John Zeitler

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.

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.

In less than a week– this coming Wednesday, in fact– I’ll be working at Pittsburgh’s biggest anime convention, Tekkoshocon, as the video game room producer. I’ve taken the title “Tyrant” in a somewhat lighthearted manner, but really “producer” is more fitting to describe my role with the convention and the game room. Last year I was approached to “run” the game room, and ultimately this expanded into developing the room as an entity within itself under Tekkoshocon, to expand the scope of our operations so that we could bring in more attention to our core show. This rapidly became almost another full time job.

The thing is, though, it’s a full time job I actually enjoy doing. I’m a collector, by nature. I enjoy finding, organizing, and managing a big library of video games, and up until about 2010 or so it was only for my enjoyment. Now, I’m able to focus my efforts to the goal of ensuring that everyone has a good time and gets to play some games that maybe they haven’t seen before. This means curating some games I personally don’t like, and dealing with people who know a lot more about those games than I do.

I mentioned this a few years ago, but Matt Boyd wrote that video games are becoming the shared culture of our generation. Last week or so when Mass Effect 3 was released, so many people were discussing the game in social circles and in other aspects that it was, for me, a little difficult to get away from it. Discussion also turned to how people had played the previous two games; people shared and compared their decisions, tactics, likes and dislikes. I was really surprised by this, even though I know I shouldn’t have been.

It’s undeniable now that pop culture, no matter how vapid or intellectually shallow it can be, is still culture. As much as it pains me to admit it, twenty years from now people are going to be talking about Jersey Shore the same way my generation looks back at Beverly Hills, 90210– hopefully with faint disdain and the benefit of hindsight, but you never know. Movies, television, music, and games– these are all part of our culture, our shared experiences that are wound across the frame of time. Even solitary experiences can foster connections.

A couple months after I’d called the police, I had occasion to go to the rental office and drop off my rent check. I asked about the girls, and found that the screaming woman had moved out a few weeks after the police visit, and that the girls were safe with their real father, on the other side of the city. You had no idea the amount of relief I felt at that.

I don’t tell that story very often, if at all, because it gives the wrong impression. I didn’t call to be a hero. I don’t want to be praised for my actions, I don’t want to be lauded. All of it will feel completely hollow to me. I don’t tell the story to boost myself, I do it to shame everyone else.

Do you know how I felt in the months between the call and the revelation of the girls’ fate? I felt horrible, guilt-ridden. They were dead, as far as I knew, and it was my fault. If I had left well enough alone, if I had just let the mother handle her child as she saw fit, they’d still be alive, and could find the way out on their own. I had no business and no right to stick my nose into it. I was as guilty as the mother was, because I had triggered the fatal escalation. It was all my fault.

Every day we’re faced with the same choice. We see evil happening every day, we see darkness and hatred and fear. It’s none of our business. We have no right to intervene. What we do have, however, is an obligation. We are, each and every one of us, bound by the life we have to protect the lives of everyone else around us. It doesn’t make us heroes. It makes us human. We shouldn’t take pleasure in saving those lives. We should instead beat ourselves up for failing to save lives. That’s what our shame and self-loathing is for. That’s the only thing it’s for. When we have a real chance to do good, and we let it pass by in the hopes that someone else will come along and do it for us, that’s when we’re not good enough, when we’re not worth help or salvation.

Those girls would never have gotten out of that situation. They were falling into the worse version of the trap that I had found myself in. Probably bullied at school, they came home to try to find solace in the arms of their parents and found no quarter. Enemies were within and without, and there was no safe place, nobody they could turn to at all. Until someone deigned to notice them and reach out a hand in help, they would begin believing that they didn’t have the right to the same happinesses that all life is entitled to. They would never learn that it was okay to ask for help– they would instead learn that it was useless to do so.

Not everyone can ask for help. But everyone is deserving of it.

That night, after I’d paid my rent and found that the girls were safe, I lay in my bed, alone and in comfort. I wasn’t overly tired. I still had a day off the next day, and my plans were open. My bills were paid, my life in order. I lay there, in the dark, and I looked back at myself through the blackness.

“I did good,” I said, softly. For the first time in my life, I meant it.

I said yesterday that I was never harmed by my family. That’s true. Where I was bullied was at school and in social situations. This is also true. But I can’t help but think how hollow it is for me to say “you just need to talk to someone” when not every victim of bullying has someone to talk to. I can only imagine what a true living hell my life would have been were it not for my family’s support. Success or failure, they’ve always had my back, and they’ve always stood by me. I’m blessed to have them. But not every victim does.

It’s a horrifying problem, and it’s not one that’s helped by the current “reality” of the vulnerability of children these days. If the media is to be believed, fiends and monsters in human skin wander every street in every town, looking to snatch up children for the most vile perversions imaginable. Only the parents of these innocents should ever be trusted with the child, regardless of how many times the father comes home drunk to beat his daughter for not cleaning up properly, or how long the mother leaves her son starving in a filthy apartment while she spends her money on alcohol and drugs. We’re sickened equally by these stories. But we can do nothing but react to these conditions. If you try to guide a child away from a lethal home environment, you’re painted with the same brush as those with sinister motives.

When I moved into my current apartment, I would notice with increasing alarm and dismay that on Sunday mornings, almost like clockwork, the apartment across the hall would erupt into horrifying screaming. A mother– or I would presume it was the mother– would fling the most vile obscenities at two girls, who I’d seen around the apartment complex. Neither one could be older than about ten, and they were sisters. This went on for months, and the shouting got worse and worse. Eventually, one Sunday, I heard the girls pounding on the door to that apartment, begging to be let in. There were shouts from the other side. “Let us in,” the girls cried. “We’re hungry. Please let us in.” After a couple more shouts, the girls bolted from the door as if the devil himself were going to come through it.

I was faced with a dilemma. Do I call the police? Would I be under suspicion of having stalked the girls? After all, it wouldn’t look good that a thirty-year-old single guy with tons of cartoons and video games in his apartment would try to offer refuge to two children. But these kids were obviously being abused. I had no doubt in my mind that there was a physical component to it that I couldn’t see; abusers, for all their irrational fury, always make sure to never leave a mark. Worse yet, what if my act of benevolence spelled doom for those girls? Abusers never take responsibility for the consequences of their actions; if the police visited the apartment, it would be perceived as the fault of the girls and not the woman for screaming.

In the end, I called the cops. The officer came by, spoke to me, then went over to the apartment. I never heard the screaming after that, and I never saw the girls again.