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McGonigal is not advocating any kind of real change, as she purports, but rather a change in perception: She wants to add a gamelike layer to the world to simulate these feelings of satisfaction, which indeed people want. What she misses is that there are legitimate reasons why people feel they’re achieving less. These include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages, and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and poor. You want to transform peoples’ lives into games so they feel as if they’re doing something worthwhile? Why not just shoot them up with drugs so they don’t notice how miserable they are? You could argue that peasants in the Middle Ages were happy imagining that the more their lives sucked here on earth the faster they’d make it into heaven. I think they’d have been better off with enough to eat and some health care. Indeed, gamification is an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people.
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The Lenten season is devoted especially to what the theologians call contrition, and so every day in Lent a prayer is said in which we ask God to give us ‘contrite hearts.’ Contrite, as you know, is a word translated from Latin, meaning crushed or pulverized. Now modern people complain that there is too much of that note in our Prayer Book. They do not wish their hearts to be pulverized, and they do not feel that they can sincerely say that they are 'miserable offenders.’ I once knew a regular churchgoer who never repeated the words, 'the burden of them (i.e. his sins) is intolerable’, because he did not feel that they were intolerable. But he was not understanding the words. I think the Prayer Book is very seldom talking primarily about our feelings; that is (I think) the first mistake we’re apt to make about these words 'we are miserable offenders.’ I do not think whether we are feeling miserable or not matters. I think it is using the word miserable in the old sense – meaning an object of pity. That a person can be a proper object of pity when he is not feeling miserable, you can easily understand if you imagine yourself looking down from a height on two crowded express trains that are traveling towards one another along the same line at 60 miles an hour. You can see that in forty seconds there will be a head-on collision. I think it would be very natural to say about the passengers of these trains, that they were objects of pity. This would not mean that they felt miserable themselves; but they would certainly be proper objects of pity. I think that is the sense in which to take the word 'miserable.’ The Prayer Book does not mean that we should feel miserable but that if we could see things from a sufficient height above we should all realize that we are in fact proper objects of pity.
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“Win the Future” is about re-imagining human life as the worst massively-multiplayer online game ever designed, an endless boss raid without a poopsock in sight, perpetually amassing the gearscore necessary to take on the next boss, the next expansion pack, always having to outdo the other l33t guilds by surrendering ever vestige of a life which might be about something other than the game, and never a moment to rest, never a sense of real progression.Where’s the vision of an easier, better, more satisfying life? A richer life in both material comfort and leisure time? A more satisfying spiritual life, or a life more fulfilled by intimacy in family, community or love? A life which progresses us towards freedom or discovery or truth? Towards new technologies whose deliverables are something other than, “Work hard to make more technologies after this technology!” A future based on reflection or wisdom or understanding? Anything besides, “Those guys over there are coming to eat your lunch, better get your nose to the grindstone!”
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To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
— W. H. Auden, “Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier”
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The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place to steal from. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt.
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I must say, here, that sociologists are the greater offenders. I listen to them around here with every effort to be fair and understanding but I can’t make out their Man. Surely that’s not homo sapiens, mon semblable! The creature the theologians write about is far closer to me.
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When offered the chance to get out, to choose our own communities, to choose our own friends, to relate to our families on our own terms, to get out from under inherited obligations of status and obedience, many of us choose to get out. But this is not to eschew commitment. This is not to give up on happiness. Few of us can live happily wholly unencumbered by commitment. To know freedom from the life of the tribe is to demand more from our lovers and our friends because we have chosen them; they are really ours. The flip-side is that we owe more, too. It’s true that commitments of choice are more tenuous than commitments of fate. College friends are more fickle that childhood friends who seem more fickle than blood, and there is some anxiety in this for those of us who depend more on what we have chosen than on what we have been given. Some of us are very lucky and would freely affirm, again and again, the bonds we fell into as children, or at birth. But some of us, the weirdos especially, are less lucky and fall mostly into loneliness when young. Some of us first meet our best friends as disembodied text on a glowing plane. But we can and do come to cherish these ghosts more than our own flesh and blood through the magic of mutual comprehension and love of the things that make us most fully separate, the things that make us feel most alien and alone
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So these apps need to work in a fundamentally different way: as more of my friends access content through Flipboard or TweetMag, my experience should get richer and richer. The apps could then become more than just a reader for links found in my Twitter stream. They could let me see which stories my friends are reading, sharing, or tweeting the most, and it could prioritize what I see based on that information. They could help me form and access communities around topics, or contribute content of my own, or add associations with other, similar content. There’s a deep reservoir of opportunity here; some of it would be easy to pull off but a lot of it would be difficult to make happen, because it would entail turning these apps from magazines into truly social products that just happen to look like beautifully designed magazines. That’s not an easy task, but someone is sure to do it, and whoever that is — whether it’s Flipboard or TweetMag or someone else entirely — they’ll stand the best chance, in my opinion, of creating a truly new, truly engrossing reading experience.
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And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party. It is not so much that their views are wrong—I am not going to fall into the trap of labeling those with whom I disagree immoral because of our disagreements—but because they won’t make any effort to think seriously about why they hold their positions about the conflict between science and religion.Perhaps it is just a turf war, but I don’t think philosophy is something to be ignored or done after a day’s work in the lab over a few beers in the faculty club. I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.