They all started killing each other because plasmid use makes you psychotic, unless you can afford to keep taking more and more.
They all started taking plasmids because they needed to compete in the workplace (then later, in the war) or end up homeless / dead.
Plasmids were legal in the first place because Randism, being based 100% on individual responsibility, doesn’t believe that things like feedback loops or cumulative effects can happen at a societal level, and so doesn’t believe in regulations.
Plasmids are a pretty clear metaphor for dehumanizing yourself to serve the market, especially because the Randian superman is a psychopath that is only self interested.
But even without plasmids the fact that the worlds elite were brought down to Rapture, yet (to quote an audio log) “we couldn’t all be captains of industry, someone had to scrub the toilets” bred a huge amount of resentment from people who felt scammed and now trapped down there. Just like in the real world the markets in BioShock rely completely on low level workers to be able to function, and yet punish them for being in that position.
My take on Bioshock is people became mutants and started killing each other because there were no laws or regulations aside from “you can’t stop others from profiting.” It was legal for them to become mutants. It was legal for them to weaponize and arm themselves before the inevitable revolution / civil war of Rapture. The closest thing to a law enforcer was the big daddy and he does NOTHING about the hordes of cannibalistic telepathic monsters. You know why? Because there are no laws against what they’re doing, the daddy was only made to protect the little sisters who produce profit for Fontaine.
Bioshock is steampunk scifi but it’s also anarchy in it’s truest form. People built whatever they liked, and they destroyed whatever they liked, and when violently mutating psychoactive drugs were introduced the latter succeeded over the former.
BioShock 2 revealed that Andrew Ryan had a secret prison to throw people into when they disrupted his control over the city. And more than once he decided he would burn it all down rather than let someone else win.
It may have masqueraded as anarchy, but the system was still rigged from the start. There was always a ruler. And power can corrupt even the strongest idealistic convictions
but the system was still rigged from the start
And this, intentionally or not, is the real message. There’s no such thing as a real meritocracy, the system is always rigged in favor of the people who created it.
Anon lacks media literacy
What’s your take on it? (I just like reading takes on Bioshock)
That executive meddling ruins final bosses.
But on a serious note, look at modern society and the tipping points we’re reaching. AI, climate change, ultra-individualism bred by class disparity. Rapture just happened to get capitalism’d a hundred years earlier.
There are points to be made about comparability to Hitler’s rise, slavery through class busting and then mind control, races to the bottom, oligopolies, regulatory capture, and-and-and- but this is a greentext community.
Does he though? In Atlas Shrugged, which Bioshock seems to be somewhat of an antithesis to, it’s not the capitalists that go crazy, but the socialists, who enact more and more draconian laws depriving the productive class of all their profits in order to funnel more money to the unproductive, which ultimately makes working entirely unprofitable.
Both works are basically at opposite ends of the spectrum — Atlas Shrugged depicts a communist utopia gone wrong, while Bioshock shows a capitalist utopia gone wrong. They’re both myopic in their own way, but the common thread seems to be that absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is a truth no one can escape. In reality, a functioning society requires a delicate balance between both forces, not a winner-takes-tall approach. Unfortunately, that idea seems to be lost on both of them, which is probably what anon is trying to hint at.
but the common thread seems to be that absolute power corrupts absolutely
This is not at all the intended message of Atlas Shrugs.
From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.
In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.
I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.
In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.
Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.
Ayn Rand,s “philosophy” is about as deep as a puddle.
Now, disregarding the whole ethical thing, the reason why Rapture Fell was because there was a very big divide beetween the workers and the people. (Also because Plasmids were not regulated and the poor became addicted)
And since there was no social housing and stuff, they Protested, and then joined Sofia Lamb, who was appealing to them
So, its more of a mix of the people going insane without ethical restrictions, the consumers going insane because of addiction, and a bunch of people dying because of protests by the workers
The Sofia Lamb bit is a retcon by hurt objectivists who thought the first game unfair. So, they retconned it to be not their fault. It was, instead, the dirty socialists fault.
Anyways, Rapture fell because unfettered business interests always end up at massive inequality. This was made worse by magic addictive powers and a complete lack of ethics. Plus, being at the bottom of the ocean meant you couldn’t just ship in a new lower class to ease tensions.
I’m surprised some egomaniacal billionaire didn’t start flooding areas if people couldn’t pay him to not to.
