Step into my Office
I keep waiting for the carpet to be pulled from under my feet. In fact, I’ve accepted that some day there’s going to be an email in my inbox pushing me out of this country. Afterall, I’ve been receiving countdowns for my “papers, please” over the past two years. There are multiple reasons why being an international person in the USA feels hostile. But one of the associated limitations is the fact that I can never truly do all that I want to. My job has to match a list of criteria for it to be acceptable – hours, pay, skills, field. It casts a narrow net for places that are suitable. So I can never go into the mountains and inhabit my tree-like dreams.
“Papers Please” is a puzzle simulation video game by Lucas Pope. Set in a fictional country, Arstotzka 1, you play as an immigration officer at the border. The game captures how the monotony of decision-making erodes your capacity for empathy. A game mechanic to illustrate this is that players are given 3 chances to let illegal immigrants in before they are punished. Some people play to the objective of the game, they are calculating and don’t care about the three chances. They are more focused on making no ‘mistakes’. Others recognise the three chances as an opportunity to give the downtrodden a better life. I wish I fell into the second category but I was making too many genuine errors that there was no room for the calculated faux pas. I turned a husband away even as he begged me to let him in because he had spent all his money to get his wife a passport last week. A wife who I let into Arstotzka (“Glory to Arstotzka”) in a previous level. No one warned me that pixel art could hurt. I fear I am the same way in life – that I lose the opportunities to take risks2 simply by having made too many mistakes already.
Most work that I find exciting is often categorised as esoteric and “unhirable”. It is also not well paid; existing in academic spaces, residencies, or fellowships. However, my visa checklist further disqualifies me from a lot of these opportunities forcing me to pursue these embers of interest in purely unpaid capacities. The myth of the artist perpetuates that my art should feel my soul (yada yada) but the truth is I still need some fuel. So in this unrelinquishing world, I have in fact been working a 9-5 life.
I initially wrote that I am fortunate enough to have a job that is pretty interesting, but that's not entirely true. I work as a creative technologist doing R&D at an interaction design studio. If that sounds like a made up job, it’s mostly because it is. But in my case, the drawback to work that is fun is short term contracts and almost nonexistent benefits (I pay for my own healthcare and Claude subscription). But for living in New York, learning from cool people and getting to be creative, that seems like a small price to pay. That is, until I don’t get to be creative. I’ve spent the past week stuck in jumping IT hoops consisting of hours of staring at a screen. My frustration rises as I wait and I think about how much redundancy is there in big corporations. Meaningless jargon, complicated hierarchies and naming structures, ‘touch bases’ and bloody halloween contests (ok, the last one might be personal). In the crudest language, corporate America seems apathetic, incompetent and unchanging. As a person who can’t look away from the “Our World is on Fire” sign, so much of what happens within our cubicle confines seems like wasted resources.
Luckily on most days, I don't feel like an apathetic, unrelenting rube but rather a creative person who needs to sometimes do uncreative tasks to stay afloat. But I more and more sympathize with the AI in the “Universal Paperclips” by Frank Lantz who decided that humans were actually pretty inefficient in the paperclip production chain and just eliminated them. Even though I feel so dispensable at my workplace that a paperclip AI would remove me from the pipeline instantly. It just feels that we’re all embedded so deep in our web of systems that only outside influence can snap us out of our corporate trance. It's similar to the book I just read “Psalm for the Wild Built” by Becky Chambers, where it was only when there was a robot uprising that the humans learnt to live harmoniously with the rest of their world.
Well anyways, the existence of AGI is already too fraught for that to be my Plan A. So when I get especially pessimistic, I turn to art as my refuge. Whether it's a good book or a puzzle game, art can rejuvenate me (I’m sure this holds true for a lot of you too!) Because art can also snap us out of our systems. I’ve been thinking about the photographer Lee Miller a lot this week. Her photography during WW2 shed light on the atrocities happening in Germany. Her most striking image is one of her washing the dirt from the camps in Hitler’s bathtub. Her work was featured in Vogue, in 1945, under the blaring headline “BELIEVE IT.” 3 This is an extreme example of intervention, but our world needs extreme right now. I just can’t help feeling like we’re all living in denial right now, refusing to see the forest for the trees. The burning forest, might I add.
One of my only gripes with this incredible game is the setting. By placing itself in the post Cold War Soviet Union coded landscape, it distances itself from a much realer parallel: America in all its “Let's build a wall glory”.↩
For my non year of the blog friends, here’s Meg’s blog on Risk which is a better, more optimistic take.↩