Naive Capitalism

We are not here to make friends.

An interesting thing about this millennium's first decade's love affair with reality television is how quickly the genre used up the conceit it was, somehow, in documentarian fashion, about an unbarred relationship between camera and life, yet continued to draw an audience specifically fascinated with its reality version of a game show.

Instead of the promised reality, which mostly took the form of scheduled asides, scenarios akin to amateur improv games and actors whose vitality was in their unschooled quipping and mugging, the genre is more notable for the universe it inaugurated of its own evolving, self-recycling conventions. Internally self-regulating, the show's hastily turned-over casts came equipped in advance with strict truisms learned from earlier runs, communal experience evolved into iron-clad rules of engagement. Participants quickly sorted themselves into either the heroes or villains of sentimental tele-novels. Hastily shedding any semblance of individual subjectivity, the borrowed morality and self-conscious aims of these shows' villains, part talent show competitors, part talk-show trash of a debased (yet voluntarily simulated) humanity, when allotted their moment before the camera, often echoed this shrewd popular conception (see clip above) of how one is supposed to be, in reality, which is a game, which requires winners, and winning is good. Call it naive or folk capitalism.

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Yet why not make friends? And why this fascination with the question? For the question is at the pounding, wounded heart of all this plaster-thin, byzantine interpersonal wrangling. Is it misrecognition of the terms of the game: that to deny subjectivity and worthiness in others nearby is tantamount to emptying the playing field, thereby handing over victory to the most nihilistic of competitors by default? Is it magical, ritualistic logic? That to sacrifice friends in this small game of a television series is to gain them all in the bigger one, that worthy field of engagement these contestants often address in the footlights, when talking to camera, "America." Is it a defensive or apprehensive gesture: One prefers, ultimately, the fair shot of a game than the trauma-inducing, commonly emotionally asymmetrical experience of a friend? Is it compulsive: We often destroy what is actually good for us in favor of what we think is good, based on whispers, limp willingness towards seductions and candy-coated delusions? Or are these contestants simply the bottom-crop of aspiring entertainers whom they appear to be, trying to clock in some valuable screen time, deftly intuiting that an audience needs a structure and that there's power in repetition and the familiar, like melodramatic plotting and a tag-phrase. Moreover, that to portray a cringe-worthy stock villain might be the more lucrative route to an on-screen career than actually "winning" these games; witness the fame industry's main tools for fascination: hating on, and scandal. For, important to note, as a strategy, not making friends only ever yielded mixed results (community-building or the esteem of one's peers was as valid an angle to win on these shows). That the contestants would be or should have been aware of this make their ad nauseum quoting of the platitude all the more quizzical. Not making friends was never a winning strategy in itself.