This is not a video game, unless it is.
It is not, however, Civilization V, which is definitely a video game. This is a SubStack. It’s a lot like a thing we remember called Medium, but let the fancy-pants authors build clients directly first.
While not getting to this planet until the late 1970s, since those late 1970s I’ve watched them move closer and closer to an even earlier TV show. Space adventurers find a planet where the casualties of war report digitally, rather than happening to be in the part of the planet where a bomb actually goes off, they essentially receive a text message that says they’ve been killed in the war - report to the funeral home.
Used to be a type of person they’d call a day dreamer. They’d have trouble focusing on their Earthly duties with their imagination lifting them off ‘into the clouds.’ So, we put a big ole net around the day dreams, and you can leave a trail for others when you’re walking through the clouds.
Its here in these clouds the thoughts flowing through my fingers are being scribed in electricity, and those thoughts get tossed out like a message in a bottle out on the open sea of human thought, held snug tight in the web.
… but this is not the time of the DayDreamers. If I spell the right words in the right order, and they strike the emotional resonance with just the right person and then they pass on the piece to someone who harmonically humms like they do, maybe that person is move and subscribes and I figure out where the microwave burritos are coming from next week.
Other than that, it’s just a like a game. You get 7 points if you get someone to leave a comment, 3 for a share and 1 for a like. Like the name says, overall you’re collecting a stack of subscriptions, so the number next to your name convinces the crowd chasers that there’s a crowd here - that they can know what others think is good and bad, to get through those awkward moments like meat-space potlucks.
Had a notion for a movie earlier today, set before the Net descended upon us - Maybe in the 40s, maybe the 1960s. Then cast the internet as a network of crystal balls, unearthed by the Nazi’s at the South Pole. Little Susie heads in to her big brother’s room to find him lax in chair, eyes rolled into the back of his head with a glowing crystal ball on the table. “Oh, sorry Suzie, I was just remote viewing the construction of the Gaza Canal.”
What better game than this, though, to figure out where those microwave burritos are coming from? Should I hire on down and that local Braum’s and spoon Milk & Sugar into cones for those still on Local News & Facebook? Is it not better to daydream with the Fisher’s of Attention and hope a sliver of the masses like’s the way this one sings?
Certainly better than pretending I’m a ruler of peoples in Sid Meier’s Skinner Box alone in the dark.
It's only a skinner box if that's all you let it be. It has the potential to be a hyperbolic time chamber, although I'd say try a Paradox (that Clausewitz Engine is powerful) instead of just pal-ing around with Sid. The 4th Universal Europe would be my recommendation. It does cost quite a few microwave burritos, but well worth the investment to gain ways of understanding the mechanics of power.
If you sling scoops for the ribald masses you can become one of those social butterflies that freaks out the squares. It’d be fun. We’re all called to serve, but it doesn’t have to be foot bathing. I can’t think without going out and doing something. My substack is dormant because all my thinking is divided evenly between the battle for my soul and repairing my marriage. As soon as the apocalypse is over Im going to say more spooky stuff about drones.