It's very textbook stuff; now that the game festivals are over, now that the charm offensive has been executed more or less flawlessly and there's no more juice to squeeze from it, it's time to produce an incredibly large cartoon knife from nowhere and move to the next phase.
Dude, I don't know. I don't understand the Game of Thrones type shit that goes on at the upper echelons of these companies, I don't know why they put somebody from the AI department in charge of the most profound concentration of living gaming history ever assembled, I don't know why they are firing the people they're firing, and I don't necessarily know why people are leaving but given the rest of this paragraph, I mean… I think morale is probably higher in Tartarus. The only thing it seems to indicate is a vast, gruesome war of some kind, happening completely off stage, where somehow only the casualties are visible.
We can nibble around the core all day. There's plenty to say about what I might do in a parallel version of the universe; rest assured that supreme ethics would thrum at the core, followed by an ever-expanding wreath of wealth and success that all contributors are party to. I just think the analysis on these kinds of things starts way too late in the process.
It's not clear to me what the social benefit is of letting companies metastatize, to become draconic. They should never have been allowed to gobble up whatever they wanted, on purely aesthetic grounds, but also because when they inevitably shit the bed it concentrates and magnifies the harms. Shockwaves of wretched despair. Ultimately, it's based on something like a religious belief: that wealthy companies have discerned some proprietary, secret knowledge about how the world works, and they should be allowed to do whatever the eff they want, when what usually happens is that they know somebody who knows somebody, got a firm grip on the teat of public money, or are psychopaths playing a game made by psychopaths for the benefit of psychopaths. Business is how psychopaths fuck.
If the rejoinder is that these smaller companies willingly sold themselves, you're still at the wrong level of analysis. I'm not talking about the pieces on the board; I'm talking about the board. It's gauche to leave the spine of the system so bare; we live in a shooting gallery for oligarchs.
(CW)TB out.
