If you asked me what I expect “VR” to look like, I would answer lowpoly, wireframes, etc. You know, the SUPERHOT vibe, or the crisp plastic cartoon vibe of Virtual Virtual Reality or VRChat, or maybe even a little Quadrilateral Cowboy. Boneworks is not that. Instead of freely-manipulated wireframes and polygons, we get… this:

Boneworks’ aesthetic goes in a wildly different direction. Everything in the world is industrial and thoroughly utilitarian. There is a deliberate theme of substantiation rather than abstraction permeating the game’s design.

At first I thought it was a visual gag (“What’s this barrel full of, anyway? Oh, data, haha”), but no, it’s consistent throughout the universe and turns out to be a core part of the world.

Boneworks takes tasks like calculation and positioning and sorting and deletion, — tasks that in real life are performed by physical hardware but that we have abstracted into the realm of ideas and decisions and design — and says NO! In this space, where they should be abstracted most of all, these things are machines, and they’re individual machines, and you’re going to look at every one of them.

I love this approach, both for its aesthetic effects and for its function as a storytelling device.

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I don’t like “events”. I don’t like it when things are limited with requirements of spacial presence and time. I don’t like experiences that only exist in one moment and then can never be relived. I don’t like ephemera. I prefer things. Toys I can play with, tools I can use, books I can read, movies I can watch, all at my own discretion. I have agency over my things. The actual lived experience from occurrence to occurrence is always different, of course, but the externalities can be repeated. I love being able to preserve the essence of a thing.

It’s one of the reasons I like computers. Or maybe it’s a psychological trait I developed because I had access to computers growing up. It probably is, I think. But either way, I love the purity of digital storage and interface. I love having an environment where experiences can be preserved and replayed at my discretion without my having to make any demands on other people.

And so that’s one of the reasons I love video games. Their mechanics are defined and can be understood and mastered. Their levels are defined and can be understood and mastered. Despite the extreme rates of “churn” — video games go out of print much faster than books or other physical media — the software is digital, and can be saved, stored, and replayed. I can look up the flash games I played as a kid and replay them, exactly as they were, and understand myself a little better for it.

Of course there are exceptions; it’s impossible to have a multiplayer game without an implicit demand that other people play with you. When an old game “dies”, it’s often not because the necessary hosting software is being intentionally withheld, but that there just isn’t a pool of people casually playing it like there used to be. That’s still a loss, and it’s sad, but that’s an unavoidable reality, and it’s not nearly as complete a loss as a one-off event being over.

So I don’t like when games force seasonal events on me. Limited-time events introduce something new, but they also necessitate the inevitable loss of that thing. And that assumes you were playing everything from the start; events introduce content that can be “missable” in a meaningful way, so if you’re weren’t playing the game at the right time, even if you own the game and finish everything you can access your experience can still be rendered incomplete. One of the things I like about games is that they’re safe, and the introduction of time-based loss compromises that safety.

That constant cycle of stress and pressure to enjoy things before they were lost is one of the main reasons I stopped playing Overwatch. I realized the seasonal events in particular weren’t good for me; they turned a game that should have been fun into an obligation that caused me anxiety.

But I’ve been thinking about this lately not because of Overwatch, but because Splatoon 3 is coming out soon. Splatoon isn’t nearly as bad as all that, I don’t think it’s deliberately predatory aside from Nintendo’s standard insistence on denying people autonomy. Splatoon 3 invokes that “people will stop playing Splatoon 2” loss, but even before that, Splatoon (a game I love) left a bad taste in my mouth because of its events.

Eugenicists need broad centrist support

Now, a lot of people pushing the anti-trans agenda aren’t actually murderers or overt political fascists. The extremists are still the extremists. Moderates sustain these genocidal movements, but they don’t drive them. Unlike the center, the people who rise to the top are always the ones drawn to the movement because of its viciousness. It still matters, though, whether the people towards the middle are willing to help them or not.

It’s still true that legislators and anti-trans activists are not pursuing moderate treatment (psychotherapy, etc); they’re distinctly aiming for obliteration. But that message only works for people who agree with those people openly willing to back genocide outright, or people who can agree with the lampshade.

Even most of the republicans don’t actually know the people they’re voting for are full-on cuckoo-bananas. But the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” types end up pushing this agenda, even if they’re unaware. People see a ballot where one choice describes a more convenient world for them, and they tick it. They’re not supposed to think about the violence it takes to make that happen.

People like framing the idea of pride like they frame the abolition of slavery or civil rights: as a celebration of a positive political change that happened in history, rather than an ongoing conflict. As soon as pride feels like a conflict, it feels like a conflict they’re on a side of, because they are.

Buying the euphemism

A lot of the people helping propel the cause of genocide don’t actually believe in the case for genocide; the genocidalists depend heavily on people buying the euphemism. That’s another topic I want to do a longer piece on someday, but here’s a brief summary on how rhetoric works on marks.

The mark says they don’t want children to be abused. Now, the people pushing the anti-abuse laws don’t care about children being abused, and their laws don’t prevent abuse, but anti-abuse is the euphemism they’re using to disguise their intents, and the mark agrees with that euphemism, so they think they must agree with the policy. In effect, the fascist hijacks the legitimate cause, just like they hijack institutions.

Even though the marks would, in isolation, be opposed to the real agenda of genocide, they believe enough in the cover story that they show up to support the genocidal cause.

The Shirley Exception

Another key factor in why people support policies they disagree with is the so-called Shirley Exception. Transphobic culture and legislation are both perceived as uncomfortable and inconvenient for a few people — adding some hoops they have to jump through — but they’re usually not seen as being explicitly genocidal.

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Okay. We looked at law. Let’s keep looking. Let’s gaze straight at the horrors until our stomachs churn and our eyes bleed.

Rhetoric background info

Before we get too deep into the craziness, I want to explain a couple common talking points.

The Social Contagion lie & Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria

In real life, the scary sounding “social contagion” is just the study of the propagation of ideas across a social network, more commonly known as memetics. As applied to transgender people though, “social contagion” is the conspiracy theory that transgenderism is an invented evil that is being spread to children through education and social media. This idea helps keeps people from seeing trans exterminationism as a true genocide: transgender people aren’t a “real” group of people, they’re actually an effect of people being tricked by “biased out-of-control transgender activists”, psychiatrists, scheming liberals, a cabal of elite pedophiles, or just Satan himself.

Ross Douthat, “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War”, NYT op-ed What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating. These kids aren’t setting themselves free from the patriarchy; they’re under the influence of online communities of imitation and academic fashions laundered into psychiatry and education — one part Tumblr and TikTok mimesis, one part Judith Butler.

At first this seems like the same basic myth as the debunked Homosexuality as Contagion false narrative now understood as the left-handed fallacy: the real cause for the increase in visibility is of course reduced social stigma and advancements in social and legal recognition. But the contagion myth has been recently “legitimized” by the pseudo-medical label of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria, describing a phenomenon where “children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion” correlating with “an increase in social media/internet use.” The only paper in the medical literature about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria is the one that invents the diagnosis: Lisa Littman’s Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports.

Littman’s study has been widely discredited by actual medical doctors — a thing Littman is not — for pulling numbers from online straw polls in order to claim discovery of a brand new disease without even attempting to assess single case of it. The real fatal flaw, though, is right in the title: it’s a study of parental reports, where untrained parties not actually afflicted by the alleged condition are asked to assess its existence in people, who in many cases are actively motivated to conceal it for fear of abuse or rejection. Worse, due to the ultrapartisan anti-transgender bias of the websites on which the polls were conducted (4thwavenow, transgender trend, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals. No, seriously.), the data was from parents who were already upset about their children coming out as trans and looking for an external, pathological factor to blame.

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So, we’ve talked broad strokes. Here’s where we start seeing specific policies emerge as part of the agenda.

Genocide as a core of the platform

In the last year or so the mainstream political attitude towards transgender people has gone from generalized bigotry to trans genocide becoming a pillar of the republican political platform.

Right off the bat, here’s Trump boosting the “activist teachers are infecting your children” social contagion rhetoric while emphasizing “parents’ rights” to… keep their children from wanting to be trans, I guess? To raucous applause, of course:

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Replying to atrupar:

"No teacher should ever be allowed to teach transgender to our children without parental consent" -- Trump

Sat May 28 23:51:21 +0000 2022

The republican party loves the tribalist us-vs-them mentality. When the democrats are painted categorically as sexual predators and threats to children, family, and the American way, that only helps them. Here’s Rebecca Boone connecting some of the dots in “Right-wing extremists amp up anti-LGBTQ rhetoric online”:

A toxic brew of hateful rhetoric has been percolating in Idaho and elsewhere around the U.S., well ahead of the arrests of the Patriot Front members at the pride event Saturday in Coeur d’Alene.
…
A “massive right-wing media ecosystem” has been promoting the notion that “there are people who are trying to take your kids to drag shows, there are trans people trying to ‘groom’ your children,” [extremism researcher] Lewis said.

The rhetoric has been amplified by right-wing social media accounts that use photos and videos of LGBTQ individuals to drive outrage among their followers.

Because I literally can’t write fast enough to keep up with the horrors, here’s the Texas GOP Report of the Permanent 2022 Platform & Resolutions Committee. As of 2022, the core platform (which is a hodgepodge of christian nationalist nonsense, in addition these bits) includes:

Genocide. It’s a big word. It describes possibly the worst atrocity the institution of society can commit. It’s so mind-bogglingly terrible that a staple holocaust denial argument is that it was simply too bad to have really happened.

Genocide is such a big word that I didn’t title this “The Case for Genocide”, even though that’s what it’s about: the case people actually make for genocide, here, today.

“Genocide”, definition, semiotics

It’s counterintuitively difficult to talk about genocide because of how thoroughly the word has become shorthand for pure evil. So first, let’s define the word itself. The United States Holocaust Museum has an excellent page on the definition of the word here:

Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

This is the “narrow definition” found in the 1948 Genocide Convention, written as a response to World War II and the atrocities of the holocaust. Modern groups like Genocide Watch classify other genocidal crimes like ethnic cleansing and political mass murder as genocide.

Genocide literally means “to kill a tribe”, or “to kill a population”. It has the -cide suffix, meaning to kill, but the “geno” is a population. The crime is the extermination of a group, not just the murder of its members. So, if someone decides that they want to make a thing no longer exist, and that thing is a kind of person, executing on that belief is genocide.

In practice, genocide is not just the crime of the act, but also the agenda. Directly killing members of the group is one act of a genocide, but so is “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” or “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” — economic oppression and eugenics, respectively. Genocide is “a coordinated plan to annihilate the individual lives of a targeted national group through disintegration of the institutions of culture, economics, language, religion, and destruction of other essential foundations of personal security, liberty, and dignity”. In addition to the effects of the act, there is also a premeditation on behalf of the organizers and drivers of the agenda.

This usually maps well to a political faction, but it isn’t necessarily driven by one particular authority: James Glass’s paper talks about the “Idea as leader” in the psychology of genocide: that the ideology is a kind of shared fantasy in a psychological space, and that Rousseau’s “fervour of intolerance” can be amplified in willed belief and enthusiastic participation in an idea greater than oneself.

There are obvious examples of genocide, both historical (like Nazi Germany) and current: the ongoing Uyghur genocide in China, but also cases where it’s not yet generally understood that a genocide event is even occurring.

(Trans people. I’m talking about trans people.)

I shouldn’t need to explain how genocide works in practice. How it starts with “us vs them” ingroup/outgroup polarization, how it’s used by authoritarians to pin the blame on their own failings or unavoidable facts of life on subgroups that can be demonized and persecuted, how the importance of national identity becomes prioritized above the people who make up the nation, how the outgroup is made to be recognizable and distinguishable in order to facilitate attack, how the definition of that subgroup shifts to meet the political needs of the people in power, how the perpetrators dehumanize the outgroup with language that equates them with animals, filth, and disease in order to numb human empathy, how the dominant ingroup wields political and societal power to deny the victims full rights of citizenship, and how the victims are ultimately persecuted, displaced, deported, or killed (extrajudicially or otherwise). Above all, the unabashed cruelty that ensues. You should know this. After the 20th century, all educated people should know this.

So here it is. A genocide is happening right now in America and Europe against trans people with the goal of eradicating the population. So let’s take a good, hard look at it. Let’s really crack this egg open.

March 2, 2022: Bandcamp puts out a press release about their “joining” Epic Games. This follows in a line of eerily similar acquisitions of companies catering to indies, namely Sketchfab and ArtStation.

There are lots of interesting topics intersecting here:

• Venture capital and the associated perverse incentives
• Antitrust and general issues with corporate consolidations
• The takeover of existing institutions, especially technical infrastructure
• The false narrative of corporations as indie and non-corporate
• Epic vs Apple and problems of platform monopoly
• Bandcamp’s correct but rare approach to piracy, which is endangered

I’ll talk more about those some day, don’t worry. For now, though, have some tweets.

badidea 🪐@0xabad1dea

the problem with making a good website is that sooner or later someone will offer you an un-refusable amount of money to ruin it twitter.com/Bandcamp/statu…

Wed Mar 02 18:04:16 +0000 2022

I can’t write about antitrust. There’s too much to talk about. So I have to break the idea down, way down, to something manageable. I’m going to chew on one phrase here, “the government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.” It’s a favourite of the pro-monopoly types and it almost sounds reasonable, so let’s think about it for like a minute.

First, when pro-monopoly types say “the government shouldn’t pick winners and losers”, what they’re picturing as the “win state” is market domination. They don’t see it as a bad thing, because they feel that success correlates with virtue, so if a corporation beats out its competitors that’s because it was right and good. We know what it’s like when corporations actualize on this; complete market domination, customers have no option but to go through you, it’s impossible to start competing against you. 100% domination, company towns, corporate rule. But that theoretical “win state” is the answer to the question of what corporations “want”.

“Corporations”, as entities, are little optimizing robots. Executives and boards and shareholders are the cogs and wires, but the thing they come together to form is something of an entirely different nature, something artificial. This is intentional; people want corporate entities instead of humans specifically because corporate entities and humans are different. Corporations last, corporations have a focused goal, corporations have that machinery to scale and pursue it effectively. That thing they form is a very primitive artificial intelligence that uses its cogs and wires to pursue a specific goal.

And the thing they aspire to, the thing they try to maximize, is market share. Revenue is great, but market share prints money. And, in theory, when nobody is cheating or exploiting or being anticompetitive, this actually works. Corporations compete against each other for customers, customers pick the best products, innovation disrupts markets, yadda yadda.

But of course that doesn’t happen with cheats at the helms of these companies. And — as with any model, sport, or competition — without enforced regulation the market rewards the cheats. And what it rewards them with is power to charge more, power to make exploitative products, and ultimately power to keep competition from disrupting them.

In an environment where corporate crime is tightly prosecuted and nobody is “light on crime” even when it comes to the wealthy and powerful, this doesn’t happen. Cut out the cancer and you heal the body.

But keeping companies from being exploitive would be “picking winners and losers”! And that’s obviously wrong, they whine.

Now, in addition to what the words mean and what the states look like, the language “winners and losers” is also absurd because it spins the conversation with an undue emotional connotation. “It’s not fair for you to regulate companies such that they might lose money, because they’ve earned it.” Poor little guy. They’re hurt, and we’re stealing from them. Except no, that’s obviously a lie. Corporations aren’t people, they don’t have emotions or feel pain, they’re organizational structures composed of individuals who are not unduly harmed by antitrust regulation.

The actual humans in this equation, the only party anywhere near this question who we should worry about harming, are the consumers. The people, who depend on access to food and medical supplies and technology. The people who are actually harmed by monopoly, requiring antitrust in the first place!

Antitrust isn’t punishment, it’s correction of situation that has gone wrong. It’s fixing a machine that is producing undesirable results. It’s a correction to the AI’s value function; there was an undesirable outcome that was accidently being rewarded. The regulatory response needs to be either “whoops, you found a new way to hurt people we haven’t made illegal yet, let’s patch that” or “whoops, you’re overtly committing crimes, and there is a consequence for that because that is what rule of law means.”

The scoundrel is the one who makes the argument that because he got away with hurting people at a profit once, to stop him now would be unfair to him. Doing right by people is bad for his business model, so it’s impossible to say who’s right or not. It’s a transparent excuse for politicians who don’t personally agree with the law because they like the company, or like the money they spend to pick the company as the winner by means of policy drift.

The question of winners and losers doesn’t matter because what “winning” is for corporations is bad, per se. Corporations are artificial creations who perform by setting goals and pushing themselves toward them. And that (competition) is enormously beneficial! But just because some state is the best thing for a nonhuman entity doesn’t mean that should happen. In fact, every way in which that state is different from one that prioritizes people is a compelling argument against it.

The following are exerpts from my fully transcribed playthrough of Psycholonials, which I wrote last summer. If you aren’t familiar with psycholonials or haven’t played the game, I recommend reading that to catch up.

If you’ve already played Psycholonials though, here’s some food for you. Exerpts though, not the whole thing.

I went to my old university today.¹ I wanted to use the library.

It was a strange experience. There were things about my time there I missed, but I didn’t miss my time there. There was too much wrong. Ways I didn’t fit.

I looked around. It was passing period, and there was a throng of students coming and going both ways. The pavement was nice, new construction. People were laughing and talking and introducing each other.

Was I wrong? Should I be missing this? There is still so much good here. So I asked myself what it was I saw, exactly. And I looked out.