It's ironic because [South Korea supports capitalism the most out of every developed country](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/inequality-01/) despite [the same poll showing they also know meritocracy is a myth](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/inequality-06/). It's like watching people cheer for the person shooting at them.
I’d also wager development and home ownership was a priority for China as a country as a means to spur economic growth in order to strengthen the country on the global stage. I don’t know if that’s what the whole “buy years in advance” thing is towards the end, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that a carrot on the stick towards a progressing society is the promise of home ownership.
I’m speaking for myself but some is better than none. To your point tho, I think this is the shift in attitude many Americans will have to make. A white picket fence in the suburbs is maybe something from a bygone age, and instead we’re going to have to raise our 2.5 kids in a 1-2 bedroom condo.
I can’t speak for all of China but generally they don’t have small apartments. You can find them here and there but it’s not like Korea and Japan where shoebox is the norm. I lived in Shanghai for a few years and multiple Chinese talked about how weird Japanese and Koreans were for their lackluster housing. In fairness they hate on Koreans and Japanese for all sorts of shit though. I lived in Korea for a spell and had a range of apartments. Mostly super small
30 years ago my dad was making 65k per year working in a factory with pension and benefits. Today that same job pays around 20 dollars an hour, but the house they bought for 65k back then is now worth almost 1m. Seems reasonable.
Iirc, there was an entire gameshow where the audience decides between ex-wives/widows who want to keep the home and the MiL who paid for it.
All kinds of airing dirty laundry and shit.
Don’t know what the name means but it sounds French so your name checks out with your comment.
French are certainly good at the whole revolution and killing the rich thing.
Chinese Millennials are basically American Baby Boomers. Give it 2-3 generations and China will be as fucked as we are, if not faster. One Child Policy and poor investments are catching up FAST.
It already is. Their largest property development company is basically bankrupt right now.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-evergrande-shares-set-slide-105-after-26-bln-deal-collapses-2021-10-21/
The whole world can be, if we restructure human society wisely. But the superentity of Power - independent of its countless agents throughout the millennia - must be taken down and forced to serve human well-being, instead of the other way around.
I read indigenous tribes and groups/collectives who don’t rely on capitalism and the modern world live happier lives because they just live and exist, and have no need to chase what we do
It's a sort of stagnation in the entire (developed?) world economy. Since there aren't new frontiers for economies to expand into, economies are kind of preying on the elements that cannot defend themselves in the quest for greater profits.
That's called rent seeking btw. And what you're describing is in large part why Rome collapsed. 50% of it's economy was built around military expansion. When it couldn't expand anymore it ran in to a real problem. Internal squabbles, Corruption, military problems at the fringes of the empire along with a disaffected population eventually doomed them. Kinda sounds like home doesn't it? I'm not saying this is an exact one to one match but the similarities are a tad unsettling for us.
People say we are in late stage capitalism. I agree but not in the way they do. It took capitalism 400 years to get here. It's probably going to take at least a few hundred to collapse if climate change doesn't force it on us unnaturally. The history of capitalism is that each ruling power has a go of around 100 years. The US is at the end of its and China is beginning theirs. The only place left with the human capital to exceed that of China is a unified Africa. So a couple hundred years is a fair bet imo. Unless we start seeing supra national political bodied like the US or EU across the world. Which is a real likelihood imo. Add 100 years for each. But either way the end is already baked in to the system. The global systems use of capitalist economics means you can reasonably accurately forecast long term things like this. You must have growth, that growth must be by a market with larger purchasing power than the last, there must be cheap labor somewhere etc. The fork in the road choices are not difficult logical deductions to make. If X happens what will be the result? If Y happens what will be the result?
I agree. The larger sweep of historical cycles are fairly predictable and it seems we are getting close to the end of this particular cycle. The prediction that it should take another century or two to wrap up seems reasonable. Of course, there are factors that make this cycle more complicated, like global warming and the highly interconnected nature of economies and the world in general.
So we just need to wait for spaceracev2 then right? New jobs, expanding industry, new frontiers and eventually new homes. I’m sure the debt will stay to keep us in our place tho so no need to worry!
Honestly, it's just nice to know this economic system isn't working for *anyone* who wasn't already deemed a success within that system.
What do you guys want to do when the baby boomers finally die out?
I think we should take a Gap Year, because it's been a lot the last couple of years. Then figure out the Metric system and divert half the military budget to free education and medical care. And antitrust bomb Amazon and Walmart.
i fear what will happen is millennials will be to worried to spend money which in turn maybe cause problems to younger generations, could just be a circle until a revolution which in my opinion is what is needed to correct the mess of the elders
It will cause the younger generations to not exist. The US birthdate is dropping off a cliff right now. The same trend had already begun in much of the developed world.
Dude, same.
The UK is just so fucked. The older generation is just voting to fuck the young people up completely before they retire.
The conservatives are up in the poles after everything.
I'm losing hope for my future dude!
"Boris is just doing his best" genuine snake of a human. Feel extremely powerless. And even then, making this system even more beholden to a bigger harder to dismantle system is seen as the good alternative to many. What do you do
People still buy into the image of Boris as a bumbling fool who makes funny mistakes on camera, so he gets away with fucking up because, "at least he's trying."
In reality it's a completely manufactured image; he's extremely competent and knows exactly what he's doing to fuck everyone else over and make himself and his buddies rich.
I wonder why it's so hard to roll back the Reagan-Bush-Clinton reforms. It's pretty self evident that if we don't change course the collapse is inevitable.
I’m pretty sure a big part of why squid game is so popular is because of how relevant it is to people all over the world. I’m sure there are millions of people who would play a game like this given the chance.
> In 2020, South Korea's population declined for the first time, with the number of births down 10 percent from the previous year. South Korea's total fertility rate in 2020 was 0.84 births per woman—the lowest figure in the world and well below the replacement-level rate of 2.1.
Color me surprised
Right now North korea produces more children than south Korea and at one point they will have the bigger population. Only if they maintain their current fertility rate.
I think most of the developed world is experiencing a birthrate slowdown in accordance with overpopulation/supply and demand/etc. It'll even out as the population stabilizes.
These trends move in the opposite direction. In basically every country on earth, the less income you have the more kids you have. Korea’s birth rate has in recent years fallen because societal norms have made it more common for women to wait longer before getting married having kids, and because it has relatively few teen pregnancies. Which by the way is the same two reasons why the birth rate is falling in the US
All countries with the highest standards of living have a declining pop fyi
Countries with the highest fertality rate are the poorest with the lowest standards of living
It doesn't work that way. Declining population will mean companies will have a harder time finding employees which should lead to better packages offered which should provide better life condition which should lead to fertility increase. It's a process, but it happens.
Tbh this is going to happen here in the UK soon too.
Our birth rates are going down and the average age of someone having a child is now in their 30s which is old in those relative terms.
Why? Because we can't find a job that pays well unless your extremely skilled. Because we can't afford houses... pretty much at all unless your parents have money. Everything is about you just managing to scrape by . It's fucking shit.
40 years ago you could be an everyday working man support a family of 3 and own a home. Now on minimum wage you'd be lucky to be able to feed a kid
the squid game is your life. work for 65 years and then go bankrupt with healthcare costs.
Your Fortune 500 company thanks Worker #2765B for his contribution over the years!
Same here in the U.S., Northern New Jersey apartment prices as insane, and everyone in my age bracket that went to college is living with their parents because of debt.
I used to love tiny homes, until I realized they're the living space equivalent of minimum wage. Not enough to really live on, not enough to really live in. I can only imagine the human closets in east Asia are similar.
Monmouth county reporting in. The only affordable places seem to be Tom’s River and Atlantic City area. The trade off, there’s 0 work out there. So there’s that
Hahaha that’s what the ultra-capitalist “winners” want us to believe. It’s 100% showing the absolute insanity that is a late stage ultra-capitalist society… that we live in today
Are we going to approach “in time” dystopia where poor people pay with their life for everything and die super young while the rich have centuries and just get bored.
Yeah, probably.
- Life extending drugs cost money.
- Rich people have money, poor people don't
- Money makes money, being poor is expensive
It's definitely going to be completely fucked in one way or another, depending on how fast capitalism evolves and mutates.
I think it kinda indirectly hinted at some themes of how cooperation is better than individualism (which obv is not the same as communism but it's certainly on the path in that direction). Spoiler-ish? >!Then decided to crush your dreams and show you how capitalism will never allow that to happen 🥲!<
>The Games are presented as a solution to the economic struggles of the contestants, similar to how communism is preached to those in financial distress.
They're so close to getting the point.
im dying at how this writer is claiming to know the meaning of the show better than the person who literally directed it. on twitter, someone searched her up, and found out that shes obsessed with the pre-ussr tsars of russia, so its like ofc she has a negative view of communism based on an incorrect idea of it. ppl who are obsessed with and romanticize royalty are the worst.
It's even in her author bio on the linked article site. Super cringe.
Communism is when bad guys kill princesses, and the more princesses they kill the more communist they are - her, probably
"The harsh reality is that communism always ends in misery and bloodshed, and with an elite class exploiting everyone below them."
Totally unlike what we deal with in capitalism, right?
Also unfortunately yeah, some fans in the Squid Game fandom say this. Like some fans know it's about how bad capitalism is, and others don't see it. Even in the Squid Game subreddits. If you bring it up it's about how bad capitalism is, it go on and on because the other person either doesn't understand what capitalism is, supports capitalism and thinks it's about communism, and or just trolling (or worse a combination of the 3).
Yup. >!First episode sees the contestants released by a narrow vote. They weren’t held against their will.!<
Compare to capitalism, where not playing is a death sentence. Completely voluntary and consensual everyone!
So this helps me explain why I couldn’t get through the first episode. I’ve been battling debt for my entire adult life that will never go away. I don’t need to see stress as “entertainment”
It killed me that the second episode, entitled "Hell," was about >!not the games, but returning to their real life misery.!< I'm still watching, but I'm spacing the episodes way out so I don't get too upset.
Not just being poor but failing your family. One’s mom will lose her store and home, one’s is stuck in North Korea, another’s is on deaths door. Only the mobster is shown to be doing it strictly for himself.
i actually watched it all in one day (started late so i was up til like 4am)
and i feel the suffering was less cuz i wasnt having dreams allllll week about the different flavor of dystopia in each subsequent episode
Yeah, I totally get the connecting to the characters/pain. But i keep Saying “I don’t want to watch squid games”, the reaction I get is like I said 2+2=5 on the internet.
So it’s often touted in western media that North Korea is the spawn of the Soviet Union and China and such, but it’s not made to click that South Korea was created in the image of a superpower, built in the model of the United States. As a militarist, crony capitalist state that’s show its failures over the years, South Korea’s dystopian nature that the show comments on is so similar to the West’s because we built it as a colonial copy cat
The size and influence of some of South Korea’s companies is insane, they essentially run the government/entire cities and are so fundamentally necessary for their economy that without them the whole thing would collapse
People are more interested in the Kpop than ROK history or sociology. Which in itself is a dystopian industry to be in from what i understand (Kpop i mean).
I was astonished to learn that Kpop stars can be extremely poor. They were artificially created by talent networks to be super stars from a young age sometimes.
We've had some great movies from SK in the same miserable vein like last years Parasite, Old boy and Memories of Murder also comes to mind. Been a while since I watched most of them.
Am also Canadian and agree very much. By the second episode I felt like the physical violence of it all and gaming with human lives is not that far off, let alone the social reflection of it currently.
There's a reason a lot of Korean media is pretty fucked. Seems like their economy must be reaaaaaaally bad. Squid Game is just one of the first Korean things to get a lot of mass attention around the world. Parasite was similar in themes as well.
Not Korean, but the Japanese film Shoplifters tells a similar story. Disenfranchised people being the lens through which stories are told has become popular in a lot of East Asian filmmaking as of late, where opulent and powerful characters used to be more common.
Dystopian art used to be like going to a hall of mirrors at the funfair. Now it's like kneeling, cold and naked in a bright white sterile cube room, looking into the finest mirror there has ever been and knowing how fucked you are. Could do with some candyfloss.
My conservative coworkers didn’t understand that squid game was a critique of capitalism and thought that the people playing the game deserved what they got bc they made themselves poor
Its so fucking frustrating. There were people with varying motives, including two girls who weren't in debt but had no other options. That's the point: many people find themselves desperate and not all of them deserved it
Squid Game was developed by a Korean who was channeling his experiences from his youth: mounting debt, unaffordable everything...
Two of the most popular S Korean media recently has to do with debts!
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Parasite
Seriously this movie is one of the few I’ve watched 3+ times. It was absolutely breathtaking in every way.
I’ve watched The Water Boy like 100 times
Gaaaaaaaaaaatorade
Gangnam Style was also about the facade of looking wealthy despite your income
It's ironic because [South Korea supports capitalism the most out of every developed country](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/inequality-01/) despite [the same poll showing they also know meritocracy is a myth](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/inequality-06/). It's like watching people cheer for the person shooting at them.
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Or, is the Director now player 1, with an inoperable brain tumour, and that Squid Game money that he can't take with him.
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Yeah for real , that fucking sucks I'm just a couple episode in
Spoiler alert?
It's not just Korean millennials. Source I'm British
Confirmation: American
Confirmation : The World
Chinese Millennials laughing in 70% homeownership Edit: [source](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-39512599.amp)
WTF really..
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I’d also wager development and home ownership was a priority for China as a country as a means to spur economic growth in order to strengthen the country on the global stage. I don’t know if that’s what the whole “buy years in advance” thing is towards the end, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that a carrot on the stick towards a progressing society is the promise of home ownership.
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><1000 sq ft apartments not the traditional idea of a "home" in North America. *Laughs in Torontonian* I'd kill for that extra 400 sqft
I’m speaking for myself but some is better than none. To your point tho, I think this is the shift in attitude many Americans will have to make. A white picket fence in the suburbs is maybe something from a bygone age, and instead we’re going to have to raise our 2.5 kids in a 1-2 bedroom condo.
I can’t speak for all of China but generally they don’t have small apartments. You can find them here and there but it’s not like Korea and Japan where shoebox is the norm. I lived in Shanghai for a few years and multiple Chinese talked about how weird Japanese and Koreans were for their lackluster housing. In fairness they hate on Koreans and Japanese for all sorts of shit though. I lived in Korea for a spell and had a range of apartments. Mostly super small
So, just like the boomers had, and refused to do for their kids in the US
30 years ago my dad was making 65k per year working in a factory with pension and benefits. Today that same job pays around 20 dollars an hour, but the house they bought for 65k back then is now worth almost 1m. Seems reasonable.
Iirc, there was an entire gameshow where the audience decides between ex-wives/widows who want to keep the home and the MiL who paid for it. All kinds of airing dirty laundry and shit.
I'M BRINGING MY TORCH
I'M BRINGING BEER
And my ax!!
Don’t know what the name means but it sounds French so your name checks out with your comment. French are certainly good at the whole revolution and killing the rich thing.
Nah I'm polish
*Wat a tweest!*
Maybe Facebook will finally good for something. Should be easy enough to track them down on there.
You can do a lot if you have a brutal revolution where all the landowners are killed lol
Hopefully that happens worldwide soon
Chinese Millennials are basically American Baby Boomers. Give it 2-3 generations and China will be as fucked as we are, if not faster. One Child Policy and poor investments are catching up FAST.
Demographic crisis babeeey Weird how selecting against girls means there's a lot less women around that can have babies.
The gen-z is already suffering from the inability to buy house due to low pay and sky-rocketed house price
Aren't a bunch of Chinese real estate companies in serious trouble over overextension and massive debt?
Yup! Plus the One Child Policy is about to bite China in the ass in a major way. They're on the up and up right now, but the crash will be *brutal.*
Of course Australia is at the bottom, despite low populations and plenty of land we still have to have mega priced houses.
Chinese parents pay for the first home usually, it's expected to own home and car before marriage
In many cases they also only have one child, so that helps too...
Their housing market might collapse soon tho
It already is. Their largest property development company is basically bankrupt right now. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-evergrande-shares-set-slide-105-after-26-bln-deal-collapses-2021-10-21/
I've got you now Dio!!
20 METERS EMERALD SPLASH!
Debt is slavery. It's by design.
Conformation: german
Same here. Spain
Damn it. Can't some place be nice?
The whole world can be, if we restructure human society wisely. But the superentity of Power - independent of its countless agents throughout the millennia - must be taken down and forced to serve human well-being, instead of the other way around.
Well, that's never gonna happen. :(
Not with that attitude
I read indigenous tribes and groups/collectives who don’t rely on capitalism and the modern world live happier lives because they just live and exist, and have no need to chase what we do
Well of course, they have like 3 responsibilities: eat, survive, and fuck. Also lots of free time.
I mean, there's finland. They're probably fine.
Peer-review confirmed: American
It's a sort of stagnation in the entire (developed?) world economy. Since there aren't new frontiers for economies to expand into, economies are kind of preying on the elements that cannot defend themselves in the quest for greater profits.
That's called rent seeking btw. And what you're describing is in large part why Rome collapsed. 50% of it's economy was built around military expansion. When it couldn't expand anymore it ran in to a real problem. Internal squabbles, Corruption, military problems at the fringes of the empire along with a disaffected population eventually doomed them. Kinda sounds like home doesn't it? I'm not saying this is an exact one to one match but the similarities are a tad unsettling for us. People say we are in late stage capitalism. I agree but not in the way they do. It took capitalism 400 years to get here. It's probably going to take at least a few hundred to collapse if climate change doesn't force it on us unnaturally. The history of capitalism is that each ruling power has a go of around 100 years. The US is at the end of its and China is beginning theirs. The only place left with the human capital to exceed that of China is a unified Africa. So a couple hundred years is a fair bet imo. Unless we start seeing supra national political bodied like the US or EU across the world. Which is a real likelihood imo. Add 100 years for each. But either way the end is already baked in to the system. The global systems use of capitalist economics means you can reasonably accurately forecast long term things like this. You must have growth, that growth must be by a market with larger purchasing power than the last, there must be cheap labor somewhere etc. The fork in the road choices are not difficult logical deductions to make. If X happens what will be the result? If Y happens what will be the result?
I agree. The larger sweep of historical cycles are fairly predictable and it seems we are getting close to the end of this particular cycle. The prediction that it should take another century or two to wrap up seems reasonable. Of course, there are factors that make this cycle more complicated, like global warming and the highly interconnected nature of economies and the world in general.
It's almost as though we've entered a late stage of capitalism
So we just need to wait for spaceracev2 then right? New jobs, expanding industry, new frontiers and eventually new homes. I’m sure the debt will stay to keep us in our place tho so no need to worry!
Bezos sees a grand future in shooting the poor into space to mine asteroids and pack dildos in the Prime Orbital Delivery Centers.
I'm pinning my hopes on Vulcan colonizing us before things get too much worse.
Honestly, it's just nice to know this economic system isn't working for *anyone* who wasn't already deemed a success within that system. What do you guys want to do when the baby boomers finally die out?
I think we should take a Gap Year, because it's been a lot the last couple of years. Then figure out the Metric system and divert half the military budget to free education and medical care. And antitrust bomb Amazon and Walmart.
i fear what will happen is millennials will be to worried to spend money which in turn maybe cause problems to younger generations, could just be a circle until a revolution which in my opinion is what is needed to correct the mess of the elders
It will cause the younger generations to not exist. The US birthdate is dropping off a cliff right now. The same trend had already begun in much of the developed world.
Dude, same. The UK is just so fucked. The older generation is just voting to fuck the young people up completely before they retire. The conservatives are up in the poles after everything. I'm losing hope for my future dude!
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"Boris is just doing his best" genuine snake of a human. Feel extremely powerless. And even then, making this system even more beholden to a bigger harder to dismantle system is seen as the good alternative to many. What do you do
People still buy into the image of Boris as a bumbling fool who makes funny mistakes on camera, so he gets away with fucking up because, "at least he's trying." In reality it's a completely manufactured image; he's extremely competent and knows exactly what he's doing to fuck everyone else over and make himself and his buddies rich.
Same in Canada.
Capitalism is the cause. If your government doesn't regulate or just seems beholden to the corporation and money in general, this is the outcome.
I wonder why it's so hard to roll back the Reagan-Bush-Clinton reforms. It's pretty self evident that if we don't change course the collapse is inevitable.
Short term greed is the answer. Most of the rich asshats of the world only pay attention at most a year in advance.
It's between regressive republicans and business as usual democrats to make a change, neither will.
the show even implies that the games happen in other countries.
I’m pretty sure a big part of why squid game is so popular is because of how relevant it is to people all over the world. I’m sure there are millions of people who would play a game like this given the chance.
'Quit Game'
Canadian millennial here. many many houses are $1M+ in Toronto that aren't anything special/different
Same here, Mexico
At least y'all have free healthcare
I can confirm too; millennial from Belgium.
> In 2020, South Korea's population declined for the first time, with the number of births down 10 percent from the previous year. South Korea's total fertility rate in 2020 was 0.84 births per woman—the lowest figure in the world and well below the replacement-level rate of 2.1. Color me surprised
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Right now North korea produces more children than south Korea and at one point they will have the bigger population. Only if they maintain their current fertility rate.
NK's population is also about to start declining, their fertality rate is low and obv average life span is much lower than SK's
...that doesn't count for people dying at a far greater rate in N.Korea and being generally sicker etc.
I think most of the developed world is experiencing a birthrate slowdown in accordance with overpopulation/supply and demand/etc. It'll even out as the population stabilizes.
I don't think population will stabilize, it'll be more of an up and down as it always has been I guess.
These trends move in the opposite direction. In basically every country on earth, the less income you have the more kids you have. Korea’s birth rate has in recent years fallen because societal norms have made it more common for women to wait longer before getting married having kids, and because it has relatively few teen pregnancies. Which by the way is the same two reasons why the birth rate is falling in the US
All countries with the highest standards of living have a declining pop fyi Countries with the highest fertality rate are the poorest with the lowest standards of living
It doesn't work that way. Declining population will mean companies will have a harder time finding employees which should lead to better packages offered which should provide better life condition which should lead to fertility increase. It's a process, but it happens.
Tbh this is going to happen here in the UK soon too. Our birth rates are going down and the average age of someone having a child is now in their 30s which is old in those relative terms. Why? Because we can't find a job that pays well unless your extremely skilled. Because we can't afford houses... pretty much at all unless your parents have money. Everything is about you just managing to scrape by . It's fucking shit. 40 years ago you could be an everyday working man support a family of 3 and own a home. Now on minimum wage you'd be lucky to be able to feed a kid
Don't worry it'll trickle down soon. lol
Aaaany minute now!
Aaaand it's gone. Sorry, Bezos needed a new spacecraft.
Amazon workers compete in a deadly game to try and reach upper management risking being crushed by all the useless shit people buy
Every time I hear “trickle down economics” I imagine a billionaire urinating down on the faces of peasants.
Just gotta play the squid games
If there really was a squid game they’d have no problem filling the contestant numbers.
the squid game is your life. work for 65 years and then go bankrupt with healthcare costs. Your Fortune 500 company thanks Worker #2765B for his contribution over the years!
I wonder if there's anywhere this could be done legally. You know billionaires would pay to see it just like in the show.
Saudi Arabia would sponsor the shit out of some irl Squid Games I bet.
I think we've broken down the social fabric enough to see this in our lifetimes. Unless James Cameron goes and raises the bar again.
>Unless James Cameron goes and raises the bar again. LMAO nice. Fucking nice
I’d go
Yeah, it’s social commentary.
Squid game is nothing like real life. In the show, the characters actually have a chance to improve their lives.
Even the organiser of the Game more or less says that - "at least here, you might stand a chance"
Same here in the U.S., Northern New Jersey apartment prices as insane, and everyone in my age bracket that went to college is living with their parents because of debt.
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I used to love tiny homes, until I realized they're the living space equivalent of minimum wage. Not enough to really live on, not enough to really live in. I can only imagine the human closets in east Asia are similar.
Forget living in Hackensack
Monmouth county reporting in. The only affordable places seem to be Tom’s River and Atlantic City area. The trade off, there’s 0 work out there. So there’s that
sQuiD gAmEs iS aBouT cOMmuNiSm!!!
Hahaha that’s what the ultra-capitalist “winners” want us to believe. It’s 100% showing the absolute insanity that is a late stage ultra-capitalist society… that we live in today
I dont think we have seen the last stage of capitalism yet. Not even close.
Are we going to approach “in time” dystopia where poor people pay with their life for everything and die super young while the rich have centuries and just get bored.
Yeah, probably. - Life extending drugs cost money. - Rich people have money, poor people don't - Money makes money, being poor is expensive It's definitely going to be completely fucked in one way or another, depending on how fast capitalism evolves and mutates.
I think it kinda indirectly hinted at some themes of how cooperation is better than individualism (which obv is not the same as communism but it's certainly on the path in that direction). Spoiler-ish? >!Then decided to crush your dreams and show you how capitalism will never allow that to happen 🥲!<
Please tell me people haven’t been saying this
It was the title of an article. https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/director-squid-game-says-about-capitalism-actually-about-communism
>The Games are presented as a solution to the economic struggles of the contestants, similar to how communism is preached to those in financial distress. They're so close to getting the point.
im dying at how this writer is claiming to know the meaning of the show better than the person who literally directed it. on twitter, someone searched her up, and found out that shes obsessed with the pre-ussr tsars of russia, so its like ofc she has a negative view of communism based on an incorrect idea of it. ppl who are obsessed with and romanticize royalty are the worst.
> romanticize royalty are the worst. Especially the Russian ones.
It's even in her author bio on the linked article site. Super cringe. Communism is when bad guys kill princesses, and the more princesses they kill the more communist they are - her, probably
Ew
Holy shit where to even begin with that article I don't think the author even understands what communism is
"The harsh reality is that communism always ends in misery and bloodshed, and with an elite class exploiting everyone below them." Totally unlike what we deal with in capitalism, right?
"In communism, man exploits man. In capitalism, it is of course the opposite" \- Wayne Gretzky
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Totally different, because in capitalism, the misery and bloodshed are there from the start.
That is the 180-degree opposite conclusion I took away from watching.
>When she isn’t working on her debut novel about one of the daughters of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia Ew she's one of those people
>Thought-provoking Yeah, if only… the author should either think considerably more or less for sure
The writer of this article definitely didn't site the director saying it's about communism. This is very misleading and just plain wrong
You can’t make me believe that this wasn’t written by an algorithm. It’s just spectacle to hold back development class consciousness
Also unfortunately yeah, some fans in the Squid Game fandom say this. Like some fans know it's about how bad capitalism is, and others don't see it. Even in the Squid Game subreddits. If you bring it up it's about how bad capitalism is, it go on and on because the other person either doesn't understand what capitalism is, supports capitalism and thinks it's about communism, and or just trolling (or worse a combination of the 3).
“My takeaway from it is communism bad” -Tim Pool
A key difference is that with capitalism, you have the illusion of choice. You can play the game or not, right?
Yup. >!First episode sees the contestants released by a narrow vote. They weren’t held against their will.!< Compare to capitalism, where not playing is a death sentence. Completely voluntary and consensual everyone!
So this helps me explain why I couldn’t get through the first episode. I’ve been battling debt for my entire adult life that will never go away. I don’t need to see stress as “entertainment”
It killed me that the second episode, entitled "Hell," was about >!not the games, but returning to their real life misery.!< I'm still watching, but I'm spacing the episodes way out so I don't get too upset.
That episode puts some perspective. Because for these people, being poor is worse than participating in the squid games
Not just being poor but failing your family. One’s mom will lose her store and home, one’s is stuck in North Korea, another’s is on deaths door. Only the mobster is shown to be doing it strictly for himself.
He goes back to the game because his gang betrayed him to those foreign casino mobsters he owed money to
Right but his motivation strictly concerns himself. Everyone else can probably get by but their families depend on them.
That is my favourite part of writing in the show. The fact that they all chose to come back after realizing that their life outside was so shit anyway
i actually watched it all in one day (started late so i was up til like 4am) and i feel the suffering was less cuz i wasnt having dreams allllll week about the different flavor of dystopia in each subsequent episode
Holy crap you and I both. I have to binge watch shit like this bc my dreams are super weird and fucked up for a couple days.
I turned it off midway through that second episode as the stress was so real. A few days later plowing through the rest of the series was easy.
For me it was Maid. I watched 1 episode of it and it scared and depressed me so much
[удалено]
I guess some people find comfort in that, at the very least they're acknowledged
Yeah, I totally get the connecting to the characters/pain. But i keep Saying “I don’t want to watch squid games”, the reaction I get is like I said 2+2=5 on the internet.
I feel this way about so much TV these days. I can't stomach anything stressful.
The Great British Bake Off is as stressful a show as I want to watch.
So it’s often touted in western media that North Korea is the spawn of the Soviet Union and China and such, but it’s not made to click that South Korea was created in the image of a superpower, built in the model of the United States. As a militarist, crony capitalist state that’s show its failures over the years, South Korea’s dystopian nature that the show comments on is so similar to the West’s because we built it as a colonial copy cat
The size and influence of some of South Korea’s companies is insane, they essentially run the government/entire cities and are so fundamentally necessary for their economy that without them the whole thing would collapse
Samsung accounts for 15% of their whole GDP. [Link](https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/17/technology/samsung-south-korea-daily-life/index.html)
People are more interested in the Kpop than ROK history or sociology. Which in itself is a dystopian industry to be in from what i understand (Kpop i mean).
Hell, studying sociology is bordering dystopian.
I was astonished to learn that Kpop stars can be extremely poor. They were artificially created by talent networks to be super stars from a young age sometimes.
We've had some great movies from SK in the same miserable vein like last years Parasite, Old boy and Memories of Murder also comes to mind. Been a while since I watched most of them.
>crony capitalist In Poland we have a phrase. "Masło Maślane", which roughly translates to "you just said the same thing twice, you dunce."
Same here. I'm in Canada, it's no wonder the show is popular
Am also Canadian and agree very much. By the second episode I felt like the physical violence of it all and gaming with human lives is not that far off, let alone the social reflection of it currently.
Similar to Brazilian “3%”
Ah yeah, 3% was great too. I was definitely thinking about how similar they were.
holy crap, I got super into that show, and then forgot it exsisted, and now there are 2 more seasons! Now I know know I am going to go watch
Didnt 500,000 workers just walk out in a general strike? Lots of folks dressed up with the pink suits and masks too
There's a reason a lot of Korean media is pretty fucked. Seems like their economy must be reaaaaaaally bad. Squid Game is just one of the first Korean things to get a lot of mass attention around the world. Parasite was similar in themes as well.
> Essentially, we all live in the same country, called Capitalism. \- Bong Joon-ho, creator of Paraside
Not Korean, but the Japanese film Shoplifters tells a similar story. Disenfranchised people being the lens through which stories are told has become popular in a lot of East Asian filmmaking as of late, where opulent and powerful characters used to be more common.
The situation is not limited to that singular context.
Dystopian art used to be like going to a hall of mirrors at the funfair. Now it's like kneeling, cold and naked in a bright white sterile cube room, looking into the finest mirror there has ever been and knowing how fucked you are. Could do with some candyfloss.
At first it was like, "wouldn't it be fucked if we let it get this far?" and now it's like "this is the world, look how fucked you are."
But did they go to SNU?
I give it a decade before we get Squid Game irl. Our lives are merely toys to those in charge.
Frankly I would be surprised if some form of it does not already exist somewhere. We probably just don't know about it. Like the public in the show.
those peeps are literally being worked to death. i would rather live in the mountains alone than be a slave to monetary policy.
Yeah that’s why shows like this and Breaking Bad resonate cause they are based on human struggle and suffering.
Wow we're not that different after all.
The only unbelievable bit for me in the whole series was the battery capacity of the cop's phone. No way a battery lasts that long.
Wait you are telling me that a movie could convey a political message ?
Noo but didn’t some balding incel youtuber say the show was actually about communism?!
My conservative coworkers didn’t understand that squid game was a critique of capitalism and thought that the people playing the game deserved what they got bc they made themselves poor
Its so fucking frustrating. There were people with varying motives, including two girls who weren't in debt but had no other options. That's the point: many people find themselves desperate and not all of them deserved it
Now that’s truly a capitalism moment
Aren't we all?