This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.

Toll Roads and Gated Communities:
How Private Commerce Took Over the Public Internet

Adam Dean

“The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation” (Katz 2012).

When the Internet went private with the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, it was the metaphorical Wild West—the land-grab decade, where unknown companies popped up to claim untapped real estate in the form of domain names, and prospecting users invented pathways to share unlimited unlegislated copyrighted material. It was in this period that long-established telecommunications companies grew their existing infrastructure to deliver faster Internet to our homes, and a new generation of hosting companies were born. Those companies that got in early parceled out the Internet into what it is today—high-speed toll roads leading to gated communities. Decades later, when the problems with this model became noticeable to the everyday user, the FCC began to assert itself as regulator by establishing Net Neutrality, which limited the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) legal right to control the direction and speed of Internet traffic for the everyday user. President Barack Obama called it, “…a victory for the millions of Americans who made their voices heard in support of a free and fair Internet” (2016).

That victory was short-lived. When those regulations were rolled back by the FCC in 2017, it was done under the banner of freedom as well. The title of the press release that introduced the rollbacks read: “CHAIRMAN PAI CIRCULATES DRAFT ORDER TO RESTORE INTERNET FREEDOM AND ELIMINATE HEAVY-HANDED INTERNET REGULATIONS” (Pelkey 2017). Then, in 2022, the FCC announced plans to support legislation to make Net Neutrality regulations law. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, “…everyone should be able to go where they want and do what they want online without their broadband provider making choices for them. I support Net Neutrality because it fosters this openness and accountability” (Perez 2022). That legislation, introduced that year in the House (H.R. 8573) and Senate (S.4676), which “expressly classifies broadband internet as a telecommunications service rather than an information service for purposes of regulation by the Federal Communications Commission,” never advanced in either chamber (Markey and Matsui 2021). As a result of this stall, the FCC under Rosenworcel’s Chairship voted to regulate the ISPs in three specific ways: 1) By prohibiting ISPs from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful content, 2) By empowering the FCC with the discretion and ability to revoke the authorizations of foreign-owned broadband operators, and 3) By empowering the FCC to monitor and intervene in service outages (FCC 2024). Of course, the battle for a free internet didn’t end there. In January, 2025, the FCC’s jurisdiction of oversight was struck down in federal court (Bowman 2025).

Through all of this, the battle over Net Neutrality has been defended and opposed under the banner of freedom—on one side the freedom banner protects the everyday consumer/end user so that they can visit any law-abiding website without restrictions or throttling, and on the other the freedom banner protects the ISP’s interests to compete in an open marketplace, where, as traffic controller, the ISP can direct end users and restrict or promote sites and content in their business interest. But the Net Neutrality battle isn’t actually limited to these two sides—the FCC v. the ISPs—and at risk of defending those should-be telecommunications companies that deliver the Internet to our homes, this simplified two-sided battle distracts from another group of traffic controllers who have been given a pass. In caring for our public Internet, the deeper critique in this essay is of the true winners of the Internet land grab. Content curators like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) are not, by the strict definition, ISPs, nor are they telecommunications companies, and so they would not have answered to the FCC even if the 2024 order had been upheld by the federal court. Instead, these commerce companies abide by the regulations set by the FTC despite their role as the replacement for traditional radio and television broadcast stations, charged with the responsibility to curate the daily news and entertainment options for 5.5 billion users each day while restricting access to those that do not pay with their personal data (Statista 2022).

In caring for the public Internet, this essay critiques precisely how the Internet was built with tax dollars and then given away to private content curators from whom the public now must rent. References made to the Internet throughout this essay are not meant to indicate published content in/on/across the Internet, but there should be some understanding that freedom of access to the Internet and freedom to access the information therein are coupled. While it is intuitive to assume access applies to both the same, there are different public and private partnerships with stakes in one or the other, and sometimes both, so their access challenges often differ. For example, Google does not have the ability to restrict access to a URL on the World Wide Web. A user can navigate directly to a website; however, most users search, even using the address bar to do so, and are subject to omissions made by the search engine in the result. On the other hand, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the international governing body of the domain names and has the technical power to revoke a website name from public access through its Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. However, its regulatory power is restricted to enforcing the basic rules of the registry, such as cybersquatting and trademark violations (ICANN 2016). As an international governing body, ICANN is one example of the existing structure already in place to enforce Internet regulation, but apart from the FCC’s push for Net Neutrality, there is no U.S. regulation for how companies, such as Alphabet or the ISP, direct, divert, dissuade and restrict users as they navigate.

The Public’s Internet

“The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. … Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them” (Hertzfield 2019).

Much has been published on the Internet’s roots, through amusing intra-government memos on over-the-network etiquette, its truncated first transmission message “LO”^[i], and its ties to the U.S. Military’s first air defense system S.A.G.E. Despite its establishment by the U.S. Department of Defense, the original Internet known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was a means to tie together the nation’s most powerful computers at various research institutions. In short, in its origin, the Internet had no commercial appeal:

It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business … Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the Government agencies which manage the ARPANet (Stacy 1982).

While ARPA held oversight over its own network, it did not deter private companies from copying the technology, and copy they did:

A number of U.S. companies have also procured or are procuring private corporate networks utilizing many of the techniques developed for ARPANET. For instance, it was recently announced that Citibank of New York City has constructed (by contract to BBN) a private network very similar to the ARPANET. …A number of companies have taken advantage of the fact that the ARPANET technology is in the public domain to obtain the listings of the ARPANET software. (Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc. 1981).

By 1980 taxpayers had invested billions of dollars in the Internet’s infrastructure, through research grants to public universities and the RAND Corporation from ARPA, the National Science Foundation and other government entities, but the handoff to private corporations was not formalized for another decade. In 1991 the High Performance Computing Act appropriated more than $1.5 billion from the National Science Foundation to “serve as the primary source of information on access to and use of the Network” (Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and Gore 1991). With the research directive still prevalent, computer science programs at UCLA, MIT, Stanford, Wisconsin and others received substantial funding toward the collective goal to provide high speed internet to the public. ISPs emerged and remained attached to the regulatory structure that came with the funding. But there were pockets of research that fell beyond the scope of ARPA—namely the organization and curation of the content published on the Internet and the potential profits in collecting and selling user data that were still untapped. While private ISPs worked closely with government partners to make the internet accessible to the everyday user, another group developed websites to host the traffic that was coming.

Google: Popularity is not Accuracy

Google began its success nearly two decades ago with this now infamous public promise to itself: “Don’t be Evil”—a mantra that helped the company become the most trusted search engine in the world. But what on earth did it mean? The phrase floated around Google in its early days, where buzzwords like accuracy, transparency and democracy were thrown around in every meeting. The phrase gained enough traction to be included in the young company’s code of conduct until 2015 when it restructured under Alphabet, Inc. Eric Schmidt attributes the phrase as “invented by Larry and Sergey” and talks about it often, including in his book, How Google Works, co-authored with Jonathan Rosenberg. Schmidt makes a strong case that it was perhaps a legitimate foundation for a code of conduct still in place at Google, or maybe not. As a guest on NPR’s quiz show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!” in 2013, Schmidt remembers a conversation with an engineer, as an example of this sincerity:

Well, it was invented by Larry and Sergey. And the idea was that we don’t quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don’t be evil, then employees can say, I think that’s evil. Now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something. So what happens is, I’m sitting in this meeting, and we’re having this debate about an advertising product. And one of the engineers pounds his fists on the table and says, that’s evil. And then the whole conversation stops, everyone goes into conniptions, and eventually we stopped the project. So it did work (NPR.org 2013).

So it did work, says Schmidt. And perhaps it did in some way create a subtle check at the brainstorming sessions, or perhaps it could have even been internalized by programmers and designers, who may have resisted subtle changes pressed by their sales wing. Perhaps. We can only know anecdotally what Google chose not to do, yet we can take a careful look at what it has done. In an interview for Logic magazine, Fred Turner, a prolific critic of cyberlibertarianism and tech utopianism, said:

About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa (Turner and Weigel 2017).

At the heart of the mantra is not whether Google is good or evil in abstraction, but that they curate what is good and evil for their users. Looking back at the company’s foundation, Brin and Page wrote in their famous paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, that PageRank would improve search quality, which is described really as keyword accuracy:

“Junk results” often wash out any results that a user is interested in. In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). … Indeed, we want our notion of “relevant” to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents. This very high precision is important even at the expense of recall (the total number of relevant documents the system is able to return) (Brin and Page 2012).

The notion of “quality” is the first hint in the original writings that PageRank could quickly get caught between two competing goals: most accurate and most popular. The word “accurate” appears only twice in the document (and accuracy does not appear). First in reference to anchor text as providing more accurate descriptions than the pages themselves, and second to criticize a web user’s lack of specificity in keyword searches (“some argue that on the web, users should specify more accurately what they want and add more words to their query”) (Brin and Page 2012). Neither of these address the question, is quality accuracy, and is accuracy quality? But Brin and Page did not seek to answer this question in the original document, perhaps relying on a public trust—whatever their answer, it won’t be evil.

At the heart of Brin and Page’s famous paper is the argument that PageRank will bring order to the Web, and certainly it has done that if the public consensus is the indicator. Google’s search engine is the most popular in the world, with 80% of the desktop market share (Statistica Research Department 2022). Credit is due to the Internet pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee and John Postel, who organized the underlying system upon which Brin and Page could organize, and credit is due to Brin and Page for discovering that hyperlinks are the lexicon of the web and can be used not just as a map of the entire globe, but to create a hierarchy for all pages. What PageRank did that had not been accomplished previously, was determining the value of pages on the web by how they relate to one another. In essence, this is the voting system that determines which webpages are “the best”. As Brin and Page explain it in their paper,

These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page’s “PageRank”, an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps a great deal (Brin and Page 2012).

They go on to explain the algorithm, which weighs and thus ranks pages according to not only the amount of links to the page but again the quality. This is the root of the democracy, as each page is a voter and is also in the pool to be voted for, and this is objective somehow. An earlier paper Brin and Page wrote with their advisor at Stanford, Terry Winograd, places this idea of PageRank’s inherent objectivity in the abstract, placing all subjective interpretation on users alone. It reads:

The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the reader’s interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a method for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them (Brin et al. 1998).

Their very idea of a popularity ranking metric, which is measured in a way that “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance” really means that each page has been cited by another page in the form of a hyperlink. And if we take a step back and consider that a person created the hyperlink, we are now in the loop that Fred Turner described. Who made the link? Someone that knows how to make links. Who decided how important that link was? Google. But the question this essay seeks to answer is not whether Google’s own judgment of evil is a proper measure, or even whether there is a notion of good and bad on which we’d settle. Making an argument for Google as good or evil would have to include their lesser-known contributions, like DeepMind, or the mobile Wi-Fi surveillance probe built into the Google Maps car, or lawsuits that charge the company with giving “unfair preference” to their own services and subsidiaries over those of their rivals. And we would have to talk about censorship and surveillance, both at the company’s own discretion and in cooperation with its regulators and partnership. All that, including the ethics of simultaneously controlling the information hierarchy and the ad revenue—AdWords and AdSense, which work hand-in-hand with PageRank—would be a long discussion of what is good, and what is evil, indeed. There is already a great deal of opinion on “Don’t be Evil” in popular media as well, so it’s safe to say that testing the morality of the mantra has been covered. What has hardly been touched, though, is the public trust in which Google is deeply embedded. Despite the widespread exposure of “Don’t be Evil”, there is some agreement, as indicated in number of users, that Google is trustworthy. It may be trust in accuracy, speed, convenience, or something else, but trust is the right word. The democracy that it is founded on, according to the original workings of PageRank, might even be a symbol of U.S. citizen trust in democracy itself. Many users may not know or consider the implications of the PageRank’s dependence, but there is significant implicit trust in its democracy, if the market share is the indicator.

But it’s important to note here that at best it’s a misunderstanding that Google is democratic, and it is not entirely clear that this was ever its purpose. It was certainly its key to the success of PageRank, but it was only the foundation. In addition to targeted search results weighing heavily on top of PageRank, the myth of the “objective” voting system has been trusted for two decades. Only in the wake of the 2016 election did the public really begin to take seriously the question: is the democracy rigged? Carole Cadwalladr reports on an ad hoc test in The Guardian, allowing Google’s autocomplete function to guide her in toward the most popular/accurate/quality results. She started with a simple keyword and allowed autocomplete to choose for her, and the results are shocking. She writes:

Google is knowledge. It’s where you go to find things out. And evil Jews are just the start of it. There are also evil women. I didn’t go looking for them either. This is what I type: “a-r-e w-o-m-e-n”. And Google offers me just two choices, the first of which is: “Are women evil?” I press return. Yes, they are. Every one of the 10 results “confirms” that they are, including the top one, from a site called sheddingoftheego.com, which is boxed out and highlighted: “Every woman has some degree of prostitute in her. Every woman has a little evil in her… Women don’t love men, they love what they can do for them. It is within reason to say women feel attraction but they cannot love men” (Cadwalladr 2016).

Cadwalladr hoped these were not the most popular/accurate/quality results, so she contacted Google and received the following response.

Our search results are a reflection of the content across the web. This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of sensitive subject matter online can affect what search results appear for a given query. These results don’t reflect Google’s own opinions or beliefs – as a company, we strongly value a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures (Cadwalladr 2016).

Jonathan Albright, Director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, studied this too. He created a list of 306 widely circulated fake news sites and followed the lexica, just as PageRank was designed to do (Albright et al. 2017). Essentially Albright revealed through the hyperlinks that there had been a vast movement to manipulate PageRank’s popularity-based results to favor this subset of pages. Understanding how this is done is the key to breaking any illusion that the PageRank democracy is representative of popular opinion. Pages vote for one another by the amount and quality of hyperlinks, which means, in oversimplified terms, the creator of the link submits the vote. Albright’s experiment shows clearly that democracy can be rigged, or even automated. This subset contained 23,000 pages and 1.3 million hyperlinks. It is very unlikely these represent the popular vote of people making the pages, and even more unlikely that it resembles the popular opinion of the searching public. Add to this the more recent and increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence to aid in content curation and the immediate creation of webpages that are included in search results, and it is clear that Brin’s and Page’s original ideas about organizing the Internet by either popularity or democracy are dead.

Facebook: Move Fast and Break Things

Hierarchies of information are big business, as Google has proven. Like traveling, the business of digital information is not in the destination. It’s the journey. Page visits are the blue ribbon for the web. The almighty click has stripped away any attention to content itself. Facebook has a famous sign that hangs in its office. It is big red lettering that says, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Indeed, the symbol of the company’s take on “Don’t be Evil.” Facebook was, for at least the four years following its launch, a community closed to advertisers. This meant that content circulated within the community by account holders, posting on their own behalf more or less. Sharing information this way, whether it was news articles, cat pictures, or political opinions, could be traced back to a user. When Facebook launched its Initial Public Stock Offering on May 18, 2012, the community-curated content dynamic broke. Facebook transformed its entire platform and mission from giving “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” into an advertising company “making the world more open and connected.” Under Meta, Facebook logs more than 2 billion daily active users (Dixon 2022). Facebook is popular for reasons that should be obvious by now; a cult of personality that so effectively brings like minds together with individualized pseudo-authority to “friend”, “like”, “unfollow”, “block.” This may be the source of the widespread success of content curation that has seated Meta among the top 10 most valuable companies in the world, but the content is no longer managed by the community of active users any more than the search results over at Google. The newsfeed now contains ads from outside the friend circle, and the ever-changing “Trending” section consists of popular news, selected by a concoction of user likes and shares, and Meta’s magic dust. What was once an exclusive friends network, with the “.edu” email address as its user criterion origin story, is now an advertiser-consumer matchmaking app. It is spelled out plainly in Meta’s Transparency Center:

Facebook’s goal is to make sure you see posts from the people, interests, and ideas that you find valuable, whether that content comes from people you’re already connected to or from those you may not yet know. When you open Facebook and see Feed in your Home tab, you experience a mix of “connected content” (e.g., content from the people you’re friends with or are following, Groups you’ve joined, and Pages you’ve liked) as well as “recommended content” (e.g., content we think you’ll be interested in from those you may want to know). We also show you ads that are tailored to you (Meta Platforms 2024).

As an aside, when auto-generating a citation for this webpage, the result is on point: “‘Log in or Sign up to View.’ n.d. Transparency.meta.com.”‌ In short, the introduction of advertisers into the closed community of Facebook has sparked the downward spiral that we are struggling to reverse. Advertisers inside the social circle means an exchange of data, but it is not a free exchange. The data flows overwhelmingly in one direction. As we converse, like and share, the advertiser listens. 

The Gated Community

As the leading two aggregators of unprecedented amounts of market research, these two companies effectively direct and manage what is accessible on the World Wide Web without having to take part in the ongoing battle for a neutral net. And, while the two companies gained credibility and user loyalty through long held outspoken advocacy of free and accessible information, their business models are now based almost exclusively on restriction. Users are contractually restricted to access only curated monetized content through their services, in exchange for opting in to a vast digital infrastructure of behavioral analytics. Most of the world accesses the Internet through Alphabet and Meta, having opted-in to participate as subjects of for-profit behavioral analytics, and we have been lured through their gateways on foundational promises of democracy and free information.

Despite these false promises, younger generations on social media may have never experienced a free Internet, where their clicks were not tracked, and we see the window for such a freedom actually shrinking further. ISPs have always been privy to our data, but have not been allowed to monetize it as the curators have. With the rollbacks on Net Neutrality protections, the ISPs could join the data free-for-all, but their entry is late in the game. Alphabet and Meta continue to expand the transactional design of their Internet, tightening the terms under which we all surf, and locking off the information they curate behind a login screen—the gated community.

Putting this together, everyday users must pay an ISP to access the Internet, then exchange personal data to search it, then log in to view and interact with one another on the most popular social media websites. There are still niche social and search companies that allow users to interact without the paywall, but the majority of users choose to pay the toll road to enter the gated community. Users still can choose to rent or purchase a domain in order to share their own intellectual property without having to grant permissions for the hosting party to monetize it, but so many users instead choose to post original content through their social media accounts, where the owners of those servers are within their users agreements to harvest and sell it.

The question of free space is just part of it. There is also the question of free information, which has been the main subject of this essay. When posting on social media, for example, we are led to believe that what we write is sent out to our friends, but we know that the property owner will decide that for us. Having a personal account on a social site is comparable to renting a house because it lets you be with your friends, but the landlord prohibits curtains, enters without asking, and sometimes takes your stuff. The restriction of information is at the discretion of the landlord, and there is no obligation, implied or written, that we have a role in this decision process. All information has restriction inherently, too. We know that if we click on a news essay, for instance, that publisher is under similar constraints. They must pay to let you enter their gate, come in their home and eat their food. A paywall is often how they do that, or agreeing to the cookies statement that pops up, or whitelisting to allow ads on your screen. The question emerges, if the information wasn’t free in newspapers, why do we expect it to become free on the Internet? In some ways, that’s a fair question, but what is unfair is the introduction of new gates to the community, each with their own tolls and taxes. It is not only the access point at which we arrive at the information. It is the service-oriented process of finding it. At one of the gates to the Internet community, you are asked, “what are you looking for?” The answer we give is the search query. You are not only given directions to the content (that would be the URL). We are given the door itself…the link directly to the information. The search engines do not promise to help us find the information. They promise that they have already found it for us. This has the makings of a utopia indeed, the world at our fingertips! But the search transaction is the exact opposite really. The queries deliver us to the information, not the information to us. The choice is narrowed down, organically we are told, so that we can choose from the very best sources related to our search. This is the trust we have in search. It is not that we used their service to find what we’re looking for within a myriad of information, it is that we were delivered to their preferred information based on the words we typed. That’s what targeting is.

It is safe to say that these companies have made the rules that suit their needs, and our choice is between their way or the highway. Opt-in culture is comparable to an entry fee at a movie theater, but you have to keep paying while you’re watching the movie. Given the backward progress of Net Neutrality, which may be an idea of the past, it is difficult to see a path that puts the freedoms of the everyday user over those of the ISPs and content curators. Though a solution that protects the everyday user’s freedom to use their public Internet feels quite out of reach at this time, it is at least worth declaring that there is one, and it is attainable, if only on the technical side. The solution to the problem is two-fold: First, the FCC can restore and extend privacy protections that were approved by the FCC in October 2016 but repealed under then chairman, Ajit Pai, in March 2017, however the cycle could continue if future chairpersons choose to roll them back again. Instead of limiting oversight power to the FCC, Congress can revisit The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act of 2022, and this has the potential to solidify Net Neutrality into law. Second, Net Neutrality should go beyond the ISP, into the domains, where the content curators monetize the clicks. ICANN already acts as a licenser in assigning domains, and so it can enforce as licenser in accordance with Net Neutrality law, which should include a standard for “basic service” for companies in the business of mass information dissemination.

For the first solution, it’s important to make a distinction between the end-user license agreements (EULA) and privacy policies. EULA are not mandatory by law, and terms of service are fairly broad and unregulated. The most common types are explicit (clickwrap) and implicit (browser wrap). EULAs are common on the web and ubiquitous in OS software and mobile apps. While equally hostile and unreadable to the end-user, it is more pressing that a solution be found within the privacy policy documents, as they must by law directly address data collection and use. Privacy laws are already subject to federal regulations, however there is almost no regulation in effect at this time. Further, a user has no option to opt-out. That option would mean that you choose not to use the service in any capacity. Considering the requirements from employers for e-mail, as the most obvious example, the forceful nature of opting-in to keep your job or do your homework reveals the high costs of the information access hierarchy. As mentioned, a gradual step toward protecting individual privacy was made by the FCC in 2016, and should be expanded. The Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules, (approved October 2016 then repealed 2017) separated the standard all-or-nothing Opt-in agreement into the following:

• Opt-in: ISPs are required to obtain affirmative “opt-in” consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information. The rules specify categories of information that are considered sensitive, which include precise geo-location, financial information, health information, children’s information, social security numbers, web browsing history, app usage history and the content of communications.
• Opt-out: ISPs would be allowed to use and share non-sensitive information unless a customer “opts-out.” All other individually identifiable customer information – for example, email address or service tier information – would be considered non-sensitive and the use and sharing of that information would be subject to opt-out consent, consistent with consumer expectations.
• Exceptions to consent requirements: Customer consent is inferred for certain purposes specified in the statute, including the provision of broadband service or billing and collection. For the use of this information, no additional customer consent is required beyond the creation of the customer-ISP relationship.

Obviously, these rules aren’t broad enough to shake us free from Alphabet’s and Meta’s information headlock, but it is the place to start. The ability to select from tiers of service might sound problematic, since it is actually adding another hierarchy on top of the hyperlink hierarchy Google has put in place for us. However, the tiers of service has an immediate and measurable improvement to all-or-nothing opt-in privacy agreements because, like initialing each page of a legal document to indicate it has been read, incremental agreement options mean more opportunities to stop and think. Alphabet and Meta have made improvements to their privacy policies, at least in transparency, but both companies retain full power to restrict content from those that will not allow their personal data to be sold. It is still, in essence, a strong-arm agreement. Regulation could ensure that access to any site is independent of that site’s own policy document. In other words, a universal agreement that grants access to all sites on the World Wide Web.

For the second solution we must create and enforce a standard for “basic service” for companies in the business of mass information dissemination. Given that the underlying infrastructure of the World Wide Web has always depended on public funding, it would be consistent with the investment to regulate mass information disseminators that utilize the infrastructure for private profits. There is precedent for this. Newton Minow proposed that networks have an obligation to serve the public interest in his famous “Vast Wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961. Specifically, a universal set of “basic services” must be publicly accessible with a default “opt-out” privacy agreement. For example, a person not logged in to any account could utilize Google’s search engine with the inherent agreement that their search habits may not be shared or sold. Some may argue further, that under a default opt-out agreement the data should not even be logged.

The enforcement model, too, is in place. Indirectly, the FCC must establish “basic services” for mass information disseminators and work directly with ICANN to enforce it. In simplest terms, the information contained behind the gates of these companies must be accessible without entering. Facebook’s login page is the most striking example. It is a moat around a castle, and the only drawbridge is your login. ICANN, which has the authority to restrict domains for registration violations, can be expanded beyond trademark and general uniformity of the domain names. The organization’s internal governance structure needs modification if it is to become an enforcing body. It currently consists of “governments and international treaty organizations, root server operators, groups concerned with the Internet’s security and the ‘at large’ community, meaning average Internet users” (ICANN 2014). When it was established in partnership with the U.S. government, it included a mandate that it must operate in a bottom-up and democratic manner. However, ICANN has stated repeatedly in public meetings that input from a global community is not amenable to the Board. In addition, ICANN has not conducted its “Conflicts of Interest and Ethics Practices Review” since 2012, and gives no indication that it intends to schedule another review (ICANN 2023).

Due to its impartial governance structure, under the proposed solution ICANN should remain limited to the management of the domain register, but could be directed by the FCC to restrict domains when for-profit mass information disseminators would violate a “basic services” mandate. It should be said, at this time, that this proposal does not take lightly the role of FCC oversight historically and looking to the future. It is crucial that the FCC return to its charge of regulating the venues of public information, far from which it has strayed.

Dr. Adam Dean is the Program Director for Communication and Media at LMU. He holds a BA in Media Studies from Penn State University, an MA in Radio, Television and Film from the University of North Texas, and a PhD in Media, Art and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University. Before joining the faculty at LMU Dr. Dean taught Digital Media Arts at Barry University in Miami while working professionally as an Adobe Certified Expert for CBS and Univision. His research and professional work focus on digital democracy and include creative projects that bring students and community partners together to produce documentaries, podcasts and other educational media.

Bibliography

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Albright, Jonathan, Janna Anderson and Rainie Lee. 2017. “The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. March 29, 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/03/29/the-future-of-free-speech-trolls-anonymity-and-fake-news-online/.

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Markey, E. 2021. “S.4676 – 117th Congress (2021-2022): Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act of 2022.” Congress.gov. 2021. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/4676.

Matsui, D. 2021. “H.R.8573 – 117th Congress (2021-2022): Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act of 2022.” Congress.gov. 2021. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8573.

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[i]                 On October 29, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock successfully transmitted the first message over the ARPANET from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. The message was “LO” while the intended message was “LOGIN”, interrupted by a computer crash.

This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.

There Are No Good Games: Dismantling Canonicity in Videogame Studies

Rian C. Johnson

Broken Machines: An Ugly Ontology of the Videogame 

Videogames are bad objects.^[1] They proliferate hidden structures of control, concentrated power, and inequity (Golumbia 2009b, 154). They are vehicles for the ideology of neoliberal capitalism (Jagoda 2020, 44). They are the “paradigmatic media of empire,” and they operate as the “ideological avatar of play,” insisting on a correct way to play that isn’t even really play at all (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 281). They promulgate rhetorics of destruction, conquest, exploitation, colonization, and violence (Mukherjee 2018; Harrer 2018; Dooghan 2019). They are a medium steeped in misogyny and the objectification and aestheticization of women (Gray, Voorhees, and Vossen 2018; D. J. Leonard and Kishonna L. Gray 2018; DeWinter and Kocurek 2017). They minstrelize people of color when not erasing them entirely (Everett and Watkins 2008; D. J. Leonard and Kishonna L. Gray 2018; D. Leonard 2003). And they are inextricably embedded in the American military-industrial complex (Ivory 2015).

Videogame culture is bad; it is “dark” and always has been (Paul 2018, 2). Popular videogame culture proselytizes the most toxic logic of the videogame in all its noxious glory. From booth babes to in-game harassment to eSports to GamerGate to the racist frenzy that forced a Japanese politician to declare official neutrality towards a Canadian-produced Samurai game in the Summer of 2024, videogame culture is toxic to everyone who sets foot outside of its punitive magic circle (Cryer 2024). The culture is the circle, and the circle is toxic. The magic circle of popular videogame culture is the proverbial embodiment of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s poisonous swamp, and like “hardcore” logic of Miyazaki’s Souls-like games, it reproduces the hidden hierarchy created through pseudo-meritocracy that ensures those who begin on top remain on top (Paul 2018, 13).

The videogame industry is very, very bad. Born in the laboratories of Brookhaven and MIT, it reached maturity amid the capitalist parable of Atari that began with dorm room piracy, snowballed into the Magnavox vs. Atari lawsuit, and ended under concrete in the New Mexico desert. From Atari to Nintendo to Blizzard, the development of videogames has been inseparable from the exploitation, harassment, and abuse of workers: fan laborers, outsourced grunt coders, and white-collar American women in Irvine, California, alike (Bulut 2020). The videogame industry is both an arm of the American military entertainment complex and an agent of warfare in its own right (Milburn 2018, 173; Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009, 98–105).

Even videogame scholarship has its problems. The gendered undertones of the Narratology vs. Ludology debates, a tendency to smooth over unseemly edges, a longstanding aversion to politics, ludo-orientalist and techno-orientalist tendencies, the murky conflation of game development and critical game studies, even a cursory survey of the field indicates that it is far from tidy. Despite this mire, the field is also always attempting perpetual normalizations in the form of theories, methods, actions, and, indeed, canons. And yet, lest negativity be misconstrued as hatred, as I write this critique, like so many others, I am simultaneously producing works arguing for the liberatory, radical, anamorphic, ameliorative, or at the very least, harmless potential in videogames. I argue, however, that if videogames offer us any chance or experience of liberation from the oppressive weight of late capitalism, it is as a glitch, a bug, a tactical action informed either by hybridity, a reparative reading, or an oppositional gaze. Left to their own devices, videogames will not bring about a revolution; they will dehumanize global workforces through a simulation fever of ludic optimization.

By nature, videogames are part and parcel of computation. Videogames are, after all, just software. If, as Tara Fickle poses in the Race Card, Eurocentrist and white supremacist cultural frameworks position Eastern cultures as ludic mirrors of Western culture, then videogames are the ludic mirror of functionalist software (Fickle 2019, 113–37). They are one and the same, operating under different mythologies. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux suggest that if one gets close enough to the game, it ceases to be one (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 287). Up close, all is reduced to computation.

David Golumbia wrote that “computation is not a neutral technology; it is a means for expanding top-down, hierarchical power, for concentrating rather than distributing” (Golumbia 2009b, 151). It is perhaps easy to imagine macro-level computational infrastructures striating and concentrating power through systemic mechanisms of economic, political, and social control. However, it’s harder to imagine the logic of computationalism at play in our everyday micro-encounters with computer technology, especially the kind disguised as play. If I was once told that Golumbia was not really a videogames scholar, it is because he was a scholar of computation and software, the latter of which videogames are but one variety, like word processors, web browsers, and media players.

As software, videogames operate as mechanisms for organizing power (and often towards the end of producing labor).^[2] On games, Golumbia wrote that “within a wide variety of computer games, one can see a process exactly isomorphic to such software applications, in which quantified resources are maximized so that the player can win the game.” These games, he contended, “reveal exactly the oligarchical-monopolist, Statist, even fascist politics at issue throughout the computerized world” (Golumbia 2009b, 135). Videogames both materially concentrate their operational powers at the hidden level of the code and offer a simulation of power concentration to players through an interface essentialism that obscures everything that the player does not control. Like computers, videogames are inherently ideological objects. They are immersive, interactive, fictional worlds that invite simulational, speculative, and parasocial thinking on the part of players and, at the same time, mask the mechanics of their own functionality and material composition, projecting outward to the surface only that which is desirable, accessible, pleasurable, fun, interesting, exciting, or entertaining when what lies beneath is always, and only, binary code.

If videogames are indeed bad, can they be fixed and made better? Can the videogame be redeemed? Can it be reborn anew, as it should have been, as factions of the independent and avant-garde games movements strive towards? No, nor should they be. Every attempt to reform the videogame reproduces in some other iteration what was problematic to begin with, simply shuffling its contents around and forcing the form’s most toxic ooze out of a different orifice. All we can do as game scholars and game players is confront them as they are and accept them for it. This is, of course, a monumental undertaking. Within the scope of this work, however, is one argument that I hope will serve as a small but necessary cog in the greater mechanism of critical videogame studies.

If we are to acknowledge videogames as bad objects, we must stop trying to salvage our favorites among them, imbuing them with the nullifying powers of aestheticization in the market economy of cultural capital. We must cease construction on and dismantle the foundations that have already been laid for the “canon” of videogames that implicitly shapes videogame studies. Multiple scholars warn of the increasing stagnation, narrowness, and coalescence of game studies (Gekker 2021; Deterding 2017; Murray 2018; Phillips 2020; Paul 2018). They are correct. To begin to remedy this pressing threat, we must surrender our attempts at mimicking the cohesion of other fields of textual study in desperate attempts at legitimization or separatism. Despite the best efforts of videogame studies’ most prominent scholars to prevent the field’s “colonization” by literature, film, or visual studies, it has ultimately colonized itself anyway (E. Aarseth 2001).

Almost twenty-five years after the discipline’s formal opening ceremony, videogame studies has colonized itself by promoting the hierarchical, bourgeois, and ultimately counterproductive economic logic of cultural capital. By arguing fervently for the legitimization of the videogame as an artistic, aesthetic object imbued with cultural capital, the videogame has been not only divorced from its origin as software but from the problematics of computationalism writ large. The result is the implementation of a logic of canonicity within videogame studies, culminating in the uneven allocation of cultural capital and the imposition of yet another layer of hierarchy upon objects that are always already incarnations of concentrated, hierarchical power.

I contend that this hyperconcentration of hierarchy has created an intellectual choke point. Only the deconstruction, dismantling, and destruction of the extant canon of videogames can correct already-established trajectories of concern within videogame studies and cultivate a freer, more diverse, and more productive future for the study of videogames. A game studies discourse grounded in the deeply flawed nature of all videogames, can more easily describe their reparative potential than one couched in terms of “good” games, “bad” games, “real” games, and “junk” games.

Culture, industry, and scholarly toxicity aside, videogames are still tricky, “grotesque” objects. They are profoundly unstable commodities and objects.  Like all new media, particularly those associated with analog gaming (and thus also with gambling), the videogame was born into a marginalized and subordinate status within the popular media landscape (Kocurek 2016). Outside of their hegemonic origins in the political and technological realms, videogames have an infamously low standing in the social and cultural hierarchy. Even if, as so many critics have argued, the videogame has or will soon achieve cultural and artistic legitimacy, this legitimacy is still largely meaningless outside of academic, industry, and entertainment gaming cultures. It should, moreover, already be clear that we cannot expect videogame culture to improve the medium’s standing in general culture.

Dismissal, denigration, and disinterest in videogames as a medium still pervades Western cultural sentiment. In 2023, 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first human recorded to “beat” Tetris, a typically unending and thus unbeatable game (Mohtasham 2024). This accomplishment is remarkable in terms of gaming as a hobby, sport, practice, and field of study and made more so by the roughly forty years between the game’s creation and the event. One would be hard-pressed to think of many other games, particularly as ubiquitous as Tetris, that required forty years of global effort to beat. And yet, Gibson’s accomplishment was overshadowed in the news cycle by a single snide remark from a Sky News anchor three weeks later (Rogers 2024).^[3] John Walker’s Kotaku article from October of 2024 also iterates this point: Walker asks one simple and critical question about the failure of a 400-million-dollar game, “Sony’s Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn’t it news?” (Walker 2024). Indeed, outside of Kotaku and other popular gaming presses, it wasn’t. However, the news cycle at that same moment in time did focus on a 200-million-dollar box office flop. ^[4]

A lack of cultural capital is not the only way videogames have a unique relationship to the dominant culture. Like film, the history of videogames is filled with legends of lost, damaged, or unfinished games. Lost media is a feature rather than a bug in the production and circulation of the videogame, which is native to digitized late capitalism. From development to production, games have a “limited lifespan” enforced by interindustry apathy towards data preservation, techno-industrial practices of planned obsolescence, and the generational cycle of console development (Newman 2012). This ephemerality is reinforced by economic systems of release, trade-in and used sales, intellectual property laws, region-locking, digitally native releases and updates, the politics of backward compatibility, and finally (outside even of the control of publishers, manufacturers, or capitalism itself) bit rot. While bit rot and data discarding may be the only empirically objective factors currently contributing to the lifespan of the videogame, their effect is exacerbated by the industry. Videogames are a mortal medium.

I am not arguing that this dismissal, disinterest, or resignation to decay is correct, good, or culturally beneficial. I am in firm agreement with Shira Chess and Mia Consalvo’s sentiment that “the future of media studies is game studies,” not because of some unique, essential power of the videogame to eclipse and supplant all other media, but because “as convergence culture becomes less of a special case and more of an everyday reality, the medium itself matters less” (Chess and Consalvo 2022, 160). Rather, I argue that the marginalization of video games as a form has not ended in mainstream culture, at least not yet. No matter how many canons have been constructed by games scholars, journalists, developers, or archivists, and how many treatises on games-as-art those same demographics publish, the game has not been elevated to an equal cultural evaluation as other, older mediums, including those that historically faced the same hurdles such as the novel, the film, or the television series. As such, these processes have accomplished little and have only limited knowledge production within game studies.

I can’t deny that, in my day-to-day life, a videogame canon is appealing. Subjectively, perhaps the driving impetus of this article stems from my own disagreement with those games that have been deemed canonical within videogame studies. However, it is by being earnest about such sentiments that the more significant issue becomes visible. As John Vanderhoef argues, following Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital, videogame canons are the product of “taste cultures,” in which the taste of dominant groups shapes the perceived importance, legitimacy, and material value of individual cultural artifacts characterized as videogames (Vanderhoef 2012). Moreover, as Glas and Von Vught demonstrate through practical experience, these dominant groups are almost always white, male, cis-gendered, and heterosexual (Glas and van Vught 2019, 9). While I do not meet all of these criteria, I meet most of them. Thus, I must also recognize that the imposition of my own fantasy canon on the field at large would be nothing more than the slightest alteration of who exactly the dominant party is. Instead of canon reformation, I argue for self-awareness. I argue for the acknowledgment that it is not the current canon that is bad or even current games that are bad, but that these problematics or “badness” are inherent attributes of the videogame. We must instead work with them rather than fruitlessly attempt to breed out these sine qua non traits.

In short, this negativity is not an argument for the obliteration of the videogame in some formalist eugenics any more than it is a call for the obliteration of any and all media that bear some problematic origin (as so many do). Rather, it is a reminder that the videogame was born in a network of power, politics, economics, and Empire, and acts of reclamation, redemption, subversion, or even radical liberation attempted with or through the videogame must neither set aside nor willfully ignore that origin. If we are to continue to study videogames, and if they are to be recovered, redeemed, or even simply neutralized, we must acknowledge their faults.

The Invisible (Master) Hand: Of Canons and Videogames

The current videogame studies canon is a fluid collection of works imbued with exceptional levels of cultural capital, and, like all canons, it does not really exist. There is no stone tablet engraved with the words World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, EverQuest, Tetris, or the Sims preserved in the basement of the Strong Museum of Play, nor even the Library of Congress. The videogame canon is, as John Guillory wrote of the literary canon, “an imaginary totality of works” (Guillory 1993, 30). And yet, “what does have a concrete location as a list…is not the canon, but the syllabus,” and “every construction of a syllabus institutes once again the process of canon formation” (Guillory 1993, 30–31). Like literary syllabi, game studies syllabi certainly exist, and the games on them are, more often than not, canonical games by virtue of their citational, instructional, and analytic repetition. Game studies, like film and literature, shapes its canon through material acts of scholarship, research, theorization, and dissemination. Jonathan Frome and Paul Martin consider the five games listed above canonical through a disproportionately high citation frequency in the two most prominent game studies journals (Frome and Martin 2019, 6). Published in 2019, Frome and Martin’s study is profoundly limited in that it only surveys two journals, disregarding published monographs, edited volumes, and not exclusively game-focused journals. However, even in this microcosmic analysis, evidence of disproportionate citation and, thus, canonization is immediately evident. In 2017, two years before Frome and Martin put the word “canon” to print, Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban gestured towards the presence of a canon in videogame studies. Yet, they argued against it without ever actually using the word, instead decrying the harmful limitations of “selective focus on a few particular games” (Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban 2017, 573). While I agree with Coavoux et al. in positionality, I insist on calling a canon a canon, because only by doing so can we access the depths of its potential harm.

If videogames are inherently problematic, so are cultural canons. Canons are hegemonies that confer cultural dominance upon a particular collection of artifacts. Hegemonies, however, are not static. Canons are lived hegemonies, and “a lived hegemony is always a process…it is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities with specific changing pressures and limits” (Williams 2009, 112). They necessitate relationships of domination and subordination, and the dominant, in this case, is manifest in what is culturally accorded the status of art or literature, creating the familiar dichotomy of high and low culture or the distinction between art and culture (Williams 2009, 110). As Williams suggests and Liam Dee expands on in Against Art and Culture, “art and culture are thus clearly the concepts of human expression, transcending rational or natural dictates, but they have an important distinction. One makes this expression extraordinary [art]. The other makes it ordinary [culture]” (Williams 2009, 145; Dee 2018, 15). That is, art and culture are the same thing inside different rhetorical frames, and thus why Dee refuses the separation between them and instead writes against “art/culture” as a dyad “to make explicit the shared qualities of ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’…and make clear that I am not referring to ‘skill’…nor an amorphous ‘way of life’” (Dee 2018, 17).

One of the cultural frames that enforces this false dichotomy and hegemonic relationship is that of the canon. For John Guillory, “the problem of what is called canon formation is best understood as a problem in the constitution and distribution of cultural capital, or more specifically, a problem of access to the means of literary production and consumption” (Guillory 1993, ix). This is simply another means of describing Williams’ hegemony in which certain objects are attributed higher values of cultural capital than others and accordingly venerated, elevated, and distributed in controlled or institutional contexts. Ultimately, canonicity is intrinsically a problem of inclusivity and diversity, for “canonization of a work is nothing but the affirmation of the social values expressed in the work” even when that affirmation is hidden beneath a veneer of artistic aestheticization. As such, the social values expressed in canonical videogames (and indeed all videogames as pieces of software) are hierarchy, exclusion, and dominance (Guillory 1993, 270).

While Guillory is not explicit in attributing the intentionality of canon formation to any individual or system, I would like to posit here that the process of canonization that has been churning in game studies for the last twenty years has been enacted through what Simone Winko theorizes as an “invisible hand.” Hans-Joachim Backe translates and synthesizes Winko’s theory as “a process in which countless individual (micro-level) actions—which may have altogether different goals—will result, in conjunction, in the (macro-level) phenomenon of canon formation” (Backe 2015, 11). In this light, canon formation is not enacted singularly or with necessary intentionality. Certainly, scholars’ selection and valuation of texts are intentional, but their usage in the canonization process is not. Canons are constructed through evaluation, and for literature, “evaluations can influence the act of writing either beforehand…or during the writing process” and are made by “literary mediators…television and radio producers…literary critics, scholars, and teachers” with the latter operating in the mode described above by the decision “to give the text more or less space” or “other works whose values have already been defined are used as points of comparison” (von Heydebrand and Winko 2010, 225). In what follows, I would like to briefly survey three significant moments of interaction between this invisible hand and the game studies canon that served to establish, legitimize, and reformat it over the nearly four decades since the field’s foundation. These moments are, chronologically, the beginning of videogame studies, the height of the videogame legitimation debate, and the recent (ironic) dominance of “independently developed” games. 

In the primordial moment, 1985 and 1986, respectively, Mary Ann Buckles and Brenda Laurel separately and coincidentally completed the first videogame studies dissertations long before videogame studies existed. When Buckles and Laurel were researching and writing about interactive narratives within videogames, they were doing so within the German Literature and Theatre departments, respectively. Working without precedent, they established the first approaches to videogame analysis, and, with them, which videogames provided the most productive analytical fodder. Thus, they also established which games would become early canonical texts.

Buckles’ dissertation is a close reading of the storied text-based role-playing game Adventure. In her introduction, Buckles delineates her area of study, distinguishing Adventure from contemporary arcade games: “Let me first emphasize what Adventure and other works of interactive fiction are not: they are not video arcade games. They do not resemble games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or Pac-Man, which require good hand-eye co-ordination and quick physical reactions” (Buckles 1985, 6). Notably, Buckles does not disvalue “video arcade games” or place them in a value hierarchy with “interactive fiction” but rather creates a taxonomy based on the skills and actions required to play.

Laurel creates a different taxonomy that, while divided along similar lines as Buckles’, introduces an element of hierarchy in its teleological orientation. Laurel’s primary area of study is what she calls “interactive fantasy systems,” which produce “interactive dramas,” a “first-person experience within a fantasy world, in which the user may create, enact, and observe a character whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might in a play” (Laurel 1986, 10–11). Her two primary examples are Zork! and Star Raiders, which both allow “the user to participate in the fantasy world as an active character” (Laurel 1986, 86). Arcade games are characterized as “antecedents to interactive fantasy” or “poetic interactive works” that generate affective experiences for the player but do not integrate the player into the world (Laurel 1986, 19–20). While Laurel does not position this class of “poetic interactive works” as oppositional to or less than “interactive dramas,” the connotation of antecedent implicitly argues for an evolutionary view of games in which the latter represent the more evolved, more complex and more capable (and thus more valuable) form of the former, creating a hierarchy between them.

The establishment of both systems of taxonomy fragmented the vast body of media called video or computer games. From the starting point of Buckles’ analysis, Adventure has become a canonical text, representative of the literary qualities of the videogame.^[5] As videogame studies, videogame history, videogame culture, and videogame development influence one another in a digital feedback loop, Adventure has remained relevant and briefly achieved prominence once again with the release and subsequent studies of the serially released 2012-2020 and acclaimed game Kentucky Route Zero which directly references and indirectly alludes to Adventure.^[6] Conversely, while Buckles and Laurel may have purposefully omitted (and articulated their reasons for doing so) Space Invaders from their studies, it has hardly been omitted from the subsequent forty years of game studies. Returning to Frome and Martin’s survey, Space Invaders was cited 34 times, ranking 20^th out of 38 in 2019 (Frome and Martin 2019, 6). In this, the game has come to stand as synonymous with both the arcade genre and a particular moment in video game history.^[7] Moreover, the ludic turn in videogame studies in the early 2000s emphasized exactly the kind of highly structured, ludus games that Space Invaders represent as if in direct response to Buckles and Laurel’s emphasis on gamic fiction.^[8] A direct correlation between Adventure and contemporary videogame studies is as clearly recognizable as its inverse: the omission of arcade games from these original studies, and the ludic fixation in early organized game studies.

What I hope to bring attention to here in this first moment is the process through which games assume and maintain prolonged and disproportionate relevance within game studies over the course of decades, rather than Mary Ann Buckles and Brenda Laurel’s personal responsibility for the field’s subsequent trajectory. It matters that these games still receive citations in game studies survey texts when innumerable other early, influential, or impactful games do not.^[9] However, no two games are alike, and this delicate negotiation of relevance shapes the ways we play, think about, study, analyze, and promulgate videogames and their study. There is a parallel universe in which the team at Cardboard Computer who developed Kentucky Route Zero made a game that takes place not around the Mammoth Cave National Park on which the world of Adventure was based, but in and around the highly fantastic Great Underground Empire of Zork! This is the power of the invisible hand that shapes canonization through individual evaluations.

A second crucial moment in the formulation of a videogame studies canon comes in the late 2000s and early 2010s in the form of popular and scholarly legitimation discourse. In Felan Parker’s 2017 article for Games and Culture, “Canonizing Bioshock,” Parker untangles the structural and rhetorical actions that made 2K’s 2007 first-person shooter Bioshock the quintessential entry in the game studies canon. Parker argues that Bioshock’s rapid incorporation into the canon of videogame studies coincided with a different moment in videogame culture: the apex of the legitimization discourse, a discourse that has plagued videogame studies to various degrees since Laurel and Buckles’ time as doctoral students (Parker 2018, 83).^[10] This discourse has always been predicated on the artificial dichotomy between “art” and “culture.” Were videogames doomed to be forever considered popular or “low” culture? Could they be art? Should they be art? Which games are art? And which games definitely are not art? These questions were voiced loudly by oft-cited works like Aaron Smuts’ “Are Videogames Art?” and Grant Tavinor’s The Art of Videogames. In both scholarly and popular culture, this phenomenon was most evident in what Parker called “Ebert versus Games,” in which, between 2005 and 2010, film critic Roger Ebert became the representative of “the prejudice against digital games as art,” disparaging the artistic legitimacy of videogames in his film reviews and on his personal blog (Parker 2018, 80).

The question of whether videogames were or could be art inspired a moment of mutual panic for scholarly and popular videogame critics. This duality is a process accounted for by Winko and von Heydebrand’s schema and is evident in the canonization of Bioshock as described by Parker. Bioshock was used to produce a “special class of AAA game that is expected to excel commercially but has a distinction from other popular favorites and best sellers by the grace of its supposed artistic quality and canonical status,” known familiarly as the prestige game (Parker 2017, 740).^[11] This definition purposefully conflates popular and scholarly consumers because, for these games to achieve the status of prestige and warrant canonization, they must be commercially, culturally, and critically successful. This formula produces games that feature dense textual experiences and raise philosophical, ethical, political, social, or cultural questions without limiting market shares by remaining “neutral enough in…politics to be widely marketable” (Parker 2017, 747). “Attractive, marketable gameplay is seen as a kind of delivery mechanism for the game’s highfalutin subject matter, and in this sense, the prestige game purports to be both more entertaining and more effective than other ‘message’ games” (Parker 2017, 748). That is, Bioshock and other prestige games juggle accessibility, entertainment, “literary” value, and novelty, culminating in an experience that Parker argues “is designed from the ground up to invite sustained reflection, debate, and criticism” and thus operates as a justification for “the whole enterprise of games criticism and scholarship” (Parker 2017, 751–52).

The traits that render Bioshock legitimate art and warrant its canonization skew strongly to the technological and economic. The game includes “attractive, marketable gameplay” and requires the newly evolved technological capabilities of the seventh generation of videogame consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as the ability of developers to anticipate and respond to the needs of broad audiences. As Grant Tavinor writes in The Art of Videogames, “the stunning representational advances may also provide one of the most compelling reasons to see videogames as a form of art” (Tavinor 2009, 70). Similarly, Smuts considers art to be those games that meet the following conditions: “integrated narratives, graphics, nearing photo-realism and elaborate three-dimensional worlds with rich and detailed textures” (Smuts 2005). We can see a clear correlation between technological capability and perceived artistic legitimacy. Notably, the games chosen as art by both Tavinor and Smuts, Grand Theft Auto IV, Max Payne, Halo, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and, of course, Bioshock, are all games that, while demonstrating cutting-edge technological capabilities, were also exceedingly successful on the commercial market. It should come as no surprise that these are hardly attributes that legitimize other cultural artifacts as “art.” After all, art films are collectively imagined to be the most inaccessible (and often unappealing) of films, and literary fiction is much less often profitable in the book and adaptation market than genre fiction. It matters that the attributes of “prestige videogames” are counterintuitive to other mediums’ conceptions of prestige. That these attributes are promoted and valued by popular videogame culture should be a point of, if not worry, then inquiry to videogame studies.

These prestige games, as marked by their success in the marketplace and culture, are ideologically aligned with the dominant logic of computation and the oozing toxicity it produces within popular “hardcore” videogame culture. It is also these games that were used within academic and popular contexts to nullify any lingering arguments for the potential illegitimacy of videogames as art. Scholars arguing for the artistic legitimacy of videogames positioned themselves in opposition to social sciences research on potential correlations between videogames and violent or antisocial behavior, put succinctly by Liam Dee in Against Art and Culture, in that “the pathology of the obsessive gamer is such that computer game addiction is recognized as a mental addiction, while poetry addiction is not” (Dee 2018, 206). To finally move beyond this discourse, videogames must be legitimized as art, for as Dee argues, “once an image is deemed aesthetic, it is abstracted from the representational hurley-burley, no longer treated as a document of reality,” which permits the aesthetic image as art to bypass sociological concerns and discourses of obscenity (Dee 2018, 68). This is not to say that I believe in a narrow or reductive relationship between videogames, violence, or addiction as the social scientists of the day were investiating or that games scholars should not play or study Bioshock because it happens to be a favorite title of “hardcore” gaming culture and the reactionary Internet bigots and trolls “hardcore” gaming culture contains. Rather, I argue that the conversion of culture to art is an established remedy to such concerns. As art, neither a text’s content nor popular fandom can be used against it. This remedy is made all the more appealing by the fact that so many videogame scholars can be described, as Simon Deterding does, “as aca/fans who turn their passion into a research profession, defending their lifestyle through research that defuses moral panics and elevates gaming as a valuable cultural practice”(Deterding 2017, 525). Yet, this solution to the crisis of legitimation is ultimately harmful, concretizing and reduplicating some of video games’ worst aspects.

But, is it possible these problems are exclusive to AAA games? Is there a form of game that has separated itself from the poisonous swamp of the mainstream games industry?  Perhaps the solution is simply to canonize different games as the “ludologists” once did to avoid the domination of the field by narrative and text heavy games like Adventure and Myst. Perhaps upon the release of Bioshock: Infinite, with its ludic stagnancy, implicit racism, and questionable political commentary, the problems in these new canonical texts, like those before them, would float to the discursive surface. This scenario could then allow for corrective actions without sacrificing the newfound artistic legitimacy of the videogame (Parker 2017, 753–55). This has happened over the last decade or so in game studies, in which a new dichotomy rivaling that of ludology and narratology has emerged: that of mainstream and independent (indie) gaming. It is this confrontation that emerges as the third and most recent moment of canonization.

The advent of indie games has come with benefits, including greater insight into abstract procedural rhetorics, the trickle-down ideological effects of binary logic in computing, increased probes into and criticism of dominant gaming cultures, and a more welcoming venue for marginalized scholars to enter and thrive within game studies. That indie games offer salvation from the hellish mire of mainstream gaming is an explicit sentiment, unlike the presence of a canon. In the 2022 special edition of Critical Studies in Media and Communications dedicated to the future of game studies, Amanda L. L. Cullen et al. argues that “it is also the role of game studies to fight for the legitimization of creators who do not engage with the games industry in normative fashions,” ultimately working towards “making queer games a sustainable alternative” to mainstream gaming (Cullen et al. 2022, 203). In this scenario, we see queer used almost synonymously for independent, for it is posed as oppositional to the mainstream. The reader must assume Cullen’s “queer” games are not merely the inclusion of diverse identities in the newest $250 million Dragon Age game but the independent. In videogame studies, the subaltern speaks through itch.io.

The veneration of the indie game as an alternative to mainstream AAA games imbues the indie game itself with a level of ontological benevolence that should immediately set off alarms. In fixating on indie games as a social good, one sees metaphysical reorientation that extrapolates more from legitimate art’s cultural function than gamers’ potential to accumulate cultural capital. As Cullen et al. conclude their argument for non-normative creators, their definition becomes apparent in their desire to look towards “creators who are making games and content for non-monetary practices” (Cullen et al. 2022, 203). Despite this, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux      rightly characterize indie games as a concretized “genre” of videogames that are “games about games” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 28–29). And the games these indie games are about are, more often than not, the “mainstream” games to which they are positioned as alternatives (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 31–32). On the level of creative production, indie games are created through the cannibalization and regurgitation of the mainstream, not its opposite regardless of the intentionality of their production.

This is, in effect, the sort of “mystical bullshit” that Liam Dee argues still “dominates” the concept of art itself, in which “creative expression is seen as special and wonderful precisely because there is a non-creative quotidian for it to be contrasted with” (Dee 2018, 3; 24). The quotidian in question is, of course, day-to-day existence under capitalism. In art, however, “even when commercial relationships are explicit, there are many strategies that are undertaken to make it seem that commerce is not what our culture is really about and that, in fact, it is anti-commercial” (Dee 2018, 114).  When Cullen et al. and others praise the indie game for its ability to shirk the economics of the marketplace and instead free the artistic vision of the creator, they transpose onto videogames the bourgeois logic of literary hierarchy that begets canons in the first place. As Raymond Williams explained,

Art is a kind of production which has to be seen as separate from the dominant bourgeois productive norm: the making of commodities. It has, then, in fantasy, to be separated from ‘production’ altogether, described by the new term ‘creation’; distinguished from its own material processes; distinguished, finally, from other products of its own kind or closely related kinds—‘art’ from ‘non-art’; ‘literature’ from ‘para-literature’ or ‘popular literature; ‘culture’ from mass ‘culture’ (Williams 2009, 154).

Or, perhaps, Indie Game from AAA Game.

Little exemplifies this problem better than Melissa Kagen’s resounding critique of the production and representational logic of the former indie darling Eastshade. Kagen argues that the game’s creator, Danny Weinbaum, “threads the needle between presenting himself as the visionary artist he is…and humble laborer” and that Weinbaum is not alone in this rhetoric of self-sacrifice for artistry amongst indie developers (Kagen 2022, 60). What is really happening “in this paradigm [in which] successful independent game development consists of a complicated cocktail of work, luck, and affect” is the possession of “enough privilege to survive precarity and the promise of overcoming it through hard work, patience, and (crucially) the subjugation of both personal needs and artistic vision in deference to player/consumers” (Kagen 2022, 62-63). In totality, Eastshade is “a fairy tale of late capitalist precarity,” in which “twenty-first-century ideologies and prejudices…make sense to have and do no harm. They aren’t underhanded, racist, or backstabbing, and they result in a gorgeous experience where everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts” (Kagen 2022, 63; 56).

“Everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts” just as easily describes the now-canonical indie game Stardew Valley, which possesses a similar production narrative of the bootstrapping auteur in developer Eric Barone.^[12] In Stardew Valley, the player experiences the quotidian of small-scale agriculture in a contemporary village in a simulacral Euramerica, farming, managing livestock, retailing crops, and marrying townsfolk. The game has been nearly universally acclaimed and ushered in a new wave of non-mimetic farming simulators, which are indeed the games that, as an indie game, Stardew Valley is about on a metatextual level.

Stardew Valley is a quintessential indie game. It is emblematic of the manner in which “indie games circulate as a form of cultural imperialism that both colonizes profitable forms of independent production and sanitizes them for mass consumption” and which “reduces all independent development to this particular aesthetic and mechanic genre of videogames and also reduces all independent developers to those white, Noth American men able to make a living developing games” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017, 33). Like Eastshade, “Stardew Valley may appear anti-capitalist and environmentalist in its invocation of a slow, community-oriented life that leaves the office cubicle behind. The gameplay…suggests a different attitude” (Jagoda 2020, 68). Patrick Jagoda argues that this different attitude is the neoliberal ideology underpinning all videogames, indie or mainstream, problematic or ameliorative. For Jagoda, “Stardew Valley is something more than a representation of neoliberal life: it is a participatory training ground for the types of processes, modes of thinking, and habits necessary to survive and thrive within—and in many active senses to build—a neoliberal lifeworld” (Jagoda 2020, 69). And, as Golumbia once wrote, “a more apt name,” for the state of the contemporary world under computationalism itself “might be ‘neoliberalism” (Golumbia 2009b, 144; Jagoda 2020, 13).

Indie games may appear to provide a break from the dominant concerns of mainstream gaming, such as technological development, homogeneity, conquest, and heroics, and that delicate balance of difficulty and accessibility that makes for a respectable prestige title. However, on a sublimated level, they replicate the same underlying ideologies of pseudo-meritocratic neoliberalism, bourgeois cultural hierarchy, and artistry while obscuring the harmful realities of the videogame as a medium. Even when the invisible hand attempts to correct itself, it cannot escape the systems that animate it in the first place. The only way out of the double bind is to get outside of it. To do so, we must acknowledge that the issues we take with some games are present at some level in all. This is to say, Stardew Valley is not special. It is not special either as a beacon of cozy comfort amidst the dominance of the epic and brutal conquests of mainstream gaming or as a reaffirmation of the neoliberal capitalist world order. Under a system of canonicity in scholarship, when only touchstone texts are ever given complete critical treatment, both our praise and critique of Stardew Valley have the same effect: reinforcing its canonical status and unrivaled cultural importance.

The prominence of indie games brings forth one peripheral problem that haunts the videogame canon and the maneuvers of the hand itself. This is the specter of a stubborn, implicit Orientalism. That is to say, for all of the influx of interest in Stardew Valley within popular and scholarly gaming cultures, there has been little interest in uncovering, addressing, and analyzing the game’s immediate East Asian ancestor, the storied and still in production, Harvest Moon series.^[13] Christopher B. Patterson argues that “videogames are Asiatic even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated upon in Asian contexts and remain colored by Asian associations as new media products” (Patterson 2020, 27). Meanwhile, the list of 38 canonical games compiled by Frome and Martin features only seven games developed in East Asia, and if we discount arcade cabinets which carry loose regional associations despite their origins, only five remain: Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, the Legend of Zelda, and Metal Gear Solid. Much like the conversation around issues of inclusion and diversification in the Western canon, the canonical texts of game studies are remarkably homogenous despite the fact that East Asian products overwhelmingly dominate the global videogame marketplace. We must ask if the videogame is indeed Asiatic in the collective cultural imagination, how can a canon of videogames be no more than 13-18% East Asian in origin? The pivot to indie games over AAA titles has made no more room for a discussion of these regional biases. As Stardew Valley’s cannibalization of Harvest Moon demonstrates, the games that indie games are so often about are East Asian. An uneven distribution of cultural capital is visible, and it is predicated upon a reductive conception of regional origin. Geographically and racially coded exclusion is a profound consequence of sheer inattention to the systemic mechanisms at play in the discursive formation of a games canon.

 As the three moments detailed above demonstrate, the academy’s structural conditions empower the invisible hand of canonicity to propagate the generation, maintenance, and dissemination of cultural capital embodied through canon formation and organization. In this way, canonicity operates in a manner equivocal to computation by obscuring the operations of already-established systems that constantly accumulate, condense, and employ power. The presence of a canon in game studies doubles the relationship between the game and hierarchical power, manifest in both games themselves as software and in canons as creations of institutionalized cultural capital. When we write about games only because other scholars have discussed them, ignored them, undervalued them, or overvalued them, we replicate the binary logic of value judgments predicated on the individual tastes of others. When we endlessly discuss the merits and demerits of the same AAA games, we reproduce them and all that comes with them. When we value games made by individual creators or studios because of their relationship to an authorial or artistic presence, we reinforce the bourgeois ideology of art as a metaphysical product of genius, discrete from the material production of commodities. When we write about only those games we think other people want to read about, we allow imagined demographics to shape material knowledge production. Each of these moments arose because of the implicit presence, fluid though it may be, of a canon of games deemed worthy of research, which shapes the how, why, and for whom we research games at the cost of all possible alternatives. When we replicate and reinforce the shadow canon of videogame studies, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by an invisible, immaterial, and unnecessary presence created by and for institutions and cultural ecosystems very incongruent with the videogame.

Player 3, Select Name, Double A: On Becoming the Hand

Like many scholars working in and around the field right now, I am concerned for the future of videogame studies. Following Alex Gekker, I am concerned that “the emphasis on certain types of (commercial) gaming phenomena” within the field, e.g. canonicity, “leads to a path of dependence that pushes game scholars to focus on a limited number of highly visible games, genres, and related practices, limiting publishing opportunities to those lacking in certain gaming capital” (Gekker 2021, 74). These limitations are what Kelly Bergstrom worries are a defining reason for the lack of diversity within videogame development and videogame studies, encapsulated by young scholars’ (including my own) worry that “their work [is] too niche, too concerned with edge cases, and too far afield to be considered within the boundaries of game studies” (Bergstrom 2022, 178). Gekker suggests a solution grounded in reframing game studies as a post-humanities field in which scholars intermix “various forms of humanities and social sciences analyses to better account for the material shift in media technologies,” or essentially, an opening up of the boundaries of game studies to include all scholars who work on, around, with, or even in videogames (Gekker 2021, 78). Bergstrom’s suggestion is similar. She asks that “we reframe our field’s genesis point,” positioning issues of identity and culture at the forefront (Bergstrom 2022, 178).

While I do not disagree with either of these suggestions, and attempt to uphold them in my own work, I question whether the amount of coalescent organization required from the field of game studies to make an organized and concerted effort of reform is not simply a reproduction of the problem itself. An organized game studies that can make a majority decision to correct its own course is a narrow game studies. This narrow game studies then once again excludes those who, Gekker writes “might be participating in game studies but not defining themselves according to their affinity with the field” (Gekker 2021, 75). Simon Deterding has already pointed out that game studies is an “increasingly narrow inter-discipline” intellectually dominated by humanities scholars and game developers within the field, and as such, an orchestrated reorientation of the field predicated on identification with the extant field only replicates the same omissions (Deterding 2017, 532).

I am also concerned that taking on any actions at the strategic level reinforce Soraya Murray’s worries about the effects of neoliberalism in the university. Like Gekker and Bergstrom, Murray is troubled about the state of game studies, emphasizing “the residue” of game studies’ origins in “entertainment writing” and “the overwhelming priority given within the academy” to “technical, training, development, and interaction” (Murray 2018, 9; 12). However, as a post-colonialist scholar, Murray is also concerned that “the neoliberalism of the university has resulted in an environment in which the critical cultural theorist of technological forms is often made to feel that, as they are not ‘making’ something, what they are doing is not productive” (Murray 2018, 17). That is to say, we do not need to make videogames, make things from video games, or (re-)make the field of videogame studies to produce insight into the cultural functions of the videogame. And yet, because videogames as objects and videogame studies are closely tethered to production, both in the material production of games themselves or the theorized production of new skills, affinities, attitudes, and information through interaction with them, it is often especially difficult to escape the logic of productivity when dealing with them in any capacity. This potential to lapse into the whims of neoliberal capitalism is especially worrisome, considering that, as we have already seen, the videogame can often double as a rhetorical instrument of neoliberalism itself. As such, instituting a post-humanities turn, reframing our field’s genesis, the promotion of specific creators, or even Christopher A. Paul’s “obligation” to address problems within videogame studies, while noble and beneficial projects, verge on simply other ways to “make” things, to prove productivity under neoliberalism (Paul 2018, 2).

What I suggest here, then, is tactical action, attention, and inattention to the field in tandem so as to produce scholarship that responds to inquiry and need. The implicit production of a canon that results in numerous chapters on Bioshock, treatises on Stardew Valley, and conference panels on The Last of Us is simply one of many components that maintain and limit the purview of game studies. It is one boundary spurring on an “increasing coalescence” of game studies “into a relatively closed community” (Deterding 2017, 536–37). Despite the depth to which canonicity is ingrained in Western scholastic culture and textual studies, de-canonization seems to be one of the easiest reparative projects to initiate within game studies. When players over 100,000 players gather in the subreddit for Palia or when Splendid Land, the working name for developer and artist Samanthuel Louise Gillson, publishes simple, short, metatextual games like Franken which comment on and promote the consumption of other niche or dying genres, they are doing de-canonization through the selection and rendering visible of these works. For, if the canon is crafted in the shadows by an invisible hand who picks and chooses, values and devalues, remembers and forgets, includes and excludes, and if we can agree that the presence of a canon in game studies is as, if not more, problematic than the existence of a canon in literary or film studies, then we must render the hand visible in game studies, as well.

The title of this subsection refers to the glitch through which the final boss of Super Smash Brothers Melee, Master Hand, a hostile, disembodied, gloved hand, can become a playable character. By plugging in two controllers, one in the 3^rd slot of a Nintendo Gamecube, loading the character select screen, lingering over the select name option on Player 3’s character slot, and pressing A on both controllers simultaneously, the player can enter battle as Master Hand. As neat as access to an otherwise forbidden character may be, playing as Master Hand is less than fun. It freezes frequently in battle and is unusable in certain game scenarios. The Super Smash Brothers fan wiki describes the pros and cons of utilizing Master Hand succinctly: “if Master Hand is allowed in a game, he may at first appear to have a considerable advantage, as he does not take knockback and thus cannot be KOed at all,” but “since the Master Hand glitch most often causes a major disadvantage to the player using it, few players even consider the option, preventing the situation from being a competitive issue” (“Master Hand Glitch” 2024). As a boss, Master Hand is a hostile NPC and a part of the encoded structures of the game itself, an unchangeable, essential quality of it. With the glitch, however, Master Hand becomes interactive, controllable, and strategically deployable as a broken character capable of breaking itself, others, and the game it inhabits. I suggest here that the system of canonization that has taken place over the last forty years of game studies has occurred through an invisible hand that we, as games scholars, might do well to think of as Master Hand. To ameliorate some of the harm it has enacted on the field, we might consider using the glitch and becoming Master Hand.

 To become Master Hand, we must become aware of our own actions in the field and how they shape it. If we want to see it changed, we must be willing to make those changes on an individual, tactical level in our own scholarship. This could mean anything from a fundamental refusal to acknowledge the existence of Bioshock to a persistent, granular inquiry into those games that are neither prestigious nor subversive like Madden ’13, Cat Quest, or The Sims: Medieval. If we desire not only the survival of game studies but the realization of its transformative power, we must accept games as they are: as a diverse array of commodified software. Eventually, if the structural logic of canonicity is left in place, the field will be reduced to a true echo chamber, appraising and sponsoring the same games, the same types of games, the same players, and the same game cultures. We cannot kill our personal Master Hand any more than we can kill the one that lives inside a tiny disc for the Nintendo Gamecube; attempting to do so will only cause it to respawn, perhaps a bit wilder this time, as Crazy Hand. Rather, we must control the Hand. Before this sounds too much like the neoliberal reforms suggested above, I want to clarify that the control I imagine is that of small, imprecise, and often ineffective gestures, just as controlling Master Hand for a round of Smash feels.

To control the Hand, we must become it and simultaneously ignore it. And as the Master Hand, we could study and theorize those games that we are interested in, that our students (all of them) are interested in, that the world at large is interested in, and those games that carry meaning for us, for others, or no one. We could study games broadly, diffusely, and carefully. We could contradict ourselves and others within our field and allow those contradictions to hold without the easy answers of reform or replacement. We could both continue to write, as we have, about the ways in which Stardew Valley offers the image of liberation from the oppression of late-stage techno-capitalism and simultaneously reinforces it under a more quaint, rural veneer. We could also write about the way the game plays, the way it was created, the way it was received culturally, its lineage as a Western descendent of East Asian non-mimetic farming simulators, and its relationship to ultra-realistic Western-produced farming simulators, and who plays it, why they play it, where they play it, and why they enjoy playing. We are also able to ask and answer all the same questions for those quaint, cozy, lightly fantastic farming games that came before it and the genre of “cozy” indie games that have come after it, and finally, we must compare our answers. We could ask if Stardew Valley is exceptional amongst its peers, and if so, try to articulate why, even if that answer turns out to be, disappointingly, nothing more than a matter of historical timing. We could acknowledge that videogames as objects are computational commodities, born in the military-industrial complex and nurtured to maturity on the sustenance of exploited labor, resource extraction, abuse, hate, and profound misogyny just as often as we rightfully acknowledge the radical, liberatory, speculative, ameliorative, healing, and educational possibilities equally embedded within the medium. Acknowledging these things means choosing not only what we say about games but also what games we say things about and why. Even when Master Hand freezes up and cancels out the game, we could always continue to try to control it to prevent it from controlling us.

Rian C. Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is also an adjunct instructor in the English department. His primary areas of interest are critical video game studies, speculative fiction studies, and cultural studies. Rian is currently in the process of completing a dissertation exploring representations of the mundane, the quotidian, and the everyday in high-fantasy single-player Japanese role-playing games.

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[1] No matter how hyperbolic, provocative, or subjective it may sound to call videogames bad objects, I am not the first. Ian Bogost once characterized games as “gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish” in which players engage in a desperate, unnecessary “attempt to get a broken machine to work again” (Bogost 2015, 1). Videogames are, Bogost claimed, “grotesque” (Bogost 2015, 1). As the theorist behind procedural rhetoric, Bogost’s orientation towards games has always been markedly more computational than most of the field and equally hyperbolic. While Bogost was referring to Flappy Bird in the above quotation, his descriptors apply to videogames in general and should do so explicitly.

[2] See Golumbia’s “Games without Play” for more on the inextricable relationship between games and labor (Golumbia 2009a). 

[3] The anchor, Jayne Secker, received substantial online blowback, including demands for an apology from anonymous netizens. Yet, an apology was never issued, nor was the comment acknowledged by the anchor or the network which in and of itself demonstrates a pervasive cultural, if not dismissal of, or at least disinterest in videogames as valuable artifacts.

[4] Unlike Concord’s simultaneous flop, publications ranging from film news to entertainment news more broadly and to mainstream general news platforms like CNBC, NPR, BBC News, and the Guardian were all invested in the post-mortem of Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux (Kim 2024; Barber 2024; Whitten 2024; Hoad 2024).

[5] On Adventure’s equivocation with storytelling and literary textuality in early game studies see Espen Aarseth’s 1997 monograph, Cybertext, which takes the game as a primary case study, Chris Crawford’s 2003 chapter “Interactive Storytelling” which names Adventure as a sort of videogamic proto-narrative, Aarseth’s 2004 chapter “Genre Trouble” in which he does much the same, taking Adventure’s narrative identity as a priori, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, in which Adventure is used again as an early prototype of Juul’s category of “progression” games in which linear, teleological ludic and narrative progression is valued above freeplay or exploration, and finally, Nick Montfort’s 2003 Twisty Little Passages, named after a quotation from the game itself. (E. J. Aarseth 1997; E. Aarseth 2004, 51; Crawford 2003, 259–60; Juul 2005, 76; Montfort 2003)

[6] For more recent research on or around Adventure, see Reed, Murray, and Salter’s 2020 Adventure Games, which encapsulates both Adventure and Kentucky Route Zero, Stuart Moulthrop’s 2021 chapter on the legacy of hypertext fiction, “Hypertext Fiction Ever After,” Andrew Reinhard’s 2021 archaeological investigation of the game, Jérémie LeClerc’s work on race, Adventure, and Kentucky Route Zero, Dennis G. Jerz, Tiffany Funk, and Jesse Snider’s work on the relationship between the in-game world and the real Mammoth Cave complex, and finally, Aubrey Anable’s phenomenal affective reading of the metatextuality between both games in Playing with Feelings (Reed, Salter, and Murray 2020; Moulthrop 2021; Reinhard 2021; LeClerc 2024; Jerz 2007; Funk 2022; Snider 2023; Anable 2018, 1–37). 

[7] A few exceptional examples are Mark J.P. Wolf’s early article on video game spatiality utilizing Space Invaders as a primary example, King and Krzywinska’s formal analyses of Space Invaders, Raiford Guins’ discussion of the Space Invaders cabinet, Jaroslav Svlech’s semiotic reading of the depiction of enemies within Space Invaders, and works from within popular video game culture like Steve Bloom’s Video Invaders or Martin Amis’ Invasion of the Space Invaders. (Wolf 1997; King and Krzywinska 2006; Guins 2014; Švelch 2023; Bloom 1982; Amis 1982)

[8] The most glaring relation between this turn and Space Invaders as an early “non-canonical” text that was then incorporated into the canon is Jesper Juul’s “Games Telling Stories?” which uses the game as a primary example in investigating the existence and presentation of narratives within videogames, but the phenomenon is what Sky LaRell Anderson considers “ludic anxiety” and provides a discursive summary in “Start, Select, Continue,” (Juul 2001; Anderson 2013)

[9] Consider the fundamental relation between texts like Ultima IV, Dragon Quest, Missile Command, Mystery House, or even Puyo Puyo and contemporary, canonical video games as well as their relative absence from anglophone video game scholarship.

[10] For insight into Mary Ann Buckles’ time as a graduate student, see Michael Erard’s 2004 profile (Erard 2004).

[11] AAA games are those games produced by major video game studies which receive the largest investment of resources, including economic, creative and skilled labor, manufacturing and distribution, and the most popular attention within and without gaming culture.

[12] For a particularly succinct and ostentatious example of this, see GQ’s 2018 photoshoot-accompanied feature on Barone as the “alchemist” of gaming (White 2018).

[13] The series’ first iteration was released in 1996, and new installments have been released regularly since then. However, in 2015, the series changed its title in the Anglosphere from Harvest Moon to Story of Seasons due to changes in licensing, localization, and publication deals. Despite this, the Japanese title, Bokujō Monogatari, and the series continuity have remained unchanged. 

This text is published as part of a special b2o issue titled “Critique as Care”, edited by Norberto Gomez, Frankie Mastrangelo, Jonathan Nichols, and Paul Robertson, and published in honor of our b2o and b2 colleague and friend, the late David Golumbia.

Bitcoin Vitalism and the Elixir of Life

Adin E. Lears

At the 2021 Bitcoin convention in Miami, Michael Saylor, CEO of the business intelligence company MicroStrategy, lauded Bitcoin as a form of energy:

Bitcoin is a system for collecting, channeling, and storing energy in the most efficient way we’ve ever invented. It is storing potential energy to stay alive. You have fat on your body? If I cut you off from food for ninety days, you’d still be alive…When you’re putting energy into Bitcoin, you’re storing fat. Fat is organic energy. Bitcoin is monetary energy (Saylor qtd. Stephenson 2022: 33).[1]

Saylor seems to imagine Bitcoin here as an energy that is economic as well as biophysical: it is an energy that supports the condition of being alive. He seems to confuse the actual and the metaphorical, taking a metaphor—Bitcoin as energy—and treating it as an actuality—Bitcoin is life-energy. In doing so, he conflates the domains of the economic and the physical in a way that would seem to correlate material wealth with greater strength and longevity. There is a kind of vitalism to this thinking, which can be characterized as a belief that the foundations and processes of life are dependent on a force beyond the physical realm. What that force is—God? Money?—remains unclear.

Saylor’s vitalist and specifically physio-economic thought is the logical extension of a rationale for cryptocurrency writ large. Proponents of crypto believe that the US dollar has been devalued at the whim of an establishment of banking “elites,” effectively breaking down the strength and vigor of the US economic system. Saylor—and other proponents—believe Bitcoin offers a better, stronger alternative. It is a means of bringing economic control, autonomy, and “sovereignty” back to the people. Ultimately, as I will show, proponents like the economist Saifedean Ammous believe that this will bring about a social and cultural revitalization, improving the quality of art, ending war, and even restoring nutrients to the soil.

Tracing the ideologies of Bitcoin back to the formation of the John Birch Society in the 1960s, David Golumbia (2016: 14-16) has detailed how such an emphasis on freedom and individual sovereignty—among other techno-utopian promises—evinces a form of cyberlibertarianism particular to the alt-right. Here I find early quickenings of such vitalism in another techno- utopian pursuit driven by a desire for both economic and physical vigor: the alchemy of the European middle ages. Since its inception among ancient natural philosophers, alchemy sought to purify and vivify matter, turning base metal into gold and restoring youth with the elixir of life. Through the European middle ages, alchemical pursuits were often informed by the promise of alchemical knowledge as a means of restoring the perfection humans had lost as a result of the biblical Fall. For many of its proponents, Bitcoin offers a similar means of eluding the constraints of government and banking “elites” and revivifying a “fallen” culture. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2016: 20) reminds us, a spirit of vitalism undergirds capitalism writ large in its impulse to see in all things a volatile potential to create profit. Bitcoin’s vitalism literalizes this perspective, yoking an animist language of material communalism with processes of economic and social exploitation and extraction. Attending to this long history of economic vitalism allows us to look past the rationalist logic favored by proponents of Bitcoin to identify its quasi-mystical appeal.

Medieval Alchemy and the Elixir of Life

In recent decades, alchemy’s vitalism has been a vexed subject among historians of science, many of whom have sought to rescue alchemy from the realm of occult esotericism by accentuating its concern with physical materials, processes, and transformations. Indeed, the influence of early alchemical theories and practices on modern chemistry and pharmacology has been well-established (DeVun 2009; Chang 2011). Yet, as scholars like Leah DeVun (2009: 102-105) and Zachary Matus (2017: 7-14) have demonstrated, alchemy’s spirituality and materialism are mutually imbricated: its theology underpins its understanding of the material world and material practices drive its spiritual aims. It is hardly necessary to keep these two realms separate in the study of medieval alchemy. This is especially true in the realm of alchemy’s metaphors, which frequently draw from religious imagery and ideas in the process of describing alchemical materials and processes. As DeVun (2009; 102-28) argues, such spiritual metaphors reveal the complexly theological basis that underpins much medieval alchemy and, moreover, serve at least two rhetorical aims: first, to render abstract scientific processes in more widely comprehensible terms and second, to imbue alchemical programs with the heft of the spiritual, even revelatory. As we will see, in articulating the meaning and value of Bitcoin, its proponents walk a similar line, melding “hard” science with the spiritual affects and feelings of religious belief.

Medieval alchemy was, in a fundamental sense, a life science. It drew from Aristotelian natural philosophy and other intellectual traditions, seeking to create an elixir or “Philosophers’ Stone” that would purify metal and prolong human life. Medieval natural philosophers drew on the ideas of Arabic naturalists, who posited a “medicine” that would heal metals, turning them from base metal into gold and silver (DeVun 2009: 84). The original aim of alchemy was this transmutation of metal; the Arabic word al-iksīr, from which the word elixir derives, originally referred only to the perfection of metals (Matus 2017: 40-41). Yet medieval thinkers like the thirteenth-century English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (d. 1292), perhaps influenced by earlier Chinese Taoist ideas about the prolongation of human life, combined the aim of purifying or tempering metal with treating the human body (DeVun 2009: 84).

The relationship between the purification of metal to gold and the prolongation of human life was not a metaphor: the same alchemical principles governed each one. For early alchemists who sought to turn base metal into gold, all metallic matter was constituted by “primary qualities”—hot, dry, wet, or cold—which could be transformed through alchemy, along with the metal’s appearance. The primary quality of tin, for example, was dry. But this quality could be transformed into the heat attributed to gold or the cold attributed to silver, through the elixir. In this way, alchemy was believed to transform both the constitutive substance and the superficial appearance of metal. Yet these primary qualities—hot, dry, cold, and wet—constituted not only metal but elemental matter—fire, earth, air, and water. And these elements, in turn, comprised the humoral matter that made up the human body: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. This material correspondence between matter and the human body enabled medieval thinkers to extend the logic of the elixir from the purification of metal to the prolongation of human life (Matus 2017: 40-41). Bacon, for example, held that all material substances, including both metals and flesh, were composed of elemental humors (Newman 1997: 319-23). The goal of alchemy was to encourage a state of what Bacon called “equal complexion”: to temper matter—metallic or fleshly—so that all of its elemental qualities or humors were in perfect balance (Newman 1997: 328-32).

Bacon’s theory of alchemical medicine offers a useful example of medieval alchemy’s techno utopianism: its aim to improve the state of the physical body, and also the value of the immaterial soul. The elixir had the capacity for moral as well as physical improvement. Bacon’s ideas on the possibility of achieving “equal complexion,” and with it the perfection of the body and soul, were grounded in biblical accounts of both prelapsarian corporeality and Pauline accounts of the resurrection of the body. In his Opus Majus, Bacon wrote:

For this condition [of immortality] will exist in our bodies after the resurrection. For an equality of elements in those bodies excludes corruption forever. For this equality is the ultimate end of the natural matter in mixed bodies, because it is the noblest state, and therefore in it the appetite of matter would cease, and would desire nothing beyond. The body of Adam did not possess elements in full equality, and therefore the contrary elements in him acted and were acted on, and consequently there was waste, and he required nourishment. For this reason, he was commanded not to eat the fruit of life. But since the elements in him approached equality, there was very little waste in him; and hence he was fit for immortality, which he could have secured if he had eaten always the fruit of the tree of life. For this fruit is thought to have elements approaching equality; and therefore it was able to continue incorruption in Adam, which would have happened if he had not sinned (DeVun 2009: 85-86).

Bacon stresses that the equal complexion of the resurrected body can be achieved on earth. He reasons that Adam’s prelapsarian body was subject to humoral imbalance that could be adjusted and equalized by consuming from the tree of life; if Adam had not sinned, consuming the tree of life might have sustained him forever. Significantly, Bacon equates alchemical “equal medicine” with the fruit of the tree of life: both possess material elements in perfect balance and both have the capacity to transfer this perfection to the body of Adam (Matus 2017: 44-46; Newman 1997: 325; DeVun 2009: 85-86). Here and across his corpus of work, Bacon stresses a direct relationship between sin and the physical body: sin caused the body to deteriorate and lose its life force; purification from sin could make the human body more vigorous and extend life. His aim was to use alchemy to turn the human body to a more pure state: a natural balance of equal complexion that approached immortality. In comparing the therapeutic effects of the alchemical elixir to the effects of the resurrection, Bacon reveals his aim to promote the perfection of heaven on earth (DeVun 2009: 86).

Indeed, for Bacon, alchemy was not simply a potent medicine. It also offered a means of converting the physical complexions and corresponding morals of non-Christians. In outlining alchemy’s purpose in this endeavor, Bacon drew on the purported advice from Aristotle to Alexander the Great presented in the pseudo-Aristotelian text the Secret of Secrets. Because various regions had their own complexions, which in turn influenced the physiology and morals of the people who dwelled there, the Secrets-author reasoned that changing the landscape would influence the bodies and minds of the inhabitants, “pacifying” them into submission. In the absence of details supplied in the Secret of Secrets, Bacon offered his alchemical elixir as a means of accomplishing this change in landscape, physiology, and moral make-up (Matus 2017: 49-52).

Bacon was not alone in his desire to draw the perfection of heaven into the earthly realm. Writing several decades after Bacon, the early fourteenth-century French Franciscan alchemist John of Rupicessa (b. 1310) elaborated on the alchemical theory of Bacon to articulate a “quintessence” that might extend life (DeVun 2009: 81-89). Rupicessa’s alchemical quintessence was based on a “fifth element,” drawn in part from Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of the pneuma, or vital spirit pervading all things, which Rupicessa understood as a manifestation of heaven on earth (DeVun 2009: 67). Whereas the primary qualities of the four earthly elements were fixed—fire is hot and dry and cannot become cold or moist—Rupicessa held that the fifth element could shift in its quality when it is necessary, making it “strong against all opposing things” (DeVun 2009: 66). It was a kind of universal cure, adding any “quality” needed to balance the humoral complexion.

Like his predecessor, Roger Bacon, Rupicessa’s description of the process of the creation and operations of the quintessence sought the restoration of spiritual purity. He extended this ideal, by additionally emphasizing that such purification could be achieved through a distinctly human ingenuity.  Describing the quintessence, Rupicessa wrote:

[T]hrough the virtue which God contributed to ornamented nature and subjected to human magisterium, man is able to cure the inconveniences of old age—which impeded the works of the Evangelical life too much among the ancient men of the gospel—and to restore the loss of youth and to recover the pristine powers and to have them again….This is what all who have worked to seek the thing created for the use of humans desire, to be able to protect the corruptible body from putrefaction and to conserve it without diminution so that it may be conserved, if it is possible, in perpetuity. This is the thing that all desire naturally: never to be corrupted, nor to die” (DeVun 2009: 65).

Though he does not frame the operation of the quintessence in terms of the biblical Fall, as Bacon does, Rupicessa’s account here nevertheless evinces a similar desire to “restore” and “recover” a “pristine power” that has been lost. Significantly, Rupicessa’s account emphasizes human exceptionalism as a foundation for scientific ingenuity. Nature has “virtue” (virtutem)—an early term for vital power or force. But this natural force is ultimately “subjected” to “human magisterium.” Such an emphasis on human power over nature implicitly recalls the prelapsarian condition of Genesis, in which God created Adam in his own image, giving him dominion over all other creatures (Genesis 1:26).

Rupicessa’s emphasis on restoring purity through human control over nature extends into his account of the materials of the quintessence. For Rupicessa, the quintessence should be made of:

something which is in itself incorruptible (if it exists in eternity), and which always makes anything that comes into unity with it uncorrupted, most of all flesh, something which nurses the virtue and spirit of life and augments and restores it; something which digests all rawness, and reduces all that has been digested to equality, and which removes from anything all excess of any quality and restores to it any lost quality (DeVun 2009: 66).

The elusive “something” Rupicessa seeks is a substance that is entirely original and sovereign; it is incorruptible “in itself,” i.e. through its own force or power, and not through something added. Its originary power allows it to exert a force that influences any matter it comes in contact with, including corruptible human flesh. Using a viscerally material metaphor of digestion, Rupicessa describes the work of the quintessence as a process of breaking human flesh down to an essence and adding back what has been lost. The originality of this substance—its purity and self-sufficiency—gestures to the ways that Rupicessa’s ideals of purity inform a related standard of sovereignty. His quintessence, in short, sought a substance of such purity and sovereign force that it could transfer such qualities to the human body and soul, restoring some of the perfection lost in the Fall.

Indeed, Rupicessa’s ideal of human sovereignty is particularly evident in his rationale for the quintessence, which emerged from the theory that humans suffered three kinds of death: natural death, violent death, and “death [that] arrives sooner than the end predetermined by God.” Medicine was fruitless against the first two. But the last kind was “because of too much regeneration and dissolution, or through too much austere abstinence or despair, or through negligence in avoiding danger of death, one kills oneself” (DeVun 2009: 64-65). In other words: Rupicessa’s third form of death was due to human error and failure to avoid danger. His quintessence sought to address this last kind of death. By acknowledging that some, not all, deaths could be prevented, Rupicessa maintained that supreme power lay in the hands of God. At the same time, he suggests a kind of human culpability for certain illness, corruption, and death, a premise undergirded by a belief in human free will. Medieval theologies of the Fall understood the postlapsarian condition as a state of spiritual slavery, defined by the sinful violation of divine law (Wyatt 2009: 248-49). Nevertheless, unlike animals, humans could exercise free will, enabling them to attain a certain freedom, even in their sinful lapsed state (Shannon 2013: 135-41; Davis 2016: 158-60).  By situating his quintessence as a remedy for “bad” human choices, Rupicessa reinforces the theology of the Fall as a crucial cornerstone of his alchemical theory. Eschewing foundational religious ideals of poverty, humility, and charity, such theory weaves the alchemical pursuit of longevity with a desire for a sovereign self-sufficiency and control.

Indeed, such individualism informed Rupicessa’s political program for the quintessence.  As DeVun has shown, Rupicessa’s “apocalyptic alchemy” was informed and made urgent by a millenarian mindset that predicted the imminent arrival of the Antichrist (DeVun 2009: 57). His quintessence promised to bolster the strength of the institutional Church at multiple levels. The alchemical production of precious metals could be used to buy necessities for Christians, and therefore contribute to funding the Church’s war against the Antichrist (DeVun 2009: 58). At the same time, alchemy’s medicinal uses could help to heal the bodily injuries resulting from that war; stronger human bodies would in turn mean longer-lived evangelizing, more powerful adversaries for the Antichrist and allies for the Church (DeVun 2009: 61-62). In this way, Rupicessa’s religious beliefs and ideals were fundamental to his alchemical theories and aims. Attending to the convergence of spiritual and material registers in medieval alchemy can amplify its emphasis on physical and moral purification, as well as human ingenuity and mastery over the natural world—all ideas that also emerge in the vitalism that undergirds much contemporary discourse on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Vitalism

As Golumbia (2016: 14-16) has shown, the conspiratorial affects and cyberlibertarian ideals around Bitcoin arguably found their origins in the paranoid economic theory popularized by the John Birch Society, whose founder Robert Welch was among the first to give voice to notions of economic control by government and banking elites. Welch’s essay, “The Truth in Time” (1966) framed social welfare programs—many of them emerging directly from the New Deal—as a means of reducing the responsibility and thus autonomy of individual citizens while building the authority and reach of the federal government. Other John Birch Society publications outlined how the US Federal Reserve has devalued the US dollar while maintaining sole control over the issuance of bank notes. Bitcoin’s emergence as a “decentralized” or “distributed” economic system responds in part to this paranoia about government control over banking. The software does not exist in a single physical location, nor is it hosted by a single company like Amazon or Google. It is, instead, networked across multiple machines. For these reasons, proponents of Bitcoin have lauded it as a form of “distributed authority” which places economic power back in the hands of ordinary people rather than banking elites. Yet, as Golumbia shows, this idea of distributed authority masks a commitment to the sovereign individuality of Bitcoin’s users, who remain free from government regulation and interference (Golumbia 2016: 27-32; 2024: 281-96).

These alt-right impulses toward freedom and individual sovereignty masked in an anti-authority, even quasi-communalist ethos are evident in Bitcoin’s vitalist currents. In his book, The Bitcoin Standard (2018: 75-76), the economist Saifdean Ammous argued that, as a sound money system less subject to the fluctuations in value emerging from fiat-systems, Bitcoin could cultivate the low time preference that he believes is essential for a flourishing human culture. For Ammous, those with low time preference are more apt to think about the future; they are more likely to delay gratification and invest, thereby yielding higher returns on their investments. In contrast, those with a high time preference tend to live in the moment, seeking instant gratification. For Ammous, this is the prevailing economic atmosphere today, a form of Keynesian economics centered on “a creed of consumption and spending to satisfy immediate wants.” He continues:

 By constantly expanding the money supply, central banks’ monetary policy makes saving and investment less attractive and thus it encourages people to save less and invest less while consuming more. The real impact of this is the widespread culture of conspicuous consumption, where people live their lives to buy ever-larger quantities of crap they do not need…The financial decisions of people also reflect on all other aspects of their personality, engendering a high time preference in all aspects of life: depreciating currency causes less saving, more borrowing, more short-termism in economic production and in artistic and cultural endeavors, and perhaps most damagingly, the depletion of the soil of its nutrients, leading to ever-lower levels of nutrients in food (141).

The baggy environmentalism of this passage—Ammous loosely links overconsumption of resources to depletion of nutrients in the earth’s soil, without explaining the relationship—amplifies a vitalist current in Ammous’s thinking: as a sound money system, Bitcoin can repair cultural and environmental devitalization.^[2] More pointedly, the logic of the passage moves seamlessly from economic value to cultural value to organic value: an inability or failure to accumulate wealth dilutes cultural production to cheap “crap,” which in turn diminishes nutrients from the soil. Humans are not living up to our full potential, Ammous implies. Our civilization is watered down and as a result, the environment around us is failing to support our basic needs. We may not even be fully human anymore, since, as Ammous makes clear in an earlier passage, animals have a higher time preference than humans (74).

Indeed, Ammous’s logic of devolution implies a desire to return to a more pure, vigorous, and human state of being, proposing that Bitcoin offers a means for such a return. He writes at length on the “artistic flourishing” of Europe under systems of sound money, juxtaposing the work of Bach and Beethoven with the “animalistic noises” produced in contemporary recording studios, which turn a profit by “selling to man the titillation of his basest instincts.” A prior  “golden era” produced music that “spoke to man’s soul and awakened him to think of higher callings than the mundane grind of daily life.” In contrast, “today’s musical noises speak to man’s most base animalistic instincts, distracting him from the realities of life by inviting him to indulge in immediate sensory pleasures (99).” Similarly, Michelangelo spent four years painting the Sistine Chapel, eating very little in order to perfect his craft. Modern art—Ammous has a particular disdain for Rothko—could have been made in several hours by “a bored six-year-old” (100). Today’s art is animalistic and childish, a devolution from the mature vigor of the past. With tremendous self-control, the great artists of prior centuries eschewed base materialism, holding their minds on the higher spiritual realm of beauty and “refined tast[e]” (101). For Ammous, Bitcoin approaches a social ethic, through which human culture can return to a thriving and peaceful state—his discussion of sound money and individual freedom makes a claim that unsound money creates the conditions for “perpetual war” (145-49). Yet it is a vision not of mutual aid, but of individual self-sufficiency. The purity implied in his logic of devolution—the “return” to material potency in both high value cultural production and greater health—underscores Ammous’s claim that sound money generates the individual freedom and self-governance that undergirds an idealized golden age of high culture.

There is a fascistic impulse to these ideals of purity and self-governance—one that becomes apparent as we consider the strange aesthetics and materialism that emerges in the use of another blockchain technology: non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a digital identifier recorded on blockchain, which typically compiles visual and audio digital files into a kind of collage of digital art. As Arne De Boever (2021) has shown, NFTs enact a strange transfiguration of value that reinforces a fetishistic affirmation of the sovereign individual, even as it purports to distribute authority. With their emphasis on the creation of art in a digital space through copies of previously existing works, NFTs have been lauded as a more “democratic” art form, unmoored from categories like authorship, ownership, and value that tie art to the market. Yet, as De Boever argues, NFTs reinforce the very categories of authenticity, creativity, and eternal value they seem to refute, buttressing an “aesthetic exceptionalism” that accentuates the singular, even transcendent qualities of the work of art and the artist. The value of NFTs is so exceptional, in fact, that the material work of art does not matter. Rather than physical objects of art, buyers of NFTs receive “cultic objects”—a token, a certificate, even a clump of hair—to signify their ownership. Such objects refer obsessively to the gross materiality of the human body. Buyers of work by the NFT artist known as Beeple, whose art sold for a record $69,346,250 at Christies in 2021, receive a small token with a cloth, which can be used to clean the token, or “to clean yourself up after blasting a hot load in yer pants.” De Boever calls this “alt-right materialis[m]” a kind of trolling assertion of excess and often sexualized materiality to mask the immateriality of the NFT. The vitalist currents that circulate through Bitcoin discourse are another example of such alt-right materialism. Though such gross tokens are a far cry from the high culture promised by Ammous, both ultimately reinforce individual sovereignty through ideals of aesthetic exceptionalism. And they hide their immaterial nature with a persistent emphasis on matter: the stuff of the human body and the living earth.

The vitalism and alt-right materialism that is implicit in Ammous’s purist vision of Bitcoin becomes far more explicit in Michael Saylor’s insistent assertion that Bitcoin is energy. In an interview with Robert Breedlove, the influencer and host of the Bitcoin-promoting “What is Money?” podcast, Saylor compares Bitcoin to other digitally networked systems like Apple, Google, and Facebook. Once they reach a certain point of economic development, these corporations are “fires that have been unleashed into society…and the effect is exothermal.”^[3] He goes on:

We have the collapse, the dematerialization of some product or service or virtue or some ineffable quality, be it friendship, or mobile devices, or information. It’s collapsing into a lower energy state. And as it collapses into a lower-energy state, huge amounts of energy in the form of profit, cash flow, and value, get given off….Facebook can improve the way you communicate to your loved ones overnight for a nickel…[W]hen you have these massive dematerializations of value and they get on a network with a network effect, it’s almost like… a crystallizing structure: you’ve got an amorphous substance and as it crystalizes we go from steam to water to ice. It collapses, it gives off energy. [Bitcoin] is that first digital monetary system: it’s collapsing into a much more efficient form; it’s giving off energy. And that just brings us back to the entire subject of how important is energy to the human race.

Saylor moves freely between descriptive and analogical modes here with a rhetorical style suitable to a venue promoting itself as “a podcast about Wisdom, Intelligence and Meaning” and “one of the most powerful philosophy podcasts in the world.” The effect is to muddle the relationship between the literal and the metaphorical, so that the analogy of Bitcoin as geothermal energy lends a vital physicality to an abstract monetary process: Bitcoin “gives off energy.” This confusion of the literal and the metaphorical is a rhetorical extension of the alt-right materialism that DeBoever identifies in NFT tokens. Just as the gross and often sexualized materiality of the token stands in for the fact that there is no material piece of art, Saylor’s Bitcoin vitalism occludes the immateriality of the currency. The stakes are higher with Saylor, however. The cultic fetish objects that stand in for NFTs make no claim they will help extend life (indeed, while their common references to masturbatory climax suggest virility, it also implies an expense of life force). For Saylor, Bitcoin can make a claim to such longevity.

The animating energy Saylor attributes to Bitcoin suffuses it with agency: later in his interview with Breedlove, Saylor describes how monetary energy “leaps from gold to Bitcoin” and “leaps from fiat to Bitcoin.” Humans can harness this energy for their own ends. Saylor explains “Money is the highest form of energy that human beings can channel. So if I went back through time, human beings as a species prosper by channeling energy. When we mastered fire, we channeled chemical energy. When we mastered missiles, we channeled kinetic energy…” Adopting Bitcoin is the next phase in human technological development necessary to prosper as a species. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the paradigmatic “creature” or “created thing” animated through the genius of human ingenuity, Bitcoin has come alive. And Saylor seeks to harness its life force.

Indeed, Saylor inadvertently places himself within a Shelleyan historical and literary genealogy of animated technology, invoking the corporation as a creature. In an interview with the Austrian podcaster and Bitcoin enthusiast Robin Seyr, Saylor responds to a question Seyr poses about what a future might look like under a Bitcoin standard:

I think, if you look at economic creatures, the classic economic creature in modern society is the corporation. The average life expectancy of the corporation is something like ten years…The number of corporations that are more than a hundred years old [trails off]. What percentage of people live to be more than a hundred, like .1 percent or .01 percent? What percent of corporations live to be more than a hundred, .0001 percent. Well, what if I told you I could make your company live forever?

In his comparison between the corporation and the “creature,” and in his attention to the lifespan of the corporation, Saylor’s response amplifies the etymological root of “corporation” in the post-classical Latin corporare: “to form into a body.” In doing so, it frames Bitcoin as a kind of vital medicine that can heal and protect the corporation, extending its lifespan to previously unseen proportions. Significantly, Saylor moves back and forth between corporate endurance and human longevity. His explicit claim is that the animating force of Bitcoin can invigorate corporations, making them “live forever.” But submerged within his response is the implicit claim that such economic energy might extend the human lifespan as well.

The logistics of Bitcoin’s capacity to improve human lifespan are unclear, beyond the simple fact that a currency perceived to build wealth might also offer more resources to live longer—better food, exercise, and healthcare, to name a few. But Saylor never substantively acknowledges the effects of economic imparity. He asks vaguely, “What’s the difference between perfect money and imperfect money?” And responds “Perfect money is economic immortality. Imperfect money is: we all have a short, brutal life.” He juxtaposes “people living in skyscrapers on the 80th floor” with “people in Africa living in mud huts.” His answers set aside any concern for the ways Bitcoin might offer practical material improvement for economic imbalances, nor does he make any attempt to understand the culturally-specific context of such conditions, in Africa or elsewhere. Instead, he is animated by a zealous drive for human improvement. Bitcoin as a new phase in human development, one in which science has realized aims that had previously been consigned to the realm of thought alone—the domain of art and religion:

Projecting economic energy through time and space has really been more of an aspirational fantasy…or an art than it was ever a science or engineering discipline. Bitcoin takes something from the artistic and from the religious and from the political domain and it moves it into the engineering domain where now there is actually a precise way to move capital…How will the world change? Profoundly [shrug]. I can create an AI that can live in cyberspace capitalized by Bitcoin that will live forever, that will have economic immortality that is completely sovereign from a company, a person, a country. That AI could, in theory split itself…spawn ten million more AIs that are all sovereign. It’s a life form….I could endow a university or nonprofit with Bitcoin that could conceivably last a thousand years without anybody working for it….I can create a company with a likely life expectancy of one hundred or five hundred or a thousand years.

Here is Saylor’s clearest turn to rhetorical alt-right materialism. By proposing that Bitcoin will materialize what has previously been consigned to the realms of art and religion, he makes literal the ideas that have dwelled in the domain of imaginative speculation and spiritual faith, sealing them with the certainty of science. In doing so, he proposes a future out of science fiction itself, one in which a new and sovereign life form is capable of spawning itself into an infinite number of other sovereign beings: a chilling vision of sovereignty on steroids.

Conclusion

I have argued that attending to the ways science and technology was—and is—imbricated with certain religious and spiritual affects amplifies the political ideals—freedom, individualism, sovereignty—behind both. Without drawing a direct line of influence between medieval alchemy and contemporary Bitcoin, I have shown how they are similar techno-utopian projects, seeking to use advances in science and technology to “perfect” society, or to bring about a utopian ideal. What is clear from the alchemical theory of Bacon and Rupicessa is that the purifying impulses of medieval alchemy could be used in the service of assuring Christian dominion: a totalizing project demanding the power of the one—the sovereign individual, nation, or faith—over the rest. Bitcoin poses a similar threat.

Alchemy was a contested subject and practice in the middle ages. Some of its critics saw it as a form of counterfeiting: if false gold entered economic circulation it could lead real gold to lose its value in the marketplace. Others took a more theological view, asserting that alchemy was a dangerous improvement on God’s creation by hubristic scientists too focused on earthly power and authority (Newman 2004: 34-114; Principe 2012: 59-60). In his under-appreciated Canterbury tale, The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), offered a powerful critique of the wasting effects of alchemical labor in fruitless pursuit of the Philosophers’ Stone. The tale is, in part, a fictional autobiography or confession from the perspective of an apprentice alchemist on the verge of shucking the ideals of mastery that have been hammered into him by a domineering master alchemist (Lears 2024). In one passage, the Yeoman describes how

He [the Philosophers’ Stone] hath ymaad us [the alchemists] spenden muchel good,

For sorwe of which almoost we wexen wood,

But that good hope crepeth in oure herte,

Supposynge evere though we sore smerte,

To be releeved by hym afterward.

Swich supposyng and hope is sharp and hard;

I warne yow wel, it is to seken evere.

That future temps hath maad men to dissevere,

In trust therof, from al that evere they hadde (Chaucer 2008: 274).

The passage vividly attests to the “sharp” and “hard” feeling of hope as the yeomen alchemists invest both their money and their bodies in the pursuit of the Philosophers’ Stone. Such desperate labor has affected them both physically and spiritually in their loss of “good”—both material goods and the more abstract quality that comprises what is good about them. The allure of “future temps”—of some promise of wealth or happiness—has resulted in the laborers’ separation from “al that ever they hadde.”

Chaucer wrote in a time of great social and civil unrest, as England was still recovering from the ravages of the plague and the economic and social transformations it had wrought. The enchanted promise of gold is keenly alive in the Yeoman’s tale; and Chaucer is sensitive to it. He acknowledges both alchemy’s promise of happiness and the ways that the pursuit of such happiness creates the very conditions the Yeoman seeks to escape: the feelings of a life dulled by work, of being used up. The mystical promise of medieval alchemy was a very real and human response to the material conditions of living in the European middle ages. As Zachary Matus has argued, alchemy was an extension of the emphasis on embodied and affective experience that suffused late-medieval religiosity (Matus 2017: 8-9). The blood of the suffering and dying body of Christ was a reminder of one’s own fleshly vulnerability and, for many alchemists, a potent symbol of the everlasting life they sought through the elixir (DeVun 2009: 116-27).

Behind the rationalist quasi-logic of Bitcoin is a similar mystical appeal. At the time of writing this essay, the Crypto platform Kraken was running an ad during Premier League soccer coverage, comparing Bitcoin to “digital gold” and promising that “it can never be counterfeited,” and that “no one can decide to just print more or shut it down.” The ad concludes with the image of a hand holding a golden ball of light, currents of buzzing electricity coursing from it, against the claim: “it puts the power back in all our hands.” In our current moment, as market-oriented government, economic, and healthcare institutions bear down upon us, foreclosing our capacity to thrive, who wouldn’t want such autonomy—for themselves and for everyone? The ad promises both.

The appeal of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based technologies has weathered a host of controversies since Bitcoin’s inauguration in 2009. Its ascendancy appears to be all but assured, particularly after the 2024 election of Donald Trump. David Golumbia’s critiques of the alt-right origins and ideals of Bitcoin offer a powerful and real model of critique as care. Attending to the mystical aspects of Bitcoin’s appeal is, I hope, an extension of this impulse—one that seeks to identify not only the dangers of Bitcoin and its misleading rhetoric, but also to look deeper, probing the dangerously wounded spirit at its core.

I thank the editors and guest editors at b2o for including me in this special issue on “Critique as Care” in honor of my friend and colleague David Golumbia. Special thanks must go to the memory of David himself, who first made me believe I might have something to say about Bitcoin and alchemy. This essay is for him.

Adin E. Lears is the author of World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Cornell, 2020) as well as articles and essays on medieval embodiment and poetics and their implications for thinking about contemporary life. Her current book project offers a premodern history of life force and its social and literary effects in post-plague England. She is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

References

Ammous, Saifedean. 2018. The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Breedlove, Robert. “Michael Saylor: Bitcoin, Energy, and Humanity.” Swan Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07nAJvGoU9g&t=160s (accessed February 25, 2025).

____. “Robert Breedlove.” https://www.youtube.com/@RobertBreedlove22 (accessed February 25, 2025).

Chang, Ku-Ming. 2011. “Alchemy as Studies of Life and Matter: Reconsidering the Place of Vitalism in Early Modern Chymistry.” Isis 102, no. 2: 322-29.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. 2008. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 272-81.

Davis, Rebecca. 2016. Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

De Boever, Arne. 2021. “The End of Art (Once Again).” boundary 2.  https://www.boundary2.org/2021/03/arne-de-boever-the-end-of-art-once-again/ (accessed February 25, 2025).

DeVun, Leah. 2009. Prophesy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupicessa in the Late Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press.

Golumbia, David. 2016. The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

____, 2024. Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Huestis, Samuel. 2023. “Cryptocurrency’s Energy Consumption Problem.” Rocky Mountain Institute. https://rmi.org/cryptocurrencys-energy-consumption-problem/ (accessed February 25, 2025).

Kraken Crypto Exchange. “See What Bitcoin Can Be.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4YkblM3McM (accessed February 25, 2025).

Lears, Adin E. 2024. “Corruption, Consumption, and Chaucer’s Reenchantment of Craft in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 46: 37-65

Matus, Zachary. 2017. Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Late Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “god n.2,” https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED18946/track?counter=4&search_id=173783 (accessed February 25, 2025).

Newman, William R. 1997. “An Overview of Roger Bacon’s Alchemy.” In Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, 317-36. Leiden, NL: Brill.

____.  2004. Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “creature (n.),” December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8061309761.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “corporation (n.),” December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1200365536.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Principe, Lawrence M. 2012. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Seyr, Robin. “Michael Saylor: ‘Bitcoin is Economic Immortality’.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A60jVnAIX40 (accessed February 25, 2025).

Shannon, Laurie. 2013. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stephenson, Will. 2022. “Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin Maximalists.” Harpers Magazine 344, no. 2062: 25-34.

Wyatt, David. 2009. Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800-1200. Leiden, NL: Brill. 

¹ There is, of course, an irony to the idea that Bitcoin might be a boon to the environment. Energy consumption is a leading cause of the current climate crisis and in 2023, Bitcoin alone (setting aside other cryptocurrencies) was estimated to consume 127 terawatt hours per year; more than many developed nations (Huestis 2023).

² Quotations from Saylor have been lightly edited for clarity and to avoid repetition.

Selected Cantos of the Inferno

Karen Pinkus

 

A good bit more than halfway through my life I stood

On a precipice looking down with dread

When came my guide, with wiry hair, the very sage Ms. Atwood.

 

“I’ll take you ‘round to see how certain souls are fairing

In hopes to cheer you up a bit,” she offered.

This, plus Xanax and some wine will make a pleasant pairing.

 

******

 

We came upon a meadow that seemed verdant from afar.

On close inspection, drought-fueled wildfires simmered

And yet, small dogs were frolicking among the ashy chars.

 

“Behold the plain of virtuous re-pugs,” Margaret indicated.

“Being of that sort, they will forever chase their croppéd tails

But will not suffer the tortures of others much worse fated.”

 

“And who’s that silver-coated fox who yaps intrepidly?” I wonder.

“That’s Liz Cheney. She sniffs and seeks her dad but finds him not

For he resides where it is much, much more hot.”

 

*****

 

Next, we sailed upon a sea of men forever treading water.

Bezos and Sir Keir I recognized among the many bobbing heads.

“They did what they had to,” said my guide, “to find themselves safe harbor.”

 

They can’t be blamed, I thought. And yet they might have spoken up

instead of normalizing the approaching storm

or diplomatic niceties continuing to perform.

 

On the shore were others who, fearing they’d be uninvited to the party

made pilgrimage to Sea-on-Lake and now are forced to dance without a spine–

a monstruous ballet by some demonic Balanchine.

 

Then we descended to a circle filled with men and women doomed

to gaseous blustery emissions from both ends

Hypocrites–the pose of twisted pretzels they assumed.

 

My guide suggested I might speak to anyone I’d pick.

A toothy smile popped right up: “Hiya! I’m Haley, Nick.

Please. Bend me as you wish,” came from one or the other orifice.

 

“And what’s that head contorted tight within a closet?”

“That’s Lady Lindsay G, who has a place reserved forever more.

Secret lover of boyish pages, he railed at ‘light shoes’ on the senate floor.”

 

*****

 

Descending, we approached one strung by hand and feet

To what might seem a cross but was in fact an X

Then suddenly came a driverless car bearing a T, to break his neck.

 

“Decipher, please, these cabalistic forms,” I begged my guide.

“That’s Mr. Musk,” she said. “And having squandered billions for his pride

he’ll spend the rest of days in agony with bloody gashes on his side.”

 

And all around a hideous cabinet of curiosities:

There’s Marco, Oz and Putin’s Tulsi

All sentenced to unending bending of the knees.

 

And then—behold!—a bloated baby with red MAGA hat

and skin so thin it appeared like saran wrap.

His crimes so many, he’s bound forever to his sweaty avocat.

 

The molten heat caused dye to fall into eyes of Rudy G.

He’d stay forever blinded as he clung on in desperation

covering his orange life raft with his vile perspiration.

 

I naturally I supposed we’d reached rock bottom, and yet

My guide elucidated: “These two are not as far down as you’d expect,

Given their rather low intellect.”

 

“The hottest places are still to come,” she pointed.

“Reserved for those entrusted with the public good

Who acted as they pleased, as tyrants self-anointed.”

 

Swimming in a sea of shit, parasites came up for breaths of air.

First gestated in the skull of one called RFK

They seemed to grow more numerous each minute of each day.

 

“That slimy worm who dons a robe is Justice Thomas,” my guide spoke.

“a sycophant in life, in death reduced perpetually

to choke on a can of pubic hair-infested Coke.”

 

“And those mucked up white-shoed feet, to whom do they belong?”

“Another justice, Sam Alito, destined to hang upside down

Like the flag he claimed his wife had flown.”

 

And farther still two Steves were heard in pain to howl:

One, a Miller grew a new foreskin every day

Only to have a fiendish mohel cut it repeatedly away.

 

The other, Bannon, writhed and bellowed,

As he conjured up conspiracies and lies

consuming his own flesh along with larval flies.

 

*****

 

After this, I need a real vacation and may seek refuge in another nation.

“Might I inquire, my kind guide, about residency in your Canadia?”

“It’s no Paradiso,” said she. “At best a purgatory ‘til the end of this administration.”

 

Karen Pinkus is a writer and professor emerita of Italian and Comparative Literature. She lives in New York City.