Mario Kart Tour: The Perfect Game for Late Stage Capitalism

I've recently joined my girlfriend in downloading Mario Kart Tour on my iPhone. While the game itself is fun, a nice recreation of certain classic Mario Kart courses and drivers going back to the original Super Nintendo version, it's also a cutthroat world where entrenched privilege allows you to skate over your competitors who have less means with which to compete, hence the title.

It should be noted, by the way, that the competitor with less means in this case is me, because I haven't shelled out the $4.99 per month for the Gold Pass.

Mainly what I mean with that tongue-in-cheek title up there is that, quite apart from the cultural divide between Gold Pass holders and others, the way races play out is a perfect encapsulation of how The Man keeps us all down:

If you draw in front, especially in the lower-speed 50cc and 100cc races, you can actually race fairly undisturbed. Racing at those speeds early on, I got a good sense of how most tracks are laid out and how to maneuver across the track to get coins or bonus points. I was able to do that because I was far enough in front that even if someone hit me with a red shell or a blooper, or even the dreaded spiny shell, I could still limp across the finish line well ahead of my competitors, who in the meantime are locked in a life and death struggle with one another for points.

Naturally, I see this as a metaphor for how in real life the upper classes play on a completely different level economically, while the rest of us fight one another for the scraps they leave. And they can afford to be generous, because we're more likely to tear one another apart than we are them. At least that's how it feels when I'm stuck somewhere around fourth or fifth place and trying to grab as many green tokens for the current Halloween tour as I can.

Then, when you do buy the Gold Pass, you get twice as many goodies from daily rewards as the plebs who just play for free. This entrenches your position even further, because it gives you more coins to buy stuff, more rubies to pay for Pipe Pulls, which give you even more good stuff (unless your pipe is crap) to help you get even further ahead.

Of course it's only five bucks a month (as my girlfriend reminded me literally a moment ago when I told her what I'm writing), and of course the developers deserve to be paid for the work they've put into creating this app. As I mentioned, it's a fun game, and the courses look great, even though I'm heartily sick of Maple Treeway by now (there's a blind curve that I always get wrong).

I'm not saying people shouldn't play it or anything like that. But I do find it notable that the real competition isn't among the top two or three spots in a race, but between second place and eighth, and everyone in between, and they're slowing each other down while the jerk up in first place is sailing blissfully on, not even worried about getting hit by a Bullet Bill (because of course those don't last long enough for the person in eighth place to get farther than fourth).

And now if you'll excuse me, I have to eke out another couple of stars from Maple Treeway.

Trying to Make Sense of Terrace House

Since my girlfriend and I joined one another's bubbles, we've been bingeing a number of TV shows together, especially since I went to stay with her for a few weeks. The big revelation for her was the richness available on Netflix, which she doesn't subscribe to (reasoning that Xfinity is expensive enough without adding streaming). Blog posts are surely coming on the likes of Aggretsuko, Narcos: Mexico and Schitt's Creek, but the first one we got into is Terrace House.

We're both Japanophiles, which is why she was interested in it, and so we started with the latest season. This is, of course, the season with the most controversy, since a contestant committed suicide after receiving torrents of online abuse. We both had an inkling of that when we started, but decided to forge on, since it's set in Tokyo.

Our first impression was some world-weary laughter, when the panel announced in the first episode that they intended for the season to end with the start of the Tokyo Olympics - the same Olympics that have now been postponed/canceled because the coronavirus. The next thing, for me at least, was the curiously low stakes of the show.

I'm not a big connoisseur of reality TV, apart from a season of UK Big Brother back in 2004, as well as Lost (not the JJ Abrams show) and Average Joe around the same time. But it struck me how Terrace House is literally just about hanging around the house and watching the housemates get to know each other. There are no prizes or competitions, and I'm guessing people don't become big stars off it the way they do after getting on UK Big Brother or something.

That's one thing that made it good shelter-in-place watching - since we ourselves have been stuck at home just hanging out.

Of course, it's also torturous because we get to see the housemates hanging out in this lovely big house in the middle of a city we both adore, and going to restaurants with amazing-looking food. We even got inspired by one episode, where illustrator Kaori and gadabout Ruka go on an ill-fated date to this place that does Tamago Kake Rice - seeing how easy it was (just make a bowl of rice and mix an uncooked egg into it, then season), we made it ourselves.

One impression that got dispelled early on was how well-behaved the housemates were. Because western reality shows tend to choose people for how they spark (negatively) off each other, we were initially surprised at how easygoing everyone on Terrace House was, but this impression wore off as housemates started having disagreements. The best one of the newest season was between Haruka and Risako, when the latter revealed the former's crush to the guy in question. Up until then the biggest drama had been between one character who seemed not to have any goals and another who kept calling him on not specializing in either his acting or his writing or his music or his carpentry.

Since finishing that series, or at least the very abbreviated run that's available internationally after Hana Kimura killed herself, we've gone back to the season just before it, set in the woods around Nagano, and we're pleased to see that the disagreements and drama have started already.

Another interesting thing to discover was that a few non-Japanese people get on the show. When the first two people left, they were replaced by another guy and girl, and in the episode introducing them, the guy is heard speaking in a different language than Japanese. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking in... Italian?!

That guy, Peppe, became one of our favorites on the show, since he brought a lot more suaveness to the house than any of the other guys on the show, and because his story is so ridiculous. A lifelong manga lover, he decided to study it in Japan, and learned perfect Japanese to do so. Asked how he was supporting himself he said he was modeling part-time to pay the bills while he got his career as a cartoonist off the ground.

I think we can all agree this isn't the natural order of things.

Anyway, if you don't mind reading subtitles and you don't mind watching people sit around and chat for an hour or so, Terrace House is a nice chill watch. It's just too bad that it ended the way it did, and in some ways the abruptness of how its run on Netflix ends makes it a little worse - we don't see Hana appear at all, just get a card at the end of the last episode expressing condolences to her family. Though maybe seeing her last appearances wouldn't have been better?

The Stakes of an Election

It's become a cliche to say that this is the most important election of our lives, because of the likelihood of electoral shenanigans and creeping authoritarianism that a Republican win will signify. This importance can also be a source of exhaustion, both from the relentless onslaught of media and social media that comes from it, as well as it being only the latest election that's being portrayed as a life or death struggle between light and darkness.

I find it interesting, and probably a feature of crisis capitalism, that Trump in 2016, Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008 all represented off-ramps into America turning shittier and more self-destructive, at least if you got all the same petitions by email that I did. I'm struck by how naive it feels to worry about John McCain or Mitt Romney dismantling democracy had they won, but of course that's how we saw it then - especially given that a win for McCain in 2008 would have represented a continuation of the GOP's policies under George W Bush.

It's also probably why so many people in 2016 thought that not voting for Hillary Clinton would be okay this one time. Donald Trump was so cartoonishly bad a candidate (pace Matt Yglesia's argument on Vox that he ran as a moderate; this may even be true, on economics, but not on anything else) that they probably figured no one in their right mind would elect him and that they could vote Jill Stein or Gary Johnson to their hearts' content - after all, we'd been told how destructive a Romney or McCain presidency would be for the dream of universal healthcare and environmental protections.

But every election I find myself thinking about a conversation that I heard back in 2006 in London, when I'd just started my job at Informa. This would have been before the Democrats captured the House and Senate amid the ongoing chaos of the Iraq War, and over a year since the 2005 general election that returned Labour's third term in office.

The conversation was between two of my coworkers, both gay men, who were talking about the prospects of David Cameron becoming prime minister at some point in the future. The UK press was awash in talk of how he represented a different kind of Tory leader - young, down to earth (insofar as an Oxford-educated aristocrat could be) and in tune with the concerns of the British middle class. He'd successfully replicated Tony Blair's trick of staking out the sensible center, though coming in from the right rather than the left, and indeed in his time as PM he didn't suddenly veer hard right: he maintained his own social liberalism and appreciation for Europe in the face of Euroskepticism within his own party.

The social liberalism is important in this context, because it struck me at the time how both of my coworkers were able to view the prospect of a Tory government without existential dread. There was no talk at that moment of the Tories coming in to take away their rights, the way there always is in America when the Republicans come to power. They were able to evaluate a Tory premiership on its own merits, rather than a threat to their actual lives, which struck me as so alien for a second.

I'd say the effect on my own politics of listening to that was hoping not only for a succession of left-leaning, social democratic governments here in the US, but also for an end to the constant back-and-forth of certain groups' rights being at risk every four years. My social media is full of people talking about how exhausting the past four years have been - a sentiment I agree with - but only a few of them acknowledge how people who are non-white, queer or simply just not male must be exhausted in this way as a matter of course, regardless of who the GOP candidate is.

It seems difficult to envision now, when we're probably headed for a civil war or a Hungarian-style illiberal fake-democracy, but it's worth dreaming of a time when both sides can agree on the basic humanity of the entire electorate. It'll take a consensus to not demonize the other side's views as unpatriotic and leading to the downfall of America, and that consensus isn't going to come as long as Twitter and Facebook are directing the public discourse.

But it's worth remembering that there's another world out there, a different way of doing things than the four-yearly crisis we have here (which is how both the Democrats and Republicans mobilize their respective bases). I hope that world comes here someday.