Bets dystopia

Round 6/ Disclosure
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By LARA FERREIRA LORENZONI & MARCELO SIANO LIMA*

Betting, gambling, is what we have left in an increasingly platformized and financialized capitalism.

1.

the acclaimed series Round 6 returns to the spotlight in a new season and, once again, draws attention as a kind of grotesque and repulsive mirror of reality. The plot is marked by explicit violence, desperate attitudes, struggle for survival and deadly bets. In short, the hypothetical Hobbesian state of nature is exposed in a terrifying postmodern version.

Starring players, all of whom are extremely impoverished, in debt and have virtually no chance of material survival in the world of exchanges mediated by capital, the plot revolves around the character Seong Gi-hun. He, Player 456, is the epitome of a “loser” in neoliberal rationality: unemployed, poor, with a ruined family life and a large debt to several loan sharks. In other words, he is an expense, a productive deficit. A disposable person.

Your last chance to redeem yourself: serve as a board game piece against others in the same situation in lethal games for the delight of a select group of paying spectators. Who knows, maybe you'll get the grand final cash prize, which accumulates more and more with the death (physical and literal) of each of the participants.

Those eliminated from the game, it is worth clarifying, pay with their own lives. Incidentally, death here is not treated with any ceremony. The banal evil, as seen in any concentration camp, is blatant. The “employees” or “soldiers” in charge of continuing the proceedings of the sinister competition commit murders and collect bodies as naturally as someone drinking a glass of water. And it could not be otherwise, because the underlying message is very clear: “We are doing society a favor by removing these filthy wretches from circulation.” It is, once again, art representing the harsh concreteness of the material world.

It has long been known that the system of production and reproduction of goods and life that is dominant today generates surpluses – both market and human. This has the disastrous consequence of disposability. In the platform capitalism of the current historical period and in the grim game of Round 6, there is a continuous war with mass death through the superfluous character of humanity that organizes the phenomenon of “bare life” – politically disqualified and killable life. The killables are placed as pawns on the table to fight among themselves, in a warlike and binary logic of kill or be killed.

It is the brutality of a Hobbesian state of nature, in which everyone is a potential enemy and the prevailing affect is the fear of violent death. Something not far from a reality in which there are no longer citizens or an organized working class. Everyone is a monad, an individual company (“entrepreneur of the self”), and therefore a competitor. And competition, as we know, needs to be eliminated.

In the series, impassive extermination, coldness in the face of barbarity, selfishness and cheating are constantly encouraged and rewarded. More than that, they are conditions sine qua non to self-preservation. This is then presented as a fatality: men, given their innate competitiveness and individualism, are doomed to devour each other. This is the final bet of the “owner of the ball”, player 001, in the final scenes of the first season. It is the cynical conclusion used for centuries to justify a succession of violations of fundamental rights and guarantees in relation to the most vulnerable.

2.

In fact, returning to Thomas Hobbes, a parenthesis is in order here in the form of a question: when the English philosopher, in the 17th century, synthesized in his work a cruel and animosity-filled behavior towards the other, was he in fact deducing a metaphysical “human nature”, or describing the war and political cannibalism that he witnessed in the rise of modern European civilization? In other words: would the compulsion to destroy the other be an innate essence whose control escapes us, or a social invocation of the permanent state of exception? We will see.

In the field of critical criminology, what has been called the punitive turn to deal with the new housing plan for poverty in neoliberalism has already been discussed – prison-penalty, with the phenomenon of hyper-incarceration. It turns out that, in post-industrial capitalism, especially in its periphery, there is no longer any intention of molding docile bodies for work, something that is clearly in extinction. Wealth has become autopoietic, capital multiplies capital. It is no longer necessary for the human being, as a piece of productivity, to be preserved, to undergo “maintenance” with attention to optimization and profit. Instead of an industrial reserve army, there is a financial contingent of poverty.

It is no coincidence that we are experiencing the dystopia of bets: as in Round 6, betting, gambling, is what we have left in an increasingly platformized and financialized capitalism. In it, the world of work is undergoing a true destruction of all the paradigms on which it has been structured since the 19th century, and the engine of the economy shifts from production to rentism, cutting down productive plants.

This creates an ever-increasing number of underemployed, precarious, unemployed, discouraged and killable people. Employment and social security structures have become liquid. The individual is left with the struggle for survival, submitting to a reality of terrifying exploitation, or to the simple social erasure of his body, of his being.

Brazil is a country that maintains strong ties with an ancestral authoritarian and exclusionary structure, in which modernity is always late. Our Welfare State, normatively, was born with the 1988 Constitution, at the exact moment when neoliberal grammar was asserting itself throughout the planet, destroying any traces of equality and recognition of individual and collective rights. With the institutional crisis that began in 2013, aggravated by the parliamentary coup of 2016, the Brazilian State moved to the position of agent promoting the entire dismantling of what the Constitution had erected.

The Brazilian working class, which had been strengthened by the union struggles of the period of redemocratization in the 1970s, lost its most basic references. In this panorama, both subjectivity and the neoliberal creed advanced with titanic force, sweetening entrepreneurship and meritocracy, presented as modern and sophisticated solutions for facing contemporary challenges. These principles took root in a social imaginary troubled by crises and frightened by poverty and loss of purchasing power. As in Round 6, the individual fights, with all available means, to stay in a game that increasingly requires him.

The profound changes we are experiencing have given the current situation a dramatic and unique character. The game is cruel, and bets, betting companies are imposing themselves as a mirage of Eden itself, an oasis, a quick solution at our fingertips in the midst of a desert and overwhelming daily life. The targets, as in the South Korean series, are undesirable beings, whose lives are dispensable, cancellable, on a planet that does not support conditions of human dignity for the entire population.

In this scenario, going for the “all or nothing” approach, disposing of one’s own life – biological and/or symbolic –, putting the last material resources to guarantee one’s own existence at risk no longer seems so absurd, given the supreme irrationality on which the civilization of algorithmic casinos is based. It is true that never before have so many bets been made. And never before have so many people paid to die. Breaking this cycle of horror requires courage and collective work. To do so, first of all, it is necessary to return to the first lessons of politics, to the understanding of life as a shared experience, in community, in short, once again, to the human condition of plurality.

*Lara Ferreira Lorenzoni, lawyer, holds a PhD in Fundamental Rights and Guarantees from the Faculty of Law of Vitória (FDV).

*Marcelo Siano Lima, historian, is a doctoral student in Fundamental Rights and Guarantees at the Faculty of Law of Vitória (FDV).


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