this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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My take on Bioshock is people became mutants and started killing each other because there were no laws or regulations aside from "you can't stop others from profiting." It was legal for them to become mutants. It was legal for them to weaponize and arm themselves before the inevitable revolution / civil war of Rapture. The closest thing to a law enforcer was the big daddy and he does NOTHING about the hordes of cannibalistic telepathic monsters. You know why? Because there are no laws against what they're doing, the daddy was only made to protect the little sisters who produce profit for Fontaine.
Bioshock is steampunk scifi but it's also anarchy in it's truest form. People built whatever they liked, and they destroyed whatever they liked, and when violently mutating psychoactive drugs were introduced the latter succeeded over the former.
BioShock 2 revealed that Andrew Ryan had a secret prison to throw people into when they disrupted his control over the city. And more than once he decided he would burn it all down rather than let someone else win.
It may have masqueraded as anarchy, but the system was still rigged from the start. There was always a ruler.
And this, intentionally or not, is the real message. There's no such thing as a real meritocracy, the system is always rigged in favor of the people who created it.
That's fair, and to add onto that Ryan did have a self destruct button in his office that would wipe out the whole city.
On the other hand, though, Fontaine and Lamb both rose to power despite Ryan's head start on authoritarianism.
Anarchy is explicitly against "profits".
And it doesn't mean that there are no rules but no rulers.
Core ideas of anarchism: mutual aid, no hierarchies, stateless moneyless society, free association.
This person: anarchism is capitalism without rules
rofl Bioshock is explicitly NOT anarchism in its truest form... Big Daddys existing at all disproves that by itself, let alone Ryan's ruling of the city.
That's not anarchism you're describing, maybe you're thinking of "anarcho"capitalism?