I'd like to go home now
Squid Game, AI, A Long December, treadmills, and future historians
What the critics of AI don't understand is that I'm dumber than a dog's dick and have zero talent or even any desire to get better at anything but I also really want to be able to tell people that I'm an artist or writer or filmmaker so they'll respect me or have sex with me.
Seriously though like my books or don't not my problem but I cannot tell you how many hours every day for a year or more I will spend for example moving the word "that" around in a sentence over and over again trying to land the perfect percussion of it. Is this inefficient? Yes! It is also the whole point of it.
The drums have to be tuned.
For today's main thing Karen Geier writes about the new season of Squid Game and how most reviewers are eliding over its direct critique of capitalism and watering it down to a matter of "income inequality."
Luke O’Neil
Kang Sae-byeok is the conduit for the strongest critique of capitalism that you will find in the show. She laments risking her life to escape to the South, only to find her circumstances even worse under capitalism. She dies in 3rd place, and her parting words are “I want to go home.”
Imprecise language in these cases matters. Capitalism is the system that demands winners and losers. Its gears are lubricated with blood. Income inequality, on the other hand, sounds like a bank error, or suggests that people just forgot somehow to ask for more money. It is a defanged criticism to say the show is about income inequality, merely one of the many symptoms of the disease of capitalism.
Paid subscribers can read it here or down below.
Our resident Canada-explainer previously wrote for Hell World about the fight over 15-minute cities, the Canadian trucker protests, mass graves found in the residential school system, and the country's response to covid.
And it's still December. Have you heard about this? I'm starting to understand what the guy meant in the song. On that note these recent covers of A Long December by MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman respectively may be of interest to many of you.
Although I'm not sure either – while both quite good – fully live up to my admittedly high standards for the song.
Real quick let's go to Luke's Movie Corner. I watched Park Chan-wook's 2022 film Decision to Leave over the weekend and I tell you what he directed the hell out of this one buddy. It was a touch long and the story was a hard to follow at times but man it was one of the more gorgeously shot and interestingly composed pictures I've seen in a while.
Recommended if you like:
- longing
- pining
- emotional suffering
- longing and pining while suffering emotionally
I had a few new shorts go up at Flaming Hydra the other day which you can read here. A lot of my pieces over there will appear in the next book tentatively titled We're All Fucking Dead coming out in fall 2025 via OR Books.
A live look at me editing the damned thing:
Here's one of them.
Personal best
She was on the treadmill when all of the TVs at the gym switched to coverage of the attack. Even the ones that usually show commercials for Planet Fitness while you’re at Planet Fitness. She’d never seen them do that kind of thing before. Actually one down the end still had Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers on. Not even the imminent threat of a World War III will relieve us of these men.
And then she just kept running. Notched the speed and elevation up and glided off the surge of adrenaline that televised destruction brings. Ran like the fucking wind in fact. How thrilling death can be from a distance.
Besides there was no way they would ever get to us here she thought. The odds of it. There would be no point in trying to get to us here. So far from anything important. So far from anything real.
It was such a strange feeling but she figured that if it’s meant to be the end of the world then she had better be in shape for it. Have that at least as a starting off point.
She ran for miles. She was going to outrun any of their missiles. She was a missile herself now.
Around 45 minutes in a guy hopped on the next treadmill over and started trying to get her attention. Motioning for her to take her headphones off.
I thought this recent piece in The Irish Times by Mark O'Connell was good.
Mark O’Connell
Why should Ireland be, as Khalidi put it, a special case? Perhaps I flatter myself, but I’d like to think that even if I were British, or American, or German, or Dutch, I would still be able to look at the campaign of slaughter and destruction Israel is waging, and see it for the moral outrage that it is.
It is a great shame that Ireland is a special case, but the shame is not Ireland’s. That our country – its people, and its political establishment – is making its voice heard above the deafening silence of most other western nations is something of which we can, for now, be proud. I don’t believe in the idea of being on the right side of history. The histories of the future are none of our concern. Our concern is the present. And our country is, in at least this one important sense, on the right side of it.
That bit about the histories of the future not being our concern struck a chord as it's long been a pet peeve of mine. As I wrote in the Lockdown book:
Here is a poem I read this week that I liked. Perhaps you will too.
Now to read about the famous Netflix show we all know about.
A relentless pursuit of profit
by Karen Geier
Cultural critics are dropping the ball on Squid Game season two, sidestepping its direct critique of capitalism and watering it down to “income inequality.” Why are they so afraid to call out the system the show screams about?
Squid Game has never been a hard text to unpack. It is beautiful and entertaining, but its themes are readily available for anyone capable of looking away from their phones for ten minutes. It’s about capitalism. Obviously.
Why, now that season two has dropped on Netflix, are so many reviews framing Squid Game as a story about “income inequality”? Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone calls income inequality “the whole point of this macabre story” in his review, while others specifically cited income or “economic inequality” as the boogeyman of the series. This watered-down interpretation shifts blame away from systemic oppression, reducing capitalism’s inherent violence to a mere oversight or error.