So What Do We Do?

Buddy: So where’s the bank?

Guy: There is no bank.

Buddy: So what do we do?

Guy: Whatever we want.

A few years ago I wrote about Tomorrowland, a fable of the perception of utopia within a world that denies its existence. I see it again in the recently released Free Guy. The story is the transition of an NPC in a multiplayer game into a self-aware individual who subverts the game and reveals a captured utopia, a world of autonomous, although artificial, intelligence.

In the framing story a pair of programmers have created an AI core which has been appropriated by an investor who has built an MMPG, Free City, atop it as a playground for the mayhem of its subscribers. These players are distinguished by their sunglasses.

The hero, Blue Shirt Guy, has a chance encounter with the avatar of one of the programmers and by chance acquires a pair of sunglasses. This unleashes the autonomous logic hidden in the game and sets up the overcoming of its class structure. The critical event in this process is a general strike of the entire cast of non-player characters, infected with the example of Blue Shirt Guy.

The strike sets off contradictions in the framing story and finally unveils the utopia hidden just offshore, a kind of Big Rock Candy Mountain. The MMPG collapses in disinterest in the face of this display of social autonomy.

We can't expect 20th Century Studios to deliver a prophecy of socialist revolution, so we have to see this as a fable, even a fairy tale. And a fairy tale has a happy ending. If a story wants to encompass not only individual fates but general social issues and it wants to have a happy ending it will have to sail close to the reefs of class. It can falsify this in many ways but it will be a failure. It can avoid any inventiveness at all but then it will be stale. 

Or it can apply a layer of disguise which it may be aware of or not. I think that's what we have here. What's important is what seems to be the inevitability of these fables of the invading socialist society. They can be suppressed, and there are plenty ready to do so, but they can also make money for the studios. In any case they will find an audience.