“I love the young people.”
Well, seems a recent New York Times interview with Presidential hopeful Joe Biden has me flashing back to the 90’s. When asked about Silicon Valley’s power growth during Obama’s administration, he mentioned the “creeps” who are rich because they make games that “teach you how to kill people”:
And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America. And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire — who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people, you know the ——
CW: Like video games.
Yeah, video games. And I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively speaking. Have everybody contact. They get out and go out and contact the switchboard, just blow it up.
Oh, Joe. It’s been 30 years. If video games were any good at teaching kids how to kill, the kinds of fuckwits that shoot up schools and theaters would have higher kill counts before dying or being brought to justice. These idiots are less cold-blooded killers, and more fuckups that are stymied by couches or just having things not go their way. Also, fun fact (not really game-related): Randy Stair thought girls didn’t have buttholes, despite being an age where he should’ve really known better. My point being, the types normally accused of being influenced by violent video games usually aren’t terribly bright.
But I digress:
And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, “We are the economic engine of America. We are the ones.” And fortunately I had done a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating. As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment.
The point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we are, we are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree. Every industrial revolution, every major technological breakthrough, every single one. We’re in the fourth one. The hardest speech I’ve ever had to make in my life, I was asked to speak at the World Economic Forum, to give an answer on, to speak to the fourth industrial revolution. Will there be a middle class? It’s not so clear there will be, and I’ve worked on it harder than any speech I’ve ever worked on.
The fact is, in every other revolution that we’ve had technologically, it’s taken somewhere between six years and a generation for a government to come in and level the playing field again. All of a sudden, remember the Luddites smashing the machinery in the Midlands? That was their answer when the culture was changing. Same thing with television. Same thing before that with radio. Same thing, but this is gigantic. And it’s a responsibility of government to make sure it is not abused. Not abused. And so this is one of those areas where I think it’s being abused. For example, the idea that he cooperates with knowing that Russia was engaged in dealing with using the internet, I mean using their platform, to try to undermine American elections. That’s close to criminal.
So, the thing he’s getting at in the latter paragraphs is § 230 Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material from the Communications Decency Act. The purpose of which is to protect platform owners from being held legally responsible for content uploaded by users. Biden doesn’t like that. He wants that gone. Despite the fact that that’s kinda necessary to keep things from being cluster-fucked to death with legal battles, since then all it’d take to bring a corporation to its knees for any reason whatsoever would be to have as many people as possible upload illegal content.
That said, this isn’t the first time Biden’s taken aim at vidya. He’s said he’s in support of taxing violent games before, and also that people shouldn’t fear studies indicating a link between video games and violence. Despite the fact that it’s repeatedly turned up inconclusive results.
As an aside for any Boomers; remember when Dungeons and Dragons caused Satanic cult violence?
Remember when rock music caused violence and Satanic cults?
Remember when comics caused youth delinquency?
I could go on. Just remember to eat your cereal to cool your blood, kids.
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