing.
Ever wonder why N'Sync, Backstreet Boyz, (insert generic auto-generated band here) are so popular?
Yes...I had't actually read much of him, but that poem really grabbed me.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
it was probably created under some non-democratic government. Democracy is a rather recent thing.
Oops...duh, got my governmental and economic systems mixed up. But as I think of it, the same probably holds true. In non-capitalist societies, art is appreciated for its own sake (or by mandate of the government), not for it's market value.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Woah, I hope that was just a bold tag that got away.
Like I said, I am not a World Bank supporter. I would agree that they are part of the problem. I would also go on the record as being against globalism. I don't want a world government, and I have serious problems with any entity that can exert power on such a global scale.
That being said, the World Bank's privatization policy is exactly the kind of medicine that the poorer nations of South America need. Unfortunately, the corruption in places like Bolivia and Peru pretty much guarantee problems like this.
Blaming the corruption of the Bolivian government on the World Bank seems awfully unfair, however. The World Bank wanted Bolivia to privatise their water distribution, but they probably didn't tell them to only consider one bid. That sort of corruption they did on their own.
Believe it or not companies like the rule of law. They will happily use bribery if that is the only way to get the job done, but bribery is a two-edged sword. The person that you are bribing today so that you can have sole access to the water system in Cochabamba is the same guy that could accept a bribe tommorrow from your competitor and grant them sole access to the water system in Cochabamba (plus whatever improvements you have made). Companies may want to cheat, but even more than that they want some structure in place that keeps the other guys from cheating. More than anything it is this sort of corruption that keeps capital out of countries like Bolivia and Peru, and guarantees that the poor will stay poor. Blaming the World Bank or the IMF is just pure scapegoating.
Once again I am not a supporter of the World Bank nor the IMF, but I think that far too often they take the blame for things that are completely outside their control. Besides, where would Bolivia be without the money that they have borrowed from foreign banks? The people of Cochabamba probably wouldn't have a water system at all. Their plight would certainly be much worse than it is now without the capital that they receive from these sources.
So before you start spouting about US Imperialism think about what the lack of organizations like the World Bank and the IMF would mean for developing countries. No one is forcing these countries to take this money.
jihad n. A religious or quasi-religious war where the victims of such a war are forced to convert or die.
This is what is going on. The corporations have their own little jihad going on and those who don't become pawns and slaves to them are metaphorically killed by being declared crazy, or a heretic, or as a violent person.
They want to label us violent anarchists? I think the time has come to show them they don't know how far we can go. Although it is wrong, it is time that we kill the major sites, destroy equipment destined for the powers that be, and force our way into the capitals of the world. It's the only way to stop the immoral animals who rule over us. We should start our own jihad.
Read About Me
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Errr...perhaps we have different definitions of what "capitalism" is. I find capitalism to have three irreducible elements: investment (of capital), risk (of loss of capital) and profit (return on capital). Thus, to me, "trading" *is* capitalism, and that goes back into the Stone Age. (For example the trade in amber and silk along the Silk Road goes back *at least* 10,000 years.) If you are restricting yourself to Europe, then you have to go back at least to the Hanseatic League around the 13th Century in Northern Germany.
On the other hand, some people mark the start of "capitalism" with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800's. Your notation of "1600's" makes me think that you see the start of "capitalism" with the first granting of corporate charters, while I would argue that that marks the start of "corporatism", which I see as merely a variant of capitalism (although -- with its legal shift of liability away from the individuals comprising the enterprise and onto the enterprise itself -- clearly an important one).
However, for art to last beyond the immediate requires societal involvement, generally from a broad segment of society. If a particular piece of art's appeal is confined to an individual or a small segment of society, it is far more susceptible to being forgotten or lost. Without a greater society to 'approve' and preserve works of art, we'd have an awfully empty culture.
Again, I beg to differ. Art is what the *artist* says it is, not society. By your definition, Robert Mapplethorpe and Vincent van Gogh (in his lifetime) were not really artists, and neither were the Sex Pistols (or Elvis Presley in 1956). Ironically, sometimes the first mark of a great artist is a society united *against* his works. (It was only later that society came to appreciate the works of the above-named artists.) And what about "folk" art or "outsider" art? I'm not trying to excuse "junk" as art; I just don't agree that a "society" MUST validate art before it *is* art.
By your definition, the turgid, sentimental works produced under the Nazi regime *were* art and the "decadent" art that they reviled was *not* (by the standards of German society at that point in time). Today, the opposite is generally felt to be true. Similarly, the dreary works of "social realism" under Stalin and Mao were enthusiastically received at the time; today they are seen as little more than anachronistic embarassments.
Bottom line: society's judgement is irrelevant; the artist's judgement is irreplaceable. Society's standards change, because there is not -- and can never be -- any objective standard for judging what is art and what isn't. The soul of the artist is the final arbitrar.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
runs on the "latest and greatest" MS OS.
Check out the netcraft results here.
-Peter
Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.
Meant to say "Funny that a WEBSITE about ..."
don't flame me!
-Peter
Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.
Evil coporporations? how can corporations force people to do anything? how are they evil? they simply make a product and sell it. they can't tax you or imprison you or enslave you (oh wait, that's a government). they are inherently unevil, because their existence depends on you buying their product or service. Katz shows he is only repeating an ancient mantra - "Capitalism is Evil." he fails to realize that a successful small business turns into (gasp!) a corporation. the problem is that information empowers individuals, and corporations are reduced to service roles. evil corporations fall fast and hard in todays info-rich world; no one buys their stuff if they don't want to. For god's sakes, read Toffler's Powershift.