I was browsing the app store on my phone the other day, looking for a decent game to pass the time, and I had a moment of unusual clarity. I was reading a review of a popular franchise and people were upset that it was going to be available only on mobile iOS platforms, that they couldn’t play it on a more traditional gaming medium, like a 360 or DS or PS3.
I read their words, their complaints, and all of a sudden, it was as if I were reading gibberish. What they were saying didn’t make sense to me; I literally didn’t understand it.
I had a confuse.
People were angry over the fact that a traditional video-game franchise, made by a company that had grown to prominence during the eight-bit and sixteen-bit eras, had an entry that could run only on a machine that made those traditional consoles look like a caveman banging two rocks together.
I mean, take a moment and think about it. The piece of hardware in your hand or your pocket, that device that’s called merely a phone, has every single capability of any gaming system from fifteen to twenty years ago, in addition to its being able to make voice and video calls, and people are angry when games are released on only that platform. They get profoundly mad. Frothing-at-the-mouth, vitriolic-rant, online-petition-with-thirty-thousand-signatures upset.
We’re talking seriously butthurt here.
I want to know why.
Why are these people so angry? Why are they so upset that something we would have killed to have ten years ago is now considered rubbish?
When did we forget how to recognize that moment where the future becomes the present? When did we lose that sense of wonder that right now, RIGHT NOW, we are capable of accessing any recorded media or literature in the entirety of human history via a palm-sized portable device? When did we become inured to the fact that if we were to describe our current tech level to someone of even twenty-five years ago, he or she would most likely lock us up in the insane asylum or tell us to go back to our parents’ basement and read more nerd books?
When did we become immune to just how impressive our tools actually are?
We have power plants that work off reactions that are found in stars. We can talk to people on the other side of the world like they were right next door to us. We use a system of geosynchronous satellites to navigate our personal automobiles, some of which run on pure electricity. I’m currently writing on a machine that automatically spellchecks my words, that can reallocate my finances, that communicates through thin air with a giant network of other machines all across the globe in case I need to look something up, and that also edits music and videos I could make appear on demand if I were so inclined. The only thing it doesn’t do is brew coffee, and that’s because I don’t have a wi-fi equipped coffeemaker (which I now know is an actual thing because I just Googled it).
If you told Ronald Reagan he would have the ability to shut down an Iranian nuclear-weapons facility by writing some words in a coding language, he’d have lost his mind. We are living Star Wars here, people.
Why are we so incapable of examining the wonder around us? The terror around us?
I believe it’s because we’ve forgotten how to remember the short-term past. We’re so enthralled with what might be, with what potentialities await, that we rarely stop to look around and see what is. What we’ve created from what we used to be, the slow shifts that add up to drastic change, these are buried in the mind’s memory banks and left to lie in their sepulchral dust, forgotten in the mad dance of now and tomorrow. Sure, we can open history’s archives and learn lessons from one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, or more years ago (for those who care to look), but we have a curious set of blinders when it comes to events that happen in our own lifetimes.
Why can’t we see the constant flux that surrounds us through a twenty-five- or fifty-year period? Is it because most of us judge the world based on our personal experience, and in our personal experience, changes accumulate over time so gradually that we don’t even notice?
Don’t bother thinking that one over, I’ll answer it for you—yes. Just look at all the stories from people saying climate change isn’t real because they wore sandals in the winter or jackets in the summer (never mind the increasing severity of weather patterns and seasonal fluctuations!), those who ignore statistics in favor of anecdotal tales (you’ll totally win the lottery this time!), or the multitudes who consistently choose short-term gains over long-term losses because the latter is diffused over a much broader spectrum (too big to fail now, but look at those quarterly reports go!). Hell, look at all the poor people who perennially vote for rich people to take more and more of their rights away and then wonder why social inequity keeps rising. We’re a pretty fucking dumb bunch of animals when it comes to paying attention to what’s going on in our lives, I’m not gonna lie.
Case in point: all the iDevices people take for granted. Constant innovation, upgrading, features—the differences between the first iPod and an iPhone 5 are nothing short of amazing, and that’s over the course of barely twelve years, which is leaving out the fact that if you showed an original iPod to some people from 1990, they’d shit themselves. No one blinks an eye, though; people don’t think back to CD players and Walkmans and tape decks. They just download another album because it’s not like they’re going to use all thirty-two of those gigabytes anyway.
(Seriously. Thirty-two gigabytes of storage space on something that’s three inches by five inches. Holy shit; beam me up.)
But there’s a darker side to that calculus, that constant change without scrutiny. It ain’t all gleaming plastic and entertainment. Take a gander at the current state of civil liberties in this country. You think there wouldn’t have been a public uproar if Nixon tried to pass something like the Patriot Act? If we indefinitely detained our own people without giving them recourse to a jury trial in a functionally illegal prison? Yet now we’re talking about surveilling our own cities with drones and executing American citizens without a trial—national security applied with a conveniently wider and wider net. Innovation goes both ways—one man’s Jobs is another man’s Rove.
Sadly, it looks like we’ll just keep taking those changes for granted. We’re like the lobster sitting in the pot of slowly heating water, too dumb to realize that eventually it’s going to boil. For every outraged geek who’s busy mashing away at his keyboard because his game is available only (only!) on the phone, there is a mindless citizen who thinks Freedom of Information requests really aren’t that important now, are they, I mean, it’s not like they’ve really told us anything for the past ten years anyway, right? Both limited by the same worldview, the same tunnel vision of now. Both unable to see just how much things have really changed because each step was so small, so logical, so natural. Both simmering away, content in their hot tub.
Well, whatever, fuck it, I’m bored. Time to go download Drone Hunter 3. I really wish it were on 360, though.