This blog is becoming a dump for images for my radio show...

Boy Do I Look Like a Stoner in This Picture

"Hipermarketi in kafiči..." My thoughts on the protests

Začnem pri možu v ogledalu...

Last year, the Workers' and Punks' University hosted a series of lectures focusing on the mathematical side of the prolonged crisis. They went over most peoples' heads (alas, Marxism =/= Economics), mine included, though I found them enlightening, if nothing else for the little tidbits I could take away and use to help piece together my threadbare understanding of what happened. One rather controversial guest was this guy "in the trenches", so to speak, a data analyst for the Bank of Slovenia. It was his job to study charts all day and crunch raw numeric data, and seeing as that involves little in the way speaking engagements, his presentation did a bit of a belly flop. I felt sorry for him, he was nervous, and as I learned doing my show, when you're nervous the fallback is to cling to the one point you're 100% sure about and repeat it over and over again.

But, on reflection, in many cases it's the people who, strategically or out of a fit of nerves, don't jazz it up, who repeat one thing that they're sure about over and over again, that actually have great potential to alter your perspective. And this guy was no exception. His "one thing"? The money Slovenian banks lent out during the boom years, and that we the taxpayers are now on the hook for, went into two things: "hipermarketi in kafiči". That's megamarkets and cafes. There was an explanation which he was afraid would quickly go off the deep end of economic theory, which he nervously skimmed over, and the gist of which was that while the development of supermarkets and bars was strongly suppressed in Yugoslavia, from which it naturally follows that there'd be an urge to splurge in independent Slovenia,  the returns on "investments" of this kind, where there are 0 barriers to competition, are microscopic to non-existent even when business is booming. Hence we are now broke. He shied away from continuing, like I said, and soon the presentation trickled down to "This is the one point, the one thing I want to get across; I'm sorry I'm not a good speaker, but please, keep this in mind: hipermarketi in kafiči, that's what this is all about... hipermarketi in kafiči... hipermarketi in kafiči... hipermarketi in kafiči."

Flash forward a couple of months to a Friday at the end of December, when the protests were at their height. A small but compact parade of younger protesters escorted by the police had temporarily shut down Čelovška Ulica, and I had to get off the bus one stop sooner than usual. Walking into the center, what really jumped out at me was how every fucking kafič I passed was full to bursting with people chilling after the main protest. Every fucking one, even those obscure ones you can live in Ljubljana half your life without ever noticing, like the one nestled away in a corner behind the Protestant Church (Steam, I believe it's called?). At every cafe it was the same story: people at various stages of drunk, with anarchy armbands, Mao caps and various other left-leaning paraphernalia, crammed in at or over tables filled with empty bottles of Laško, while signs from the protest were propped up on the wall or lying neglected on the wet sidewalk.

This pissed me off. Frequenting a bar or cafe is every Slovene's God-given right, nay duty, but do you seriously fucking have to do it on a day the country collectively decided to set aside in order to publicly vent its anger and frustration with the general situation, which, objectively speaking, is unbearable. Can't you make a fucking sandwich at home and bring it with you, can't you buy beer at a store (not at a hipermarket, of course, but at a mom and pop store or from a fruit seller) and bring it with you... if you're preaching that the status quo is the fucking problem, and then parking your hide under a fucking Zlatorog sign at Pr' Maticu or Pr' Ančki or Pr' Semaforu or Pr' Bitek, you really need to get a Latin dictionary and look up status quo.

So good luck, guys, I hope you get what you're looking for and I hope Janša disappears forever. I very much hope higher education remains a right, not a privilege, and I'm happy you're out there, doing what you're doing.

But, to reiterate... although compared to Americans, Slovenes are very dismissive of formalities and gestures (and I looove them for it), if you're out there screaming for sweeping, overarching change, for just one day, at least act like you can stay away from something that's a symbol - or more accurately a hotbed - of everything keeping us back (populism, alcohol, bad investments, among other things).

Don't worry, Parlament Pub will still be there tomorrow morning... I heard from a very reliable source at a prominent institution that it's not going anywhere.

**UPDATE**

A beverage company, G3 Spirits, has taken over K4! In other words, a club that once nurtured the talent of designers and DJs, that is, people who can create added value, is now in the hands of a liquor distributor! Hipermarket in kafiči indeed!

 

Ljubljana Pizza version 2012 tier list

Robo Ky: Depedning on who's making the list, an A or D tier character in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +. And generally awesome.

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Believing the pizza place in the small town of Podutik near where I live was called Pizzeria Vezuvij (Pizzerija Vesuvius), I searched for it in vain on the internet. Nothing, not a single hit in Slovenia; there was a hit or two in cyrillic, and that was it. Did it go out of business, I wondered. No, there'd still be a listing or a review somewhere on the web if that were the case. Well, it turns out it's actually called Picerija Etna ("Pizzeria Aetna"), and this was the third or so time I was wrongly convinced it was called Vezuvij. It's the fact that they're both named after mountains in Italy... and probably that there's also a pizzeria called Vulkan ("Volcano") in Ljubljana.

Well, in searching for the elusive Vezuvij I inadvertently ended up reading a handful of articles on the web about the best pizza in Ljubljana. Don't even get me started... let's just say it AIN'T Foculus. And over my delicious margherita s suho salamo at Etna I got to thinking long and hard about how I'd rate the pizza of Ljubljana. Problem is, everything is pretty close together in the rankings, and they're all viable.

Which led me to realize that instead of an enumerated list, the most appropriate way to rate the pizza places of Ljubljana would be a tier list, the likes of which fighting game fans use to rank the playable characters in a game. Tiers are general clusters of characters which are more or less equally good. The highest tier is the S tier, then come A, B, C (D, etc.) and junk (usually reserved for joke or gimmick characters like Dan in Street Fighter IV). + and - tiers may also be used, and usually the order in which characters are listed in each tier is significant.

What makes this system relevant to the case at hand is that 1. tier placements and even the concept of tiers itself are the subject of heated debate, 2. regardless of tier, every character can win any given match - more scientifically grounded tiers are based on match up tables, which show how many games each character would win if two characters (and two equally skilled players) played ten matches, with 7-3 being the highest mark (in our case, this corresponds to how, because of different cooks, number of customers being served, etc. on any given day any one pizza place in Ljubljana can be better than another pizza place). And 3. to be credible, tier lists should roughly follow a standard distribution, with S and junk tier having the fewest members and the tiers in the middle the most.

I think Ljubljana is more like an Arc Systems game than a Capcom game in that the tiers are relatively close, subjective taste is a huge factor and, like I said, they're all pretty much viable contenders:

S tier: Trnovski zvon

S-/A+ tier: Azur

A tier: Vezuvij, Tunel*, Angel, Emonska klet, Dvor

B tier: Foculus, Dobra vila

C tier: Pinki

"Junk" tier**: Mercator pizzas, Parma

* I haven't eaten here in years but back in the day when I ate there all the time it was easily the most consistent pizza place.

** In line with the analogy, these pizzas aren't necessarily bad, they just can't be taken seriously. (When someone says "wanna get some pizza," no Ljubljančan ever replies "sure, where do you wanna go, Mercator?")

Chingy, the black guy at Best Buy

Scary Movie 4: "They're taking everyone... young, old, rich, poor, Chingy."

I've been busy lately and posting has been the last thing on my mind. However, preparing a radio show about the teen movies of 1995 (Hackers, Empire Records, Tank Girl) that ever so subtly builds into a crescendo of "pretty clothes and trinkets aside, Wes Anderson is a caste monger and the point of all his work is that a rigid class system guarantees a quality, pretty consumer aesthetic... and that's the profane reality behind the high-sounding libertarianism that's currently all the rage among my peers in the US." has been exhilarating. Having had to watch a whole lot of 1995 to reach that point was incredibly exhausting, and after the show, on Saturday night, I came home and passed out in bed. But the next morning I was awoken - perhaps for the first time in my life - by the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing that the world is a better place because of something that I did. Radio waves carrying my solid condemnation of Super Bad, Wes and premium cable ideology are now out there somewhere, floating through space. Who knows, perhaps someone was even listening and paying attention.

I've been riding that high ever since, and it's led me back to Drop Aztek.

After the show, I went and got a drink with Riley, a talented photographer who's in Slovenia to research the Erased, and somehow the conversation went to Chingy (I think I had used the term "chingy" to refer to money, as I'm wont to do). I believe her words were "we bought that album and listened to it like all the time!", which wouldn't have struck me as noteworthy had I not just spent three days cataloging the little differences between a time when you'd "buy albums and listen to them all the time!" and now.

My main memory of Chingy comes from 2003, when, looking at the CDs on the best sellers rack at Best Buy, I suggested, as a joke that I knew would be well received, that my friend Dennis get his sister Chingy for Christmas. We both laughed as the cover, featuring Chingy standing by his ride beneath the St. Louis arch, delivered the punchline.

Why did the joke work? Because this was a Best Buy in the middle of what must be one of the largest suburban retail clusters in the US and consequently the world (the Roosevelt-Butterfield-Oakbrook shopping area cuts through 5 cities). And there, at that moment in time when Best Buy was the place for white people to be on account of where consumer technology (and shady consumer credit to pay for it) was going, was this strategically placed black guy, looking all street, staring down the throngs of suburban holiday shoppers from the cover of his album. There is something inherently funny about that, and the joke would probably have gone over just as well had I merely pointed to the CD and said "Chingy."

Nor was it an isolated incident. Back then, I'd say up until about 2006, many laughs were to be had as my boys Dennis and Lev would deliberately put on their worst accents and recite Eminem and Chingy lyrics; Lev with his thick Slovene accent "spontaneously" (he may have actually been practicing this at home, which, if you know the guy, makes it all the more funny) working "and when you sleep I hope you dream about it, and when you dream I hope you scream about it"  into a conversation was probably a high point. And for a ladies' perspective, there was Sis singing "I Don't Wanna Be a Player No More" as she donned a faux snakeskin tube top (oh, she was warned) for some suburban clubbing with her Italian friend Monica. That same Sis would make me proud several years later, when a broken jukebox stuck on "My Humps" would lead to what perhaps was the one of the finest bouts of ironic whiteness the world - or at least that townie bar in Villa Park - had ever seen. 

Of course, one would certainly be right to detect a hint of scorn or derision: towards the brashness and perceived silliness of black culture, and in Eminem's case, towards the idea of wiggerism. Add to that college, which makes people, and Americans in particular, incredibly fun and incredibly obnoxious, and it wouldn't be difficult to apply the word "racist" to some of the funnier moments. But it is in fact only once one readily admits to the white self-assuredness underlying some of our reactions that the true significance of the hip hop and RnB of the early 2000 decade, of this black music that, for a good five years, had established itself as a synonym for pop music, reveals itself. Having secured a place in the pre-internet pop pantheon, it brought with it a whole slough of non-white ideas about hyper-consumption, violence and sexuality. Already accepted by the mainstream and heavily promoted, among other things, by an MTV that still played videos, once the music had kicked up all these incongruities, they were just out there. Complementing that was way that the nature and (for perhaps the last time) potentially extreme profitability of the pipeline then in place for distributing and promoting music discouraged the establishment of a uniform discourse, of an agreed upon "neutral" location for our encounters with Chingy & Co., which would have streamlined the process of reacting to the music (this, it should go without saying, was to eventually be provided by the internet, which was then still in its infancy). Without something like that to aid in processing a black guy's boast that while he does have numerous existential problems, some involving possible imprisonment, a [nasty expletive for girlfriend] is not one of them, all we were left with was our pile of preconceived notions, some rooted in the Clinton-era PC movement and the efforts made in our early to mid 20s to explore music, and with it black music in some form or another (be it jazz or indie hip hop or even Kid Rock in the Americans' case, or house music in the Europeans' case), and others in the everyday racism of anecdotes and off-hand observations, inherited ideas about blacks and black culture, and a wide range of media treatments, many of which themselves were reactions to black culture - "And all the girlies say I'm pretty fly... for a white guy".

And I feel that it is in that openness, in the sort of necessity that more or less everybody felt to interact with or react to this music on the one hand, and in the free discretion and circumstantial nature of those reactions on the other, that the true value of not only that era's hip hop and RnB, but of hip hop and RnB in general lies. It explains why Kanye West, for reasons no one can exactly pinpoint, sounds damn good right about now and why the music of, say, Kendrick Lamar, though perfectly fine and well, somehow feels lacking. Look at it this way: in 2004, my dad called me with the express purpose of telling me about this rapper named 50 Cent who was shot like 13 times. Later that year, he insisted I download the Up In Smoke! DVD (which in itself was a veritable laugh factory) and watch it with him. And guess who beat Facebook to the punch in filling me in on the Kanye incident at the Grammys and Kanye's relationship with Kim Kardashian... yup, my dad, the retiree.

Forget my dad, my sister doesn't know who Kendrick Lamar is. And Pitchfork's elusive near-perfect rating for his album only serves to underscore how unimportant Pitchfork is.
  

The Radio Show about "Hipsters" to End all Radio Shows about "Hipsters"

Yesterday I made my solo on-air debut on Radio Student. I prepared a show about the word "hipster", and had the thing down pat... in my head. Nerves got the best of me, and some things didn't come out as clear as I would have liked. So, without further ado, a written summary of what I was trying to say.

It is impossible to define the word "hipster" by looking for a common trait among all phenomena to which the word could be attached, as they are too numerous and diverse and, as the word could shows, no one phenomenon can be unequivocally described with the word "hipster" every single time it appears. It follows that to get to the bottom of this now-common word, it would be a good idea to start by considering literature on the subject.
The relevant literature can be broken down into two groups: satirical or humorous works and negative/academic works. The former - The Hipster Handbook, Stuff White People Like, and the Do's and Don't's column of Vice magazine - are comical in nature. While they provide much interesting information on the subject and, each in its own way, plenty of insight, they are ultimately the product of a rich tradition of self-deprecating humour (they are written by self-proclaimed hipsters/white people), which itself has nothing to do with hipsters as such. They must be understood in this light.
The second group encompasses both lay critiques of hipsterism, such as internet content like Supernews' Hipsters in Space Cartoon and other purely negative outsider depictions, and academic criticism, which, with little exception, is almost entirely negative. Various academic works on the subject of the hipster have focused on: gentrification, class prejudice, the inability of today's youth to produce a real or viable culture, political apathy, a naive view of the past, etc. Most of these claims can be easily refuted.
One work that, in contrast to those listed above, is actually fairly helpful in understanding the hipster is Gavin McInnes' essay for the website Taki's Magazine. I perhaps should have pointed out that while I strongly suggest everyone read said essay, and I generally greatly enjoy the author's insights, I in no way agree with or endorse any of his political beliefs or social prejudices (slovenec, ki bo še naprej raziskoval dela tega avtorja, bo hitro naletel na skrajno desničarske ideje). Mr. McInnes' work is basically a summary of a conference he attended at UCLA on the subject of youth culture. He bases the essay around the assumption, almost universally voiced at the conference, that "today more than ever, youth is wasted on the young," an assumption he completely rejects. The part of the essay which seems key to me in understanding the hipster is where he points out how, thanks to the internet, young people today operate outside the system to create with greater freedom than ever before. In doing so, he claims, they are not "ripping off" the culture or style of underprivileged groups (as several academics had claimed), but are rather themselves constituting a DIY culture of their own similar to that once typical of poor or underprivileged groups, in particular blacks.
The two key points Mr. McInnes is trying to make draw us nearer to an understanding of this phenomenon. First, the almost universal negativity surrounding hipsters and young people which serves as a framework for his essay. This is in fact the one universal trait of all accounts of hipsters. In the satirical works listed above, this can be easily explained, as I have shown, by the fact that these works draw on a tradition of self-deprecating humor, and that it is this, and not any "information" they may provide on "hipsters", that makes them noteworthy. Of course, this hasn't stopped serious criticism from using these works as hard evidence. Although the accounts of serious criticism use a number of very different points of departure, and may ultimately take the form of a Marxist, aesthetic, ethical, etc. critique, the one thing they all have in common is that, in the final instance, they attribute to hipsters, as individuals and not as a group,  general bad manners.
The second point Mr. McInnes makes is the connection between "hipsters" and engagement in non-mainstream, alternative forms of consumerism.
I tie the two together and add a third element that to date has been entirely absent from the discourse on hipsters: the incredible expansion, roughly in the middle of the previous decade, that is at about the same time the hipster took shape, of the media to appeal to include wide range of perspectives and to include a very wide range of groups. I illustrate this using TV, although I believe that this observation applies to the entire world of consumerism. Whereas TV was once considered both an opiate for the masses and an ideological apparatus in the way it excluded certain groups and behaviours, today, TV has both widespread intellectual appeal, largely due to premium cable dramas, and is extremely inclusive, as evidenced by the once invisible groups who today have a significant presence on television: turbofolk culture in Jersey Shore, nerd culture in Big Bang Theory, G4, and "cult movies" based around nerd culture.
This shift has, however, meant that in it's efforts to provide an all-encompassing representation of the cultural sphere, TV specifically and consumer culture in general has had to forfeit its moral imperative; the sphere of mainstream consumerism is no longer a reflection of broader societal norms and morals. Whereas those who were once forced to create a culture on the fringes of the mainstream media that excluded them could be easily labelled morally questionable (all rap or RnB as "gangster rap", heavy metal culture as satanic, mods and rockers as a moral threat to the nation, etc.), today, the diversity of the media and consumerism makes this impossible.
"Hipsters" or, more accurately, young people, still continue to partake in forms of consumerism on the fringes of the mainstream. Even though ideological limitations and the exclusivist nature of the media have disappeared, the limitation created by the fact that "the media" and "consumerism" are in fact publicly traded companies with a commitment to create value for shareholders remains as strong as ever. When they engage in non-mainstream forms of consumerism or non-mainstream media, young people do so for a wide variety of reasons. Although a desire to set oneself apart (which, I also note, is more typical of certain age groups, eg. late high school, college students) by choosing an obscure or uncommon or non-mainstream product could be a factor in this engagement, it is only one of many factors. By choosing to eat organic, one could be exhibiting "snobbish" behaviour; however, it is equally likely that the person in question simply does not want to eat genetically modified slop (and if said person has used the internet to do a little research, this explanation is even more plausible), and the real answer could be a combination of both factors. Another example, which I wish I would have thought of when I was on the air: Ariel Pink, one of the few indie musicians I'd swear by, is often said to pursue a lo-fi, cheap-sounding aesthetic in his music, ostensibly for the sake of distancing himself from a mainstream, polished sound. He counters these claims by saying that this is reading too much into his music, and that for him as a musician, lo-fi elements are merely a tool,  something I feel is clearly borne out in his music. (Again, I borrowed this general observation from Gavin McInnes).
We can therefore conclude that "hipsters" can be broadly compared to past cultural movements in the way that they participate in forms that are not part of mainstream, big money, corporate consumerism. Gavin McInnes is even of the view that today's young people are much better at it than any previous generation of young people. However, as I have pointed out, the way the media now accommodates (as a viable profit-making strategy) a vast spectrum of cultural and moral views makes it considerably more difficult to portray the culture of young people as a moral threat. It follows that the only way that remains to discredit those who, even momentarily, partake in non-mainstream forms, is by attributing to individuals not socially dangerous attitudes, but generally harmless character flaws: egoism, narcissism, bad manners, etc.*

We can therefore conclude that when someone who has been labeled a hipster says "I'm NOT a hipster," nine times out of ten, all the person in question is trying to say is "I'm not an anti-social, narcissistic asshole."

And most people who could be reasonably labelled hipsters are in fact not anti-social, narcissistic assholes.

Regarding the last part of the show, I greatly miscalculated the time I would need to present my thoughts. I now realise that even if I would have had the 20 or 25 minutes I had originally planned instead of the 10 or so minutes I got, it would have been insufficient. I plan on preparing a show dedicated to this topic sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can find some of my thoughts on it in this short blog post.

 * This may sound greatly exaggerated. But to take one example that is in line with my observations about organic food as a part of "hipster" culture: The Simpsons episode where Lisa decides to become a vegetarian (The Simpsons played a big part in the shift that occurred in the media, among other things, by poking fun at staid moral attitudes). Lisa appears at a family barbecue with a large bowl of red liquid and says "I've made enough gespacho for all, now you don't have to eat meat!" The guests laugh loudly, and Barney Gumble (the town drunk) tells her to "Go back to Russia!" Which is to say only a Communist would be a vegetarian. I am aware I previously advised against using humor as hard evidence, but one need but read official documents on Satanic ritual abuse to see that, as an expression of a general attitude, this "joke" was not far from the truth.

Facebook "sucks" and will continue to "suck" until it starts charging me

It's obvious that Facebook isn't or won't be able to make money. I should add "for investors". Because unlike what CNBC would have us believe, they're the only ones unhappy about Facebook.
Amid all the "buzz on the Street" or "squawk" or whatever, that's something that nobody is really noticing. It all goes back to what Thorsten Veblen noted a long time ago: the root of any financial turbulence can be traced to an unhappy capitalist(s) (the x-treme paraphrasing is mine). What exactly said capitalist is unhappy about is of little concern, it could be a tooth ache for all we know, but the fact is, he isn't hitting the trading floor until he feels better. Since Thorsten Veblen's time, this monitoring of how rich people are feeling has been extrapolated into countless indices and indicators generally known as "the market", and since about 2000, these have come to be a real time representation of, well, the life pulse of all existence. But they aren't, and what makes the people who use or buy stuff happy isn't necessarily what makes the coloured arrows go up on the Street.

In other words, Facebook is fine, there is nothing wrong with Facebook. Before the failed IPO, I could impress pretty girls I haven't seen in 5 years with my ironic use of 50 Cent lyrics just as well as I can now; before the shares missed their target price, the people I used to work with could post pictures of neglected and abused animals and make me feel bad just as easily and effortlessly as they can now.

That's because Facebook has what I call a "culture of usability". "Usability" implies that for most people, the product or technology in question is and can only be relevant during actual use and interaction. "Culture" implies that when a new product or technology appears, lots of different people converge around a general pattern of use.

To take an example, for many people, owning a car is about getting from point A to point B when they need to get from point A to point B, and owning a drill is about being able to drill a hole if and when they need to drill a hole. At the same time, and in opposition to cultures of usability, there exist cultures of identity: the guys from Top Gear use cars to define who they are even, or especially, when they are not going from point A to point B; Tim "the Toolman" Taylor (yes, I had to go there) needs more power, arrgh arrgh arrgh even, and especially, when there's no particular need to drill a hole. Note that while cars and drills are not free, the person who needs a car only to go to work and back (for simplicity's sake, let's say our worker works at a company where what you drive doesn't impact your chances of promotion or having sex with coworkers) will be less likely to buy a turbo-charged something-or-other (I'm not a car guy), and the person looking to hang up a picture on the wall will in all likelihood not be bothered by the 20 or so seconds of loud noise the drill makes to the point that he or she would shell out an extra fifty dollars for a drill with a noise-muffler. And it's the turbo charged widget, the noise muffler, that create added value, which, if you're a producer of goods, is "where the real money is."

That's the seat of Facebook's financial woes, not the fact that not enough users are clicking ads or the ones that are clicking aren't buying enough stuff. As the market-based discourse enshrouds Facebook in negative hype, what it's really trying to do is break the bad news: we don't really like Facebook as such, we're just "using" it to stay connected. To illustrate, let's take a look at a historical example of how big money has generated and perpetuated the myth of the transition from "dark ages" of usability to the "golden age" of identity with another technology that, once the differences are cancelled out, was in a position similar to the one Facebook now finds itself in.  

The myth I'm referring to is the "North American Video Game Crash of 1983" (note the caps and the quotes). As the adding of the year to the end of the phrase shows,  the whole concept was invented well after 1983. And invented is the right word. Yes, on the level of making tons of money on fads, a severe disruption occurred when Atari, then basically a synonym for video games, got too greedy, overpaying for licenses which it converted into shitty games; also the Atari 2600 had no lock-out mechanism, so anybody could make games, and anybody did, and they were shit. But then the story continues: The result was a glut of unsellable game cartridges. Retailers sent back the games they had already ordered, the video game "fad" was seen as just that, cue the stock footage of the angry early-1980s mob that VH1/CNN uses for half-hour documentaries about Disco Demolition/Ryan White. The whole of North America took a vow never to play video games – not just from Atari, but from any manufacturer – again, which ultimately didn't matter, because, having been pushed to brink of bankruptcy by the shittiest fad ever, retailers were adamant in their refusal to stock them.

Far from being merely the "mainstream" account, this is the only version of the story. The problem is that regardless of whether a particular account is targeted towards the business crowd or towards video game nerds, whether it's being told by CNBC or G4, the protagonist remains the same: profit; profit for Atari and Activision, profit for the countless other companies who had gone from manufacturing kiddie pools to manufacturing consoles in the hope of cashing in on the trend, profit for retailers. Of course, the huge sums of money involved are what make the story of the Crash generally interesting. But at the same time, the money angle is a one-sided account (the rough outline of which I sketched above). A broader account that includes non-official sources, i.e. childhood memories from yours truly, paints a different picture, one that challenges the generally accepted story on several points.

I got my Atari 2600 in 1986. 1986? That's right, three years after the video game crash supposedly made the situation in the US similar to the current situation in China (where consoles are banned). And I loved my 2600. I'd play it all the time. My neighbours and friends to this day, Mike and Greg, would come by to play my 2600, then I'd go to their place to play Donkey Kong Jr. on their Colecovision. Again, in 1986. And our enthusiasm had surprisingly little to do with the actual games: for us, those consoles meant the giant leap from not being able to play games on a TV to being able to play games on a TV. Firing up an emulator today, it's easy to concur that there were terrible games... but to an 8 year old in 1986, the world of difference separating E.T. or Pac Man for the 2600 and not being able to play games on a TV was incomparably greater than the relatively minor (the Atari 2600 was very primitive) differences in quality between Chase the Chuckwagon (A game about dog food published by Purina) and Frogger (a decent port of a good game). And that's usability. I didn't know the pixelized adventurer in Pitfall was named "Pitfall Harry", or even that Mike and Greg's Colecovision was much more powerful than my Atari 2600. It was all just video games, a fun, novel way to spend the tons of free time we had.

And this state of indifference, of playing video games because they were something new and because as such, they had an immediate appeal to our young minds, continued well through the era of the NES, that is, the system that supposedly brought the "dark ages" of the crash to an end and sent video games on the path to the glorious, multi-trillion dollar future that awaited them. James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, is the author of a series of videos that presents a fascinating, game-by-game analysis of the terrible games we played throughout the NES era. And by "played", as James makes abundantly clear, I certainly do not mean – as in many generic tales cited in accounts of the Crash – that we played these games for five minutes, realised they were junk, and threw them in the trash. No, we actually sat down and tried to play through these horrible abominations of mankind: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ghostbusters, Fester's Quest...

Instead of a climactic arc with a dramatic crash ending in miraculous rebirth, therefore, the actual, lived history of the "Crash" is one of continuity for many people my age. So why is this angle, which for many people is the only one that actually affected their relationship towards video games (kids don't know what share prices are, or at least they didn't in 1986) systematically ignored? Watch any E3 press conference, go on any gamer forum and the answer soon becomes clear. When the NES ended the "Crash", that is, when it made video games attractive to capital, what it did that mattered was take the first step towards molding the loose, ad hoc cultures of usability that had taken shape around video games since the time of Pong into profitable cultures of identity closely managed from corporate HQ. Already with the 16-bit era, supporting a console meant, ipso facto, supporting and identifying with, from bottom to top, the organisation that made it: its supply chain, its board, its advertising and PR departments (hence the cult following that's sprung up around Sega's advertising)... and of course its business results. Today, it's not uncommon for arguments among gamers about a particular console or game manufacturer to feature Q4 data from said manufacturer; similarly, it's CEOs (as opposed to people actually involved in making the games) that take center stage at E3, to the uproarious applause of legions of fanboys. It's a situation that, I can imagine, works out well for game manufacturers (and their shareholders), who are constantly thinking of new, legally questionable ways to "lock in" players' wallets. (It is interesting to note that the next generation Xbox and Playstation consoles will be designed so as to prevent used games from being played, thus shutting down another culture of usability, that of the exchange and rental of used video games).

Twenty years from now, we'll probably be telling the same tale about Facebook. The purely fiduciary slump Facebook is now in will be retrospectively reworded to imply that we the users were in fact dissatisfied with Facebook before it started charging us. Once a new pay-to-play version comes out (probably as a "free" feature of a pay-to-play service like Xbox live or Apple TV), it will be outwardly recognized as superior from the perspective of the user and, less outwardly, as assuring for the investor in its focus on brand identification as a basis for added value.

So there you go, Mark. If you aspire to be a trillionaire, convince me I love Facebook more than I love my friends.