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The FUPQ Board of Socialist Regents is hard at work tabulating attendance, participation, baksheesh and other inducements involved in awarding titles, degrees, certificates and prizes for those who participated in the recently-concluded 20-part lecture series on Combatting Tyranny.

While waiting for the results and the unveiling of the listing of honorariums, I thought it would be huge fun to offer up the following thoroughly modernized version of a think piece published by Phoenix Quinn (who later changed his name to Silas Soule shortly before achieving e-paranirvana) back on Day 759. Hope you enjoy it!

-- RFW








As the e-USA once again enters a cycle of occupation, with its attendant hand-wringing about the meaning of winning, I am sure many of my dear readers have been reminded, as I have been, of Phoenix Quinn's examination of Michael Eldred's analysis of Karl Marx's critique of capital as a guide to the phenomenology of bourgeois society. And so I thought it might be handy to review today...


Eldred's somewhat mathematical take on capitalist deconstruction, and PQ's interpretation of it through the ludic lens of the New World, comes down to asking if technological development generally -- and by the property of transitive e-similitude, the game mechanics involved in "winning" eRepublik -- isn't something entirely artificial, in a phenomenological-ontological sense?

That is say, is it not the case that capital itself has a despotic nature, a self-preserving response that echoes from capital to capital that has, in essence, like certain mindless nether-creatures, no concern whatsoever for human existence? And thus, mutatis mutandis, can we not then also hypothesize that eRepublik is essentially... anti-human?

Hmmm...




Within this critical framework, doing phenomenology means learning to see in an age when we are struck by blindness.

The essence of capitalist accumulation is an endless, limitless valorization of value. And this essence sets itself up in an occulted fashion, behind the backs of people. The key point that Eldred (and PQ) were alluding to was not a critique of capitalist economy per se; rather a questioning of the essence of capital as an anti-humanist machination.

The transcendent mathematics part of it is to characterize value as neither money (means of exchange) nor capital (method of accumulation, etc.) but as the essence of a transcendental valorizing function. In other words, a function that makes everything that exists appear as valorizable.

In this sense, the essence of captial is not something "capitalist" in the way that that term is often bandied about. It is neither money or the lust for money (nor the protection of e-USA as Grand e-Farmville, for example). Nor is it some thing or thought or opinion, either objective or subjective. Rather, it is a calculating "gainful" mode of "revealing" that everything has the potential for winnings.





Humans (and e-citizens) are called on by the destiny of the win (again, a similitude to the Call of Cthulu is not too untoward...) and are thus compelled to think in a calculative, but at the same time incalculably risky manner that sets up everything as an image, as a representation of the potential for gain. In this way, the "win" is constructed to hold sway ontologically as the essence of historical truth.






The circuit of valorization self-perpetuates. There is no essential "use value" involved, and thus there are no human-oriented criteria or variables.

The "win" turns endlessly within itself, throwing off more "winnings". The win entices and ensares humans in a competitive struggle for "winnings" in the broadest possible sense. By engendering this never-ending struggle (and sacrifice and suffering), the win valorizes the humans themselves. Everything that can be "won" from human beings feeds into the gain and success of the valorization function.

Everything is gathered into the win function. It is a mathematical and pheonomenological black hole. In this critique, Capital is a function that uncovers all being with regard to its value for the sake of winning. Money, the representative image of wealth and an index for valuation by means of exchange, when expressed dynamically, in motion, is capital setting all being into motion for the sake of winnings.

There is nothing, not even the sky, that cannot be valorized, even in a narrow economic sense (e.g., air traffic corridors and so on).






At this level, the Quinnish critique is revealed to be not so much a revelation of the conflict between one economic (e-)social class and another, as it is a radical critique showing that all subjects (all players), including the "ruling class" ones, are dragged into the circling spiral of valorization. All class-tagging of actors can and must then be regarded as mere character masks, that is, as personifications of value-forms.

Your avatar is like a single data point on the curve of the valorization function as applied to the being of eRepublik.

Furthermore, striving for gain against the silent, embedded call of the win does not mean that people employed in the win-cycle necessarily experience the employment (or game play) as uncanny or exploitative, although an element of boredom and alienation is not uncommon. They may even experience their "work" (or "play") as fulfilling despite or -- perhaps more intriguing -- because of the prevailing oblivion to being (and particularly, oblivion to human being) that is "thrown off" by the valorization function.





The revolutionary path, which is to say, the way to construction of a meaningful, lively, sustainable social ecology, can therefore not be simply a matter of criticizing by way of cultural critique "the fast life" and whatnot (of "the eager players", let's say) operating within the cogs of the win as "false living" (or the e-similitude of such). It requires seeing that in the relentless totalization of this way of existing we are being exposed to it blindly and thoughtlessly, without a prospect of gaining an insight into a greater, more open dimension (of work, of life, of play, of being) arriving from afar.





By seeking to create alternative spaces, by forming cross-cultural and anti-national alliances, by pushing the boundaries, by exploring the social lacunae and insisting on generating fun and thus refusing to "win" the game according to its pre-configured model, perhaps that far-flung dimension can be glimpsed.

And by gaining such a glimpse, do we not in fact win immensely more than a game?