Mckenzie Wark's Allegory Of The Cave

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” refers to the idea of the shadows in the cave being used to subjugate prisoners in a cave. They are being entranced and trapped by their own shadows, and believe that the shadows are the thing that they represent: for example, the shadow of a dog is a dog. The image of the prisoners chained to the wall, forced to watch something they think is the outside but that they create, has persisted in society for millennia, and for good reason. The allegory strikes at the heart of the systems that use something of people in order to create something that can be appropriated. The allegory of the cave has implications for media and for culture. The central argument of the “Allegory of the Cave” is that we are all prisoners to an invisible system. Some systems are more restrictive than others, of course, but in the final analysis all people are prisoners somehow and the representations they see of the outside world. Further, the representations inform people’s understandings of Forms in that much of the representations and symbols in life are abstract, with the blind leading the blind in terms of how they understand that the term for something is a central truth. …show more content…
“Outside each cave is another cave; beyond the game is another game. Each has its particular rules; each has its ranks of high scores. Is that all there is? The gamer who lifts an eye from the target risks a paralyzing boredom” (Wark). The central argument of Wark’s piece is that gaming creates worlds that, despite their ephemerality and lack of connection to the mandate for productivity in the real world, gaming allows for a resistance to the hegemony of the