essay

Vocal Cord Parasite

First published by Landfill Editions, September, 2021

“‘I was invaded by words, burrowing and breeding inside me.’ - Skull Face

I. Ludic Lethality Index (2021)

You know something’s shifted in the culture when public transport announcements are imploring people not to cosplay. From the robotic tannoys of Birmingham New Street Station to signs posted on the local metro service, visitors to Insomnia 2019—the UK’s largest LAN party and perhaps most intense video games expo—were actively discouraged from traveling to the event in the likenesses of their favorite fictional characters for fear of distressing the public and raising potential terror alerts with the local constabulary. Like some covert infiltration operation, all scratch-built theatrical weaponry, crafted masks and home-brew armour were expected to remain safely concealed within backpacks and duffle bags until arrival at the venue. This was no on-site procurement mission. Attendees would be required to transform themselves stealthily, from civilians into fantastical combatants, in the unglamorous locales of the venue’s bathrooms and public foyer spaces.

The paranoia wasn’t entirely misplaced. The early months of 2019 had seen a strange metamorphosis of right wing extremism that had grotesquely blurred the practice of live-streamed gaming, and in particular the ‘heads-up-display’ of popular ‘first-person shooter’ games, with acts of racially motivated domestic terrorism in New Zealand and the United States. For Julia Ebner, Research Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, this emergent ‘gamification’ of terror had distorted the boundaries of the real and the virtual, suggesting that ‘attacks inspired by socio-technological dynamics in online radicalization hotbeds’ had increasingly proved ‘that digital dualism is a dangerous fallacy’.(1) That a reactionary subsection of gaming culture had already greased the wheels of a right wing presidential election back in 2016, and sustained a series of highly publicized volatile rebuttals and harassment campaigns against progressive criticism from feminist commentators since the Gamergate fiasco of 2014, the reputation of gamers as a community had certainly become publicly soured in the run up to 2019’s expo.          

Annually ensconced within the crystalline citadel of the National Exhibition Centre, Insomnia is a brilliantly saccharine mess of Monster Energy drinks, overpriced Japanese snacks and concentrated geekery. It’s where a swelling junk tide of retro electronics and Funko Pops figurines crashes up against high-spec, high concept promotional stands for forthcoming Triple-A titles … the whole thing hauntingly illuminated by the lulling incandescences of a thousand gaming rigs smoldering in the venue’s vast darkened conference spaces.

If gamers are a people without a country, then Insomnia might be a kind of piratical summit, an outpost for the virtually rootless. I’m completely in love with it, and have been visiting the past few years in search of some kind of connection to my own restless identity as a gamer with a cautious interest in the weird history of the Military-Entertainment Complex, a concept that usefully describes the disconcerting entanglement of martial research and development programs with civilian leisure activities. 

In this techno-political milieu the domain of play is not simply figured as a site of simulation and prediction, but as a vital terrain upon which the popular military imaginary might be ideologically seeded and cultivated. Infamously, it’s where novel opportunities for enlistment may occur, and where emergent forms of fictive speculation and affective encounter might open productive conduits for ambient contamination between military and mass culture. In the post-9/11 era, US Imperial interests were culturally lobbied via a close advisory relationship between the Department of Defence (DoD) and the producers of popular TV shows and video games to both justify and normalize the Pentagon’s ‘war on terror’ as a diffusely mediated counter to Al Qaeda’s ‘image victory’(2) of the specular destruction of the Twin Towers. However, as researchers Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell have suggested, this cross-pollination is less one-directional and ideologically focused than it might have first appeared. Indeed, it might constitute a new affective regime of ‘epic-realism’ in which gun-licensing contracts and future war scenarios based upon the diplomatic instabilities of our collapsing present are just as culturally and financially lucrative to franchise war game developers as the co-option of play is to military interests seeking new tools of indoctrination. The result is a weird grey area, where entertainment markets and military PR exercises enter into new forms of mutually sustaining parasitism. 

‘Rather than being primarily grounded in militaristic ideologies,’ write Lenoir and Caldwell, ‘the most widely consumed wargames of today are shaped far more by their efforts to make something as boring, traumatic, and universally condemned as war into a source of repeatable entertainment experiences.’(3) They continue: ‘The production and modulation of affect central to franchise war-games constitute a powerful force in shaping the contemporary American war imaginary and, as articulated by Brian Massumi in discussing the relation between affect and ideology, indirectly generate “ideological effects by non-ideological means.”’(4)       

At Insomnia, the evidence of this enmeshment of cultures was clear. Beyond the countless computers running Call of Duty, an entire environment had been constructed by The Inflatable Wall Company to simulate the appearance of a blitzed, vaguely Middle Eastern village. A watchtower, armored vehicle, and multiple banners designated this location as a ‘base camp’ for the British Army, a bastion staffed by uniformed service personnel who roamed the site encouraging people to tackle climbing walls or enter a fortified gaming area whose banks of PCs demonstrating reconnaissance operations were shrouded with camouflage netting.

Such military presence at gaming conventions isn’t new. Back in 2006, Ed Halter wrote chillingly of US Special Forces rappelling from Black Hawk Helicopters onto the Los Angeles Convention Centre to promote the Ubisoft-developed recruitment tool America’s Army at 2003’s E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo).(5) Pitched against the backdrop of recently ceased American combat operations in Iraq, Halter was reluctant to suggest that such actions anticipated a wholesale migration of the war on terror from the streets of Baghdad to the ‘heart of the global entertainment industry’, but that such infringements had certainly contributed to a digital obscuration of the frontlines of US foreign policy. Eight years later, and in an era marred by the  uneasy legacy of unmanned weaponry and predator drone strikes, director Tonje Hessen Schei would document the evolution of this martial-ludic milieu in his documentary Drone (2014), which captured footage of decorated Air Force personnel scouting the swathes of young people attending gaming conventions for adequately dextrous drone pilots. 

Even the digital evolution of attacks on UK security had resolved itself into anticipatory measures at Insomnia, with the presence of the National Crime Agency’s Cyber Crime Unit—an affiliate of the National Cyber Security Centre—distributing information and advertising employment opportunities alongside a startling video. This animated display dramatized cyber attacks on the UK that seemed to predominantly originate in China and Russia. The film rendered the idea of digital threat in the spectacular graphical language of video games and seemed to re-inscribe the vaguest notion of an adversarial ‘east’ as a sharply defined, neon-tinted combatant in some bizarre tower defense exercise.

Walking around Insomnia’s countless stalls and tables, humming arcade consoles and groups of excitable teens playing Banjo-Kazooie (1998) and The Typing of the Dead (1999) on softly glowing CRT monitors, I wondered what to make of this weird moment in which local government had exercised its emergent paranoia around the potential threat of playful dress-up customs while the actually-armed agents of state-sanctioned violence and online defence programs were seeking to enlist members of the very same community that their governing state had become mistrustful of.   

Writing on the development of digital warfare in 1991, Manuel De Landa noted the procedural use of the US Army’s ‘Lethality Index’ by emergent AI applications in the anticipation of various threats.(6) The Lethality Index is a bizarre metric that calculates the potential danger to human life by different weapons systems, from fire arms to ballistically trained soldiers. Might the Military Entertainment Complex have entered into a novel ludic phase in which networked play, the strange enclaves of fandom, and the permissive circumstances of online assembly and speech provided the protean conditions for newly unpredictable subjects? Might it be appropriate to talk of the emergence of a ‘Ludic Lethality Index’ in which the vaguest and most uninformed notion of the ‘gamer’ has become an agent within this metric, an unaffiliated cell that must be recruited before it can be radicalized? 

Such weird and certainly distressing thoughts were sharpened by my most resonant encounter of the expo: the wonderful, vulnerable figure of a solitary young person dressed as Metal Gear Solid’s effeminate assassin Raiden. They walked through the venue in high heels, their face concealed by a skeletal metal jaw and bionic eye, their hands fumbling to hold a home-made katana alongside a clumsily-bagged packed lunch. While their impressive cybernetic costume alluded to the entwinement of their character’s body with the distributed communications networks of future military contractors(7), their actual body, in this place, seemed caught between the revelry of play and the conspiratorial machinations of an increasingly polluted intimacy between martial scheming and the creative ingenuity of gaming cultures.        

II. Trouble in Outer Heaven (2017)

I keep falling down troll holes. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with a specific YouTube video documenting the inventive disruption of He Will Not Divide Us (HWNDU, 2017), the 24hr live-streamed participatory artwork launched at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York on the day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Conceived by artists Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Rönnkö and Luke Turner as an invitation to voice collective resistance to the caustic populism catalysed by Trump’s pugnacious campaign, the webcast’s first iteration invited attendees to direct the words ‘he will not divide us’ at a wall-mounted camera in a modest, and perhaps overly naive, expression of communality and defiance. A gesture that, despite its earnest intentions, was perceived cynically by right wing trolls as a virtue signalling act of self-aggrandisement.

After catalysing multiple instances of public unrest—and in turn, documenting the transmigration of an online, fugitive populist rhetoric into a form of unprecedented offline social assembly—the work was relocated to the El Rey Theatre, Albuquerque before being moved a third time to a supposedly unknown location where it would take on a different form: a single flag, printed with the work’s title, flying defiantly before camera for the duration of Trump’s four year term in office. However, in what is now being referred to as an almost legendary act of ‘weaponised autism’, online communities centered around 4Chan’s /pol/ board collectively cross-referenced the cloud formation, contrails and constellations visible in the video feed to determine the flag’s exact location within two days of it being flown, ultimately replacing the project’s liberal emblem of hope with one of their own: a bright red MAGA baseball cap.

In the short video edited to commemorate this act of admittedly impressive trollish pedantry, a very specific soundtrack was chosen to elevate the uninspiring screen grabs of message board chat and complex trigonometric calculations to the level of cinematic heroism. Drawn from the video game Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004), the song ‘Snake Eater’ is a brazen, brass-heavy pastiche of a Bond theme, its impassioned lyrics evoking an ambiguous code of union, ‘I give my life, not in honour, but for you…’.

This reference doesn’t arrive out of nowhere. Futuristic martial imagery drawn from the Metal Gear franchise has permeated the ‘meme wars’—a form of online image-based activism reminiscent of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s—since its inception. Metal Gear is a sprawling, at times barely comprehensible narrative of political intrigue. It’s most recent iteration, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) boasts a hero named Punished ‘Venom’ Snake, an eye-patched, cybernetically enhanced specialist in ‘tactical espionage action’ whose ability to sneak, infiltrate, disrupt, destroy and exfiltrate ‘hot zones’ allows him to perform strategic maneuvers amongst government black sites, munitions depots and advanced weapons research laboratories, unbeknownst to the sovereign states that maintain and monitor them.

Venom Snake is a surgically disguised proxy of Big Boss, Metal Gear’s protagonist / antagonist depending on where you pick up the series, and it’s Big Boss’s cunning and promethean plight that seems to have great resonance for reactionaries. Where the official game lionised Punished Snake the ‘Fallen Legend’, the shit-posters of the emergent right celebrated Punished Trump, the ‘Hero Denied By His Homeland’. Indeed, one of HWNDU’s most iconic counter-protesters, ‘Jesus’, would resurrect a ‘Punished’ version of himself, delivering a rallying rendition of ‘Snake Eater’ to the world via commandeered feed.   

Despite his popularity, and my own life-long affection for him, Big Boss in his various biogenetic iterations (Naked, Venom… and even his cursed offspring, product of the Les Enfants Terribles cloning project, Liquid), is a libertarian terrorist. A monomaniacal idealist who desires to establish ‘Mother Base’—eventually known as ‘Outer Heaven’—as a separatist state or ‘pirate utopia’. This huge maritime stronghold comprises a mercenary task force and a nuclear deterrent housed upon a series of weaponised research and development platforms constructed in the warm waters of the Seychelles, an autonomous locale well beyond the reach of national jurisdiction. With Trump’s ascendency to the White House, these themes of extra-governmental partisanship and chivalric coalition struck a new chord for the alt-right, that contentious tributary of conservatism whose ideologues conceal noxious principles of ethno-nationalism and misogyny beneath an over-exacting faith in ‘scientific rationalism’, tech-entrepreneurialism and the ‘gaming' of reality.

In her essay ‘The Silicon Ideology’, pseudonymous essayist Josephine Armistead attempts to understand the alt-right and its neo-reactionary principles by tracing a history of fascism through cyber-libertarianism, the hacker communities of the 1970s and ’80s, and popular science-fictive tropes of the last twenty years, eventually describing a world into which tech-determinist rhetoric has made more probable the likelihood that such projects as Seasteading (the formation of autonomous tax-free maritime communities uncannily reminiscent of Metal Gear’s Outer Heaven, popularised by anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel), or the emergence of crypto markets (including such grim fantasies as the untraceable ‘assassination market’ that could potentially destroy governments as we know them) will come to define our future.

As the writer Jacob Siegel has recently pointed out, the techniques of pronounced attentiveness utilised by /pol/ in their attack on HWNDU constituted an unprecedented form of popular networked reconnaissance, a tactic also recently re-employed to identify and attack anti-fascist protesters. Such practices of vigilantist weaponised data analysis resonate strongly with Metal Gear’s notion of a stateless army, Militaires Sans Frontières (Soldiers Without Borders) operating outside of state legislated judicial process. No matter how jokingly 4Chan calls for the formation of a free state (Kekistan) to harbour its ‘disparate and dispossessed peoples’ (read trolls, shitposters and internet lurkers), it’s difficult to believe that this offensive ‘extra-statecraft’ hasn’t already been mobilised, that ‘Outer Heaven’ might have been covertly assembled in the digital ether whilst we weren’t looking. Such practices of fabulation, infiltration and separatism have hauntingly familiar precedents in the history of US neo-nazism, be it the surreptitious propaganda techniques of George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce’s desire to establish an aryan enclave in the Appalachian Mountains, or the violent saboteur tactics of Louis Beam.

Further, the supposedly emancipatory strategies of trans-humanist experimentation and artificial intelligence have long been a preoccupation of right-libertarian techno-utopianism, a strain of thought that dovetails neatly with neo-reaction asserting that the computationally competent—coders, hackers and tech-entrepreneurs—are the logical inheritors of the future, able to coldly rationalise the ‘problems’ wrought by a globalised world including the corruption of centralised banks, social diversity and immigration. One of our concern at present should be the techniques with which this technological ambition chooses to safeguard, prohibit or enhance certain bodies at the expense of others. Technological innovation doesn’t necessarily imply a future hospitable to all. When futures are projected according to populist fantasies of separatism and the mocking illogic of trolldom, we can’t remain complacent about the relationship between ‘tech’ and ‘body’, or the futures such bodies might forcibly induce.       

Notes

(1). Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives Of Extremists (London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) 238, 240.
(2).  See Retort (Iain A. Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital And Spectacle In A New Age of War (London and New York: Verso, 2005). 
(3).  Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, The Military-Entertainment Complex (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press, 2018) 84.
(4). Ibid., 91-92.
(5).  Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to XBox: War and Video Games (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2006) vii-xxvii. 
(6).  Manuel De Land, War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 2.
(7).  Lenoir and Caldwell term this communicational relationship the ‘RMA', or ‘Revolution In Military Affairs’, inferring the enhancement of soldierly ability through networked distribution of information, from GPS, to enhanced intel. Metal Gear Solid’s ‘codec’ communications are a perfect example of this kind of expanded consciousness of the soldier.