“The Internet transformed our lives, and in many ways for the better. But not everyone was happy. People started to worry that it was encroaching on people's freedoms—that the price we paid for so much convenience was constant monitoring and an abdication of control. We had become members of a "symbiotic surveillance society." Naturally, there are people who have similar concerns about the chiral network. There's a pretty sizable faction that wants nothing to do with it whatsoever. That said, I can't help but feel that they're being naive. There's no such thing as a free lunch."
///
Most examinations of Sam Porter Bridges focus on his role as a courier. A porter lugging packages to isolated pockets of humanity that are, in turns, grateful, suspicious, and hungry for human contact in a post-apocalyptic landscape that doubles as an outdoorsman’s idea of hiking heaven. Along the way, Sam helps other porters (players) build shelters, roads, and bridges so that his company, Bridges, can usher along the Great Reconnection of America. Besides package delivery and infrastructural legwork, Sam is also a door-to-door internet salesman that must coax people to rejoin Bridges’ chiral network—not just for themselves, but for the greater good.
Bridges wants to connect nodes across the country to complete its chiral network and achieve its ultimate form, so that Americans can receive medical assistance and weather forecasts, as well as faster pizza delivery. The network is also a pseudomagic-quantum science web that manipulates time to let people send email and 3D-print stuff on demand, all using dark-matter crystals from beyond the veil. And because the arc of the universe bends towards repetition, the chiral network is another flavor of colonialism cloaked in altruism, validated by the apocalypse. At its heart, Bridges is simply repackaging its quest for blessed socioeconomic familiarity—new centralized government network, who dis—as another way of “hiding heaven in the future.”
There is no heaven in Death Stranding. There is nothing especially divine about the mysterious Beaches through which Bridges funnels its data. But for all of writer/director Hideo Kojima’s fondness for absurd deus ex machina tricks, it is somewhat straightforward about one thing—that extinction is inevitable, and our evangelical belief that technology will save us means nothing. In the game’s painfully overwritten excitement to show us the sincere can-do spirit of Bridges staff and citizens (and the word-vomit expositional documents that glazed over hundreds if not thousands of eyeballs), it also shows how little its story does with the themes of constant recursion and resurrection through technology.
Of course, Death Stranding’s weird, stilted version of America has already been conquered—Sam roams a post-Stranding country that mends itself withh the same historical imperial strategies instead of doing something—really, anything—differently. But nuanced storytelling isn’t Kojima’s strong suit, and it’s easier to get players emotionally invested in recreating familiarity instead of building something totally new. We’re largely left with the hubris of history repeating—a cheerful, feelgood resurrection of another privatized net that invokes the same moralistic righteousness as early American colonial expansion.
The manifest destiny nature of Bridges’ physical “westward expansion” is obvious even in a surface reading—the moral, essential inevitability to capture (or recapture) control of the west with technology, all in the name of a correct and civilized existence. Sam isn’t just lugging crates —he’s helping to build key infrastructure along his travels, taking a page from the imperial European tradition of building railways across Africa in the name of progress. Railways in America followed what academic Manu Karuka called railroad colonialism where railroads were “infrastructures of reaction, as attempts to control the future,” and infrastructure played a police function. Of course, US railways today have been largely neglected in favor of shinier, newer ideas that inevitably prioritize capitalism over citizens.
Infrastructure isn’t just about transport and logistics, but communication. And with digital colonialism (mostly at the hands of American tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Uber, and Facebook+) permeating through swathes of the Global South++, it comes as no surprise to see that even in a fictional situation where everything has gone to hell and society can rebuild from the ground up, the vestiges of old imperalistic governments stick to the same recipe for “success.”
While Bridges was established first and foremost as a logistics organization concerned with infrastructure, it follows the same playbook as a colonial government albeit with better optics; it was founded by a literal extinction entity whose half-baked concern for the fate of America is something I just can’t take seriously (if we’re supposed to take anything in a Kojima game seriously). Bridges and Death Stranding’s American government are positioned as one and the same, with the same goals. Die-Hardman, the most tedious G-man archetype in the game, is quick to bring up TANSTAAFL—“there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”—a phrase popularized by libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. It’s quippy shorthand for saying that nothing comes for free, and has historically been applied to everything from statistics to social policy.
Sam doesn’t seem to care about a free lunch; in fact, at the end of the game, he simply goes off the grid. When it comes to the actual Bridges mission busywork—delivering stuff, building generators, and setting up chiral network nodes—he doesn’t care about any of it. As Ed Smith points out, Sam has a calm temperament, patience and resilience—traits that “an actual, good person might have.” The game never forces you to make people join the network, but implies that it’s morally correct for you to do so. While Death Stranding is more or less conscious of the cyclical repetition of America’s mistakes and inexhaustible hubris, Kojima’s approach to storytelling and ideas of community mostly come off as hollow with such a dispassionately agreeable protagonist.
Writing this now, it’s easy to see that I also don’t give nearly enough of a shit about the current state of surveillance capitalism because it’s such an ingrained part of my life, especially in a place like Singapore. It’s the payoff for having a smartphone, unprecedented levels of internet connectivity, and living in a prominent “smart city.” Within the context of civic efficiency and the greater good, technology and convenience is the new bread and circuses, at least to my government. For all my nitpicking over Death Stranding—a game I continue to have mixed feelings about—it unintentionally raises a ratking of internal conflict about my own attitudes and complacency in the grand scheme of things, like my own country’s virulently technocratic tendencies. If repetition is in the cards, perhaps Kojima has unwittingly written one of the sloppiest but most telling narratives about the vanity of modern society and the recursive way that technology and neocolonialist practices brings u closer not to some future vision of utopia, but a very real and unimaginative hell.
///
+ There’s also the matter of extensive (and relatively recent) Chinese investment in African countries’ internet and communications infrastructure which has alternatively been described as concerning and hyperbolic. These investments fall under China’s enormous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which can include building power plants, 5G networks, ports, railways, and fiberoptic cables in participating BRI countries—the most intensive projects are in the Global South.
++ In 2016, Indian regulators shut down Facebook’s “Free Basics” program that offered free, limited text-only internet to users through its own platform. Users could access Facebook news, health, and employment services, with the end goal of getting them to pay for more. Mark Zuckerberg painted the program as a moral responsibility to countries still developing internet infrastructure, glossing over his company’s barefaced exploitation of basic internet access as a modern human right.
***
Alexis Ong is a freelance culture journalist, a neo-luddite, and a cat simp. She mostly writes about video games, internet things, and technological oddities; you can find wretched things on Twitter at @steppinlazer and professional things at www.alexis.work.