MrBeast’s recreation stripped Squid Game’s anticapitalist allegory into literal spectacle.

Evidence

While the Netflix show was the most popular television launch in the streaming service’s history at the time, with 142 million households streaming the show during its first four weeks of availability, MrBeast’s hit 142 million views after eight days. And, in comparing the productions, minute-to-minute, the recreation cost more to produce than Netflix’s show. The original Squid Game cost approximately 43,500 per minute of television programming; Donaldson's recreation is estimated to have cost around 134,600 per minute. But what strikes us is how, in MrBeast’s video, the anticapitalist allegory of Squid Game is deallegorized, made into a simple material reality of capitalist “charity,” of capitalist “spectacle,” in its recreation. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 322

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated goal of analyzing a real creator via the four infrastructures — the warehouse-as-studio here is the ‘market’ infrastructure converting critique into literal commodity.
• SEED: Angle: the deallegorization move — a critique of capitalism becoming a higher-budget literalization of itself — as a general mechanism for how platforms absorb and neutralize critique.