Restarting the blog - Virtual conflict as cultural catharsis: re-fighting Vietnam 2.0

I had forgotten this blog existed for several years, so for this attempt to kick it back into life I'm going to post an article I wrote for Kings College London's Strife blog two years ago; "Virtual conflict as cultural catharsis: re-fighting Vietnam 2.0" It encapsulates my interests in the political dimensions of popular culture, particularly how video games can affect our perception of real-world events.

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Storytelling is a core part of how we communicate with each other, understand complex issues and come to terms with the world around us. The prevalence of so-called ‘talking therapies’ show that such processes are important in helping to overcome and move past negative events and experiences. The experience of 9/11 left long-lasting and deep collective and cultural damage on the US/Western collective psyches. The ‘War on Terror’ has been compared to what Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson: ‘a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about be derailed.’ Popular culture, in this case Western-developed video/computer games, have become a medium in which the cathartic and curative process of storytelling is taking place on a cultural level, to move past and overcome both of these ‘unfinished’ conflicts.

War and conflict have been staple thematic topics in games for decades, as far back as Space Invaders and Missile Command in the late 1970s. However, the games released after 9/11 show an interesting pattern indicating a marked swing in direction and focus. Between 2002 and 2005 there were two games released that were set during the first Gulf War (Conflict: Desert Storm I & II), at least nine games released set during the Vietnam War (Vietcong, Vietcong 2, Battlefield: Vietnam, Conflict: Vietnam, Shellshock: ‘Nam 67, Wings over Vietnam, Platoon, Men of Valor, Line of Sight: Vietnam) as well as many more set in the modern day in real or analogous Middle-Eastern theatres. One of the most stand-out titles from this period was America’s 10 Most Wanted, whose finale consists of the player fighting Osama Bin Laden in hand-to-hand combat, and subsequently bundling him into a helicopter that flies off into the sunset while the credits roll. From this period mainstream game development began to shift to reflect changing current events. From 2008 games in this thematic field have often adopted Private Military Contractors in both pro and antagonistic roles. after the details of Blackwater’s/Xe’s involvement in Iraq became wider public knowledge and a hot topic of the time.

The ability of popular culture to serve as a space for cultural catharsis and as a coping mechanism isn’t a new one; after the collective cultural trauma of Vietnam a similar process of mourning and understanding took place. The trajectory of tone and content in the ‘war is hell’ films from the 1970s such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter shifted dramatically to the restorative and cathartic films from the 1980s like Top Gun and Rambo. These films either painted the US military in a far more positive and victorious light or, in the case ofRambo, literally re-fighting Vietnam on-screen.

What is interesting is that in games after 9/11 this process moved in the opposite direction. The games that emerged in the first few years after 9/11 can broadly be interpreted as revenge power-fantasies. The largely tactical focus of these titles place the player in the position of a soldier with a ‘grunt’s-eye view’. This creates a space in which the player can rewrite history, restore agency and re-establish the ‘correct’ order of the world on an individual level; winning the battles AND winning the war. It is only in recent years that some developers have taken steps to question and critique what can be seen as a largely jingoistic and cynically simplified streamlining of complex geopolitical issues.

The 2012 game Spec Ops: The Line was a deeply critical response to the way in which war and conflict had been portrayed in games. Taking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as inspiration, the game took a cynical approach to the increasingly detailed yet sanitised depiction of war. Starting out as a formulaic tale of Western intervention to help a sandstorm-buried Dubai, the game depicts ambiguous moral choices as well as civilian collateral damage in a highly critical and subversive way. The game makes the player stop to reflect on their actions, something that is normally outside the usually simplistic and circular justifications other games use for the violent acts that the player witnesses and facilitates. Similarly, the 2008 game Far Cry 2 borrows lightly from Heart of Darkness, taking place in a fictional African country in the grips of a civil war between two greedy and ruthless militias.

As western military involvement in the Middle East has, at least in the eyes of the western audiences, wound down to be out of sight and out of mind, western popular culture has adapted to react to new threats. Wikileaks, Anonymous and Edward Snowden are being explored as the new sources of cultural anxiety and trauma; Call of Duty: Black Ops II features a hacker antagonist, who in the near future takes control of the United States’ expanded drone forces. The recently released Watch_Dogs puts the player in the shoes of a skilled hacker in a near-future Chicago, and can be interpreted as a warning against the danger hackers pose to increasingly centralised and interconnected systems. At the same time it offers up a new revenge fantasy to anyone who has been the victim of the seemingly unending frauds, data thefts and security breaches of many internet-based services.

Why does this matter? The medium of games is a uniquely textured and tactile environment to continue the human necessity of storytelling; whether it be in moment-to-moment gameplay experiences or the underlying story or theme a particular game is exploring. A generation has grown up being bombarded with messages about the necessity for increased security, updates on the latest protracted conflict in a place they have never seen or heard of in any other context, and the constant threat of terrorism hanging over them like the sword of Damocles; all of this is delivered through a ubiquitous, 24-hour news media. It is entirely possible that games are the first instance of many people engaging with any of these topics on a participatory and interactive level. It is worth considering the way that game portray war and conflict, and how these messages are received by audiences due to the potential for their affecting of popular thought relating to real world events and issues. The condensing and streamlining of conflicts like Vietnam and the ‘War on Terror’ into simple and easily digestible narratives applies the same maximal and binary filtering logic of George W. Bush’s “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” speech. As a medium that lets us tell ourselves the stories through interactivity, games should be telling us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear. The difficult truths about these traumatic moments in our cultural memory are important. Without them the conflicts they depict will remain ‘unfinished’ and the cultural catharsis sought through them will remain out of reach.

Crossing back from the other side

Another Anonymous-themed post, however it is on a topic that is particularly interesting and is a continuation of my core thesis. Two events of Anonymous' actions of recent times have come to my attention, and highlight the continuing adaptation, change and development of the collective into new and interesting areas.

The first is a spinoff movement towards conducting a guerilla campaign of security analysis - first targeting the already under-scrutiny Chinese agricultural compay Chaoda Modern Agriculture; questioning profit margins, curious resignations of auditing staff and investigating offshoot offices and websites for more details of and examples of fraud by the senior executive staff, publishing their report for free and in its entirety online, claiming that more than $400m has been funnelled out of the company under the guises of legitimate spending, with the ultimate goal being the total delisting of the company as a result of this investigation.

The second is an open threat by someone operating under the banner (or should I say, mask) of Anonymous to expose Mexican officials, journalists and others who are involved with the Zetas drug cartel, as a response to a member of Anonymous being kidnapped by the cartel in the town of Veracruz.

The first example highlights the diversity of the movement as a whole, as well as its acephalous and almost anarchic nature, and the absolute adherence to the core ideology of absolute freedom of information, especially information that particular individuals have a highly vested interest to keep under wraps. However the second example can be seen as a clear divergence from this core ideology - something which is impossible to control due to Anonymous' unorganised and inherently leaderless structure. There is nothing to stop anyone claiming that they are part of the collective, or that their actions are a collective response. In fact, in an inversion of conventional structural and organisational hierarchy and theory, these events and actions become part of Anonymous as a whole, regardless of how reckless and destabilising they may be.

As such the movement changes, evolves and adapts at a constant and unrelenting pace. It is entirely possible that this kind of direct vigilantism could become increasingly frequent, in which Anons attempt to "right wrongs" more than protect freedom of information, even using that same freedom to do so.

Anonymous back in the real world - a return to form?

During my Master's programme, I became increasingly interested in Anonymous as the next evolutionary step in the development of insurgency/politically subversive action, building the idea from a simple seminar presentation into my full dissertation, charting their origins, history, development, ideology, structure (or lack of), and attempting to understand the above through the application of insurgency/counterinsurgency theory. Part of the purpose of this blog is to continue to work and develop this topic - amongst similar related ones - in a constructive and catalogued fashion, as well as to make mention of material and ideas that did not make it into the already generous word limit of my original work.

The presence of Anonymous in the Occupy Wall Street protest movement in America - as well as the associated protests around the world - should come as no great surprise. Anonymous became involved in the Arab Spring uprisings in their own manner - offering workarounds and loopholes in government communications surveillance, channels for contact with external activists and diasporas, as well as through direct attack on the internet presences of the regimes being challenged by their populations.

This time however, with the protests taking place in western/westernised countries, they have been able to take part "IRL" (in real life) in addition to their usual, internet-based routes. A fairly common and naive opinion of Anonymous, LulzSec and other related/aligned movements is that they stick to protesting online as basement-dwelling pale nerds don't tend to do to well when faced with riot police, batons and kettling tactics, and would certainly fair even worse against the military regimes of North Africa and the Middle East.

In a way this viewpoint is both right and wrong, for almost the same reasons. Due to the deliberate eschewing of direct control structures, Anonymous operates globally in an acephalous manner, acting as a force multiplyer to existing causes that come to its attention, making use of increasingly sophisitcated public relations and culture jamming skills, the developmental trajectory of which can be clearly documented and analysed. The exact methodology of this I shall come to in a later blog, but they do not have the physical capability to protest on their own, certainly not like they managed in 2008 with the Project Chanology protests.

As such, they have taken the path of least resistance, and operate in an environment that adapts, changes and enables communication of information at a speed that governments and corporations have found difficult to keep pace with, which gives them the clear advantage in terms of influence and reaching target audiences in a way that said audience instinctively understands and uses on a constant basis.

As such it is interesting to see them return to participating in real world actions, however whether this is the moment that Anonymous emerges as a serious and recognisable entity outside of its native environment remains to be seen.

A Taste of things to come

Welcome to Internetual Analysis. This blog serves to A) force myself to keep up to date with current events in my fields of interest and B) that I think, write and analyse them consistently to stay in practise throughout my search for a gainful position in which I can do so professionally, maybe even beyond.

I hope that you find this interesting, I should have plenty of material to be getting on with.