“Warm and Stuffy” - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 171

But these anthropocentric positions have been challenged. Heidegger
argued that technology makes “the unreasonable demand” that nature “sup-
ply energy which can be extracted and stored,” bending seasonal rhythms to
the demands of work, growth and competition. Also contra the dominant
perspective, Hume maintained that animals, like people, “learn many things
from experience,” developing “knowledge of the nature of fi re, water, earth,
stones, heights, depths, etc.” in addition to receiving instruction as part of
domestication. Rather than being merely sensate, advanced animals apply
reason through inference. More simplistically, if empathetically, Bentham
asked of our duty of care to animals: “the question is not, Can they reason?
nor, Can they talk ? but, Can they suf er ”' Here again, the impact of technol-
ogy is not merely a human problem, but one for all inhabitants of the Earth.
There is a duty of care to the weak on the part of the strong as denizens of
shared space (Heidegger 1977, 288, 296, 299; Hume 1955, 112-113; Ben-
tham 1970; Swanton 2010). We see this ethic of cross-generational and cross-
species concern in the artwork of Francisco Benjamin López Toledo, inter
alios (see http://www.franciscotoledo.net/fl ash/interim.htm).
At the same time, questioning the development, manufacture and use of
consumer electronics and their gaming subset reminds us uncomfortably
of an Old Testament or Malthusian problematization of pleasure, a pessi-
mistic analysis and rhetoric that place environmentalists on the side of pain
versus pleasure and moralism versus markets. To convey the importance of
the environmental peril engendered by games, one needs to embrace both
pleasure and democracy. There are many alternatives to clickapitalism and
clickocracy. Choice can be ethical as well as pleasurable, and politics sus-
tainable as well as participatory (Lewis and Potter 2011; see also cultural-
studies.podbean.com/2010/08/06/sarah-banet-weiser) .
The fi nger-wagging aspects of environmentalism are easily parodied and
criticized, so the style of conveying the message matters. But we are in a
conjuncture where style has been paramount and the Global North has
invested in an economic fantasy of protected agriculture, neglected manu-
facturing, boosted services and diminished social security—a debt culture
brokered against imperial “glory” and achieved under the sign of a sup-
posed ability to trade out of protectionism and deferral through the sale
of culture. To counter this powerful hegemony, we need a discourse of the
citizen as well as the consumer.
Three zones of citizen rights function within democracies: political citi-
zenship, which confers the right to reside and vote on territorial terms;
economic citizenship, which allocates the right to work and prosper; and
cultural citizenship, the right to know and speak. These rights correspond
to the French Revolutionary cry liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality,
solidarity) and the Argentine left's contemporary version: ser ciudadano,
tener trabajo, y ser alfabetizado (citizenship, employment, literacy). Each
one has normally appealed to national jurisdictions, but such boundar-
ies and interests are brought into question by the border-crossing reality