Battleangel

Australia gets stupid and effectively bans “Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure” for inciting “the crime of graffiti vandalism.” Sly as they are they didn’t outright ban it either but simply refused classification.

Ironically, the game - which is set in a city of the future - features a world where freedom of expression is suppressed by a tyrannical city government.

Players battle the authorities to overthrow corrupt officials using only street fighting skills and graffiti.

It is eerie watching the daily news and seeing the world slip away bit by bit. Perhaps there is something we can all learn here, even if we’re not very good at graffiti. Oh, but wait, everyone is still busy bashing China over their desire to censor digital technology. At least they’re doing it for a tangible reason.

This sort of folly however, about preventing “antisocial behavior” and promoting good Christian, mercantile moralistic communitarianism just ruins my day. First of all because it doesn’t make any sense, lacks scientific merit and second because it could well be transplanted elsewhere. Impulsive people and their wars on common sense. Not to say that latter is isn’t also true in the case of corporate adaptation on the Chinese market. We will all pay for the sins of Google and Yahoo. Just like Australian authorities can’t resist trying to define proper decorum, others will be as powerless to resist controlling what their citizens can access in the wired world. And they’ve just been shown by example that not even Google’s ethics are without a price. That is indeed destabilizing. Just as when the US sets out on its grand but misguided and deceitful campaigns against terrorism, the violence that ensues sparks more violence and abuse, and not just in the vicinity of the theaters of war per se, but in fact, we are all infected by the social pattern.