Bioshock is a game which gives a possible interpretation of what it would look like for something to come after Slave Morality. I will give a summary of its prologue before asking my question.
In the world of Bioshock, Andrew Ryan understands how the slaves have duped the Good. In the world of the slaves, strength is asked to express itself as weakness. The strong are murders, the quick are thieves, the smart are blasphemers, and the creative are corrupter. With this understanding, Ryan had a city built where artists, scientists, and the strong could live away from the slaves and their world-wide slave morality. He calls his city Rapture.
At first, this city thrives with competition, but from competition came someone who would compete with Andrew Ryan. This was Frank Fontaine, a conman. He created several altruistic seeming enterprises in Rapture like orphanages and poor houses, which were in fact all used to create and collect ADAM, a substance with extreme medicinal properties like allowing for genetic re-engineering but is also addictive and leads to insanity and deformity. Exploiting the poor for good PR and medical research, Fontaine eventually reached the point to actually compete with Andrew Ryan for control of Rapture.
This led to both figures fighting for control through propaganda and other means. Eventually Fontaine uses his obedient poor people to stage a rebellion, empowering them with ADAM. These poor people, despite the power they have obtained through ADAM, are but slaves and horrid-looking. The insane artists, doctors, and inventors are some of the most deadliest denizens of this new Rapture as they have the power to make their amoral visions a reality.
Now, of course, Rapture is just a fictional world, but I think one should be concerned to what extent the Masters could sustain their world before one masters exploits the weak, causing another slave revolt, and the addiction to power turns itself against the strong, making them actually weak.
What do you think a post-slave world would look like? How long would it last? Can it only exist as a separate little haven for the strong like Rapture or must the whole world change?
Conceiving an edenic space for the post-slaves seems absurd, even for a video game. Within this description, there are implicit claims about essential human characteristics that I find hard to justify or even to consider. During the process of revolution, myths circulate about the post revolution-space, one which corrects all of the wrongs perpetrated by the current regime. Historically speaking, this space never actually develops. The same folks who commit bloody acts of political violence end up taking political responsibility for the nuevo-state. Although I don't really know the backstory of the game, the creation of this ghettoized heaven probably mirrors the revolutionary structure. As you probably know, within this breakage, the structures of inequality don't disappear, new parties simply fill already-established roles. The violence continues. The despair soldiers on. Some revolutionary activists have suggested, with respect to postcolonial contexts, that the generation who fought for liberation should be destroyed with the old city. I tend to think that memories of colonial oppression should live on in the intra-subjective memory. What, if anything, will be the impetus towards resisting this description of strength.
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