Summary: The guest this week is C. Derick Varn. This is part two of a conversation wherein Varn, who is a poet and university lecturer working in South Korea, and I discuss the French Philosopher Louis Althusser's essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. I want to thank everyone who is a regular donor to Diet Soap and especially my gang who regularly participate in the Philosophy workshop. The new announcement is that I'm going to start having what I'll call office hours on Skype. This weekend I'll be available for participants in the workshop so we can talk about Hegel or anything else that seems relevant. Eventually I hope to get all of the workshop participants writing and critiquing each others work as well. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com I should tell you all to follow me on Twitter and friend me on Facebook. Music in this episode includes Money by the Flying Lizards and Artificial by the X-ray Spex. Also clips from Zizek and Ron Strickland. ---- Unrelated essay: Life as a Video Game Called “Class”? Douglas Lain John Scalzi recently posted a blog entry entitled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” and in it he aimed at describing how racism and sexism is played by referring to video games, specifically to RPGs. In most video games, players have the option of playing a harder or easier version of the same thing. In a video game like Guitar Hero, for instance, the difficulty level determines how many notes you have to hit and the complexity of the song you have to play. Scalzi uses this idea of a difficulty level to explain the concept of privilege to his mostly white, mostly male, and definitely nerdy audience. “I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word ’privilege,’ to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.” Scalzi’s essay works. He drives home how being a Straight White Male is easier than being a Gay Black Woman, and the inequity seems real by the end of Scalzi’s post. However, as is often the case online, the conversation around the essay was just as interesting as the essay itself, and one repeated question that came out of Scalzi’s blog post might be articulated in this way: How should class should be understood through video games? “Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane.” —John Scalzi, “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is,” May, 2012 As a PKD fan and as a Matrix paranoid, I want to believe. That is, I don’t have to imagine that life here in the U.S. is a massive video game like World of Warcraft. Scalzi suggests this possibility and I believe him right away. We really are in a video game, and this game is rigged. Read more at Tor.com
