I’ve never been a big fan of Rockstar’s output, mind you. Apart from fucking around on questionably sourced PC ports of Vice City back in the day, ignoring the plot as much as possible and just spawning tanks to cause mischief, I’ve not really been drawn by their weirdly form over function design of clunky but cinematically appropiate animation priority and cop evading mechanics.
My partner (And please read this as “pardner”) however is a big fan of westerns, and as such, a big fan of the Red Dead Redemption games. So back in the days where we were separated by an ocean of idiots refusing to wear a mask, and a slightly smaller volume of water, I got Red Dead Online (Because for some reason you could get that separately?) to play with her.
Apart from it being an exercise in peak Rockstar mission design (Ride horse to a distant place, shoot a bunch of people, recover a mcguffin, deliver the mcguffin to another place while being chased by people that just spawn wherever they want), what honestly surprised me was how quietly gorgeous the entire game was.
The reality is that the game isn’t really doing many super complex graphical effects that take hardware with several thousand gigafarts of power to accomplish – at the time I was playing it on a 12 year old PC, and it still looked gorgeous. It’s just made with a solid art direction and taste, with a lot of very cheap simple tricks applied with artisanal precision to make a great representation of the vast wilderness of the fictional frontier era land we explore while playing Mounted Amazon Deliveryperson with Guns.
Wish I could say the same of the netcode, which is Nintendo-worthy on random incidents of teleporting your horse on top of you and instantly killing you for no reason, but the mood and ambience of the game is peak, at least.
When later on my partner and I were finally together, and after investing on a used PS4 Pro we affectionately nicknamed the “Boeing 747 Engine”, we also sourced a copy of the game from our local game store, GAME, House of the Game. I had seen nothing of the story mode until then, so I happily watched her play through most of the plot, vicariously living it second hand with long stretches of frustrating game design in between the story beats.
The plot follows Arthur Morgan, member of the Van der Linde gang of merry bandits, led by charismatic guy Dutch Van der Linde, who fancies himself some sort of an intellectual anarchist that dreams of freedom from all the authority, stealing from the rich to provide for the most unfortunate outcasts of the buddying society in the area; and is always one last score away from his end goal of moving to Tahiti to farm mangos.
However that last score never happens – bad luck, the authorities and very interpersonal spats; alongside my sworn enemy, mental illness – gets in the way of their dream; with Arthur on the side, suddenly faced with his own mortality, pondering the morality of their actions, and wanting to do something meaninful before he passes on.
However out of all the plot you go through, there’s an specific beat that stayed with me and resonated for a long time. At some point during the wild chase around the entire map, you end up stationed closest to the biggest, most modern city in this fictionalized frontier: Saint Denis
There’s something rotten in Saint Denis
Saint Denis is the single big, urbanized city in the entire map (at least as far as you’re concerned at the point), with flashy electric lamps and paved roads, a tram that makes the rounds around town, theaters, brothels, big stores!
And also a permanent coat of industrial fumes and smog, factories, shady dealings and very prominent more marginalized people than in the smaller, less civilized towns you’ve been to before.
“This place, ain’t no such thing as civilized. It’s man so in love with greed… He has forgotten himself and only found appetites.”
-Dutch Van der Linde
The writing slaps you in the face about how a place like Saint Denis is disgusting and revolting, an affront against the natural order, – It’s in fact one of the only areas with organized police – an empire of bright lights and unbreathable air, of necessary inequality for the sake of progress. An attempt to tame the wilderness into a more comfortable utilitarian space.
Of course this is a commercial game, and Dutch isn’t really as clever as a lot of his fans claim him to be, so they never call out how there’s a clear capitalist motivation behind turning the ruthless plains and mountains of this frontier into paved streets full of poverty and pollution as hard as they should – that would be having too much of a message, after all. But the entire thing stayed with me for a completely different reason.
Please come down Sidetrack Alley with me once more!
The wild frontier of Geocities
I’m old enough to remember an internet before Facebook even existed. My version of it was a lot of spending some afternoons in one of the cybercafes that quickly popped up before the turn of the century with a box of floppies, downloading MIDIs of songs and low definition anime pictures to add to the folder of “I have no idea what gender dysphoria is but I really want to be this girl in here and wish magic was real!!!” while catching up on the latest rumors about the upcoming Pokemon Gold and Silver on barely browsable Geocities fansites (Did you know Pikablu is actually on it???)
If that hasn’t killed you with a blast of cringe and sudden aging, then you probably are entitled to romanticize a very different era of the net, one where after being mostly a military experiment embraced by furries and anime fans to talk to each other; everyone else was left trying to figure out how to use for themselves.
And it was kind of a fucking shitshow, mind you! Everyone was trying to get you to install 35 thousand different programs to do whatever -Java, Flash, ActiveX, Shockwave, and this thing called Napster that lets you download “systemofadown-thelegendofzelda.mp3”?? Websites had no coherent design, some of them being extremely hard to read, with flashing backgrounds and autoplay music. Finding anything you actually wanted to read was hard and akin to diving into a random city with no map trying to figure out where to buy that specific sour gummy candy you really like.
And of course, shock material, random jumpscares, and the random sprinkles of nutcases hate criming people that might not have existed at the time – not to mention all the viruses and malware. This girl lost her computer to whatever virus was on that pikachu volleyball game TWICE. (In my defense I was SURE the second time it wouldn’t happen.)
The internet, to a degree, was absolute wilderness. Everyone just arrived to this vast virgin land and planted their flags, and everyone had their own rules and things they really really wanted to say. Exploring it was taking differently calculated risks, and knowing that evil could lurk at any point. It was also a huge effort! You needed to be more knowledgeable in computer wizardry than the average to even get connected, or learn how to use anything – how to set up an email account, or install an IRC client to chat.
I remember at some point during this era, stating that I liked the internet above watching TV, because I could read on whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, and wasn’t tied up to whatever an specific TV channel was broadcasting at the time. This statement was usually followed by seeing a random spook when I wasn’t expecting it on a random website and ending the afternoon crying in the shower. But you know, shit be like that sometimes.
Clearly I wasn’t the only one with this thought, because at some point, the powers that be also realized that a lot of people were flocking to a land they didn’t control, some place that wasn’t full of advertising and corporately appropriate content – and reacted in kind.
First they came for the chatrooms; and I did not speak out
The colonization of the internet didn’t happen with a genocide of the natives and millions of liters of bloodshed. It happened in the name of convenience and accessibility. “Hey, finding good IRC channels to hang out takes a long time, why not make an MSN Messenger account?” “Fiddling with HTML to make your personal website sucks, here have this tool that will do everything for you.” “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to find what you want on the internet quickly?” “Hey, come to this new website called Facebook, you can find your high school friends on it!! Wild!!”
We allowed corporations to pave the roads and set the tram lines for us, and we shouldn’t be surprised if years later those roads never take us anywhere we want and we’re not allowed to ride the trams at all – They were, at no point, made for us, and the more time it passes the more obvious it is.
“But TC, you can’t be serious, you can’t be saying the internet of before was better, right?” No, absolutely not. I think only people that didn’t actually live through that can have that thick of rose tinted glasses, because they got all the second hand nostalgia of the good times and few of the “why am I getting porn pop-ups in office and random charges on my credit card” times.
When Arthur Morgan and Dutch arrive at Saint Denis, they meet Angelo Bronte, the person running the crime syndicate in town. Under a facade of being a respectable upstanding citizen, he is a new class of criminal, a more civilized one – one whose dealings happen in the shadows of all those fancy electric lights and outside of the paved gardens. He’s a big supporter of law enforcement and the local political establishment, regularly attending social events, and making generous donations to them.
He eventually betrays the entire gang after having encouraged them to run a couple “errands” for him, and by this I mean get Arthur and company to take out some people for him in exchange for freeing a young boy from the Van Der Linde gang he had taken hostage.
The current internet is full of Angelo Brontes. We’re exposed to the exact same amount of noxious shit we were (but now, algorithmically), corporations still want you to install all their software (Except now, it’s Apps™️ instead), malware and scams still run rampant and probably come built in with your Xbox, and on top of that everything is a giant advertisement. Finding what we want is increasingly hard when we have to fight what the search engine company wants us to see to get there, and the same crimes we had before just keep happening outside of the fancy electric lights. And of course, everything has a thick veneer of corporate compliance layered on top of itself.
The previous wilderness state was bad, and anyone that lived through it experienced a lot of what humanity is capable of when left to their devices, with all its glory and all its horror, but the current civilized internet is absolutely terrifying with machine made horrors beyond our comprehension; We have gone from artisanally crafted, hand made slurs left in your Livejournal comments to automated robots that will dry out a lake to come up with a regurgitated insult on your Xitter feed.
Platforms you fill with your entire social circle and life willingly will betray you if they can make money out of it. Websites you trust with your communication needs, your thoughts, memories and notes will happily steal them for profit. Apps that help you organize with friends will willingly rat you out. Corporations aren’t your friends and will only help you for as long as it’s profitable, and your art is just content for their content machine – as should be obvious by now. They will get you to do their bidding for them, and then happily report you to the authorities – we’re civilized now, aren’t we.
The good news is, breaking out from all of that is way easier than it was before! Anyone can host their own website, if they desire so. Maybe even at your own house, on your own computer, or a cheap Raspberry Pi (Yes, they do a lot more things than let you install emulators and never shut fuck); there’s hundreds of open, federated, cross compatible chat and IM platforms you can use. You can run your own cloud storage at home if you want! You don’t have to lose any of the perceived convenience you have now if you don’t want to, and anything a corporation offers you can do yourself, better.
Stop relying on corporations to keep whatever online garden you want for yourself, and start looking on how to be self reliant on your digital life. Or else your gang will always have a rat in its midst, and a couple Brontes asking you for Content™️
quiche.cafe 
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