I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.

racism, against black people

Recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nxeiFpSJfc

It’s a bit anecdotal as evidence goes, to be fair, and I recommend watching it, not taking my summary of it at face value, but the general idea IIRC is: black people are more treated as a curiosity. Like being curious about someone of an ethnicity you have never seen before, who looks so different. But since China doesn’t have the racialized cultural context that the white supremacist west has, it’s not an aggressive or hateful curiosity.

There’s this mythos in western thinking that goes something like, “Racism is cause people are tribal and mistrusting of strangers.” But it’s missing how systemically racism gets developed over time in history and for what purpose(s). And China, as far as I can tell, has no reason for such a development of power in relation to black people, so they simply don’t have the racism that the west has.

As tempting as it is sometimes, doomerism is counter revolutionary. Not to be confused with being down sometimes or contending with depression. Taking a stance, even if meant in jest (and doomerism does go for dark humor sometimes) that suggests there is no hope is a problem. That’s not even getting into the problems with feeding narratives about exaggerated differences between generations, which is a divide and conquer thing, and doesn’t help us build solidarity with anyone.

There are observable differences between generations in culture and conditions they face, to a certain extent, but exaggerated statements about them that suggest helplessness or a fixed, doomed state of being is not a good idea. And the liberation cause is one where people have more in common, usually, than they have differences.

Pretty sure twitter got worse with stuff like this since Musk took over. Anecdotal, but even with all the wild BS twitter had, I could swear it used to have more of a veneer of decency on the surface at least. Now it seems like every other post that has a mildly “human decency” perspective has got accounts flooding it with stuff that reads like astroturfing for the capitalist, imperialist order.

And I know the porn bots got worse on there (that’s easy to see and I’ve not been the only one to mention it) so if those bots are getting through, it would stand to reason other bots may be getting through more as well. Not to say there aren’t real people who push this stuff, but the sheer amount of it is hard to believe as authentic “deep in propaganda” posting. And with LLMs being how they are now, it’s feasible to produce bots who can write more coherent and human-sounding BS.

I highly recommend Mao’s essay On Contradiction: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

I’ve been trying to revisit it more than once until it crystallizes in application. I can try to give an example of how I apply what I think is roughly dialectical thinking beyond purely basic class stuff. It’s something I thought through a while ago, but I’ve never formally written down my reasoning and observations, so bear with me.

In text generation AI, I encountered a problem. I’m making a long story short, but I found there were companies, one in particular that I experienced directly, who provided an AI-powered chat service to help people with emotional support and loneliness (that was in part how it was advertised and scripted). However, this service also pulled the rug on people at some point and caused a lot of damage.

This drove me to ultimately seek out and support a lesser known (at least at the time) AI service that was staunch on user privacy (using encryption to accomplish it) and being uncensored text (you can write anything in private with it). Within this, I had to contend with the fact that I am not someone who blanketly goes “free speech”; I am not someone who thinks people should just be able to do whatever no matter the circumstances. I also had to contend with the fact that I am not a blanket supporter of AI, considering its implications for messing with the jobs of working class people. Even more complicated, this was (still is) an AI service that also allows image generation (though that aspect of it is not something where you can generate anything - you can’t generate “lifelike” due to how the model is trained) and image generation arguably poses more of a threat to jobs than text generation, since it creates an image start to finish without needing an artist in the process at all. Furthermore, this was the main source of funding for that company (they don’t take money from outside investors).

But, this was also the only AI service taking seriously the consequences of dealing with emotionally vulnerable people who are saying private and sensitive things to an AI. In order to side with these people and side with them having a harm reduction place to cope with the loneliness and abandonment capitalist life has inflicted on so many, I am also siding in some part with the development of AI and the proliferation of it and consequences intersecting with it and capitalism devaluation of labor, even if I try to have conscious limits on how I partake in that and in what way.

So, my “support” of AI in this understanding is conditional and developing, based on how it intersects with what regular people are dealing with and the consequences it has, helpful or unhelpful. It also contains a certain amount of contradiction, in the sense that I am arguably allying with people I’d rather not be, to an extent, in order to reduce harm for the time being and support development of AI in a direction that is genuinely safer (not “safer” in the corporate PR meaning). I am not capitulating on caring about regular people in the process, but I am having to choose where I put my energies in the direction of substantively helping them. I don’t pretend it is a challenge or threat to the capitalist order, something like this, but it is something where I tried to really go through it and work out what was the best course of action while keeping the ideological core intact. There was/is, as far as I could discern, no “right answer” in a binary meaning of it. Instead, I was trying to work out where in the contradictions of it made the most sense to take action to enact my intent to side with regular people and what form that action would take.

I am not very confident on the subject and practice of dialectical materialism, so please don’t take this as a model of it. But hopefully it can provide some food for thought, if nothing else.

Good god. That is… a lot to deal with.

Great point and healthy reminder that the practice part in theory and practice is critical to get anywhere.

I have some experience with modding and game making - not paid company work type of stuff, but studied it in college, have made (small) games on my own or with others and have done extensive modding in one game that got a fair bit of attention.

I agree with cf saying it depends somewhat on the game. But also, overall modding is likely going to be easier for a number of reasons:

1. Scope. Modding forces you to work within heavy constraints due to being unable to directly edit the game engine, source code, etc. For creative control, this is a drawback, but when you’re just trying to get something, anything made, it’s a help. It means what could be an overwhelming pool of possibility and a vision gone out of control becomes more akin to, “Okay, let’s see if I can change the color of this house.” In other words, it forces you to approach tasks as a smaller set of steps and in so doing, makes it easier to make some kind of progress at all, rather than none.

2. Framework. Modding a game means there’s already an existing framework there, a game that functions relatively well, presumably has a decent gameplay loop, etc. So you don’t have to worry about, “Am I making something that will be utterly boring/unappealing/etc.” because there’s still the underlying game beneath it. So it’s a lot harder to spend time on something that isn’t enjoyable at all. And it means you have existing game design to mimic. In the game I heavily modded, some of the stuff I did was effectively repurposing features that were already there to use them slightly differently. I was still being creative and doing my own ideas, but much of the actual work of it was already done.

Does this mean modding will always be easier than making your own game? Not necessarily. For example, you could make a simple console-based (like command prompt, not game console) grid game with C++ that uses ASCII characters to simulate where stuff is and a player moving from a starting point to a goal. Something I’ve done before. But, will this fulfill your desire to enact a creative vision? Probably not. The more you have to learn to get started, the harder it’s going to be to get to the creative part and that seems to be the part people usually crave as an entry point.

Hope that makes sense!

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.

So, thanks for the back and forth on this. I ended up updating and it seems to be working again now. Since you figure it’s not using new functionality, my best guess is something old got deprecated in a way that my version was depending on in some part of the process.

Either way, working now, so yay.

Hi, I’m on desktop, Firefox browser. Though now I’m thinking about it, maybe I do need to look into updating my browser. I might have disabled updates at some point in order to keep things the same, but that might mess with it if depends on something newer? Hmm.

Barring any info that it might be something else, I might look into browser update later today to see if that makes any difference.

Well said, this is in line with what I remember learning in the past too, though I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. The phenomenon of capitalist realism, for example, I don’t think would be possible if economic systems were separate from the rest of social stuff. People who defend capitalism while not benefiting from it meaningfully are not just “brainwashed” in the sense of being convinced it’s a good system, their way of life and thinking is tangled up in the capitalist process. For example, the way I see some people in the US act about new products, it seems that it does not even occur to them to consider the idea of “new product” as a bad thing, only whether it is “good product” or “bad product.” Something that might be seen by a different kind of society as excess and waste is widely viewed as a form of progress and advancement under capitalism. This kind of thing, I would argue, is not just incidental, but necessary for the system to function with any longevity.

As of, I can’t recall exactly, a couple of days ago? The “Next” button at the bottom of the feed page just takes me to the same first page of results. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Something I haven’t seen touched on in this thread is the nature of surveillance. I find that western (idealism?) thinking often poses things as a binary good/bad in a universalized way. So, for example, state good / state bad, or surveillance good / surveillance bad. Another common one I see on the western internet is people who say censorship bad, free speech good as a sort of ideal, but they gloss over the practicalities of stuff like the Paradox of Tolerance.

I don’t know what the surveillance is like in China and you’ve already received plenty of answers on whether they have it. What I can speak to is I know that in the US, the nature of surveillance and violations of privacy has a distinctly chilling connotation. The US, last I checked, has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It has a loophole for basically slavery through prison labor, or in some cases bare bones wages that are on the borderline. It has a history that includes stuff like MKUltra and COINTELPRO. Or more overt stuff like its history of violence against striking workers and efforts to disrupt them in any way possible. And that’s just against its own people. That’s not even getting into the CIA and its violent history across the world.

So for a place like the US, surveillance is an extension of the already existing dictatorship of capital and imperialist history abroad. A lot of people in the US don’t trust their own government and for good reason (though sometimes the actual reasons they land on are out to lunch, compared to the well-documented ones).

What I’m getting at here is, the dynamic of the US informs the nature of surveillance. So I think it’s important to also investigate and take into account what is the nature of surveillance in China. How is it used and for what purposes. What need and intentions has it most developed out of. What kind of accountability processes does it have or enable. I think it’s safe to figure that since not every state has the same conditions or goals, the development of surveillance and its purposes will not be identical, and so the way it impacts the citizens and how they think about surveillance also will not be identical.

That’s awesome, well done!

I kinda hate it, but I also don’t tend to like “prankster” type of humor in general. In spite of that, it’s hard for me to think it’s valid to be opposed to it generally if the people involved are all okay with it. So like, two friends “roasting” each other, okay, I guess none of my business if they are truly fine with it and enjoy it. But even then, are they doing stuff similar to “aftercare”? Where they reaffirm they really do love and appreciate each other after any digging is done. Because if not, it seems like an easy way for people to be in an unhealthy dynamic, where one of them is crying inside and just going along with it to get along.

And in the context of a sub like roastme, there’s nothing close to “aftercare”, no real off button on it, and it’s complete strangers. So it seems like a horrible setup for doing it in a way that is at all healthy.

Exactly, well said. Some of the worst people/entities in history “worked hard” at doing horrific things. Didn’t make the things they did any less horrific.