Club PA Newsletter #68 (Patreon)

With BlizzCon starting up today, we have delivered a timely strip.

One of the conceits of The Good Place, a cool show written and performed by ridiculously smart people, is that modern life is simply too complex to fully comprehend.  The authentic fruits of endless moral and material supply chains, projecting forward and backward through time, can be difficult to unravel.  There are certain kinds of game news I find especially bewildering, and Blizzard's actions regarding a player's support for Hong Kong - namely stripping their prize money, now returned, plus a ban - fits squarely into this category.

It seems pretty clear that they were in the wrong, and it's something they owned up to in the opening statements of the convention - but the origin point still nettles. Some have claimed Chinese ownership is responsible for these actions.  It's not impossible to make this case.  It's simply a known fact that the Internet, as we conceive of it, doesn't exist there; information travels differently, where it travels at all.  But the truth of this isn't something I can <i>know</i>.

"Takes," in the modern parlance, are readily available.  But I don't actually want to be a source of Takes.  I want to be a source of useful language.  And the level at which Business as a global phenomenon is vast, enmeshed, and fundamentally opaque makes it very difficult to be or even feel useful.  It does, however, offer clean, clear battle lines for ideological opponents to muster at and sneer at their foes.  I'm not above it, certainly.  But I'd like to offer more, if I can, in a context that has become treacherous to rhetorically navigate.    

(CW)TB