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.
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS