Collective Conscious

Eas­ily Dis­tracted:

Three things about Occupy, two short, one long.

1) Occupy is already a suc­cess if the model is to pro­voke reac­tion from its chief tar­gets. It’s hard to imag­ine pun­dits pass­ing up the chance to com­ment on any­thing: the ²⁴⁄₇ news cycle is a harsh taskmas­ter. Nev­er­the­less, the num­ber of surly, whiny or mali­cious com­men­taries as well as the drop­ping of any pre­tense of an ethos of objec­tiv­ity from some reporters has been pretty strik­ing. What’s more inter­est­ing is the extent to which active responses (as in Oak­land) or threat­ened responses (as in New York City) from the powers-​​that-​​be have taken place. I hon­estly expected munic­i­pal and other author­i­ties to just patron­ize and wait it out. I think there may be real anx­i­ety inside the crony-​​capitalist/​Washington nexus about the pos­si­ble spread of mass protest or pub­lic discontent.

2) I’d con­tinue to argue that there is a soci­o­log­i­cal limit in the cur­rent iter­a­tion of Occupy that mir­rors sim­i­lar lim­its in pro­gres­sive elec­toral pol­i­tics, and that this is where the reac­tion of Tea Party rep­re­sen­ta­tives has been instruc­tive: they don’t want to explore the obvi­ous con­nec­tions and real over­laps between some of their rejec­tion of the sta­tus quo and Occupy because they don’t like the soci­o­log­i­cal habi­tus of the peo­ple involved (a sen­ti­ment shared very much vice-​​versa). How­ever, the sin­gle least inter­est­ing, least use­ful crit­i­cism of Occupy in cir­cu­la­tion is that it lacks a con­crete set of demands, that it needs some kind of con­crete pol­icy plat­form that politi­cians could adopt. This misses the point in every way pos­si­ble. First, that Occupy’s cri­tique can’t be boiled down into some­thing like “Pass a new ver­sion of Glass-​​Steagall”, that the real issue is “Why did we get rid of sen­si­ble gov­er­nance and guardian­ship of that type in the first place, and why can’t we have it back now?” You can’t solve our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion with the pas­sage of some laws if the insti­tu­tions charged with imple­ment­ing them will sub­vert, ignore or supercede those laws. You can’t solve our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion if the next reg­u­la­tion you cre­ate will promptly be evaded or mocked by those it was intended to reg­u­late. (Bank of America’s debit-​​use charge, I’m look­ing at you.) It’s the sys­tem that’s bro­ken: you don’t solve sys­temic fail­ure with a five-​​point leg­isla­tive plan. Demands in this con­text have to be some­thing more like, “Unelect every­one and com­pre­hen­sively reform the process of elect­ing a new group of rep­re­sen­ta­tives and lead­ers, expect account­abil­ity in both eco­nomic and polit­i­cal life and set real con­se­quences for the fail­ure of that expec­ta­tion, make trans­parency in both busi­ness and gov­ern­ment one of the sacred watch­words of a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety”. Maybe Occupy needs more of a boiled-​​down, two-​​sentence root-​​level phi­los­o­phy or view­point (par­ity with some­thing like “down with big gov­ern­ment”) but it doesn’t need a set of demands that the political-​​financial com­plex can promptly ignore or play point­less leg­isla­tive shell games with.

3) I think Matt Taibbi pro­vides as good a “root-​​level phi­los­o­phy” as you can ask for: that Occupy is not against wealth, is not against com­pe­ti­tion, is not against busi­ness, is not against bank­ing. It’s a very spe­cific argu­ment that the game as it stands is rigged, that the cheaters are being allowed to oper­ate with impunity, that the safe­guards against cheat­ing are com­pro­mised, and that the cheats are run­ning the risk of destroy­ing the game itself.

As my read­ers and col­leagues know, I’m hope­lessly addicted to analo­gies and metaphors. Here let me try an anal­ogy that I don’t think is par­tic­u­larly metaphor­i­cal, that is in fact quite directly applic­a­ble to this sit­u­a­tion: the his­tory of the com­puter game Dia­blo II.

The game was a huge com­mer­cial suc­cesses and ini­tially sup­ported a large, thriv­ing and het­eroge­nous mul­ti­player com­mu­nity where the range of par­tic­i­pa­tion went from casual play­ers who played few other games (online or oth­er­wise) to ded­i­cated, hard­core play­ers with long expe­ri­ence in a vari­ety of gam­ing gen­res and forms.

Dia­blo II allowed play­ers to trade mag­i­cal items obtained through play, as well as to com­pete with one another in var­i­ous ways. It was con­se­quently one of the first mul­ti­player games to gen­er­ate an unplanned real-​​money trans­ac­tion (RMT) mar­ket, as play­ers offered desir­able items to other play­ers in return for cash pay­ments through var­i­ous third-​​party venues. This being a fairly new kind of thing at the time, nei­ther the player com­mu­nity nor the game’s pro­ducer really antic­i­pated what would fol­low. Ini­tially, cru­cial data about char­ac­ters was kept client-​​side, and so was rel­a­tively easy to hack. At first, only a small num­ber of play­ers used cheats in order to gain an edge in RMT trans­ac­tions. At that point, the game’s mul­ti­player ecosys­tem was still rel­a­tively healthy: a large num­ber of cus­tomers, a small num­ber of cheaters. Arguably the cheaters may even have helped a bit by intro­duc­ing highly desir­able dupli­cates of items at a faster rate into the mul­ti­player econ­omy. In short order, how­ever, the ease of cheat­ing, cre­ated mostly by a lack of gov­er­nance and con­trol over the play­ing envi­ron­ment on the part of the game pro­ducer, dev­as­tated the mul­ti­player com­mu­nity. Items lost all value as they were illic­itly dupli­cated in mas­sive quan­ti­ties, and any sense of gen­uine com­pe­ti­tion between play­ers evap­o­rated as cheats pro­lif­er­ated. In the end, the cheaters were left to prey on each other, an activ­ity which defines “dimin­ish­ing returns”.

In the end, open cheat­ing, or cheat­ing which pro­lif­er­ates in the absence of gov­er­nance and enforce­ment, is not even in the inter­ests of the cheaters. But once a socioe­co­nomic sys­tem moves head­long in that direc­tion, its accel­er­a­tion towards gen­er­al­ized dis­as­ter can be expo­nen­tial. Cheaters them­selves can­not be expected to stop that move­ment even if they under­stand that it’s not in their own inter­ests, because they’ve spe­cial­ized their eco­nomic activ­ity to take advan­tage of cheats. The biggest hack­ers of Dia­blo II when it was at the tip­ping point prob­a­bly couldn’t have played the game even mar­gin­ally well if denied access to their hacks: the game had become about hack­ing at that point, and about the incomes they could obtain from doing so. When the prey left and the cheats become more dif­fi­cult, the cheaters just went look­ing for some other racket. A par­a­site at some point can become too spe­cial­ized in its reliance on a com­plex vec­tor and on the ecol­ogy of a par­tic­u­lar host: if through its own effi­cient depre­da­tion or in con­cert with other stresses, it kills too many hosts, the par­a­site can’t undo its evo­lu­tion. At some point in the 1990s, a frac­tion of finan­cial cap­i­tal­ism became so depen­dent upon sub­vert­ing or unrav­el­ing safe­guards and so expec­tant of a level of profit obtained through government-​​protected mar­ket manip­u­la­tion that it became effec­tively unable to back off and seek some more sta­ble equilibrium–and its polit­i­cal part­ners became the same. The idea that Goldman-​​Sachs in the last decade rep­re­sents “the free mar­ket” is as laugh­able as say­ing that the 19^th rail­road indus­try in the US was a laissez-​​faire tri­umph: in both cases, plu­toc­racy was secured through and within the state rather than in the absence of it.

Stop­ping that isn’t a mat­ter of a pol­icy here or a sin­gle bug­fix there. It’s about a com­pre­hen­sive change to the par­a­digm. It’s about the gov­ern­ment of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple, for the peo­ple, not per­ish­ing from this earth.