It started with a simple Helping Hand, but before I knew it, Pokemon Go had me in a Jynx. In the beginning, my boyfriend was into using Submission and Vice Grip, and everyone knows the joy of a shared String Shot.
But then I got in way too deep, and before I knew it I couldn’t Harden, let alone Squirtle, without the thought of being Bullet Seeded.
While mankind has always lived in close quarters with animals, most notably dogs, who have earned the moniker “man’s best friend,” recent trends show the damage this relationship is doing to our society.
From the fur community to Pokemon Go, the sexualisation of animals is an increasing phenomenon in our world. This treatment of (often fictional) creatures as objects for sexual outreach shows a very sick side of human nature.
Not content with sexualising other human beings, or living out their perverse fantasies in the privacy of their own home, Pokemon Go has these people out in our streets, interacting with innocent people, and, even more horrifying, children, under the guise of playing this game.
In an increasingly undemocratic world, one of the few lessons of the ancient Greeks has remained: the importance of a healthy polis. The city-state can only exist in its optimal form when it has space for the community to come together and openly conduct trade. For the ancient Greeks, this space was the agora, and it formed the centre of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the city.
In our modern age, where these activities can have no physical presence, the space of the agora now extends to all of our streets. The work of the polis plays out in every centimetre of our public space. Pokemon Go, a game where children are encouraged to freely wander the streets in the hopes of catching a fictional cartoon creature, cheaply projected onto the player’s immediate surroundings, has taken this to a new level. To add further insult to injury, many major landmarks of our cities’ history have been desecrated by “poke-stops” and “gyms”.
Int he latest from a world obsessed with forcing the torture and consumption of animals on the general population, Pokemon Go literally forces people to take joy in the imprisonment and enslavement of animals for the purpose of human entertainment. Not content with the barbarism of the racetrack, the inhumanity of the slaughterhouse, or the horrors of the puppy mill, the new mobile game from Niantic shows a complete disregard for the vegan population
It is unsurprising that a franchise with the tagline “gotta catch ‘em all” would be nothing more than a guise for capitalism’s continued assault on all semblances of humanity and morality, and yet, this fact seems to have gone unnoticed by most of society. Mankind, it would seem, is content to allow the propaganda of the technology behemoth, Google, to continue to pollute the minds of the masses. The cost of this pollution? The opportunity to “catch” cartoon animals on your phone. Who would have thought the catalyst for mankind’s fall would come at so low a price?
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