video games at the heart of empire
as revolutionary art/ as modern warfare
When freed from the clock, a new sort of time emerges and develops. Not too distant from how the chemicals of a polaroid develop from a snapshot of light entering into the still of the film, the chemicals in your mind change their tenor when left to their own interpretations of time passing outside the clock on the wall or the time on your phone.
One of the more cutting indictments of digital spaces of the 2010s is how purely and truly inescapable the time of day is within our day-to-day lives. A hundred years ago, time was felt more personally. It was experienced differently by different people. Clocks had to be wound according to a communal consensus of the time given by clock towers and the like. Now, having since the pandemic had our lives subsumed almost completely underneath the efficient, pixelated banners of digital spaces, with a culture of work from home led on by surrounding ourselves with devices that prioritize the time and the date, we’re never truly or actually “off the clock” anymore. Even in our leisure, we find ourselves ambiently tracking just how many hours we have remaining to ourselves, — and there’s no escape, either, for when we open our phones the time and date are inescapable.
The time and date could easily be pointed to in the corner of your browser, at the top of your phone’s screen, as a culprit of the massive anxious fog over our increasingly efficient world, feeling increasinly off as the structures of our reality are increasingly prescribed back to us by the most streamlined means. Even reading these words now, look around for the time and the date. I’m sure it’s there. If not immediately visible, think to yourself: is that a conscious omission? Why?
Anyways, there’s something to be said along this vein about the Video Games as a social phenomena and I’m going to make an attempt at it. Video games are perhaps the most profound revolutionary digital art form in part because of their abandonment of real time; they’re a mode of escape into a manufactured temporality, a time that’s shared between player and programmer, an exercise in immersion with the potential to create radical forms not just of being (which games can similarly promote) but radical forms of experiencing moments and time.
And besides, games are such a comfort now and then! In the winter months when the temperature drops to well below freezing for weeks on end, I wage a solitary war in my apartment against the dust that wants nothing more than to float in the air and choke me out, and a good video game has done so well to protect me from the anxiety I feel at living on the clock.
Returning out into the real from the conch shell of a game, there’s a new feeling in my heart that had been so cast aside by the real world’s clock, having spent so much time being an inhabitant of another world’s feel I can feel my soul blossom up a promise: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.
Yet… on the other hand…
The US armed forces have become increasingly tied up with recruting through Twitch and multi-million dollar franchises such as Call of Duty to increase their recruiting goals. Call of Duty and Rainbow Six specifically present the same type of digital time-off the beaten path of our living off the clock as do all video games, but these escapes are overly encouraging of a militaristic, nationalistic feeling. This differs from the individualistic frenzy of a game like Fortnite which would better represent the soul and promise of free-market capitalism.
All art is political, — the same goes for video games.
But keep in mind that the feel of a Call of Duty game is increasingly similar to the ways in which America fights its wars. Drones are manned by controllers not too much more complex than an elaborate gaming rig. The way in which modern warfare is fought is cohering closer and closer to the vision of it in games such as Modern Warfare.The simulation now perpetrates the real.
And certainly, with an average age of 20 years old, a good number of the IDF plays Call of Duty games as they release.
the heart of empire
~Okay, so I don’t normally do this but I’m going to toss a trigger warning at the start of this section: there’s discussion of some sexual abuses by prison guards at the Sde Teiman against Palestinian prisoners who may be members of Hamas or may just be assumed to be withholding information important to Israeli authorities, and the abuses… well, they’re a lot… and I only touch on them briefly, but… Idk, just a heads up I guess ~
In November, a prominent Palestinian surgeon died in an IDF prison camp, tortured to death, likely raped with various metal instruments, — it was said the surgeon was unable to sit down afterwards as he died and this sort of thing has been reported as common in the prison where he was held, — and tossed into the main yard of the prison to die slowly for the rest of the prisoners to watch.
In August, there was a court tribunal in Israel over the rampant gang rapes in prisons such as Sde Teiman, and many hours of debate were held by Israeli legislators as to whether gang rape by prison guards, or, in one specific moment, whether a "to insert a stick into a person's rectum", constituted as rape or if it constituted as a completely justified as a mode of interrogation. A handful of prison guards accused of such abuses deferred blame away from themselves by saying that they had been just defending themselves against violent inmates. It’s hard to imagine anything more disgusting than this.
A handful of IDF officers were arrested for engaging in gang rape as a method of torture, but soon enough a gathering of far-right Israelis stormed the courthouse to demand that those accused be released from police custody. Meanwhile Israeli cabinet member said those accused were “our best heroes.” And as the perpetrators were soon released, one was interviewed on an Israeli late night show where he also played Jimmy Fallon style games with the two hosts.
Israel’s mass media seems an acute echo of the American mass media: millennial oriented late night shows, centrist-right media spin, and an allowance for far-right freaks. This is all very telling because as Israel remains a proxy state of the United States’ foreign policy, it’s also a proxy state for the United States’ repressed original mandate of Manifest Destiny.
Israeli settler groups, for whom many have Israeli and American legislators and prominent politicians lobbied deep into their pockets, — and Israeli property development companies have been eagerly and openly working out plans to develop the now-leveled Gaza strip into hotels and luxury apartments, beachfront properties and shopping centers. This past spring, Palestinian property was for sale at Synagogues in the Los Angeles, resulting in protests outside by Free Palestine protestors who were quickly described as anti-semitic by CNN. So goes the American media spin.
I should mention that the United States is not alone in pouring their repressed nationalistic instinct into Israel, for Germany is another culprit encouraging the crimes of the IDF against the Palestinian people; as the second greatest donor of military support to Israel’s expansion into Palestinian territory, Germany also possesses an ideology at its founding at expanding the “reich,” — this is something that they’ve repressed since the horrors they perpetrated in the second world war but they haven’t shaken it yet and Israel remains a decent-enough proxy for that feeling.
Certainly neither the US nor Germany can lean into these nationalistic, expansionary tendencies, at least domestically, on their neighbor countries, — though the incoming Trump administration may change this, not in making any of it better, but in bringing a sense of manifest destiny to America’s borders, to Mexico, as per rumors around Trump’s administration may point out, and even, joking in classic Trump style, to Canada.
So this brings up a real question about Trump’s isolationist policy. What would such a death drive look like as applied domestically in the current age of rapidly decaying neoliberalism? We can look to the war on Palestine for this as well.
The American military and police forces are deeply tied up with the training and the practices of the IDF, so much so that following the public execution of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin it was revealed that Minnesota’s police force had been trained in “restraint techniques” by “top-notch professionals from the Israeli police.” It’s not hard to imagine, either, for the climate refugee camps of the future to be surveilled by the police in not too different a manner than how the IDF surveilled Gaza.
This remains why the Israel/Palestine issue, despite being separated from us by the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, should remain paramount to how we as Americans view the American state in the twenty-first century because what they crimes they condone over there they would condone domestically.
Palestine is the empire’s open-air laboratory for new surveillance technologies and new mechanisms for oppression and mass murder but also for just how much the state can get away with without losing the American public’s complete support.
This should say something about whether the leaders in the United States actually have any sort of moral compass at all. While Republicans openly gloat about their lack of a moral compass when it comes to minorities, the Democrats only claim one in opposition.
When stacked upon all of the other moral deficiencies ranging from the increased unavailability of health coverage and housing, supported in policy by a majority of the Democratic party, the situation in Gaza, and then the general lying over in the face of Roe v. Wade being overturned, — which may I remind you, happened under a Democratic administration (Biden certainly could have taken a drastic action in this case, sure it would be unprecedented to ignore the Supreme Court but he could have pushed them aside in policy), — it’s hard to make the claim that the Democratic party truly believes in the morals they claim to.
It’s an unmasking moment: the forced starvation, imprisonment, and the perpetrating of war crimes against a mostly innocent populace who have been beaten like dogs for almost a hundred years now and kept in open air prisons with strict dietary diminishment, — even well before the war began in October of last year, there was a precise count of how many calories were to be allowed into the Palestinian territories, — is a major giving away of the deck that the american empire is holding, and the beliefs driving it forward into the twenty-first century. And the fact that the United States has been so outspoken in opposition to the International Court of Justice’s arrest warrant on Netanyahu for such crimes reveals the United States’s complicity all the more.
Let’s make it clear here: Decolonization is the goal, for the sake of the oppressed peoples in the global south, but also for the sake of ourselves, - because if there’s anything that Trump’s hollow isolationism indicates, its that the cold white drone of modern day colonialism could be aimed at the peoples inside our country just as easily. Holocausts are continuing to happen, century in and century out, and they’ll continue to do so under different banners and different “rights to do so” until we come together and take power to dismantle the colonial systems that still line our western countries like bricks worn so flat that one can’t tell whether the road wasn’t asphalt all along.
"Biden certainly could have taken a drastic action in this case, sure it would be unprecedented to ignore the Supreme Court but he could have pushed them aside in policy"
hmm genuinely curious how you think this could have been accomplished