There can be no more elegant example of the alienation of the modern workplace than the fact that hundreds of millions of employees across the globe spend their lunch hours pretending to be farmers on the Internet. With all the breathtaking and transformative power of the Web at their fingertips, armies of workers and young people still choose to spend their online hours growing virtual potatoes on badly animated digital fields.
One of the biggest forums for this activity is FarmVille, the online role-playing game made popular through Facebook, whose players tend and trade digital crops and livestock. Almost 100 million people subscribe to the game, which has just announced profits of US$500 million for this year. I have an account myself and have spent many happy hours playing on my virtual farm, although my attempts to grow virtual opium were swiftly curtailed by the virtual CIA.
This week, FarmVille’s controlling company, Zynga, has begun a major expansion drive, announcing a new deal with Yahoo and marketing its in-game credits in real-world supermarkets. Zynga’s stock is predicted to soar, especially after the launch of CityVille, an urban version that runs along the same principles of clunky virtual enterprise. Because of the extraordinary speed with which FarmVille has become popular, it is tempting to regard it as a fad; but this is no isolated phenomenon.
The Internet now boasts several massively popular farm-themed video games: from Farmerama to Happy Farm, where 23 million people in China and Taiwan daily tend their digital crops. Altogether, since 2008, the number of regular players of farm-themed online games across the world has ballooned to almost 150 million — 2.5 percent of the entire human race.
Most video games have obvious escapist themes, allowing players to immerse themselves in fantastical scenarios such as leading dwarf armies or shooting aliens in epic space battles.
Farming games tap into a powerful collective wish-fulfillment fantasy: the fantasy of running your own life rather than being a peasant in the neo-feudal hierarchy of corporate serfdom. The precarity and anxiety of modern labor conditions have become more acute during the financial crises of the past two years, and this is precisely the timeframe in which the craze for these online games took off.
The bitter irony, of course, is that FarmVille itself is a neo--feudal state, where rich virtual landowners exploit the free labor of virtual farmhands to make real profits. For all its evocation of rustic utopia, this and other farm simulations are ruthless markets whose exploitation of human emotion is anything but virtual. Real-world gift cards, now available in real-world supermarkets, can buy FarmVille players in-game advantages such as better “equipment” and more “seeds,” and, as with many games, some independent speculators have made huge profits by trading online assets and even running gaming sweatshops to boost their profits.
The stated mission of Zynga is to “connect the world through games” — but rather than connecting the world, online farming games unite it in a compliant virtual fantasy of self-determination that displaces real resistance. Alienated workers pay real money to play out a fantasy of having control over the products of their own labor, but the true tragedy is that, even in the jerky bucolic idyll of FarmVille, they are still working for someone else’s profit.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion