Okay, I have to get a confession out of the way — I am an avowed Jon Katz hater of many years. I first started ragging on Katz regularly when he was writing for Wired’s various online ventures, and followed him over to Slashdot where ripping Katz’s latest efforts is a sport.
The thing with Katz is not that he writes things I do not agree with or that he is not a particularly good or careful writer (though all three of those things are true), but rather that he is completely inconsistent and often downright bizarre. I’m beginning to suspect that Katz is an artificial intelligence program akin to Eliza.
The problem for the true Katz basher, unfortunately, is that Jon’s starting to go so far off the deep end that it is not even sporting to take swipes at him anymore. Today, for example, he actually has a serious article pushing the role-playing games “Mage: The Ascension” and “Shadowrun” as allegories of our technocratic age. According to Katz,
It’s amazing to encounter so insightful a worldview in a paper-and-pencil role-playing game. While mainstream society was dismissing geeks and nerds, they were increasingly retreating — via games, MUDs and MOOs — into their own folktales, fantasy worlds that foretold the future as brilliantly as Orwell or H.G. Wells. “Shadowrunner,” “Werewolf” and “Changeling” were escape routes, a new genre that offered some of the most revealing insights yet into the people who built (and are still building) the Net and Web, and creating continuing revolutions like the open source movement.
Hey, I am a fanatical RPG fan who has bookshelves filled with games I will never play, but this is the biggest crock of —- I have read in a long time. They are fun games, but they hardly rise to the level of a new sort of folk tale. I am surprised he doesn’t add in a riff about how “Magic: The Gathering” is some geek take on the duality of art and commerce.
The thing I detest about Katz is his self-appointed role as geek spokesman, especially with the nonsense he wrote after the Columbine shooting. Katz depicted Klebold and Hariss as these helpless misunderstood, victims of a cruel society. Hey, I spent my lunch hours in high school with some friends programming on Trash-80s and Apple IIs, and I do not remember any of us feeling we had to off our classmates because we were misunderstood.
The bottom line is that Katz really gets off on that mix of superiority and fear that many of us felt as kids because we were not part of the popular crowds but, on the other hand, we killed those kids — metaphorically, of course — when it came time for the SATs. Katz always strikes me as the sort of guy who would rent a Ferrari to go back to his 10 year high school reunion to prove something to his former classmates.