THE DIGITAL WASTE LAND
This post has two parts. Click here for the seconD part, “The Politics of Hope”.
ThIS POST IS THE SECOND IN the DIALECTICS OF LOCKDOWN series. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST POST, “ASYLUM POLITICS”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD POST, “CONCENTRATION CAMP WORLD”.
1. Squid Game (Netflix, 2021).
2. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/26/squid-games-creator-rich-netflix-bonus-hwang-dong-hyuk.
3. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019).
4. www.electronicbeats.net/mark-fisher-recommends-james-blakes-overgrown/.
5. The Replacements, “Unsatisfied”, on Let It Be (1984).
6. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (1951; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pengion, 1971), p. 26.
7. Alice in Borderland (Netflix, 2020).
I
GAME SHOW
GAME SHOW
These days political opposition increasingly turns into participation. To use pseudo-Jungian terms, nonconformist archetypes such as rebel, guerilla and hermit are replaced by the complicit archetype of contestant in a nightmarishly evolved reality TV show. This is why the murderous competition in Netflix’s Squid Game is so resonant.1 The emotionally desolate allegory from South Korea shows what capitalist society can become. “The show is motivated by a simple idea,” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told the Guardian. “We are fighting for our lives in very unequal circumstances.”2 The fact that the series is, inevitably, produced by Big Tech itself illustrates how dissent merges with entertainment. But entertainment here doesn’t mean fun or leisure—it means exploitation, corporate power and the psychosocial war of all against all.
The false paradise of life under twenty-first-century western capitalism increasingly seems to be an inescapable walled garden. Near the start of Squid Game the traumatised competitors are allowed to leave the lethal tournament and return to their everyday lives. But their situations are so compromised by debt that they quickly rejoin the game, even though they are more likely to die than win the prize money. There is no real opt-out: poverty and precarity drive people not into the gutter but into a gladiatorial arena that only one combatant can exit alive. Society’s losers exist now not on the margins but centre-stage—the space of the outsider has been ingested by the mainstream. There is a connection here to the other great recent Korean screen success, Parasite, which is (as the title indicates) also a story about the politics of inhabitation and confinement.3
Squid Game’s dramatisation of social–ideological enclosure, entrapment, incorporation is reinforced by a variation on the theme of violent revenge, which in so many Korean films is the last resort of the most ruthlessly abused and aggrieved people—their ultimate hope for justice (though often makeshift justice only comes at the price of a victim–avenger’s own death). In Squid Game, however, the abusers are anonymous VIPs in masks (see also another harrowing Korean show, Hellbound). Their victims don’t know who they are up against. The only path to revenge is to win the game and so become rich like the VIPs, or rather like an Apprentice VIP, and then seek to uncover the conspiracy. This shift in the theme of revenge, which again turns what was once an outsider role into an insider one, points to a desperate political restriction in the contemporary world. The desire to fight back risks finding itself caught in a snare which adjusts to each resisting struggle by tightening the wire.
Rebellion risks turning into a parody of itself or even an accessory of the status quo. I am reminded of something Mark Fisher wrote in 2013 about the “secret sadness” of contemporary pop music. He noticed that the hedonism and bravado of superstars like Drake and Kanye West barely concealed “frustration, anger, and self-disgust”, the artists “aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is”.4 What was missing from this Xanadu melancholia was the age-old rock’n’roll emotional landscape of life on the margins—the life of troubled teenagers and misfits, heartbroken lovers, society’s downtrodden and dissatisfied. (The Replacements: “Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m satisfied.”5) The loss of this landscape means even sadness now belongs to the secretive world of the rich, and we are nudged through music to weep for the sorrows of billionaires rather than our own.
Albert Camus wrote in 1951: “The spirit of revolt can only exist in a society where theoretic equality conceals great factual inequalities.”6 The implication of this statement is that as factual inequalities increase so too does the spirit of revolt. But what if, instead, past a certain point a rise in inequality leads to a vanishing of the possibility of rebellion? Also, Camus’s emphasis on endemic social hypocrisy prefigures the problem of the unquittable tournament in the sense that one root meaning of hypocrisy (from the Greek verb ῠ̔ποκρῑ́νομαι) is to perform in a play, to interpret a role, to dissemble. Squid Game presents social hypocrisy perfected, where there is nothing but performance and deception—society as pure and total game-show, where revolt has been replaced by a spectacle of competition.
The collapse of communism has deprived the secularised West of the idea of a different form of society to hope for (or to hate). Initially celebrated by some as the culmination of history which would benefit everyone, the reality is that instead of universal capitalism bringing widespread prosperity and happiness, it has created mounting levels of tension and demoralisation. The pressure of the objective scandal of this situation should be leading to protest and antagonism, but the neutralising ideology that Fisher labelled capitalist realism (the ingrained assumption that no other mode of society is possible) short-circuits opposition. Thus we are all left locked “in it together”, penned in the dog-eat-dog game with its worthless lottery promise of success, lacking any alternative, any exit route, any outside to fight to reach.
If rebellion is foreclosed or hijacked in a world which is more and more inhospitable, what is left is a psychosocial state of siege and famine, with anxiety and suspicion becoming constants of everyday life. The only remedy for the resulting sadness and emptiness is the one fantasised in Squid Game—to strive for success within the system, perhaps even with the hope of turning against the system in the end. “I’ll avenge everyone,” says the protagonist of another Netflix allegory from East Asia, Alice in Borderland, “I’ll stop the mastermind of this game.”7 But first he has to play by the rules and win, which is a perverse type of rebellion indeed ... if it is even rebellion at all.
Questions of faith, courage and commitment arise in the void once occupied by the old culture of protest. Doesn’t a desperate political situation demand a will to struggle, with resolute hope, rather than acquiesce? Or else, to quote Alice in Borderland again, “How will you live in this world that’s full of despair?”
Go to Part 2