Shadowrunning In The Corporate Republic

A few years ago, the pen-and-pencil game "Shadowrun" would have seemed an especially geeky fantasy. In the Corporate Republic, it looms much larger, both a warning and a prophesy. Many of us are Shadowrunners now, many more are going to be in the 21st century. Fifth in a series. (Read More).

"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.

Corporate Oligarchy is Nothing New

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

Right and Wrong.

Katz is partially correct. After all, the growth of corporate power means that a company beholden to no one but its stockholders can dictate policy to a government. It used to be that governments were stronger entities than any other in the land; after all, the purpose of a good government is to maintain order and protect its citizens.

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.

The Tar Baby Principle?

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.

Shadowrun is hardly the primary source.

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.

--

Dark Futures are Old Hat

Shadowrun was neither the first, nor the only Dark Future ever to find it's way into the real world.

(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.

I can do it, too, Jon

Alright alright alright.

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.

GnuKatz

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.

This is a game..

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.

Magic still exists...

...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.

Oh my gawd.

It's jarring to come across this increasingly plausible vision of the future.

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.

Ummm...Katz...

Speaking as a former player, there are some serious problems here.

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. [talsorian.com] 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.

A New, Worldwide Political Correctness?

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?

Boundaries, control and open source

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 [gnu.org]?

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 [slashdot.org] 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.

self-aggrandizement

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.

The Summer the Gnu K.A.T.Z. took over...

"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. "

(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 /. 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!"

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."

bd's guide to being an activist

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!

Re:This is a game..

How dare you combat hyperbole with facts!

:)

Life is an adventure

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.

The Return of Trolls

trolls have assumed their true forms, throwing off their human guises

Sounds like Slashdot to me...

Huh... Quality is going down

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?

Idiot Savant activism

That's so much like what I realized after the WTO protests: A lot of the protest sympathizers I talked to didn't actually know what they were protesting against.

"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.)

We need better citizens, not skulking geeks.

Oh, PLEASE!

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)

A little more in-depth on the corporate situation

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 --

The main parallel between Slashdot and Shadowrun

The Shadowrun sourcebooks are all presented as text files on a large BBS, with responses from the users that are occasionally more interesting than the text file itself.

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 ([e-mail])

Re:Corporate Oligarchy is Nothing New

It's like this -
Monsanso has to expand their markets. Monsanto (as well as ADM and others) make their money off of western farming practices. They sell fertilizers, they sell pesticides, they sell seeds.

So what to they do? They push industrial farming practices (which work just fine in places like Western Europe or the North American Midwest) on Third World countries where for starters the soil simply can't support that kind of agriculture for more than a couple of years. After that, the soil's tapped out, the farmer moves on, and desertification expands.

Here's an example of business practices surrounding genetically modified foods - Ag industry producers like to create crops that are resistant to their own brand of herbicides and thrive on their own brand of fertilizer. I would liken it to being roughly as effective as selling "Integrated Solutions" such as MS BackOffice. Overpriced, exploitative, and unneeded.

-carl

Re:Idiot Savant activism

No, I think he's someone who understands all too well what this sort of revolution is about.

Its not about liberation, freedom, or giving a damn about anyone else. Its about power. They want it. They want to run the world. They recognize that they cannot do so without the approval of a large number of people. They then parrot lines and stories and arguments that make said people think the cadre is fighting for them. And then, with the blood, sweat, tears and lives of those very same people, the cadre "betrays" them (the cadre always intended to, so there's no real betrayal), milks them, bleeds them dry.

Orwell's pigs pleading to the rest of the farm about how much they are sacrificing for the freedom of all farm animals.

No, this guy isn't kidding: he understands all too well. He just didn't keep the secret, secret.

He may mean warm bodies now, but whether they're warm or cold is irrelevant once his type have seized power.

Re:Corporate Oligarchy is Nothing New

Monsanto produces seeds that don't produce offspring, if that's the right term. It's called the terminator gene, and is patented by monsanto. If you buty their seeds, you have to go back every year to buy more (there's actualy a licensing fee you have to pay), instead of saving them like farmers usually do. If you're caught with Monsanto seed on your land, and don't have a license, they take you to court (even if it's blown onto your proerty from your neighbours farm, gotta love protecting that bottom line).

One of the huge problems with this, is Monsanto has only one strain of seeds. Places like Etiopia, where wheat (for example) seems to have origintated from, still host 80% or so of the wheat gene pool. This pool is needed for crossbreading of strains to ensure diversity, and to ensure than no one disease or parasite can destroy the whole wheat crop.

That's not good business for Monsanto, and the smaller countries and farmers are worried about what would happen if trade laws forced them to deal with Monsanto. The World Bank and the IMF put pretty tight restrictions on governmental policy for those countries who need to borrow money.

The really sad part is that all the loans to 3rd world countries could be easily forgiven by the west. We lost more in the market crash of 1989 than we would lose in forgiving these debts, and it hasn't seemed to hurt the economy to any degree.

So what's stoping us? The need and want to control to some degree 3rd world (developing) countries.

Re:GnuKatz

ROFLMAO.

> Maybe, with enough work, we could finally get him to say something useful for once

Hell, I'd be content for him to use the "1" key in his dates. A lowercase "l" hasn't been substitutable for a "1" in a date since the age of the typewriter.

It's not just this article - look at damn near every article it writes - every time he means "19xx" as a year, it types "l9xx".

Congrats to the coder who fixed the "Micros~1 compliant quotes" bug. Can we have him pipe its output through sed and s/l9/19/g before it goes to Slashdot in the next revision?

I suppose the original idea was to add a little "human touch" to it, because no software would make an error like that, only an older human raised on typewriters. But to me, it's just tiresome :-)

Once more into the breach, dear friends ...

and once more Jon tries to make a grand myth where little of substance exists.

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 ... stop!

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?

Re:Idiot Savant activism

So, we're sort of on the same page, just in different contexts.

The original statement was about the people that appeared on TV during the WTO protests. This brings up more "power held by a few" issues, since we can't trust the TV editor's selection of individuals to present.

Even still, if I had a full understanding of all of the issues involved and someone from a local TV station came up to me and asked why I was protesting, my answer would be swayed by:

a) brevity in the hopes that it would get on the air
b) the fact that there was a camera in my face and a possible TV audience watching
c) that my mom might be watching
d) trying to cram all of the ideas into a 5-second sound byte that they might actually use.

I don't agree that the main issue is the people having a full understanding of the issues, I think it is at least as important to have large numbers of people protesting. If there had been 10 uber-intelligent people protesting outside you wouldn't have seen it on TV.

The thing that raises awareness is NOISE. You need to make a big noise to be heard in this society, and I think that even though the most intelligible people weren't the ones whose voices were heard, a lot of awareness was created.

I like to believe that everyone is capable of understanding the basics of the issues involved in even fairly esoteric debates.

The basic issue is power. Too much power in the hands of a few. There are offshoots of details and individual instances of harm, but these people had a basic understanding. They probably had a much better understanding than those of us who weren't there know.

Social change requires huge numbers of people and a basic, commonly understood cause. I think that's what we had, and I can only hope that the number of people involved increases.

I honestly believe that this basic function of growth is what will lead to a better understanding.

Re: Meme warfare -- you're a century too late.

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.

"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.

Re:Magic still exists...

Your point is well taken, but historical hermeticism doesn't really fit into the techno-mage view. Hermeticism was all about changing perception, similar to Timothy Leary's LSD beliefs, rather than actual physical manipulation. They couched their theories in alchemichal formulae that only initiates could decipher in fear of the Inquisition rather than any true belief in the supernatural. Hacking one's own consciousness was the plan; the demons and angels so prevelant in Alchemical treatsies were metaphors for psychological constructs.

The convergence of hermetic mysticism and information technology could be downright fascinating however. It would seem to offer even more than the merging of Architectural science and mysticism that brought about the Freemasons.

Re:Idiot Savant activism

And this is different from the rest of history in what way? Would you perhaps prefer feudalism?

I'd prefer the best balance of power possible. I'd prefer to see progression toward empowering individuals over greedy corporate interests. Again, we're somewhat in agreement, and I totally agree with you on the Web/Internet's ability to let more of us have our voices heard.

I'm trying hard to stay away from the standard rhetoric, but it's not easy to do. The last 16 years of government legislation have been bulding toward protecting businesses rather than individuals. Well-funded lobbyists speak louder than the rest of us.

That's part of the reason that the U.S. government was set up with so many checks and balances, and it's also the reason why our founding fathers wanted to make sure that the citizenry had the right to bear arms.

It's "We the People," not "We the Corporate Entities." I have yet to see anything the WTO has done so far, or tried to do so far, that wasn't meant to bring more wealth to those who already have enough. I haven't seen anything that's meant to benefit anyone other than the already powerful.

People that join causes without understanding why these causes are important are inevitably being duped. Chances are good that they are even serving the cause of some of the same people that they hate.

Theoretically, I can see your point. I just don't think it's the case with this current argument. I certainly don't think that the people portrayed as modern hippies were serving or helping the cause of the WTO by protesting in the streets. These people weren't *that* uninformed.

Another thing to keep in mind here is that it's the WORLD Trade Organization. These protests weren't jsut viewed in the US, you have to remember that TV stations all over the world are just as keen to show disquiet and riots in the US as we are of showing the riots in other countries.

In other words, these demonstrations made more noise than just about any website imaginable. Footage was viewed in more homes than Yahoo and AOL can ever hope to invade.

And it's especially poignant that these demonstrators weren't out for their own personal interests, or for US interests, they were out for basic human rights on a global scale.

I think it was key that people in other nations got a chance to see the side of America that isn't all about self-interest and ending up on the better end of every business deal we get involved in.

I'm glad everyone saw Americans standing up for global human rights. Do I wish that those had been Americans who had showered that day? Maybe. Do I wish they had all had solid arguments, or better ideas, or better capabilities of expressing them to the (entirely corporate owned)media? Sure. Do I think that there were probably mroe focused, clean-shaven folk there? I saw a lot of them in the background shots, but ery few interviewed.

During this last meeting that was held in DC, government agencies raided a building that was storing necessary first-aid kits for the protesters. The protesters were organizing, and getting prepared for the media and for general FIRST AID.

The raiders arrested over 20 people who were breaking no laws, and who were never convicted of breaking any. They were just detained, beaten and "oppressed." The first aid items were confiscated. Freaking TAMPONS were confiscated.

Power has always had the tendency to consolidate in the hands of few people.

This is true, and will continue to be. The US Government has loads of checks and balances, some of which still even work. But that's another story... :]

The issue is, during these early, formative stages of the inevitable global governing body, shouldn't we try to build in some checks and balances? Because the entities with a controlling interest so far have shown no interest is such things.

Re:Shadowrun is hardly the primary source.

But let us not forget the important thing here:

If Shadowrun were real, then Jon Katz really could be a troll!

This explains everything!
--

Re:Corporate Oligarchy is Nothing New

---
Because the seeds Monsanto sells are sterile, producing plants with no offspring. You have to keep going back to Monsanto and buy more seeds every planting season.
---

Do you 'have to' keep going back? Did Monsanto market the seeds as being non-terminating when they were? Are there not other companies people could go to for seeds and fertilizer?


- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])