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< | High in the sky: cloud gaming and privacy | >
> | Lovecraftian Corporations | | | | |
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< | -- By RobertLarese - 01 Mar 2024 | >
> | -- By Anderson Dalmeus - 01 Mar 2024 | | | | |
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< | Computer gaming - to be deliberately cavalier, this includes gaming on a PC or a console, or even your smart phone - is something of a binary. All forms may be played on a third-party server or local machine. Consider first the second means. To enjoy the thing to be enjoyed, another set of third parties typically provide access to group-playing, so called "going online," "online" or, simply "on" by connecting local machines together over the internet. Microsoft is one of these other third parties. Bill Gates is happy to sell you the local machine, and for an allegedly paltry ten dollars a month, provide the connectivity to other local machines. See https://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/gold. But this type of gaming is comprised of at least personal hardware running the game locally, should the "gamer" forego multiplayer. The twenty-first century heralded a competitor to this local machine plus internet collaboration model.
Enter cloud gaming.
Imagine an end user, the player, a pipe relaying the user's inputs to a remote machine, could be a server farm or another individual's personal computer, where the game is run, and a pipe that transfer outputs back to the user, over an internet connection strong enough to handle whatever absurdly sharp rendering the game requires for enjoyment. At its core, "[c]loud gaming . . . renders an interactive gaming application remotely in the cloud and streams the scenes as a video sequence back to the player over the Internet." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6574660.
I suppose the obvious question is whether Microsoft and others will move away from the personal hardware component. Netflix did. This paper does not concern that strategic decision. Netflix knows every button you press: They "mobilized the [cursor] and sent it into battle." https://www.churchillbookcollector.com/pages/books/006737/winston-s-churchill/mr-churchills-speech-in-the-house-of-commons-2nd-of-august-1944. Suppose we continue to consent, through apathy or willful blindness or sheer ignorance, to the counter-privacy model of internet consumerism. How then should we feel about cloud gaming?
Is this another tidal wave?
The appeal of cloud gaming is instant: It offers users high-powered computing without the computing limits of personal hardware. But it also has another appeal: Accessibility. By "fall 2020, cloud gaming services [were still] largely unavailable to those outside North America and Central Europe." https://project-paladin.org/.. Cloud gaming is not without implementation issues. Both "interaction latency" with respect to inputs and "streaming quality" of outputs. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6574660. If these challenges are overcome, users could experience a quality gaming experience without the upfront cost of a personal machine. This could doom the less privileged to a subscription model, conscripting them into a system where even their own accolades are not their own.
Assume away the subjugation of these acolytes for a moment. This may be a more reasonable assumption than it appears. Researchers at the University of Michigan in 2020 developed a method of cloud gaming, leveraging Moonlight and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), that delivered to users computer gaming at "approximately 60¢/hour when in use," after "approximately 500 hours" of free cloud gaming for the first three months of use. https://johnragone.medium.com/500-hours-of-free-4k-60-fps-cloud-gaming-with-gcp-and-moonlight-c796fa10f0a3.
There is still a problem. Cloud gaming allows "less powerful computational devices that are otherwise incapable of running high-quality games," e.g., a simple computer or even a smart phone, run such "high-quality games." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6574660. Just like Netflix, GCP, NVIDIA "GeForce Now," or whoever is providing the more powerful "computational device" knows what it is the user is doing. NVIDIA, too, has sent the cursor to battle. It "fights [not] for the users." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/quotes/?item=qt0406294.
Were you to investigate academic treatments of privacy concerns vis a vis clouding gaming, or even computing generally, password security and data breaches would occupy your field. Netflix musters their "password strength," power to ensure your data is safely in their hands for their use. Cloud gamers may expect the same passionate concerns from their providers, too. In many respects, Netflix may stand in for cloud gaming companies. "Cloud gaming companies collect and store a large amount of personal data from users, including their gaming preferences, purchase history, and personal information." https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=07715def-72bb-4181-88ba-2a9c6fa0646b. Consider again, the Netflix analog. When users had to order DVDs, Netflix's development of user preferences required at least some physical interaction; now, they even know what movies you mull over but ultimately pass on. This is a disaster.
A few television streaming services held out with respect to advertising until quite recently. Missing this revenue proved too much for even the most dutiful companies. Cloud gaming services are unsurprisingly doing the same. See https://www.thurrott.com/games/298440/nvidia-geforce-now-free-tier-is-getting-pre-roll-ads. When state legislatures as early as 2008 were passing laws regulating the content of video games because of their alleged harmful effects on the users, governments and private citizens should be just as alarmed with the sort of "personalized," predatory and targeted, advertising. See https://www.cga.ct.gov/2008/rpt/2008-R-0233.htm#:~:text=Several%20states%2C%20including%20California%2C%20Georgia,sale%20of%20such%20video%20games. If there is even an ounce of truth in the "social media is killing free will" mantra, then we should all be alarmed. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9597644/.
To attempt a clamp down on these breaches or return to the early years, when cloud gaming was small, bifurcated into a hobbyist faction and a nascent commercial industry, think NVIDIA "GeForce Now." Both were cottage industries. This is assuredly an either-or fallacy. Recall the researchers at University of Michigan who built a do-it-yourself free cloud gaming implementation, that was "applauded internationally by [several thousand] cloud gaming enthusiasts from Latin America to Singapore." https://project-paladin.org/. It appears then that the cloud gaming industry might be primed for a grassroots implementation of a more private cloud gaming deployment. The success of such an effort relies on widespread adoption, typically by word of mouth or other nonmainstream channels. Leveraging the amateur cloud gaming subculture, the cursor's power to observe and control could be minimized. Interested researchers would be wise to devote effort to this area. | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
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> | Corporations have become nearly ubiquitous in the every day life of Americans. They are understood by their branding their products and services and the people who work there. The corporate entity can be understood as a kind of legal fiction ordained by the bureaucracy of the state. However we might also consider taking the phrase “corporate entity” in a very literal sense. That is when we say that google is a corporate entity we do not merely mean to say that it is a short hand for understanding the culmination of disparate processes and projects that form google but rather that google does in fact take on a life of its own by the process of incorporation. This may seem like a tortured conclusion and even now as I write it I can feel myself stretching the phrase “take on a life of its own” but it isn’t an unprecedented interpretation either. This thinking should really just be considered an extension of the reasoning that led the Supreme Court to their decisions in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad and Citizens United v the FEC. Corporations law is designed for the purpose of manifesting the capital C “Corporation” as a distinct legal thing from its property and its labor and these cases tell us that corporations also have 1st amendment rights to free speech and 14th amendment rights to protections from the state. However I will have to break with the Supreme Court in one small detail of their characterization of corporate entities. Rather than viewing them as persons or having personhood they should be viewed the same way one views the abominations of a Lovecraftian horror. They are creatures that exist abstractly and even to begin to perceive them in their true forms fundamentally alters the mind away from the natural reasoning of a human. Their machinations are unknowable in their entirety and their goals are not always anthropomorphic. One might consider that the shareholders or the board of a corporation are ultimately responsible for its decisions but that is like saying the neurons in a person’s brain are responsible for their decisions. It is doubtless true but reveals little about the actual person. The same way the cells of the body come together to form a whole person without ever arguably being able to engage with or understand that they do form that person the workers and owners of a corporation form an 3entity that they will never be able to engage with directly. It is why the law imposes fiduciary duties on board members. Because the corporation cannot speak to any individual piece that makes it any more than I can directly talk to my own cells and these duties prevent the entities constituents from becoming cancerous to it. While it may yet still seem farfetched to claim that a corporation literally does exist as a result of the law, is that more farfetched than selling your time to that corporation? If the corporation is not literally real then where does a someone’s time go when they spend all of those hours working for it? Obviously not to that person because then they’d be working for themselves. That person feeds their time, their energy, their hopes, their dreams and nearly everything they hold dear to that corporation but the corporation doesn’t actually exist. What is to be said of a world where a person can give all that they are into nothing? Certainly we would call this madness. But even then we are simply led back to the Lovecraftian description of the corporation and its impact on those who engage with it. One pours their blood sweat and tears into the void and while it would be an emotionally satisfying to say that the void isn’t there the apparent absence of all the effort poured in is evidence that something is there. If that void were not there to speak of then all that was poured into it would also be there. Likewise it is evident that corporations do exist because something seems to be draining humanity of all its energy and productivity. Something is eating the planets resources at a rate that no mere organism could. One might say humans could do that but as stated before humans are the to corporations as cells are to the human. Individual cells could not do what the entire human could and you could have as many cells in the human body as you would like but they all only move when the greater human acts intentionally. This means that corporations the wretched conglomeration of human activity and productivity are inevitable. The horrific conclusion of a Lovecraftian story is that the eldritch creatures pulling the strings of society are unavoidable and cannot be defeated by humanity. In the Lovecraftian lens this is because they are like natural disasters. Devastating though they may be they are merely a part of life that are simply beyond the control of mankind. But I will take it a step further still. The corporate entity is not merely a force of nature mankind must contend with but rather it is the human nature of any group that grows to be a size large enough to have that complexity. The corporate creature awakens at some point after enough human mass and activity comes about and it begins to consume all that there is to consume. The only choice on the individual level for humans is whether to be part of the entity or to go off the grid. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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