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NPR's Book of the Day
‘How a Game Lives,’ ‘How to Save the Internet’ show the best and worst of life online
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The Internet can be a very, very, very bad place, full of bad actors and dark deeds. But it can be a genuinely beautiful place too, where people earnestly share their wonder. That's the theme of today's episode. We'll do kind of a Dickensian best of times, worst of times. Look at the Internet. In a bit, we'll hear from Nick Clegg, former president of global affairs at Meta, about his book how to Save. That's the bad stuff, but let's start with the good. I spend a lot of time on YouTube watching video essays. It's where some of the most cutting edge documentary filmmaking is happening. Cultural critic Jacob Geller is a big video essayist, mainly about video games, but about other stuff too. And he's compiled some of these essays in a book titled How a Game Lives. His conversation with Hear Now Scott Tong.
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After the break, support for NPR and the following message come from Warby Parker, the one stop shop for all your vision needs. They offer expertly crafted prescription eyewear plus contacts, eye exams and more. For everything you need to see. Visit your nearest Warby Parker store or head to warbyparker.com this message comes from Progressive Insurance. Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
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If you are looking for smart commentary on culture and the arts, where do you go? Surely the Last place is YouTube. Right may be wrong One of the.
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Great joys of getting older and marginally wiser is going back to old favorite media and discovering new aspects of it.
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That is writer Jacob Geller. He's 30 and he makes these long thinky video essays for YouTube on art and literature, on movies and video games. He's even posted semi deep thoughts on deep holes and why some of us are obsessed with digging them.
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It's this immediacy between action and result that I think makes digging a hole so appealing. You take a shovel full of dirt out of the ground and you can immediately see your impact on the world.
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Geller has a new book out that puts his video essays in old school printed form. It's called How a Game Lives and Jacob Geller joins me now. Welcome.
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Hi Scott.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Good to have you. Your medium to share your views on games and life and culture is the video essay. So to illustrate, let's play some audio from your most popular video essay on YouTube. It's called Fear of Cold. And this is you describing your experiences trying to survive in a video game called Frostpunk.
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As the temperature plummeted further and further below zero, I realized that I had knocked over the first domino hours before without even thinking about it. As I scrambled to keep my city at a livable temperature, forsaking all other resources and every standard of civilization in the face of that white death, I had a sudden flashback to a story I heard as a kid.
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So that's really interesting.
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Right.
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You are connecting something happening in a video game with a childhood memory. Is that something important you're trying to do here? Collapse the boundary between digital life and real life?
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I think so. It would not be uncommon in a movie review to reference a book that the movie seems like it's building upon or reference, you know, an artistic movement when you're talking about an architectural style. And video games are very new and haven't had a chance to be put into those conversations as often. But it's one of my favorite things to do to show that they are also part of this giant conversation about art that we're all having.
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Yeah, so in this particular essay, just kind of. Right. Understand the Jacob Geller brain in Fear of Cold. What are you trying to say with this essay?
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So the place that the essay starts is with the short story To Build a Fire.
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Right. Jack London, a lot of us have read it.
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Yeah, I think a lot of people have. And I certainly had this moment of first reading it and being so kind of petrified by the writing itself and him just so viscerally capturing what it means to be cold and. And from there just kind of going into other places to stories of actual adventurers and also the Shining, you know, like, what do these all have in common? What are they talking about when they're talking about the cold?
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Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting, many of our listeners, they've engaged this kind of cultural commentary criticism through old school ways, I'll call it.
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Right.
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Nonfiction books, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, or novels by John Updike or Tom Wolfe, or documentaries by Michael Moore, perhaps on video games, which is often where your essays start. So for many of the rest of us, how do games help you explore these big questions?
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What I find so interesting about games is they are incredibly good at making you feel a specific feeling. That's what we're looking for from anything, I think, you know, if I'm watching a movie, I want to feel something. But games have so many different tools. Most games have a narrative of some sort, but also games have mechanics. They have specific ways that they make you interact with the world. And so, for instance, the game that we heard about earlier, Frostpunk, is a survival game where it's asking you to portion out coal and wood and food in an attempt to survive a freeze. And you're having to make decisions in a way that you can't do in a book. And it makes it really interesting to analyze.
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Yeah. Where does the kernel of an essay come from? I wonder if you have, for instance, of where you started with something and then you started to aggregate film, literature, the Simpsons, whatever.
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Right. I give the advice that I'm looking for the smallest possible thing that catches my interest. A really challenging thing with games is they're so big, it's hard to know where to start. But earlier this year, I made a video that was literally titled a video about digging a hole.
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I've seen part of that.
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Yeah, yeah.
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No, it includes a game. It includes the famous scene from Shawshank Redemption. Right. The most famous prisoner hole in the world. It's a good example of all these different mediums that you're pulling in here.
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Yeah, yeah. And the. The origin of that was there was just a game titled a game about digging a hole, and it really wasn't much more complicated than that pitch. Still, it got a grip on me. Where was. When I wasn't playing, I would think about digging a hole and made me think about this larger question of, like, why are we compelled to. And then you can find, you know, news stories of people just digging holes in their backyard for no reason. And it's fun to kind of consider, why do some of us have this urge?
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You know, you once wrote blogs, in the introduction of your new book, you write that in the past, your pieces, quote, couldn't break containment. They were contained in a space. How do you think about trying to reach as many people out there in as many ways as possible?
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Us on YouTube spend a lot of time bemoaning the algorithm, which is kind of the machine that determines whether an audience gets to see a video or not. There are many negative aspects of that that we've seen, ways that it can kind of cause political radicalization and all of this. But something that is actually, you know, kind of amazing about it is it has allowed me to make these things that seem incredibly specific and then find that actually a lot of people have the same niche, specific interests. You know, when I was first writing blogs, the only people that would See, those blogs were people who were already following me for some reason.
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Yeah.
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But YouTube did make it possible for me to write a video about the cold or about digging a hole and suddenly somehow determine that actually this is a video that hundreds of thousands of people would like to watch.
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So now we're talking to you in part because you have a book out, so why come back to the ancient technology of the physical book?
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It seems like a regression, right? To go from the amazing, sparkly world of YouTube to books. When the Internet started, we kind of talked about it as, oh, my gosh, the Internet is forever. And a kind of alarming trend that we've seen is that that is not the case. And especially in, you know, in the world of games writing. So many websites have gone bankrupt and all of their archives have just disappeared. And so by kind of making this book, I can archive my work, and I can also make it more beautiful. I can, you know, include art. I can go back and look at the ways that my thoughts have changed. But it really is this feeling of anything digital kind of slipping through our fingers if we're not actively trying to preserve it.
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Your book is called How a Game Lives, and you've noticed that there are many ways a game, maybe kind of like a video, can die, Right. It can be delisted by a store online. A once popular online game can vanish from servers overnight. Kind of same thing you're talking about. How do you hope your work here can preserve in this age when things come and go?
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I think some of the most important records of art that we have is how people respond to it at the time. It is wonderful to see a painting, but it's even more wonderful to understand what that painting meant when it was first unveiled, what people's reactions were to Impressionism or to Cubism or anything. And games are very much the same way. Where modern games are built on the back of old games. It's a very iterative medium. But if we aren't able to remember what people were talking about when those first things came out, then we end up just kind of having the same conversations over and over. And so what I really want to preserve is this idea that people have always been talking about games as art and treating games as art. And if we can remember that, then we can kind of move forward in the way that we think about them and analyze them.
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That's Jacob Geller, video essayist and author of the new book How a Game Lives. It's in Bookstore starting November 19th. Jacob, very good to talk to you. Thank you so much.
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It was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for having me. This message comes from Schwab.
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Alright, onto the bad. There's a lot wrong with the Internet, but there are no simple fixes. Nick Clegg knows that. He was high up at Meta as the company tried to navigate questions of censorship, geopolitics, free speech and more. His book is titled how to Save the Internet. Here's npr.
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Steve Inske, our next guest, has had a career like few others. Nick Clegg was deputy prime minister of the UK and then became president of global affairs at Meta, a close aide to company Mark Zuckerberg. He's now written of his experience in a book called how to Save the Internet. Clegg left Meta at the start of this year, just as Zuckerberg and other tech leaders were heading to President Trump's second inauguration.
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Many of them, of course, lined up in front of the members of the cabinet, so it was as if the tech leadership of Silicon Valley was being given greater priority than the political leadership of the new administration.
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At almost the same time, Meta decided to abandon fact checking on social media posts, aligning with an admin that disliked it. Clegg says he understands the tech world's sudden shift to Trump after years when they seem to favor Democrats or despised politics altogether.
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And I guess that's partly driven by the fact that a lot of these big companies are in a bit of an existential competition with each other on AI. So of course, in that context, if you see your neighbour or the leader of your most competitive opponent in Silicon Valley beating a path to mar a Lago or Washington, D.C. in you think, oh well, I better do the same thing as well. I don't want to be left out. So I think there was a kind of FOMO thing going on where if one or two of them were doing that, they all ended up doing that.
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Is that why Meta shifted its stance on content moderation at that very moment?
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Well, I think it may have played a part of it. I think, to be fair, there is a Perception, which I don't think is wholly wrong, for what it's worth, that maybe the companies, including Meta, and even at my time at Meta, that maybe we overdid it a bit and we needed to pull back on some of that. And I. I don't think you can criticize the companies or criticize Meta for adjusting because it's not a science. And the boundaries of free expression versus content moderation have become a much more politicized subject in the last half decade or so. But I would have thought in the long run, it is in all of their interests not to embark on this kind of whiplash where they keep changing their stance depending on who's in the White House. In the long run, given the significance of these companies, I would have thought it's best for them to be able to kind of have a bit of a North Star themselves and stick to it, or stick roughly to it, rather than swinging, you know, like a yo yo from one side to the other.
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I'm thinking back to 2021, when Facebook and other social media platforms banned President Trump in the aftermath of the January 6th attacks. And I can remember thinking at the time, as a journalist, trying to understand this, okay, I get it, I understand why they did that. But, wow, do I really want a corporation to have that much power?
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Right?
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I mean, I could feel the dilemma then, looking back at it now, was Meta wrong to ban the president at that time?
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So I was very involved, in fact, I was instrumental and key in making that decision on behalf of, as it was then, Facebook. You get an uneasy feeling having an unelected entity, one of these tech companies, deciding that an outgoing president of the United States had forfeited the right to use Facebook's services. On the other hand, it is equally troubling to think that just because someone is powerful, they can violate the rules, because all of these companies, including Meta, have quite well established and well publicized content rules about what you can and can't do on the platform. I think many people felt at the time the circumstances were quite, quite exceptional. All the turbulence and unrest, and that was a principle which the company acted on at the time.
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So would you say you stand by that decision even today, even though the company ultimately backed off and paid the president for it?
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I believe in the circumstances at the time, it was a decision that I took and others took in the company for understandable reasons because content rules of Meta were violated. But I definitely feel very uneasy about the precedent that a decision like that set.
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For sure, you talk about democratic countries working Together to regulate the Internet. You call it a digital democracies alliance. What exactly is it that you want them to regulate, that is possible to regulate?
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At the moment, we're seeing the growing fragmentation, the balkanization of the Internet itself. And it's now, I think, colliding with the deglobalization of politics everywhere, whether it's Modi, whether it's Erdogan, whether it's Trump, whether it's Brexit, Governments everywhere are trying to reassert their own political sovereignty over things which otherwise escape their jurisdiction, notably the Internet, and that will increasingly lead to a fragmented Internet. So my assertion in the book is that if we want to preserve the openness of the Internet that we all take for granted, at least outside China, there has to be a deliberate decision by the three major techno democracies in the world, the United States, India, and Europe, in that sort of descending order of importance, to create new rules of the road, new guardrails, particularly pertinent to artificial intelligence, so that the openness, so open data flows, for instance, which are the main sort of arteries of the Internet, remain open in the years ahead, so that there is transparency in the way in which these AI models are assembled, so that science is shared across the democratic world. On how you invest in AI infrastructure and make it as sustainable as possible.
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I'm fascinated. Just now, if I understood you correctly, you ranked India as more important than the entire of Europe when it comes to Internet issues?
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I do, actually. I think that if India were to swing in a Chinese direction, if I can put it crudely like that, in other words, if Modi or whoever succeeds him were to decide, do you know what, India is easily big enough. It's the biggest democracy in the world. We can do what the Chinese have done, which is basically wall off the Internet and surveil people within the country. I think if that were the case, then the global Internet as we know it would basically be dead. So it's one of the reasons why I think the mishandling of Modi by this Trump administration seems so spectacularly misjudged, because driving Modi into the embrace of his erstwhile opponent, Xi Jinping. If I was in the State Department now, that would send a real chill down my spine, I tell you, because if India aligns with China in the AI age, then US Leadership will, over time, erode.
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This is a mischievous way to put the question, but I'll do it. Are you then an Internet globalist?
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Yes, I am. Unapologetically so.
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Nick Clegg. Is the author of how to Save the Internet. Thanks so much for your time.
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Thank you.
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And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think you can write to us at Book of the day@npr.org I'm Major Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and Ivy Buck and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Meyer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by John Ketchum, Avery Keatley, Adriana Gallardo, Ana Perez, Lindsey Totty, Michael Radcliffe, Dee Purvaz, Sarah Handel, Natalie Winston, Lady Key Rose James, Masha Marino and Todd Mundt. Yolanda Sanguine is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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