Game, Over & Over

The capitalisation of resistance is becoming an irreversible canon; it gives the impression that there is a descending trajectory into an era of neoliberal fundamentalist insanity and hyper-capitalist empire; torture becomes a spectacle and suffering a commodity. This banalisation is introduced through a gamification of agency and a homogenization of bodies. Hyper-capitalism seeks to subtract any agency an individual or any alternative community has acquired, with the desire to turn them into zombified assets. Every act of resistance gets bought or eliminated. Countercultures are converted into numbers and profit, likes and followers, views and subscriptions, coolness, vibes and auras. Bodies, physical appearances, behavioural patterns are broken down into measurable units, scores and numbers, what Deleuze calls the dividual (the divided individual), stored, tracked and used in data systems similar to a video game avatar’s stats.

Ways of being, doing, and desiring differently end up being CEO speeches, a corporate facade, a self improvement book, a gym subscription, a yoga course or a psychotherapy session provided by your desk job. Mental health within capitalism is exclusively treated and perceived as a private personalised problem that can be hacked via pills and toxic positivity as if you’re a video game avatar that drinks a health potion or gets a buff; it doesn’t take into account the socioeconomic and political conditions that affect mental health.[1] Physical health is treated in the same manners as well through fitness: tests, performance optimizations, real-time measuring gadgets and by following online Dietitian gurus and coaches that present food challenges with promising rewards to scrollers. All these rewards come in expense of subscriptions and by purchasing tons of food supplements and gear: pay-to-win.[2]

Capitalism is all about marketing and branding campaigns manifested as images wrapped as commodities and entertainment. Star Wars becomes a video game, Spider-Man an action figure, Barbie a movie and Fallout a series. Real life (RL) imitates images but images don’t imitate real life, they dip marketable fragments of real life into a glossy candy sauce and spam it as an endless loop of a sugar-coated promo reel that one consumes over and over again. RL becomes degraded into digits, profit and stock market. Everything translates into quantized values that arbitrarily make sense only when ranked against something else. Bodies are clashing and antagonising against each other based on their skills and abilities. They are turned into mindless NPCs and follow what producers, developers and funders order them to do. Work becomes a competition for deals and prizes, a league chart. Workers need to optimise their performance in order to get rewarded with bonuses: achievement unlocked. Bodies become role-playing marionettes and have to play their role well in order to stay alive; this gamified reality transforms our bodies into ghosts, “secondary other”, that remain alive through our video game avatars and digital identities, as images haunted by the main characters: celebrities, public figures, influencers, streamers and so on.

Scrolling equates to consuming tons of amounts of violence and propaganda: cultural wars, information wars and real-time wars. Real-time warfare consumption protects us from the reality of witnessing the killing of another being or the bombardment of a landscape. War becomes a computerised technological operation, a virtual spectacle, a simulated copy of the actual. Cultural wars feature factions of polarised users that try hard to win each user on their side based on an echo chamber that circulates conspiracy theories, toxicity, and hate towards the other. One says something in a comment section, somebody else says the opposite, then somebody else says that both are wrong and then there is a misrepresented and oversimplified infographic about it. It is raining outside, but maybe not, but maybe yes, but maybe no such thing as rain exists, maybe you’re living in a desert and you didn’t know about it in the first place. You’re stuck behind LCD screens and interfaces all day, losing track of time while doomscrolling yourself to death in the toilet until your brain becomes a melted turd.

Surfing the internet is no longer just about waves, more like waves with a gazillion of sharks that spawn from everywhere all at once. It is all about targeting, eliminating and cancelling and filtering out images: short out-of-context  clips, remixed memes, photo dumps, AI generated content and so on. Censorship, surveillance and misinformation breeds toxicity and bigotry, they make users target each other as if they are in an First-person Shooter (FPS) video game but instead of targeting the hostile NPCs, they’re targeting each other — or otherness — which in terms of the big Other’s desires it is a successful operation. McKenzie Wark writes in Gamer Theory (2007):

“To target is to overcome the indifference of self and other and at the same time to introduce an oscillation into the moment of this very overcoming. Press the trigger down and the target selects something other than you;”[3]

The internet has become a cybernetic battlefield. A relentless competition over power, attention and information. It is raided with bots, ads, trolls, clickbaits, content creators, conspiracy theories, viruses, spam, junk, dead links and inactive accounts. There are game masters that restrict your movement through the internet, gaslighting you taking certain paths, consuming particular information and being brainwashed to have specific opinions. If you push your account to the extreme by posting content that “doesn’t follow the guidelines” or has “inappropriate content”, a platform might ban your account: game over; but you can always start over. 

Social media is now filled with gaming aesthetics, such as NPC Tik Tokers[4, 5], e-girls, waifus and catboys, memes such as the POV Holding Sword and Cigarette,  niche online fantasy-driven trends Goblincore and Fairycore aesthetics which blend aesthetics from different historical eras and fragment time in an anti-chrononormativity fashion, the Playstation 2 AI filter[6] and video memes featuring characters such as the Huh? Cat, the Sad Cat Meowing or the Tiny Green Mall Wizard / Wizard Gnome. Social media culture has turned into character modes; it is all about auras such as the Dazed’s recent article Ranking 2024’s Olympic athletes based strictly on their aura after the obsession of online users with South Korean pistol shooter Kim Yeji’s gear and apparel, who set a new world record and won a silver medal. The athlete was then memefied next to the turkish athlete and sport shooter Yusuf Dikeç who also won a silver medal and went viral due to his casual vibe and lack of high-tech gear that contradicted Kim Yeji’s exuberant and gear-dependent appearance.[7] Meme culture has skyrocketed in the nether dimension, running faster than the speed of light; it feels as if every molecule of meatspace is prone to be memefied in a glimpse of an eye, but without actually having any critical depth, rather than just aiming to go viral for dopamine rush.

Joe Biden controversially debuted on Tik Tok with a Dark Brandon meme[8] and the Biden administration announced that it was hiring a meme manager[9], commodifying memes into a marketing campaign as a result. Memes have been the core of internet communication; they can fight the AI language models and their unstoppable data mining that traces to the grinding nature of Minecraft or any other open-world MMORPG. Maggie Appleton writes in The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI:

“No language model will be able to keep up with the pace of weird internet lingo and memes. I expect we'll lean into this. Using neologisms, jargon, euphemistic emoji, unusual phrases, ingroup dialects, and memes-of-the-moment will help signal your humanity.”

Another example of meme commodification is Charli XCX’s latest release Brat with which she has gone full-on Main Character mode by incorporating a meme-able album artwork through the Brat Generator as a marketing campaign — something which Kamala Harris presidential campaign took advantage of after Charlie XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat”.[10] The artist Camila Cabello was accused of copying Charli XCX’s album artwork by releasing a vinyl variant of her album C, XOXO that features a blue background with the title of the album written with a similar low-res font.[11] This backfired a series of online duels between the fans, forcing them which side they’ll defend. Famous artists and celebrities no longer seem to be regular people, rather simulations, video game characters; they have lost their agency, their bodies are at the stake of their fans, marketing campaigns and social media image. Fans have to choose who to support based on their esoteric beefs, like the Drake and Kendric Lamar beef[12], turning art into a profit-driven role-playing game.

The commodification of memes and their diffusion within mainstream discourse has resulted in creating a new meme-able meatspace that is tremendously distorted and fragmented, leaving no clue on what’s real and what’s not, leaking post-truth and conspiracy theories that are developed online within meatspace itself. A recent example of this Donald Trump’s assassination attempt which gave birth to a gazillion memes, AI generated images, tattoos, printed apparel with custom graphics just within 48 hours of the attempt, creating a race for a viral trophy while conspiracy theories were flooding forums and comment sections. Just like celebrities, public personas such as Donald Trump no longer maintain agency over their bodies, it is at the stake of the public’s opinions and their imagery, which in the case of Trump’s assassination attempt is underlined by the polarised reactions of death wish quotes such as “don’t miss again” and “you missed” and those who condemned political violence.[13]

Lastly the murder of the UnitedHealthcare's chief executive Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione spawned a series of memes referring to the video game series Luigi’s Mansion connecting the person with the game series due to the similarity of their names, creating yet another online fakelore and gamifying memes even more. This discourse was opened and introduced even the game Among Us (2018) within this paranoia due to its premise and the fact that Luigi Mangione used to play the game in 2020. Alicia Victoria Lozano writes in the NBC article 'Extremely ironic': Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO slaying played video game killer, friend recalls that the game could be considered a training terrain for RL killers:

“In the game, called "Among Us," some players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who perform other tasks while trying to avoid suspicion from other players.”