Virtual Genocide; Our Graveyard

I’ve been playing some TF2 recently. About an hour when I can, but after awhile my mind gets all foggy.

I visited all the maps I knew by heart when it released. The game was released on October 10th, 2007. The game is now eighteen years old.

And I was there for all the first class updates, before our “hat apocalypse” and pilot programme for cosmetic economies. Probably still netting in millions, deprecating the need for an entry fee. They made it free to play sometime ago.

There’s this eerie video called “I Pet Goat, II” and while many love to make predictions and scenes, whether it’s the rise of the Antichrist or a resolution to destroy Babylon’s temple persisting, found in the Federal Reserve, in the Met Gala, it still has some poignant depictions. Suits as slaves.

One clip in that video shows a child whose mind is infested by a parasite with a TV/monitor for a face. The child sits limply while all of these pixels and imaginary conversations cloud its eyes. Stock markets and its imaginary numbers crashing and rising. A mind hollowed to make room for the virtual demon and its wires coiled about and nesting.

I’m not sure when the dial was ramped up, but technology back in the day still had an “Otherness” to it. You’d get your Nintendo Power magazine to figure out strategies and discuss over recess. A family would have a computer in the living room, taking turns for minute activities.

There’s a silent symphony now, everywhere I turn. Dogwalkers rarely excluded, red light neighbors coming along.

What do you think is the most humane way to steward those who don’t fit in the plans? The Kingmakers know they can only offer enough distractions where you let your free will drive you to a hidden death.

An earlier entry of mine imagines about the prior children of pop culture, also coincidentally about TF2. Somewhere in the eighties. Now they roam this far off world and reality, watching it transform while discarded. This selection process has been going on for centuries and it’s just more subtle now.

One of my favorite themes that I hope to write more is where you are completely undesirable in the eyes of Nature. Since natural selection is impartial and permanent, what a strange fate it is, indeed, to be born to fail. How you were ever born to begin with is only a mystery — actually, it’s quite clear; don’t you know Civilization can lean dysgenic?

We can talk about the scourge of fentanyl, absolutely, I guess I’m just thinking about this other one. Our virtual genocide, where you can, from birth to death, live through a screen, selecting yourself out of society willingly. Now filled with old stories, like when TF2 was released.

Here is my death bed. Adorned with flowers and paper cranes of light pink and white to violet. By the wind fury you can have some too; after all, it seems you have a lot right next to me. This is our graveyard.

I wonder what old stories are written on your tombstone.