If Escapism is the Opposite of Escape, what is Gamification?

Like everyone else on the Internet, I’ve been reading Reality is Broken and have found myself deeply ambivalent. It’s such an overwhelmingly friendly book that one feels almost bad criticizing it: Jane McGonigal seems nothing if not genuine, and her games–like SuperBetter, in which she takes on the role of a superhero slaying the effects of her concussion with long walks and podcasts–range from the innocuous to the honestly helpful. But maybe–well, maybe that’s what makes it so dangerous.

Gamification seems, by and large, to have identified a real problem with alienation and modern life. Part of the reason we play games is indeed that they offer us a purpose and a chance to feel great, a chance to see the effects of our actions. I have plenty of aesthetic reasons for playing games, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say they have had, at times, a purely anesthetic value. I’ve played games because they let me feel successful, because they let me feel as though I was tackling problems or gaining skills in a way I could never do in real life.

In a sense, reality is broken in a way that can never be fixed, and probably shouldn’t be–I’m obviously never going to be able to master all the skills I’ve mastered in video games, because games present a simplified version of those skills. But in other ways, I think we’ve really become completely alienated from any kind of meaningful work or skill–our lives are based on finding a “career” that works entirely on an extremely scarce prestige or currency system, and then defining ourselves by it completely. We’ve taken something that sounds good–make your work something you love–and turned it into a game that very few people can win. Likewise, even as all of us benefit in a capitalistic system, inequality rises, giving most of us an ultimate goal that is completely unreachable. So, in this sense, reality is broken: We’re reaching for an unattainable final goal, and, along the way, making nothing of consequence.

Baby’s First Pessimist: The Whale and the Reactor

As is my Cornell birthright, I used to read a lot of Science and Technology Studies stuff, but lately I’ve been slacking on that in order to read science fiction and work on games journalism. While reading some games studies and zombie theory, though, I found a reference to Langdon Winner, which led to looking him up, which led to aforementioned reading of The Whale and the Reactor.

I’d never heard of Winner before, but was, I found out, familiar with his anecdotes–he (along with biographer Robert Caro) is the one who popularized the story of Robert Moses’ Long Island bridges, which were, he alleges, intentionally built too low to accommodate public buses, and therefore kept the poor and black off beaches intended for the middle class and wealthy, who traveled by car.

This story’s been disputed, but the general thesis of the first part of his book–that artifacts, or technology, has politics, whether intentional or unintentional–holds up, despite the potential shakiness of this anecdote. Perhaps a more general way of putting Winner’s thesis for this first part is not so much that technology has politics (which implies a kind of intentionality that I don’t think is completely correct), but that it has political implications–the way we shape our environment shapes us, for better or worse. STS was, I understand, a fairly nascent field at that time, but he’s been vindicated by time: By the time I went to school it was fairly well-acknowledged that this happened–mechanization changed the power dynamic between blue-collar workers and their bosses, The Pill changed the power dynamic between women and men.

The more interesting parts of his book, however, are where he explores what, exactly, he thinks that technology is leading us. And, contrary to most of the stuff I read, it’s not a good place, he says. It’s a world of centralized power and growing inequality, of poorly-thought-through technophilia and declining liberty. Given that this was the Reagan/Thatcher era in which he was writing, a lot of what he’s saying feels like a reflection of the times–he’s also clearly fighting some culture wars here, and addresses some of the same concerns as my perpetual nemesis Allan Bloom, but in a way that posits technological development, and the social orders it condones, as the cause instead of feminism and Mick Jagger. Like Bloom, Winner is looking for the Good Life and a form of absolute truth, and finds it before capitalism, but is more interested in a restrained form of (possibly?) agrarian anarcho-syndicalism than the “unabashedly elitist” Athens that Bloom idealizes.

In an idea somewhat contrary to his first section on artifacts and politics, Winner is adamant about the need to actively take control of technology, rather than letting it lead us. The reason that I, a woman incredibly allergic to standard anti-tech screeds, am able to read this at all is because Winner is unfailingly thoughtful and analytical about what, precisely, he dislikes about technology, and (of course) because I agree with his end goals. He refuses to talk in the vague and fuzzy notions of “humanity” that much anti-tech stuff goes into, and he acknowledges the problems with appealing to “nature” and the “natural world.” Nor does he charge that technology makes us lazy, or seem to believe that it is bad because it disrupts the intended order of the weak being dominated by the strong.

All that aside, what’s really enlightening about Winner’s stuff is how neatly he dissects the “technology revolution” talk that was around even in the 1980s. It’s a bit of an easy target, to be sure, but it’s also a pervasive one: The “Internet will change everything” folks who believe that the Internet is inherently decentralizing and gives power to the people. Apparently, the same argument was made about electricity:

In 1924, for example, Joseph K. Hart, a professor of education, extolled the liberation electricity would bring. “Centralization,” he wrote, “has claimed everything for a century: the results are apparent on every hand. But the reign of steam approaches its end: a new stage in the industrial revolution comes on. Electric power, breaking away from its servitude to steam, is becoming independent. Electricity is a decentralizing form of power: it runs out over distributing lines and subdivides to all the minutae of life and need. Working with it, men may feel the thrill of control and freedom once again.”

This is what I love about technology studies: Finding crazy futurism that never came to pass. But stuff like this really highlights the false utopia that people have created around the Internet: The idea that it will do our job of creating a decentralized world for us, that by their very nature things like Twitter and Facebook will create a beautiful new order in which everyone has an equal participatory voice.

Well, Wikileaks showed that up for what it was, didn’t it? The net takes censorship as damage and routes around it? Then how could Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard essentially shut down online donations? Why is Wikileaks itself being dumped by provider after provider? We may not be able to shut down someone’s voice online altogether, but the Net is far less open than it seems. A few Internet service providers or hosting sites agreeing to drop or block something and suddenly it’s nearly gone.

I love technology, but I don’t think it’s inherently a good thing, and I think we should be thinking harder about what we want it to do. Tech can liberate or enslave–but it is, ultimately, up to us. At least that’s what I’d like to think.

Editorials are killing journalism

So Ross Douthat has another column up, and we’ve no doubt already gone through the same cycle we always do when that happens.

Step 1: Douthat writes a thoughtless, specious argument with the window dressing of legitimacy, i.e. “The point of [heterosexual marriage] is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.”

Step 2: People refute it. I.e. “So, Douthat doesn’t actually give any arguments for why heterosexual marriage is a microcosm of civilization or why it’s a distinctly better way of supporting procreation; he just assumes that because he uses words like ‘microcosm’ people will agree with him. Basically, his argument is this: ‘Straight marriage is really, really hard, and it’s a way of supporting kids. Therefore, we treasure it as civilization writ small, and the state should support it. However, these days, because people don’t stay together for life, it makes even gay marriage–not that I’m saying gay marriage is worse! (but it is)–look good.’ Honestly, if we just supported things that were really, really hard, we’d have tax deductions for people who trained circus cats. In fact, I think that might actually be a far more apt description of civilization as I’ve seen it.”

Step 3: Douthat writes another column.

Yes there is a war, it’s much like the one I’ve been waiting for.

I saw Cory Doctorow speak last week and although it wasn’t really what he was talking about (it was a copyright thing); I wish he’d gotten to address post-scarcity economics.

I haven’t read enough Doctorow to really know how he sees post-scarcity economics; I’ve read more Sterling, Stephenson and Watts on the matter, and I haven’t read Sterling’s most recent post-scarcity fiction (aside from his short-shorts on 3D printers.) But it’s really obvious and rarely pointed-out that post-scarcity is a way to get around the failure of traditional class warfare.

Class warfare has a venerable tradition in science fiction. I’m not sure if H.G. Wells was the first to predict it, but The Time Machine, where the poor literally eat the rich, is the first example I can remember. After that came periodic waves of even more explicitly political fiction: Jack London’s The Iron Heel is a science-fiction adaptation of proletarian revolution from 1908, and Damon Knight took up the banner in the mid-20th century with fiction based around his version of alien-assisted warfare between exploited workers and upper-class owners.

There are still writers doing class-struggle fiction; Marxist author China Mieville comes to mind first, and the Rifters trilogy is to some extent about class warfare, although it doesn’t really start with the warfare until the third book. Overall, though, things have changed. Of Wells, G.K. Chesterton wrote that

Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except in favor of something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favor of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated and assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of engineers.

Would that this were still correct; however, it doesn’t really feel like it any more. It’s probably just my pessimism, but it feels more like we have the very wealthy, a middle class that’s getting smaller and smaller, the working poor, and the unemployed. The last class feels like it’s only going to get larger. And that is where post-scarcity economics comes in.

In previous incarnations of class struggle, the proletariat took over the means of production. In the post-scarcity future, they drop out of it.

This became immediately obvious in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which easily-available replicators created a way for the massive underclass to live in relative comfort, their resentment against the neo-Victorian industrialists diverted into soap operas and crude comedies. Bruce Sterling’s Distraction was about a massive failure of consumerism, which created a 25% unemployment rate and vast roving communes that survived on produced food and economies of prestige. I’ve already talked about the Rifters trilogy, but it’s got its own pessimistic version of post-scarcity. And Charles’ Stross’ Accelerando gives us not just physical post-scarcity economics, but unlimited computing power.

These all articulate their own version of post-scarcity economics, but all share some common features. Firstly, society is sharply divided, with a huge underclass of permanently unemployed. Secondly, scientific discoveries make it possible for the unemployed to live without working, but also without monetary public assistance, something that sets post-scarcity economics apart from similar welfare-state fiction like Alan Moore’s Halo Jones. But while the poor are virtually self-sufficient, there is no class mobility–not because there aren’t educational opportunities, but because there are simply so few positions available.

Lastly, even though there is often class resentment, post-scarcity economics stories tend to work on the premise that the classes, while sharply differentiated, will generally just leave each other alone. This becomes very, very important.

I’ll start back up next time with a few examples, primarily Accelerando, The Diamond Age, and either Distraction, Maelstrom, or Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, which has a fairly unique vision of post-scarcity New York City.

Where have all the hackers gone?

Okay, it’s been a while. It’s ninety-seven degrees outside and feels every one of them. I graduated and suddenly found myself unable to do anything but spend hours playing with the Source SDK and reading House of Leaves. And playing System Shocks 1 and 2. I’ve finally completed both of them in somewhat under 35 hours total, which is something like twice the minimum amount of time in which they can be finished at non-speedrun pace (playing the original System Shock mission on “hard” gives you a maximum of seven hours to complete the game.) This is due both to the fact that I’m extremely methodical, and that for all the time I play, I’m really not very good.

Playing System Shock (and Uplink, a 2001 War Games-esque hacking sim) has made me realize how much the hacker has really retreated as a figure of our cultural imagination. Time was, everyone and their sister was a hacker, and every ridiculously over-specialized tactical strike team included a computer expert (who was invariably recruited after the FBI burst into the server farm he had assembled in his parents’ basement. There was always a server farm and a giant magnet. And unless you were in Cowboy Bebop, it was always a he.) But where have they gone?

I last remember hackers in the early Oughts, and while there’s still the odd one, they seem to have phased out. The dot-com bubble may well have had a lot to do with this, as well as the fact that computers aren’t nearly as foreign as they used to be. We’re also apparently in a sort of macho phase, where we’re afraid of a man who’s too skinny or is too good at purely non-physical pursuits. The place occupied by the hacker seems to have split into two career tracks: The engineer and the social engineer. The engineer is more common in video games, the social engineer in film and print fiction.

Fictional hacking was always a combination of two factors: Technical aptitude and confidence tricks. The hacker understood computers better than (s)he understood people, and could break into any technical system. But even if the hacker was borderline-autistic, they would at very least have figured out social interaction as a mechanical process, and at best be geekily charismatic. People, to paraphrase Kevin Mitnick, are the weakest part of any security system.

The engineer takes the technical tricks of the hacker, but with a more tactile, mechanical bent. It’s a good choice, honestly, because ever since Neuromancer writers, including myself, have been jumping through hoops in order to make hacking seem interesting, whereas engineering actually occasionally involves something more exciting than extended typing sessions. The engineer combines the hands-on work of the mechanic with the cerebral intellectualism that convinces the audience they’re watching/playing someone of a higher caliber (while we seem content to have relatively low-ranking soldiers in combat fiction, we only accept people with civilian jobs if they’re some kind of intelligentsia.) Hence Tony Stark of the recent Iron Man movies, or Isaac Sciencefictionportmanteau of Dead Space, who are both engineers.

In the case of Isaac, we see the social ineptitude of the hacker preserved, because Isaac verges on straight-up autism. In game cutscenes he literally has supposedly good friends speak to him without appearing to even acknowledge their presence. And mind you these are third-person cutscenes.

The flip side of this is the social engineer. This person tends not to have any specific demonstrable skills, but is an all-around clever smooth talker. They may be able to tech their way out of something, but more likely they talk their way out of it, and the technology becomes window dressing on their charisma. The Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who is the first example that comes to mind: The series came back in the mid-Oughts, and after a season with Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston, we got David Tennant as a fast-talking, self-describedly “clever” social engineer who faked his way into events with psychic paper and essentially crowdsourced his rebirth in one of the season finales. Historical and heist fiction also lends itself to this well: Take Leonardo diCaprio’s role in Catch Me if you Can and remakes of The Italian Job and the Ocean’s Eleven series.

As with the hackers, the engineer and social engineer are often from poor backgrounds (particularly the social engineer, who is living by his wits), but they’re both taking advantage of a certain level of cultural trust, which often points to them being white men (who are the people people trust.) The exceptions to this that I can remember are rare: You’ve got Kaylee from Firefly, in many ways a toned-down version of Ed, the hacker from Cowboy Bebop (who was, after all, originally supposed to be male.) But women who get by on their wits have a distinctly different narrative, and it’s usually much more strongly tied to their sexuality (I get the feeling that the female superhacker from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is something like this, although I’ve not read it.)

It’s kind of a shame, because as I’ve said, it would open up the possibilities for characters immensely. It’s also just that narratives are important. The way we frame our lives is through stories, by imagining ourselves as heroes. What do we do when all our hero play gets supplanted by rationalizations–”I’m like Iron Man, but…a girl, and…that means I can’t have Pepper Potts, but…” In the end, it just kind of peters out.

Vicarious suffering

I broke down and got Metro 2033 last night: It’s a post-apocalyptic Russian corridor shooter based on (apparently) a well-known Russian novel. (It’s good, by the way, so far. Like the story of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with the mechanics of Half-Life 2.) But there’s something unsettling about the copy for it:

Witness the everyday horrors of a broken society living in constant fear. The year is 2033 and you’re part of an entire generation that has been born and raised underground. Steel your nerve and prepare to face the terrors that await.

It reminds me inordinately of another game (which I’ve never played, because it’s supposed to be not very good at all), whose copy begins:

War is hell. It destroys the human psyche as easily as it smashes the body and lays waste to the battlefield. But somehow something has come to the war-torn killing fields of Viet Nam that takes you into the deepest level of Hell in this violent, horror-filled first-person survival game.

They both just seem so…voyeuristic. Most games could be described this way, and it makes them feel like a form of disaster tourism: Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and watch the wretched descent into madness! It’s made me examine, a bit, why it is that I play games, and while I think there is a bit of this to it, there’s also a comparison to be made with other media, which don’t receive this scrutiny by virtue of being non-interactive.

Memento Mori ex Machina

In System Shock 2, I’ve escaped both spaceships, the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, and have gone into the mind-hive of the Many to fight them. There must have been something in the air in ’99, because the endgame of System Shock 2 feels a lot like the endgame of Half-Life, down to the shooting-the-stars-around-somethings-head-and-then-exploding-it.

There’s a certain logic to it, to some extent. It’s easier to render indoor environments than outdoor ones, because a man-made environment is far less complex and more familiar. Therefore, SS2 is set in a spaceship, Half-Life in a research facility. When things need shaken up for the endgame, it only makes sense to switch from inorganic to organic, but not to real organic, because the rendering capabilities weren’t up to that. Thus, you get Gordon Freeman from Half-Life jumping a portal into parallel universe Xen where everything is neon green and squishy-soft, and my Space Navy Guy heading into the red and gooey mind-hive of the Many (which isn’t the actual end of the game, but it’s pretty close.)

From other angles, however, this is a bad move for a video game, mostly because a game shouldn’t be playing to its weaknesses in the last couple of levels. If you’re going to put something technically experimental in a game that you’re not sure you’ll be able to pull off, it’s best to do it somewhere in the middle: If it’s at the beginning, it’ll drive people off; if it’s at the end, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth. In their native angular environments, SS2 and Half-Life look remarkably good even ten years later (SS2 only with a bit of modding), but when you move to the organic places, it’s just ugly and difficult to get around in.

So why do they do it? I’ve mentioned one reason above, but as far as I can tell there’s another reason that’s more fundamental to games and gaming culture. Partly because of their history as computer/console artifacts, and because of their mode of combat, shooters have always to some extent been about the (good) machine-like versus the (evil or weak) biological.

The body in most of the shooters I’ve played is envisioned as machine-like, technological, and mathematical. Sometimes this is literal, like when you’re a scientist in Half-Life or a mechanically-enhanced soldier in Deus Ex or Crysis or Lost Planet, for that matter, also Half-Life. In many other cases it’s metaphorical; you represent part of a crack team of soldiers who, when together, function like a machine (Call of Duty, F.E.A.R.) or a fighter designed to restore order (Resident Evil 5.)

You’re rarely, however, fighting a force that’s like you. There’s an important gameplay reason for this (re: drones are boring), but it’s also that fear and horror in a game is evoked through the hideously biological or unscientific. In Doom this is demons and Hellbeasts in space: Religion and atavism are invading the scientific domain of the space exploration project. In Lost Planet it’s a giant bug that keeps getting in the way of your terraforming, so you fight it in a giant robot suit. And so on.

Half-Life decided to consciously take this to extremes, so you’re basically a tidy physicist fighting messy biology. Your enemies (the Gonarch–a combination of gonad and monarch–the headcrab, a jumping vagina dentata, and the Nihilanth, a giant fetus in a stone-rimmed womb) are alien, but evoke human sexuality (this was referred to in Raising the Bar, Valve’s book on developing the Half-Life saga, as a way to exploit the “inherent homophobia of 14-year-old boys.”)

When you’ve built your game around this, an organic endgame is vital, because flesh has become the most terrifying thing a person can face. After all the developments of engineering and physics in the twentieth century (and the space program and computing really did make it the century of physics) the flesh is the one thing that is seen as sacrosanct and unchangeable, but also the source of our destruction. To change the flesh is frightening–hence our fear of body-snatching and cyborgs–but in the end, the flesh will decay or tumesce. The flesh will betray you, no matter how many guns you have. You are going to age and die. And shooting as many external reminders of that as you can is all you can really do about it.

P.S. Bioshock is really interesting in the context of this and Susan Faludi’s Backlash. I’ll have to talk about it sometime.

Giving in to the Have-Nots

My name is Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question:
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone!

Kitsch magazine (which has a Wikipedia article longer than some feature articles) was the first thing I ever wrote for at Cornell, and I only wrote for it for one semester. That said, I really liked the idea of it, even if it didn’t always live up to my expectations. For an example of Kitsch at its best, try this piece on Ithaca’s only strip club. So I’m kind of sad that their last issue is yet another piece on Allan Bloom.

Actually, it’s a piece on “liberal guilt,” which makes, er, liberal use of dictionary and UrbanDictionary definitions without a particular lot of analysis. That’s one of the things that bugs me about Kitsch sometimes–the writers often seem like perpetual outsiders, never quite understanding or identifying with the things about which they want to write. This, I think, is mostly a matter of style. I like gonzo. They don’t. But unless you’re doing a piece about philology, dictionary definitions are an…error.

But I digress. The piece is called “A Short History of Liberal Guilt at Cornell,” and it’s by a vague acquaintance of mine, Maurice Chammah. His piece goes through liberal guilt as being something conservatives use to smear liberals, to being a reclaimed liberal point of pride, to being…well, we’ll get to that. Here’s the initial definition.

“Liberal guilt” is a difficult term to define. Associated with privilege, liberal guilt is an idea defined most commonly and acutely by self-styled conservatives, who accuse liberals of an inability to admit that being white and having money does not automatically implicate them in the problems of the world.

My Vague Acquaintance strives for a sort of objectivity in this piece, but his position keeps coming through, and he’s pretty sympathetic to people who are sick of being “automatically implicated in the problems of the world,” even if he makes fun of Bloom as “philosophically long-winded.” (For the record, he’s not. He’s a beautiful writer and a terrible philosopher. Half his book is just empty, but very funny, snark.) I think the point he’s getting at here is mostly about privilege. Liberal guilt is about feeling guilty about privilege, and maybe (or maybe not) doing something about it.

So, there are three questions here. One: Are we implicated in the problems of the world? Two: Can we fix them? Three: Should we care about them?

What is the future of ownership?

Ownership and property rights as we know them are a mere blip on the radar of history. Their theoretical creation was a product of a lot of things–the rise of capitalism and fall of feudalism/aristocracy, the need to have a basis to claim colonies, the need to do this by kicking the original inhabitants off their land–and I don’t know as much as I should for the theoretical justification of it. What is curious, though, is the way that mechanical and digital reproduction have changed our conception of ownership.

Before the printing press (and for a while after), the very idea of copyright did not exist. Books-as-text could not be separated from books-as-thing: When you read a Bible, it had been reproduced by hand and was an artifact in itself. Stories, meanwhile, were largely told by one person, then appropriated, changed, and retold by another–the Brothers Grimm became famous for collecting versions of these folktales and putting them into a codified form.

When it was established, copyright wasn’t meant to create the book-as-consumer good; it was a method of limiting author liability by getting everything approved beforehand rather than waiting for something to get denounced as treasonous by the Crown. Writers, at that point, didn’t tend to make much money off their books–publishers got paid through the books, but writers relied on their patrons or the sale of newspapers they edited.

Over time, this changed, and by the twentieth century, books and other cultural properties were seen as sacrosanct possessions of the author or creator–they always kept the final rights to an imagined “original,” and only sold (or lent) copies to the people who actually read it. Until the 1970s, it wasn’t even clear that someone was allowed to sell or rent a tape they bought to another person: In the early 1980s, a bill was brought that would require permission from the copyright holder in order to rent that tape to other people. When this failed, what got codified was called the First Sale Doctrine–if you’re an author, director, or musician, when you sell a copy of your book, DVD, or record to someone, they get to do whatever they want with it (short of making more copies to sell to people). They can rent it, sell it to someone, or (in my interpretation) make backup copies for their own use.

First Sale Doctrine was what basically allowed me to read, watch, or listen to anything at all for the first eighteen years of my life. All the CDs I bought were used, the movies I watched were rented, and the books I got were either from the library or the libertarian-hippie-owned used bookstore two towns over (when I bought my friend a copy of The Fountainhead so she could enter the Ayn Rand essay contest, the proprietor, sitting behind boxes of “When Clinton lied, no one died” buttons, told me approvingly that “That’s the book that convinced me to drop out of college.”)

But what is the First Sale Doctrine going to look like in an age where the concept of selling “a copy” of something ends up seeming absurd?

“Philosophy as conspicuous leisure”

Oh no, not more philosophy. And, worse, philosophy that collides with my current interpersonal conflicts. You know in fantasy novels when people are fighting over whether the world is flat or conical, or something like that (I can’t actually think of an example right now, bu tI know there must be one), or in Gulliver’s Travels where there are wars between people who eat their eggs little-end-up and those who start with the big end? That’s my life right now.

So the Times has a piece about what it means to be a philosopher, and here’s their central conclusion:

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time…The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

And goodness, someday I’m going to be in a place where I won’t hate this stuff on sight. Once again, it’s really odd to feel resentful of this as a person who can spend an hour accidentally ignoring people on a bus while thinking about what justice is. I think it’s because this kind of philosophy feels like its object is not real thought, but a smug, back-patting condescension.