Join the new world

The Strange Disappearance of Phoenix Quinn


Prison Notebooks of Phoenix Quinn, part 6



This here is based on explorations into the voluminous scrapbooks, scribblings, paste-ups, cut-ups and what may even be a little bit of throw-up discovered by this writer while cleaning up some of the grand mess found at the SFP's secret undersea lair. Which, by the way, is secretly located somewhere off the coast of Australia, possibly in the direction of Tasmania, but possibly otherwise. I'm not entirely sure. And of course even if I was sure, I wouldn't tell.


The thing of it is... I kind of just woke up there one day. Spent quite a bit of time there, actually. I discovered PQ's Prison Notebooks and had plenty of time to look through them before Jimmy Cincinnati showed up one day in a yellow socialist submarine.

I hitched a ride with him to my new home in Washington State and here I am.

Anyway. Based on puzzling together a pastiche of PQ's think-pieces, marginal notes, doodles and the occasional taped-together montage of magazine photos, I've come up a trail of breadcrumbs leading up to abrupt transformation of Phoenix Quinn into Silas Soule, followed by his subsequent disappearance.





By the way. Turns out, among other somewhat unexpected oddities, PQ was a huge Gram Parsons fan.




An early article by Phoenix Quinn consisted entirely of a short list of mild Hungarian epithets. Things like: "Az egy nagy marha." and "Te fasz!". Its original intention was obviously to supply eUSAnians with amusing ammunition for tweaking the noses of their occupiers.

But according to his marginal notes, it turned out better than PQ expected. Got a bunch of votes, many of them from Hungarians. Turned out that a lot of players kind of dug it when things got a bit sweary.

Based on that success, subsequently PQ often injected a wee bit of shit-slinging into his strange spiels. Just to spice things up a bit.






Beginning with an unpublished piece called "Dialectical Mechanism", but echoed afterwards in published articles, Quinn alluded, in his typically oblique and mysterious way, to a "ludic fallacy" inherent in eRepublik.

"Ludic" is from the Latin word "ludus", meaning "game". His reference was to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2010 best-selling book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, where Taleb described the ludic fallacy as "the misuse of games to model real-life situations".

One skates on thin ice when trying to make a definitive statement about the meaning of a Quinnicism. But I'll go out on a limb and guess that he was getting at a two-fold observation. At the surface level, the "ludic fallacy" remarks are a criticism of players, but even more so of game designers, who take the nationalistic aspects of the game seriously.

From what is hinted at in the Notebooks, Quinn had a deep appreciation for games as learning devices. His deeper concern seemed to be that eRepublik is not only a bad simulation, but a bad teacher. And, for a philosopher, bad in the worst possible way -- not just bad in the sense of low-skilled, but bad in the sense of ethically challenged.

He always seems to have had a somewhat troubled relationship to the game, which evidently never lived up to his initial expectations of it.









It is obvious that PQ was a player older than average. He was probably even older than Franklin Stone, the Cold-Hearted Snake, who as we all know is older than spit. On the latest incarnation of the SFP Forum, Quinn listed his birth-date as March 28th, 1871. Astute reds and revolutionaries in the audience will recognize that as Day 1 of the Paris Commune.

So. Probably not his real birthday. I'm guessing.

We find in the Notebooks at least one claim that he was one of the founders of the RCYB (a Maoist youth gang) in 1977. There are also several jokes and side-notes about "Joey" in the Notebooks, which seem to be references to his friendship with "Joey Johnson", an RCYBer who became famous for burning American flags. Casual references to the Moody Park Rebellion of 1978 in Houston, to The Clash concert at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin in 1979, and various notes regarding the late-70s Austin punk rock scene are peppered throughout his scribblings.

There is also the evidence of PQ's often-freely-expressed antipathy to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. All of which indicates that he was probably well into his college/young radical career by the mid-to-late '70s. Which means that he was probably into his 60's by the time he disappeared from eRepublik.






On these long winter evenings, as I ponder the coming winter, which they say will be harsh one, I keep coming back to pondering PQ's revelations about being a Maoist when he was a teenager or in his early twenties. It strikes me that much of the reason PQ focused his attention on the SFP was -- perhaps -- a kind of working-out of an internal dialog.

He had clearly abandoned the Maoist milieu by the early 80s, long before starting to play eRepublik. But much of his writing, if you take the time to decode it, turns on a kind of post-Marxist analysis that grafts large elements of anarchist, left-libertarian, commons-oriented, social-ecology and even buddhist thinking onto a more or less classic Marxist-Maoist take on both classes and the world situation.

I expect he was chasing some kind of "calico bonnet" the whole time. And that his real interest was never really in eRepublik itself. Rather, it was riding the long, strange trip known as the SFP through a series of thought experiments that intrigued him.







PQ e-publically obfuscated his relationship to drugs and alcohol. He often played the stoner, made jokes about drinking and hallucinogenic substances, and so on. In fact, as is obvious in his journal entries, he had become a stone-cold tee-totaller several years before he started playing eRepublik, after a substantial struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction. It seems that he even quit smoking cigarettes for good while playing eRep.

So it's interesting to surmise whether PQ's long-running obsession with eRep was, in some weird way, a kind of substitution for, or perhaps a working-out-of, his previous chemical addictions.

We'll probably never know for sure.







In an extraordinarily long 2010 essay that wandered through Kant, ethics, realness, economics, ludic conceits, Habermas' criticisms of Schmitt's neo-fascist existentialism, cosmopolitanism, pragmatism, the limits of tolerance, the problems with "militant democracy" and the difficulties and joys of cross-cultural communications, PQ eventually quotes Brecht putting words into Galileo's mouth: "Pity the land that needs heroes." and then goes on at some length about languages that provide for a "familiar" form of "you", like "tu" in Spanish.

He finally ends up by claiming that the ability to create "friends" in eRep is the only possible means to invoke, in some tiny way, the spirit of the widespread world-wide anti-war demonstrations of 2003, which he considers to have been the most important event, thus far, of the 21st century. An event which Habermas had summarized with the words: "Make no mistake, the normative authority of the United States lies in ruins."

He ends, somewhat oddly, but in a clear echo of the "ludic fallacy" theme, by arguing for a revisionist understanding of the 19th-century American pragmatist philosopher, Charles Pierce, drawing an analogy to buddhist epistemology, which prefers to simply treat metaphysical questions as irrelevant, to be neither condemned nor embraced, and put an emphasis instead on the consequences of actions (or non-actions).

The "add as a friend" option has no real direct impact on any game mechanics. It is simply for pleasure, to allow the players to "hear" one another more clearly.









The next really profound piece appeared a year or so later: "The Will to Disappearance". This was an overt step into guerilla ontology and chaos linguistics, a pastiche on Hakim Bey's anarchist screed from the 1990s on "Temporary Autonomous Zones". It was devoted to a couple of player-comrades who had left the game.

The essay went on at some length about "a strategy of disappearance from th e-Social" and it offered a critique of "morbid deathfreak nihilistic interpretations of revolutionary theory".

The essay first recommends an attitude of all-around e-refusal, including:
* Voluntary illiteracy by refusing to even recognize any "meta" rules
* Disdain for voting as a ridiculous exercise in boredom
* Refusing to "work", promoting alternative schemes like "donation farming" instead
* Refusing to "believe", not only be rejecting play religions like "Dioism" but also by opposing the use of casual "soft porn" images as a form of "fun", encouraging sexiness of free spirits as opposed to the "dull regurgitations of botoxed, plasticine Real Hollywood styles"
* Encouraging homelessness. "Be an e-hobo"
* Refuse to be straight. "oedipal misery lies at the heart of control"
* Refuse to embrace e-Art, refuse all mediation. Instead seek out the difficult path of being truly creative.


PQ concluded that "the only solution ... lies in the emergence of autonomous , common, communal, constitutional, egalitarian, equal, free, friendly, individualistic, informal, just, libertarian, orderly, popular, populist, self-ruling, socialist zones. Such are the only possible 'time' and 'place' for art to happen for the sheer pleasure of creative play. ... not only beyond Control, but beyond definition, beyond gazing, beyond naming, beyond the understanding of both Plato and the e-State. It exists in a time and place beyond their ability to see."


Yeah. I had same thought as you. Pretty zen, right?








For many years, PQ more or less cruised through eRepublik, pretty much repeating the same basic themes outlined above, in one form or another, without ever really attempting to "be" an active player.

Shortly before his disappearance, the character Phoenix Quinn transformed into Silas Soule, a 19th century US Army officer who refused to shoot Native Americans and was later murdered, probably by the officer whose orders he had refused.

This transformation occurred during the stand-off at Standing Rock, at just about the time a group of US military veterans had joined the resistance camp, declaring their solidarity with the Lakota Sioux and against the pipeline.

Shortly after that, as it became evident that the Orange Cheeto was going to be the Republican candidate, and that the neo-liberal Democrats were imploding under the weight of their own devotion to the oligarchy, Quinn/Soule effectively self-immolated, his account and his articles going up in the proverbial e-smoke.







So. My guess is that PQ's disappearance was not so strange after all. In fact, it was long overdue.

He eventually realized that he had successfully worked out, thanks to eRepublik, and in particular via the supportive community around the Socialist Freedom Party, his various psychological and philosophical challenges.

Once he had finally developed a convincing world-view, one that centers on efforts at horizontal mutualism, on a kind of devotion to construction of a social-ecology which can be, indeed, must be, built outside of any state-centered politics, but is fully aware of the role of the commons and the agency of home and family in the most profound sense, and which does not fall into the errors of vulgar neo-liberalism or moronic Randian-libertarianism, then he saw that this kind of vision would never be able to fit into the eRepublik mold.

And so he was done. Simple as that.





It seems.