Entry tags:

digital people, news, politics, rant

Reuters and the War on Imagination
This just in from Reuters:

Poll: Most adults don’t want fantasy avatars

I clicked on the link, expecting something that heralded an assault on identity freedom, pointed to the virulence of bigotry against furries and transsexuals - the usual bitter news from the atomic world that looks all too much like a War on Imagination.

But that's not what I found in the data, despite the desperate spin from Eric Reuters that played on all those elements of my expectation. What did the data actually say? Only 44% of a general audience - *not* users of synthetic worlds, but Atomic folks on the street - said they *wouldn't* experiment with identity and appearance in a synthetic world, given the chance. Only 44% were so grounded in their atomic identity, so incurious or unimaginative, to not even want the option of trying.

Maybe they're not the problem, those ordinary people out there. Maybe the problem, the people who actually assault imagination and creative freedom, are the ones in positions of power in the media. And maybe, just maybe, this implausible spin on a survey is a sign of desperation, of an attempted "surge" in their War on Imagination.

Look at what Eric Reuters did. Let's start with that headline. "Most adults don't want fantasy avatars.' First, the natural converse of that statement is, "people who want fantasy avatars are mostly children." Yes, demean and belittle us from word one. Also, "fantasy avatars?" To me a "fantasy avatar" is *any* avatar in WoW, or drows and mermaids in SL. How many millions of people are *using* fantasy avatars in MMOs already, all over the world? 

The question actually asked was,

Is it "fantasy" to dramatically alter one's appearance?  To be taller, or a different race, or to reclaim youth, or healthy limbs? Fifty-six percent of ordinary Americans at least wouldn't say no to the choice to do so.

The article also goes on to refer to "the chance to roleplay a furry, robot, or the opposite gender."  "Play" and "fantasy" on the one hand, "adults" and "real world" on the other. And, transgender expression equated to "roleplaying a robot."  Gods, the condescending bigotry in that statement!

I call shenanigans, Eric Reuters.

Creative freedom, freedom of the *individual* to define herself, rather than the state, the bank, the employer - that's not childishness. That's empowerment.

And maybe that's what's behind the War on Imagination.  Imagination is power, imagination is freedom. Imagination is the refusal of packaged reality, the rejection of stories imposed upon us from outside.  The imposition of stories is the exercise of the power of the state, the financial institution, the media conglomerate. Our elites are too sophisticated to resort to power in its crudest form of physical coercion: they exercise power through belief. Belief in their creation myths, belief in their endless wars on "terror," of all things, belief that we are our credit reports, our census data, belief that we are "consumers" rather than creators.

If we lack the freedom to create our own identities, we have no creative freedom at all. If we are not allowed - by the government, by Reuters, by the brownshirted PN street thugs of the ruling orthodoxy - to use our very selves as a medium of expression, then no canvas, no keyboard, no screen can matter as a medium of expression. If we cannot own ourselves, if our very existence is not recognized as *our* intellectual property, then we only have what the powers that be allow us to have, and which they make take from us tomorrow in the next click-through "agreement."

Maybe I am childish. Maybe I am playful.

Maybe those aren't bad things.

But one thing I know for certain?  I *own* the right to create myself, to define myself. And not all the thrones and powers, not all the media lackeys and barbarian goons, will *ever* get me to accept their stories in place of my own.

"Most People Want Identity Choice" - *there's* the truth behind your desperate spin, Eric Reuters. We will not be denied.