THE VIN-GUARD PARTY

REVIEW: The Riddick game about resisting authoritarianism

INTRODUCTION

A lot of video game reviews these days will begin with an anecdote from the author's time playing, because doing so gives the reader an evocative slice of the critic's experience around which the rest of the review can be framed. I tried that rhetorical strategy for this review of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, but decided that opening The Spieler's first proper feature with a detailed anecdote about murdering a dozen correctional officers had low expected value as a content strategy. Indeed, I realized that Butcher Bay — one of my very favorite games of all time — is at first remarkably difficult to write about in a high-minded capacity.

I suppose that's fitting for a game whose player character is a 3D model of Vin Diesel based on Vin Diesel's intellectual property with dialogue rewritten by Vin Diesel specifically so that it would come across as maximally Vin Dieselesque. But if you know anything about Vin Diesel the man, you know he's a lot closer to Steve Urkel than Dominic Toretto in real life. And much like Urkel, he leads a rich and thoughtfully considered inner-life of philosophy and culture but keeps shit on the down-low so that we all keep rooting for him when he switches to his smooth-operator persona. I believe this is how Vin Diesel managed to build an A-List acting career around the schlocky meathead archetype while simultaneously cultivating a reputation as an affable nerd in person.

Escape from Butcher Bay, for its part, is a 2004 stealth-action game and narrative prequel to David Twohy's 2000 sci-fi horror film Pitch Black. If you're not familiar with the Riddick IP, by the way, my summary of its setting and world-building essentially boils down to "Vin Diesel wrings necks instead of driving cars. Also he's both Batman and Man-Bat." As far as this review is concerned, that's all the background you really need. Butcher Bay stands out in that it was written and designed by a mostly Nordic team for consumption by a mostly American audience, and all of this was happening against a backdrop of the Bush administration's many tribulations stateside and overseas. So just in case you’re sat there thinking that a 2004 Vin Diesel game must be a shitheaded distraction of no value to anyone save the fiending tweakers who reliably show up to Fast & Furious movies, I'm afraid you're only about half right.

You see, I have a theory — upon which The Spieler will gradually expand — that interactive narrative in general and game design in particular hold significant, unexplored potential as facilitators of emancipatory creativity. Escape from Butcher Bay is among only a handful of games that literally ask the player to partake in violent rebellion against a capital-oriented institution toward the end of achieving personal freedom. In so doing, it delivers a remarkable message about the nature of and struggle for self-determination that I find more prescient today than ever before.

Forget the migraine-inducing political implications of that statement for now — I seem to have mislaid my crack pipe, so we're not gonna use the fucking Chronicles of Riddick tie-in game as an excuse to talk about electoral politics in America. We are, however, fixing to undertake a little comparative study of American political economy specifically, contrasting the America of 2004 with this weird spin-off version we have in 2025. My read of Butcher Bay's narrative is that it's about taking responsibility for one's own freedom. And as we all become increasingly conscious of our departing social order's vast limitations, it feels commensurately worthwhile to analyze that feeling as it manifests in one of my favorite video games.

And I may as well be the one to do it, because I still have a copy of this game free of digital rights management software and so can still play it in 2025. The Steam version, as well as all retail boxes of which I'm aware, suffer from an infestation of 2000s-era online copy-protection subroutines and will refuse to run without successfully calling home to a Web server that was shut down yonks ago. If you want to play Escape from Butcher Bay yourself, your legal options for so doing are either:

1. Reinstall the GoG version if you were clairvoyant enough to buy it before the distribution rights expired, or

2. Dig out your original Xbox, find a cable adapter for your modern TV, and lurk around on Ebay until you find a second-hand copy of the (palpably inferior) 2004 Xbox version

...or I guess you could just set sail for international waters, so to speak. But I'm reticent about publicly encouraging digital piracy at this particular moment in history.

I'm just about expositioned out for now, so come along and join me on this narrative investigation of the critico-philosophical social theory underlying the game where a Vin Diesel character wrecks up a big corporate workplace.

ACT 1: PRESENTATION AND PREMISE

Escape from Butcher Bay's 2009 remaster — the version I'm playing — begins with a nostalgically crunchy full-motion video cutscene in which pitch-darkness enthusiast Richard B. Riddick is transported by spaceship to the Butcher Bay Correctional Facility. The setting, including the isolated desert planet on which Butcher Bay is found, was conceived from scratch by a crack team of Swedish game designers working in collaboration with the American film studios on one hand and Vin Diesel himself on the other. I can tell they worked closely together — how else could a team of Northern Europeans design a prison setting this convincingly anti-humanitarian?

The game's first minutes take place in a dream sequence for want of an in-universe reason to tutorialize first-person action gameplay mechanics. Back when Butcher Bay was released, you see, the First-Person Shooter (FPS) vertical was still dominated by games like Serious Sam, Unreal Tournament, and other catharsis generators largely devoid of narrative context. Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, which would respectively redefine FPS gameplay and FPS narrativization for generations to come, were both still months away. Much of Butcher Bay's unique identity is therefore derived from its peculiar approaches to FPS design that hadn't yet been standardized.

What sticks out right away is how authentically cinematic the game feels to play. I'm not generally fond of games emulating the presentation and aesthetics of film, because it’s very difficult to balance ludonarrative storytelling with the stylistic and technical languages of film. In simpler terms, I want to feel like I'm playing my games instead of watching them. But historically, some games have successfully met me halfway in this regard: I put up with Yakuza Zero's TV-length soap operas because they were interspersed among hours of high-octane Tokyo streetfighting, and I put up with Butcher Bay's film-like presentation because it runs through the entire experience and complements the gameplay rather than interrupting or distracting from it.

For a prominent example thereof, Act 1 begins with an early progenitor of the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare style of forced-march opening cutscene in which Head of Security Abbott leads us toward the towering monolith of Butcher Bay. But instead of shooting us in the face with a novelty pistol like Khaled Al-Asad, Abbott begins the story by constructing a spectacular rhetorical panopticon in which he expects Riddick to imprison himself. Notably, he does so in the voice of rapper and body-shop kingpin Xzibit:

Alright, pay attention, punk: you are now Butcher Bay Prisoner #5421135-2. Remember your number. Remember the rules — MY rules. And listen: there's no "outside" at Butcher's, just a whole planet of desert. So check those desires right now, because you will NOT get out. No one has... no one ever will.

If you didn't read that in Xzibit's voice, please go back and read it again. If you don't know who Xzibit is, then go fuck yourself you should look him up 'cause he's neat.

A steel security door, about six meters tall by one meter thick, lurches open in front of us and reveals the filthy prison interior. We turn toward Cellblock A. Abbott calls to an unseen controller: “Okay, close the gate!” Without the vast outdoors to attenuate the echo, the screeching of warped steel against corroded bearings is nearly deafening.

“No physical contact with other inmates WHATSOEVER”, suggests Abbott. “No contraband of any kind, and don't ask what's contraband — I define it day by day. So spare yourself and carry nothing but lint in those pockets.”

Sadly, Riddick's garments are made mostly of sturdy canvas and lint-resistant polyester composites.

We pass through a mantrap vestibule, ignoring the rowdy hollering of the new neighbors. Abbott pauses in front of the steel door to Cell A34. “It's time for us to delouse your filthy ass. Don't breathe.” It's the game's second- or third-most obvious visual reference to The Shawshank Redemption. Vin Diesel's performance makes Riddick into rather more stolid a protagonist than Andy Dufresne, however, and so the delousing sequence barely even registers as oppressive while the chalky white haze blocks our view of our own eyelashes.

Act 1 introduces the game's premise by trying to convince the player that poor Riddick's (I knew him well!) situation is well and truly hopeless. Abbott makes a good point about the environmental barriers to our escape, and enduring his bravado feels like watching Carl von Clausewitz debate Bernie Sanders. "Very well, Senator — suppose we could overwhelm a practically nation-sized force of private guards and evade a surveillance infrastructure big enough to embarrass the Chinese Communist Party. There still exists nothing but scorching desert for thousands of miles in every direction!"

Does the Abbott-Clausewitz axis have a point? It's certainly the case that escaping a prison planet would require some space-worthy conveyance.

"But leaving by spaceship would require a dense conspiracy to pull off," I hear Clausewitz object. "One would need to escape custody, of course, and then somehow locate and infiltrate a spaceport. Then one would have to hijack a vessel and leave the solar system without being shot back down." Perhaps technically conceivable on the margins, but a vast and wealthy institution dedicated to our perpetual incarceration stands in our way. Escaping Butcher Bay would be like operating a decent fucking healthcare bureaucracy beyond the shores of Cuba. Why even bother to dream? The Powers That Be were here long before we arrived, and no man before us has opposed them and succeeded. They surround themselves in megalithic towers of concrete and steel and each day tighten their grip on our delicate necks. In order that our asphyxiation not be more agonizing than necessary, our path of least resistance is simply not to resist. Oh, and hold your breath so that you don't suffocate while they delouse our filthy asses, right?

But this game is called Escape from Butcher Bay, not Noodle-Armed Melvin Stoically Endures Oppression. Act 1 ends with Riddick escaping custody and taking up arms. The assault rifle we steal is cartoonishly inaccurate, as though we'd plucked it from the first twenty minutes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky — clearly a deliberate choice on the developers' part, because the firefights stay lengthy and threatening when three shots in five miss their marks. Nevertheless, we’re still playing as Vin Diesel, so the game contrives an excuse to recapture us in a cutscene, seize our weapon, and hasten us into Act 2.

ACT 2: BIRTH OF THE PRISON

“What to do, what to do?” Warden Hoxie wonders aloud as he paces about his palatial corner office. He's our principal antagonist, and it's come time for him to monologue about his ideology. His slicked-back blonde locks, tailored Übersturmführer's uniform, and sophisticated High German accent give off the palpable, Himmler-like air of the bitch-ass nerd who is still extremely dangerous. This could've been Hans Winkle's future had I not stabbed him in the brain back in Wolfenstein: The New Order.

“I've got entire regions rioting, my slam has become a damn warzone, I'm losing men faster than I can replace them, and this unrest, well... it began soon after you arrived, Riddick.”

“Could be a coincidence,” offers our 3D model of Vin Diesel, remarkably convincing for 2004.

“Oh, don't sell yourself short,” replies the beleaguered job-creator. “I'm sending you to the mines, Riddick. Down below the surface, where the sun never shines. You'll be the target of every con... I expect things could get ugly.” He casts a sharp gesture, and Riddick is led from the room at gunpoint.

“...Butcher Bay had a detached deficiency,” thinks Riddick to himself as he emerges from the ultra-secure shipping container in Tower 17 that now serves as his quarters. “It could contain the cons, but could never control them.”

And indeed, we peer across a vast chasm and see an inmate hanging from a length of steel in an attempt to hide. A guard sees him and kicks him in the face, whereupon he falls to what I presume is his death. Hard to be sure — the screaming trailed off after a few seconds of freefall, so maybe he broke the fall on a big pile of marshmallows and then cured cancer and became president.

---

You know, up until relatively recently, humanity had no particular use for "the prison" as we now understand it, i.e., as a nominally reformist institution where malcontents are sent to stamp license plates until they learn to play by the rules. This wasn't because there were no criminals, mind you, but because there was no interconnected, centralized authority around to benefit from such a thing. Oh, and there were fewer bleeding-heart types demanding humanitarian treatment of their coreligionists and countryfolk. So, if a man's neighbor was larcenous or his serf disobedient, it was almost always more convenient for the local reeve to either make the poor bastard a galley slave or just cut his damn head off rather than pay his room and board in some disused fortification.

Then, around about fifty years ago, Michel Foucault worked himself into an absolute fucking lather over the emerging character of Western disciplinary structures and so penned Discipline and Punish. It's basically a treatise on the nature of punishing others' flesh in order to express power and control, but don't get the wrong idea — this is not a sexy read. Its most pertinent contention, and the reason I bring it up, is that today's prisons work as they do in order to demonstrate power and exert social control (profit motives are a related but separate discussion for later). This theory stands in stark contrast to the goofy and yet remarkably endurant idea that prisons exist as tools of deterrence or, even more quaintly, as means of social rehabilitation.

In Act 2 of Butcher Bay, in addition to being incarcerated on an isolated desert planet, Riddick is also deep underground with yet more layers of access control and surveillance to stop him moving back upwards. Despite this, we feel more free now than when the game began. In a single act of shock and awe — that is, the Cellblock riot from earlier — Riddick laid bare the contradictions and hypocrisies behind which the institution's authorities had cravenly sheltered. Sure, we're all still physically confined by the gates and walls, but infrastructure alone does not a prison make. The gates need computer systems and a guard corps in order to actually do the work of containing inmates, and it's in those detached deficiencies where we'll find our way out.

Okay, we've about reached the point where I've gotta lay my cards on the table and sincerely, unironically argue that the story of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is about social control in liberal market societies. Well, here goes:

Foucault, known for his social heterodoxy (he was the big gay), was so upset by this Panopticon idea because it functioned as a metaphor for statist discipline and its capacity for social repression. He took pains to remind us that the scary part was not the literal Prison itself, but the constellation of far more subtle techniques of control that would become available to the disciplinary apparatuses of the future. Contrapositively, then, when that dimension of subtlety is absent from a disciplinary exercise, we recognize it as a sign that the disciplinarian in question fears some (perceived) incipient threat to their power. Think "stuffing the ballot box" versus "openly incarcerating political opponents." These days, the pages of that particular playbook have grown dog-eared and worn from overuse.

In Butcher Bay, we see lots of evidence of the disciplinary apparatus's apparent power, but very little evidence of its ability to actually project that power. Putting oneself in Riddick's shoes, one can almost imagine him enjoying his life of subterranean incarceration as each day, he comes up with novel ways of tormenting his captors. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion,” waxed Camus, poetically. Imagine Sisyphus happy, yeah?

But making peace with one's fate is some nerd shit for the terminally downtrodden, and the real ones make their own destiny. Riddick therefore escapes custody, destroys hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of military-grade security hardware, and kills his way to the nearest spaceport. Just before boarding a spaceship, we notice something we hadn't seen before down on the planet's surface: a long, winding railway leading away from the prison, its end hidden over the horizon. Perhaps freedom was closer than we thought all along?

In any event, we're only a few hours into the game and the publisher says we need at least another forty-five minutes before rolling credits. So, Riddick gets shot in the ribs and recaptured after boarding the ship and is again marched before Warden Hoxie. I'm not sure why he insists on meeting with inmates in his office, especially since he never asks us to do the guards' taxes or launder embezzled money for him.

ACT 3: DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

Dressed in a sci-fi gimp suit of uncertain provenance, we stand before the Warden.

“Your luck has just run out,” asserts Hoxie, lacking evidence. “Since you are a little too, uh... volatile to keep in the general population, I'm putting you in cold storage.”

“I could use the rest. Give my ribs time to heal,” says Riddick, who has for all intents and purposes already escaped Butcher Bay even as he stands in chains before its Warden. “I'm just getting started, Hoxie.”

“Yes, I was afraid of that,” replies Hoxie, accidentally vocalizing his most honest truth. “That's why I'm having you put into cryosleep. Pleasant dreams, Riddick.”

We come to in the hazy intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness. “The tower... cold storage for cons,” reflects Riddick. “Hell on cryosleep ice.”

“Your mandatory two minutes of daily exercise begins now,” announces the disembodied voice of a woman. “According to Law #88432-337B, this is your right as a prisoner, and your only right.” Well, at least we have a right. And an extremely prolific legislature, it would appear. “A proposition to abolish Law #88432-337B is currently pending,” clarifies the voice.

“Today is... MONDAY.” We stand up out of our new quarters, a man-sized box only just large enough to contain a single adult movie-star. The room in which we find ourselves, a closed cylinder perhaps 10 meters in diameter, brings to mind an Apple Store were it designed by H.R. Giger, or perhaps Monsters, Inc. as directed by David Lynch.

“Remember these words of wisdom:” offers the PA. “Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. Sedative administered.” Riddick slumps to the ground.

---

Escape from Butcher Bay's final act dispenses with any pretense that its Swedish development team had nothing to say about the American society that inspired so much of their setting. The cryostorage facility represents their rather successful attempt to render the most existentially horrifying solitary confinement scenario imaginable. The PA's exhortation at the end, evoking the naïve pseudo-Christian moralizing of Shawshank's Samuel Norton, is just the cherry on top of the sleep-paralysis sundae.

But the cell itself just the acutely spooky part. The real existential horror lies in the brutal realization that we now spend only two minutes of each day awake, and how we must spend those two minutes of precious awareness still being force-fed the ideology that put us here. Even if we wanted to obsequiously follow the PA's supposed wisdom, we now lack the agency to do so, and the Prison knows it.

But remember: the Prison can only contain us. It can't control us for shit. Sure, we're probably not breaking out through sheer physical force alone — not now that we've got this constant Ketamine hangover. That said, we still have a deficiency to exploit: this sedation protocol distills our entire stream of consciousness into an uninterruptible machine of conspiracy and violence. And in any event, these mechanisms of oppression are only as effective at controlling us as the fleshy rats manning the controls are at maintaining them.

It takes Riddick a grand total of two days — or about four minutes of conscious effort — to find a design flaw in the system that he can exploit to deactivate his sedation suit and the lock keeping his containment shut. How was it so easy? Well, this sort of thing usually happens because some prick in the C-Suite cheaped out on the IT backbone and outsourced the subroutines to an inexpensive freelance developer overseas who hasn't answered the phone since. I'm not an expert on Riddick deep lore, but there you have my head-canon. Point is: we escaped Butcher Bay way back in Act 1 when we refused even to act compliant. Leaving here will be as simple as identifying a systemic weakness in this unthinkably complicated corporate bureaucracy, and that'll be like finding a needle in a needle-stack.

So later, when we bring down a guard with a single round from a small-caliber sidearm, we realize that the personnel in Triple-Max are not well trained nor even wearing body armor. We further realize that they never expected a cold-storage prisoner to escape and so have absolutely no plan for stopping us. You see, even though the Prison can't control its inmates for shit, it does a remarkably good job of controlling its own human capital. Even over the continuous streams of overlapping gunfire, you can almost hear the guards muttering "ehh, not my problem" under their breaths.

After all, they too are condemned to spend their lives on a desolate prison world. Riddick, who was brought here against his will, remains free at heart even as his body is incarcerated — he obviously has something to live for on the outside. The dead pencil-pusher at our feet became free in a sense, but only after we unexpectedly divested him of his contractual obligations. Even if he'd wanted to leave Butcher Bay, what was he to do? Just up and fly away? What then of his unpaid debts?! I'll circle back around to this in a moment. For now, let's finish the game and roll credits.

A few gratuitous action set-pieces later, Riddick officially formalizes his restored freedom in the same place he first attained it after the riot: in Warden Hoxie's office, quietly listening to a monologue that betrays the speaker's growing desperation:

“Riddick... there must be s-something... uh... Shit, Riddick, you wouldn't...”

But that's all he can think to say, because only one thing can happen next. I would feel churlish about spoiling the details of his death scene, which is compellingly inventive in its barbarism.

In the end, not even the larger-than-life Warden Hoxie could escape the prison of his own managerial incompetence, just like Shawshank's warden whose unbreakable façade ultimately crumbles with his ignominious suicide. The tragedy of Hoxie's character is that, for all of his money, power, and influence, he was never truly in control of much of anything. And, as his prison grew in size and organizational complexity, he'll have suffered the same awful fate as every big-time CEO: the terrifying realization that his org-chart was growing faster than he could manage or understand it, and that there was nothing he could do to slow it down without breaking the Spectacle and violating the Masquerade.

Riddick finally departs the planet in a stolen spaceship, just like Bernie knew he would from the word "go." The credits roll. I have time to read every individual name. Gosh, remember when it took fewer than 2000 people to develop a media product?

ACT ∞: THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY

We're done with Riddick's role in the narrative, but his story is only part of the full picture. Let's jump backwards in time like this were Pulp Fiction and talk about the guards' lives when they're not getting their spinal columns pulverized by Riddick.

“Butcher's is really falling apart”, gossips a guard who doesn't see through Riddick's disguise when we approach. “No one cares. Not Hoxie or the guards. Everyone's either addicts or gun-crazy. Or dead.”

The salaried staff at Butcher Bay, lacking any practical means of commuting home, live and recreate in a filthy, sunless habitation facility that’s unaffectionately referred to as "Pigsville." There are no women anywhere in this game, by the way, save for a few computer voices. Don't worry, though! There's still plenty of competitively priced booze and cigarettes available for purchase to keep the dark thoughts at bay.

“Huh? No... not the probe... no!” stammers one of two security checkpoint guards, slumped over on a bench and too drunk to properly react to us snapping his colleague's neck right in front of him. An alarm blares, audible throughout Pigsville. The man assigned to respond is not answering his radio, so the alarm is ignored and the cadavers remain undiscovered in plain sight.

“Yeah, they're all the same,” remarks an off-duty guard, similarly drunk to the gills. “First, they tell ya how much they need ya, then, when ya look away... anyway, you can take this.” He hands Riddick an unlabeled bottle of inexpensive liquor — valuable, since the grocery shipment is late and there's none left to buy. We walk to the convenience store that sold it and find for sale an armored prison guard's uniform. This is where all of Butcher's guards go to pay for their own jobs. Uniforms cost as much as twenty-six packs of cigarettes. We pay with cash stolen from various guards' lockers, which are out in the open and do not lock.

“You have some liquor, huh?” asks a guard as we waltz through the secure checkpoint. He offers to buy the rotgut off us at several times its MSRP. When we agree to the sale, the vim returns to his face and he suddenly bares his soul to us.

“This whole damn planet just sweats the life outta ya. In the last ten days, four inmates hanged themselves on my watch. Compared to Butcher's, the end of a rope... don't look so bad.”

Oh, reminder: Northern Europeans living in a social democracy writing a sci-fi prison setting inspired by American media. And I figure they must have at least heard about Camus at the Stockholm Academy for the Socialist Arts, even though I doubt they were themselves Neomarxist critical theorists.

Remember, folks: NO TO CRIMES.

---

"Oh, come on, ya big asshole," I hear some of you muttering. "Is the 2004 Chronicles of Riddick game really about capitalism?"

It's admittedly a strange question to ask about a game that would not have been funded absent the profit incentive of a media tie-in for that Chronicles of Riddick film. It's also not quite as simple as that.

See, the average gamer in the early 2000s was many things, but class-conscious was not one of them. Indeed, the idea of engaging with a video game in any kind of high-minded intellectual capacity was still relatively novel to the gaming mainstream. Some of you reading may not even be aware of such a thing as an intellectually stimulating video game. And that's to say nothing of the executive staff at the video game publishers whom, let's recall, couldn't even be bothered with the pretense of social responsibility that far back.

Maybe it's for that reason that the salaried writers, designers, and programmers at Starbreeze Studios were able to sneak multiple hours of unmistakable social commentary into a game with a five-hour runtime. In retrospect, the folks behind Spec Ops: The Line probably owe a debt of gratitude to Starbreeze for practically inventing this “hide a critique of contemporary neoliberalism in a dumbass action game” strategy. Despite all its antiquated tech, padded gameplay, and other foibles, this is genuinely and truly one of the most creatively intrepid games I’ve ever played.

CONCLUSION

From where I sit, Escape from Butcher Bay is a narrative work of interactive fiction about an unfree man who again becomes free against overwhelming odds because, although he is confined and without apparent hope, his captors can't dominate his Will to Freedom. All of this so happens to take place under the guise of a commercial media product — most gaming-industry executives think video games are for nerdy man-children, after all, and it was much the same in 2004. We've never known that archetype to be very critical.

Nowadays, in the United States of twenty years later, one observes a profoundly disturbing turn against the popular Will to Freedom, manifested as a sort of learned helplessness exhibited by millions of people who have grown accustomed to their modern discomforts and refuse even to dream of an emancipated future. Modern techniques of resource extraction, manufacturing, and logistics are more than capable of providing for, at a minimum, all of our basic needs plus shitloads left over. Why, then, are these techniques being applied instead to ever-costlier data centers from which to host ever-shittier enterprise GPT microservices that none of us even-the-fuck want? Can't we at least fix the goddamn roads first? For God's sake, folks, the socialist European bastards who made this game are trying to lap us one!

And as long as I'm going full crashout, why do Nobel laureates and world-leading experts on macroeconomic theory keep pointing to vacuous and anodyne cop-outs like "political realism" to explain why Americans, uniquely among peoples in the developed world, are still regularly immiserated by routine expenses? Why is the once-ascendant expert class now so thoroughly passive and disengaged from the institutions it claims to defend? I presume the Swedes, also living under a decidedly neoliberal system, are themselves pragmatists in their own dealings. Bizarrely, they've somehow discovered a way to pivot to new political modalities when they appear obviously superior to the status quo. Why can't we have that political realism instead of this broke-ass bootleg version? Forget imperialist expansion into Canada and Greenland — annex that shit.

I guess I won't bother speculating about what it would take for this or that pundit to shoulder his Mosin and take to the streets. Most of them are pretty old now and wouldn't be very threatening as Baader-Meinhof urban guerillas anyway. Instead, I'll speculate about what it'll take to effect an alternative politics that appeals to the shared subjective experience directly before our eyes. You know, that one sphere of observable reality that hasn't yet been enshittified to death by social media incentives, VC funds, or Mr. Beast’s goofy ass.

And, given the peculiar new realities of what I'll diplomatically call a heterodox and illiberal presidential administration that was popularly elected over its business-as-usual alternative, the pitiful humiliation of the existing world order would appear nearly complete. In the months and years to come, I expect we'll see a number of opportunities to reject the noise and the bullshit such that we can reach out and seize back the agency that's been right in front of us, as long as we have the balls so to do. We really do need those balls, though — at this juncture, waiting for our elected leaders (or, God forbid, our musicians) to do it for us would be nothing short of farcical.

I'll leave you with what I consider the moral of Butcher Bay's story: the old-world institutions driven by nihilistic avarice and run by naïve, dopey careerists can only control those who consent to be controlled, because they are too frail of body and spirit to stop dissidents with old-fashioned feudal violence. The keys to the spaceship are right there on the desk in front of us. They're guarded only by a contracted third-party security professional who's been trained not to confront shoplifters, and he's on our side in any case. Why not just reach out and take the keys? That way, perhaps nobody else has to get hurt.

Til next time friends <3