Stop Fighting It. (And why I don’t want to hear it anymore)

I’m sick and tired of people who still consider grass roots movements to be a laughing matter. Or worse yet, still clinging to the ragged popular myth that ‘they don’t work’.

Welcome to 2007, neanderthals. They work.

Somewhere in the past week, I came across the viewpoint that our entire society is based on obedience. It’s a startling revelation to have in this, the supposed ‘Land Of The Free’. But a salient one, nonetheless. Think about it. The entire operational day-to-day framework of the American existence depends on suspension of disbelief, the implied trust between the public population and our privately owned handlers. There’s a lot of things about our lives that we accept merely because we’re told ‘that’s how it is’, and because it’s ‘too much work’ to go against the grain of what we’re told when it’s in direct opposition to our best interests.

Don’t believe me?

Well, most scholars of this school of thought would point you to the Vietnam War. An unpopular war sparks a groundswell of protests that become so hard to ignore, the powers-that-be are forced to re-evaluate and face facts: it’s time to leave. I, however, would like to point to a more recent event, one which is being overlooked everywhere outside of the internet.

First, the message boards erupted with thousands of posts that were very anti-GameSpot oriented, which caused a moderation nightmare and sparked even more action. At last report, over 500 individuals have canceled their pay subscription to the site, with many more threatening to do so unless an explanation is given. But they’ve already moved past this, and some very upset GameSpot fans are starting to get organized. They’re not talking about a simple boycott of the site; they’re talking about boycotting the advertisers that use GS for promotion. [Source]

GameSpot, for the uninitiated, is a gaming website geared towards the hardcore gamer. It delivers news and (most importantly here) previews of upcoming games and related content. The initial flare up came about when GameSpot quietly binned reviewer Jeff Gerstmann for giving a game a low score. The game in question was “Kane and Lynch”, the newest offering from Eidos Interactive. All of these facts may seem like so much loose gravel until you understand the mud underneath: Eidos paid the owners of GameSpot lots of monies to plaster ads for Kane and Lynch all over the GameSpot domain site. “Aha!”, you say, “a sad coincidence”. Not really. After the bad review went public, Eidos pulled their advertising from the site completely, asking for their money back, and the rest is history.

When you get down to where the rubber meets the road, you’ll find that Jeff was doing what he was hired to do (one would assume): review a game. Better yet, if I may paraphrase my good friend King Rat, he “pointed out the nickle in the pile of shit and then neatly disposed of the whole thing.” Which is, ultimately, what you would want a reviewer to do. But Eidos didn’t like it’s ROI (alternate word for use here: payola) and decided to bail. Even THAT would be marginally fine, had GameSpot not turned around and shot the messenger.

So, that brings us up to speed nicely. The whole unfolding saga illustrates what companies in particular (and the ruling class in general) should quickly become aware of; it’s the information age. The public is very sick and tired of constantly bending over and taking it up the tailpipe. The nice, shiny PR phrase for it is ‘outrage fatigue’. It is, by nature, a double edged sword. You will either have people who blithely continue to take punishment, or you will have people (as you can see above) who will band together and take their displeasure to the next level. And that is exactly where this lopsided parasitic relationship that the large majority of us have been shoehorned into falls apart.

What happened to GameSpot next is a direct result of ground level outrage by your garden variety consumers:

Very early this morning, the Pepsi/Mountain Dew ads came down. Coincidence? Maybe. But it seems rather unlikely that Pepsi bought a one day ad on Gamespot for Mountain Dew. It’s not like they’re on a tight budget. At one point yesterday, literally every ad space came up Dew. Now it’s Alienware (Dell). Lots and lots of Alienware.

I’m going to wait and make up my mind about this whole mess once someone from Gamespot, CNET, or Eidos decides they’ve lost enough street cred to open up and talk, however, this whole situation is really beginning to remind me of a soap opera, where one of the characters in the show is mute.

It’s like watching a beating.

I can’t help but ask myself, “With all of the punches that Gamespot is absorbing, why don’t they fight back?”[Source]

Why don’t they fight back, indeed. Perhaps they feel it’s not worth their time to comment on internal policy or procedure, (They have.) or perhaps they got caught with their pants down and don’t have a good explanation for why their naughty bits got caught in the cookie jar.

All of this is illustrative of a larger point, of course. I’m a political wonk first, a gamer second. Naturally, I see this whole incident as counter-intuitive to all this ‘grassroots doesn’t work’ hot air. In fact, over the past year and a half or so, the grassroots have been upgraded in public standing by those that fear them most. We’ve come a long way from ‘just a bunch of conspiracy nuts running wild’. We are now a fully functional, autonomous counter-force to the less than savory agenda of the institutional con-man for profit. A kind of “anti-business major” on the socio-economic ladder, if you will. But I get ahead of myself, that article isn’t finished yet.

The double-up fiscal and social pounding that GameSpot is taking is not unique in timbre or ferocity when it comes to grassroots reprisals in the 21st century. With the help of YouTube, the Consumerist, Digg, and the infinitesimal blogs everywhere, a slow but steady shift is occuring, and it’s gaining speed every minute of every day. It’s half-past Winter in the socio-political timeline of the US, and dandelions are breaking through the permafrost as far as the eye can see. You’ve got your TiVo’s, your organized nationwide protests, the CNN/YouTube Presidential Debates, Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year, and the time honored “corporate criminal perp-walk/public apology” dance. The awaking collective consciousness records everything and never forgets.

This makes the white collar sleight-of-hand artist very, very nervous. Hell, even Karl Rove ducked out before his house of cards crashed in on his head. This kind of fear used to be the sole domain of the commonman prole in the street. But now even the elite are beginning to learn how important it is to watch your (public) ass. When you have an organization that never sleeps, doesn’t answer to anyone, and can’t be bought, you’re praying that they never find out where the bodies are buried. But find them we will, because we come in all shapes, sizes, clearances, and interests. And there’s legions of us that want to be the person that breaks the story or finds a new piece to fit into the puzzle. Today, Progressive and Conservative run news sites pull the kind of readership traditional newspaper owners dream up during absinthe and coke binges. Network news channels quote, vilify, attack, and interview “big name” blog sites like they were traditional media sources. They didn’t get it, but they’re starting to. They want to slay the beast that’s eating them alive, but it’s reached their heart, and so it goes that they are too late.

I think it’s time to say it. Welcome to the New Fourth Estate. Mark me well, elite isolationists. Your time of a constrained world view is nearing a close, barring your destruction of the entire race. Now, we who live in the real world help to shape the perception of it, in ways you could only dream of harnessing. So stop fighting it. I don’t want to hear about how it’s not going to work when it already is.

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