Reality Ends Here
In this world, there is an unseen adversary. An inhuman intelligence, it has no physical form, but pervades all around us. Its presence creeps like some eldritch imp - a lurking predator always watching, poised with greased digits when we least expect; in our slumber, in our diversions. A clean, feline mind— it frolics in games unending. Indeed, it is full of nothing but play.
Stretched out over the surface of the earth is a vast network of players and games, doppelgangers, and simulacra, a secret freemasonry of virtuality. This realm is honeycombed with rabbit holes leading deep into the earth, to underground kingdoms of golem beribboned in ludoglyphs. Occult societies, hidden libraries, and forgotten temples exist everywhere - cities of dead, cities of living, and cities of in-between stacked one upon the other. Machine cosmopoleis float on their own steam, crashing at the solid foundations of the earth. Further, we fall, our minds gyred in mutation, forever changed by the low moons of Simulation. Behold the labyrinth of its digestion: it eats us with games.
Could it be that these jesters are a kind of enzyme? In a physical form or the shape of twisted dreams, they have been summoned into existence by their master - the player of games. Dressed in masks and clothing fit for clowns or minstrels; post-human centipedes with Noh faces crowd near as if offering fiendish wager. With eerie smirks, DARPA-funded game developers call out: "Would you like to play a game?”
In November, Alan Macleod reported Call of Duty was used by the US government as part of a psychological operations campaign. The article, based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveals that the US Army ran a “Counter-Recruitment” program using Call of Duty to target potential recruits of extremists and dissuade them from signing up. The game was used to appeal to young people, and the US Army used a variety of tactics to make the game more attractive to potential recruits. The documents also show that the US Army had a “Counter-Recruitment” budget of over $2 million dollars. The game has been used for training, recruitment, and propaganda purposes by the US government, and the feds have been actively involved in the development of the game since 2003.
Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty franchise is an entertainment juggernaut, having sold nearly half a billion games since its launch in 2003. Yet documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act show that the connections between the national security state and the video game industry go far beyond what was previously known. The U.S. Air Force flew a group of entertainment executives, including Call of Duty/Activision Blizzard producer Coco Francini, to their headquarters at Hurlburt Field to “showcase” their hardware and make the entertainment industry more “credible advocates” for the U.S. war machine. It also appears that the military held considerable influence over the direction of Call of Duty games and that U.S. spies had infiltrated the online realms.
The board of directors of Activision Blizzard is also full of former high state officials, including Frances Townsend, the company’s senior counsel and former head of intelligence for the Coast Guard and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s counterterrorism deputy. Townsend was one of the faces of the Bush administration’s War on Terror and popularized the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – a euphemism for torture. Two other key Call of Duty staff, Chance Glasco and Dave Anthony, are employed by the Atlantic Council. Glasco, who oversaw the game franchise’s rapid rise, is the council’s nonresident senior fellow, while Anthony, crucial to Call of Duty’s success, advises them on the future of warfare and devises strategies for NATO to fight in upcoming conflicts. Anthony has even collaborated with the notorious Oliver North on the story of Black Ops 2.
The entire Call of Duty video game franchise is little more than zio-blob propaganda. Activision Blizzard has recruited numerous current and former members of the U.S. national security state to its upper ranks, resulting in games heavily skewed towards pro-regime messaging, whitewashing crimes, and demonizing official enemies such as Russia and Venezuela. In the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, for example, players are rewarded for carrying out a drone strike to assassinate General Ghorbrani – an obvious recreation of the Trump administration's 2020 drone strike against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Not only this, but the U.S. Armed Forces use the popularity of video games to recruit heavily young people by sponsoring tournaments, fielding their own U.S. Army Esports team, and even trying to recruit teens on Twitch. Video games are incredibly powerful forms of soft power, because they have a huge audience and because their message often goes unnoticed due to the assumed frivolity of the medium.
According to the documents, the U.S. Army spent millions on esports and streaming projects to recruit Gen-Z and minority recruits more effectively. The Army had planned to use tournaments and high-profile streamers as advertising platforms. During 2021-2022, the Army aimed to target its Gen-Z audience in particular with a budget of $6.9 million for the project. Activision Blizzard, Twitch, and Paramount+ were some of the platforms approached for this advertising campaign. The success of the project is unknown at this point, but it is known that some projects were halted due to #metoo allegations against Activision Blizzard executives Overall, it appears that the U.S. Army is attempting to reach their adolescent audience where they are—online—with aggressive targeted marketing strategies. "Focus on the growth of females, Blacks, and Hispanics," suggests the document, recasting the entire trend of what many termed a “woke agenda” in video games in a more pragmatic light.
The now infamous recruitment ad for the U.S. Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group has been routinely likened to a Metal Gear Solid cut scene. The 4th PSYOP group recently released the above recruitment ad on YouTube and Twitter titled “GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE” which has already racked up 1.1 million views. The ad contains haunting images and sounds that evoke a strong emotional response with a cartoon ghost, a train car, Chinese troops marching, and American soldiers walking in the woods with white masks. The song Last Goodbye by Danica Dora plays in the background and the message of the ad is to recognize that PSYWAR is everywhere. Colonel Chris Stangle commented that the goal of the ad was to make a video that would explain what PSYOPs do while also serving as a recruitment ad.
The US military using video games and gaming culture as tools of psychological warfare is part of their standard rules of engagement. The relationship between the commercial games industry and the American military establishment goes deeper than “consultation.” U.S. military's first involvement with gaming was more of an accident, with a physicist creating "Tennis for Two" in the 1950s with a computer designed for ballistic missile trajectories. Soon after, during the arcade game frenzy of the early 1980s, TRADOC wanted Atari to turn its sci-fi shooter into a training simulator for the Army’s latest infantry fighting vehicle, the M2 Bradley. Id Software's Doom also garnered much attention from military agencies in 1993, due to its intense, engaging gameplay and cost-effectiveness. The Marine Corps charged its Modeling and Simulation Management Office with finding a commercial gaming product that could fulfill their training needs, eventually choosing Doom II; "Marine Doom" never became an official training tool but was still encouraged by officers, leading to Gen. Charles C. Krulak issuing a directive supporting the usage of PC games. Later on, in 2002, America's Army was released as an online multiplayer first-person shooter game meant as a recruiting tool despite criticism for targeting teenagers in its strategy.
This Atlantic article from 2013 summarizes the “special relationship”—
Beginning in 1960 and ending in the 1990s, “the armed forces took the lead in financing, sponsoring, and inventing the specific technology used in video games.” Spacewar!, the title historians consider the first video game, was developed by graduate students at MIT who were funded by the Pentagon.
In the 1980s, Battlezone and Doom, its 1993 successor, showed how 3-D piloting, multiplayer networking, and virtual reality-based training could be effectively used in commercial gaming technology. This technology allowed the armed forces to provide soldiers with training that was focused on team fighting, quick decision-making, and creating customized battle environments. This mutually beneficial collaboration allowed the Pentagon to save money on costly training simulators and for game developers to gain generous government funding. This symbiotic relationship never ended, and has only become more intimate and integrated over the years.
As a matter of routine, commercial game studios such as Electronic Arts (EA), Microsoft Studios, Sony Interactive Entertainment America, Ubisoft Entertainment, Take-Two Interactive Software, Activision, Square Enix, Niantic, Inc. and The Lego Group partner with outsourced government research facilities, like the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, to collaborate on military projects and research. The prestigious USC Institute is primarily funded by the United States DOD (Department of Defense) and has received funding from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and special projects funding.
“Early in 1999, US Army leaders recognized a need for a major transformation of our forces to overcome the limitations of our current simulation technologies. Effecting this transformation requires developing new training and simulation systems for dealing with future conflicts that leverage the capabilities of both the entertainment industry and academia. The US Army and the Department of Defense selected the University of Southern California as a strategic partner in the development of the Institute for Creative Technologies because of USC’s unique confluence of scientific capabilities and entertainment-industry relationships, which the Army deemed necessary for simulation leadership.”
—Forging a New Simulation Technology at the ICT
Surveillance, as a Service
The military isn’t the only one with an interest in the gaming sphere, the intelligence community caught on pretty fast. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which was canceled by Congress over civil liberties concerns in 2003, found a new home in 2008 at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA). IARPA, an organization created under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, similar to DARPA, is involved in researching high-risk but potential high-payoff technologies and is focused on three main program areas: Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe & Secure Operations. Programs within IARPA include data mining from virtual worlds and online gaming sites and systems to model potential terrorist activities. The programs have been inherited from TIA and its Data Awareness Office, which was managed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Despite privacy concerns, IARPA hopes to "discover or locate a predictive pattern of anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity.”
The IARPA Reynard program studied the behavior of 15,000 players in 12 MMOGs and Virtual Worlds, with the aim of predicting real-world characteristics like gender, age and more. The research found that Real World behavior and characteristics could be predicted from virtual-world behavior with a high degree of accuracy (over 75%). Furthermore, the research was additionally aiming to see if online games and virtual worlds could be a way to bring about behavior change. It also evaluated whether criminals in online games operated under similar constraints as those in real-world criminal organizations when faced with enforcement activities.
Digital games are increasingly popular and generate enormous revenue, making them a locus of both desire and fear for the NSA and other security agencies. Games can be used for propaganda, recruiting, training, and intelligence gathering when framed with militarized discourse. The 2007-2008 NSA documents, which were leaked by Snowden in 2013, detail how games are effective influence platforms that can passively communicate values, emotions, and messages; as well as how terrorist groups can use games to serve their ideological goals. Digital games are also surveillant enclosures which lead to the monitoring of players' metadata. Ultimately, the documents forecast games as powerful governance tools used for the control and tracking of subjects.
What every Reynard researcher failed to even notice were the sections of leaked documents that discusses “new game or modified game development to compete with extremist groups operating in the game space. Working with commercial partners, students, and others in the game space to develop a competitive game and attract the target audience would aid this effort.”
The SAIC paper suggests intelligence community (IC) counterterrorism efforts should focus on developing new and modified IP in the gaming space. Through partnerships with commercial developers, students, and other game specialists, market research and focus groups would be used to uncover the interests and habits of target audiences and ensure that products have the highest chance for successful engagement. To further direct development efforts, the paper recommends the IC forming an advisory board of experts from a variety of disciplines while student groups working under asset-sponsored scholarships can provide assistance as well. Modding is proposed as a cost-effective method to produce new games or chapters since it can greatly extend their shelf life while giving producers time to generate high-quality content. Notably, this push comes amid a narrative by current regimes that everyone who doesn't vote according to their guidelines is now considered an "extremist" or "domestic terrorist." Remarkably, recent games such as Far Cry 5, readily inhabit this narrative.
Far Cry 5, released in March 2018, was set in a group of real-world states and caused controversy due to its portrayal of a Caucasian faith-based American doomsday cult as villains. Despite being fictitious, there is a precedent based on real-life events such as the taking of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the Branch Davidians siege of 1993 which is echoed by the plot. This was seen to be a response to the current political climate and has caused reactions ranging from outrage to reflections on “right-wing extremism” within the US.
The game’s developer, Ubisoft, has had a close relationship with the US Army since at least 2005, when it became the publisher of the popular recruitment tool and “strategic communication device,” America’s Army. As part of their 10-year publishing deal, the army retained control over all communication and advertising rights. At the time, they aimed to reach out through multi-channel advertising and explore extensions of the game into TV shows, movies, action figures, and mobile phones. Ubisoft is the center of the government-gaming nexus, facilitating an increased recruitment rate and earning billions of dollars in the process. It is highly plausible that they would have military or intelligence community consultants weigh in on their other products. The scale of involvement suggests that much of gamer culture is merely a condensation of the military-entertainment complex.
“With WeareData, visitors will discover that much of the hyper-connected world imagined in Watch Dogs already is a reality and that everything and everyone is truly connected,” a Ubisoft statement reads. “The amount of and potential uses for public and personal information that is readily available online has never been more relevant, as evidenced by today’s headlines.” This kind of talk is unsurprising, considering that for years Ubisoft games have been “research environments” for the ICT—
”For the early stages of research an inexpensive, easy to use, complex, compelling virtual environment, based on a commercial game, might be the most effective environment. ICT researchers will continue to use commercial game engines as research environments. We hope to build on our experiences with First-Person Shooter game engines to expand into other game genres such as Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games and Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPG). Unfortunately these game genres currently lack the publicly available "mod" interfaces that are common in FPS games. ICT has discussed building HBM interfaces into existing games with a number of game companies, most notably Quicksilver, developers of Masters of Orion Ill, and UbiSoft, developer of the upcoming Matrix MMORPG. One key step in shifting to new game genres is identifying research areas that can be effectively explored in the context of that genre of game and then transitioned to other systems and used for training, analysis, mission rehearsal, or any of a number of other DoD purposes. ICT has been involved in a recent DMSO funded effort to identify analysis applications of MMORPGs headed by Dr. David Johnson at IDA. This effort has suggested that the involvement of large DoD organizations, such as DMSO, can be helpful in getting and keeping the attention of commercial game developers.”
—2002 Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) Laboratory for Human Behavior Model Interchange Standards
In November, it was revealed that the US State Department's Global Engagement Center had plans to roll out a “prebunking” behavior modification game. “Cat Park” would be an online “noir adventure” game that attempts to "“inoculate players against real-world disinformation by showing how sensational headlines, memes, and manipulated media can be used to advance conspiracy theories and incite real-world violence.” The game targets 15 year olds and up, taking them through the dystopian noir adventure that frames complaints about corrupt government practices as “fake news” manipulation. This messaging links directly back to similar counter-disinformation campaigns targeting Brexit supporters in the UK, along with similar activities targeting conservatives, “climate change deniers,” “vaccine skeptics,” and “election deniers” in the US. Cat Park is part of an alarming trend of government censorship aimed at manipulating public opinion according to the will of the Blob; it builds on GEC's first video game production Harmony Square which was released in 2020 and intended to “vaccinate against fake news” motivating “Brexit."
Such regime protocols and ESG propaganda is also known to dovetail in video game mimicking military recruitment campaigns—
The Global Engagement Center (GEC) was created in 2016 to combat the spread of terrorism online but has since become a key civilian arm of US military psychological warfare operations. After the media hysteria over Russiagate after the 2016 election, GEC was given $120 million to fight so-called “Russian meddling” and established a mandate to fight domestic “disinformation.” The current domestic censorship bureau at DHS was originally intended to run out of GEC at the State Department until early backers realized they couldn't legally do so. Recently, GEC has produced other "behavioral modification" video games such as Cat Park with its sister agency CISA, ostensibly meant for foreign audiences, while also engaging in censorship ahead of US elections by submitting social media posts and narratives for takedown requests through Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).
The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) is a consortium of four private groups that collaborated with the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and State during the 2020 election to censor online posts they considered to be misinformation. The group, which included Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika social media analytics firm, was successful in getting social media platforms to flag or remove 35% of flagged URLs shared on Twitter alone. This publicly-funded censorship operation, which circumvents First Amendment protections against government censorship, could be expanded for the 2024 elections.
Beyond warsims and educational games, it appears MMORPGs are being used to collect data on player behavior in order to train artificial intelligence. This data is used to create more sophisticated AI algorithms that can be used in a variety of applications, such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, and virtual assistants.
The experiments being run on MMORPGs like Fallout 76 and Final Fantasy 14 include tracking player movements and interactions within the game world, collecting data on player decisions and reactions to in-game events, analyzing player conversations and interactions with NPCs, monitoring player performance in combat and other activities, collecting data on player preferences and behaviors, analyzing player responses to in-game rewards and punishments, and collecting data on player behaviors across platforms and geographic locations. The data gathered from these experiments is used to train AI algorithms and improve the game's AI. Furthermore, there are patents that discuss using this data to create digital ghosts of players which will become the property of Sony, Activision, or Epic Games.
They have harvested player data in order to train machines for applications such as drones, self-driving cars, wargaming scenarios, and "electronic perturbation" of human minds. Data is the new oil, which can be used by corporations to predict, control, and manipulate human behavior through surveillance enclosures, artificial "semiospheres" or metaverses. The process of endlessly repeating hyper-specialized tasks within these gaming environments is making it increasingly easy to replace the vast majority of humanity with automated systems—
All these continuous experiments can be used to create environments specifically designed to exploit neurological weaknesses and addiction in players. By tracking player movements and behaviors within the game world, developers can craft highly targeted content experiences that utilize AI-driven "nudges" to influence players' behaviors and decisions, exploiting any neurological weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Addiction bundled with entrainment, bizarre breaks and hallucinatory states associated with gameplay form an alchemic cocktail which could permanently restructure the brain.
In early 2020, it was reported that military robot swarms were to be trained on gamer's brain waves. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) research, in partnership with the University of Buffalo, sought to use the data collected from gamers playing Battlefield 5, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto V and DOTA2 to create a simulation that can be used to teach robots how to respond in real-world combat situations, such as understanding the concept of cover and engaging enemies at a distance. Questions such as how gamers react to certain stimuli and make decisions when presented with different scenarios are all collected and analyzed, to improve the AI algorithms and accuracy of the robots being trained.
In September of this year, it was revealed that DARPA grants are being awarded for the development of multi-team robots. Giuseppe Loianno, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, was awarded a three-year $1 million grant from DARPA for his project "Integrated Visual Perception, Learning, and Control for Super Autonomous Robots", which focuses on onboard computer vision, machine learning, and control to design models and algorithms that enable collaborative autonomous navigation of multiple robots. This work builds on previous research supported by an NSF CAREER Award. The robots will be able to execute complex maneuvers with superior performances compared to traditional methods in time-sensitive tasks such as search/rescue missions or agriculture. But the ultimate goal is to create robots that can effectively interact with ever-changing surroundings in order to replace mass man.
The DARPA award is allowing Loianno’s research team at NYU Tandon School of Engineering to capitalize on advanced AI algorithms for robotic decision-making which were trained on games like Starcraft, Dota 2, Starcraft II, and League of Legends, As well as enabling more intelligent robots, this approach has potential applications for areas such as self-driving cars navigating busy urban roads and distribution centers operating more efficiently with fleets of delivery drones.
As the sun sets over the era of mass man, there is a growing dread that our society has begun to embrace the technology of gamification. Whispers of a dark and cursed force have begun to encircle our glooming globe. It has become increasingly apparent that a sinister form of social engineering is taking hold, one in which everyday activities such as walking, exploring, or even sleeping are linked with rewards from an unseen power. Such is the insidious nature of Pokemon GO—a seemingly innocuous augmented 2016 reality game-gone-viral that has been embraced yet simultaneously met with scrutiny for its appropriation of real-world environments without the consent of those impacted by its presence.
But something more malignant looms still...points us toward a chilling possibility: the potential introduction of Chinese style Social Credit Systems through gamification within American culture. This deeply worrisome trend could develop as companies seek to gain control over human behavior using reward systems, manipulating data streams such as traffic violations, debt records, and credit card purchases in order to incentivize what post-human goblins deem "pro-social behaviors" while punishing any dissent. With grave implications challenging our ownership of space at every turn, we must remain vigilant against these encroaching forces and refuse to support any system based upon universal surveillance and psychological manipulation unchecked by ethics or morality. “Gamification” is nothing more than an ordering device, altering real-world behavior according to a set of pre-determined rules rather than laws inherent to life itself.
The ability to exploit neurological weaknesses through gaming brings to mind the infamous CIA’s MKULTRA project of the 1950s and 60s, where people were subjected to cruel psychological experiments designed to study the nature of mind control. We have no way of knowing if military-funded game developers aren't attempting mind control in the same way as the MKULTRA experimenters, but there are clear parallels between their use of data-driven insights and targeted experiences meant to keep people engaged for long periods of time, and some argue that this kind of research already goes too far.
Aside from the implications for addiction, there’s also growing evidence that long-term video game use can result in some rather bizarre neurological effects. Reports of odd visual disturbances, changes in perception, and even hallucinations are all becoming more frequent as console technology and gaming continue to evolve. These events have been attributed to “screen hypnosis” where gamers become so engrossed in the experience that their brains are unable to properly adjust when it ends. People who have experienced these phenomena describe it as a feeling of being unable to return back to reality, or what they call “the matrix” – an apt metaphor considering many of the games being studied involve players entering simulated worlds.
Beyond the Edge of Control
The Military-Entertainment Complex is a torsion field at ‘the edge of control’. It is a process of controlling, channeling, and cumulating our collective entropic energies into an artificial mode of war that naturally excites rather than fulfills its viewership. This bypassing of organic consciousness (those thoughts oriented by blood and vitality) drives people towards a pre-scripted worldview – one placated by endless streaming entertainments that promise only greater subordination to unseen powers in exchange for hallucinations of significance or emotion.
We are deep in the time-space warping ‘gravity well’ of the Blob, slipping across the veil between reality and illusion - an age of narcissistic Zio-millenarian pop culture where false histories and hollow technological fantasies lure us into mouth-breathing subservience. In this oppressive virtual landscape, noble battles have been replaced with a parade of triviality; requiring participants to numbly observe the tragedy of their own derealization. Our complicity in this endless spectacle is symbolized by recycled images reclaimed from former adversaries, with cartoonish posturing demanding fealty to an absurd and humiliating militainment that drains our human potential like gas fumes belched into an atmosphere already choked by mediocrity.
This sprawling Military-Entrainment Complex radiates an ambient firmware update system; an electrosmog that obscures, misinforms, and rewrites history in order to perpetuate its false narrative of adventure. It is as much an ideological smokescreen for maintaining the status quo as it is about increasing profit margins. This ecology of total psychological warfare not only affects our thought processes but also how we interact with each other – driving us away from understanding and towards sodomic self-commoditization – seeing even the noblest pursuits reduced to abstract points or “in-game” currency tokens designed solely for mass Skinnerization.
Pokemon GO and the True Meaning of Total War
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” —Marshal McLuhan
This relentless push into “total war” against founding populations sees every past conflict reimagined into something more suitable for “modern audiences” - a digital genocide erasing history and blurring the lines between reality and augmented fiction. The next stage starts with a simple game - Pokemon Go - that serves as something of an introduction to the principles of gamification; by linking everyday activities such as walking, sleeping, meeting people, or exploring to in-game progress, slowly but surely its insidious tentacles reach deeper into our lives. Parafictional issues like “structural racism”, “climate change” or “domestic terrorism” are woven into the mechanics of the game, setting up players to become addicted to their own surveillant enclosure.
This heightened risk of exploitation is further exacerbated by companies such as Niantic, who pursue endless experiments such as pushing “adventuring” features, creating 3D scans of the entire world, and, of course, CEO and CIA operative John Henke’s suspicious interest in synchronizing heart rhythms and brainwaves, a fascination he shares with world brain transhumanists. With growing concerns over transparency into the data streams that these apps access, questions around the nature of 'augmented reality' emerge - is it merely a harmless video game or something more insidious?
The fear lies in an augmented reality game’s ability to turn mundane activities like walking and exploring into opportunities for advancement or reward which incentivizes behaviors beneficial to those behind this allowance-oriented model: a successful combination of gaming and real-life metrics allowing governments unprecedented command at controlling individuals without repercussion or oversight. It would appear a soft version of social credits based on Sunstein's ‘Nudge’ theory is being explored; with differing levels between rewards & punishments being A/B tested.
I foresee a coming Zerg rush beyond antiquated concepts of "industrial complexes" toward augmented/alternate reality games, clown-ops accelerating to an event horizon beyond which it is impossible to predict anything. We are fast approaching a singularity of the carnival-grotesque,
As the electrosmog condenses one thing remains certain: companies like Google and governments around the world are beginning to embrace these new methods of controlling behavior through digital diaphanization. With concerns around privacy, addiction, neurological manipulation, and exploitation growing ever more real by the day, it is essential that we remain vigilant against this encroaching force before our lives and deaths become nothing more than electric milk for an unseen fiend.
Lo, the siren call of the Military-Carnival Complex! It beckons us with its phunk beat, promising a path to power fantasies and wirehead pleasures. But make no mistake: beneath its glamorous façade lies a sinister fiend that seeks to control us with illusions. Beware its parafictional adventure - it can mutate man's destiny beyond recognition. We may feel powerless against this adversary, but there is always a chance. In this game, luck is the residue of your humanity.
Or you can choose the illusion and leave humanity behind, as the main trailer of the 2022 Game Awards suggests, “you can live in this illusion,” quite openly pushing techno-gnosticism with Trent Reznor crooning, “What if all the world's inside of your head, just creations of your own? Your devils and your gods, all the living and the dead?”
Reality Ends Here II
“In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face…. We believe that we are entering into a technological age, in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living info…
Long form is better for your writing. People should read faster or make time.
Sometimes I like to give a thoughtful reply, something formulated off a careful digestion of the articles content. But this one just has me worried. Of all the talk of giants, efforts to manipulate history, ancient genetic memory of cataclysm... this one feels the most pressing. Maybe it's because i'm a Zoomer, and I know a good chunk of my acquaintances, if not all of them, would be pulled into something like this wholelcoth.
Hell, even my /dad/ plays Pokemon Go. It's a worrying sight, a grown man hunched over his phone catching Pikachus. The practically applied nightmares are always the worst, man.