It was probably 1991, possibly in Skegness. I saw a game in the arcades that I loved playing. I can’t remember it’s actual name, but it was almost identical to Whack Attack.
I began having great holiday fun bashing these resurfacing heads, until a group of kids probably a few years older suddenly appeared, grabbing my hammer and taking over the game as my mum looked on helpless to stop them.
It was a case of who was the biggest and loudest and I came to recall this lesson at a later age after I began to develop my own political opinions.
It is beyond doubt that life increasingly feels Game-ified. From the smiley, angry face buttons to rate your shopping experience, to how we gain popularity as social media actors.
Yet, nowhere is this more evident than in how we engage in politics. ,
Anton Jäger has recently published a popular book called ‘Hyperpolitics’, in which he partially speaks about how organisational politics and the adjacent long term movements has been usurped by a tendency to swarm from one issue to the next, shout about it and then move to another.
This is what I’m calling Whack Attack politics. Instead of the heads popping up out of holes, it’s a fresh injustice or news scandal. A sea of heads pop up to scream injustice and denounce the baddie, only to move onto the next one in a week or so.
I do believe it comes from a genuine desire to live in a kinder more equal world but it blends with this hipster-ish tendency found on social media to be ahead of the game, with a finger always on the pulse of the latest good cause to fight.
I don’t pretend I am not guilty of indulging in this (after all, it’s quite hipster to reference Hyperpolitics right now). There’s this sense that if only I share something enough justice will be done.
But I am a firm believer that justice-seeking is just one part a genuinely progressive movement, which requires an ability to meet/see the opposition, sworn enemies or not, and importantly to have genuine faith that a better tomorrow is possible – something that in my experience hits you from the outside and can’t be willed into existence.
And this is what is really at play. A persuasive sense of powerlessness because we lack faith in a better tomorrow and don’t know what to properly do about this.
This leads us to Whack Attack politics, where justice becomes an endless game to find the next ‘baddie’ to blame, bashing one head with a mallet after another, in perpetuity.
