Angry Planet - A Military History of Metal Gear Solid

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

War. War never changes.Except … that’s not exactly true is it? I’d argue that war has changed demonstrably in the past two decades. It’s gotten longer, somehow less deadly, and far weirder. Also. Despite America being engaged in multiple conflicts on multiple continents … Americans are paying less attention to foreign military engagements than ever before. The current international situation, I’d say, is a bit of an anomaly.Worse, the country is fractured in a way that can be hard to understand. There’s more information than ever before and, instead of uniting us, it’s making it hard for us to settle on a consensus reality. We live in confusing, stressful, and bizarre times.How did we get here?I don’t know. If I did, I’d be selling a book and not here, with you, podcasting. What I can do is discuss a piece of art. A prescient piece of art I think helps explain how we got here.Here to discuss that piece of art is Cameron Kunzelman. Kunzelman is a media critic who has published in may illustrious publications. Cameron, thank you so much for joining us.OK. So I’m talking about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. This is it. We’re doing the Metal Gear Solid episode.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The Pentagon, in order to make arguments about like kind of supersuits, for lack of a better term, right? In order to make arguments about why that might be necessary for future wars, they began using video game concept art. to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. War, war never changes. Except that's not exactly true, is it?

I argue that war has changed demonstrably in the past two decades. It's gotten longer, somehow less deadly for certain people involved, and far weirder. Also, despite America being engaged in multiple. conflicts on multiple continents, Americans are paying less attention to foreign military engagements than ever before. Worse, the country feels fractured in a way that can be hard to understand. There's more information than ever before, and that information seems to be making us fight each other. It could be hard to even settle on a consensus reality. We live in confusing, stressful, and bizarre times. So how did we get here? I don't know. If I did, I'd be selling a book and not here

with you podcasting. But what I can do is discuss a piece of art, a prescient piece of art that I think helps explain how we got here. And here to discuss that is Cameron Kundselman. Kundselman is a media critic who is published in many illustrious publications. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Okay. So I'm talking about Metal Gear Solid two Sons of Liberty. This is it. This is what we're doing. We're doing the Metal Gear Solid episode. Metal Gear. Yes. Ah. So to people who don't know what Metal Gear Solid is, sir. Can you give us, give us the, like, give us a briefing. Oh, golly. Metal Gear, Metal Gear as a franchise, uh, and maybe we should just say Metal Gear Solid

because there's, there's Metal Gear One and two that are, um, I don't know, pseudo-canonical, unclear at this point. Um, but the Metal Gear Solid franchise is basically a secret history. I don't know if other people would put it this way, but a secret history of, um, American, of global conflict from the Cold War onward. And it's based around first the boss and then big boss and then his son, Solid Snake.

And kind of traces via, what's it, tactical stealth action? Is that the subtitle? Tactical espionage action, I think. There we go. Yeah, tactical espionage action. And so using using these mechanics, kind of third person, stealth mechanics and shooting mechanics and things like that, walks through all of these progressively more complicated stories about this kind of family, this literal genetic lineage and memetic lineage of super soldiers down through from the 1960s into the 2020s. I don't really know when Metal Gear Solid 4 takes place. It's unclear, but it feels like it's a bleeding edge of now kind of thing, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Like 10 or 20 years after the events of 2, I would say, probably. So what is it about Metal Gear Solid 2 that seems to resonate with people? Because this is one of those things that if you kind of Google around a little bit, There's a lot of articles about Metal Gear Solid 2 predicting the current world and people feeling like it resonates with them. And this is a game that is now almost 20 years old, just shy of 20 years old. Well, I think something that makes Metal Gear too particularly interesting for people is the first game is kind of a straightforward, as straightforward as a video game can be, straightforward infiltration of a nuclear facility or a nuclear storage facility that is also like a weapons development facility.

Some terrorists have taken control of the Metal Gear and you got to destroy it to keep them from doing bad stuff with it. The Metal Gear can launch nuclear material from a mobile platform and so it's reigniting all of these tensions that are supposedly left behind by the Cold War. If you played it through Metal Gear Solid, you can hear a lot about the Smart Treaties or no, Start Treaties and all of that kind of stuff. There's a lot there. But kind of, so well-loved game, big kind of PlayStation classic kind of thing on the original PlayStation. Meliger Solid 2 is on the PlayStation 2. So it's important to think of the kind of resonance of video games, I think, due to their technical and kind of platform locations, right? There are plenty of great and brilliant games that get made that don't get any attention.

And sometimes that has very little to do with content and everything to do with context. Middle Gear Solid 2 is interesting because Millilegro Solid 1 really well received, really well liked. Middle Gear Solid 2 comes out on the PlayStation 2 platform. It's using all of the cool stuff that the PlayStation 2 does. It's being promoted very heavily. So when we talk about Metal Gear Solid 2 being really important, I never want to minimize the fact that it was coming from a privileged market position. Okay, so that's like one thing.

The other hand, which I think is the one that you're more after, perhaps more interested in, is that it doesn't necessarily predict, but certainly is in conversation with the way that media works today. Meaning that it tells, basically, are we spoiling the entirety of the game here? This is a, yes, yeah, yeah, we're just going to, we're just going to, we're just going to, lay it all out on the line. The whole game is a simulation. Right. Right.

It is a, the mission you play as the main character Riden is, like, this whole thing you're doing. So there's a oil spill cleanup platform that's been constructed that has also been taken over by terrorists in this game. There is a thing called Metal Gear Ray and another thing called, what's the big turtle looking thing? The big shell? Not the big shell. I'm calling it. It's not a turtle. I don't know why I'm calling it that.

G.W. Oh, yeah, the AI housing, basically. Yeah, the big boat thing. So it's this big, you know, weapon, oil cleanup facility that's been constructed, but in reality, what it's actually supporting or hiding is all of these things called Metal Gear Rays,

which are kind of better defined metal gears, like that one in the first game, and this big thing called GW, which is a big AI that acts as a middleman to everything, all communications technology. So on one hand, it's kind of premedicating or it's not really premedicating because these things were happening in the 90s in the early 2000s already,

but it's remediating the way that we think about the relationship between ideology and soldiers and how one can train a soldier, how one can produce a soldier. Very, very similar to kind of the Michelle Foucault-style docile bodies argument that you can transform anyone, if under the right conditions, you can transform them into anything you want to transform them into. In this case, a Riden is being simulated into a replication of Solid Snake, who is this kind of super soldier. So there's that part, and then there's this other part that media technology and the internet has fundamentally transformed the way that people interact with one another and that older values such as, you know, well-regarded truth, common sense, factual claims, all those

things can be edited in real time by this kind of science fictional thing. We also call this, you know, post-modernity. But Hideo Kiyokushima isn't interested in that. He's interested in Metal Gear's. So I think those were the kind of the two reasons that this game has so much staying power content-wise, all that bracketed within the kind of market logic that governs who saw that game and under what context and why they might think it's cool, you know, 20 years on. Well, let's talk about that a little bit because I remember, did you play this when it came out? Yeah, absolutely. I did as well. Out of curiosity, how old were you? Do you remember?

Oh, I was a teenager. I don't remember exactly. what year it came out. I'm looking on the internet. It was November 2001. Yeah, that's right, because there were the Twin Towers and things like that at the end of the game had to be edited out. So I was 12 years old.

Something like that. Okay. Wow. So what was that experience like for you? Because like you said, Metal Gear Solid 1 was this pretty, it was a little dense, politically dense, I would say, but it was pretty straightforward. You were a super soldier. You were infiltrating a base

to stop bad guys from attaining Metal Gear, which is basically like a big Gundam that had a rail gun on the back that could launch a nuke. Yep. Got a rail gun, got a sonar thing, got a little cockpit. And that was, like, that's a little bit more complicated than that, but essentially that's the game. Yeah.

So you're 12, I assume you had played the first Metal Gear. Yeah, absolutely. So they market this game. They say, Snake is coming back. there was a demo that was one of the best probably one of the better demos I think I've ever played honestly that's the beginning of portion of the game where you get to play a snake on this boat and it was packaged with another Hideo-Kajima game zone of the enders so this game comes out and you spend those first few hours playing a snake and then they kind of pulled the rug out from under us right yeah absolutely

So the oil spill, the big shell, which is what the terrorists take over, this kind of oil cleanup facility, that quote-unquote oil spill happens due to a tanker being sunk, supposedly, by Solid Stake. And so you play through that as the kind of prelude slash demo for the game. So you are 12 years old sitting there playing Metal Gear Solid 2. what is that experience I'm curious what that experience is like for you when the game switches from being about snake to being about riding and then gets very esoteric and complicated I didn't have a problem with it

I don't know 9-11 it just happened man there was a lot of complicated stuff going on in the world none of that seemed too far-fetched I also had parents who were just like you know I don't know what they would have described themselves as, you know, politically. But this is the rural South. They certainly weren't like raw, raw patriots, right? You know, certainly there were, and a lot of people from the community I grew up in, you know, they shipped off to various conflicts after, you know, after 9-11.

Which is all to say, the context that I was in was like, okay, well, this is not any weirder or stranger than anything else. happening in my life. I certainly think that Middle Griselad II prepared me for for later understanding much more complicated arguments. But, you know, in the sense of like when I began reading about post-modernity, I was like, oh, yeah, this is like the kind of thing that, that Kojima was obviously reading and in communication with. Now, he might have just been like watching David Bowie interviews where David Bowie is saying

the same thing, but, you know, whatever. The kind of some modes of filtration. But yeah, I will also say this. It's a weird game, but moment to moment, not that complicated. No, no, that's very true. You're still basically doing the same thing that you're doing in the first one, right? Yeah. I mean, you're infiltrating the base.

You're doing stuff. You're fighting people. You're doing stealth mechanics, all that kind of stuff. Very much about going around and collecting key cards and doing things like that. And so it's interesting to see it kind of be labeled as, you know, this game that, predicts the post-truth era or, you know, fake news or anything like that, when, again, it's really recycling a lot of arguments that are kind of in the ather, especially in the late 90s, around the internet and things like that. And also, you know, I don't know,

within a couple years we are talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And then when, in a couple years after that, we're learning that those initial arguments were, you know, perhaps false. So it's interesting to me that, you know, Meligrasal Choo comes out, perhaps a little bit complicated, perhaps some of it's going over my head, but very quickly in the next couple years, it just becomes part of the goo, you know what I mean, that we're politically in at that time. So, you know, there's that kind of thing. Well, and I think going back and playing it, the moment that I think everyone remembers that is being the big reveal and the thing that quote unquote predicts the future

is actually a pretty relatively small moment in the grand scheme of things. And yet it is the one thing that I remembered very vividly from when I played it when it came out. It is this moment. I've got some of it written down. I'm going to read a little bit of it here.

During the entire game, you are receiving instructions from the colonel, who you know from the previous game is kind of like an authority figure. based essentially on the colonel figure from Rambo. And he kind of breaks down and you figure out that he is an avatar of this AI that, as you said, is the intermediary for the world's information. And it explains to the player character why it's doing what it's doing. It essentially says that there's too much information and we've got to call some of it.

We've just got to get rid of some of this stuff. Because survival of, you know, the way biology works, there's the survival of the fittest. Some people get cold. The good genes move on. But in the current digital age, there's no way to call the bad information. It just exists forever. And I feel like that it's really, it's only about 15 minutes of the game that is kind of dense, meaty portion right there.

but that seems to have made an outsized impact in people's memories. Do you think it's because of, like you said, that the world that we live in now seems to have kind of... Well, it's also, I think, a question of aesthetics, right? Like, what's interesting about that segment is not just that, like, this AI who has been pretending to be your commanding officer that you have trusted throughout this whole other game, right? I mean, Colonel Campbell is the handler for Solid Snake in Older Solid One. He's the uncle for Merrill, the kind of number two character for it, right? So it's not just like he's a familiar face, but he's a familiar face who you've gotten to know through several perspectives and who has kind of personal stake in this kind of world. But what's interesting about that, right, is I don't think I think people take that claim that you just read, right?

And I think that does stick out in their mind. But that's also in this like long run of the AI being killed, basically, right? So there's this kind of attack that's happening on it. So it starts yelling things about scissors. He tells this story shortly after that about being in, like being abducted by aliens. And it's truly eerie, right? And so it's part of this kind of representation of the breakdown of information that you could take is true. true. And so on one hand, it's kind of this theory of technology, this kind of systems theory,

or this kind of Gregory Bates in style reiteration of evolutionary theory into the technological environment. And on the other hand, it's the absolute demolishing of that, right? It's that this system is as fallible as anything else in this world. And I think those two things together, I think are both disturbing in the exact way that you're talking about, but also aesthetically disturbing. It's creepy. I remember playing it for the first time. And yeah, it's probably like 1 o'clock in the morning. This is me like in a marathon session. And, you know, I'm playing this probably not in November when it comes out, but I'm pretty sure I'm playing it like in February of the next year if I, you know, if I were to like try to pinpoint when it is. And, you know,

I certainly, I began playing this game at like noon and then we just went all the the way through it or maybe even earlier. And so I just remember, you know, it's dark outside and this figure that I am very familiar with. I played Miller Gear Solid like a dozen times beforehand. Now begins in toning these like incredibly creepy things alongside this kind of utilitarian hell moment. And both of those things I think are wrapped up in that moment for many people.

Maybe I'm wrong. People, you know, let me know. Let me know people who are listening if that's not true. But I think it's hard to separate those two things out for many players of the game. Because the kernel is physically, the image of the kernel is physically transforming into a skull in front of you. Yeah, absolutely. It's zooming in and out and things like that, right? Which normally you would be having to do with your controller if you wanted to move it.

So that's, you know, it's kind of disturbing the relationship of who is really in control here, which is kind of what the whole scene is about. So, yeah, absolutely. There's all these other kind of aesthetic and visual and auditory layers. He just starts, like, saying sounds at one point, and that's deeply scary. That's where the Lolle Lule Lowe comes from, isn't it? The Lolle Lule Lowe is at the very beginning of the game, too. Okay.

So they did... Got it. So they did seed that in there. Yeah, the Marine commander at the very beginning of the game is like, The Lollay Lule Lowe. Lo! When I saw that, I was like, oh, my God, this is art. This is true art.

We're not going to, by the way, listeners, we are not going to explain what the Lolley-Lule-Low is because we will be here for another hour. Yeah, just Google it. Yeah. You don't. You don't need to know. Don't Google it. You really, it's not, don't worry about it. All right, we're going to pause here for a break.

We're on with Cameron Kundleman. We are talking about Metal Gear Solid 2, Sons of Liberty, in the way it blew all of our minds and continues to blow our minds to this day. All right. Thank you, War College listeners. We are back on with Cameron Kundleman. we are talking about Metal Gear Solid 2, Sons of Liberty. Why, okay, so we've kind of talked about these market reasons and the aesthetic reasons for why that particular scene made an impact. Why, we broaden the discussion a little bit, why do you think we are, we keep returning to this game?

And do you think there is anything to this sense that it was prescient, that it predicted the future, that it has anything to say about where we are now? I mean, I think it has the, well, it's interesting that people, and I think you're right, that a lot of people do talk about it in its predictive capacity. And I'm sure that I've written something. I've written about Middle Gear a lot of times. And I'm sure I've made this claim somewhere too, because I think it's an easy trap to fall in. You know, the brilliant thing about when this game is talking about soldiers and when it's talking about the ability to say use VR to create soldiers. or to train soldiers or the kind of cultural context that makes war make sense or whatever, right, ideology and the production of ideology and the reproduction of ideology. It's always using clips and kind of stock footage of those things that existed at the time.

You know, so what's the battle zone? Battlezone maybe is the name of the game from the 1980s, the first person shooter that gets licensed by the military. Doom is done. And then, of course, there's the development of America's Army. I'm sure that you have talked about those things on this podcast and that listeners know about them too. But, you know, you can look at books like Patrick Krogan's gameplay mode,

which is a history of simulation coming out of military technology. You can look at books like that to kind of see that what's fascinating to me about Middle Gear Solid, too, is that there's almost nothing predictive about it. It's almost entirely reflexive of. of ideas that are already happening. There is also Colin Milburn wrote this book called Mondo Nano, which is kind of a wide-ranging book. It goes to a lot of places.

But he has a really fascinating chapter in that about how the Pentagon in order to make arguments about, I think they like kind of supersuits for lack of a better term, right, for military contracting, for military research. in order to make arguments about why that might be necessary for future wars, they began using video game concept art to communicate those things. We have this really kind of brilliant analysis of defense contractors releasing their PowerPoint slides and then looking at those PowerPoint slides to see what video games they have brought this kind of predictive capacity out of. Which is all to say that these games that are thinking about,

they're thinking about war and thinking about war technology are almost always in conversation, I think, with the present, just as much as they are predictive. I think what we could say is why does the general person not know about the conditions of the now, which is what you kind of addressed all the way back. So far ago in the intro, that there are, yeah, that people are doing things like this in the world right now, consistently and constantly. And it's only when our knowledge of fiction aligns with our knowledge of the present that we then begin to say, oh, something predicted something else. So it's almost happenstance then? I don't know if it's happenstance. I think it's reflective of the conditions. And I think it's also a general cultural ignorance, particularly in the United States, around like what the military is up to.

No, I mean, that's a good point. I bet that constantly. Right. And we've kind of built a military system in this country, in my opinion, that encourages the citizenry to not pay attention to it. You know, less than 1% of the population serves. There's no draft. Congress is kind of detached from the mechanism of like declaring and prosecuting wars. And so we are allowed, we have allowed someone else to kind of take care of that.

I think that's absolutely true. Circling back around, though, another, you've kind of talked about it a couple times. Something that struck me as I was playing it the second time that I didn't really, I don't think really hit me before is this idea that this idea that both of the games, the first and the second, are actually training programs and that you as the player are participating in a military training program to create a soldiers, this weird I hate to use this word, meta-commentary, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I don't even know if it's meta-commentary. I think it just might be commentary. Yeah, I think you're right. It's just commentary done in a way we don't normally see in video games or don't normally think about in video games, maybe. Yeah. To my memory, and you've played it again recently,

so you can tell me if this is right. But to my memory, the implication is, in fact, that the first game that we played, Middle Gear Solid is the VR mission that Ryden was in in order to prepare Ryden for the tanker mission that we play in Middle Gear Solid 2. Yes, that's correct. It's kind of a quick throwaway line, but they definitely, yes, as Campbell was degenerating, he does say that. And if you remember, the first game actually had a bunch of VR missions packaged with it to teach you how to play the game before Shadow Moses, the Shadow Mosis portion began. And I think they packaged that off and sold it separately as well.

Yeah. Yeah. To my mind, it was like a separate thing. And it also had you playing other characters too, which is, yeah, VR missions was an interesting thing. But yeah, kind of the bigger, the other kind of piece of that that you're talking about, that this is ultimately a training mission. And this is ultimately a mechanism to produce a certain type of soldier is the very end of the game or at the very beginning of the game, you can write. a name in, right? So you can write, I don't know, but, or Jeff, whatever you want to write, right? And that's just the name of your save file. And the whole game you're playing, you're like,

oh, I just named my save file. I named it my first name, right? I named it butt. And it's whatever. And at the very last thing of the game, Ryden, our main character we've been playing as the whole time, takes off his dog tags and you can see them and it's the name you put in at the beginning of the game, implying that that Riden is literally you. And that the mechanism of playing the game in the same way that play middle year solid one produces Riden as this kind of replicant soldier thing. Playing Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 produces you as this kind of replicant thing of military ideology or whatever. And, you know, that's kind of a media affects argument that has a lot of ground.

And I think there's a lot of ways of talking about it. But generally, I think there's an agreement that living in an increasingly militarized society with where things like nuclear weapons or American adventurism worldwide, where those things are normalized, does produce a particular kind of subjectivity or a particular type of personhood that takes those things for granted. And so that, yeah, it's commentary, I think, that anyone can become any kind of thing under the right conditions. And kind of the long arc of Metal Gear Solid from Middle Gear Solid 3, which is the prequel, all the way to Metal Gear Solid 4, which is kind of the last game about Solid Snake sequentially, is that anyone can become the best soldier in the world. You just have to produce the correct conditions for them to reach that potential. Can we talk about Metal Gear Solid 4 a little bit? We can talk about whatever you want. It's your podcast.

Fair enough. Middleger solid for I'll say it's probably I think it's probably the worst game in the series Um I it's been a long time since I played it From a from a gameplay For now I mean just overall actually I'll say I'll make a judgment call

It's the worst one of the Of the one through five But are you encoding Peacewalker in there? I am not because I haven't played it Peaceforker's got a lot of like grinding at least Don't have to do any grinding in Middle Gear Solid 4. Well, those are, Peacewalkers always is also one of the, like, strong nuclear anti-war games, though, isn't it? Like, that's what I've always heard about it.

I've always wanted to play it, but I never have. No, I'm derailed. Okay, Metal Gear Solid 4 kind of paints the picture of, uh... Can I give an alternate explanation? Hit me. Millier Solid 4 tells the story of a world where no one has control of the guns. Correct. Except a universal data.

Base. Yeah, but that universal base seems very interested in making different factions fight against each other seemingly to perpetuate a system where they can sell more guns. The war economy. Exactly. The war economy. You hear that 4,000 times during that game. War economy and nanomachines.

Yeah. Both are important. There's interesting stuff in that game. And the reason it keeps, that one particular keeps coming back into my mind is, is the war economy and the commercials. Do you remember these? Yeah, I do. So we live in a world, and I don't think maybe people on the East Coast don't see it as much as someone.

You say you grew up in the rural South. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I live currently in the semi-rural South. So I see much more broadly and much more strongly in my day-to-day life the way the military culture is changing the civilian culture, the way that it's trickling down. And in these commercials that you have in Metal Gear Solid 4, you see this world where it's almost like Robocop, the first Robocop, where it is that taken to its extreme, to extreme absurdity. But every year that goes by, it feels a little bit closer to home. Thoughts? Yeah.

To some extent, right? And I think the Robocop comparison is a really good one. Everything that's a parody of the reigning order in which we live, if that order continues to grow, we'll just become reality. You know what I mean? right like you know so what if if middle of your solid four is partially um the the kummi staff who made it um if it is their response to the the global conditions under american war production right and and i think that's like that's the condition that we we can talk about that period in right so it comes out in 20 maybe 11 2010 no it's got to be earlier than that right

No, Metal Gear Solid 4. It was a PS3 game. Yeah. Let's, we can Google this. Yeah. Here's what we can do. Guns of the Patriots. 2008.

Yeah. 2008. So, yeah. So Meliger Solid 4 comes out in 2008. The United States is deep in two foreign conflicts. And this is a bunch of Japanese developers looking at a game series that they have made that is commenting on the conditions of, war and those conditions have only gotten more extreme, right? I mean, you know, think about making, uh, milk or solid two in, in the, you know,

2000 or so, uh, and finishing up in 2000, or, you know, 2001, but developing it from 2000 through 2001. And then the extreme difference of, of that seven years there, they've made a game in the middle too, right? They made middle gear solid three. So, um, all to say, you know, I think that, that they are. looking at over the course of the games we have made, how has military culture and how has the worldwide response to American interventionism worldwide, how has that changed? And what does

American culture look like in that context? And then where can we extrapolate from there? But again, you know, that is not stopped. That hasn't been curtailed at all. We we are in, we are still in those same conflicts. They haven't stopped. And so eventually, yeah, I think that, that the projective parody just turns into the thing that it is, or the world turns into that parody. First, the tragedy then is farce. Right.

As it were. And I think if, if the audience to get like a good, get their brain around this in a way that may be easier for them to swallow, I think. If you think about the Islamic State, they're aesthetic. Are you asking me if I just think about the Islamist? No, no, no. I'm directing, I'm directly talking to the audience now.

I'm so sorry. Again, I said this is going to be a we're weirder one than we normally do. If you think about the Islamic State, and especially its aesthetic, as as parity, what would have been considered parity, in a pre-2001 world, what would have been considered scare tactics written in right-wing magazines

about the worst thing we thought about Islamic fundamentalists. And then when those people started to coalesce and they adopted that and that became, you know, as you said, first is tragedy, then as farce. We're not quite back around in the farce or maybe it went in a different order.

but I see echoes of that. Yeah, I mean, I was in a graduate seminar a few years ago with someone, or no, maybe I was just a talk. I was a talk a few years ago where, and this is right when the Islamic State is really kind of becoming the key focal point of kind of like American international politics or the way that kind of we were talking about it day to day. And they showed a, you know, a promo ad, basically, that the Islamic State had made that that's facing the West, particularly the United States. And the ad was entirely this almost like pure parody. I think that if it had been in a robocop film, it would have been funny. But it was literally about how, and to be clear, this is not funny at all. but it was literally just a series of numbers of American service members who commit suicide. And it was talking about those numbers and it was using that as this kind of like criticism of the United States.

They're like, look at what happens to service members after they serve and when they do it. And it was truly like to see that was like it was indescribable, honestly, in the sense of it was such an extreme, both an extreme form of rhetoric, but in the package that it was in, it was a commercial. I mean, it was an Instagram ad effectively. It had all the moving tight text and like beautifully animated images and things like that, but it was fundamentally about like this kind of criticism of rot within the United States, you know, armed services and support for veterans that was being used as a recruiting tactic for the Islamic State. And so all to say, to wrap that up into a thing, it's certainly something that I don't think I could have thought would have existed, you know, 10 years beforehand. And yet it's there and it's not parodic at all. It is in fact, I guess, theoretically an effective recruiting maneuver. And that's what the talk I was in was all about, was trying to figure out like, what is the visual rhetoric here? How is this working? Who is this actually targeting in its, you know, who is this interpolating? Who is it trying to bring into conversation? All that kind of stuff. The ads kind of hit in that same region.

That line between satire and reality lately is getting so razor thin. And I think maybe some of that is kind of the media milieu that you and I grew up in. You know, the 90s was so rich in absurd satire of some of these forces. And now it's like not just Islamic State, obviously, but now it's like the worst jokes of the 90s and early aughts are becoming the reality. that we live in. Yeah, 100%. It's almost like South Park was not an effective tool to criticize anything. Well, if comedians were good at destroying political power, then John Stewart would have destroyed the Bush administration, right?

Yeah, or comedians might have done anything ever. Yeah, exactly. That is a generalization. That's not true. Plenty of communities have done important and interesting things. But the John Stewart example is a really good one. Yeah. They provide great comfort in times of stress, but they don't, you know, they hold, they hold rallies for sanity in Capitol Hill that years later look a little embarrassing, in my opinion.

Yeah. Yes. So you're, you know, not a normally, what I'm trying to say. So we usually like to end war college on a depressing note. Great. I'm great at that. It's my whole deal. I think we kind of took it to a depressing place there at the end.

And I feel pretty good and bad about it. How do you feel? I feel great about it. Cameron Cundleman, thank you so much for coming on to War College and talking about Metal Gear Solid to Sons of Liberty with us and for dropping a bomb as Foucaulte reference. Any time. In any of those books or anything that I mentioned, they're all good. They're all fun to read.

I love reading. And you know what? I'm happy to come talk about weird military video games in each time. We may do this again, then. Put a pin in that. Sure. Ryden, are you receiving? We're still here.

How's that possible? The AI was destroyed. Only GW. Who are you? To begin with, we're not what you'd call human. Over the past 200 years, a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House. It's not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The White House was our primordial soup, a base of evolution.

We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we. Cut the crap! If you're immortal, why would you take away individual freedoms and censor the net? Jack, don't be silly. Don't you know that our plans have your interests, not ours in mind?

What? Jack, listen carefully, like a good boy. The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering. And in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. What do you mean?

Human memories, ideas, culture, history. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives, through words, pictures, symbols, from tablets to books. But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on.

Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is, Jack. But in the current digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness, never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretation, slander. All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Right. You seem to think that our plan is one of censorship. Are you telling me it's not?

You're being silly. What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context. Create context. The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development. of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty,

huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. Be nice to other people. But beat out the competition. You're special. Believe in yourself and you will succeed. But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed. You exercise your right to freedom, and this is the result.

All rhetoric, to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests, continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small, gated, community afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever truth suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.

The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in truth. And this is the way the world ends, not with a bang,

but a whimper. We're trying to stop that from how It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species. And you think you're qualified to decide what's necessary and not? Absolutely. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths, and even interpret their meaning for later generations? That's what it means to create context. I'll decide for myself what to believe and what to pass on. But is that even your own idea?

Or something Snake told you. That's the proof of your incompetence right there. You lack the qualifications to exercise free will. That's not true. I have the right... Does something like a self exist inside of you? That's what you call self. Serves as nothing more than a mask to cover your own being. In this era of ready-made truths, self is just something used to preserve those positive emotions that you occasionally feel.

Another possibility is that self is a concept you conveniently borrowed under the logic that would endow you with some sense of strength. That's crap! Is it? Would you prefer that someone else tell you? All right, Dan, explain it to him. Jack, you're simply the best, and you got there all by yourself. self. Oh, what happened? Do you feel lost?

Why not try a bit of soul searching? Don't think you'll find anything, though. Ironing, that although self is something that you yourself fashion, every time something goes wrong, you turn around and place the blame on something else. It's not my fault. It's not your fault. In denial, you simply resort to looking for another,

more convenient truth, in order to make yourself feel, better. Leaving behind in an instant the so-called truth you once embraced. Should someone like that be able to decide what is truth? Should someone like you even have the right to decide? You've done nothing but abuse your freedom. You don't deserve to be free. We're not the one smothering the world. You are. The individual is supposed to be weak, but far from powerless. A single person has the potential to ruin the world. And the age of digitized communication has given even more power to the individual. Too much power for an immature species. Building a legacy involves figuring out what is wanted and what needs to be done for that goal. All this you used to struggle with. Now we think for you.

We are your guardians after all. You want to control human thought, human behavior? Of course. Anything can be quantum. nowadays. That's what this exercise was designed to prove. You fell in love with me just as you were meant to after all. Isn't that right, Jack? Osolet was not told the whole truth to say the least. We rule an entire nation. Of what interest would a single soldier, no matter how able, be to us? The S3 plan does not stand for solid snake simulation. What it does stand for is selection for societal sanity.