July 03, 2016 | Author: Mircea Popescu

Competitive play in any online game that includes guilds, raids, what have you - in a word, cooperative play - always reduces to a matter of organisation. It's never a matter of skill. It's always a matter of "getting people to be active", running a voice server, red tape and the general annoyance of a regular job. In point of fact, the difference between the cubical job and the cubical game is exactly nil. Whether you're watching spreadsheets in space or watching spreadsheets in space, you're still watching spreadsheets in space.

Why is that ?

Obviously, game "designers" carry a part of the guilt. They're people living in office farms "designing" "games" for people living in office farms, under the supervision of people supervising people living in office farms. The end result will reproduce those mechanics familiar to the office farmed chicken, necessarily. This is a sad fact, and a much more important, much more valid point of concern than boob plate armor or whatever non-topic the irrelevant gaggle of mayogendered Michael Moore wanna-bes are gargling this season. Stop training the kids to be office drones, yo! Games are supposed to celebrate the special unique excellence of those few that are especially excellent! Not of everyone! Not everybody can reach max level, not everybody should ever see or touch the elite content. Most people should never see the final cutscene on their own, because most people should not be capable of that achievement, because the game should cater to the elite human not to the consumer market. For crying out loud already!

But that part is just a part, and it's not even the larger part. Think for a moment, what happens once a game comes out ? Players try out things, discover the optimal gameplay, and then everyone's forced to follow that, at which point the game's pretty much dead, which is to say all the lamers move in en masse to carebear the shit out of their virtual spreadsheets (in space!) and generally be anti-achieving, obnoxious bores to the power of over nine thousand.

Why is that ?

Players can't shut up about things. The second thing a good player does after discovering a gameplay improvement is - post on a forum. The first thing is cream his pants. He's literally sitting there in soiled underwear explaining to everyone capable of clucking on a forum topic how to do things better. The obvious solution to this of course is Eulora, which is to say designing in such a manner that after a thousand of hours of gameplay, the player hasn't actually understood more of the internal mechanics of the game than when he started.

Nevertheless, why is that a problem in the first place ?

It should be obvious to a pubescent human that there's two fonts of power in this world, which is to say, bureaucracy and knowledge (in reverse order). The staff and the ring, if you prefer Medieval terminology cca 1200. And it should be just as obvious to just as pubescent a human that if you fetter one, you necessarily, necessarily boost the other. Power is a zero sum game, if you castrate the mages you thereby empower the office drones, what's so hard to grasp here ? If "information wants to be free" then thereby and necessarily your ass wants to be run by a social worker sent by Mommy-government to change your diapers and adjust your Welbutrin drip. This is a surprise ?

Yet people engage in a completely insane sort of knowledge sharing, blind and uncaring, broadcast randomly to all comers in such a decerebrated manner utterly reminescent of fish spawning that even the notion of value of knowledge dissolves under the volume of the outpour.

Consumers of knowledge are so few and far between that they expect the emitters to package their knowledge in peculiar manners. And the emitters oblige! They use simpler words and emasculate their work product, like a sort of crazed Shakespeare that bowdlerized himself while living! This nonsense is particularly evident from the vantage of Trilema - every now and againi one of these idiots self-importantly announces to the world his inability to comprehend some article or other, with all the firebrand stemming from a firm conviction that this isn't his fault! He needn't be ashamed that he failed to comprehend written text, oh, no. The text, mind you, the god damned text should have been different. I doubt I've heard anything more ridiculous in my entire life.

Consumers of knowledge are so few and far between that they actually expect a prize for having followed some less-than-absolutely-plain bit, five minutes' worth at best. They want a food pellet, like they used to get in school, they've put five minutes' mental effort in they should get at the very least a new car for this!

Why is that ?

Personally, I blame open source. I think it was a terrible, terrible idea. It is directly and inextricably to blame for the disaster perceived today, where ambitious young lads of either gender prefer murky political work, in the form of indolent gossip and community organizing to actual engineering work. To reading code.

It's directly obvious, kids, like all living things, want food. Papica. They don't want work and they sure as fuck don't want labour. What's the path to easiest food with least labour ? Certainly and surely as fuck not knowledge. That's free, because some idiots (which also happened to be communists - go fig!) decided one day it'd be a good idea to blast the entire world with all their brains' content, whether that world as much as asked for it or not! So then what's left ?

If knowledge is free then knowing is not worth doing, which is how there's absolutely no end of hollow craniums posturing about their "background and experience in management experience spawns many years". A five year old monkey throwing darts at a box full of rabbits intended for dermatologic testing would have produced a more useful, better designed, safer pile of crap than Ethereum. But that's not their concern, their concern is to posture, to call inept nonsense that wouldn't on its own merits earn the name of "ximLbnqNpSqiuPUhgHPQ" by lofty if unearned monikers like "The Dao" and generally carry on in that disgraceful manner.

There's fifty of these idiots at the lowest count, all crowded around USG.MIT's utterly ridiculed attempt to matter in the world today. Fifty. At least. None of them has the first inkling of a clue of the subject matter ; each of them has already spent imaginary adolescent fortunes fifty times, and come up with clever names. You know, for "branding". They've all contributed, and their contribution has cost their [metaphorical] parents north of 300 million to date. A goat would have been a preferable replacement for the lot, for what damage can a goat do ? It'll eat ten thousand dollars' worth of hay its entire life, at the most, which is a whole lot the fuck cheaper than a quarter to half a billion.

All you can tell about everyone involved in Tor is that hey, weren't these the idiots that tried to accuse the founder of rape ? All you can tell about "linux contributors" is that... hey, they're a bunch of idiots that try to accuse Linus of rape. All these schmucks do every day is feminine bullshit and the social media version of office politics.

Why is that ?

Well doh, what would you have them do ? There's absolutely no need to read code because, read my lips, anyone could do that. Why would they do it if anyone could do it ? Let anyone do it then, they're busy. They're busy with more important stuff. Hey, have you heard what MP said about niggers ?!?!?!

Open source ? You lose. But why is that ?

And no, I don't mean "why is it that open source === you lose", I mean why is open source even a thing in the first place ? Well... as it happens the answer is simple, and also obvious, and therefore completely unintuitive to the sort of dumbass that tends to fall for this sort of error.

Here's the dumbass reasoning :

  1. Every other item I encounter is an animal of the same species, age, and gender as I.ii
  2. The disjunction between the contents of my head and the reunion of the contents of all the other heads is X
  3. The value of X for me is Y

  4. Ergo, should X be made available to the whole world, the whole world would be richer by Y * headcount.

For all you know 1 may even be correct. It doesn't happen to be correct, but its correctness is entirely irrelevant to the point. For all you know 2 may also be correct. There's no certainty that it would be, which is how we end up blessed with all the genre fiction crap and assorted self-important fanfic ; nevertheless for the sake of discussing this example let's allow it. 3 is probably more or less in range, which is to say whatever the error, we could conceive of a view zoomed out enough to tolerate it.

Nevertheless, 4 doesn't follow. 4 doesn't follow at all. It is the exact typical error of the infantile mind. You know why children under ~5 years of age fall so much ? It's because they conceptualize the world as a static construction. Everything it sees is, to the infantile mind, as unmovable as scenery in a side scroller. Captain Comic isn't going to push a ledge out of the way. Similarly, the toddler doesn't expect any dynamic equilibrium in his environment, and he will step on a precariously balanced chair with the ease he'd step on granite bedrock. He sees it there, so it is there, so it will support him. Or a tank, really, or anything else. That's the other thing, they keep building these towers that fall down because who could have predicted you can't balance a fridge on a pickled olive ? They're just as non-transparent, what magic is this!

The infantile mind doesn't go away. It just withdraws. The knowledgeable derp is still very much a derp, he's not become a man through spending his youth reading and thinking about things. On the contrary, he's stayed a child. He doesn't, on account of the painful bumps nature provides, expect mechanics to work like in a picture - but this doesn't impede him from expecting economics, for instance, to still work this way. Because nature doesn't provide any bumps he can recognize on that scale, and so there's nothing to fix his toddler stupid. Which is the mechanism through which "intelligent" people in the sense of, useful, knowledgeable monkeys, end up with insanely infantile views of large topics, such as socialism. Heck, Louis Armstrong believed dietarianism to be the solution to all ills. It's in that vein.

But in reality, in actual, dynamic, real reality, 4 doesn't even come close to working, and for many reasons. Chief among them - that if the world's knowledge is freely available, the only remaining hierarchy provider will be bureaucracy. No, social hierarchy doesn't go away. Just like how beheading the king doesn't mean monarchy goes away. It just moves on down to an even shittier form. You don't want social hierarchy based on knowledge, because you're at the mental age of four and prefer to pretend equality with everyone instead of humiliating some, oppressing some, respecting others and so on ? Fine! You'll get social hierarchy on the basis of invidious womanly bullshit. Happy nao ?

tl;dr Forget free / open source. It's bad for the environment and worse for you. Information doesn't want to be free - useless bureaucrats want you to make it free so they get a chance to pretend to power.

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  1. Like, every five minutes, especially when something happens. Somehow the derp fails to see the relationship between me and events in a proper causative mold, preferring instead the fantasy where events "just happen", and I, just like him, innocently bystand. Because hey, socialism, that's how it works, all people are equal in their irrelevancy and we all equally own the Sun! Then inexplicably those events keep driving them to Trilema articles and what is this! []
  2. Don't laugh, this is exactly how goats think. To a goat's mind, the caretaker is a goat of about the same age, and of the same gender. Because goats are dumb.

    Not quite as dumb as computer programmers, but still, on the scale of intelligence, quite well subhuman. []