Antebellum slavery functioned as pre-industrial capitalism linked to late capitalist supply chains.

Evidence

The structural parallels between Donaldson’s videos and Squid Game are, from the outset, striking. Both seem organized around giveaways of massive sums of money for people who “win” some sort of competition. These competitions treat individuals as literal game tokens, as manipulable matter to be molded into entertainment. If the Korean series allegorizes the conflict between national economies and global capital—as late capitalist institutions such as the IMF demand deregulation, “flexibility,” and policies hostile to labor—then MrBeast’s location in the American South should be understood as providing a particularly strange, and particularly notable, late capitalist background. As Mandel describes in Late Capitalism, the American South, in the global economy prior to the Civil War, was not a region characterized by a capitalist mode of production (even if American capitalism inherently relied on this region for the totality of its economy). Slavery in the United States was, instead, a form of “pre-industrial capitalism” embodied in the plantation economy. After the Civil War, the South had to be “developed” and reintegrated into capitalism, without the development of manufacturing, realizing itself best in the industries associated with the “New South”: finance and banking, tourism, technology and research, and entertainment. Centers for these industries thus developed in cities such as Charlotte, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill “Research Triangle,” Nashville, Asheville, Savannah, Charleston, Atlanta, and New Orleans, among other urban environments throughout the region. While these cities have become centers of economic activity, many of the more rural communities and towns in the South have remained economically impoverished, with occasional “development” through the building of, for instance, data centers for Facebook and Google in Western North Carolina. MrBeast’s physical location, an hour east of Raleigh, positions him in an unusual location specific to late capitalist development in North Carolina—namely, he can maintain a proximity to Raleigh (its tech industries, which include gaming and esports, fields that he could potentially leverage as sponsors) while also maintaining a proximity toward economically depressed areas outside the larger urban centers of the New South. The entertainment of watching people compete for—or just be given—large sums of money is a form that is specific to the political and cultural economy of late capitalism, especially that of the American South, where the city becomes a space of technological, postindustrial “innovation” and the country is left behind. The excessive spending, the large gifts implied by Donaldson’s videos, speak to extreme economic imbalances that characterize urban centers and rural margins in late capitalist life, imbalances that are also central to the geographical organization of supply chains described throughout this chapter. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 329

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the Corpocene’s infrastructures — here the South’s post-industrial geography of cities vs. rural margins — structure where creators and their labor pools sit.