It was revealed earlier this evening that Microsoft (among a number of the world’s largest Internet companies) provides direct access to its services to the National Security Agency in order to spy on both Americans and foreign citizens.  This includes the ability to access chat, video, voice, images, and a whole host of other information.  That is to say, precisely the kind of information that the Kinect is designed to capture and transmit.  This creates the suddenly very plausible scenario that the NSA or some other law enforcement agency in the U.S. could get direct access to a live video and audio feed of your living room (or wherever your Xbox One and TV are located) without you having any idea that it is doing so and with no resistance from Microsoft.  (If you don’t think this kind of thing is plausible, you should read the Guardian article I linked earlier in this paragraph.)

This is, to put it mildly, extremely concerning.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about data surveillance and thinking about what it means for us as a society*.  We’re very quickly approaching a point at which virtually everything we do is being watched and recorded by someone or something, both in public and what we have traditionally considered “private”.  Almost everything that you do is being tracked or will probably be soon: what web sites you visit, how long it takes you to perform various tasks at work, how and where you drive your car, what options you choose in video game menus and how long you spend looking at them, your purchasing habits, and on and on.  And while I think there is increasing awareness of this fact (at least I hope there is), I don’t think there’s an awful lot of clarity about why exactly we should care about this beyond ambiguous (though still important) concerns about “privacy”.

Washington University law professor Neil Richards identifies two main causes for concern in this development in his paper plainly titled The Dangers Of Surveillance (it’s worth noting that Richards is talking about surveillance in general, including government surveillance, while I’m interested primarily in corporate surveillance).  The first is that, without what he calls “intellectual privacy”, people will begin to limit the thoughts that they feel comfortable expressing, which will hold back both personal and social growth.  The second is that constant surveillance distorts the power relationship between “watcher” and “watched” which he says enhances “the watcher’s ability to blackmail, coerce, and discriminate against the people under its’ scrutiny” (pg 3-4).  I think he’s correct on both counts, and I’m going to use a couple of recent developments in corporate data surveillance to explain exactly how these effects impact peoples’ lives in a concrete way.  One thing that really seems to be missing in a lot of discussions about surveillance is specific impacts on our lives, so I’m hoping to rectify that somewhat here.

BACKGROUND

A few recent trends and articles about them have got me thinking about this in more detail. The Associated Press has reported on the growing trend of potential employers asking applicants to provide Facebook passwords so that the employer can, if we’re being honest, spy on their private life.  Another story discusses credit start-ups who are using data from services such as your e-mail and social networking accounts to determine your credit-worthiness on the basis of things like the borrowing histories of your social networking acquaintances.  Then there’s the recruiting firm that uses its massive database full of information trawled from places as varied as Twitter and GitHub to put together profiles on tons of people, none of whom know they’re being tracked, in order to determine who to contact to make job offers to.

Some of this surveillance is performed with the knowledge of the person being spied on and some of it isn’t but the effects are likely to be similar either way.  While it may turn out to be the case that the specific examples I’ve cited will fail to catch on, the idea in general of this kind of surveillance is here to stay unless we take strong steps to counter them.  There are two significant issues with this situation that I’m going to take a look at.  The first is the way this constant state of surveillance will require people to alter their behaviour for the benefit of corporations which may want to hire or do business with them and the second is the disproportionate impact this will have on people from lower income groups.

SURVEILLANCE, WORK, AND SOCIAL NORMS

The first problem with this kind of corporate surveillance of our private lives is the degree to which it allows corporations to control our behaviour outside of the workplace.  It has always been the case, for example, that you could be fired for saying something in public which your employer feels reflects poorly on the company.  It is only in the very recent past, however, that the possibility for making “public” statements has become so widely available.  In the past your options were very limited: you might be interviewed as a woman-on-the-street for a TV news program or maybe you’d write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper.  These were very limited opportunities and they had a very short shelf-life; the odds of anyone making any attempt to find out what you’d said in passing on some television show a few years ago were virtually nil unless you were a prominent public figure.  Now, however, a significant amount of our interactions and activities are essentially public in nature, from Twitter to blog posts to comments on web communities we frequent and all sorts of other similar venues.  These social interactions are, to a large degree, saved in perpetuity.  We are not responsible for them just in the immediate moments after taking part in them, viewed by a temporally limited audience; we now must take responsibility for them for as long as they remain available online (potentially forever) to an audience of, essentially, everyone.

However, the kinds of developments discussed in the articles I linked above take this much further.  It is bad enough that we are having to redefine our idea of “public” as vast amounts of our social interactions become broadly available for long periods of time, but now we are beginning to be asked to subject even those parts of our online lives that were previously “private” (like our Facebook and email accounts) to this kind of surveillance and moral judgement.  Further, as companies rely on this information more and more to put together pictures of the kinds of people they think we are, it will become a requirement that we not only subject ourselves to this surveillance, but that we live much of our lives in public so that a sizeable footprint from which to draw data about us from is available for companies to make use of.  At that point there are only two options: willingly subject significant amounts of your life to corporate surveillance or withdraw from the system, maintaining some semblance of privacy but in return giving up access to large swathes of the job market, credit markets, insurance markets, and whatever else begins to use these spying techniques in the future.  This is not an acceptable social trade-off, and we need to tackle these issues head-on before more people are forced into making these kinds of decisions.

What happens when a significant amount of our private lives are subject to corporate surveillance is that we are forced to live in a way that corporations approve of regardless of our own personal desires or code of ethics.  If companies are relying on access to our private lives in order to make judgements about whether to hire us, provide us with a loan, etc. then we have to begin thinking at virtually all times about whether our behaviour accords with the principles of the businesses that we interact with.  Are we going to have to limit our discussions about things like workplace safety, our desire to unionise, etc. if those things are going to be subject to corporate surveillance?  You can’t be fired from your current job for discussing unionisation (at least not in Ontario), but what’s to stop a potential future employer who has access to your private Facebook account from choosing not to hire you on the basis of those conversations in what is, ostensibly, private (like your private messages)?  Other examples are easy to come up with; for example, what if you’ve had discussions about joining a protest?  What if you’ve made a joke that was critical of a company that you’re now trying to do business with?  What if you’ve complained about your boss?  Can we do any of those things in a venue that could be subject to analysis by corporate algorithms at some unspecified future date?

This is going to have extremely limiting effects on what kinds of opinions people are able to express, what kinds of activities they engage in, etc.  If we live our lives out online and we’re required to submit a huge portion of what we do to businesses so that they can analyse it to ensure that our behaviour accords with the standards that they’ve set out, we’re providing corporations with way too much power over our lives.  We are approaching a point at which we’re not just responsible to our employers while we’re at work, but at virtually all times.  Indeed, if corporate surveillance proceeds in the direction it’s going we’ll become responsible to potential future employers as well, in addition to places such as lending institutions whose services we may wish or even need to do business with.

It is imperative that we take decisive action to prevent these trends from continuing.  Corporations have no right to know what we do in our free time, and they should not be granted the power to dictate the social norms to which we must adhere through constant surveillance of our private lives.  We do not belong to the companies we do business with.

CORPORATE SURVEILLANCE AND CLASS INEQUALITIES

You may be thinking, “Sure, companies will inevitably use data as it becomes more widely available and ubiquitous, but we’re in no danger of it completely usurping traditional methods of judging job applicants such as where you went to university or how much experience you have.”  This is quite likely true.  But it is true to very differing degrees to people with different economic and social backgrounds.  If you’ve got a business degree from Harvard you’re probably not going to have much trouble using that to find work.  And indeed, if you’ve got a business degree from Harvard you’ve probably made some excellent social connections along the way that can help guide you toward good employment, among other things.

But what if you don’t have a good degree from a respected university?  What if you haven’t built up significant experience working similar jobs in the past?  What if your upbringing hasn’t provided you with the kinds of connections that make it easier to find good work?  Then you’re much more likely to be subject to this kind of surveillance.  Which means that corporations are going to be exerting differing amounts of pressure to conform on people based on their social status (which, though it should go without saying, also often has a lot to do with ethnicity).  If you come from a well-off family and have plenty of social or economic status already you won’t be subject to nearly the same degree of surveillance or pressure to change your behaviour and limit the expression of your opinions in comparison to someone who has not been so lucky.

That people who from lower socioeconomic groups are subject to more surveillance is something that is already broadly true.  For example, New York City’s stop and frisk program overwhelmingly targets visible minorities, subjecting them to a level of police surveillance that white, middle class New Yorkers very rarely are.  Similarly, there’s a long history of organizations such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service performing significant amounts of surveillance on peaceful protest groups while paying relatively little attention to corporations or the wealthy who are engaging in illegal, destructive behaviour.  This inequality in surveillance serves to further cement socioeconomic differences, and we ought to fight back against attempts to extend this kind of surveillance into the digital realm.

That these uses of technology are likely to disproportionately affect poor and working class people is not just conjecture (however rooted in history) on my part.  Two of the articles I linked to above are specifically about companies using these kinds of technology to assess people who fall outside the bounds within which these companies normally do business.  The credit start-up mentioned above is targetting people who don’t have access to regular credit markets, particularly people who don’t have credit histories and are difficult to otherwise judge.  And the firm whose algorithm tries to assess potential job applicants has written it specifically so that it can analyse people who don’t have the standard job qualifications.  While their intent may not be to engage in surveillance based on socioeconomic status, in the end that’s what it is, and that’s what it will be for similar companies in the future as well.

WRAPPING UP

A lot of discussions about online privacy take for granted that we understand what privacy is and why it’s important.  It’s often unclear, though, why privacy matters and what specific effects violations of privacy may have on our lives.  I’ve only scraped the surface of the massive, constant violations of privacy that we’re subject to when we use online services, but I hope that for the small corner of that ecosystem that I’ve discussed here I’ve given a bit of a more clear explanation about what exactly it is that we ought to be fighting against, why and how it will specifically affect our lives.  This kind of surveillance isn’t just harmless data gathering; it can have significant impacts on the ways in which we go about our private lives, and we should remain vigilant against its encroachment into our private spaces.

* – because I’m working on a video game about the ubiquity of corporate data surveillance in our lives.  Also because I work with some of this kind of data at my job.  Also because I’m a nerd.

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES

As to what’s enjoyable about the game, as I’ve said, its looks are simply stunning.  Columbia, the city in the sky, is itself a thing to behold, but it’s in some of the smaller set pieces that the artistic design really struck me.  One recurring trick that the game uses is to place light sources such that when you look up at a statue it appears to be shining brightly, an aura or halo of light encircling the head of the statue’s subject.  This provides a very nice unspoken support to the game’s religious themes.  In general the use of lighting is fantastic.  Because of the use of stained glass and other similar kinds of environmental features, entire scenes are coloured in ways that are both bizarre and beautiful.  It’s pretty unusual to see a room in a video game bathed in bright pink sunlight, but Bioshock Infinite uses that sort of effect extremely well.

Another element of the game’s visuals that works really well is the use of entryways.  Important statues or buildings are often viewable through an archway or door as you approach it, before you’re able to go through it, centering your attention to some of the game’s more impressive art design.  It’s a trick that works really well and even though it’s used repeatedly I never found it repetitive because the scenes that were being framed were often quite different in nature and appearance.

Image taken from Kotaku

One trick that the game uses in order to impart its sense of visual majesty is through unusually scaled objects.  A significant number of the objects in the game, from statues to doorways, signs to stairwells, are unusually large.  This helps these objects to become very visually striking on a television, where normally scaled objects may have struggled to stand out.  This element of the art design takes advantage of the fact that the game’s perspective is in first person, as these elements would have looked silly if the player character was visible on screen at all times.  Nevertheless, I did find that the scaling did some strange things with my perception in the game.  I often found it difficult to tell if I was standing or crouching because the camera always looks like it’s low to the ground on account of the sheer size of many of the objects strewn around the game’s environments.

Aside from the art, I found the combat in Bioshock Infinite to generally be superior to that of the original Bioshock.  The aiming felt much less floaty and the guns felt more effective.  The shift from enclosed spaces, so necessary in the original Bioshock because of the atmosphere of horror it intended to impart, to wide open spaces was a smart one.  It allows the combats to feel much more tactical and varied.  The inclusion of verticality in particular (with fights often taking place across multiple levels with balconies, bridges, etc.) really lends a much more dynamic feeling to the combat in the game.  The vigors were interesting, though I found that I used a much smaller combination of them than I did in the original Bioshock.  Early on in the game I basically stuck to Murder of Crows (to stun enemies) and Bucking Bronco (to throw them into the air), as I found disabling enemies to be a much more effective tactic than trying to increase my damage output.  Later on I used Murder of Crows less and Return to Sender (a bullet absorbing shield) more.  Still, in general I found the vigor/gunplay combo to be more interesting and effective than it was in the first Bioshock.

IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES

If you were to stop reading there I think you would come away with the impression that Bioshock Infinite is a pretty fantastic game with some fairly minor flaws.  Unfortunately, it’s a game with some fairly serious flaws.  Before getting into the story, which is an unmitigated mess of contradictions and general nonsense, I want to talk about some of the game design decisions that I found hampered my ability to enjoy the experience.

For all of the praise the game has received for being, basically, like no other first person shooter on the market (save the original Bioshock), it falls back on some fairly standard genre conventions and has some fairly indefensible design decisions.  While the game may aim for immersion, it is often extremely game-y.  Take, for example, the fact that the game constantly has you scavenging through virtually every container you come across (garbage bins, crates, mailboxes[?!?]) to find ammo and other useful items.  Why are there rockets in mailboxes?  Why are there bananas in weapon crates?

Official promotional screenshot

The game features one of the things I find most annoying in modern games, and that’s achievement pop-ups. I don’t mean the system level “you’ve earned a trophy!” pop-ups, which are annoying enough on their own.  I mean there are collection achievements that you get for doing a certain amount of some activity (finding all the in-game audio recordings, for example) and every time you find one the experience is interrupted with a pop-up using in-game assets to remind you how close you are to earning the achievement.  There is no way to turn these off (at least not that I could find), so you have no choice but to constantly be pestered about how close you are to some numerical objective unrelated to anything in the game proper.

There’s also the superfluous upgrade system which is in the game because, I guess, every game now needs to take advantage of the parts of our brain that like seeing numbers get bigger and our pack rat, gathering tendencies.  The main problem with the weapon upgrade system is that, because there’s not nearly enough money to upgrade every weapon, you end up investing in 2 or 3 and then use those exclusively throughout the game, rather than trying to learn about the full breadth of options available.  Because you can start investing in earlier weapons before later weapons become available, this creates a bias toward ignoring weapons introduced later on in the game.  I know that in my case I almost exclusively used the carbine except against larger enemies against whom I used the volley gun.  This problem also exists with the vigors, and as I said I only used 3 of them for the vast majority of the game.

The equipment system in the game is even worse.  In theory it allows you to customise your character, but in reality most of the pieces of equipment have little if any effect on how you play the game.  I certainly didn’t feel like I could create a character “build” like you would in a role-playing game (or, for that matter, like you could in the first Bioshock).  This problem is compounded by the fact that which piece of equipment you acquire from an item box is randomised, so there’s no way to plan or construct a character.  Dishonored did this with its bone charms, which served a similar purpose, and I don’t really understand why games seem to be doing this.  It leads to less, not more, variety as you learn that the results of your foraging are unreliable and that you should learn to play the game without their benefits.

IT WAS STILL THE WORST OF TIMES

So that’s the gameplay, but now we get to the thing about the game that I really found untenable, and that’s the story.  Going into all of my problems with it would easily be a couple thousand word blog entry on its own, so I’ll try to keep this somewhat focussed in order to keep it at a readable length.  First of all, there’s only just barely a consistent plot that runs through most of the game.  The initial set-up makes it feel like there will be two prominent themes present in the game: religion and racism.  Both of these topics are all but dropped for huge portions of the game (especially the race angle), and by the resolution of the story they’re pretty much ignored in favour of the weird sci-fi multiple universes mumbo jumbo that has taken over.  The game frequently drops you into long-winded scenarios that have nothing obvious to do with the plot at hand and serve only to make the game longer; I’m thinking, particularly, of the large section in Finktown, which touches on race issues but only in a very cursory sense and is mostly just a back-and-forth series of fetch quests.

In general the pacing of the game is bizarre.  There are at least three times in the game where your character has ostensibly completed all of the tasks that they need to in order to leave Columbia with Elizabeth, only to have some major, unforseen set-back deposit you in a completely new location with an entirely new goal (and often having to track down Elizabeth yet again).  The first Bioshock was about a city that had been created with a purpose and then examined what happenned when that purpose actually played out among a society of supposedly like-minded individuals; Bioshock Infinite creates a city and then has you running around it arbitrarily doing things that don’t really advance the story in any clear way.

Official promotional screenshot

One of the game’s most visually striking sections is in the Soldier’s Field level, where Booker walks through museum exhibits dedicated to 2 wars he fought in.  The idea of this museum is fascinating in theory.  It breaks down in practice.  Instead of chasing Comstock, the game’s antagonist, Booker suddenly finds himself being harassed by an old war buddy (who is himself after Comstock); this war buddy claims that all of Booker’s old war buddies are themselves in Columbia and they all want Booker to kill them because . . . I’m not really sure why.  I’m not sure what the point of this entire lengthy section of the game is, except to provide a flimsy excuse for the character to need to shoot things in cool looking environments.  It’s one of a number of places where the game introduces a new antagonist, distracting from the main plot, only to completely discard that antagonist for the vast majority of the game.

The story is so alarmingly disjointed that I got the impression that huge sections of the game (or at least the story) were likely rewritten during production, and the game was pushed out the door without time to make it all fit together in any sensible fashion.  The fact that the plot seems to diverge a good deal from early promotional videos, combined with the game’s sudden delay as it neared its original release date, suggests to me that this may be the case.

OK, so the ending.  I’m among the many people who didn’t like Mass Effect 3‘s ending, for reasons I’ve written about before, but Bioshock Infinite‘s ending is certainly worse.  ME3‘s ending was unsatisfying and felt like a cop-out, but it was at least coherent.  Bioshock Infinite‘s ending is basically nonsense.  I could go on and on about how absurd the game becomes as it reaches its climax (like the time-travelling element suddenly introduced at nearly the last moment), but I’ll key in on just a couple of points just to highlight how nonsensical it is.

Prior to the start of the game, Booker has amassed a large gambling debt.  In order to pay off this debt, he agrees to give his creditor his baby daughter.  His creditor turns out to be working for Comstock.  Comstock turns out to be a different version of Booker in other universes.  So, in effect, Booker owes a gambling debt to a version of himself in a different universe?  How?  Why?  Comstock is not presented in any of the universes the game examines as running a gambling business or being involved in any way with gambling.  Further, Booker has apparently made the decision to give over his daughter to pay off the debt in multiple universes.  So multiple Bookers have amassed gambling debts owed to multiple other Bookers, all in different universes?  The whole thing makes no sense.

And then there is the ending to the game, where Elizabeth reveals to Booker that he is Comstock and the only way to prevent Comstock from being born in all of the possible universes is for Booker to kill himself prior to the point at which, in some universes, he adopts the new persona.  OK, so the first thing here is that it’s entirely unclear why there is one master universe up until the point at which Booker chooses whether to become baptised and become Comstock and why there are then an infinite number of universes that spring forth at exactly that time, which is what the game must be implying if there is a “master” Booker who can be killed, preventing all of the splinter universes.

But more importantly, the story runs into the kind of impossible looping logic that virtually all stories involving time travelling run into, and it goes like this: In order to prevent Comstock from coming into being, Booker has to be killed before the point at which he becomes Comstock.  The person who reveals this to him (and who ultimately kills him) is Elizabeth, his daughter.  In order for Elizabeth to gain the power to see and affect these multiple universes, she must be raised by Comstock and the Luteces, whose experiments give her this power.  When Elizabeth kills Booker, she prevents Comstock from ever coming into existence.  But in doing so, she must prevent herself from ever being experimented on by the Luteces, which means she must prevent herself from gaining the ability to travel across time and universes, which means she can’t kill Booker, which means Comstock must be exist.  And on and on in a circle forever.  This is the ultimate problem that any story about time travelling runs into, and Bioshock is felled by it as well.

So, in conclusion, there are some elements of Bioshock Infinite that I really enjoyed.  The art direction and level design is excellent, and the combat can be very fun at times.  But the experience is degraded by a strict adherence to “video game-y” elements borrowed from other games and a story that devolves into a nonsensical mess by the time it thinks it has resolved.

10. Wish Upon A Blackstar by Celldweller

This is a bit of a weird one on this list.  I’m not really into a lot of electronic music and the electronic music that I am into tends to be on the ambient side of things (The Field, for example).  On the one hand I kind of want to hate this album for reminding me of dub-step, but it has a few things going for it that dub-step doesn’t:

1. It’s very melody-driven.

2. There are lots of guitars and live drums.

3. It’s not shit.

It’s entirely possible that a big part of why I like this is that Celldweller is an act that I was introduced to around the time I started university and I’ve been waiting to hear this album, much delayed, for several years.  Odds are pretty good that you’ve heard Celldweller even if you don’t realise it; check out the list of films, video games, and TV shows his music has been licensed for.  Anyway, I’m not really sure what to say about the album other than the fact that I’m not entirely sure why I like it, but like it I do.

9. Sweet Heart Sweet Light by Spiritualized

I’m not really sure what the deal is with Spiritualized.  I like pretty much all of their albums, but I never seem to listen to them.  Then every once in a while they’ll put out a new one and I’ll go, “Oh yeah, these guys.  They’re good!”  Plus, I mean, the guy who writes all the songs calls himself J. Spaceman, so there’s that.  If you’ve heard any Spiritualized before then you’ve more or less heard this album.  It still works as well as it ever did, but there’s not much here you’ll have not heard before.  If you haven’t, Jason Pierce (Spaceman) writes big orchestral arrangements one instrument at a time by playing them on piano, then enlists people who play other instruments to play the real thing on his albums and on tour.  Most of the songs tend to be centred around piano or guitar, which Pierce plays, but they tend to be pretty . . . big.  He creates an interesting fusion of psych-rock and gospel that doesn’t really sound like anything else.  As the name implies, the songs frequently deal with themes of faith and God, but in a personal rather than evangelical sense.  The album itself sits near the back of my list at #9, but this song may be my favourite of the year:

8. Mr. M by Lambchop

Lambchop are another strange band who don’t really sound like anything else, always sound like themselves, and keep putting really good music.  The lyrics continue to be wry and insightful, telling interesting stories about fairly normal people.  The music continues to be beautiful and calming, but there are offbeat undercurrents running through most of the songs.  I don’t have much else to say about this one, but it’s worth a listen (as is the rest of their back catalogue if you’ve not heard them before).

7. Attack On Memory by Cloud Nothings

I suspect that if I had first heard this album 6 or 7 years ago I would have liked it much more.  It’s an album that reminds me a lot of the feeling that you first get when you leave university; the world seems open to you in ways it hadn’t before, and yet it seems so closed off at the same time.  You begin to realise how many of the goals that you set for yourself haven’t been reached and probably won’t be.  This could lead to quiet reflection, reassessment and adjustment, or it could lead to raging at what’s been lost, or what never was but seemed like it might be.  Cloud Nothings have clearly chosen to rage.  Choruses on this album are often simple, repeated lamentations like “No future! No past!” or “No one knows our plans for us/We won’t last long”.  But despite that, the album feels too restrained.  There’s a lot of shouting, but the music never quite seems to match the intensity of the lyrics or the vocals.  This is a band that could really use a DOD Grunge pedal.

6. Rooms Filled With Light by Fanfarlo

Rooms Filled With Light is probably the best pop album released in 2012, so it’s unfortunate that it seems to have been pretty overlooked.  I talked about it on Twitter one day, and a number of people checked it out and told me that they really enjoyed it.  I suspect it’s one of those albums that nobody knows about but everyone would love if they just gave it a listen (The Delgados’ Hate, one of my favourite albums ever, is another great pop album that seems to fall into this category).  Rooms Filled With Light is that strange brand of Scandinavian pop music that works so well combining pianos, strings, electronic instrumentation, and the occasional brass instrument.  The lyrics are often ambiguous criticisms of modern life, as with the incessant sarcasm of the album’s catchiest track, “Shiny Things”: “Let’s not worry about going extinct/We’ll be preserved on a shelf somewhere”, “It’s as if nothing happened, as if it was enough/Think we rolled over gladly, thinking of shiny things”.  It’s catchy but never simple, inventive but never indecipherable, the perfect kind of pop album for someone who likes their pop music to be a little more smartly composed.

5. Threads by Now Now

I really, really like this album.  But I kind of feel guilty about it.  In contrast to Fanfarlo, who I like because their music is complex and creative, Now Now have written an album full of simple indie rock melodies, standard song structures, and straight-forward lyrics.  But as those things sometimes do, in this instance they work together really well.  There are times when the more rock-oriented songs on this album remind me of another album full of simplistic guitar parts – Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights, which is a masterpiece.  I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, as this is no Turn On The Bright Lights.  But I’ll be damned if I haven’t listened to it a lot in the past few months.  The guitar parts are simple, but they’re often just really good.  Something about them just clicks with me.  And then there’s the lyrics.  They’re simple and often repetitive (3/4 of the songs must mention difficulty sleeping), but they’re earnest expressions of young love and its loss, and there’s something about that that always stirs up powerful nostalgia in me.  Consider, for example, the opening lyrics to “Wolf”: “I would kill to be your clothes/Cling to your body and hang from your bones/But I could make a mark if you would let me start”.  So it all works.  I’m not sure why, but it does.  Plus the lead guitarist is really cute.

4. Kitsune by Marriages

Now we get to the part of the list where the Isis influence begins to make its presence.  Isis was a metal band that put out some of the best metal albums of the 2000s.  Their members have been prolific, with numerous side projects.  One of those was instrumental rock band Red Sparowes.  Two of the members of Red Sparowes (though none of the ones from Isis) formed a new band this year, Marriages.  They’re not quite a metal band, but they’re definitely on the harder end of the rock spectrum.  This is an album filled with great, swirling, melodic guitar leads and rumbling, driving bass lines.  It also contains what may be the only metal song ever written about being pregnant.  It’s also the rare hard rock band with a female vocalist who has a great rock voice rather than a highly melodic one that contrasts with the more edgy music.  At risk of wandering into cliche territory, it’s also got a really atmospheric feeling to it.  These songs are dense.  This is the kind of album that doesn’t get written often enough anymore, one with consistently great, loud, crunchy guitars.  I’m embedding one song here to keep with the format of this blog entry, but all of Kitsune can be listened to free and legally on the band’s page.

3. No by Old Man Gloom

Round 2 of the Isis connections, this time much more closely.  Old Man Gloom is an experimental metal band fronted by former Isis frontman Aaron Turner.  It’s a super-group of metal/hardcore bands in a sense, also featuring members of Converge and Cave In.  In the past Old Man Gloom’s music has been difficult and unapproachable, which is probably about what you’d expect from an experimental metal band.  No is also a fairly difficult, complex album, but it’s far more approachable than their previous efforts.  The album opens with a two and a half minute track of what is essentially guitar feedback and ambient drones, and the second track ends with 4 minutes of slowly deteriorating noise.  But by the third track the album is veering closer into more recognisable metal territory, and the middle stretch of the album is full of killer guitar parts that it’s virtually impossible not to throw up the devil horns and head-bang to.  Even the more straight-forward songs are still pretty unusual, even in the realm of heavy metal, but the whole thing is put together exceptionally well.  It might be a difficult album to get into, but it definitely rewards patience and repeated listens.  And as I’ve said, some of the guitar riffs are just killer.  The band has released a free stream of the full album, so you should definitely check it out.

2. Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

I find it a bit surprising that a new GY!BE album was released and it wasn’t my favourite album of the year, but here we are and there that is.  Allelujah! is a very good album.  A great album.  But it doesn’t quite live up to their first few releases.  It’s a far more rock-oriented album than any of their others, and while knowing my taste in music you might think I would appreciate that, in the context of GY!BE I don’t necessarily.  One of the things that has made their music so amazing in the past is its other-worldliness.  GY!BE records have always sounded like nothing else on Earth, even though many bands have tried to copy them.  Their previous work mixed orchestral arrangements, standard rock instrumentation, and various field recordings in a completely unique, always exhilirating fashion.  This album maintains a lot of what made them great in the past, but there’s just that little something missing.  But maybe I’m being too hard on this album on account of how mind-blowingly good most of their previous work has been (I’d rate Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven among my top few albums ever released and “Moya” may just be the best song of all time).  This is still a fantastic album, better than all but one that I heard this year.  And you should definitely listen to it too, if you haven’t.  It’s hard to list a sample track since the whole album contains just two 20 minute songs and two shorter interludes, so here’s the better half of the album:

1. Heaven by The Walkmen

And that brings us to #1.  I’ve been asked what it is about The Walkmen that makes them such a fantastic band, and I find it hard to explain.  On the surface they’re just an indie rock band playing indie rock songs.  There’s no one particular thing that sets them apart from all the other bands writing indie rock songs; what makes The Walkmen great is that they do what they do perfectly.  Their albums are full of perfectly written guitar parts, catchy and memorable, backed by a lock-step rhythm section that always drives the songs in the right direction.  There are no wasted notes, no unnecessary parts in Walkmen songs.  While all of The Walkmen’s albums are excellent, every other album is truly top-notch and Heaven falls on the top-notch side of the ledger (along with Bows and Arrows and You and Me).  One of the things that I love about this band is that they do something that almost no other band does: write songs about being a normal person doing normal things.  They write songs about things like reflecting on friends’ weddings and how that makes you feel about where you’re at in your life.  The lyrics, like the music, so frequently hit their mark by leaning toward quiet understatement rather than grand posturing.  Here’s how The Walkmen sing a love song: “You should follow me where it goes/It might take a while but you never know”.  Exactly.  Everything in its right place.

One thing I will say is that I found 2012 to be a pretty disappointing year for games.  I’ve felt for a while now as though the AAA console side of the industry has been moving away from the kinds of games I find interesting.  Almost everything is a shooter of some sort or other now.  When I think about all the great games even one generation of consoles ago, even those that had guns featured them only tangentially (Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 come to mind, Silent Hill 2 & 3 as well, etc.) The JRPG, my favourite genre, has all but dropped off the face of the Earth.  The last good JRPGs I can think of, Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata, came out 5 years ago.  And while I used to be a big fan of action-adventure games, there’s virtually nothing like Beyond Good & Evil being released anymore.  Action-adventure games these days have too much action and not enough adventure.  So I found 2012 to be a fairly unimpressive year for gaming, and I hope 2013 offers more.

But now, let’s dive into the best games of 2012.

5. Dishonored

Dishonored seemed to come out of nowhere.  I’d never heard of it until this spring, when Garnett Lee mentioned it on the Shacknews podcast as a game he’d seen behind closed doors that was really going to blow people away.  Over the course of the year information began trickling out about the game.  First an exciting cinematic trailer.  Then some gameplay.  Then more gameplay.  Suddenly everyone was talking about it.  Part of what made it seem so fun was that it was such a rarity: a big budget game with a new world to explore, and we hadn’t been exposed to it until shortly before it was released.  Before any of us had even played the game it seemed so exciting just because the circumstances surrounding it were so unusual.

And how about the game itself?  It mostly succeeded, although not quite.  The first few levels of the game (after the tutorial area) felt fresh and open and vibrant.  They seemed full of possibility.  They were big, open spaces (or had the appearance of it, anyway) with big, open gameplay.  You could run into enemies head on, though your pistol was not very effective; you could use your magical abilities to confuse or frighten your foes (even possess them!); you could use the fun new Blink ability to shoot up to the rooftops and evade your foes entirely, looking for the perfect line through the rooftops where no one could spot you.

And then, somewhere along the journey it loses its way.  Levels become closed off.  Stealth becomes less viable and also less fun.  Deaths seem to come frequently (at the urging of Rock, Paper, Shotgun I played the game on Hard, so maybe that contributed to that aspect of the game).  I came to realise how unrewarding the stealth often was.  While Metal Gear Solid turned stealth into a game of cat and mouse, where the chase was often half the fun, Dishonored said you were either hidden or fighting; fleeing was often useless and never fun.  And then there’s the plot, which was neither entertaining nor enlightening.  The game increasingly falls back on a tired bag of game design tools, like audio logs, diaries, and one of my least favourite game experiences: getting captured halfway through the game and losing all of your powers.

It sounds like I’m pretty down on the game, but I think that’s because it showed so much promise.  Parts of the game are brilliant.  Parts of the game could have used more work.  But it was almost always fun, and those glimpses of excellence are enough to land this game in my list.

4. Torchlight 2

Diablo 3 may very well be my most played game this year, if measured by the number of hours played.  That’s largely because it had cross-platform (Windows/Mac) co-op, and I’ve played through it with my girlfriend with every character except the Witch Doctor.  (Because the Witch Doctor is pretty terribly racist.  Check out this page to see how Blizzard portrays it.)  While Diablo may have logged more hours for logistical reasons, Torchlight 2 is unambiguously the better dungeon crawler.  In fact, measured purely in terms of gameplay, Torchlight 2 might be the best game I played this year.  On a mechanical level it’s pitch perfect.  It’s well balanced, lovingly crafted, and exceedingly fun from moment-to-moment.  Now, I’m a guy who values other stuff in games too, like story, character, and setting, as you’ll see when you get further down the list.  For that reason, Torchlight 2 sits a bit back on my list.

But while you’re playing Torchlight 2, oh what a game it is.  There are so many moments in Torchlight where I find myself saying “Why couldn’t Diablo do this?”  Some of them are simple, like the fact that resource management (health and mana) is far more tactical in TL2.  Some of them are big, like the fact that boss fights last longer and involve more complex tactics, completely changing how you have to approach them (while in Diablo 3 bosses are all just damage sponges, and not even very good ones most of the time).

To some degree it’s hard to describe why exactly I like Torchlight 2 so much, especially in comparison to the other games on this list, about which I have an awful lot to say.  The best way to describe it is to say that the moment-to-moment tactical decision making is just tremendously fun, and very involving.  It’s a game that requires you to pay attention virtually all of the time.  For a game about bashing things in the face, it provides a surprisingly large variety of ways to do it between different character classes and the viable builds within them.  I felt like the individual skills I was using at any given time, combined with the varying tactics needed to beat different kinds of enemies, made the game feel far more active, more engaging than Diablo 3.

There’s variety in other places, too.  The environments, drawn in a comic book style, are frequently a sight to behold.  There’s a great mixture of sprawling outdoor environments and claustrophobic indoor environments, and which one you’re currently in affects the tactics that are viable.  You almost always have several quests at any given time, and travelling around the map finishing them up is fun.  The Phase Beasts lead to challenge rooms that frequently require the player to approach them in ways that a standard encounter wouldn’t.  There’s just so much here that’s so cleverly designed.  It’s a joy to play.

3. Guild Wars 2

Unlike Dishonored, which approached very suddenly and felt like a mystery, Guild Wars 2 is a game I’d been anxiously waiting for since April 2010, when ArenaNet released its Design Manifesto.  The ideas it contained, and those put forth by ArenaNet in subsequent press for the game, made it sound like they were turning the MMORPG genre into something fresh and exciting.  They talked about breaking up the “Holy Trinity” of DPS/Tank/Healer, of making the game more social, of ridding it of the grind.  Did they succeed?  I think they mostly did.

Many of the games innovations seem so obvious it’s unclear why they hadn’t been done by someone else.  Removing “revive” skills and simply letting any nearby player revive a fallen character makes it feel like you can rely on others in combat.  Because experience is granted for reviving a downed character, strangers will often revive strangers they run across on their adventures; brilliant.  Giving experience points to every player who takes part in a fight rather than just the player who first attacks a monster is a great way to foster cooperation.  Making loot drops unique to each player cuts down on ridiculous fighting over who gets the goods after an enemy has been defeated.

In fact, if there’s one thing that I love most about the Guild Wars 2 experience, it’s that the game constantly finds ways to make players want to work together, even if they’re strangers and may never cross paths again.  This makes the game feel genuinely massive and social at all times.  The world events, not exactly an innovation but very well done in GW2, add to this too.  There is virtually never a downside to working with other players to accomplish your goals and there is almost always something to be gained from it.  I’m a huge fan of online games that cause players to want to work together by the very nature of their design (Left 4 Dead would be another excellent example), and Guild Wars 2 absolutely nails this.  People will frequently talk about how online games prove that people are really selfish and destructive, but games like Guild Wars 2 show that it’s really all about what the design supports.  Give people an environment where teamwork is more fun, and they’ll jump on the opportunity to help each other out.

There are other great things about Guild Wars 2, too, like the joys of simply exploring and the fact that the game rewards you for it, but as this is getting a bit long already I’ll leave my praise there.  With all that said, you may be wondering why a game worthy of this much praise isn’t higher up my list.  There are certainly faults in the game, like the fact that you more or less max out on power and unlock all of your abilities very early on, reducing the feeling of growth that is often pivotal to RPGs.  And the combat, for all the tweaks they’ve made to the MMORPG format, is still not tremendously impressive. Also, while the game has great depth and many innovations, it’s incredibly poor at teaching you to play.  I know we live in an age where MMO players scour wikis and message boards for strategies, builds, etc., but it boggles my mind that in 2012 a game like Guild Wars 2 could be released that doesn’t even explain something as important as the fact that your off-hand weapon gains different abilities based on what primary weapon you have equipped.  Players shouldn’t have to find that out by accident!

Part of it too, is that for me GW2 partly succumbs to its excellent pricing model.  Because there is no subscription to play, I don’t feel any particular sense of urgency to return, knowing that content will all still be there when I want it.  Having written so much praise for the game though, I’m suddenly pretty keen to get back to it.

2. The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is all sorts of things that video games usually aren’t.  It’s episodic (released in 2-3 hour chunks roughly once a month for five months).  It’s only $25 (I picked it up for half that during one of Steam’s sales).  There aren’t a lot of guns.  There are lots of female characters, and none of them runs around half naked with big, bouncing boobs.  There’s a lot of dialogue, and it’s pretty smartly written.  It may go without saying that I was pretty stunned when it won Game Of The Year at the Gametrailers/Spike TV Video Game Awards.  And while you’ve seen that it’s not #1 on my list, I still think it was well deserved.

One of the main complaints levelled at The Walking Dead is that it only offers the illusion of choice.  Since the game is marketed largely as one where the player is frequently faced with difficult plot and character-related decisions, this could be seen as a pretty major blow against the game.  But I think that attack it’s misguided at best and ignorant and mean-spirited at worst.  All video games offer illusions.  Video games are illusion machines.  And the illusions that The Walking Dead offered me were some of the most enthralling illusions that I’ve ever been offered in a video game.

This is a game that you owe it to yourself to play, and since so much of it revolves around potential spoiler territory I’m going to try to avoid describing too many specifics.  But here’s an example of why the game is so great.  The game primarily revolves around the relationship of the player character, Lee, and a little girl named Clem who he is protecting.  Their relationship provides moments of tenseness, tenderness, and all sorts of things in between.  It involves some of the most moving scenes I’ve ever experienced in a video game.  But if the game were just the story of Lee and Clem, it wouldn’t be what it is.

No, to me the thing that really makes the game tick is Kenny.  Kenny is from the southern U.S.  He speaks with a drawl.  He has a handlebar moustache.  He drives a truck.  In any other game, Kenny would be a disaster, a joke for educated suburbanites to laugh at and feel superior to.  In The Walking Dead, he’s a complex, empathetic man whose love for his family is the force driving him to stay strong in a world full of despair and uncertainty.  He’s central to many of the game’s scenes.  He clashes with many characters, including Lee, when he feels that there’s a way to do things that would be better for his family.  Over the course of the game, I developed a bond with Kenny as strong as the bond I’ve formed with any other video game character.  I’d defended him, I’d fought with him, I’d wondered if I’d be better off without him, and I’d stood side-by-side with him through the worst the world could throw at me, knowing it was me and him against the world.  The plot is threaded through Lee and Clem’s relationship, but Kenny and his family are what makes the game truly special.

It’s not a perfect game.  The addition in later episodes of what essentially amount to first-person shooter controls in a few sections was a real let-down.  And the story as a whole gets too action-heavy in the last couple of episodes, which is a shame because The Walking Dead works best when it’s a character drama rather than an action game.  Additionally, given that this is a game from Telltale, whose previous works include the excellent Sam & Max games and the terrific Tales of Monkey Island, I was disappointed that there were virtually no puzzles to solve.  But none of those things significantly detracts from the experience.

And in the end . . . I didn’t cry.  But I was pretty choked up.  The Walking Dead was the most emotionally satisfying experience I had with any piece of fiction in 2012.

1. Mass Effect 3

After saying all that about The Walking Dead, and after all the criticism and controversies surrounding Mass Effect 3, ME3 is still my favourite game of 2012?  It is.  I’ll begin where it makes sense, at the end.  There’s no way around it, the ending of the game is terrible.  But it’s not terrible for the reasons that it’s frequently criticised for.  No, it’s terrible because it’s a deus ex machina, and deus ex machinas are without fail a shitty way to resolve a story.  Apart from the ending itself, the entire last hour or two of the game seems very tonally different from the rest of the series and doesn’t quite work.  It’s yet another example of a story that starts out by building a great mystery (way back in Mass Effect 1) and then unravels when the mystery is solved.

There are other problems with the game too.  The first Mass Effect was a role playing game with some action elements.  The second Mass Effect was an action game with some light role playing.  ME3 tilts slightly back toward the role playing end of the spectrum, but it’s still primarily a third-person shooter.  It’s still not a very tactically involved game, there’s still not much customisation or character growth (in gameplay, not narrative terms), and it still relies almost entirely on twitch reflexes rather than statistics.  It does at times have problems dealing with the complexity of what’s come before, including a number of problems with the narrative that ME2 introduced (like the unnecessary diversion of the Illusive Man storyline).  Because of the possibility that virtually every primary character in Mass Effect 2 can die at the end, ME3 isn’t able to treat the ME2 characters with the gravity or screen time that I think they deserve.

Nevertheless, it’s a fantastic game and, up until the final section, a fitting end to a great series.  People complain that they felt that decisions from previous games didn’t affect Mass Effect 3 enough, but I found decisions I’d made affecting ME3 at every turn.  Take, for example, the game’s ability to pursue romantic relationships with other characters.  In Mass Effect 2, my Commander Sheppard had entered a relationship with Tali.  In Mass Effect 3, before Tali had even entered the story, the option to have a romantic relationship with other characters had been closed off.  This may sound minor, but it’s not: on account of a decision I’d made in a previous game, characters in Mass Effect 3 became more emotionally distant from my Sheppard.  Most games simply let the main character sleep with as many characters as they want, many even reward the player for it through achievements.  But in Mass Effect 3, my decision about a relationship in a previous game still carried narrative weight.  That’s fantastic.

Another example of why Mass Effect’s story-telling is so great: Steve Cortez, the man who manages Normandy’s armory.  During a conversation with Cortez, he mentions that his husband died in a Reaper attack.  The game doesn’t make a big deal about the fact that Cortez is gay.  Neither does Sheppard.  He’s not “Steve, the gay guy”, he’s “Steve, the guy who cares about his spouse”.  This may not seem like much, but given the lack of gay characters in the vast majority of games and the excessive homophobia in some gaming communities, it actually speaks very highly of Bioware.  This matters not because I want games to tick off a nice “liberal” checkbox in their plots, but because it’s moments like this that show that Bioware is capable of making games that are really genuinely mature.  In an industry where “mature” is so often a marketing tool meant to indicate excessive vulgarity, Bioware at its best is capable of creating a much more relatable “maturity”, one that reflects the depth and the humanity of real people.

As I said when describing Torchlight 2, story in games matters to me.  And until the last little bit, Mass Effect 3 nails its story.  Many players complained that the ending didn’t allow them much closure on their relationships with the various members of their crew, but that’s missing the point: the whole game is that closure.  The main characters, like Liara, Tali, and Garrus, receive closure on their stories in the lengthy sections of the game that take place on those characters’ home planets, and elsewhere in the story as well.  The major decision made on the quarian homeworld is the closure on Tali’s story.  And those sections of the game, which take up a significant portion of its playing time, feature great level design, beautiful locations, and emotionally gripping narrative.

I know I’ve not said too much about how Mass Effect 3 plays, but it is a lot of fun to play.  I wish it were more RPG and less action game, but as far as action games go it’s well designed, well balanced, and pretty unique (even if it does involve a lot of shooting, the tech/biotic powers change up the format quite a bit).  Torchlight 2 may be the best game I played this year in terms of mechanics and The Walking Dead may have had the most involving story, but Mass Effect 3 was the game that combined story and gameplay in the way that most engaged me.  That’s why it’s my game of the year.

The way to meet the climate change challenge is by taxing carbon emissions, not by government acting as venture capitalist to the green-energy industry. Fiscal stimulus was necessary in 2009. It’s not an excuse for unending government subsidy to particular industries and firms.

This is a common sentiment among conservatives, and I think it’s worth examing in a bit more detail.  Frum he doesn’t want the government making investment decisions, presumably because he believes the market is better suited to finding efficient solutions than the government is.  Most conservatives are in favour of high military spending, though (admittedly not libertarians, who may favour isolationism as a foreign policy).  While progressives often call for cuts to military spending, believing it to be too high, I don’t think you’d find very many people except at the far left who don’t agree that the government does at least in general need to fund the military.

A significant portion of the funding for the military goes to paying salaries for the people who work in the military.  But a lot of it also goes to the firms that manufacture the equipment and vehicles used by the military; that is to say that a large portion of the military budget is a subsidy to arms manufacturers.  In its most insidious form this is known as the military-industrial complex, but even in a more basic form the point still holds – that the government subsidises military contractors.  And no one really objects to this; while there are all sorts of things that people might wish to do to improve this process, virtually no one believes that on principle the government ought privatise the military and stop “picking winners and losers” in terms of military contractors.  Why is this?

It’s because we recognise the need to provide national security as one of the primary functions of the state.  People at various places on the political spectrum may disagree about what precisely counts as security (resources, housing, etc.) and how best to ensure it, but virtually everyone agrees that security is vital for the state to uphold.  The military, along with diplomacy, is the primary way through which the government carries out the task of ensuring the protection of the people within its borders.  We recognise and accept this, and even though the process of choosing military contractors may not be ideal we don’t for a minute believe that we would be better off letting the private sector protect us from foreign armies or other major threats of violence.  Security is one of the most vital functions of the state.

Global warming is a significant threat to our security.  The impacts of Hurricane Sandy in places like New York and New Jersey this week has been a visceral indicator of what, exactly, might be in store for us.  Before anyone jumps on me here, it’s absolutely true that it is unlikely that global warming directly caused Hurricane Sandy, but the evidence strongly suggests that global warming will make hurricanes worse.  While there is some disagreement about whether global warming will actually increase the number of hurricanes, there’s widespread agreement that global warming will increase the intensity of them; see, for example, here or here or here.  In fact, one study published last year in the prestigious academic journal Nature found that intensifying hurricanes were likely to cause New York to be hit with a highly increased rate of major flooding.

Hurricane intensity is the topic du jour on account of the events of the past few days, but they’re hardly the only security threat that global warming poses.  Climate models predict large increased rates of wildfires, for example.  Food security is another huge issue, and a number of studies have found that global warming “will affect all four dimensions of food security, namely food availability (i.e., production and trade), access to food, stability of food supplies, and food utilization”.  Food security affects people directly in terms of hunger and malnutrition, but its effects on national security are even greater than that, as decreased availability of food will almost certainly lead to more widespread instability as nations fight over diminishing resources.

These are not just the views of some crazy lefties; the view that global warming is a serious issue related to national security has been voiced by The Pentagon (pg. 84):

Climate change and energy are two key issues that will play a significant role in shaping the
future security environment. Although they produce distinct types of challenges, climate change,
energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked. The actions that the Department
takes now can prepare us to respond effectively to these challenges in the near term and in the
future.

As well as the U.S. Navy:

“Climate change will affect the type, scope, and location of future Navy missions, so it’s essential that naval force structure and infrastructure are delivered at the right time and at the right cost,” Titley explained. “That will depend upon a rigorous assessment of future requirements and capabilities, and an understanding of the timing, severity, and impact of the changing climate, based on the best available science,” he added.

A wide array of foreign policy think-tanks have also put out reports discussing the seriousness of the threat, including the American Security Project (which includes on its board of directors a number of former military officials in addition to John Kerry and Chuck Hagel), the Center for Naval Analyses (funded by the U.S. Navy), and the Center for a New American Security (whose founders are both now high ranking foreign policy officials in the Obama administration).

[As a brief aside before I wrap up here, it has struck me for some time that it's very odd that in order to be considered a Very Serious Person you have to be very hawkish on the threat that Iran is said to pose to global security.  I think most people agree that nuclear weapons are a serious danger and that we ought to try to limit their spread (except, some would argue, to their own government, which naturally ought to abide by a separate set of rules).  And yet being in order to be considered a Very Serious Person on global warming - an issue with significant security ramifications which seems likely to result in the deaths of millions of people - you have to be against taking any serious action to halt the threat.  That dichotomy has never sat very well with me.]

Global warming is a significant threat to our security.  As such, we ought to treat it like national security and not like a problem with markets.  That means that the government ought to be highly involved in funding and directing solutions to help us combat it.  Spending money on things like renewable resource generation isn’t just about deciding what companies are worth investing in, it’s about making important decisions to protect the security of our own countries and the stability of the international community as a whole.  That does not preclude also using market-based mechanisms like a carbon tax or a cap and trade system, but it does mean that the government needs to be heavily involved in studying, designing, and implementing the overall framework within which we tackle these growing threats, just like it is with other significant security threats.

This isn’t a question of right vs left views on the environment or the econonomy or what the proper role of government is.  We all agree that a fundamental function of government is to protect its people.  So it’s time to let the government do that by make major investments in the technology necessary to combat global warming.

Then earlier this week Adrian Chen, writing at Gawker, revealed the offline identity of a man who he described as “the biggest troll on the web“.  Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail chimed in this morning saying that “The Gawker-Reddit thing really shows that anonymity serves no useful role in online communities.”  He then went on to say that “The whole point about an online community is that it’s *public.* Anonymity fine for email, makes no sense in public.”  So I figured maybe I should finally get around to writing that blog post about why anonymity on the Internet is a good thing.

As far as Saunders’ argument goes, I’ve taken two tweets out of a sequence, so I would urge you to go through his feed and follow the whole thread to see what he was saying in more detail.  Also, he’s got a great Twitter feed so if you’re interested in politics (Canadian or otherwise) I’d definitely recommend giving him a follow.  He discusses his views on privacy/anonymity in some more detail in this piece, so you can give that a read too to get a bit more information on his perspective.  I really strongly disagree with a lot of it, especially his conflation of state/organization/personal privacy, but that’s a complicated issue for another day.

I want to be clear before going any further that my intent here is not to delve too deeply into the legal questions around these issues which are many and complex.  What I’m more interested in is arguing that whether or not it deserves legal protections, anonymity is unambiguously a good thing to preserve on the World Wide Web, at least in instances where people desire it.  People should be free to post under their real names should they desire to do so, and I post under my real name on at least one web site that enforces a real name policy, but I do think in many cases anonymity is a net benefit.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE GENDER, MAN

One thing that’s really important to keep in mind here is that this is often a highly gendered issue.  For women, anonymity online isn’t just a question of identity, it’s also often a question of safety.  I’ve worked in the video game industry, done some game development independently outside of it, and gaming is one of my primary hobbies; it’s an area I know a good deal about, so I’m going to focus on it for a minute.  Women often hide their identities in gaming communities because if they don’t, they’re pretty likely to be subject to harassment over it.  Here are just a couple of examples of the many articles detailing this behaviour for anyone who isn’t familiar with it.

It is obviously true that women shouldn’t have to put up with that type of  behaviour in gaming communities, but even if we take better steps to reduce it (like stronger moderation, which I’m in favour of) many women will continue to be harassed outside of the games themselves; better moderation does nothing to change the fact that some male gamers are tremendous douchebags who will track women down outside of the games and harass them elsewhere.

Thus we’re left with two choices: either allow anonymity in these communities to reduce the odds that women will be harassed for their gender or disallow anonymity and tell women to suck it up.  If we follow the second choice, we’re left with two problems.  The first is that women who want to continue to be a part of these communities will now have no choice but to subject themselves to harassment.  The second is that many women will choose to leave these communities entirely.  Anonymity in this scenario provides very obvious benefits.

Part of the idea behind making people use real identities is that they will be less likely to do things like harass women if their behaviour is attached to their real name.  While this may be true in some cases, on the whole it’s hopelessly naive thinking.  When I used to work for a major game developer a number of the men who worked there engaged in this kind of behaviour in person in the workplace (that management had no interest in dealing with the problem certainly didn’t help).

It’s also true online that the worst offenders are often not especially concerned about people discovering their real identities.  Earlier this year Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a video series about the tropes surrounding female characters in video games.  I won’t give you all the details, but this is one of many stories outlining what happenned.  Among the many forms of harassment that Sarkeesian was subject to, one person made a game in which users could “punch” an image of her face, causing it to become increasingly battered.  When the creator of the game, Ben Spurr, was discovered, he didn’t back down or apologise.  Instead, under his real name and beside a picture of himself, he defended the game.  So too did a number of other men, as captured in this Storify piece about the situation.  Anonymity doesn’t stop trolls.  If anything, real names embolden them because now they have a clear target who is a readily identifiable person to harass.

While I’ve focussed on gaming industry scenarios here because they’re what I’m most familiar with, this is a problem that goes well outside of gaming communities.  Earlier this year at the New Statesman, Helen Lewis wrote a piece collecting the stories of harassment from other female writers.  They were subject to threats of vicious violence, rape, and murde just as Sarkeesian was.  These threats sometimes contain personal details like phone numbers and addresses.  While, thankfully, I’m not aware of any women who have actually been tracked down and assaulted or murdered by online trolls, I think threats and intimidation are still a very serious issue that we ought to treat as such.

Many women do choose to reveal their identities online, of course, but for the reasons I’ve outlined (and others I haven’t, 1000 words into this post) I think it’s a clear benefit to society as a whole (and women in particular) if their ability to remain anonymous online is retained.

[As if on cue, this was retweeted into my Twitter feed as I was writing this post.  There's a guy who has no problem defending slut-shaming as "socially beneficial" on a Twitter profile that as far as I can tell lists his real name beside an actual photo of his face.  That comment may not constitute harassment on its own, but it's certainly a defence of harassment.]

ALL THE WEB’S A STAGE, AND YOUR LIFE IS A SCRIPT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAN

One of the major challenges of the ways in which our lives have become connected to and lived through the World Wide Web is that we don’t really yet have a handle on what it means that “the Internet is forever”.  I’m sure lots of people thinking that they do, maybe some of them even do, but I sure don’t and in general I don’t think very many other people do either.  For example, Facebook has only been online for 8 years and has only been open to the general public for 6.  In August of 2008 (just 4 years ago) Facebook had 100 million users, which is only 10% of what is currently has.  Half of all Facebook accounts were created in the past 2 years.  [Wikipedia used for these figures.]  These kinds of technologies are all very new, and it’s virtually impossible to say what kind of effects their continued existence will have several decades from now.

What does this mean though and why should we care?  I’ll give a personal example to demonstrate what I’m getting at.  When I was a teenager, I struggled with depression (I’m depression free and live a very happy life now, if you were wondering).  At the time, like many other people, I kept a blog which was more like a diary than the story-based blogging we’re familiar with now.  And in my blog I wrote about my depression: how I felt, what I thought, how it affected my life.  I did this anonymously.  And I shared this blog and these thoughts with people from other online communities I was a part of, all of which I was a part of anonymously.  Being able to have these outlets to discuss my experiences with depression was helpful, cathartic.  It didn’t fix my problems but it made me feel like someone, somewhere, was concerned (and in the comments I got, people told me that they were).  At the time, that was very important to me.

What if I hadn’t been able to write those posts anonymously?  I certainly would have felt worse to not write them at all.  That would have made my life as a teenager much more difficult, maybe even unbearable.  But if I had written them under my real name, I would have been risking subjecting myself to ridicule and harassment at school, possibly at home as well.  Having an anonymous blog and an anonymous identity in various online communities was a big help to me.

Here’s how this ties into the idea that “the Internet is forever” though: if those comments were attached to my real name and identity, I would essentially be marked with them forever.  Potential employers, for example, could search for my name, find what I’d written, and be scared off from hiring me.  Not hiring someone on the basis of mental illness is illegal, of course, but how would anyone ever know that blog posts I’d written about depression as a teenager were affecting my employment as an adult?

Beyond that, I certainly said and did some very stupid things as a teenager, as virtually everyone does.  Is it really a net benefit to society for those things to be captured in perpetuity in an easily searchable format on the Internet?  I certainly don’t think that it is.  In many cases teenagers post the stupid things they do online under their real names anyway, but I was smart enough not to do that and I’m very thankful that it would be difficult (though not impossible) to learn much about my teenage years through even a very detailed web search (I know how difficult it is because I’ve tried and even armed with very specific information like the pseudonyms I used to post under there’s very little that I was able to turn up).

Now let’s extend this a bit: what if it wasn’t just a few stupid things you’d said as a teenager, but all of the things you’d ever said on the Internet that were available for anyone who wanted to find them?  What if every time you started a new relationship you knew your new significant other would be able to find out all about all the messy break-ups you’d ever written about online just by throwing your name into Google?  What if a potential employer could find out that you played a lot of World of Warcraft, decide that you aren’t likely to be a very good worker, and not hire you?  What if the parishoners at your church could easily find out about something you said or did that they found to be against their beliefs and harassed you for it, especially if you’re part of a community or a family where religion is considered a vital part of social and communal life?  You hcould argue that maybe you shouldn’t want to be a part of that church or that workplace or that relationship, but that’s beside the point – how does enabling these things make our lives better?

It’s possible, of course, that your online identity could be connected to your real life identity even if you use a pseudonym, and as an adult I’ve been much more careful about making sure that I wouldn’t be overly concerned about anything that I say in places like this blog or my Twitter account being attached to my real name at some indeterminate point in the future.  But I would still be a bit less open, a bit less honest, and a bit less interesting if I had no choice but to attach my real identity to them.  I’m aware of the fact that my real identity could become known, but the fact that it’s not especially likely that my real name could be attached to everything I’ve ever said certainly makes me more willing to say what I hope are interesting things.

Here are a few more examples to drive this home: does it provide any real net benefit to society if your boss can quickly and easily find all of the videos you’ve ever commented on on Youtube?  What about if the oppressive religious parents of an LGBT teenager could effortlessly discover the sexual identity that their child felt obliged to hide just by typing their name into Google?  Is our political system going to become any better if the generation of politicians who have grown up using the web were to have their entire online lives dragged through the mud if they run for office when they’re 40?  Anonymity provides many benefits.

WHOSE PUBLIC IS IT, ANYWAY?

One last thing that I want to talk about is the nature of the terms “public” and “anonymous” and what we mean by them.  It may sound like this would have been a good topic to start with, but I think it goes well at the end here, so here we are and there that is.  I have a problem with the way we mark the public/private divide in terms of the Internet.  We often discuss the World Wide Web as though all of it is the same, but it’s not.  Some forums are viewable to anyone who visits them; my posts about hockey on Pension Plan Puppets fall into this category.  But many other things on the web are sectioned off either through limited/audited registration or personal privacy settings: my Facebook account with all of the settings set to “Private” falls in this category.  There are also other things that fall into a bit of a grey area, like online games that limit the number of players who can enter them or require a password to join but are nevertheless on “public” servers.

A lot of people argue that anything on Facebook is essentially posted in public, regardless of privacy settings (Facebook’s constant attempts to frustrate users who try to maintain privacy don’t help).  Part of this argument is that anything posted on Facebook can very easily be shared, so we ought to act as though it’s public.  But this is akin to arguing that because anything I send through the postal service can be taped to a lamp post I ought to treat all of my correspondence as public, or that because any of my conversations may be surreptitiously recorded I ought to treat all of my conversations as public.  This may sound somewhat silly, but it is essentially the argument made by people like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who really does think our lives ought to be lived in public.  [As an aside, I'm not sure how seriously we ought to take that assertion; Facebook stands to make a lot of money from advertising if it can connect everything users do to a real identity.  {As an aside to my aside, some of the things Facebook already does in that regard are pretty unethical and at some point I should get around to writing about it.}]

It’s also worth noting that in a pretty significant number of our interactions offline, anonymity, not identity is the default (I may have stolen that point from someone, and if so I apologise for not remembering who and giving you credit for it).  When you go to the grocery store the other shoppers know nothing about you aside from what you look like (and, if they’re nosy, what you’re buying).  The cashier doesn’t know any more about you unless you hand them a credit card with your name on it.  In fact, in this kind of interaction the “real life” people you’re interacting with very likely know less about you than the people in almost any online community you participate in anonymously.

And this is true even in situations where we see people more often.  For example, I play in a recreational basketball league.  Aside from my teammates (who are also coworkers) and the league organisers, no one in the league knows anything about me.  No one knows my name (though they might pick it up if one of my teammates shouts it out), no one knows where I work, how old I am, where I live, or any other personal information about me.  They could find many of these things out by asking me, but that’s not any different than any online community.

It’s certainly true that there is a degree to which it is easier to hold me accountable for my actions in the basketball league than in an online community, particular if my behaviour were to descend into outright harassment or some criminal form of activity.  But generally speaking I remain anonymous in all aspects but my appearance to the other basketball teams, and no one really consideres this to be a major flaw of organised sports.  So if we don’t want to be able to connect the people we play basketball with to things like their address or their job, why do we think these things are necessary or beneficial in online communities?

To connect this back to what I was talking about in the previous section, think about things this way: if you’re at a restaurant with some friends, everything that you say is essentially “public”.  If you were to be quoted in a newspaper or mocked on a Twitter feed for something you said at that restaurant, for example, you’d not have much cause to complain.  And much of the World Wide Web is public just like that restaurant is.  But there’s a significant difference with the WWW, which is that it’s pretty much recorded forever.

So imagine that not only were your conversations in restaurants theoretically public, imagine if every restaurant you ate at had tape recorders to capture everything you said and then published those conversations somewhere easily accessible by the general public.  And imagine that not only were those conversations available, but they were very clearly attached to your real name and identity.  That’s basically what a non-anonymous Internet is.

And in this scenario I’d be willing to bet that most people would either stop going to restaurants, would try to get laws passed preventing this behaviour for the sake of privacy, or would try to find ways to ensure that their conversations were more difficult to attach to their real identities (perhaps by wearing disguises in restaurants or masking their voices in some way).  We would almost certainly not tolerate such behaviour in offline “public” spaces, so why should it be not just acceptable, but the norm in online public spaces?

So I think there is a very strong case to be made for anonymity online.  There are pretty clear and very strong benefits to be gained from it.  The idea that getting rid of anonymity will dramatically improve behaviour online is idealistic and naive.  In many (but not all) cases there are significant downsides to be had from discouraging or not allowing anonymity.  And anonymity is usually the default offline, and that seems to me to be much better than the alternative.  So let’s keep anonymity.  And let’s recognise that it’s actually kind of a good thing after all.

[Please note that I am not defending anonymity as a inviolable or absolute, nor am I defending any one particular case of anonymity; I mean this as an argument in favour of anonymity as an option in principle.]

“This is worse than normal, a lot less fun, and it feels impossible for us to change the conversation”

Or:

Reporters feel like both campaigns have decided to run out the clock with limited press avails, distractions, and negative attacks, rather than run confident campaigns with bold policy platforms or lofty notions of hope and change

And:

“The fact is, we are under-covering the economy, we are under-covering — but you cover the campaign that is in front of you”

Emphasis in those quotes added by me to highlight something I’m going to get to a bit later in this post, but keep that line of thought in mind as we proceed.  Reporters also complained about the general speed of the news cycle and the need they feel to keep up with Twitter (they say that they really do need to, I think it’s something dumb that they’ve convinced themselves of).

* * *

Let’s talk about something else for a minute.  It’ll all tie together, just stick with me for a bit.  On the second night of last week’s Democratic National Convention the keynote speaker was Bill Clinton.  His speech was quite long and it was filled with concrete facts and economic statistics.

The speech was a huge hit.  Slate’s “snap poll” of immediate reactions found that nearly twice as many respondents believed Bill Clinton gave the best speech of the convention in comparison to Barack Obama – and Obama himself was elected largely on account of his skill at oration.  Additionally, 56.8% of respondents said they were more likely to vote Democrat after hearing Clinton’s speech.  A Gallup poll also found that voters were impressed by Clinton, as 56% said his speech was either “excellent” or “good”;  this compares to 43% for Obama and 38% for Romney.  Even among Republicans 58% said Clinton’s speech was either “excellent”, “good”, or “OK”!  Some of that may come down to the fact that it’s easier for voters to say that they like a politician of the opposing stripe once he’s left office, but the gap here is so big that I think a lot of it really did have to do with the quality of Clinton’s speech.

It wasn’t just voters who enjoyed Clinton’s speech;  a wide range of political reporters and columnists were impressed too.  The Atlantic has a good collection of responses.  What was one of the most common themes among the reactions?  That Clinton succeeded because he trusts voters to be able to pay attention to and understand the details of policy.  American reporters/commentators in my Twitter feed overwhelmingly expressed that opinion.  Jon Stewart ran a segment the next night expressing joyous confusion over the substance of Clinton’s speech.  Under the headline “Why Bill Clinton’s Speeches Succeed” Atlantic correspondent James Fallows opened with the following sentence “Because he treats listeners as if they are smart,” before continuing to explain exactly how he does that.  Over at The Washington Post, Ezra Klein approvingly called Clinton “Wonk-In-Chief”.  Over at the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry said “I wish someone had given this sort of speech at the Republican convention” because he “like[d] the instinct to make a wonky case for the president on substance”.

People sought out Bill Clinton’s speech too.  The combined view count for the top 3 most viewed videos for “bill clinton dnc 2012″ on Youtube have Clinton’s speech being viewed by 4.75 million people.  Compared that to Barack Obama (3.9 million) or Mitt Romney (about a million) or Clint Eastwood (3.4 million).

So the speech was a huge success.  Pundits loved it.  Democrats loved it.  Republicans respected and were even a bit impressed by it.  And the reason they all loved it was because he had the audacity to hope that voters would want to know what the people who want to run their country would actually do if they were put in charge.

* * *

What does this have to do with the Politico article I talked about above?  The political journalists I (/Politico) cited above complained that the current campaign was lacking in detail and that they wished the campaigns would talk more about policy.  They said that they had no power to change the conversation.  And yet all it took was one speech from a former President and everyone was talking about policy.  And not only were they talking about policy, they were talking about how much they all loved talking about policy.  It turns out that people really do want to hear that.  And they want to talk about it too.

So I’ve got an idea: if the political media wants a discussion about policies, then the political media needs to have that discussion itself.  If Paul Ryan won’t answer questions about what his budget proposals contain, do some digging and find out!  Call some experts, crunch some numbers, tell your readers what Ryan won’t!  The always reliable Paul Krugman has talked about this issue a number of times but it virtually never gets mentioned in mainstream reporting.  If reporters started talking in every article relating to Romney/Ryan about how Ryan’s budget plan would actually increase the deficit I’ll bet they’d feel the need to start talking about those issues pretty quickly.  They might even start answering direct questions from reporters about those issues.  This is the power that the media does have to change the conversation.  Bill Clinton already showed you that you like that kind of thing and they showed you that voters do too.  Use that power!

The truth is that politicians can get away with spinning the media only because the media allows itself to be spun.  If politicians are never made to answer for their claims (or worse, never forced to make claims to begin with!) then they know that they can benefit from being hopelessly vague.  But the media can change that.  There’s a ridiculous focus on “balance” in the media, a sort of false objectivity that has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with elevating subjectivity, but even within that framework there’s a lot that can be done.  Write an article about how Ryan’s budget plan would increase rather than decrease the deficit.  Consult the work done by the Tax Policy Center and the Congressional Budget Office and report on what they’ve said about the Ryan budget.  Ask the Democrats to talk about it; I’ll bet you’d have no problem finding someone in the Democratic Party willing to tell you what they think is wrong with Ryan’s budget.  And if the Ryan/Romney team won’t talk about it?  If they won’t answer questions about it?  Run the article without them.  Say that they refused the chance to provide clarifications or explanations.  Run with that work over and over again.  You don’t think Romney/Ryan will feel the need to start providing some kind of rebuttal once that information gets widely circulated?  Of-fucking-course they will.  The political media can make that happen.

I’ve only talked about the Ryan budget plan so far, but reporters could do this for all kinds of issues.  Not enough talk about Obama’s plans for Afghanistan?  Then write articles about what he’s done so far.  Talk about the troop surge.  Talk about how the situation is still a mess.  Talk about how the pull-out from Iraq has failed to result in any increased stability in the region.  Talk about what Obama has the military doing in Yemen or Somalia rather than leaving Jeremy Scahill to single-handedly cover these topics at The Nation.  Ask the politicians what they’ve learned from the mess the U.S. created in the Middle East.  Make them answer.  Talk about the issues until they have no choice but to get involved in that conversation or allow their chances to be (re-)elected to rest on someone else’s framing of the issues.

The political media says it wants those conversations.  It praises Bill Clinton for trying to have them.  It talks about how much voters appreciate being treated like policy matters, and they do.  Tired of boring campaigns without enough conversations about substantive policy matters?  Then there’s only one thing for the political media to do: go make those conversations happen.

YOU AND VALVE AGREE TO RESOLVE ALL DISPUTES AND CLAIMS BETWEEN US IN INDIVIDUAL BINDING ARBITRATION. THAT INCLUDES, BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO, ANY CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO: (i) ANY ASPECT OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US; (ii) THIS AGREEMENT; OR (iii) YOUR USE OF STEAM, YOUR ACCOUNT OR THE SOFTWARE. IT APPLIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER SUCH CLAIMS ARE BASED IN CONTRACT, TORT, STATUTE, FRAUD, UNFAIR COMPETITION, MISREPRESENTATION OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY.

And also that:

YOU AND VALVE AGREE NOT TO BRING OR PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION, PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION OR COLLECTIVE ARBITRATION, EVEN IF AAA’s PROCEDURES OR RULES WOULD OTHERWISE ALLOW ONE. THE ARBITRATOR MAY AWARD RELIEF ONLY IN FAVOR OF THE INDIVIDUAL PARTY SEEKING RELIEF AND ONLY TO THE EXTENT OF THAT PARTY’S INDIVIDUAL CLAIM.

This follows similar moves by both Sony and Microsoft on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles respectively.  Both companies were following on the heels of AT&T, which instituted a similar waiver in their Terms Of Service at least as far back as 2006.  The State of California passed a law banning such clauses, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that states do not have the power to implement such laws, and so these waivers are currently legal in the U.S.  I do not know of a case where such a waiver has ever been tested in another jurisdiction, so I can’t speak to their legality elsewhere.

These changes are not meaningless.  In 2005 Sony settled a class action lawsuit dealing with disc read errors on Playstation 2 consoles.  Sony has also faced class actions in relation to their removal of Other OS support from the Playstation 3 as well as the theft of customer data from the Playstation Network.  Microsoft has not been spared either, as they were sued over the infamous Red Ring Of Death problems with the Xbox 360.  I couldn’t find information on how any of those lawsuits other than the PS2 disc read error one were resolved, but there is at least one instance of a class action succeeding against one of these corporations.

I have a number of problems with these waivers and they relate to problems with Terms Of Service agreements more generally.  One of the problems is the ability for companies to update Terms Of Service at virtually any time, thus changing the rules that consumers have to operate under.  Let’s say that I own a 360, PS3, and some number of games on Steam (all of which are true).  In the past year I have now had my legal rights restricted in relation to products I have already paid for in ways that were not present when I paid for those products.  For example, Xbox Live Indie Games will not play on an Xbox 360 without an active Xbox Live connection nor can a user play an online game without an active Playstation Network connection.  Therefore, consumers are presented with two options – agree to new rules arbitrarily thrust upon them or lose access to content they already paid for under different rules.  That this is patently unfair is, I think, pretty obvious.

One could, of course, refuse the agreement and not be bound by the new terms, but in that case they would lose access to something bought under a perfectly fair prior agreement.  And yes, in theory customers should know that a Terms Of Service agreement can be modified and thus they are in some way agreeing to the potential for the rules to change at some point in the future, but without legal limits on the ways in which these contracts can be modified a consumer is presented with an impossible scenario in which they are required to attempt to foresee every possible change that could ever be made to the agreement before deciding whether or not to use a service.  This is completely unreasonable.

Making matters worse, most consumers probably don’t read Terms Of Service agreements.  You can say that in theory they should, but the suggestion is not feasible; The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal has reported on a study which found that to read the Terms Of Service agreements you’re bound to in just one year would take 78 work days – and that was just for the TOSs from web sites, no mention of cell phone providers, video game manufacturers, etc..  No human being can reasonably be expected to do this.

Combating these problems is going to require legislation.  What we need are a set of legally standardised Terms Of Service agreements.  A number could exist – for example, one for web pages, one for telecommunications, one for software, etc.  But the important thing is that users should only have to read one TOS in order to understand their rights and responsibilities.  There could be room for some negotiation within them (for example, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a cable company to raise rates with reasonable notice that they intend to do so) but fundamental rules like what your legal remedies are ought to be standardised and non-changing.  Let’s say we create 10 TOS under this new law for various kinds of goods and services.  That works out to an hour and forty minutes of reading.  That’s still a fair amount, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable and since they would only ever change when legislation changed users wouldn’t have to keep re-reading new agreements all the time to keep up with changes.

This would allow consumers to have a much better idea what specifically they’ve agreed to and it would also level the playing field by ensuring that companies could not cut off access to goods or services already paid for by unilaterally changing the rules.  I should say that I would include Privacy Policies as part of these standardised TOSs, but I have a number of ideas for fixing Privacy Policies and that’s a complicated issue for another day.  Consumers should have the right to know what rules they’re being governed by and to have those rules be consistent.  The only way we can ever fix that is through legislation because it’s clear that corporations are going to continue pushing those boundaries as far as lawmakers let them.

In response, detractors of unions will often say that, sure, those things are important, but now we live in a different society where those kinds of things are guaranteed and now unions are just being greedy and fighting for things that aren’t affordable.  So, here’s the thing that strikes me about that – people said the exact same things about the kinds of things unions fought for in the past that most people now appreciate.  “We can’t afford it”, “unions are just being greedy”, etc., those are the kinds of arguments that have been used to fight against all manner of social progress for as long as unions and liberal democracy have existed.

I’ve mentioned this before and I think it’s worth repeating: if a certain kind of social progress has been necessary throughout human history up until the exact moment during which you live, that suggests that it’s probably worth taking a step back and examining whether the need for that kind of progress has really ceased to exist.  It is of course possible that you do live during a moment in time during which that issue has been resolved; after all, if the issue ever is resolved, some set of people has to be the group to be alive at the time.  But when history seems to come together in such a way that progress ceases to be necessary precisely when you’re the one being asked to fight for it or possibly sacrifice for it, it seems to me highly likely to me that there’s a little bit more going on and that we should reflect on what that might be.