Alienated Labor

The action of a variety of fan-made counter-strike gamemodes is to isolate and then extrapolate to its furthest conclusions a particular gameplay element. The action of falling is temporarily halted, harnessing it in order to surf. Basic navigation’s way of momentum is turned into bhopping. Sightlines and aiming are the primary object in the AWP maps, a gamemode based solely on the “apex gun” by which all others refer their skill to. Most deathmatch maps, in order to provide the thrilling rush of the kill-ping resort to bots, populating the server with a large number of zombies in order to make easy targets for player. The “ideal” of the default gameplay is sliced into pieces, with each piece isolated and separated out, in order to be treated in isolation.

Such an action has spawned mutations of its own. DotA originated from Warcraft 3’s older genre, with one aspect of gameplay, the control of an individual character raised above the others, extrapolated to the sole focus of a gamemode. In turn, this was balanced on its own and thus became in itself something new, isolated from the original by which it originates.

This mechanism, that seen strikingly as well in gym equipment, is the latest evolution of the mechanism that sparked the invention of tools. Corvids can be seen using various pieces of bent wire, weights, thrown objects, understanding various chains of cause and effect of physical reality in order to solve minor puzzles. All of the observed actions here are actions extrapolating from actions which exist elsewhere. Grabbing objects with the beak turns into manipulating them, which in turn is linked to causation of one object interacting with another. The beak can grasp the first object and then the tool is born.

Unique among tool-using animals, humanity took this evolution down a far different path than the raven or the fellow primate. Endowed with a higher capacity for abstract thought, the tool’s extrapolation from observed phenomena set off the same chain reaction that can be seen in the creation of the MOBA genre. A tool in interaction with another tool created a third, the machine of the difference between the two tools. The first truly human invention, alienated labor, was beget from this process. The difference of two tools in interaction (the machine) comes into being in order to interact with others.

The first machine can never be alone so long as more than the two tools which create it exist. Machines naturally couple with each other, with the tools linking together by being shared abstractions. One abstraction from typical processes harnesses the sheering of plants from soil by bare hands, another abstraction from typical processes harnesses the grinding of materials behind other solidities. 

It’s these machines in combination that then begets supermachines, a category of machine made up of smaller machines. This is obviously a category of perspective, with the supermachine becoming a machine as soon as its considered a machine coupling into a larger supermachine, but a useful category nonetheless. It’s this abstraction which makes the unique piece of human development, separate from other animals.

The tool alone is nothing, an extension of a natural process that can be created by any being with limited intellect. The machine is beyond intellect, as it develops intellects of its own. The process of combination and recombination that creates supermachines is a process by which things beyond the original organic manipulators are created, entities which act as extensions from the actions of their submachines. 

It’s this continual abstraction that tells the story of automation and by extension, the developing relationship to technology. Development upon development in production technology comes ever-closer to the fantasy of the ultimate network of machines, the society as a complete supermachine, with the human input fully alienated. The fantasy is a fantasy of Neo-Eden of the future, where machines become such a complete alienation from human labor that the human can exist atop them, picking fruits of fully alien production as if it descended from heaven itself. Regardless of whether realized or not, this is often the fantasy of many futurist stories, with the ideas of foraging, of abandonment so common in apocalypse stories being the darker modern retelling of the utopian post-scarcities of earlier eras.