Thoughts On: Syndicate

In 2012, Electronic Arts published the first-person shooter Syndicate intended as a sort of franchise reboot of the 1993 title of the same name. Developed by Starbreeze Studios, the game shares many mechanical similarities with their prior efforts, chiefly The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.

The story was written by Richard Morgan, perhaps best known as the author of Altered Carbon, a futuristic cyberpunk-ian tale where human consciousness is stored on a stack and the surrounding body is often regarded as only so much "meat". So devalued is human life (at least the aspects of life not contained on a chip) in the novel that murder not damaging the stacks of the victims is referred to as "organic damage".

The world of Syndicate is a cyberpunk dystopia where multinational mega-corporations (the so-called Syndicates), unfettered by such pesky considerations as anti-trust laws come to dominate and carve up the globe, becoming in effect new breeds of empires, complete with their own military might and consumer bases. Into this world Morgan seems a natural fit, but ultimately the story of Syndicate doesn't quite work, and I will attempt to articulate why.

Power and Politics

The primary occupation of the political class is just that - political. They are concerned with the business of achieving and maintaining their power, for politics is the art and science of power dynamics. This is tacitly admitted by the political class, who often speak of communication to their constituencies as their primary concern. That their constituents believe they serve their best interests is of primary importance, whether this is true is secondary or not important at all if the means of communication are effective enough. That they must appeal to constituents - to the public - is not at all a characteristic of democratic systems. It is inherent in all political systems, for there is always power in numeracy. The degree to which they must appeal however is regulated by the means of control they have at their disposal and varies by the type of system.

Effective politicians are those who succeed in intensifying and consolidating their power. They do this by perceiving the most advantageous power bases with which to align themselves and so seizing the opportunity. In a capitalist society with unchecked corporate growth, corporate interests will grow to become a formidable power base. In such a system no politician can find success without strategic alignment and balance between corporate and public interests. Like seeks like, and so consolidated political power seeks out institutions of consolidated power with which to forge alliances and determine points of mutual interest. Large corporations, religions, and sprawling organizations become natural allies to consolidated hierarchical political power, which becomes increasingly incapable of interfacing with the individual.

The Tuning Problem in Physics

The tuning problem in physics is the question of why the constants of the laws of nature have assumed their values relative to one another that they have. In order to have a chance of answering the question we must rephrase it in a way that it could possibly be answered scientifically. That is, not why the values are what they are, but rather how it is that they are what they are. The distinction may seem subtle and unnecessary, but it shifts us from trying to assign a reason (an unscientific task) to one of understanding a process (an eminently scientific endeavour).

I say tuning problem because these constants appear as tunable parameters in the natural laws. Assuming they could assume any value relative to one another, for we have no knowledge of how they might be constrained, we find that there is an extremely narrow range in which a universe such as our own is made possible. But the term also suggests a process, one of adjustment - that of the parameters being tuned with respect to one another.

The Optimistic Dystopia of Brave New World

Reading Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World I was struck by how utopian his dystopia is. Huxley does not present a world that is obviously wrong from the inside, since the inhabitants suffer from the same corruption that plagues their society. It is only from the perspective of an outsider, or someone imperfectly adjusted to the system, that one can see just how out-of-sync the society is with human nature. This makes for an interesting angle and a welcome contrast from other dystopian fiction where the systemic problems are apparent to all yet the characters feel powerless to do anything about it. However, from the perspective of a prediction of the future, Brave New World comes across as overly optimistic. It should be noted however that Brave New World takes place so far in the future (around the seventh century A.F. - After Ford, Henry Ford that is) that any assignments of optimistic or pessimistic are in truth entirely useless. All is speculation, beyond that there is little we can say.

From Relativity to Rambling Thoughts

What follows are my own train of thoughts spurred on from reading Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. I use these ideas as jumping off points into the highly speculative which is not covered in the book.

In his book, Einstein explains how the special theory of relativity comes about after taking seriously two positions about the nature of reality and following both of them through to their logical conclusions. These are the constancy of the speed of light in vacuo and that of relativity: the idea that there is no preferred reference body of uniform motion in the universe, such that the physical laws are independent of such motion.

Thoughts On: Arrival

Much was made of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life. I thought it was OK, but I didn't really enjoy it as I hoped I would or as enthusiastic reviews had led me to believe I might. From a science-fiction aspect I found the movie interesting but unchallenging. Conversations with others after the film led me to believe that this may be mostly to do with an unusual familiarity on my part with some of the subjects the film deals with.

Hidden Lore in Avatar

James Cameron's Avatar is a bit of a forgotten pop-cultural relic. No doubt this will soon change with the eventual release of Avatar 2 and subsequent sequels. I say forgotten because outside of its impact at the box-office and on spearheading the 3D theatre experience, it is seldom discussed. In an age that has no shortage of big bombastic blockbuster spectacle franchises, this should not be unexpected. I don't think you can point to Avatar's lack of 'stickiness', for lack of a better term, in people's minds as a specific failing of the film in comparison to other franchises. Franchises like Star Wars became popular in a time where such films were an incredible rarity and more modern franchises like Harry Potter released films in quick succession after each other at regular intervals. And all of these 'sticky' franchises had countless merchandising: toys, cereals, lunchboxes, cartoon spin-offs, etc. that kept them present in the minds of the public. So Avatar's lack of 'stickiness' could easily be due to its self-imposed hibernation, rather than resulting from any lacking aspect of the film itself.

But because Avatar has been forgotten, there has been little digging into the lore of it that usually accompanies such large spectacle films (although admittedly such speculation tends to cluster around franchises after they have more than one film rather than around singular event-style films). Avatar was also saddled with a straightforward story that didn't give audiences much to chew on after the euphoria of the visual spectacle had worn off. This has caused many to ask what could possibly be worth exploring in the world of Avatar to warrant Avatars 2, 3, 4 and 5. However, as with any nascent imagined universe, there are countless possibilities still out there and avenues to be explored. In this space I want to pick up on a few interesting wrinkles hiding just under the surface of the world presented in Avatar that could make the world potentially worth revisiting.