Paul Mason, gone but not forgotten….just why did the BBC employ this man as a senior political editor?
What was it about his juvenile politics that so enriched our lives, that enlightened and educated us about the world?
Paul Mason, lover of anarchists, Occupy and Communism….and the Internet.
Perfect for the BBC with its studied neutrality on all subjects. Just a shame Mason let his personal views contaminate every film and report he produced.
Here is a reminder of just why the old Trots at the BBC loved him so much:
How computer games can help us overthrow capitalism
The challenge is to design a game where instead of being a badass in LA, you can be a goodass on a communal farm
What I am proposing is something different. What if, just as in an Occupy camp, where they try to “live despite capitalism”, you could live “despite” the property forms and voracious market economics of a computer game?
What if you could choose to play any of these games without trying to gain wealth through conquest, violence or the mercantile capitalist strategy of buying cheap and selling dear? What if you could pursue a strategy to create things collaboratively, outside the market, and give the basic necessities of life away for free? Would you be able, singly or in groups, to screw the slash-and-grab economy so badly that you forced it into a transition state beyond destructive competition?
The challenge is to design a game where the economy can evolve: from competition to collaboration. Where instead of being a badass in LA, you can be a goodass on a communal farm in Andalusia.
As a fan of the game, I’d like the opportunity to do something radically different: #OccupyTamriel anyone?
He’s completely lost it hasn’t he?
Sadly missed, if only for entertainment value.
One of his thoughts:
Information goods undermine economic systems based on scarcity. Free, collaboratively made products, like Wikipedia potentially, kill commercial products in their market. Open source products – even when commercialised, like the Android system that runs on 70% of all new smartphones – can reduce the market share of closed, proprietary products.
So open source information can undermine the capitalist system?
Yeah right…tell that to Microsoft which opened up its code to software developers and took over the world.
Good old Mason. ‘Right on’ but never right….and Android? Apple still dominates because it has the massive apps store….a closed proprietary system ruling the world and making billions.
Love to know how these people actualy get jobs anywhere. It would not involve turning up to an interview to COMPETE with other applicants, WOULD IT!!!!!!!!!!!
I wonder if the generous pension Comrade Mason will get from the BBC will be collectable at
50 ?
55 ?
60 ?
65 ?
And if it will be greather than mine? Also I would like to know his total asset value please; because he clearly needs to lead us “beyond authority” and BY EXAMPLE.
He must prove that he is not a hypocrit by handing it ALL over to a revolutionary committee of selfish self righteous middle class leftist tossers like Occupy. I’m sure that they will use it wisely on their metamorphosis from the juvenile ‘undergraduate grunge’ stage to their disgusting fully fledged smug Adult form – public sector / media sector leftist on 60K+ for doing FA with three ‘exceptional’ children, one of whom is called Cressida, who is praised by her parents for her consttant and piercing screams in pubs whilst you are tying to have a quiet pint…… (oops, seems that yesterday lunchtime has prejuduiced me a bit)
Lest we forget, the last time communists ‘decided’ that collective farms were a good idea millions were deliberately starved to death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Bet your bottom dollar that his BBC pension for his 11 year employment undermining the democracy I spent a 25 year military career protecting, will beat my £8,600 per annun reward.
As I recall he was… is a big Apple fan (not in a NY sense).
Must dig out his post on his collection of i-Ronyfailure toys, all doubtless uniquely funded, without which he could not properly coordinate fire extinguisher safety talks with his muse.
Yeah, but would you want to fly in a plane where the navigation software was open source, programmed by pasty faced teenagers in the mom’s basements?
As a medical programmer myself, I can tell you that there are plenty of software applications that would never get developed if it were left up to the open source movement, and you wouldn’t want their product even if they did develop it.
“As a medical programmer ”
—
It’s possible Obama may have a bit of freelance for you at the ‘mo.
Cool. I’m looking for a self-employment opportunity to avoid this “auto-enrolment” pension malarkey. My current employer is forcing me to start a new Scottish Widows pension because they won’t pay the employer contribution into my existing pension, which I am perfectly happy with.
Scottish Widows is owned by Lloyds TSB, one of the banks that collapsed and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer.
I hope you’re a more nuanced programmer than you are a historian.
Lloyds was stitched-up by one G. Brown, who conspired with its CEO to have it rescue HBOS – the cause of its demise.
The collapse of Lloyds says less about the bank per se than the megalomaniac hired hands who run shareholders’ assets as if they owned them and socialist fools who run the country in similar style.
Why would I need to be a historian? I was working for HBOS when it happened.
Nothing I said is factually wrong.
The computer games industry sells what sells – it is both a strength of the sector and a weakness as innovation is second fiddle to commercial appeal. But then that’s any market really.
What Comrade Mason has forgot, with the usual selective memory of the blinkered left, is that these sorts of games have been tried before – and the vast majority of them failed to sell.
Still if he feels he can pull it off (hoo hoo) then who’s to stop him? A Sim Commune is on it’s way. Swiftly followed by Sim Round-Up and the final game in the trilogy Sim Death Camp.
Thinking about this it is not such a bad idea – but you would have to get the ground rules down first. So, you start off by inheriting a farm from Uncle Twistleton-ffUckwit, the twenty-third Lord of Hypocrisy. Then you need followers. These can be won by persuading school friends of a similar bent, i.e. public or private school chums to join in. Oh and we must not forget the young idealistic women – they’ll be needed for the
rapesexual empowerment sessions. And perhaps a few serfs – a couple of Dave Sparts from the local Poly perhaps?Now the main game mechanic would need to be a balance between interminable meetings and votes on boycotting Israel and actual farm work. Do you have enough serfs to weed the fields or do you need to persuade one of the less good looking women to join in? After all choosing a corker from the
rapefeminist section might just piss off Tristan or Jonty and the level ofidle toffsComrade Directors mustn’t fall beneath 4 or you won’t have a quorum for the next vote. Incidentally, the votes are meaningless as nothing practical ever transpires from them but they must be had daily or the serfs will begin to realise what’s going on and get uppity.Hmm, this needs some more thought …
I lost 20k off my pension thanks to Gordon Brown (describing himslf as no longer a politician) who keeps grabbing the taxpayers money.
And try getting the Financial Ombudsman Service to do anything to help you. They also figure in the list of complete wastes of time.
If anyone want to make some serious and considered points about what to do with the BBC, you have an opportunity on John Redwood’s blog today.
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2013/12/08/funding-the-bbc/
‘What if you could choose to play any of these games without trying to gain wealth through conquest, violence or the mercantile capitalist strategy of buying cheap and selling dear?’
This juvenile evergreen student activist needs to be made to work for the rest of his life in the private sector ‘capitalist system’ that thus far has fed his very comfortable lifestyle. No, make that half of the rest of his life – the other half in Cuba.
Stick to northern soul Paul. The other half has got it on Sky+. She’s must have watched it scores of times. The revolution ? Ehh . Keep the faith !
This reads like a high-schooler’s project. Mason was an early-ish player of Second Life, and probably got jealous of people using its internal economy to earn real-life money. That’s how these things usually start. I bet he’s been fiddling around with Minecraft and Farmville, and came up with this cunning plan.
Everything’s free, just like in an Occupy camp? No, you blithering idiot. All that stuff was given to your darling Occupiers by people who bought it with their filthy capitalist lucre. No such thing as a free Occupy camp. This is utter madness, and I’m actually shocked the BBC’s flagship news program had somebody as an economics commentator who is this @#$%ing stupid. I mean, we all knew Mason was a screaming Leftoid extremist, but this is childish idiocy.
In any event, unfortunately for Mason, someone’s beaten him to it. There’s already a kids’ game like that for the iPhone.
This is the brain the BBC felt was good enough to be the economics expert on Newsnight. Come see the bias inherent in the system.
Now that his extremism is once again all out in the open, though, the challenge will be to demonstrate how Mason’s known personal ideology shows up in his reporting for the BBC. The line of defense we get is that, while any individual has personal opinions, professional Beeboids don’t let it color their work. They, we are told, leave their opinions at the door. This is not the case with Mason. There’s plenty of evidence on this blog already, if someone takes the time to collect it.
I’ll bet he’s tried to mine bitcoin. But I’ll also bet that if he ever had the power, he’d make ownership of bitcoin illegal.
I bet Mason does hate the whole concept. I’m still kicking myself I didn’t by some when it was $92 a few weeks ago. Like a dumbass, I was waiting with a friend to get one of those new ASIC machines before buying in. It was looking like they’d never ship, so I put it off. I’m a fool.
I was looking at them over a year ago and because the purchasing procedure is so intricate (to me, anyway) I just gave up. Kick myself? Not really, it’s like everything in life, the real stuff comes from hard work, not clever oneupmanship. But I suspect, just like all socialists, communists etc, Mr Mason really doesn’t want to be an ordinary pleb, he wants to be an elite pleb, with lots of power, influence and, most importantly, money.
Dunno what games comrad Mason likes playing but im quite happy saving humanity from aliens
Agreed – Quake II being the best FPS ever penned
I’ve always seen the collectivist Strogg , reshaping human beings to fit their twisted ends and attempting to re-engineer gravity to achieve victory , as cultural Marxists and the lone space marine as the embodiment of the free individual.
Perhaps comrade Mason sees it the same hence his frustration. After all if you cant stamp out human nature in the virtual world were can you?
I bet Mason objects to the economy in Assassin’s Creed as well. Plus hunting! Oh, the horror, a Beeboid’s nightmare.
As an avid gamer, the irony of Mason trumpeting games for “overthrow(ing) capitalism” when he recently tried to suggest it was nothing more than a forum for testosterone-fuelled teenage boys to exercise chauvinism is amazing. Not to mention that the videogames industry is worth billions.
Gone but sadly not forgotten.