Virtual Mad Cow Disease

FarmVille - Zynga

A Lesson In Socialism 101

Howdy Pardner -- it's old Synapse here and I'ma takin the bull by the horns... ok, so I no longer "drawl" so good. (Only when I'm tired, intoxicated, annoyed..or don't feel worth a poop.)

A hugely popular Facebook game by Zynga, Farmville, is making the rounds and is taking the internet by storm. I reluctantly admit to being suckered in by digital mad cow syndrome (This is where you spend hours waiting with bated breath for a Wandering Stallion, a Lonely Bull, an adorable Calf, a Lonely Grey Horse, etc... and snatch it up before ANYONE ELSE GETS IT...)
It's an enormous time waster, a new form of addiction, its just gotten so bad that rather than go into work today I stayed home to play it. Oh The Humanity!

At first glance, the game seems quite innocuous. You can have YOUR digital farm, the way YOU want it to be, YOU can make Farmville money...bla bla. The ins and outs are endless. From six patches of dirt and nothing else I expanded my own farm to a freaking monstrous 20x20 plantation. Then I noticed some game features that gave me pause for recollection. It's not all you think.

There are subtle nuances of communism woven through gameplay that are geared toward subconsciously getting the players to accept it (at least in Synapses' mind) You cannot fertilize your own crops. You have to get friends to do it, and you have to fertilize theirs. Buying the shit to build a Horse Stable is out of the question unless you whip out the credit card, as one lad in Great Britain had the foresight to do... racking his mother's card up to US$1400. You have to wait for others to send you a board here, a brick there, a nail here, and so on... that or just nab 10 Wandering Stallions. :)

The bonus system is most bothersome. If someone works to achieve a goal, say, reaching level 30, or building a structure, you can click to get a bonus in Farmville coins. (Thereby you get paid for someone else's work that YOU yourself did not do.) If you happen to breed a bull to a cow and the cow has a calf, forget about keeping it -- it goes to someone who did NOT do the breeding. See my point... wealth distribution at its finest. And should you go overboard in fuel hoarding, or claiming too many bonuses -- it CUTS YOU OFF. (Cap and trade, anyone?) The plowing of dirt, also costs Farmcoins (taxation of my plantation) and should you have the misfortune to run out of farmcoins... your activity grinds to a halt.

You wouldn't know just by looking at it... it looks to be good clean family fun. The music is simple, lulling, rhythmic and repetitive. Agriculture has been a mainstay of the American way of life, FOREVER. Yet what does the Bible say about old Scratch? Is he going to appear to you as he is, with horns on his head, a pitchfork, a tail, or whatever weird deformations that Lucifer has often been portrayed as? NO -- he's going to come up to you as an "Angel of Light...",AKA something attractive and pleasant. In other words, we just might be pulled down the primrose path toward no more capitalism by the ring being threaded through our noses.

"It's just a game" you say. Yea, that's true. You can play or you can not play. But IF you do choose to play (and I hope you find me on there and make me your neighbor, I can always use ONE MORE COW...) at least recognize the thing for what it is... a subtle conditioning toward the acceptance of Socialism. One of their favorite brainwashing techniques is as follows... they tell you a statement. Then get you to repeat it back to you. Then over and over again, back and forth. Repeat it often enough, then it becomes true. They WANT you to accept it every time they steal your wealth... over and over again, to redistribute it to the poor (although most of it goes into their pockets)

Perhaps the most troubling part of all this: You can buy Farmcash or Farm Coins, to make purchases with it... in essense, they not only gave us a way to be painlessly brainwashed into accepting the yoke of socialism, but in a sense we are paying for our own "reeducation", whether its our money or our time.

Well yipes! What do we do! OMG!!!

The answer is...

to take this red pill and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The answer lies in waking up and looking at all of the things bombarding us with open eyes. Television, radio, computer games, the Internet.... all of it.

And to answer your question, YES, I'm on pure air, although that might get cut off if my boss finds out the reason for my being absent. :)