Long Tail Gamer

(Not exactly a video game story. Maybe a little.  Not much.)

Seen the trailer for TRON Legacy yet?  Or maybe you've played the classic Light Cycle games -- there's a jillion of them but I'm partial to Armagetron myself.  Or perhaps, like me, you remember seeing the glimmering, hyperangular world of TRON for the first time in a movie theater. 

When I went home, I looked at my Commodore 64 in a whole new way.  (Especially the Activision ant farm that was Little Computer People.  But I digress.)  I love TRON.  I taught TRON over The Matrix in my film classes.  I think it's got that much to it, despite its many warts.

The original movie TRON stands out to me as emblematic of the libre spirit of personal computing.  Oh, the movie is ideologically rigged, no question: it frames the good/evil battle in terms of the free-wheeling ex-corporate hacker Flynn against the restrictive and monolithic Master Control Program in a thinly veiled metaphor of people-as-programs. 

At stake is the freedom of the system.  The MCP wants to absorb and regulate ... well, everything.  Including the real world.  Flynn, as a user of the system, wants freedom and access: the programs must run, the information must flow.  And pay special attention to the arguments heaped upon Dillenger by the kindly old scientist guy.  His psuedo-spiritual rhetoric practically leapt from Richard Stallman's mighty keyboard.

As a metaphor, it works great.  Yay freedom, boo tryanny, right?  Or yay personal computers, boo mainframe.  Whatever.  But add those pesky Means of Production into the mix, take another look, and it becomes a more complicated paradox.

Ever heard of a hegemony?

Disney produced the TRON franchise, and as such they have significant investment in controlling what happens to the product.  Disney is a major player in the consortia that create and implement DRM systems which restrict your use of the media, and turns you into a criminal if you try to do anything untoward, such as act like you own what you paid for.  

The blessings of the House of Mouse can make or break deals across the spectrum, from Microsoft's private endeavors to the more public affairs of Congress.   They cover -- or want to cover -- every act of media out there.

All of this has to happen in quiet ways, of course.  Disney considers it a failure of the system if you even understand what DRM is and what it does to you.  But if pressed, they'll tell you that DRM makes digital video possible.  It's a requirement for the system to work at all, they say.  Naturally, for it to work, it has to work their way, from one end to the other -- see the HDMI/HDCP video cable protocols of your home entertainment system for how friendly it is with components Disney hasn't authorized.

So we're talking about a pervasive system that authorizes every transaction of digital information.  It is powerful.  It stands in the way of users by rigidly and unassailably ordering the system in its image.  It controls and channels and nothing happens without its blessing.  People who deviate from acceptable use are confined or destroyed. 

Sound familiar?

In the thinly veiled metaphor, Disney is the Master Control Program, the villian of its own movies and games. 

So Disney incorporated a viewpoint into TRON that opposes its own methodology: pervasive, overarching control is shown as morally bankrupt in the movie.  That viewpoint feels good to the audience: it's normal.  So they --and I really mean *we* because I love TRON -- buy up the movies.  Then, Disney uses that money to keep their own pervasive, overarching control in place.  And because of the corporate politics of DRM, that's normal too. 

Mutually conflicting norms.  Freedom is good and control is bad.  Freedom is bad and control is good.  You naturally buy into both viewpoints when you watch TRON.  See?

And that's how hegemony perpetuates.  You freely consume what you might otherwise resist.  The result is the insideous paradox of freedom and control, all packaged up in the movie TRON, establishing the norm that such control is regular and natural.  (Or, if you like, the SecuROM copy protection on the video game Tron 2.0.)

Got your tickets yet?