OPENING SALVO // GAME THEORY
Shall We Play a Game?
The unreal gets real
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
Friends, Romans, countrymen. It’s America, 2023, and we’re playing a game.
A portion of the professional-managerial class, service industry workers, teachers, CEOs and entrepreneurs, artisans, legal professionals, journalists, and creatives spend some of their time and energy doing activities that would be entirely alien to our great-grandmothers.
We root out deep fakes, fight trolls, and outrun a net of serpentine algorithms that shift and morph each day as they chase after us and our personal data. We contribute to status-seeking culture by posting ego-inflating selfies and distributing hearts as if it’s Valentine’s Day in elementary school. Actual people—people with feelings and families and challenges we don’t know about—we feel free to flame, dox, pile on, and swarm. We give them a thumbs up or down as if we were a mercurial ruler overlooking the combat arena, making a decision either to condemn some poor man or to be his patron.
If you are a person who engages in any of these activities and then also spends time making fun of people who like to live-action role play (LARP) at the Rennaissance Faire, I sentence you to a period of deep reflection about which is weirder, healthier, or more fun: staring into a black hole for hours while your sanity and sense of shame and empathy drains away, or getting into a costume with your friends and play fighting.
So I laughed out loud—actually out loud—when I learned that Lord Elon Musk, in the tartan of Twitter, Tesla, and Space X, and Lord Mark Zuckerberg, master of Meta and the powerful realms of Facebook and Instagram, are edging toward the most real thing ever: getting into a cage to fight it out, mano a mano. //
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //