The Founder: Articles of Incorporation

I've wanted to make a video game for a while now, and I've finally started working on one in the past few months. It's called The Founder and it is a dystopian business simulator. In this game, you play an entrepreneur with your sights set on becoming the next disruptive innovator dreaming up a company that will bravely push the world into a new, brighter future.

Dystopian fiction is great. But so many of these works plop the reader in some ambiguously distant future and start things from there. The progression to that point, say, from our own historical moment, is far more interesting to me. It's more startling to see how our current systems, values, and ways of thinking which intuitively feel like they make sense gradually move us towards a world none of us would have ever conceded to.

Technosolutionism as a perspective has a lot of innate appeal to it - how nice would it be if our ills could be easily solved by a simple engineering feat or a new scientific breakthrough, neatly packaged into some product or service? Of course, such a perspective neglects the fact that, while technology is marvelous and certainly has the potential to solve many hard problems, not all problems can be solved by it, and even for those that it can solve, technology is only ever realized in a social context. Technology takes on the values of the environment in which it was nurtured: if developed under the logic of business interests, it comes with or flourishes as new modes of control. We've already seen in forms both technological - DRM and deep packet inspection, for instance - and legal - DMCA, SOPA/PIPA, net neutrality, for instance.

Those examples (I reckon) are universally acknowledged as bad ideas. Things get more interesting when you realize many lauded consumer products and services are just as nefarious, if not more so for their insidious nature.

As a few examples: Uber force workers to abide by unfair contracts under the guise of economic independence (among many of their other transgressions), AirBnB destabilize rent prices and undercut affordable housing while pumping an ad campaign to convince residents otherwise, and Google, Facebook, Twitter, Comcast, Time Warner, etc. are (of course) influencing government policy through lots and lots of lobbying, ostensibly for our benefit.

The Founder takes this world - our world - starting from a decade or two ago, and plots out a possible, if exaggerated, trajectory. How is the promise of technology captured and expressed when borne out of the businesses' relentlessly growth-oriented, profit-seeking logic? What does progress look like in a world obsessed with growth as measured by sheer economic output rather than metrics of well-being?

Like any good power-fantasy game, you are at the center of it! The Founder puts players into the shoes of someone who has bought into techno-capitalist logic and lets them loose in a fictional universe. The player will be instrumental in the progression to an unsavory future; a progression which will (ideally) feel disturbingly rational under the logic of the game. Winning in The Founder means shaping a world in which you are successful - at the expense of it being a dystopia for almost everyone else. It's not what you set out to do as the Founder, but that is what manifests from the definitions of short-term success within the game. Although The Founder brings it to levels of absurdity, I'm hoping the parallels between the preposterous world of The Founder and our own are clear.