Miss Pacman.

We were talking in one of my classes this week about the politics of code on the internet; this is to say that the sites you visit and the way you respond to those sites is always going to be limited by the way that the internet itself is coded. In part this is an aspect of the language in which the pages you visit are programmed and in another way it is an aspect of the infrastructure that supports the internet itself. In the case of the latter, the infrastructure of the internet, there is a big push and pull between a variety of parties:

first, the government has to always decide how much it is going to regulate the internet (striking a balance between the concept that internet access is now an essential service, like water or electricity, and should thus be available to everyone in a reasonably unfettered way, or, that the internet is a dangerous source of material that could harm the rule of law in a given nation and needs to be strictly regulated, and the impulse to stay in bed with big business and support the transformation of the internet from a fairly open source information sharing resource to a giant online mall). The government in Canada, thus far, has done a very good job of capitulating to corporate interests and denying Canadian citizens completely honest access to this potentially useful means of participating in the public sphere. Nevertheless, government intervention or non intervention to a large degree determines the manner in which users will end up doing their surfing.

Second, The corporations that provide internet access (and increasingly the content viewed during that access) also create an infrastructure; particularly in the sense that they want to turn the experience of being on the internet into one that hardwires users into consumers. Every time a person consents to allowing cookies, or consents to sign up (even for free) to view the content of a site, or allow third party software, or anything like that, anytime anyone does one those these things, this individual is consenting to give up personal information to a corporation that will be used to created more targeted marketing and create more lists of things that consumer and all consumers like him or her are into. The object is to sell the use more shit and to keep the user surfing around places that have the potential to sell the user more shit all the time.

The corporate ideal (if you think about a conglomerate like AOL Time Warner) is that all the time a user spends on the internet will be spent surfing sites that are somehow affiliated with AOL Time Warner. Thus, everything the user does from e-mail to checking out online music to checking out vacations to checking out porn or whatever will all be contained within the envelope owned by that corp. and thus will at all times have the potential to funnel profit back into one of the tentacles of the corp.

Thus, the more that a corporation swallows, the more time that a user is forced to spend time on the internet solely for the purpose of conspicuous consumption. Even the idea of having to give up something to get something (i.e., personal information for content) creates a psychological environment where users are bated into the concept that they can’t truly function in a public space unless it is for the purpose of conspicuous consumption.

So, anyhow, from here we obviously went into a discussion of Foucault’s vision of the city as a place that has been structured for both maximum efficiency and at the same time maximum visibility. I leave you to read Discipline and Punish if you don’t follow me here. The point I wanted to make was that it is nearly impossible to visit the downtown core of a city now without raising a great deal of suspicion from all of those who are watching the core (either consciously as security guards or police or unconsciously, with their snap judgments on what is and isn’t proper behavior, as regular fellow citizens) if you do not travel in the guise of the conspicuous consumer.

Consider what would happen, for example, if you decided to go and stand in a mall for a while but you did not buy anything and you did not have any baggage in your hand and you did not appear to be in the mall for any particular purpose. It is quite likely that a security guard would come along at a certain point and ask, probably politely, what it was that you were doing there. If you did not or could not answer, or that you answer was that you were just standing there because you felt like it, it is quite probably that the security guard would ask you to leave the premises (at least this is what always happens to me). If, however, you attempted the same stunt, but holding shopping bags and other items that it was clear that you had just bought, it is likely that it would take you much longer to get thrown out.

The same applies to most downtown spaces. People just seem to have more purpose when they are walking around with bags or they are walking somewhere looking like they are on their way to pick up some bags full of things. In this way the downtown core of the city has been refigured into a space that is commercial and not necessarily a place of leisure. Even public parks (especially in Montreal) now have an anti vagrancy law, thus encouraging people who are out on consumption adventures (like people on dates and tourists) from being troubled by the sight of people who are only in the parks because the like being in parks or they have no other place to sleep.

This is the way that cities can be coded. I then told the class (somewhat more contentiously) that another example of coding is the Lonely Planet Guide. Let’s say, for example, that you decide to go on a trip to India and you buy the Lonely Planet and follow it. You will find that you end up staying in the recommended hotels and eating at the recommended cafes and visiting the recommended sites and along the way you will keep meeting the same people (mostly scruffy looking backpackers from Israel and Austria who look just like you and have the same snooty attitude about how in touch with the local culture as you are and who dislike you as much as you dislike them because of the fact that all of you want to experience something new and feel like you are the first one to experience it, as though each one of you was Dr. Livingstone reborn, but all you find at the end of the day is that you end up back at the same hostel as everyone else listening to a CD of Indian Flute with a trance beat and talking about the best way to get out to the beach) all the time.

It’s a bummer, but it’s because the whole thing has evolved into a kind of code that the visitors fall into and it dominates their whole trip and the locals play into it too and they provide the service that they think the visitors want and then you go home and look at flicker and realize that 75, 000 people have already taken the same photo of the same swami standing in front of the same temple holding the same snake as you did. Om shanty shanty om.

Well, said my class, it’s a code but it’s different from the internet of the city because it’s a voluntary code. If you decide to walk one block past where the Lonely Planet says you should, or you go one café over from where the guide says, then you will end up at a place that is twice as cheap and three times as local and there won’t be a tourist in sight. You really will be Dr. Livingstone…or maybe Lord Clive would be a better example in this case.

Anyhow, I thought of the Lonely Planet Guide because one time I was travelling in India along with my sister, following the guidebook (sort of) and somewhere along the line, sick of travelling on trains and staying in hostels with the same people and the same sort of people, we decided to get off the beaten track to see what sort of adventures we might find.

To this end, we decided to visit a place that the Lonely Planet expressly said was a complete waste of time and a shithole, to boot; a sea coast town in Andhra Pradesh known as Vijayawada. Truly, it’s not such a bad place (if anyone from there is reading this, it’s not such a bad place); although it tends to lack a lot of the glamour or touristy attraction of some of the larger cities in India. It is a flat town but it looks down between two large masses of land along the course of a river’s mouth into the Pacific Ocean. If the same location were located in the south of France or in Italy, I feel sure that it would be the playground for billionaires, but things can only be where they are. I have no idea what industry or trade keeps Vijayawada running and I’m not particularly curious to find out. There sure weren’t any damn tourists there, though, billionaire or otherwise.

To make a long story short, without any guide as to what we could do for fun in Vijayawada, we decided to wander around the streets to see what sort of things were happening. There was one fellow who tried to trick us by telling us he wanted to take us to his favourite restaurant; this involving getting in and out of numerous taxies and going round the city in circles presumably to get us completely lost, but in the end he fails to trick us because we just got bored of his tricks and wandered off while he in the growing distance and dusk grew increasingly abusive about our decision to desert him.

Mostly people in Vijayawada left us alone; and this was a testament to how far off the beaten track this place was. When you travel along the Lonely Planet route there are people trying to take you for your money at every turn. The relationship between the swindling locals and the aggravated tourists becomes a kind of symbiotic dance after a while and they learn how to respond to each other and how to move around each other, but in Vijayawada people just watched us go by with a kind of passing disinterest, like chaw chewing cowboys leaning up against wood rails outside the saloon.

The one exception, though, was when we decided to stop into a local arcade to pass some time by playing video games. This place was really a throwback: they had all these old beaten up videogame machines, the tall ones that look like voting booths that I used to play Jungle Hunt and Galaxian on at the back of the Shop ‘n’ Bag when I was so short that the joystick was parallel to my neck while I played. And before every machine was a wiry teenage kid hammering at the smooth and hand greasy knob of the joystick while his friends crowded ‘round behind him cheering him on. And as we passed each machine, decided where we were going to drop a coin to play we came upon a surprising revelation: every single machine was loaded with Miss Pacman. The entire arcade was devoted to this single game.

I got this said my sister. And indeed she did have it. We had been playing Miss Pacman on our home Atari 2600 for years. It was like picking up a language we had been born with but had not spoken for a few years. It was a thing that would come back to us easily and even the replacement of our old comfy basement, with its scattered cushions and toys, by the dingy light of the arcade and the murmur of Telugu teenagers was not going to be enough to stop us. We knew this game.

My sister got a machine and began to play. Level one flew by, level two flew by, level three flew by. A few other people in the arcade gathered behind her and began to watch. Level four, level five, level six. A murmur was running through the crowd now. This is such bullshit she said. Level seven, level eight. Now there were all there, cheering her. Level nine, level ten. It became clear at a certain point that she was going to play forever. The crowd was going mad. It was like they had never seen a Miss Pacman player like this before. She could have been their queen. They would have toted her high upon a litter, feeding her little white pellets (or maybe rice idlys) at her whim. Finally she got bored and she just walked away from the controls. Anyhow, she said, I’ve played this game before. You do it.

Now it was my turn to take the controls. Another murmur ran through the crowd. Could the brother be as great as the sister? Did the genius gene run through all their blood? Level one. I died twice. Half the people walked away to their own games. Level two: success. Level three, I died again. The rest of the crowd wandered off. You are bullshit, my sister said.