The Sunday Papers

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The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

Sundays are for lying in bed and thinking of ways to interfere with your downstairs neighbour's space as much as their loud music interferes with yours. Crucially the method cannot be one that can be immediately turned around and used back against you. Perhaps taking up the aim of walking up and down the creaking stairs 100 times a day or investing in a door bell with a very loud and long tune.

While I think on that for most of the morning as everything in my bedroom vibrates with loud bass from below, I will have a read of what's good on the internet this week.

My former boss Rich Stanton has been doing the (Manor) Lord's work over at cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer and providing an annotated version of The McAfee Effect. You know, the rap about the strange life of John McAfee, famous for creating antivirus software and, well, infamous for much else.

What you know bout the streets?
What you know bout Belize?
Fairly simple to start off with: McAfee took a massive hit in the global financial crash of 2008, and emigrated to Belize, claiming he wished to escape US regulations and "materialism."
What you know bout faking your own heart attack just to ditch the police!?
A classic: McAfee faked a heart attack while under threat of deportation, forcing his transfer to a hospital. Take everything McAfee says with a huge pinch of salt, but he later explained the incident on X:
"Did I really fake a heart attack while in prison in Guatemala?" writes McAfee. "A: Yes. Why? A: I was being deported back to Belize at noon. My lawyers needed until 2:00 to file a stay of deportation. I told them:
"Don't worry. Get the Stay. I got the rest."

After the White House released a montage of bomb strikes in Iran framed by footage taken from Wii Sports, Kenneth Shepard asks which game company will actually step and push back against Trump.

It’s not like you need me to tell you that the way American politics has contorted itself to placate a government seemingly run by 12-year-old internet trolls isn’t normal, or that none of the usual systems that were supposed to keep checks and balances in place to stop a fascist regime seem to apply anymore. Everyone’s scared of a 79-year-old toddler because someone gave him a loaded gun that he’s swinging around. He gets to break laws, bypass protocols, lie, start wars, and endanger people in and outside of America on whatever destructive whims pop into his addled noggin.
Video games and other pieces of pop culture have been dragged into it because right wingers are notoriously incapable of creating anything themselves, and have to bastardize other people’s ideas so the masses will point and clap because they understood that reference. And since the rules don’t seem to actually apply and the Trump administration has a hell of a lot more resources to endure a legal battle than a guy who pirated some games does, no one’s taking any action here. At this point I don’t know if it’s cowardice, or if this idiocy has just become so normalized nobody even cares.

On a related note, I've been reading a paper by Mark Coeckelbergh which is his attempt to define technofascism, and how AI and other new technologies mean authoritarianism may not look like the images we traditionally have in our mind.

[R]ather than mass rallies and visible paramilitary violence (e.g., against minorities and political opponents), control is now usually exerted through opaque systems that predict, influence, and constrain behavior, often in ways invisible to the public. For example, fascism’s features are increasingly reflected in the algorithmic governance of contemporary digital platforms, where decision-making processes are opaque, centralized, and resistant to democratic oversight. Similarly, social welfare institutions and insurances use AI in ways that are not transparent to users.
AI has specific features that facilitate these forms of control. In contrast to earlier digital technologies, AI in the form of machine learning produces outcomes in ways that are not transparent; yet by producing convincing and seemingly “authoritative” text, for instance, it tempts the user to following its recommendations without much thinking or judgment. With AI, it is now also possible to manipulate masses of people in a fast and effective way, based on personalized profiles. Moreover, due to the huge resources needed to train AI (data centers, enormous volumes of data), a few large corporations tend to oligopolize AI and hence exert a lot of power of its development, use, and future.

Steve Ballmer is a name I know best from his days at Microsoft – you may remember the time he stormed the stage, screaming, jumping, and looking like someone psyching themselves up to slap a bull's testes. After leaving tech, he went on to buy an NBA team, the Los Angeles Clippers and it is that venture which, not his time leading one of the largest corporations in the world, that has seen him crop up in the pages of the LRB.

In what starts as a recounting of a potentially sketchy player sponsorship, writer Arvin Alaigh draws back to show how legacy sports media refuses to engage with the story. I'm not a great follower of sports, but it's hard to resist a story of corporate shadiness.

Last September, the podcaster Pablo Torre reported that the Clippers’ star player, Kawhi Leonard, had signed an unusual endorsement deal in 2022 with Aspiration, a tree-planting financial firm that sponsored the Clippers in the early 2020s. Aspiration would pay Leonard $28 million over four years, in exchange for which he ‘literally did nothing’. The contract would be terminated, however, if he stopped playing for the Clippers. Meanwhile, Ballmer had invested $50 million in Aspiration. Together, this suggests that the Clippers may have used Aspiration as an intermediary to pay their star player extra money under the table, an arrangement that would breach the NBA salary cap.
Although the NBA is a corporate entity that epitomises the runaway glut of hyper-capitalism (billionaire owners, multimillionaire players), it is strictly regulated to ensure competitive practice. The salary cap is the spine of the league’s regulatory regime, designed to prevent the richest teams from simply buying up the top players at unmatchable salaries (English football fans can only look on in envy or despair; the Premier League clubs recently voted against introducing a salary cap). Ballmer remains the world’s richest professional sports team owner.

I could always fight fire with fire with my neighbour and invest in a speaker system and hit him with both barrels of Steve Reich's Clapping Music and Piano Phase. I could put them on loop and play them from 9am until 6pm so there would be no grounds for a noise complaint. Better still, it's great music to work to. Yes, this plan is coming together nicely and, better still, it can count as my music recommendations this week.