The extraordinary success of Netflix’s Squid Game demonstrates how many people relate to a portrayal of capitalism’s miseries — and how few feel there is any way to escape.

Squid Game has been described as an allegory for capitalism more generally, but these masked VIPs suggest it refers to a particular kind of capitalism at a particular moment. The people the VIPs represent aren’t just capitalists appropriating the surplus value of our labor; they’re sadists enacting a brutality made possible by a totally hegemonic global system — a capitalism so confident, so immune to challenge, that it no longer has to pretend. The game might be a secret, but the equivalent brutality of the outside world is not.

Part of this hegemony is afforded through anonymity. Where, for instance, the comparable brutality in something like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is broadcast to the masses as a control mechanism, Squid Game is played behind closed doors. The implication is that in the real world, there’s little need for control: Squid Game’s players are already resigned to the system from which the VIPs benefit because they see no alternative.

In Squid Game, anonymity acts to reinforce hegemony. Its goal is to maintain the belief that things happen this way not because a few people benefit from it, but because they have to; there is no other way the world could operate. When asked what he would like to bet in a final game against the tournament’s organizer, Gi-hun rightly replies, “Anything. You can take everything from me if you want anyway.”

This line — a rejection of the mirage of the level playing field — is not representative of the players’ attitudes throughout the show. The tournament’s masked Front Man sells the belief that each game represents a true meritocracy, free from the prejudices that inhibit worthy success in the outside world. The lie, of course, is that the players aren’t playing against one another: They’re playing against a system, and the system has the odds stacked in its favor.

In fact, Squid Game argues that the illusion of success is one of the ruling class’s greatest cruelties. Gi-hun’s experience ahead of the first game is contrasted with that of his childhood best friend and competitor, Sang-woo. He left the local town to study at Seoul National University and, Gi-hun believes, has been jet-setting on business trips ever since. We soon learn that Sang-woo has actually been on the run after committing various financial crimes and running up millions of won in debt — debt that lands him back alongside Gi-hun.

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