Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Gamergate Failed [TW: no Sargon]
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Can you explain what you mean by that?
Although I don't necessarily subscribe to Italian Elite Theory (especially on the grounds of what ought to be), I can't deny that some of it's assertions are entirely correct.
One of those assertions is that elites will always exist, and will always be supported by institutions. You can't ever just remove elites altogether and hope that institutions survive. Nor can you have an insittutionaless society. Elites can only be replaced. Normally, by separate institutions that can support them, and basically swap out or transition people over to the new institutions.
You need to build a parallel structure for people to move onto. If we were talking about education, this would be basically about building tons of private colleges and private credential systems, away from the current crop of state education schools & universities.
The video game industry already has an absolute fuck-ton of parallel structures in the form of small businesses that can more quickly respond to market forces (independent game studios) as well as parallel: secondary markets (content generation), marketing platforms (livestreamers and video presenters), publishing systems (Twitch.io, Steam, GoG, none are exclusive to an oligarchy of large developers), education (game jams, online courses, coding suites, Unity tutorials) so on and so forth.
When economic downturns arrive, the largest and most centralized structures will naturally take the largest hits because they are the slowest to respond. Plenty of small businesses will be able to respond quickly, and even if many go under, they are quickly replaced by entrapanuers who see the gap and can quickly act to take advantage of it.
As a result all large businesses use regulation and subsidy to protect themselves from market forces. The governments that are loyal to these corporations are prepared to damage the economy in order to save only the largest businesses. However, this power does not exist in the video-game space the way that it does in Energy, Transportation, Food, Weapons, etc. DC isn't coming to bail them out. Even if the parent companies are getting bailed out, the game studios are still going to get cut because consumer choice will lead people away from entertainment. Meaning that true deflation is the only result for the whole industry.
That allows the larger, established, and no longer functioning structures to collapse; but provides much needed growth opportunities for the smaller companies, along with cheaper labor from experienced people from the larger corporations that don't find the value in their game studios. Additionally (like with Twitter) the bureaucratic hangers-on will get immediately thrown to the wolves to protect the profit line.
You are right in how gaming will survive the crash, and thankfully we already have anti-woke/non-woke developers ready to capitalize on this by securing ideologically aligned talent that only works for large companies for paychecks.
Play the music, Mr. Romer