The Chapo Guide to Revolution

by Chapo Trap House

  Gaming

  * * *

  Prestige TV may seem benign, but if we don’t resist its siren song, the grim end result will be something far worse. We speak, of course, of gaming, a growing strain of entertainment that jettisons all pretensions to artistry, theme, or even craft in favor of catering to the basest instincts of an increasingly slothful and sadistic citizenry, a citizenry every day rendered more vile, more hateful, more incapable of basic social function by the mindless b

  This is Virgil Texas (Gamertag: Obamacare) speaking. I’ve hacked into the printing press to delete this shameful anti-Gamer tirade written by my revisionist colleagues. In its place is a brief manifesto about the purest, most revolutionary form of art, courtesy of me and Felix (Gamertag: Professor_Headshot).

  ~~GREETZ~~

  Congratulations, you’ve “scored.” You’ve “pounded beers” and “had sex” after “winning state.” Your life has peaked after batting the game-winning slam dunk and fingering the tight end of the opposing sportsball squadron. As you deplete your brain cells and bodily fluids for a few moments of base skin pleasure, engaging in a series of high-five-style hand slaps whilst listening to brain-dead hip-hop about being a “player,” your imagination grows too feeble to anticipate the years beyond your wasted youth when you will slip into an inexorable mental decline from years of brutal bloodsport and testosterone supplement abuse and your nasty children will quibble over who gets your vintage Toyota Matrix. When you reach the end of your finite supply of orgasms, having long since become immobile due to the idiot’s brew, perhaps you might realize in your last few flashes of lucidity that you could have been a different type of person had you spent your peak years in discipline, self-denial, and constant practice. Perhaps you could have been an artist, a nomad, a connoisseur, a genius, a freedom fighter, a warrior. Perhaps you could have taken a name that struck fear into the hearts of strangers in every realm you wandered. Perhaps instead of some mewling crotch spawn left to defile your legacy, your progeny could have been an avatar that would have granted you immortality in the Cloud.

  Perhaps you could have been a Gamer.

  Being a Gamer first and foremost means being a well-rounded intellectual. A Gamer embodies the classical Greek ideal of a human being: an athlete, an aesthete, a philosopher. Like Jean des Esseintes, the Gamer spurns vulgar bourgeois society to devote their life to total immersion in high culture. From their aerie, the Gamer consumes art that speaks to all of the human condition. The Gamer explores notions of identity and genetics in Metal Gear Solid, destiny and duty in Halo, and speed and sexuality in Sonic the Hedgehog. The Gamer uses controllers and keyboards as keys to the universe, achieving a level of interaction with essential texts that book readers could only ever dream of.

  The Gamer does not eschew nongaming social interaction. When not challenging one another in teamchat, Gamers take to the agora of the message board, from which the highest intellectual activity of the past three decades has emerged. They usually debate games as art, sport, and life on the boards, but their wisdom is also seen in famed Off-Topic threads such as “Asshole Parents Won’t Accept Rent in Bitcoins,” “Who Invented Blow Jobs?,” and “Short Men Shouldn’t Have to Pay Taxes.”

  The rest of the world anguishes over menial tasks like office small talk and family get-togethers so much that there’s an entire genre of writing dedicated to how they should confront their mean uncle or not humiliate themselves at the watercooler. They mope about fuckbois on Tinder, asexual representation in Riverdale, and whether they should tip their therapist. They’ve created a world of supposed creature comforts that they’re too self-conscious and neurotic to even enjoy, their fleeting moments of leisure alternating between self-flagellation and self-importance.

  In comparison, the Gamer exists in his own space, separate from the dirty terrestrial confines his siblings, cousins, and classmates imprison themselves in. One doesn’t need a guide to arguing politics on Thanksgiving if one just shuffles out of one’s room, loads up a plate, and hurries back to Orc Theme Park Tycoon without once making eye contact. Why make an existential crisis out of dating app travails when one could just forgo all romantic ambitions? Why twist oneself in knots over how one comes off to a coworker if one can just avoid a job altogether? While normies toil in the brutal purgatory they’ve created for themselves, the Gamer moves freely between virtual nations, unharmed by a doomed society’s jagged edges.

  A Brief History of Challenging Everything

  * * *

  The first computer game was coded by Ada Lovelace, history’s first programmer, for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. Cholera Quest was a modest success in Victorian London and sparked a debate over whether women should be allowed to be computer programmers, a controversy that rages to this day.

  Graphical games emerged during the Cold War, when technicians poached from the ruins of the Nazi war machine by the RAND Corporation designed such rudimentary games as Tennis for Two, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Missile Command. The latter was famously enjoyed by John F. Kennedy, arguably our first Gamer president, who used lessons gleaned from Missile Command to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, telling Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, “The only winning move is not to play.” This, of course, was a lie, as the real moral of the game was to spawn nukes to build up an overwhelming first-strike capacity and take out your opponent’s missile installations before he has a chance to retaliate, a lesson quickly internalized by a young Pong aficionado Gamer named Henry Kissinger.

  The video-game gap between the US and the USSR widened in the 1970s and early ’80s, when consumer capitalism produced the Atari 2600 and Pac-Man, a game that simulated rapacious gluttony, while state Communism produced the Autotraktor Konsole and Tetris, a game that simulated the repetitive and futile drudgery of manual labor.

  In consumerist societies, pricey home-gaming systems proliferated until the mid-1980s, when overspeculation on health-drop derivatives caused the infamous video-game crash of 1983. Out of the ashes emerged the Japanese, who established the modern video-game console model with the Nintendo Entertainment System. From then on, Gamers were treated to an unbroken string of leading-edge consoles, each more eye-poppingly advanced than the last: SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, Xbox, the fucking Sega Saturn that you got for Christmas when you said you wanted a PlayStation. For an industry driven by the recommendations of the man at the video-game store who said you would want this, gaming has experienced a nearly unparalleled rate of innovation, bested only, perhaps, by gun manufacturing and pornography.

  Yet for every two steps forward, gaming has taken a step back. Modern gaming is more immersive, more profound, and more challenging to the Gamer’s intelligence and reflexes than it has ever been. But the industry is blighted by unfair pay-to-win models; loot-box scams; invasive DRM schemes; preorder rip-offs; DLCs substituting for core content; abusive labor practices toward developers, testers, artists, and voice actors; and players getting banned from Xbox Live for total bullshit reasons. Misogyny and racism run rampant in the darker corners of the gaming world. Your opponents are winning because of lag. Scott won’t let me play, even though it’s a two-player game. How should the moral Gamer act when faced with such endemic malignance? How shall we purge these noxious elements so that we as Gamers may finally reach Outer Heaven?

  Ready Player Fun

  * * *

  The Gamer acts, first and foremost, by gaming. For all its longevity and cultural impact, gaming as an art form is arguably still in its infancy. As with any virgin mass-media culture, the contours of its evolution will be dictated by a mixture of capital and the expectations of its audience. As a digital medium with many forms and genres—mobile gaming, browser gaming, eSports, big-budget titles, indie games, RPGs, simulations, etc.—gaming is evolving rapidly in several different directions, and the proliferation of developer tools and a relatively low barrier of entry for game creators means new ideas, mechanics, and experiences can be introduced by nearly anyone with a computer and fr
ee time. And if the blogosphere, social media, and self-publishing have taught us anything, it’s that most of this new “outsider” content is sure to be spiritually and intellectually uplifting.

  Looking forward, virtual reality is the next logical development in human culture. Much like the way you can’t pay your phone bill without going online anymore, one day you’ll handle all your transactions by putting on a VR outfit, walking to a virtual bank, and interacting with a nine-foot-tall Spyro the Dragon as a woman with big breasts. Virtual reality will consume all other art forms. Instead of reading a physical novel or e-book in the meatspace, we’ll suit up and open a virtual tome. Once we’ve fully shed the fetters of our corporeal bodies, we’ll finally be able to attend digital concerts, meet up at digital bars, and make digital love with one another, all on VR servers like xXx_DarthBudBundy_xXx’s Room [FULL Married with Children RP ONLY].

  Will this brave new world be any better than our current one? For the answer to that question, you’ll have to buy the second edition of this book. Until then, we at Chapo Virtual House say, “Long live the New Flesh, same as the Old Flesh!”

  * * *

  I. See page 220 (where the Elevator Products section begins).

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  WORK

  In capitalist society, work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.

  —PAUL LAFARGUE

  Work sucks, I know.

  —BLINK-182

  * * *

  Most Americans despise their jobs, yet suffer from a species of brain worm that makes them believe work is inherently virtuous. America thinks of itself as a come-to-play-every-day, lunch-pail kind of nation, possessing intangible strengths like “coachability,” “instinct,” and “a century or so of a free labor supply” that have made us rich, powerful, and the envy of the world. The American Work Ethic sets us apart from flashy, hip-hop-style, vacation-taking European countries and other players with raw, natural ability, like China. We keep our heads down, never complain, and grind every day. That’s how global economic champions are made.

  And, for some reason, we take for granted that for the majority of the precious handful of decades we’re alive, we’ll be making money for someone else, doing something we’d rather not do. Not only do we resign ourselves to this fate, we want nothing more than to make sure everyone else is roped into the assembly line as well. At the bottom of our stomachs we hate our bosses, but we dream of someday becoming them. Political theorists call this “fake consciousness,” and there is no faker friend than your boss, no faker crew than your workplace.

  So why do we put up with it? The answer lies in a shared set of national beliefs about work and how it sets us free. The first key myth in this psychology is a timeless classic you’ll hear from warehouse managers, boomer dads, and Joe Biden: “Work builds character.” Here’s the latter at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, quoting his own dad:

  Dad never failed to remind us that a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about—[applause]—it’s about your dignity. [Cheers, applause.] It’s about respect. It’s about your place in the community. It’s about being able to look your child in the eye and say, Honey, it’s going to be okay, and mean it, and know it’s true. [Cheers, applause.]

  Usually when people invoke “character,” it means some combination of grit, patience, determination, ingenuity, focus, self-discipline, and empathy. And sure, these are all good things that make for self-confident and healthy individuals.

  But now ask yourself: Does your job bring out these traits in you, your colleagues, or your boss? Or is it much more likely to bring out things like anxiety, impatience, petulance, authoritarianism, and a pent-up sense of homicidal rage? The contradiction is easy to unpack: the idea that work “builds character” makes sense only outside the context of wage labor, the reality of most people’s employment. Sexless Silicon Valley weirdos and horny reptilian politicians alike talk about work as a matter of innate human creativity, self-determination, and boundless possibility. In fact, most jobs chip away at those things until they’ve been completely annihilated. Jobs destroy character, day after miserable day. They drain all the time and energy you would otherwise have for fun, sex, hobbies, and anything other than staring blankly at a computer in the couple of hours you have to yourself after 7:00 p.m.

  So when old people tell you that work builds character, what they really mean is that it trains you to slog through hopelessness and alcoholism and to redirect your unexpressed rage toward your family and your loved ones. It doesn’t build character, but it sure does build a tolerance to the antidepressants, mood stabilizers, five-hour energy diarrhea drinks, and “focus”-enhancing drugs coursing through your bloodstream.

  Another uniquely American lie meant to cover all this up is the idea that “the rich work hardest of all.” The premise that the wealthy got that way from working harder than you do—or, at the very least, that they’re justly compensated—is a central myth of a country that let a hundred assholes on Wall Street get away with deleting $10 trillion in 2008 and (after brutally suppressing a grassroots “Occupy” movement) immediately pretended it never happened.

  Sure, the average CEO or VP may work “longer hours” than you, maybe, but what are they actually doing with their time? By definition, the only things their job affords them the time to do are pace around their huge office, promote and attend conferences, glaze over during PowerPoint presentations created by other people, trade golf stories over three-martini lunches, and worry about their taxes. The factor of their income over that of a regular person is so astronomical that to be “equal” they would have to work hundreds of times harder and give 10,000 percent all the time. Also: since the 1980s, bosses don’t get paid only in terms of salary, they get stock options, too, which are taxed less than income. As a reward for being a good test taker—or, more likely, for being the child of a good test taker—bosses are compensated at a rate that would shame the Egyptian pharaohs, all in return for “blue-sky thinking” and “inno-vention” that mostly involves putting a marketable gloss on wage theft and parasitic rent-seeking. The average CEO gets paid three hundred times more than you do solely for being the type of creep who impresses imbeciles like David Brooks at Davos.

  All right, so maybe they don’t toil as hard as their workers, but at least the big bosses do some good by hiring all those workers, right?

  At one point during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called the parents of a fallen US Army officer, Humayun Khan, “so unfair to me, very unfair.” In response to this, George Stephanopoulos asked him if he’d ever sacrificed anything in his life comparable to what the Khans and their son had. He responded: “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I created thousands and thousands of jobs.” Pressed to elaborate, he said, “I think those are sacrifices. I think when I can employ thousands and thousands of people, take care of their education, take care of so many things [sic].” This quote made headlines for a few hours before being overtaken in the news cycle when Trump claimed, “I fucked Bigfoot. Beautiful! Tremendous!” But it deserves to be remembered.

  Of all the off-the-cuff imbecility that Trump spouted during his soggy march toward the White House, this nugget is one of the most revealing bits: How could anyone define the extraction of surplus labor from thousands of people—to fund the construction of Trump’s diamond-encrusted sexcopter—as an act of “sacrifice”? Because, somewhere along the way, a Chamber of Commerce messaging gremlin turned the base metal of capitalist exploitation into the shimmering gold of “job creation.” And, because we’ve torn organized labor to pieces and shipped the shreds to China to be reassembled and shipped back to us as Emperor’s New Groove Happy Meal toys, there’s no one in a position of power to call bullshit on it.

  The ugly truth is that no employer hires anyone unless they can extract more value from them than they have to pay out in wages and benefits.

  But what abo
ut the good ones? “Small businesses”? This fetish is widespread even on the Left. It’s nice to think that, far away from the Borg-like monopolies of Wal-Mart and Comcast, there exists a benign, plucky, authentic type of business, perhaps run by a cute old Italian couple who employ a bunch of young boys in aprons with slicked-back hair who carry big paper bags of groceries to your doorstep.

  If this kind of shop even still exists, it’s likely that those slick-haired boys have no stake in the business, have shitty or zero benefits, and are probably huffing vitamins every hour to make it through the day. Little old Giuseppe works everybody till 8:00 p.m., doesn’t pay overtime, and has a tendency to pinch all the young women on the hip any chance he gets. Meanwhile, his wife day-drinks and occasionally slips the word eggplant into her unnecessary monologues about “urban types” hanging around the neighborhood.

  Even more likely, this mythical old couple is actually a loud, crew cut–sporting Trump voter or anti-vaccine Wine Mom who gets away with abusing his or her employees even more than the corporate droids working for Target and McDonalds do. Small-business owners are, generally speaking, insane egomaniacs who believe enough in their “pizza restaurant with a night club atmosphere” to borrow $250,000 and lord it over a workforce of desperate people. And you know what? Even if the boss is a nice person (it can happen), they still deny their employees an equal share in the profits of the business and continue to prop up the completely arbitrary social order that lifts up people with access to a bank loan and makes everyone else dependent on their personal generosity.

  The simple fact is, bosses aren’t your friends, they’re not your parents, and they’re not your benefactors. They want to turn your sweat and anxiety and mounting desperation into a second Jet Ski. Asking nicely has never gotten workers anywhere, but that’s what people tend to do when they think their boss hired them out of the goodness of his heart. Don’t fall for it. The next time you hear “job creator,” just imagine your boss sitting on his ass eating a foie gras burrito while you pull a fist-sized ball of pubic hair out of the break room sink.