What bothers me with the Fallout show, is that on the surface it looks like a capitalist critique. It is partly, but it does so in a very anti-materialist comical way that ultimately you can easily discard as fiction.
Fallout show spoilers
Vault tec intentionally nuke the planet. Not to secure resources, not to end a war, not even for some vague political end that accidently goes wrong. They nuke the planet so they can deliberately live underground for hundreds of years in a cramped-ass vault.
You could almost convince me this secret society of corporate interests were legitimately talking out of both sides of their mouth to each other if it wasn’t for the nuke the planet scheme. They simultaneously think competition is good, and also bad and need to end it permanently?
From what I understood of the show, Vault-Tech’s idea was if they nuke the world they get rid of all competition. If they are the ones dropping the bombs themselves, they can prepare ahead of time for survival and come out ready to dominate a completely “reset” market. It’s a sort of zero sum game; if you assume that another company will have the same idea, and you assume that they will also drop bombs after themselves preparing for the fallout and recovery, then you would want to be the first to prepare and drop the bombs. The show could have explored all of the logical fallacies with this, but they didn’t so it’s unsatisfactory in the greater theme.
I completely agree that it’s a very superficial and lazy critique of capitalism, bordering on offensive. It is slop, the only thing intentional about it is appealing to a broad audience and making profit.
What bothers me with the Fallout show, is that on the surface it looks like a capitalist critique. It is partly, but it does so in a very anti-materialist comical way that ultimately you can easily discard as fiction.
Fallout show spoilers
Vault tec intentionally nuke the planet. Not to secure resources, not to end a war, not even for some vague political end that accidently goes wrong. They nuke the planet so they can deliberately live underground for hundreds of years in a cramped-ass vault.
You could almost convince me this secret society of corporate interests were legitimately talking out of both sides of their mouth to each other if it wasn’t for the nuke the planet scheme. They simultaneously think competition is good, and also bad and need to end it permanently?
From what I understood of the show, Vault-Tech’s idea was if they nuke the world they get rid of all competition. If they are the ones dropping the bombs themselves, they can prepare ahead of time for survival and come out ready to dominate a completely “reset” market. It’s a sort of zero sum game; if you assume that another company will have the same idea, and you assume that they will also drop bombs after themselves preparing for the fallout and recovery, then you would want to be the first to prepare and drop the bombs. The show could have explored all of the logical fallacies with this, but they didn’t so it’s unsatisfactory in the greater theme.
I completely agree that it’s a very superficial and lazy critique of capitalism, bordering on offensive. It is slop, the only thing intentional about it is appealing to a broad audience and making profit.