John Zeitler

If punk is defined as a threat of revolution, post-punk could be seen as a relaxation of the demand. Post-punk is just as socially conscious, just as strident in calling out the injustices of the world as it stands, but doesn’t look to tear down the establishment before correcting the flaws. If social change is brain surgery, then punk uses a chainsaw where post-punk uses a scalpel. In literature, of course, this means creating a roman a clef where you have certain hypotheticals standing in for elements of reality; we call this trope “Like Reality Unless Noted”.

Take Star Trek. I didn’t need to be a literature major to realize that the Klingons were the Black Panthers with funny accents, or that the Romulans were Soviets with goatees and pointy ears; once I knew the atmosphere of the 1960s, the allegories in Star Trek became almost painfully obvious, even at 12. In the era in which it was made, Trek brought a ton of social issues to the forefront. Segregation, racial equality, even gender equality– how many of you knew that, in the original plans, the Enterprise’s first officer was to be a woman? So we could say that Star Trek has the setup to be a punk show…

Except when it comes to aliens, that is. It didn’t challenge the notion that these “others” are people until almost thirty years later, with The Next Generation introducing to us Klingons who’ve made their peace with the Federation, and Romulans who are just as strangled by their insular, isolationist policies as they are protected by them. By re-framing the world in which the show was set, TNG had the freedom to explore a lot of the same social ills further down the line– just as its original had, and just as the real world had evolved along with it. The Klingons weren’t worried about integrating with the Federation anymore, now they needed to get along with them while retaining their cultural identity. The Romulans were becoming aware of the harm their borderline-fascism was doing to them, but couldn’t let go of it as they had indoctrinated themselves and their children a little too well. The Enterprise crew wasn’t seen as the heroes because they blasted away the “bad guys”– but because they worked within the system to help everyone.

This is the power of fiction. This is what makes a writer the single most powerful force in history. It comes from the role of the fool; the role of the storyteller to reframe a situation to achieve an outcome of great good– or great evil. One pen is mightier than a thousand million swords, if only because the pen can spin reality so that the swords are never needed.

Journalism, as I said, is going away, and will be replaced with something else. I don’t know what. I can’t know what, because it hasn’t happened yet. It probably won’t happen in my lifetime. There is, of course, the chance that it will. It would be a major upheaval, a massive, concerted effort to topple Ted Turner’s tower of television truth-telling, and it certainly could happen given enough people and enough outrage. But I highly doubt it.

Punk, as it’s applied to… pretty much anything these days, is rooted in revolution. Punk is the ultimate rebellion against a system– an entrenched organization. Punk breaks the rules. Most of the time, it’s with an eye towards making social progress. If you really listen to some of the best that punk has to offer– Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, The Clash– you’ll hear incredibly plaintive cries for change and social justice. You’ll also hear the sentiment that if the establishment (whatever form it may take) doesn’t change, it will be changed. Punk is equal parts promise and threat.

The thing is, though, you can get more with a carrot and a stick than you can with just the stick. Punk has its place, and I’m all for an intolerable situation being turned on its side when there is no alternative. In other parts of the world, that’s the case, and more power to them– I pray every day that somewhere in Iran there’s a kid with a guitar practicing just three chords, and how to play them as loud and fast as he can. But with the advances of technology that are available in the “stable” parts of the world– in Europe, Oceania, the Americas, and eastern/southeastern Asia– comes the realization that the great wheels of the machine aren’t controlled by just one guy at the helm, and that you can do more from within it than from without. That’s post-punk.

Journalism might be replaced, as technology gets stronger, with a mechanism where we can all see an objective view of what happened at previously “newsworthy” points in time/space and draw our own conclusions. It might be replaced with less emphasis on current events and more emphasis on trusted experts giving us insight into situations without condescension. Or it might be replaced with just nonstop advertising barraging us across all senses. We don’t know. But journalism, in its current form, is dying.

Here’s a fun little thought experiment. Go to your local store and peruse the buggy whip aisle. Look at all of the brands, emblems, luxury materials, and lengths and weights available. Sounds silly, right? I mean, there are no stores that have buggy whip aisles. I’d be honestly shocked if you could even find a buggy whip for sale in anything but an Amish shop nowadays. And yet, that’s not seen as a bad thing. Sure, it was rather traumatic to the buggy whip manufacturers at the dawn of the automobile. But now?

The point of that, of course, is that nothing lasts forever. Change is going to happen whether you like it or not. Some people will see it as good, and some will see it as bad. Sometimes change is sudden and jarring, like the 2011 “Arab Spring”. Sometimes it’s glacial, yet inevitable, like the decline of the cassette tape. In a changing market, sometimes it’s caused by forces external to the market creating a backlash (let’s take the Video Game Crash of 1984 as the example here) and sometimes it’s triggered from within in order to attract new customers (let’s use the rise of motion-based gaming).

As humans, we are in the unique position of being able to react to change better than animals are. Animals reacted to the Ice Age by dying, forcing their species to evolve pelts. Humans reacted to the Ice Age by wearing lots of thinner animal pelts. Nature– either the random laws of chance or the guided hand of a creator– rewards changing to adapt to a circumstance. Nature imposes the death penalty on stagnating organisms.

So we have changes happening in our society, in our grocery stores, in our refrigerators, on our clothing, in our very bodies. The price of progress is the relentless march of change. Every day we step a little bit away from “bad”, and a little bit closer to “better”. We cannot afford to stay in one place for even a moment, or we are all as good as dead.

So things are changing. But even change itself is not a constant, not a singular, monolithic thing. Change comes in many forms. It can be evolutionary, or it can be revolutionary. And that’s where the difference between “Cyberpunk” and “Post-Cyberpunk” lies.

A few days ago I had occasion to take a look at TV Tropes. I intend to do so again once I’m done writing, and hopefully by the time you read this I’ll have remembered to come up for air. But in this particular instance, I happened across that site’s definition of the genre known as “Post-Cyberpunk”, and realized that the themes it seems to encompass resonate very deeply with my personal philosophy.

If the last few weeks of posts haven’t already hammered that point into ridiculousness, I think that there are some very deep and very damaging flaws with the way American society works nowadays. But I also think that there is the chance– however slim– that the systems in place are not inherently corrupt, that there is the chance that society can right itself without a revolution, and that as time goes on the standard of living for everyone has been and can continue to get better. So I’m an idealist in the long run. Doesn’t mean I can’t be a pessimist in the immediate.

That’s the primary difference, and it goes back to another theme that’s popped up quite a bit lately in my musings: short-sightedness. Just because things suck now and things will continue to suck for the near term doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to them always sucking. In fact, doing so means you’re guaranteeing that they will. If you can see that things are going to get worse before they get better, then you probably ought to consider taking action to prevent them from getting so bad that it takes unreasonably long for them to get better.

A couple of posts ago I was very upset about the state of journalism being, as I felt, hopelessly mired in sensationalism and truthlessness. I said that the situation was completely intractible and that there just wouldn’t be any improvement made. I stand by that, but there’s a reason: it’s because, eventually, journalism will go away entirely, and be replaced with something else.

I talk a lot about how I’m being “prejudiced” against as a geek. It’s strong language, culturally, especially in urban and suburban America, to bandy about words like that. It’s even harder when the social stigma is attached to a label that can be applied to anyone, even people who do face far harsher oppression. Given that I’m in a position of social and cultural privilege, it may seem disingenuous to say that I’ve been the victim of discrimination.

When I was much younger, I’d lie awake at night and think what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been born when I was. I’m not physically strong, and I’m certainly not blessed with an overabundance of endurance. I kept thinking back to what would have become of me in the middle ages, in medieval Europe. Obviously I wouldn’t have been royalty, and certainly my intellect would not have been developed– I wouldn’t have even known how to read, much less learned how at the age of three. My temper problem would prevent me from being in the clergy. Most likely, I would have either been tortured into becoming a berserker, or just simply executed for being too smart for my own good.

It occurs to me that the exact same thing is happening to very intelligent people the world over, regardless of race, creed, culture, or gender. It’s happening in Uganda, as a child who’d be able to solve his village’s water crisis is being gunned down by another child soldier for a warlord who will never even acknowledge his very existence. It’s happening in North Korea, as a teenager who’d be able to rally for democratic reforms is having the creative leadership thinking indoctrinated out of him in a conscription camp. It’s happening in Iran, as a young adult who’d be able to develop a new communications paradigm refuses to do so out of fear of being disappeared by the government.

And don’t kid yourself. It’s happening in Pennsylvania, as incredibly intelligent students are being ignored by the system because they’re too smart for their grade level and the region they live in is too impoverished to support the educators that could challenge them. It’s happening in Colorado, as a teacher who honestly wants to make a difference in the lives of his students and be the mentor they desperately need is forced to flip burgers as the school he works at is closed down. It’s happening in Illinois, as students with special needs are being ignored by the public school systems that their parents pay for.

I mean this with every fiber of my being, and I will say it even as they put the blindfold on me and stand me up against the wall: Fix education, and you fix every social ill, ever, forever.

Last week, Lifehacker ran a neat feature on how to determine when someone was being emotionally manipulative in your life and how to combat it. A lot of the techniques that were listed are the standard arsenal of bullies and fiends the world over, and unfortunately the net outcome of the article is really just going to be more people who know how to effectively prey upon people who haven’t read it. I’d love to have enough faith in humanity to believe that isn’t the case, but it’s not what we’re conditioned to do anymore.

Communications and interpersonal relationships these days aren’t about getting a message through or coming to an improved understanding of the truth. Nowadays the general tactic for getting your point across is to stab someone with it. Misinformation spreads faster than truth, and deliberate disinformation spreads faster still. Honesty and integrity aren’t virtues anymore. They’re vulnerabilities. I’m reminded of nothing so much as the old CIA euphemism for execution, used to prevent popping up on intelligence radars; they called it “wetwork”. The campaigns of falsehoods perpetrated as truth can be no better described as anything but “bridgework”: employing trolls and monsters to distort the perception of the truth in the public eye until it actually does become the truth.

The saddest part about this is that, despite the claims I’ve made of having hope that the trend could be reversed, I know it won’t be. Lies pay better than honesty. There’s nothing in it for anyone by telling the truth. The going rate for someone’s integrity has been getting cheaper and cheaper with every passing moment. I have hope that there’ll be a sea change in how communications, ethics, and journalism are done in this nation, but it’s the same hope that I have for immortality to be made cheaply available in my lifetime: such a long shot as to be completely infeasible.

The definition of a cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing. I wonder how we’ll define cynicism once there’s no value left in anything.

I’m sure that by now the Mass Effect 3 ending “controversy” is either dwindling down or completely irrelevant, but at the time I’m writing this, a group is petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to intervene over what is being characterized as a case of false advertising. Again, by the time this goes live I’ll probably have made it through to the ending myself, but as of right now the only thing I know is that the culmination of a huge number of choices and player actions across three games are distilled into one final choice which determines which ending you get.

Yeah, this is definitely something to be (have been?) up in arms about.

While this load of bullshit was going on, I had a discussion with a couple of friends who were, to various degrees, involved in the issue (though certainly not on the side of the “protesters”– I don’t know anyone that stupid). One of them argued that it’s remarkable how a video game is causing this much of an emotional attachment in certain people, and that the outcry is a rallying point for the “games as art” movement. To which I promptly replied that no, as much as we would want it to be seen as a positive, the media is going to portray the outcry as “a bunch of immature pseudoadults whining over the ending to a children’s video game that they’re too old to be playing”. It probably already has.

I can’t be positive about this. I literally cannot find the good out of all of this. If there is any, it’s too well hidden and too miniscule to offset the tremendous amount of public-perception damage that this is doing to gaming as a whole. We want gaming to be treated as an adult pastime, as something that anyone of any age can enjoy, but the minute something goes wrong, gamers revert to a twelve-year-old mentality and start whining to beat the band. We can’t have it both ways, and unfortunately it looks like the way we want it is to reinforce the stereotype that’s been imposed on us.

As much as I want to be “out” as a geek, I have to accept that doing so means I’m not going to be free of the associated prejudice in my lifetime.

A year or so back, when a scandal hit NPR regarding funding integrity in the higher-ups, it was eventually discovered that the “damning evidence” in that case was in fact almost completely fabricated. Amazingly, the individual responsible faced no repercussions for presenting an outrageously false accusation. Then, just a few weeks ago, a report by This American Life on worker conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese plant where Apple makes many of its products, was retracted after TAL discovered that it was “partially fabricated”. The individual who provided TAL with the report claimed innocence, stating “What I do is not journalism”.

Douglas Adams’ books may not have been philosophy, for that matter, but he wrote “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we have to at least consider the possibility” that it’s a duck.

The line between fact and fiction is blurring more and more every day. News shows have shifted within my lifetime– which, despite my griping, is not terribly long– from a cold, impersonal reading of the facts to a cavalcade of entertainment and showmanship that offers excruciatingly little in the way of actual information. Fact-checking is an afterthought; what matters now is being the first to break a scandal, and to hell with whether or not it’s actually true. The phrase “style over substance” has lost its meaning because the style is the substance. There’s nothing underneath it.

But the only thing that really makes me think there’s still hope yet is that, in both of the cases cited above, the agencies who were deceived owned up to it. I heard about the NPR thing first on NPR. While I haven’t been listening to This American Life for years now, the revelation of the deception occurred when they titled their entire show for the week “Retraction”. You don’t see that kind of self-policing anymore. You don’t see journalists second-guessing their informants and looking for confirmation.

When I was in high school, I read through “All The President’s Men” for a reading assignment, and that was around the time I got asked to be the editor of the school newspaper. Granted, that’s twenty years behind me now, but I like to think it taught me to appreciate journalistic integrity a lot more than some of the people who’re on the air now. And while I’m not making claims to be a media professional at all, I can promise you that if I’m going to make a claim here, I’m going to fact-check it first. It’s long been my policy to cite sources when I post about breaking events, and to only link to trusted sources. And if I’m the last man on the web doing it, well, then I’m probably going to have a really small number of trusted sources to link to, now won’t I?

I mentioned yesterday that I don’t like call-in shows. There are any number of seeds for this particular gripe, and certainly a lot of them can be laid at the feet of Rush Limbaugh. (I’m above making the joke “They should be laid at his feet, where he’ll never see them anyway”, but I hope someone else isn’t.) But the biggest one, and the one which reaches across all political spectrums and is in my opinion endemic to the format, is that it’s basically an ideological rally masquerading as a (marginally) civil discussion.

A call-in show in American radio is basically like this: the host goes on a monologue/rant for a certain amount of time, dictating the topic of the day and if you’re lucky giving evidence to support his viewpoint. Then, after a commercial break, the host opens the telephone lines to listen to people who will invariably contest his viewpoint, at which point the host will tell the caller that they are stupid and wrong and that they should feel bad for being so stupid and wrong. Amazingly enough, people continue to call in repeatedly to be belittled in this manner, and often feel the need to suck up to the host in order to enhance the experience of being insulted. This has happened on more than one day on literally every call-in talk show I have ever heard on American radio.

Which is why I find the BBC’s “World Have Your Say” to be an incredibly surreal experience. You get callers from literally everywhere, and the host’s job isn’t to command the groupthink, but to keep people on-topic and to challenge some of the stranger viewpoints with actually informed questions. The host doesn’t editorialize, doesn’t tell us what the caller meant, doesn’t try to do the thinking for us. It’s literally the callers who just say their piece, build on each other, and have a genuinely interesting talk. I’d be utterly despairing if the American callers on the show weren’t civil and respectful, which they are.

This is, to me, what radio and communications are for. It might be naivete to think that communications tools are meant to bring people together and to enhance the state of human interactions, but I still believe that with all my heart. When we can have a discussion with participants from all corners of the Earth, calmly talking and reasoning out their problems, it’s foolishness not to be a little awed at that. It’s foolish to abuse that kind of a gift by using it to ram an opinion through everybody else’s earholes.

I started listening to XM Radio’s “POTUS ’08″ station early in 2008 during the runup to the elections. I’ll spare you the rant over how the station was gutted pretty much immediately afterwards, but the bottom line is that I was fascinated at all of the sausage-making and inside-baseball that went on behind the scenes, and comparing it to how other radio stations were covering the primaries and the campaigns was an eye-opening astonishment.

POTUS went incredibly deep into the campaigns, detailing without bias what each side was doing when they took a course of action. I was hooked instantly– there was finally a station and service devoted to a centrist, honest, truly fair look at all sides of the election, and I loved it. It was the pinnacle of my idealized coverage: give the voters all the facts, don’t sugar-coat or condescend, and let the voters make actual informed decisions rather than gut-feeling rolls of the dice. While I have some issues with how the station is being run now– in particular I dislike the afternoon call-in show, because a) centrism doesn’t need a pulpit-beater like Pete Dominick, and b) I hate call-in shows anyway– I still think it’s a great way to get accurate information about the campaign. I’m like as not to continue to pay for satellite radio specifically for POTUS, because there’s f%$#-all in terms of a centrist viewpoint on terrestrial airwaves. But that’s not my point today.

A couple weeks ago, Senator John McCain– a man who, while I disagree with him on a great many things, I respect greatly for his behavior during the conclusion of his 2008 presidency campaign– noted that this was the ugliest primary race for the Republican nomination in his memory, and that it was doing little but to divide his party. Meanwhile, other Republicans were saying that the protracted bullfight between the front-runners is a good thing, because it keeps the campaign in the media.

I’m starting to think that certain political analysts are confusing the campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America with a season of Survivor.