![]() The two are at once connected, allowing both people and things-labor and capital-to pass through. Point and click here, and a blue orifice opens up on solid tile. ![]() This handy gizmo, universally known as the “portal gun”, 7 represents the perfect fantasy of spooky labor at a distance, the reification of the digital abolition of space. Technologies such as Zoom or the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, for instance. If the modern era and its industrial infrastructure gave us the defeat of distance then surely the post-modern, post-industrial cyber-era has unleashed something further, not merely triumph but annihilation-less a “defeat of distance” than an abolition of space, brought to you by technologies that allow instantaneous communication and labor at a distance. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the railway, steamship, and telegraph, society had achieved “the defeat of distance.” 5 Faster ships, better roads, newer and more abstract methods of communication: century after century the twin engines of capitalism and state formation have ground down the fundamental essence of space, the once-inescapable reality that right here and over there were very different places indeed, even when separated by only a paltry handful of miles. 4īut capitalism, as always, inevitably seeks to consume and destroy what it feeds upon. The fundamental innovation of the merchant class was to arbitrage space, to move objects from where they are cheap to where they are expensive. Not “space” as in “the final frontier”, 3 but in the more prosaic sense of distance. Fortunately, you soon get your hands on a miraculous device that lets you work remotely…Ĭapitalism has, since birth, been entangled with space. ![]() A disembodied voice keeps pestering you with instructions-come here, go there, press that- which rapidly exceed your own innate capabilities. But there’s more to it than that.ĭespite your total isolation, you’ve got plenty to do. Loneliness alone would make Portal seem relevant during our COVID-imposed quarantine. This loneliness alone would make Portal seem relevant during our COVID-imposed quarantine, much the same way as all the old “bottle episodes” on TV shows have now suddenly taken on intense quarantine overtones. Even Pac-Man had the ghosts of all those dead astronauts to keep him company. Since Pong, few video games have leaned this far into isolation. But there are no other humans where you are. You yourself are human, with a ragged haircut and a “pajamas count as clothes in quarantine”-style tattered orange jumpsuit. For the rest of the game 2, you will not encounter another living being. You wake up in a minimalist space defined by vast sweeps of grey tile, white ceramic, and glare-free glass, a little bit like an Apple Store designed in hell 1. The first thing you notice about the 2007 video game Portal is the isolation. Within the hour, you’ve formed an inappropriately emotional attachment to a friendly box. Nevertheless, it’s time to get to work-solving bizarre, abstract puzzles in a desolate landscape of constantly shifting mortal danger. Your alarm clock’s going off, but otherwise there are no signs of human life and you don’t expect that to change. – Donald Trump on the response to COVID-19 This Was A Triumph: Remote Work Dystopias from Portal to Pandemic Lessons on remote revolution from the Aperture Science Enrichment Center
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |