What Rough Beast Slouches towards Bethlehem to Be Born?
Which of this recent crop of shows encapsulates the capitalism the best? The one about beasts? The one about traitors? The one about...squid?
Anti-capitalism is just another flavour of capitalism. That’s been clear for a while now. Take the marketing of Netflix’s Squid Game, a compulsive yet unsubtle show about contestants playing childhood games for cash, which results in the losers getting killed like dogs, as former, current, and future US president Donald Trump might say.
In the interim between seasons one and two, Netflix has been milking this cash cow dry, with reality shows and all manner of gaudy tat – tie-ins and lamewad merch (if your date has a Funko Pop doll on his shelf, vacate the premises immediately).
The money-grubbing doesn’t stop there. By splitting this already fairly padded-out season into two separate runs, Netflix enjoys the spoils of two different fiscal quarters; it also increases the likelihood of subscriber retention. What’s more, by releasing it in December, they got a huge amount of views from the diehards, and the more casual fans watched it after the Xmas holidays, also helping the respective quarters to look rosy.
The creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, didn’t get properly remunerated for season one even though the show for which he received no backend made $900 million in revenue for Netflix. Of course, no one could have foreseen the head-spinning success it ended up being, but it sounds like he got sweet AF. The poor wretch directed every single episode of the first season and – I shit you not – lost eight or nine teeth in the process due to the immense stress of the undertaking. The irony here, as if so often the case with reality, is a little on the nose.
But such ironies kept stacking up – of course they did. All this handwringing about Netflix’s hypocrisy in cashing in is eye-rollingly predictable, as if the show was a probing, sombre treatise on capitalism and not an excuse to see a horde of people get entertainingly slaughtered – mostly peripheral characters; the cowards didn’t have the courage to kill the pregnant lady.
In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher’s brilliant, seminal text oft-quoted by that annoying guy in your life, Fisher outlines how capitalism makes dissident art just another wing of the factory. He really sticks it to the film Wall-E:
“A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.”
Take that, Wall-E. For too long you’ve been trying to get one up on us. Speaking of interpassivity, Netflix seems hell-bent on not just performing your subversiveness on your behalf, but it also wants to perform procedural memory for you so you don’t have to. Screenwriters working for Netflix reported being told their shows “weren’t second screen enough.”. Since it is now understood that viewers, being simply too addicted to their phones, will be glued to them, the screenwriters were told to get their protagonists “to announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”. But I don’t hate Netflix for all this; I hate them for not going ahead with David Lynch’s Unrecorded Night and Snootworld when they make abominations like Kinda Pregnant. And now the great man is dead.
For all its broadness, Squid Game can be pretty insightful; in season two, it’s diabolically clever how after each bloodbath the contestants vote as to whether they should quit and take the winnings accrued thus far or risk their lives all over again for much more cash. This really gets at the insatiability that capitalism relies upon to keep propelling itself.
Which brings me to Amazon’s reality show Beast Games. In a tone-deaf move, they’ve modelled it on Squid Game, seemingly unaware that using a fictional series about the indiscriminate inhumanity of capitalism as the basis for a reality show demonstrating the indiscriminate inhumanity of capitalism might not have been such a swell idea, the saving grace of a fictional show depicting extreme things being, of course, that it’s not actually real.
Now, what I’m about to say here isn’t to take anything away from the enterprising whelp called MrBeast. He has accomplished a lot: he has the most subscribers of any YouTube channel; he rose to prominence by counting to 1000 in a video. He has talked about being apolitical to ensure engagement but, somewhat paradoxically, claimed he might one day run for president. Maybe he’ll be our messiah. To be fair, he has shown some philanthropic flair: he built over a hundred wells in Africa and has planted 23 million trees worldwide. Ever since going viral, he’s been tasking his contestants with increasingly baroque challenges on YouTube – for instance, getting two strangers to live together in a house for 100 days.
Recently, he’s brought his schtick to Amazon on a scale so whoppingly outsized that he himself looks a bit discomfited by what he has wrought. Or maybe that’s just his standard awkward demeanour. MrBeast, whose glazed expression makes him look like a young man who has ejaculated too many times in the one morning and now has to summon the will to visit his grandmother, is not terribly charismatic. His grin is more of a grimace, but maybe we’d grimace too if our job was to dangle cash prizes in front of desperate, hungry eyes, only to snatch them away.
Gladiatorial-like, the 1000 contestants – the most ever assembled for a reality show – are dispatched in increasingly agonising and cruel ways that would make the instant blankness of being murdered in Squid Game seem like a blessing by comparison. There are only very halfhearted attempts to humanise the lumpen they wheel in. But their backstories are meaningless, for they are there to be crushed by an uncaring, unfeeling system. The show barely provides us with the grounding of a narrative arc: there are just too many people to keep track of, each one as grasping and bovine-looking as the last. They never rise above being mere numbers. And when the show occasionally attempts to humanise one of them, they come off as the most insufferable narcissists who believe God is uniquely interested in their fate in this tawdry affair. Frequently, contestants are offered exorbitant bribes, life-changing amounts of cash, with the proviso that they have to betray their team and get them eliminated. Later in the interminable series, a private island is one of the prizes – Amazon has spared no expense.
MrBeast is like a slumlord at times. Having already unceremoniously eliminated hundreds of contestants in the first game, he announces with glee that the city that they will live in if they get to the next round only has 500 beds and there are 600 contestants left, which leads to more eliminations and backstabbing.
Contestants openly weep in front of Mr. Beast and his vacant, fresh-faced-looking cronies, who look like they’ve just made their confirmation and are now going to the arcade to throw some fun snaps at passersby. They're the sort of shrilling upstarts who'd consider a night huffing helium and playing Cards Against Humanity a night well spent. Upon seeing defeated contestants wailing in despair, they just shrug as if to say, That's a bummer. As the anguished contestants delve into backstories of woe that’d rival Ingmar Bergman, MrBeast’s crew look away lest things get more real than they need to. These interchangeable lads with their cool-guy jackets are there just to bleat inanities at the camera. They say things like, Now things are about to get really crazy. (Disclaimer: not an actual quote; I can’t be bothered to go back to check what they actually say.)
How apt it is that Beast Games should appear on Amazon. In thinking about Amazon’s unchecked greed, it’s useful to invoke Yanis Varoufakis’ idea of technofeudalism. Now, vassal businesses have to pay Amazon, a third-party platform, to get access to you. Instead of traditional advertising and capital, Amazon uses behavioural modification algorithms to grab you by the short and curlies. Since Amazon is such a frictionless way to consume – you can buy while shitting – and therefore has access to a massive customer base, businesses have no choice but to pay their overlords cloud rent – the equivalent of ground rent in feudal terms. These overlords don’t produce the means of production and require fewer workers. They are digital landlords, hoarding money. Eighty-five percent of traditional corporations’ revenue goes to workers wages. Less than one percent of Zuckerberg’s revenue goes to employees. Therefore, money doesn’t go back into the economy and doesn’t circulate. Every time you buy something off Amazon, they skim off somewhere between twenty and forty-five percent off the profits from businesses.
Likewise, MrBeast and the producers tempt the contestants into anti-competitive behaviour, resulting in them winning loads of cash at the expense of others. With all this in mind, Beast Games is a galling and wasteful parading of wealth, perpetrated by the anti-competitive corporation that’s largely responsible for the economy’s stagnation and the countless stories of woe seen on Beast Games, those stories it couldn’t even be bothered to take an actual interest in. And so, precariously employed workers, people who can’t make financial plans for future expenditures, have to go home after an arduous day to watch people desperately compete for an island while shovelling mulch into their gobs because they can’t afford more nourishing food, what with all the small businesses closing down and inflation skyrocketing.
Amazon, our technofeudal lords, are so ginormous they don’t so much dwarf the competition as annihilate it completely, just as contestants on Beast Games often find that their efforts were for naught because of the avarice of a sudden betrayer who’s taking the lion’s share. As is the way with unencumbered capitalism, things have got much bigger than anyone anticipated because the franchise must keep expanding. Too much is never enough. Ultimately, MrBeast and his snivelling goons seem dwarfed by the whole charmless affair, as if they’ve set off too many fireworks at school and are now worried about people’s safety, and boy does this empathy thing kind of suck and make me feel kind of wack, bro, shiiiiiit.
Such is the insatiability of the capitalist that MrBeast has to keep upping the ante, never settling for less. His whole selling point is how ridiculously extravagant his capital has become. Just like his contestants, he’ll always be seeking that bigger thrill. As Adrian Johnson states in Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capitalism:
The infinitude of the supposed "end" of capitalist greed means that no capitalist can gratify their greed insofar as gratification entails reaching a determinate resting state, arriving at the placid repose of satiety, Likewise, the capitalist's consumers, interpellated by the capitalist's greed, also cannot attain, despite marketing's false promises to the contrary, enough of one or more commodity to thoroughly and enduringly slake the thirst of their capital-stoked covetousness.
Even have-nots are not immune to this insatiability, as seen by the passing up of huge cash windfalls in Beast Games. In Squid Game, “the salesman” offers countless homeless people the choice between a loaf of bread and a lottery ticket. All of them pick the lottery ticket.
It’s senseless getting angry at MrBeast: he is the blank, uncomprehending vessel of an inhuman system too autonomous to impede. Capitalism is a faceless, intractable force that operates through individuals. Even its winners are instrumentalised and at its mercy. Oh sure, you could track down some guilty parties that are exploitative expropriators a la Luigi Mangione, but that wouldn’t put a stop to anything (which is not to say there shouldn’t be more accountability via “digital taxes,” etc.). Personalising your gripe with capitalism does nothing to slow its rangy strides.
Nevertheless, some of the contestants have tried to get their own back for being made into lab rats. In September 2024, five Beast Games contestants filed a 54-page class action lawsuit against MrBeast’s production company and Amazon, alleging widespread mistreatment, inadequate compensation, and “serious emotional distress, including suffering, anguish, fright, horror, nervousness, anxiety, […] worry, shock, humiliation, and/or shame.”.
To summarise Beast Games, the unpleasant show can be engrossing in the same way watching a tsunami sweep away an entire community like an Etch A Sketch is engrossing. Real end-times viewing.
The best show of this crop, in terms of sophistication and sheer entertainment value, is The Traitors UK. It is essentially the game Werewolf or Mafia, but set in a Scottish castle and taking place over the course of two weeks. My future wife, Claudia Winkleman, selects a few the traitors who are made aware of each other, and the rest are the faithful. Each day, a contestant believed to be a traitor is banished by popular vote; later that night, the traitors, who have to avoid detection, convene in deliciously camp fashion in a turret, kitted out in hooded robes, and proceed to ‘kill’ one of the faithful.
We actually get to know this motley crew of characters, many of whom are whiny hysterics or just straightforwardly stupid. But there is the occasional charmer or endearing weirdo.
At least on the surface, what sets apart the UK version – by all accounts the American version is an extended shrieking fit no less dignified than Beast Games – is a cosiness and the sense that it’s just a game, and that no matter how heated it gets, grudges won’t be held. This more humane hue to the show makes the viewer feel less bad about enjoying the considerable drama that occurs at the roundtable where they decide who to banish, often with incredible denseness, targeting someone for being shifty when they’re just introverted, etc. Upon being banished, the banished reassure their teary-eyed vanquishers by saying it’s nothing personal and it’s just a game.
But isn’t this exactly the sort of double bluff that the purest proponents of capitalism insist upon – that you must accept its vagaries with good cheer; that its arbitrary performance reviews are to be taken with sanguinity because that’s what makes you a team player? That if you’ve been let go, you take it on the chin like a champ: For reasons too obtuse to fully elucidate, we are terminating your contract. Bureaucratic nicespeak is the carapace that protects capitalism’s victors from the injustice they’re complicit in; it’s the lube before the great sodomising.
In the same way workers have to adhere to nonsensical bureaucratic rituals, The Traitors game doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Much has been made of the fact that the game doesn’t really make sense. If a traitor is banished, the producers tend to force the remaining traitors to ‘seduce’ a new traitor anyway. The supply of traitors is quickly replenished. And yet, contestants erupt with rapturous joy when they successfully banish a traitor and become hopelessly forlorn when they fail to do so when it really doesn’t matter – they might as well just vote out the people they don’t like.
In the end, as was the case in the most recent season, they democratically decide whether or not to keep banishing until they are satisfied there are no more traitors, even banishing those who there is no evidence against. Afterwards, the winners make a big deal of how it was with a heavy heart they banished faithfuls pretending to the viewers – and maybe to themselves – that it wasn’t prompted by base self-interest – the chance to win a larger prize pot.
In Beast Games, contestants who’ve been dispatched wail in agony; in The Traitors, they feel compelled braveface it, making sure their being cast asunder is conducted with the utmost conviviality. Which mode of oppression is more taxing?
A traitor winning the prize pot is much more satisfying. In season two, a pretty boy with an angelic face (I won’t say his name should you not want a full spoiler) committed wholesale to being a deceptive, self-serving bastard and went on to win. He was never under suspicion. He played a blinder and never feigned to be out for anyone else but himself. There’s more dignity in that than in all that performative hand-wringing. This is why Season 2 is the best season of The Traitors; when the faithful win, it's usually gormless dolts who are victorious simply because they got lucky and seemed too hapless to be evil masterminds and therefore were not under suspicion.
So which show is a more faithful encapsulation of capitalism? Beast Games, in all its ruthless bluntness, gets to the godless, monstrous core of what capitalism truly is, and The Traitors, an infinitely superior show, is a perfect distillation of the deceptive cheeriness that capitalism cloaks itself in the better to conceal the maw of that godless, insatiable monster; a chirpy, wheedling solicitude is what makes capitalism’s indignities seem to go down easier for those besting and maybe even those bested. We can still go out for a drink outside all of this. Even though there can only be one winner, and that’s the one who gets the prize pot.