This shift towards computerisation thoroughly affected the scientific perception of the environment. The purpose of the living world and its inhabitants was to ensure ‘optimal’ outcomes for the deployment of nuclear weapons and the tracking of their effects. Data, considered a strategic asset ripe for exchange and exploitation, were not only directly captured from the bodies of the colonised populations and territories, but very much injected, under the form of presupposed taxonomy made intelligible for the colonial gaze. This brutal in-forming, performed at gunpoint and realised technically, manifested the epistemological bounties arising from mechanisms of power designed to “dominate, extract, hierarchise and subdue”. Conversely, entities that refused their dissolution inside this blinkered model were labelled “inhomogeneities,” a denomination that presupposed their eventual homogenisation within nuclear technoaesthetics, and their “mobilisation as a resource for the exercise of power”.

In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals - the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. Yet this primary myth of the American republic ignores the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: that some individuals can prosper only through the suffering of others. The life of Thomas Jefferson - the man behind the ideal of `Jeffersonian democracy' - clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.

The accessibility of video game engines, combined with their core ability of simulating worlds, systems and rules, has cultivated a broader potential beyond entertainment products. Many of the resilient economic solidarity models we have researched at New Design Congress depend at least in part on game engines as a key component for social organising, presentation, education or value. More broadly, game engines have found application in a surprising range of disciplines, including architecture visualisation, cultural archival efforts, visual arts, urban planning and traffic simulation, education and vocational training, academia, pilot training, medical research and transportation.