The problem isn’t that the world works like “Squid Game.” The problem is that we’ve already accepted it as normal.
We’re not talking here about a simple television series, but a cruel allegory that reveals, with surgical precision, how global power is organized. South Korea offered the world a ferocious parable: behind the neon, blood. Behind the game, economic extermination. Behind the entertainment, a war of all against all for the remaining spoils of the planet.
Because that’s the world today: a brutal competition for survival in a system that rewards the most ruthless, not the most just. And what in the series are people desperate to pay their debts, in reality are entire countries, multinational corporations, and governments competing with rigged rules in an arena designed by the owners of the game.
Indebted Countries as Marked Players
Each participant in the Squid Game is there because they have no other option, economically speaking. They have been reduced to their minimum human value: a number in the red. And that is the same logic of the global economy: peripheral countries subjected to unpayable debt, enslaved by compound interest, forced to compete among themselves for crumbs of foreign investment.
What is Argentina negotiating with the IMF if not Player 456 trying to win one last game so as not to be hanged by its creditors? What is the Congo in its struggle to maintain its sovereignty over coltan if not a player surrounded by snipers?
Countries no longer negotiate on equal terms. They participate in a game that was designed so they always lose… while the “VIPs” delight in watching the misery of others.
In “Squid Game,” the game organizers not only allow the carnage: they monetize it. This is how large corporations operate today. They are not interested in producing well-being, but in controlling markets, absorbing competition, and transforming human need into profit.
Every corporation has its own version of the “game,” with its own human tokens: precarious workers, indebted consumers, algorithms that exploit the time, attention, and mental health of millions.
The rules are unclear. The clauses are in the fine print. The contract can never be broken. The game always favors the top brass. And when a player rebels, they are simply eliminated. Quieted. Silenced. Sometimes with lawsuits. Sometimes with drones.
The VIP Observers
The most repugnant scene in Squid Game is also the most realistic: a handful of rich men, hidden behind golden masks, morbidly observe the players’ suffering. They bet. They laugh. They are bored.
That’s what vulture funds speculating on bankrupt countries look like. While thousands die from hunger, forced migration, or wars over lithium and gas, the elite entertains itself with “forecasts,” “growth models,” and “sustainable investment trends.”
And not to mention how they turn disaster into a narrative: climate change is your fault because you leave the light on, not the fault of the 1% who emit more CO₂ than all African countries combined.
In “Squid Game,” the player can leave the game if everyone votes to end it. In real life, that would be leaving the system. But the system has convinced us that there is no way out. That the game, though cruel, is the only thing that exists. That the chaos outside is worse.
The truth is that many are already leaving the game. From the de-dollarization of blocs like BRICS to mass migration toward alternative ways of life, local currencies, cooperatives, and digital resistance. It’s not a solution, not even close, but at least it’s an alternative.
“Squid Game” isn’t a script. It’s a confession. A stylized revelation of how power works when no one checks on it. And although they try to convince us it’s just fiction, every day someone loses their home due to an unpayable mortgage, every time a country surrenders its sovereignty for a loan, every time a corporation buys water, a new round is being played.
The terrible thing isn’t that there are unfair rules. It’s that many still believe they have a chance of winning.
Playful Violence
Fiction sometimes spits out truths more brutal than the nightly news. “Squid Games” is nothing more than a sordid parable about the systemic competition that dominates the globalized world. It’s not a future dystopia, but a mirror of the present.
While some saw it as a “creative” series, the truth is that “Squid Game” functions as a merciless x-ray of the economic hierarchies and geopolitical impulses of the post-pandemic era. Through “traditional” childhood trials transformed into extermination rituals, the series reminds us that power games are not only cruel, but that, in their logic, spectacle and bloodshed are synonymous with governability.
It is no coincidence that this South Korean production has burst onto the scene in a global context marked by massive debt, rising suicide rates, social unrest, and the emotional collapse of millions. “Squid Game” doesn’t depict a hypothetical future. It denounces a present as structured as a fourth-generation war: without visible fronts, without uniformed armies, but equally lethal, or even worse, than the wars of the past.
The series proposes a selection mechanism that is all too reminiscent of IMF debt dynamics, immigration lotteries, or job “chances” under junk contracts. All under the promise that someone—just one—can “win.” This individualistic narrative of success is, in itself, a weapon of soft war.
South Korea: Surveillance Laboratory
That the series emerges from South Korea is neither a whim nor a coincidence. It is one of the countries with the highest levels of citizen surveillance, suicide rates, and academic competitiveness. A country where access to success is measured in bank installments and academic results, and where failure has no safety net. South Korea has historically been a testing ground for Asian neoliberal doctrine and its geographical location. First, due to the war (1950-53), then due to the dictatorship, and now due to algorithms and cryptocurrencies, within the framework of a global economic war that has no parallel in world history.
“Squid Games” exposes this model: debt as a trap, the game as an ideology, the camera as a judge. All the contestants are ordinary citizens, and the geographical location places this country within a hostile territory alongside North Korea and China. South Koreans are driven by their own financial misfortunes. No one is a criminal by choice. They are criminalized by the system. Does that sound familiar?
An Allegory of Hybrid Warfare
The series is not only a socioeconomic critique. It is also a geostrategic parable. In a world where war no longer requires missiles but streaming platforms, memes, bots, and “narratives,” “Squid Game” demonstrates how the global unconscious is colonized through aesthetics of death.
Each test represents a phase of current hybrid wars: disinformation, trauma, propaganda, spectacle, and selective elimination. The mask of the “Front Man”—half guard, half bureaucrat—could be found in any digital security office. The VIPs who bet on the participants inevitably refer to the global elites who enrich themselves by watching the world burn: hedge funds, investment banks, Big Tech, and stateless politicians.
The true dystopia is that many viewers ended up wanting to play Squid Game. Pink outfits were sold, themed parties were held, and even “real-life versions” of the game—without murders, for now?—were organized in playgrounds or on reality shows. Criticism was transformed into a commodity. The message was devoured by the algorithm. Netflix smiled.
“Squid Game” wasn’t just a series. It was a geopolitical document disguised as a drama. A reminder that systemic violence has become playful, that hunger is aesthetic, that desperation is a trending topic. And above all: that on the current global stage, those who don’t kill (metaphorically, of course) are condemned to oblivion.
Welcome to the new normal.
By the way, and although it may seem contradictory, I also liked the series, because at the end of everything, within great artistic or cinematic works, there are great truths to decode.
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