Book Review: "Free" by Chris Anderson (2009)

As the costs of digital distribution fall toward zero, how can companies and content creators turn profits? According to the former "WIRED" editor and current drone manufacturer...they can't. 

In "Free: the Future of a Radical Price," Chris Anderson -- the former WIRED EIC -- doesn't take long at all to establish the book's central thesis: that, with the proliferation of the Internet and digital distribution channels, we're now living in an epoch in which a deflationary economy anchored around bits has completely triumphed over the old world order of inflationary economies anchored around atoms -- that being, tangible, real-world goods.

With a net annual deflation rate of about 50 percent, Anderson postulates that all cyberspace goods are destined to halve in price every single year. Citing Monty Python, the decline of transistor prices, early Jell-O advertising gimmicks and the pioneering "freebie" promotions of King Gillette -- who, it is perhaps worth noting, penned a weird-ass urban supremacist manifesto/unrealized "Bioshock" game called "The Human Drift" in 1894 -- Anderson feels that it's only natural that online-centric manufacturers and retailers today would flock towards new wave "freemiums" to sustain their own operations.

Via direct cross-subsidies -- "loss leaders" like popcorn generating revenue in lieu of fundamentally free films and ongoing annuities, like "free" phones with two-year subscriber contracts replacing point-of-sale streams -- Anderson argues that there is already a template readily available for online companies to base their own "free" models upon. In fact, Anderson rattles off several variations for us, including segmented markets -- basically, a "progressive tax" that allows women to get free drinks at clubs and kids to eat free at Sunday buffets -- tiered content (Flickr vs. Flickr Pro is the example he uses in the book) and even emerging "non-monetary markets" like zero-cost "gift economy" distribution networks (read: free Wiki articles) and even "labor exchange" relationships (which Anderson illustrates in the book with the example of porn sites that give you free nudity in exchange for helping them figure out CAPTCHA puzzles.)

Early, early on in "Free," Anderson introduces to something he calls the "Five Percent Rule" -- that being, this idea that just five percent of online service users will offset the business losses of 95 percent of the same online services's users not paying anything at all. And then, he immediately brings up how piracy murder-death-killed the music industry, providing us with the first of many, many in-text contradictions that should make us wonder a plenty about Mr. Anderson's allegedly beneficial "free-to-all" Tao. Furthermore, his citing of negative pricing business models -- like bands playing clubs to perform and gyms in Europe that, as long as you don't miss any weekly visits, have free memberships -- seem more like fanciful asides than genuine advice for start-up operations.

From there, Anderson gives us a history of "free," letting us know, for some reason, that the Catholic Church once condemned interest rates and that the Koran has a decisively anti-usury bent. He goes on for a bit about Paul Ehrlich's wrong-ass predictions, Kroptokin's "Mutual Aid," the Dunbar Number and New York's  Raines Law, before seguing into a passage about ASCAP and BMI and how the Haber-Bosch Process lead to the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s. If you're wondering what this stuff has to do with "freemium" business models -- well, that makes two of us, naturally.

After some shit about "corn economies" and "disposable cultures," he says that America fully embraced the "Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits" sometime in the 1950s, indicating a shift from resource processing to service jobs. Today's "symbolic analysts," he tells us, are nothing more than yesterday's farmers and manufacturers in pursuit of scarcity.

Comparing The Village Voice to The Onion, he describes how free woks as an "evolutionary stable strategy." He later rephrases the statement, with the sardonic aphorism "you can't fall off the floor."

From there, it is aside city for a good fifty pages. We learn about Kopelman's "Penny Gap," The Sample Lab! International Model, a 2007 French union lawsuit against Amazon, Mead's Compound Learning Curve and some dude named John Draper, who is perhaps most notable for having the nickname "Captain Crunch." Then, Anderson makes the somewhat controversial claim that piracy actually creates user dependency, which in turn, lowers adoption costs. Which, fittingly enough, is a great transition point to a conversation about the positive aspects of de-monetization.

The Internet, described by Anderson as a "liquidity machine," allows individuals to make money by shrinking markets. You see, free turns "$1 billion industries" into "$1 million industries" by wealth redistribution, which in turn creates more efficient markets. Of course, with lower entry barriers, he lets us know its pretty goddamn hard to turn a profit under such a system, and that more often than not, the model just results in the rich getting richer, but uh...free is still somehow good, I think?

Anderson then rattles off a fairly agreeable list as to why paid content is deader than Elvis, and then gives us a primer on impression models. Interestingly, he uses the video game market as his case study for industries that have "benefit" from freemium models, and praises Derek Webb for his "data-mining" approach to fan outreach. Oh, and he kind of glosses over how selling visitor data to third parties has become something of a monetization model, but SHHH!

With "quasi-currencies" like views and Facebook likes taken into consideration, Anderson said the market for "free" was about $300 billion in 2009 dollars. As such, he said that more and more organizations find themselves competing in non-monetary markets, where "attention" and "reputation" are considered as good as actual revenue. Except, uh, people aren't actually making money off this shit, which is the gigantic elephant turd in the punch bowl Anderson doesn't have the bait and tackle to come out and tell us.

In China and Brazil, he talks about how piracy culture has led to some innovative underground markets -- chiefly, an emerging "fake receipt" economy. And then, he lets us know that the "walls" between editorial and business boards in the journalism industry have been yanked down, and as such, we're all the worse for it.

Giving us some bullshit about "the tragedy of the commons," he tells us that many content creators will now have to look for indirect revenue streams -- like consulting, lecturing and blogs -- to stay afloat financially. Even heavy hitters like Facebook and YouTube have ongoing revenue problems, he said: pretty much putting a big, fat ~ next to his ENTIRE goddamn argument, he lets us know that, in a recession, "free can't be the only model" if organizations want to survive.

Below are Anderson's Ten Principles of Abundance Thinking, with my thoughts in red.

1. Digital things will ultimately be free. (which means unless you can't eat it or print it out yourself, you're pretty much in a fucked market.)
2. Products of physical goods make core products free by selling other stuff. (also, you can make more money if you work more than one job, too.)
3. Selling upgrades to free products can combat piracy. (except for when it doesn't, which is all the fucking time.) 
4. Free opens the door to charging consumers. (too bad he never explicitly tells us how to make that leap, though) 
5. You can sell around free services. (which means you're working two jobs, only one of which involves you actually getting paid for something.) 
6. You HAVE to be "free" before your competitors. (but what happens when ALL of your competitors are giving away stuff for free, though?)
7. Eventually, you will be competing with free, anyway. (oh, OK. But wait, how am I supposed to be making money off this shit again?)
8. You need to stop metering things that are too cheap to meter. (which under a free model, is your ENTIRE model.) 
9. Value will always migrate to the next higher layer when free becomes the norm. (so what's the FUCKING point of even being free to begin with?)
10. You should always manage for abundance, not scarcity. (translation: learn to deal with being poor.) 

Personally, I prefer Biggie's "Ten Crack Commandments," but I guess there is more sagacity in that top ten than asininity, I will admit. Then again, the fundamental rub with Anderson's entire shtick is that, compared to free, ANY financial gain is automatically profitable, so really -- what's the point with all this, again?

When I picked up "Free," I was expecting a fairly conventional primer on how upstarts could leverage temporarily free, entry-level services into more sustainable revenue models. Instead, what I got was some bullshit about how free boasts visibility and facilitates future user adoption, conveniently leaving out how a service would successfully shift from free to paid models in between. Free, this asshole keeps telling us, will pave the way to truly lucrative business models in the future, but he never even gets anywhere close to establishing a solid system for services to make that very transition. The shit icing on the turd cake was when he used journalism as a case study of sorts; you see, journalists, in the absence of traditional papers, can still make money as consultant editors for non-professional, hyper-local websites, he cheerily tells us. Of course, he never brings up the abject failure of AOL's Patch service, which was more or less that very model.

I'm not sure if I want to call Anderson an opportunist -- or better yet, a piss-poor speculator -- but "Free" is a book that feels far, far removed from reality. Maybe his ideas would gel in very, very small commerce sectors, but the tips and tactics outlined in this book aren't going to save any upstart business from insolvency. Really, the core thesis of "Free" can be summed up as "don't plan on making money, so that if you incidentally make money, it'll be awesome."

That's not a business strategy, Mr. Anderson. Hell, that's not even a halfway viable business ideal. There are some interesting ideas in "Free," but nothing that has any import on today's e-commerce world, I am afraid.

But at the end of the day, I will at least give some of Anderson's theories about "free" products some praise. After all, I picked up my copy of the book -- irony of ironies -- because a local retailer just wanted to get rid of surplus copies on the shelves.

That's right: I didn't pay a single cent for "Free." And to be honest? I still feel like I paid too much for it.

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100 People You Should DEFINITELY Ignore

Some individuals are well worth listening to. Here's a brief list of the kind of people who most certainly are not.

001. English majors, talking about anything other than English.

002. ANYBODY wearing a sandwich board, of any kind.

003. Guys with a tendency to preface an inordinate number of statements with the phrase "now, I'm no expert..."

004. Anybody who is concerned about something after being "enlightened" by a YouTube video.

005. People who wear shirts with whole sentences written on them.

006. Gender studies professors.

007. People who say they have exclusive information that was "suppressed" by the government.

008. Anyone who claims to have graduated from "the School of Hard Knocks."

009. 99.8 percent of white rappers.

010. For some inexplicable reason, almost all dudes whose first name is either Darryl or Duane.

011. Any advocate for home schooling.

012. Anyone who actually uses the term "cisgender."

013. People who, at any point in time, have owned Yosemite Sam mudflaps.

014. The proprietors of any stores that have the word "shoppe" in their title.

015. Any self-described iconoclast.

016. ANYBODY clearly wearing two different kinds of flip-flops at the same time.

017. Most anybody who regularly frequents record shops.

018. People who use their workplace website photo as their Facebook profile pic.

019. Paleo dieters.

020. Anybody who claims to "love" science.

021. Anyone carrying a bullhorn with bumper stickers on it.

022. People dressed up like Japanese cartoon characters, anywhere at anytime for any reason.

023. People that actually say the words "indeed" and "furthermore" in casual conversation.

024. White people who try to sound like they're actually speaking Spanish when ordering Mexican food.

025. People who think they "ought to run for office someday."

People who publicly advertise their want of sexual favors in exchange for mundane acts of charity: TRUSTWORTHY. 

026. People who have a heavy metal band's logo tattooed somewhere on their body.

027. People who say they went to college to "find themselves."

028. Any Caucasian couple who give their children ostentatiously ethnic-sounding first names.

029. Representatives from any organization that has "Jesus" in its title.

030. People who proudly wear clothing with the anarchy symbol on it.

031. Anybody who brags about making homemade jewelry.

032. Guys who claim to know what "good beer" really tastes like.

033. People who actually play badminton.

034. Any person wearing a hoodie and sunglasses simultaneously.

035. People who brag about the results of their STD tests.

036. People who feel the need to randomly whistle.

037. Individuals who pride themselves on being "semi-fluent" in other languages.

038. Guys who are convinced that certain foods tasted differently ten years ago.

039. Anyone who thinks jokes about bacon are actually funny.

040. Anybody who has a zombie sticker on their car.

041. People who constantly remind you not to pronounce the silent letters in their name.

042. Anyone who has used the phrase "taken to its logical conclusion" at any point in their lives.

043. People who try to give you homemade remedies for acne treatment.

044. People who are only into Major League Baseball.

045. People who just have to remind you that they're in the process of "quitting smoking."

046. People who shop while listening to their iPods.

047. Guys who actually call radio stations to request songs.

048. Anyone who says they are a "patron of the fine arts."

049. People who, for some inexplicable reason, are adamant that you always use coasters.

050. People who use the term "they" as a vague noun, especially in reference to an unexplained collective-authority. For example: "They say them video games is what's turning all them kids into school shooters."

In this photograph alone, I can spot at least seven things that would most likely make this individual an unreliable source of information. How many can you detect, dear reader?

051. People that are really into college sports teams, when they themselves never actually attended said college. Bonus points if they've never attended any college, for that matter.

052. People who, for some reason, have plastic wrapped sporks in their kitchen drawers.

053. People who never tell you what their initials stand for. Case in point: Mr. T.

054. Those who take great pride in being "nerdy."

055. People who laugh like the alien warrior from "Predator."

056. Small town journalists.

057. Individuals who are really into graffiti -- the paler their complexion, the further you should stay away from them.

058. ANYONE handing out pamphlets that aren't Chinese restaurant menus or fliers about furniture store sales.

059. Girls with really pronounced gum lines.

060. Barnes and Noble cashiers, especially when they start telling you about other books they think you'd like.

061. Anyone into Eastern Mysticism who isn't an Eastern Mystic.

062. Guys holding brooms, mops, rakes or other implements welded to wooden poles, whom address you with the sentence "Hey buddy, listen here for a minute."

063. People who literally begin and end all of their sentences with the word "man."

064. Individuals who carefully enunciate commas when they speak.

065. Any woman who self-identifies as a "BBW."

066. People fatter than you, talking about exercise regiments.

067. Anybody who stops to spit while conversing with you.

068. Guys who quote "Big Trouble in Little China."

069. ANYONE who brings up pleather, for any reason and at any juncture.

070. Those who think awkwardness is charming.

071. People who like to speak in alliteration.

072. Anyone into organic farming.

073. Anybody who tries to strike up a conversation with you while using a public bathroom.

074. People who attend sporting events, wearing jerseys that aren't of the two teams playing.

075. Anybody who points a lot.

If anyone you know has written erotic fan fiction, odds are they're probably not the best people to seek advice from.

076. People who really like news stories about home invaders getting shot.

077. Pretty much anyone that uses the term "welfare queen."

078. People who DON'T think the first "Rocky" movie was the best one.

079. Fans of science fiction literature.

080. Anyone inside a Spencer's Gifts store.

081. People who like to talk about injuries they've had since "way back when."

082. Fruit vendors who misspell "fruit" on their signage.

083. The owners of businesses that prominently display animated neon signs.

084. People on the comment section of any national news organization's website.

085. Anyone with a pronounced dislike of gypsies.

086. Anybody even remotely associated with bars that use the word "nigger" for advertisement purposes.

087. People who tell you they're going to blog about things, but then never do.

088. Anyone championing an "all-natural" therapy or remedy, of any kind.

089. People always complaining about the "urbanization" of America.

090. People who wear sunglasses indoors -- ain't none of us got any time for any "K-Pax" motherfuckers on this planet, pal.

091. Anyone who enjoys thoroughly describing to you what their last bowl movement was like.

092. Dumbass parents who let their elementary schoolers have YouTube accounts.

093. Anyone who has aspirations of "taking the country back."

094. Anyone with a fondness for interpretive dance.

095. People who are convinced that at least half of all the U.S. presidents were actually alien lizard monsters.

096. Guys wearing burlap sacks over their heads, perhaps wielding a chainsaw or perhaps not.

097. People selling anything with the word meat encircled by suspiciously pronounced quotation marks.

098. Any guest on "The Maury Povich Show."

099. Colloidal silver salespeople.

100. People who run niche-interest humor blogs.

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Ignoring the Biggest Problem in American Society?

Why Americans’ Dependency on Subordinate Identity is probably the Root Cause of All Evils in Contemporary U.S. Society 

“The ones that love us least, are the ones we’ll die to please, if it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand them…”

-- The Replacements

“Bastards of Young” (1984)

Many, many years ago, I had a particularly shitty office job. Through some sort of great cosmological fluke, I got a position at a small town airport, which as fate would have it, was owned by some sort of eccentric millionaire racecar-driver wannabe. One year, everybody at the airport decided to throw the owner a birthday surprise, which -- and I swear I’m not making this up -- was a custom-made golf cart. So I’m standing there, wearing my little red uniform, just looking aimlessly in front of me, while everybody else in the hangar -- also wearing their stupid little red uniforms -- sported mile-wide smiles and had jubilant gleams in their eyes. When it came time to sing Mr. Owner “Happy Birthday,” my coworkers were belting out the lyrics with the gusto of the French freedom fighters singing “La Marseillaise” in “Casablanca.” These people were genuinely enthusiastic and excited about the moment; and at was at that moment, I do believe, that I fully understood how Nazi Germany came to exist.

America, in case you haven’t noticed, seems to have a lot of problems. For the longest time, social scientists (aka, shitheads with university tenure that don’t know what they’re talking about) have looked at all of these assorted cultural problems as isolated things, with hardly any intellectual of note pinpointing an American weltanschauung as the root cause of all our social maladies. Well folks, an American Way of Life -- which completely supersedes a regional way of life, or an ethnic way of life, or a socioeconomic way of life -- does indeed exist, and if you want to know why virtually every single problem in the nation exists, from overweight kindergartners to school shooters to absentee fathers to insider trading, it all harks back to this central truth of American existence: it’s our subordinate identities, and only our subordinate identities, that fuel us as social individuals, in turn shaping our perspectives and decision-making more than any other core variable, be it religion, political ideology or even ethno-racial backgrounds.

In short? Who we are, what we think and what we do is more or less wholly dictated by how connected we feel to those who have power over us. Generally, the closer we feel to being on our boss’s “good side,” the better we feel about our lot in life, and the more we feel as if we are on our employer’s shit list, the worse we feel about ourselves and humanity as a whole. A good sub-theorem to add to the equation is this: more or less our entire personalities and core characteristics  are decided by how close we are to our respective overlords, or how closely we perceive ourselves to be to our respective overlords -- be they middle managers, rock bands we worship, or even the disassociative majoritarianism of the Internet itself.

OK, this is a lot of stuff to digest, and I know, it sounds a little abstract at first. But stick with me here; this stuff will all make way more sense than you want it to in just a minute.

Let’s begin by addressing a word we hear all the goddamn time, especially when conversations about the alleged “American Character” arise: individuality. Now, individuality is probably the most overly-romanticized (meaning “fraudulent“) ideal in human history, as the collective forces of our respective culture more or less steamroll us into uniform shapes no matter how “against the grain” we like to consider ourselves. Even the most hardcore anarchistic, militant Libertarians still live lives that are culturally enforced -- they wear clothes when they go outside, the take jobs to make money so they can by stuff the TV tells them to and they live in houses they take out loans to purchase. Sure, they may claim to be rugged individuals by proxy of their political convictions, but at the end of the day, they look, sound, and act like everybody else. In today’s America, “counter culture” is an absolute impossibility; unless you’re a complete Luddite (by religious choice, such as the Amish, or by cultural mandate, such as the registered sex offenders that have to live in woodland encampments) you are very much a part of the system, so to speak, regardless of your (relatively insignificant) sociopolitical or philosophical “principles.”

Of course, as individuals that really aren’t individuals at all, we try to come up with ways to make ourselves feel different from everybody else. If you’re a really shallow Goth kid, you might dye your hair blue or pierce your anus or something, and if you’re a middle-aged, median-income suburban dad, you might get hair implants or go out and buy a sports car. The idea here is pretty much the same; to differentiate ourselves from the cookie cutter masses, we vouch for aesthetic (and thus, easily observable) alterations that allegedly make us “stand out from the crowd.” The problem here is pretty apparent; you may look different from everybody else, but what do you know, you still sound, act and think the same way as everyone around you. Your outer shell may be different, but on the inside? You’re just the same as everybody else around you.

Naturally, this leads to the second phase of “individual” reassessment, which usually involves the adoption of some ideology or philosophy that supposedly makes one “better” or “superior” to his or her peers. If you promote any religious or political cause, no matter how asinine, this is PRECISELY what you’re doing. The quest for meaning, in a lot of ways, is nothing more than the quest for a distinct identity, and by absorbing the tenets of some pre-existing ideology -- which seeks to explain everything while positing just about every tangible and abstract construct you can think of as obviously righteous or obviously wrongheaded -- you’re basically taking the shortest walking trail to “individuality” as a cultural inhabitant. So, even though you look, act and live like everybody else around you, you are now privy to some kind of greater knowledge that makes you distinct as a cultural system member. But, uh, what happens when you find yourself among a crowd of individuals who share, vaunt and celebrate that same “greater truth” that makes you such a special little snowflake?

Well, shit. You can always take the “holier than thou” approach and claim that you’ve got this super-special ideological thing right while everybody else who professes to have the super-special ideological thing right is actually wrong -- thus explaining why we have both Protestants and Catholics, to a large degree -- or you can instead find individual value within a certain hierarchical position within said group ethos that you, and ideally you alone, occupy.

And that brings us to the concept of “occupational identity,” which is really the most important identity framer we as an American peoples have. In general, the first thing we ask a person we meet is “what do you do for a living?” -- a question that seeks not to uncover what a person’s ideological beliefs or area of expertise is, but really, what his or her organizational rank happens to be. A lot of times, the response isn’t even a direct duty; for example, one may reply “I work for (insert tech company here)” instead of saying “I’m a computer programmer,” or that “I work for (insert firm here)” instead of “I’m a C.P.A.” or something along those lines. Essentially, one’s primary occupational task doesn’t matter; what matters is which organization does that person perform that task for, and much, much more importantly, what is the individual in question’s hierarchical value to said organization? I imagine conversations of the like transpiring all the time at social mixers:

Individual A: So, what do you do for a living?

Individual B: I work for AT&T.

Individual A: What do you do at AT&T?

Individual B: I’m a data management systems specialist.

Individual A: Ok.

Individual B: An assistant data management systems specialist, to be more precise.

In a nutshell, that tells you everything you need to know about that person as a social system inhabitant. Their employer denotes their line of work (which is a proxy for their socioeconomic standing and educational background), their position denotes their hierarchical company status, and -- this is the key point to all of this, readers -- their proximity to positions of power denotes the sum of their cultural import. If you run your own company, you’re big shit; if you’re an assistant to the person who runs his or her own company, you’re not as big shit, but comparably, you’re still pretty big shit. The pecking order hardly needs any elucidation: a VP is bigger shit than a regional manager, but a regional manager is bigger shit than a department manager, who is bigger shit than a staffer, who is bigger shit than the entry-level guys, etc.

This infrastructural rank has become the most important -- and in many ways, the sole defining -- element of who we are as individual Americans. All of who and what we are -- our values, our hopes, our dreams, our longings -- can hence be boiled down to simply where we stand within our respective occupational (*) bases. Anything else, the culture at large tells us, is simply irrelevant.

(*) And just to make this a little more comprehensive, when I refer to “occupational” here, I am explicitly referring to any sort of group system that an individual feels as if he or she contributes to AND derives a sense of identity from. So this could feasibly extend to MMORPG clans, message boards or any other kind of online community, in general.

In America, our work defines us. We obsess over it, we worry about it, and in many ways, our employer becomes our new parents -- our providers, our mentors, our disciplinarians. In many ways, the name of the game here isn’t to really succeed in one’s field, but to succeed in one’s company -- that is, assume some real, or some perceived, importance and then fight like hell to maintain it. Where one is, organizationally, then becomes a de facto self cause -- one’s utmost social reason for existence. That, and that alone, probably explains why so many people shoot up their workplaces; because when the workplace slights them, it’s a slight against everything they believe they are as human beings.

But let’s take it even further; for organizational rank, I think we abandon all of our core scruples as human beings. I mean, every last one of them. For a pay raise (and with it, the associated institutional upgrade), I think most Americans would have no problem performing oral sex on their boss, be it male or female. Despite all of that vaunting of the “sanctity of marriage,” I’d venture to guess that for organizational prestige, most Americans would similarly sleep with a coworker, if it meant intra-company advancement, to some degree. Trust me, there’s a reason why a term like “work spouse” even exists in the first place.

The average American cares more about work than he does his family, for sure. Of course, nobody will come out and say that, but we all know it’s the truth. Just look at Sandy Hook and Columbine; so engrossed were the parents of those school shooters in their lines of work, they were completely blinded to the reality of who their own children were. Methinks if Daddy Lanza or Daddy Klebold had spent just a wee bit more time talking to their kids instead of scrolling through spreadsheets at corporate HQ, maybe, just maybe, we’d have a few less caskets in the ground today.

Whatever identity we think we have is subsumed in the organizational identity. Like the eponymous “Blob,” our worker identity digest everything in its path, until we’re a bunch of shapeless, formless globs of animated -- yet thoughtless -- tissue. The company becomes our God, our pie in the sky. Whatever is good for it, we tell ourselves, is good for us; if that means we have to be silent when our bosses tell “nigger jokes” during lunch break, or turn a blind eye when a higher-up sexually harasses a custodian, so be it. The organization supersedes all, and all else is inconsequential to who I am as a person.

Climbing the ladder of success, we neglect everything around us; our parents, our girlfriends, our best chums. Our organizational identity gets us to view those things as mere side stories, as nothing more than weekend background static compared to the 40 hours of our lives that actually count each week. The more we are invested in our work, and especially our perceived organizational identity, the less attuned we are to our true humanities. Everything that we hold dear as individuals -- things like conscientiousness and ethics -- we more or less have to rid ourselves of in order to succeed in the dog-eat-dog, post-Industrialist global economy.

So what do we do when we realize that everything we are is a lie, and all that money in our bank accounts can’t help us reclaim our souls? Well, drugs and alcohol are a good start for most folks, and maybe even hyper-religiosity or hyper-politicking as a less physical -- yet brain numbing, all the same -- home remedy. Or you can cheat on your spouse, or beat up your kids. Or maybe even leave your wife and kids altogether, with only your job remaining as the sole vestige of you past life. Violence -- spectacular, cable news-baiting violence -- is usually a last, last resort, and exposes the hilarious Catch 22 of the whole scenario: being an organizational zombie (yet maintaining that oh-so-valuable workplace identity) saps you of all semblances of humanity, but not being an organizational zombie (and therefore, losing that oh-so-valuable workplace identity) makes you want to kill everything in the world.

You know, maybe that omnipresent connectivity to our organizational identities is what drives us to do all of the evil shit we do. I mean, after all, we’re stuck in a vacuum that, on one hand, is totally destroying us emotionally, yet at the same time, it’s providing us with all our social wants. Not that being completely confused, befuddled or conflicted -- in addition to being placed in a position we consider inescapable altogether -- would ever, EVER get us to behave erratically or destructively. Ever.

And yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “But Jimbo, if organizational identity and an obsession with the workplace is really the soul-destroying thing you tell us it is, then how come Japan and China -- arguably the world’s two most industrious nations -- have among the lowest rates of depression in the world?”

Well, it’s different, because American depression is different than Asian depression. Japanese dudes don’t open fire on school children when they’re feeling blue, they just suck on some chlorine gas and make sure their windows are sealed tight, to make sure nobody else is inadvertently killed. Since Japan and China are true collectivist nations -- indeed, the large urban populations in both countries pretty much necessitate an all-encompassing sense of social cohesion, just as a survival mechanism -- you could argue that one’s workplace identity really isn’t all that far removed from his or her societal identity. But in America, where we’re INDIVIDUALS, GOD-DAMN-IT, there’s a distinct rift between our organizational personas and our personas as social system inhabitants. We’re forced to be two different people in America, whereas in Asia, who you are as worker and overall human being is pretty much the same thing.

And so, this natural conflict goes on for a couple of decades, until we kill ourselves, kill somebody else, or completely squelch our humanity altogether and become lifeless globs who don’t even realize it when people run over our toes with shopping cart wheels. And then, retirement comes along, and one afternoon, we have to sit down in our reclining chair and reflect on what we’ve done with our lives, and suddenly, we realize we haven’t really done Jack Shit for ourselves. Sure, we may have kept the company up and running, but we know we’ll be forgotten. Once we’re dead, nobody will give a shit about our organizational identities: a shame, really, because in America, that’s usually our most pronounced persona, if not the only one we elect to present to the world at large.

But in the meantime, our organizational identities protect us from the inevitability of our own cosmological unimportance. It allows us to sell sugary, fat-loaded foodstuffs to already-overweight kids, basically as a skeleton key to exonerate us of guilt. “We’re just doing what our superiors want,” we’ll say.  It allows us to turn a blind eye when some creepy-ass, under-parented child goes on another soon-to-be-forgotten homicide spree, and it’ll get us to forget all about deadbeat dads and the unavoidable statistical outcomes for those who live fatherless existences. Those of us who tend to think we’d never commit violent crime would cook books, shred documents or take a bullet ourselves for our bossman; if he goes, our sense of self goes with them, we’ll tell ourselves. Corporate crime, surely, has to be worth that.

Hannah Arendt called it the "banality of evil." Daniel Goldhagen explicitly referred to it as the primary catalyst for the Holocaust in "Hitler's Willing Executioners." In terms of an American framework, Ward Churchill kinda touched upon it in his miscellaneous screeds against technocracy, while the main character in "Thank You for Smoking" somewhat alluded to it by calling the universal excuse of one's outstanding mortgage the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense."

No matter what you call it, though, the things I’ve seen fellow Americans do, all in the name of maintaining organizational rank, is absolutely blood chilling. These are people that are genuinely aroused by the sight of a man receiving a golf cart, after all. If they’ll do that, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll toss you into a furnace, too.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The ORIGINAL Script!

Had Wes Craven had his way, we could’ve ended up with a very, very different movie. Just how different, you may be wondering? Read on, Freddy fanatics…

I’m going to tell you kids something you already know: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors” is pretty fucking awesome. With all of the hilarious Freddy quips, inventive deaths, big name stars (Morpheus and Patricia Arquette among them!), rockin’ Dokken tunes and a screenplay that’s both energetic and spooky, not only do I consider “Elm Street 3” to be the best of the Freddy movies, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only Elm Street movie. It’s a film that struck a near-perfect balance between the series’ early, pure horror roots and its latter, self-parodying excesses; as such, it’s one of the most revered slasher flicks of the 1980s, and for very, very good reason.

That said, there’s something that’s always kinda’ peeved me about the film...or rather, the film’s poster. For one thing, the kids represented on the flyer don’t really look anything at all like the kids in the movie (where’s the platinum haired new wave rocker chick and the dude in a denim jacket swinging a mace, guys?), and then, there’s that little two-story ranch home near the bottom of the poster. See it just sitting there, being all ominous and spooky, all out in the woods and stuff? Sure, there’s a mechanic in the final film about a papier-mâché house that looks similar to that, but beyond that, the on-poster home has precious little to do with the film itself.

Now, I’m no cinema historian, but if I didn’t know any better, whoever designed the film’s poster looks like he or she based his or her work on the film’s original script. You kids know all about the original “Elm Street 3,” don’t you? You know, the one Wes Craven and pals ironed out sometime in 1986, with a totally different plotline, redesigned characters and totally different deaths and creep out sequences? Well, if not, perhaps its time I gave you fellows a look at what could’ve been, no?

Picture it: 1985. The second “Elm Street” movie had just been released, and it, for lack of a better term, sucked. An executive mandate for the first “Elm Street” movie pretty much wrested the series away from original director and Freddy creator Wes Craven, whom had nothing to do with part 2. Although the second film did make quite a bit of money, pretty much everybody and their mama knew it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the first flick (despite some hilariously blunt homoerotic overtones), so the guys at New Line Cinema said “you know what? How about we give Wes a call, and ask him if he wants to help out with part 3.”

While Wes Craven didn’t end up directing the actual film, he did have a hand in its production and its script. Before Frank Darabont and director Chuck Russell punched up the script (effectively, giving us the movie we all know and love today), Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner were hired by New Line to deliver an initial script, and hells a poppin’, what they sent in was WAY different than the final filmed product. While there are some similarities between the original script and the final script, there are a ton of changes, which really affected the entire tone of the story; ultimately, the original “Dream Warriors” script was a bit darker and more gruesome, with a greater emphasis on Nancy as a sort of vigilante defender. Oh, and it completely rewrites the entire Freddy mythos, so for those of you that are heavy into canon, you might want to pay attention here.

So, what was the original script like? Here, dear readers, is my official Cliff Notes version of the ORIGINAL “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3”…

First up, there’s a pre-credits scene featuring a fetal Freddy literally ripping through his mother’s stomach in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. This is followed up by a montage of  “missing kids” posters across America, with the camera panning in on a flyer for a missing redheaded girl.

Then, we jump to Nancy, driving down some country back roads, listening to radio reports about teen suicide trends. Hey, she sees that one redheaded girl from the missing poster, just standing on the side of the road! Naturally, she lets her hitch a ride with her.

Of course, Nancy gets a flat tire. Sans a spare, she wanders out into an open field, where she encounters the same cabin from the intro. And outside it,  there are kids in little tuxes and party dresses skipping rope and singing the iconic “One, Two” nursery rhyme. As any normal human being would do, Nancy approaches the home, as the kids scatter into the darkness. There’s a bunch of tricycles on the porch. And the wind chime has razor fingers on it!

Inside, she finds an elevator with floor numbers reaching up into the 5,000s. She steps in, gets trapped, and it drops down at like a million miles per hours. And it also goes sideways, like the “Tower of Terror” and shit. Then, Freddy’s claw hand attacks her, but she fends it off. Then the HELL-avater stops, and she encounters both a giant tricycle and her elderly dad -- you know, the police guy from the first movie. He gives her the old “We barbecued his ass way back when speech,” pointing to Freddy’s charred skeletal remains. But there’s only a hand left? Hey, where did the rest of his flame-broiled zombie ass go, he asks?

Then we jump back to the redhead sleeping in Nancy’s car. A gigantic snake (with Freddy’s glove for a head!) yanks her -- by the mouth -- through the windshield. She’s sucked up into an oak tree (not an Elm tree, the script specifically tells us) where…well, I suppose its safe to assume not much good can happen.

So back in the cabin, Nancy and her dad chase Freddy’s hand around, until it squeezes through a barred window. He then pulls his eyelids out like Stretch Armstrong and SLICES THEM OFF with a razor-blade lined finger! Then, Nancy wakes up. Oh, I get it -- she was dreaming in her car the entire time! Enter Neil Guinness, a doctor who just conveniently happened to be out in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

Apparently, Nancy fell asleep at the wheel, and crashed her car in a ditch. He checks her out…medically speaking, of course. There’s blood all over Nancy’s car. Apparently, she hit an animal…yes, that’s right, an animal. Guinness said she can stay at his place. Nancy accepts his offer, because she’s the most reasonable person in the history of the world.

At Guinness’ place, Nancy talks about how she’s tried to find her dad, who apparently went AWOL after the first movie. He said there’s this house he’s been trying to find for awhile, though…

So, Guinness, being creepy as hell, peers at Nancy while she sleeps. He notices her RX meds -- something called  Hypnocil. A psychiatrist by trade, he decides to flip through some medical books. It’s some sort of non FDA-approved experimental drug that’s supposed to suppress night terrors or something.

Nancy seems to have a nightmare, with the hitcher from earlier flying through the window. She’s had her hair ripped off her head, showing a bloody scalp a la that one hooker in “Warlock: the Armageddon.”  THEN THE HAIR COMES ALIVE AND ATTACKS HER! Guinness watches Nancy writhe in bed with the invisible force, so he intercedes. He slaps her, and then his fucking jaw falls off and his skin starts melting into putty. Uh-oh…

With a four foot wide mouth, Guinness starts to “digest” Nancy whole (similar to the snake scene from the official ANOES3.) Right before he eats her head, the snake monster’s head transforms into Freddy’s. Then the REAL Neil arrives and wakes her up. She has a fit about the drugs not working anymore. She looks down at her hands, and there’s some charred, flesh-like shit underneath her cuticles…

Next scene, Neil and Nancy drive back to the field, and what do you know, her car is gone. She notes an ominous looking tree, surrounded by ominous looking birds. Last night, she said, was the first time she’s had a dream of any kind in five years.

Neil and Nancy arrive at the hospital. There, he encounters Kristen, a young woman who had just attempted suicide. What unfurls next is pretty much the same scene from the NOES3 finished product, with Nancy singing the nursery rhyme to “calm” Kristen down. From there, we’re introduced to the denizens of the hospital’s “special adolescent ward”: There’s Jennifer, who has a knack for burning herself with cigarettes; Taryn, a black girl that likes to draw pictures of fire; and of course, Kincaid who is pretty much the same character as he is in the final product. By the way: I cannot tell you how much pride I feel knowing that the actor that played him GRADUATED from the same university I did.

Neil and Nancy talk for a bit. For whatever reason, kids from out of town seem to be flocking to the county to commit suicide. And all of the survivors appear to have sleeping disorders.

Hey, they found Nancy’s car…suspended 200 feet in the air over a grain silo, for some reason! And it’s been slashed to shit, by something…

So, Nancy gets hired by Neil as an assistant. They go to Kristen’s parents’ place, and they are complete yuppie scumbags who only care about tennis. They say they’re going to send her to a boarding school in New York. Yeah, that’ll fix her. Nancy goes into Kristen’s room. She finds a photo of Kristen…and the hitchhiker from her dreams!

Then, the local cops find the hiker’s body in the trees. Nancy decides to investigate the mysterious cabin…which wouldn’t you believe it, just so happens to exist in “the real world,” too…and as soon as she steps into the kitchen, SHE SINKS INTO AN UNDERWATER ABYSS! There, she sees her dad, with bloody eyes, at the bottom. She goes upstairs and encounters “baby Freddy,” which turns into the full grown version we’re all more accustom to. A Mini-chase begins, and Nancy escape from house, and Freddy promises to “shit” on her corpse someday.

By the way; the film doesn’t take place in Springwood, Ohio, the canonical setting of the series. As to where the movie textually takes place, the script never tells us.

So Nancy runs to Neil. He tells her the last Freddy dream was all a hallucination. The cops say the cabin out back is the old “Krueger place,” which some locals think is haunted. In fact, just last week, some dude locked himself inside it and tried to burn it down. And hey, he’s one of Neil’s patients, wouldn’t you know it? Holy shit, that lunatic that tried to burn the place down? IT’S NANCY’S DAD! Somehow, he blinded himself in the blaze. He tells Nancy that the house has to be destroyed, because its some sort of metaphysical portal that allows Freddy to enter people’s dreams or some shit like that.

ENTER Joey and Laredo. Joey is a frail kid with spasms who has built a near perfect replica of the Krueger cabin. Laredo is some long-haired Dungeons and Dragons dweeb. We also meet Phillip, whom we are told “sleepwalks.” So, Phil ends up getting hoisted by Freddy, kinda’ like Phil in the final print. Only, he’s not strung up like a puppet, he’s just being kinda’ carried down the hallway, I suppose. Freddy walks him right through a wall, and straight into the path of an oncoming ambulance.

There’s a group meeting after Phil’s death, and the psych department director is a real bitch. Neil thinks all the kids are experiencing “delayed stress syndrome.” Kristen undergoes an EEG. Nancy thinks she sees Kristen disappear while being probed, but Neil thinks she’s still hallucinating. The next day, Kristen’s parents check her out of the hospital.

Cue Jennifer’s death. It’s virtually the same as it is in the movie, only sans the “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” line.

Kristen returns to school, with bandaged wrists, and all of the snobby girls make fun of her. In psych class, they’re having a convenient lecture about dreaming, and Deimos, and the dream world being a interphase between life and death and shit. Kristen falls asleep, and in her dream, yanks one of the tops off the bitchy girls. Except Kristen really does yank the girls’ top off in class, and it’s all funny and stuff.

Next scene, Nancy looks like she’s going to set the old Krueger house ablaze. A cop and his German Shepherd show up, though and prevent her, so she goes back to the ward to probe her daddy for advice. Her dad tells her the only way to get the job done is to burn the house from the inside, and with the help of some “dream warriors,” too.

Back to Kristen. In her room, she’s looking at some St. Girard Catholic School flyers when all of a sudden she develops stigmata AND FLIES THROUGH HER BEDROOM WINDOW IN A JESUS CHRIST POSE. She’s literally flown to New York and through the school, where all of the girls have bloody arm bandages, too. She winds up in the old Krueger house, where Freddy “crosses” himself and blood and shit comes out. She cries to Nancy, who is awake, and gets sucked through a portal in her mattress.

Nancy finds herself in Kristen’s dream, just in time to make the save. Right before Fred gets them, they both wake up in Kristen’s bed. “We have to talk,” Nancy says.

So, the two go back into Dreamland, to burn down the Krueger house. However, they end up attacked by a GERMAN SHEPHERD with FREDDY COLORED FUR AND A FREDDY HEAD! Kristen pulls Kincaid into the dream, and he punches Freddy. Freddy gets all big and stuff and then the trio wake up in the hospital, where the psych director is really, really peeved…and not really asking any questions about how THEY ALL ended up in the secured facility through the apparent magic of teleportation.

In the next scene, Nancy and Neil have sex -- and trust me, it’s about as clumsily written as you’d expect a love scene penned by the dude who made “The Last House on the Left” would be. Nancy has a dream that all of the dead kids offed earlier in the film approach her and ask her to kill Freddy for them. She wakes up. She goes to the hospital, and her dad tells her that all the kids in the hospital are “dream warriors” that have gathered for a final battle against Freddy. They escape into a group meeting, and all of the kids “vanish” during some sort of meditation ritual. Neil can’t believe his eyes!

They awaken on some mystical hilltop, all transformed into real “Dream Warriors.” Joey is now all muscular and shit, for example. Nancy gives them a Patton speech about why they’ve been assembled…a “Seven Samurai,” basically, to kill Freddy. A door literally appears out of nowhere, leading to Freddy’s home, presumably. They all chant “We’re home!” before entering the great unknown…

Back at the hospital, there’s a massive manhunt going on. At one point, Nancy’s dad -- no longer usable in the Dream World, we were told earlier -- runs across the lawn, on fire and shit. Before he dies, he tells Neil that he has to physically go to the Krueger house and burn it down.

In dream world, the kids TRY to set the Krueger house on fire, but nothing happens. So, they all have Molotov cocktails, saying shit about how they’re going to get Freddy. Taryn gets distracted, though, by her “Grandma’s” voice. Of course, it’s Freddy, who yells “Grandma, your black ass!” and EATS her alive with his torso, which has “The Thing” teeth now. “Sometimes, you’re hard to stomach,” Freddy quips.

Joey gets it next. He walks into a room that turns into your typical high school girl's dorm, where he meets up with one of the girls at school he used to have a crush on. She kisses him, but her tongue turns into a snake and rips his goddamn eyeballs out. Then Freddy TURNS INTO A BED and rips his arms and legs off. Some gruesome shit right there, for sure.

Then Neil shows up at the ranch and quotes Shakespeare. Then he looks at the wind chime, which is now made out of human fingers! He goes in, and cuts off one of his fingers, and then puts it back on. Which, I guess, means he’s officially in the dream world now. And Freddy puts out the house fire by simply opening his mouth and spraying the flames with water.

Now, we come to Laredo’s death, and holy shit, this would’ve been something. Freddy shows up disguised as Laredo’s little brother, and tries to guilt trip him about his drowning. Laredo, displaying more sense than anyone in the movie thus far, kicks his “brother” in the balls and says he ain’t falling for that shit, Holmes. And realizing that he can do anything in dreamland, HE TRANSFORMS  INTO A TEN FOOT TALL GARGOYLE! Freddy responds by transforming into A GIANT CROW, to which Laredo responds by transforming into a giant fucking net. And then, Freddy jumps out with a post-hole digger(?!?), screams “screw you,” and he’s dead. Needless to say, it would’ve been a hoot to see how Kevin Yagher and pals would’ve made this one come to life; and considering how shitty the “transformative” battle sequence from the second “Mortal Kombat” movie turned out (which came out A DECADE after this film was released), it’s a pretty safe bet we would’ve seen ourselves some Grade-A lame-oh special effects here.

So, we’re down to Neil, Nancy, Kristen and Kincaid. The script says Kincaid spit’s a giant clam at Freddy (a shellfish or a booger, I’m not sure) and they napalm his ass with Molotov cocktails. Kristen manages to yank everybody out of the dream right before a fire incinerates them in dream world…

…and they wake up RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of her parents’ big soiree. And of course, Freddy follows them into the real world, and we’ve got some CRAZY SHIT coming our way. Freddy kills a ton of guests as collateral damage, and the kids run into Kristen’s dad’s TROPHY ROOM where he has a ton of guns and shit. Kincaid grabs an AR-14 and goes Al Capone on Freddy, but it doesn’t really daze him. The four try to dream teleport once more, and they wind up back at the mental institution. That is, everybody except Kincaid, who is STUCK IN A WALL between the real world (Kristen’s parents’ place) and the dream plane! Freddy then gives Kincaid a razor claw colonoscopy, with his glove popping out of his mouth. Through the aperture, Freddy’s head turns into a crocodile, and he BITES OFF THE HEAD of the bitchy psych director!

“Are we dreaming, or is this real?” Nancy asks. We as viewers have no idea at this point. The surviving three then find themselves back at the ranch home. Freddy calls Neil a “faggot” and knocks him out with a Dhalsim punch. Freddy calls Nancy and Kris the “c-word,” and a boiler room chase ‘tis on. Eventually, Nancy remembers how she beat him in the first movie -- by pretending that he’s not real -- and sure enough, it makes Freddy burst into flames.

In comes Nancy’s dad, all burned up and shit. Of course, its Freddy in disguise, but unlike in the final movie, Nancy KNOWS it’s not really her dad and stabs Fred with a shard of metal. Unfortunately, it also allows Fred to stab her, mortally wounding her. Kristen gets a pre-death lecture from Nancy, and Kristen promises to dream her away to a magical fantasy realm. With the house in flames, Kris drags Neil out.

So, the house burns to the ground, revealing a newer house, circa the 1940s. Apparently, its created a time loop, sending Kristen back to Freddy’s birth. She finds fetal Freddy, slams him up against a wall a few times and stabs him with his own claw blade thingy.

Flash forward a few months, and Neil and Kris are having diner. Apparently, Neil gets to visit Nancy nocturnally now. She bids him adieu, and there’s the little replica of the Krueger house Joey made. And then, right before the credits roll, we see a light mysteriously flick on inside the prop…followed by an ominous metal scratching sound.

So, uh, yeah, there’s a lot of changes there, no? I guess, mechanically, it’s the same film, but the characters (especially Nancy’s dad) and especially the chronology of the Freddy mythos are totally different. Whereas the latter films established Freddy as an actual human being (albeit, one that’s the alleged bastard son of a thousand maniacs), in this film, it’s VERY clear that Freddy was never a “real” human being at all, instead, being some kind of murderous mutant, claw handed freak that, I guess, has always lurked in the shadows. Of course, that opens up a huge timeline paradox; if Freddy has always been this mutant freak-o, then doesn’t that completely contradict the entire mythos established by the first film? I mean, shit, the very first scene in that one was Freddy assembling his claw hand, and here, the movie is telling us that it was something Freddy was born with. The part about Freddy being a molester and getting burned and shit remains canon, but its seriously skewed by the re-invention of Freddy’s background; I’m not saying it’s a complete plot hole, but it certainly muddies what was, up to that point, a fairly cohesive character origin story.

I actually liked Nancy taking on the vigilante role in the film, and I thought the dynamic of her and her loony asylum-bound dad working together to fight Freddy would’ve been awesome. Hey, it’s better than just using him as a drunk that gets killed by a shovel, I suppose. Overall, I also liked the “Dream Warriors” as assembled in this film more than I did the final product “Warriors” -- they are largely the same characters, but the minor tweaks, I thought, really created a more interesting cast.

Furthermore, I really liked the retooled bit players, especially Nancy’s love interest, who comes off as a bit more of a jerk here. I also fucking LOVED the idea of making Kristen’s parents super yuppie scumbag don’t-give-a-fuck socialites, and the “Freddy crashes the party scene” would’ve been all sorts of awesome. I also liked the psych director character, who was excised out of the final shooting script; she definitely made for a great “sub-villain,” of sorts.

The death scenes in the original script I thought were way better than the death scenes we got in the final film -- although as stated above, I’m not sure how good they would’ve looked using contemporary technologies. All in all, the deaths just seemed more gruesome and vicious, and the idea of hearing Freddy yell “Grandma, your black ass!” would’ve been the funniest thing in the history of anything.

As far as the Catholic imagery, I guess it would’ve been cool, even if that “crucifix” nightmare scene would’ve likely looked like shit on the Silver Screen. There’s also a ton of iconography about Deimos and the blind -- an allusion to Greek mythology, almost assuredly -- but it really doesn’t lead to anything too noteworthy. And the ending, I think, set up the series for a new franchise tandem team -- Neil and Kristen -- with Nancy probably in line to return as a “Dream Angel,” sort of a good version of Freddy Krueger, as was a plotline in the old “Elm Street” Marvel comics.

Of course, the “Elm Street 3” we got was just flat out awesome, so I can’t complain too much about the heavy script changes that went on from draft one to the finished product. Alas, in an alternate reality somewhere, you can rest happy, knowing that there exists -- somewhere in the multiverse -- an “Elm Street 3” featuring Freddy Krueger as a giant bird. Lord knows, that helps me sleep a little better, each and every evening…

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PROPAGANDA REVIEW: “My Twisted World” by Elliot Rodger

It’s easily the best manifesto written by a homicidal, World of Warcraft-obsessed misogynist you’ll read in 2014!

“Why do things have to be this way? I’m sure that is the question everyone will be asking after the Day of Retribution is over. They will all be asking why, indeed, why? That is the question I’ve had for everyone throughout all my years of suffering. Why was I condemned to live a life of misery and worthlessness while other men were able to experience the pleasures of sex and love with women? Why do all things have to be this way? I ask all of you.”

For those of you still wondering why Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger decided to hop in his BMW and start popping caps in assorted white girl asses -- this, after already stabbing three men to death -- “My Twisted World” is pretty much his dual-use raison d’etre/mea culpa. Alike Anders Breivik’s 77-corpse marketing campaign for “2038: A European Declaration of Independence,” I think its pretty safe to assume the whole reason the world’s most famous incensed virgin embarked upon his killing spree was just to build publicity for this flimsy tirade, which serves as something of a combination autobiography and blueprint for global female enslavement. Granted, it’s a challenging literary thematic -- acting as both heartwarming coming-of-age treatise and genocidal strategy guide -- but then again, it’s not like he can pen anything worse than “Atlas Shrugged” here. Oh, and by examining his batshit ramblings, there may indeed be an opportunity to understand how he went from snobby dickhead to snobby dickhead mass killer, which in turn, would allot society a greater knowledge of how to prevent similar mayhem from happening in the future. And like I said before, this shit has to be better than anything Ayn Rand’s fingers threw up, so there’s an automatic positive for us right there.

Rodger begins his manifesto by discussing his early childhood. He was born July 24, 1991 in London, where he lived until the age of 5. His dad, Peter, was a photographer/wannabe filmmaker who came from an old money family; his father, George, was a famed British photog, who is probably best known for taking pictures of concentration camp bodies and nude Zulu warriors. Mama Rodger was a Chinese film set nurse who was born in Malaysia. There’s a pretty good chance, Elliot tells us, that she got boned by George Lucas, too.

So, Elliot goes to a private school and watches “The Land Before Time” with his grandmother. By the time he is four, he has already visited six different countries. His sister Georgia is born when he’s about five, so the family decides to relocate to California. Elliot fondly recalls playing with girls in elementary school (apparently, the last time any females paid him any attention), and cites being kicked off the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios for being too short as the first of many, many injustices he would encounter in his lifetime.

For Christmas, he receives his first home video game console, a Nintendo 64.

“Of course, while playing these video games, my innocent happy self knew nothing of the significant role video games would play during a large portion of my life,” he writes. “And the sanctuary such games would provide for me from the cruelties of this world.”

So, his parents split up and Daddy Rodger monkeys around in Morocco for awhile and gets remarried. Meanwhile, Elliot remains in California with his mother, playing Pokemon with his friends and attending the red carpet premiere of the first “Star Wars” prequel.”

He talks about the joy of finding a Charizard trading card, people making fun of him for being short, and trying to get into the skateboarding subculture. “This was the start,” he said, “of an obsession to copy everything the supposed ‘cool kids’ were doing.” He starts collecting Beanie babies as a secret hobby, while spending his afternoons playing “Banjo and Kazooie” and “Golden Eye.”

He receives a PS2 for Christmas claims to get awesome at hacky sack, and begins submerging himself into the Internet as a substitute for actual human bonds. “Joining chatrooms through AOL temporarily filled in the social void for a few weeks,” he writes “This will definitely not be the first time I would try to fill in that void with the Internet.”

Then he gets an Xbox, and starts playing “Diablo 2” a lot. Then, he begins visiting an online game café called Planet Cyber, where he’s exposed to porn for the first time.

“Finding out about sex,” Rodger states, “was just the beginning of my horrific downfall.”

He rambles on for a few pages about “Halo 2,” and then he talks about his obsession with “World of Warcraft.”

 “I was so immersed in the game that I no longer cared what people thought about me," he wrote. “I only saw school as something that took time away from WoW.”

So, his step mama gives birth, and he tells us that even though he’s a teenager, he’s still kinda’ afraid of the dark. He gets backstage passes to see the third “Star Wars” prequel early, but since he’s in the eighth grade now, he lets us know that nobody gives a shit about that nerdy stuff anymore.

“Avatar: the Last Air Bender” becomes his favorite TV show, and he recounts his masturbatory habits. Ever shameful of beating off to standard pornography, he said he used regular websites as spanking fodder instead.

While Daddy Rodger is out making the documentary “Oh My God,” his son remains in self-imposed isolation. “My only social interaction was with my online friends,” Elliot painfully recollects.

WoW expansion packs get released, and he talks at length about how cool it was to have a teacher in high school that was into video games. How nice, Elliot said, it felt to actually have a real human being to talk to about stuff.

At this point, Elliot’s jealousy of “cool kids” starts boiling over. He recalls watching “Alpha Dog,” and cheering when the main character died. He got to hang out with people, and go to parties, and make out with chicks, Rodger writes: his death was well deserved.

Then, Rodger starts formulating these grandiose “Logan’s Run”-like plans to abolish sex as a human activity. So invested in his out-there, totalitarian fantasies that he tells us that he temporarily quits playing WoW to focus on his despotic, sci-fi visions.

He writes about using Facebook “stalking accounts” to spy on classmates, and brushes up on artificial insemination technologies at Barnes and Noble. His parents, finally beginning to suspect something ain’t right with this boy, make him see a “life coach,” but unsurprisingly, it has little impact on reshaping Rodger’s general outlook. He gets back on the Warcraft, and drives around late at night, listening to “Two is Better than One” over and over again. Huh…and you thought Seung Hui Cho had shitty taste in music!

Rodger tells us he gets into the work of George R.R. Martin, and decides to move to Santa Barbara -- primarily, because that’s the setting of “Alpha Dog,” and he presumably thought if he moved there, he, too, would find himself fully absorbed into the same sex-soaked social life that a fictitious movie character was. Yeah, I know the movie was technically based on a true story, but still.

He reads “The Secret” and some other "Law of Attraction” shit, and starts taking Karate classes. None of them appear to have done him any good. Instead, he sinks deep into the fantasy world of “Game of Thrones.”

“Each week I looked forward to the next episode,” he writes, “and each episode gave me a small hint of joy in my otherwise bleak life.”

So, he starts attending classes at Santa Barbara City College, and let us know that he really, REALLY doesn’t like his Hispanic suitemates. He attends the premiere of the first “Hunger Games” movie (for which his daddy was an assistant director) and a private Katy Perry concert, and tells us how much he hates the fact that kids richer than he was were in attendance. After reading “Power of Your Subconscious Mind,” he does what any level-headed person would do: he starts buying lottery tickets en masse, believing that the power of positive thought would lead to him hitting the jackpot, and thusly, make everybody like him.

During a pity party, he gets drunk and spills win on his laptop. Afterwards, he makes his mama buy him a new one. His parents make him go see a psychiatrist, and that’s when he first starts thinking about his fateful “Day of Retribution.”

He begins purchasing handguns, and spends virtually all of his free-time holed up, by himself, in his bedroom. With only his mass hatred of all of humanity to keep him company, he then begins thinking up shit like this:

“I concluded that woman are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves…when I came to this brilliant, perfect revelation, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way, I am one of the few people on this world who had the intelligence to see this. I am like a god, and my purpose is to exact ultimate Retribution on all of the impurities I see in the world.”

Then, he starts visiting the recently shamed-out-of-existence website PUAHATE.COM, which is dedicated to disgruntled patrons of alleged “pick up artists.” With nothing left to live for, he said his original plan was to strike on Halloween 2013, but there were too many Po-Po out and about. He ends up seeing more counselors, and makes one last ditch effort to get laid before turning 22, but he winds up getting his ass kicked in a street fight instead. He spends Halloween getting drunk in his mama’s hot tub, all by his lonesome. Funny how no one seems to be pinning the blame on alcoholism as a  potential catalyst for the murders, no?

He recounts the sorrow he felt watching a couple make out on a golf course, which more than anything else in the manifesto, comes closest to giving us a “breaking point” moment.

“There were lots of other people there as well, for it was quite a unique sunset. All of them must have had thoughts of admiration towards the couple, and thoughts of contempt towards me because I was all alone and unwanted. I have lived such an unnatural life, devoid of love, sex and pleasure. Watching sunsets was one of the few joys I had left, and now that too was taken from me. How can I enjoy a sunset anymore, knowing that other men get to enjoy them with their beautiful girlfriends at their side? There was no more life for me to live.”

He targets Valentine’s Day 2014 as the original date of attack, but then bumps it up to April 26. What did his grandiose plan consist of, you may be wondering? Well, here’s what his ideal mass murder endeavor would’ve resembled:

“On the day before the Day of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance. Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery. The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber. After that, I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with  hammer, and slit their throats. I will torture some of the good looking people before I kill them, assuming that the good looking people had the best sex lives. All of that pleasure they had in life, I will punish by bringing them pain and suffering. I have lived a life of pain and suffering, and it was time to bring the pain to people who actually deserve it. I will cut them, flay them, strip all the skin off their flesh and pour boiling water all over them while they are still alive, as well as any other form of torture I could possibly think of. When they are dead, I will behead them and keep their heads in a bag, for their heads will play a major role in the final phase.”

All right, so round one of the Elliot Rodger murder parade would basically be the first “Hellraiser” movie. That’s all fine and dandy, but what non-Cenobite-themed mass mayhem would he have liked to hoist upon the masses?

“The Second Phase will take place on the Day of Retribution itself, just before the climactic massacre. The Second Phase will represent my War on Women. I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. They have starved me of sex for my entire youth, and gave that pleasure to other men. In doing so, they took many years of my life away. I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of the core of their wicked hearts. I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender. The hottest sorority of UCSB. After doing a  lot of extensive research within the last year, I found out that the sorority with the most beautiful girls is Alpha Phi Sorority. I know exactly where their house is, and I’ve set outside it in my car to stalk them many times. Alpha Phi sorority is full of hot beautiful blonde girls, the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have because they all looked down on me…I will sneak into their house at around 9:00 a.m. on the Day of Retribution, just before all of the partying starts, and slaughter every single one of them with my guns and knives. If I have time, I will set the whole house on fire. Then we shall see who the superior one really is!”

After that, he said he would’ve killed his entire step-family, and gone “Death Race 2000” on the streets of Isla Vista, trying to splatter as many pedestrians as he could en route to his final act:

“Once I reach Del Playa Street, I will dump the bag of severed heads I had saved from my previous victims, proclaiming to everyone how much I’ve made them all suffer. Once they see all of their friend’s heads roll onto the street, everyone will fear me as the powerful god I am. I will then start massacring everyone on Del Playa Street. I will pull up next to a house party and fire bullets at everyone partying on the front yard. I will specifically target the good looking people, and all the couples. After I have destroyed a house party, I will continue down Del Playa, destroying everything and everyone. When I see the first police car come to their rescue, I will drive away as fast as I can, shooting and ramming anyone in my path…to end my own life, I will quickly swallow all of the Xanax and Vicodin pills I have left, along with an ample amount of hard liquor. Immediately after imbibing the mixture, I will shoot myself in the head with two of my handguns simultaneously. If the gunshots don’t kill me, the deadly drug mixture eventually will. I will not suffer being captured and sent to prison.”

Prior to the attack, he uploads several YouTube videos, stating if just ONE girl would have contacted him, he probably would’ve cancelled the massacre. Alas, no one did (surprisingly, going on cryptic, eugenicist rants isn’t the best way to win over the fairer sex) and due to a head cold, he postpones his attack until May 24. Apparently, somebody WAS concerned by his videos, since the Po-Po showed up at his doorstep one day. Alas, they didn’t search his room, which Rodger said would’ve “ruined everything.” So, uh, who do we want to blame more for the massacre with that info in mind: the callous women of Santa Barbara who wouldn’t even give a horribly depressed young man one evening of social discourse, or the lackadaisical law enforcement, who with just a bit of authoritative, intrusive force, could’ve foiled all of Rodger’s plans right then and there?

He concludes the book with a passage about his highfalutin scheme to totally eradicate the female population. He wants to round up all of the Earth women into concentration camps, where a few well be kept in underground sex bunkers, you know, just to keep the species going. It’s a simple hypothesis, really: if there’s no women, there’s no sex, right? Uh…not according to at least one movie I can think of, anyway…

And of course, that brings us to the tirade’s literal final word:

“All I ever wanted was to love women, and in turn to be loved by them back. Their behavior towards me has earned my hatred, and rightfully so! I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy. Humanity struck at me first by condemning me to experience so much suffering. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I didn’t start this war. I wasn’t the one who struck first. But I will finish it by striking back. I will punish everyone. And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show the world my true worth.”

Boy oh boy, did Elliot ever show us what-for, no? After gunning and stabbing six people to death (interestingly enough, killing more men than he executed women folk), his manifesto spread like wildfire over the Interwebs, with cyber-feminists the world over slamming it for promoting misogynistic violence. Instead of capturing our hearts, Rodger’s lengthy diatribe did little more than momentarily rankle the very people it was intended to influence. Instead of dying a hero of the men’s rights movement, he just wound up being remembered as a rich, delusional pansy who killed a whole bunch of innocent people because he couldn’t get laid. That in mind, I cant imagine a more inglorious epitaph than the one Elly-boy penned for himself, really.

I suppose you can gleam some truths from the tirade, though. For one, it really demonstrates the HATE + ISOLATION + HOPELESSNESS = MASS DEATH hypothesis quite well, with Rodger blaming his own romantic failures on the totality of society, and then falling into Internet seclusion instead of engaging in any sort of pro-social bonds with anyone. Feeling that he would never be accepted, he fell in love with his grandiose murder fantasies instead, ultimately reaching a point of such depression that he decided the only satiation he could ever get out of existence was to take himself out of it altogether, with a couple of collateral bodies thrown in for good measure.

Gender-targeted, isolation-based mass murders really aren’t anything new, you know, as residents of Montreal and Killeen, Tex. can obviously tell you. Alas, no one really seems to address how Rodger’s mentality could have been altered before he started dreaming about shooting up frat houses -- instead, most Internet commentators and politico talking heads have just been yammering on and on about the poisonous “misogyny” underlying the murders, and how the ideology must be completely eradicated to prevent future killings.

I hate to tell you hens this, but after reading Elliot’s own turgid bio, it wasn’t misogyny that drove him to murder. Instead, it was a social climate that he thought bred alienation and discouraged interaction between the two sexes. Elliot didn’t kill because he wanted to rape, he killed because he was denied a true romantic bond with another human being, that glorious interpersonal state of affairs we endlessly celebrate in song and film.

He wanted to love, and he wanted someone to love him. The culture at large -- perhaps inadvertently, or perhaps not -- denied him that.

And that rejection, he carefully rationalized, was just something he decided was worth killing for one day.

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