After I wrote the final hours of Synapse X, it was mentioned to me by a few persons within my circles that perhaps I’ve been too harsh in my modernly illuminated opinion of the so-called “industry”, where I heavily criticize what it is and what it’s been. Every time the topic comes to mind in reminiscence, especially as it comes through the reminding of others, I have to conjure up the effort to talk about it in conscious rejection of my desire not to. It’s an epoch of the past, an era laid on the ground to die; its ashes swept by the wind of time into the waters, and in its burnt pyre dances a lot of sad people seeing ghosts, believing in things that aren’t and weren’t.
The people that calls me too harsh on the history of this piteous enterprise have yet to reflect. They haven’t asked themselves what it all was, what it represented, and what it did. The only thing they remember, as many do, is the momentous glory and the prompt assumption of the throne on the mountain, a king of the hill that governed only a slim portion of the perverted mediocrity of the Internet boy seeking status through criminality and other stupidities. It felt good, just like the recovering addict that remembers the euphoria of the needle pushing H into the tourniquet’d arm; we had good times, just like the seventy-year-old mob boss recalls his extortion of the brick-and-mortars lining the potholed roads of Little Italy; we won, just like you win a horse race by whipping it and paining it hard enough.
Whatever memory serves your nostalgia has forgotten or forwent all the hurt that accompanied it. What exactly have you contributed to the world during these years? Any contribution only served you, didn’t it? The most common email I get is the heartfelt one from ex-exploiters who, from their use and abuse of exploits, made themselves students of computer science. It is comforting to see that not every exploiter turned out to be a basket-case, but it is disappointing to see that this is what exploiting has served, its collective and whole contribution; it didn’t really do anything for anyone but for the exploiters, who ate all the fruits of the trees we planted on soil neither of us owned. It was all take, no give.
This is why I’m harsh on the history of the “industry”, if it even deserves that term. I recall the great feelings I’ve had then, but not so much the great impacts. Every decision made had a tumultuous butterfly effect that impacted some other man, some other developer, some other game.
But it refuses to die
As a ten-year-old kid, I was afraid of zombies, but also obsessed with them in a way. My morbid interest led to even dressing as one for halloween. Behind it all was a weird irrational belief that maybe zombies will come into existence, one day. There was so much attention to zombies back in the day in the media that surely, we will somehow conjure them up. In retrospect, this was stupid, even if imaginative.
Anyway, I’ve come to observe that zombies are in fact real. Surprise! It’s the exploiting cesspool. It’s been killed years ago when every single competent developer intelligently sought an exit from the predictable mess that was going to follow. However, you will see that it remains nonetheless animate; it has no brains but it moves! Its carcass is rotting but it still possesses a somewhat recognizable body! It gurgles out grunts, insults and other barely human words but it speaks! The untrained eye will consider it alive, when in fact it should be given one, final kick in the chest back into the hole that was carved out for it years ago.
The exploiting cesspool refuses to die. Not out of brave endurance as a fighter commits to his last stand, no, but because it really, really wants to overstay its welcome. It used to walk about when we had a community capable of growth and iteration, but it has grown countless bedsores that infects the whole mass out of staying in bed and never coming out of it. Nothing ever improves, because it cannot improve, and it’s a sin that it should improve, because it should drop the undead act and be given to the preserving arms of history.
What exactly has been gained? You will remember that this thing of ours used to offer programs that lasted for years, updating regularly, and usually asking for a single payment a copy. Exploits came together to build standards (even though an exaggeration of the times and a useless endeavour, still an indicator of a greater era), APIs and functionality were iterated as far as they could go, and everybody had plans for the next thing to come, the next greatest feature, the future. Now, what’s left? Nothing. A shell of what it used to be. The patterns that were established, which weren’t meant to be static but continually evolving, have now become a casting mold for all businesses today.
As the zombie can only decay, so does the undead business of exploiting. It can no longer grow in betterment, because it is dead, but it has yet to realize it so. As long the same kind of underclass keeps flocking to the exploiting cesspool because it has nothing better to do or seeks to hurt others in a selfish perversion of the soul, there will be people hoisting the corpse of exploiting on strings and making it dance so that people will throw dollars and cents at its feet. How many have you thrown, anyway? Have you bought your tenth, twentieth, thirthieth key this week? Which alt account are you on now? Are you too new to recall that, years ago, you were rarely if ever banned?
Companies in bad company
Those today who try to do business, even though failing to hold a candle to what has came before, stand unaware of what these memories and the temporal victory are bound with. It is because it feels nice, for a minute, to possess a slice of Internet reputation. This has always been the cosmic background radiation of the ordeal, the omnipresent and eternal constant: money alone doesn’t quench the thirst. It is a natural property of the industry, somehow. Everything done must be labelled with your name, even if that name is only a representation of you and not you, and your name must speak; in the Discord channels, on the websites, and everywhere else we find the kind of people interested in exploiting.
It is a self-delusion to think that you’re in it just for the money. This is what some people believe starting. If it hasn’t surfaced yet, it only takes time until the craving for identity and meaning metastases from the bulk of all the other bad decisions you’ve made so far. Ultimately, you will find that it always existed, that you always had it in you. This realization is the same that came to me and a few others in Synapse as we started looking elsewhere for our future. “It is fine to do this, because anyway, we were only in it for the money”, I thought, until the hunger pang of the brand demands its presence be asserted; there was obviously more to it than simply the money, there was everything else that came with it, and the vicarious pride that makes you regret, even if only for a moment, the taking-down of what you’ve built, out of incertainty that what it has been transformed into isn’t reflective of everything done prior.
It will happen to you. The resolution, of course, isn’t found in persistence. When the hunger for brand and identity surfaces, you do not feed it. You do not continue what you were doing. There is no way to change your mindset or have a new orientation that denies the upcoming staking of your social value in what you’ve built and its community; that will happen as long you persist. The only way out is to take it down. If you find yourself loving more than just the money in your business, then there is nothing that will cure this except for a brazen and Irish closure of your business. Just leave before it is too late.
What is you
The escape hatch that exploiters believe to hold is the grace of time. That, one day, they will stop with all the recklessness and be forced to move on, either through growing-up and finding something to do or by coercion when the means die. This thought is adopted by both those who use exploits and make them; nobody believes, except the most desperate and ridiculous, that they’ll still be doing exploits reaching fourthy. The escape hatch provides comfort because it acknowledges that it is all temporary, in the same way that the suicidé-to-be gains happiness in the acknowledgment of their impending death and so their liberation from this stressful mortal coil. Or is it?
It has grown increasingly clear, to both me and also a few other illuminated men, that the escape hatch is no longer inherent. It is not something naturally downstream of the environment you find yourself in no more. Instead, if you want a escape hatch, you have to do penance for it, all in order to create the reason to have one later because it is no longer guaranteed. The truth of the matter is that everyone who’s in it right now do not have an escape hatch, time no longer offers it; you are instigating consequences that grow entrenched with every passing day. What you are doing right now, if not stopped, will be felt at age twenty, thirty, and fourty if you don’t have sufficient goodwill and discipline to stop and have a plan to stop, to cease what you are doing and move on, whatever the requirements or the difficulties may be.
All the more reason to stop. If you don’t, future you will look at your present-past self and think, “oh gosh, why didn’t I stop? Why did I do this? I had so much potential!”. Why kneecap the coming two-quarters of your life over something that lacks glamour and nobility? You will find yourself, as I find everyone else still in this, immensively and profoundly stupid. You have not outgunned anybody. You are not outrunning anyone. Have a grounded, sober view of yourself for once and you will see.