Hi. I'm the developer of
Black Lives Matter. I suppose now that the flames have started to die down, I ought to stoke them.
As many of you have guessed, I'm not exactly the biggest Black Lives Matter supporter in the world. But I don't think of myself as a greedy opportunist either.
How many millions—billions?—of dollars have been spent fighting police brutality? Is it even possible to sum the value of all the man-hours spent peacefully protesting, the property damage inflicted by violent rioters, and the negative mental energy that's distracted the rest of us from leading healthy, productive lives for weeks on end every time this crops up? All for what? A chance at preventing a handful of shootings a year?
It isn't even clear that these anomalies are motivated by racism.
Right around this paragraph is typically where I'd say "Of course there are issues with systemic injustice in our country. Of course I disavow the racist Steam reviews." But offering an olive branch of understanding to those I agree with 95% of the time still won't stop them from coming up with the least charitable interpretation of what I'm saying here, so let's not waste breath stating the obvious.
This is the issue with woke politics. They insist that one has a responsibility to check their privilege and help improve society, but they stop halfway and only focus on a tiny subset of American political issues rather than looking at actual problems in the world at large. Point out that if we truly care about black lives, then we should mainly be fighting malaria rather than police brutality, and you're part of the problem. Who cares about oppressed women in the Middle East when Princess Peach is setting a bad example for girls in San Francisco? What are you, a bigot?
(That's to say nothing of how they hold people who lived hundreds of years ago to the same moral standards as us, while failing to recognize their own blindspots that future generations will judge them for. If you're mad at your ancestors for being racist, just wait until your grandkids find out that you fed children factory-farmed meat cooked in soybean oil and packaged in disposable plastic containers.)
What would our world look like if people
actually cared? It's a moot question; if there's anything the civilizational failures of 2020 have proven, it's that people
don't care. No one wants to entertain weird ideas like universal basic income or a looming pandemic; no one wants to make a genuine effort at improving their reasoning ability or becoming a more empathetic person; all they want to do is argue about the latest internet drama.
I'm not an idiot; I knew exactly what would happen when I put this game on Steam. The reviews would get flooded, giving social justice advocates the perfect opportunity to signal how
appalled they are by "racist gamers," as if a few 4channers writing deliberately offensive comments is indicative of some sort of deep-seated cultural issue. Youtubers would make videos about how pandering this game is, journalists would write articles about how problematic the comments are, debates would rage on Twitter—and meanwhile, 3000 black children would continue to die of malaria every day, with no one caring.
So much free energy, wasted on fueling the perpetual outrage machine. Energy that could otherwise be directed towards actually making the world a better place.
So I decided to capture some of it.
It's like Taleb says: “The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.”
This isn't the first game I've released on Steam, but it is the fastest-selling; this little timer that took me five minutes to code blew up more than some of my multi-year projects. And I don't intend on squirreling away the profits for my own consumption; this is only Step 1 in a very, very elaborate plan. There's a lot of
actual work to be done in this world, and those of us who have lived lucky lives have a responsibility to get started, as opposed to just virtue signalling about it.
If you don't trust a random developer on Steam with your money—which, at this point, I wouldn't blame you for—and you want to make a real positive difference in the world, I'd encourage you to donate to the
Against Malaria Foundation, which is typically thought to be the single most effective charity there is. If you really want to go above and beyond, read the
80,000 Hours Career Guide.
And if you'd like to cast a small vote against performative woke politics and outrage culture: buy my game. 💲
Thanks for playing,
