For me, blogging and getting interested in politics came about the same time. My ideas and outrage at the way the world was going seemed to find an outlet in a blog that was originally meant to be a news source for my writer’s website. And as such, I have a soft spot for online activism.
The Internet is a rapidly growing medium and the media is seeing a shift in the way we read news. Slowly, the profit-hungry media corporations are losing a grip on the monopoly of news and knowledge that they hold so important to keeping the political current flowing in their direction. Blogs and independent online journalists seem to be gaining a hearing amongst those looking for alternative sources of news and increasingly, online gaming has even been tapped into by a dedicated band of activists looking to get their message heard.
One such activist is Joseph DeLappe, who has intervened into a multiplayer military simulator, America’s Army with the pseudonym ‘dead-in-iraq.’ America’s Army is an online multiplayer game funded by the U.S. Pentagon with the aim of recruiting gamers into the army to fight a war DeLappe is against.
As soon as he enters the game, he enters a command to drop his weapon and as an allusion to the cannon fodder that civilians are turned into in Iraq, he offers himself to be killed with no means of defence. Then, as the session continues, he begins to type names of the 3,500 American soldiers that have been killed in Iraq since Bush invaded on the basis of lies. He has taken screen shots and posted them to his website to record his protest.
The unique intervention manages to piss off a lot of right-wing gamers as they’re confronted with the names of people who’ve been economically drafted to die for their fucked cause. But it also confronts those who’ve been sucked into the idea that this is all just a game and sucked into going into the real deal, killing real people and risking their real life.
It’s the ability of reaching people online and making a connection to the real world that makes DeLappe’s intervention so powerful. Also, for other anti-war activists and those against the war, it’s inspiring to hear that activism can find outlets in so many creative ways and that it might inspire others to get active.
