Page 37 - Ruminations

35. Unannounced merger

Something has been brewing in this culture for a generation,
corresponding to the watersheds in technology and “liberation”
movements occurring roughly in the early 1970s. It is at the
confluence of human nature and social norms, ergo of interest
anthropologically. It is the explosion in role-playing as a major pastime
and substitute for prior forms of social interaction. It requires a cross-
disciplinary analysis to make any sense, despite those fields of inquiry
inevitably coming into interpretive (not to mention descriptive)
conflict over the phenomenon. The “what” and “why” of role-playing
need to be informed by the “how” of computer and communications
technology.
A simple model would take into account the deep psychological
need to belong to a group, the almost-certainly “hard-wired” desire to
have a satisfying role within the hierarchy of that group; the
breakdown of traditional social organization in the anomic, alienated
post-WWII industrial world; and the corporate exploitation of
infantilized young adults in a psychologically-manipulated commercial
culture. It would show how those attributes smoothly play into the
ascendance of electronic complexities involving hidden identity and
disguise. If the “real” world of adult roles, as defined and degraded by
the manipulating media, aided and abetted by hedonistic parents (now
sociopolitical neuters, distant and clueless), is taken away, then the
new worlds of games and costumes and electronic proxies, designed
to appeal to children, will fill the vacuum.
In the early 1960s, an opposition was often set up between Aldous
Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984”: which
dystopian vision was being born before our eyes? For surely
something profound started in that era. A children’s crusade or a
revolution or Roman excesses of prosperity: where was it going?
It went to war, reaction and the resurgence of predatory capitalism
exploiting unnecessary crises. Prosperity ended and a new opiate of
the masses came out of the same Silicon Valley laboratories that
would enable a quantum leap in surveillance technology. The
prophetic literary dystopias merged. Hallowe’en has grown in
importance, expanding into weeks of role-playing catharsis: a dark
American carnival, devoid of religious significance and innocent fun.