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What To Do In Times Like This (Part One)


Music: Titanium



Collaboration represents the nascent form of a new collective process of creation.

Let's strive to collectively create a single coherent 132-hour movie. That would be twice as long as The Wire, the longest movie made to-date.

Just like that epic story of the Town of the Big House dealt with real lawyers, drug addicts, cops and so on, so too can we provide a kind of collective self-representation of a community, like in those old Greek tragedies in which a polis collectively staged its own experience.

What is called for is less an objective realism (a realistic presentation of a social milieu) than a subjective realism, a film staged by a precisely defined actual social unity. There should be scenes designed specifically to mark distance from any crude realism. For example, it would be good to have an episode not too far from the start of the film in which every line of dialog is a character uttering the word "shit", in a variety of different languages, and with various connotations, ending with one of the leads muttering "Shittingshitshit".

This would demonstrate a willingness to break taboos by using a (slightly) prohibited word, as a point of seduction in the sense of providing a break from the "serious stuff" that we will have presented up to that point, and a simple juvenile scatalogical joke marking out our distance from "proper" social-realist drama.







The Hatch

Our film should cross over the line, the inviolate boundary between the two realms of Players, those participating in the eRepublikan Dream and those left behind. It should be called something like The Hatch.

The topic of The Hatch is the e-class struggle tout court, the Real of our times, including its cultural consequences. It should show how the two cultures of eRepublik co-exist without contact and without interaction, even without knowledge of each other, like Harlem and the rest of Manhattan, like the West Bank and the Israeli cities that, once part of it, and still only a few miles away, are distant and apart.

Two cultures that are separated in the basic manner of their relating to the Real of eRepublik: one stands for an honest if brutal confrontation with the raw horror of boredom, pixel-addiction and the spectacularized e-consumption of dead time, while in the other, reality is carefully screened. The viewer will be able to make out the contours of the rich players as a new biological race, secured against dis-ease and enhanced through metagame, goldbeast and botfarming interventions that "taste" ever so slightly of genetic engineering, while observing that the very same technologies are used to control the vast multitudes of the poor and the middle classes.

We pretend to war against elitism and cheating, but in truth, the e-system simply brutalizes and dehumanizes the underclass of players who are no longer needed as a labor supply. The Hatch will not be a film about eRepublik per se; it will be about the eRepublikans that got left behind.

Like the drug war in real life, there is a war on against the underclass of players now. And that's all it is, a war of attrition. It has no other meaning.



The Hatch will be a bleak film with a fatalistic worldview, a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern metagame institutions are the Olympian forces. The policing and technocratic and macroeconomic forces are the ones throwing lightning bolts and hitting players in the ass for no decent reason.







This film project will be extraordinarily cutting-edge, very much in keeping with the trendiest aesthetic mind-benders, particularly detourning the re-emergence of anthropomorphosized prosopopeia in our everyday life. You are all familiar with it: "The markets expect bold action from the central banks."

Nowadays, "the market" has opinions and even demands sacrifices from us in the manner of an ancient pagan god.

It may seem that there is a certain ambiguity as to the precise identity of these "Olympian forces". Is it the capitalist market system, as such, which causes the working class to be disappeared? Or -- and this is a very common "reading" of the pervasive prosopopeian memes -- is it primarily certain state institutions who are "speaking" from "on high"?


In our film, the viewer should likewise have the option of reading the story simply as a liberal critique of bureaucratic alienation and inefficiency. After all, it is a basic function of state bureaucracy to reproduce itself, not to solve society's (or e-society's) problems. It is not so far-fetched, indeed, for bureaucracy even to create problems in order to justify its existence.




Remember the illegal electrician in Brazil?



His criminality consisted entirely of simply repairing malfunctions. The most daring conspiracy against the order of bureaucracy comes from those who try to solve the problems the bureaucracy is supposed to deal with.

It has often been observed, through various lenses, that the free-enterprise system of private ownership, managed prices, industrialism and mercantilist democracy, as with the bureaucracies that it spawns, likewise has as its ultimate impetus not the satisfaction of existing human (or player) demands, but to create ever new demands so as to facilitate its continuous expanded reproduction.



A certain K. Marx once formulated the idea of the arbitrary and anonymous power of the market as a modern version of Fate. Echoing his work, a slew of recent Hollywood blockbusters portray ancient gods or half-gods getting trapped in the bodies of confused US adolescents. This "strange forces speaking to us" is clearly a leitmotif worth working with...

So how can we formulate this divine presence in The Hatch?

Here's my outline...

In telling the story of how Fate affects individual players and triumphs over them, The Hatch should proceed systematically, each collection of episodes taking the viewer a further step in the exploration:

1) First, simply show the conflict, the ordinary mass of players versus egoists and jerk-offs and self-appointed cops; then

2) Step back and explore the ultimate cause: the disintegration of the e-working class, the exploitation of the middle class, and the internetizization of a life of boredom; then

3) Look at how admins and their lackies develop strategies to resolve the problem and their failure;

4) Next, a deep dive into why "education", particularly of the most alienated (formerly) working-class youth is utterly insufficient to address the situation; and, finally,

5) As our epic, life-sized film winds towards its inevitable conclusion, focus on the role of the e-media: why is the general playing public not adequately informed as to the true scope of the problem?




Utopian e-Realities


A basic procedure of our film project should be to not limit ourselves to depictions of the harsh reality of eRepublik, but to present utopian dreams as part and parcel of the New World's texture, as something that is constitutive of e-reality itself.




For example, a storyline could show how a player uses money and goods acquired through, errm, devious means, to build up his contacts, in view of an ultimately utopian, but seemingly practical, project, say the rebuilding and revitalization of a small e-country.

We could show how he understands e-history and knows that the e-labor movement and the whole eRep society organized around work cannot continue to exist unless the country comes back. This then is his Utopian project, Utopian even in the stereotypical sense in which it is actually impractical and improbable -- since history never moves backwards in this way -- and in fact we, and the viewer, will know that it is an idle dream, in fact one that will eventually destroy him.

This kind of juxtaposition of hope and fear will certainly make for good drama.








As things unfold further, just like in any good postmodern mobster film, our film-making collectivity can explore the ambiguities of illegality within our gaming world. Perhaps a character's Mom can step in to prevent him from turning state's evidence against a Cheat, in the interest of protecting the Family (or the State, the Party, the Clique, or the e-Nation). Such a Mother, after all, is only mobilizing her own family utopia, isn't she?

Perhaps we could have a few fantasy-utopian episodes, exploring what a game world looks like where real life cash plays no role at all and any player is perfectly free to create as many characters as he or she likes. Can't we imagine how a situation of complete freedom could eliminate the daily turf battles and ridiculous, soul-sucking PTOs?

As these types of stories unfold, the utopian plot lines should not hesitate to take on friendship itself. Can't you see the scene?...

Two friends who have betrayed each other are having a drunken chat-up on IRC, reminiscing about the past and acting as if their old friendship were intact, despite their mutual betrayal. It would not be about fakery or hypocrisy, but a real look at a sincere wish for how things might have been.

After all, betrayal can only only happen if you love.

The denouement of our utopian plots should involve a criminal technocrat who strives to sublate e-crime into pure business.





The underlying ambiguity -- the delicious dramatic tension -- is that if these utopias are indeed part and parcel of our e-reality, and what makes the New World go round, then are we simply beyond good and evil?

In other words: is not the outmoded ethical binary of good and evil little more than an afterimage of that otherness it also seeks to produce? To put it bluntly, isn't this what "the gods" instruct us to believe: that the good is ourselves and the people like us; that evil is other people in their radical difference from us (of whatever type, the details are unimportant).



But -- in a final twist -- as honest film-makers, we would also have to demonstrate that e-society today is one from which, for all kinds of reasons (and possibly very good ones), difference is vanishing and, along with it, evil itself.


And there we will have uncovered the actual beginning of the ethico-philosophical problem being addressed by The Hatch. For all of that is too facile. The pre-modern, pre-Christian identification of Good with "people like us" simply will not do.



The proper ethical focus of The Hatch must be precisely the problem of the true ethical act: what can a (relatively) honest player do in today's conditions?



We explore that question in Part Two...

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