Today my boyfriend introduced me to a short story from an old collection he picked up secondhand. It’s called “The Available Data on the Worp Reaction”. In the story a nonverbal child named Aldous Worp builds a machine out of parts gathered from a scrap-heap. Despite all common sense the seemingly-random parts fit together perfectly and in time the machine is finished. Aldous pulls a lever, and the entire contraption lifts three meters into the air. With the turn of a wheel, it lowers again to the ground. The child delights in demonstrating his creation to onlookers at first. However:
Finally, the importunities of the press could no longer be denied and early in the afternoon of the second day, telecasters arrived on the scene.
Aldous Worp surveyed them for a moment, then brought his invention back to earth. With a set look on his face, he climbed to its top, clambered down into its bowels and, in due course, reappeared with the ancient cogwheel. This he carefully placed in its original resting place in the chicken coop. Systematically, and in order of installation, he removed each part from his structure and carefully returned it to its original place in the original heap by the chicken coop.
I think a lot about how capitalism demands the monetization of every activity. Passions become jobs, hobbies become side hustles. If it can be leveraged for profit, it will be. Capitalism’s representatives, in the story, are the telejournalists. There’s money in a good story, but Aldous is having none of it. He didn’t build the machine so others can profit from his creation: he built it for his own inscrutable, personal reasons.
Seeing my enthusiasm for the story, my boyfriend introduced me to the Lemon Demon song “The Machine”. The premise is similar: someone builds a vast machine that does... nothing! Nothing at all! But, the song says, “the nothing that it does / negates the everything we know / because it's screaming "Just because!””. I think this speaks to a similar view of creation and invention as the Aldous Worp story. Capitalism has twisted the social fabric such that making something for any reason other than accomplishing a material purpose is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible and threatening, to the delicate status quo capitalism's built around itself. The notion that value can come in forms other than the material is anathema to the power structures built around the accumulation of material wealth.
I think that's part of what I like about roleplaying games. Roleplaying (at least with a private group and not an actual-play podcast etc) is an act of creation for creation's sake. The audience is limited to the creators. It doesn't need to serve a purpose external to the process, the process is the purpose of the activity.
