There's something deeply fascinating about tracing the movement of rebellion across video game generations.

Two decades ago Jet Set Radio dropped, inspired by a turntable and rave scene still nostalgic for the counterculture, yet slipping into punk nihilism. Though Beat, Tab, Gum, and co fight against gentrification, riot cops, tanks, and corporate assassins, their turf wars with other youth gangs betrays a lack of political consciousness over shared conditions of dispossession. All they can do is vent their hatred of the system through a particular brand of rebellious individualism that lacks any capacities to change the system. Like dälek, watching his beloved hip-hop fall from revolutionary Pan-Africanism to misogynistic gangbanging, it's easy to ask in tears "Yo what the fuck happened?" A singer on a track in Jet Set Radio repeats "Everybody listen to the music" but he never states what for. For the music in and of itself, we must suppose; for life experienced now, immediately, without political hope or change.



Twenty years later Splatoon drops, and rebellion is not even a nuisance. Radical individualism, the great outside of Jet Set Radio's Tokyo-to, has been completely absorbed by the fashionistas of Splatoon's Inkopolis. From cradle to grave, Inklings are encouraged to rebel through hats, shirts, shoes, and corporate-sponsored firearms. Unlike the turf wars of Jet Set Radio, which were an excess the state couldn't control, the turf wars of Splatoon are a televised spectacle waged between Inklings and Octarians, capable of sustaining the fashionista military industrial complex through the constitution of competitive, consumptive, and nationalistic subjects. Set far in the future, in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the extinction of the human species, Splatoon can only imagine more of the same, of capitalism as a homologous development in the genomes of our cephalopod kin. It's telling that there are no cops in Splatoon—its citizens have learnt to police themselves.



The culmination of Jet Set Radio is a battle against a black magic corporate takeover of Tokyo-to that unites at least two of the warring youth gangs, if only towards the abolition of one particularly bad capitalist. The culmination of Splatoon is the end of a resource war whereby the Inklings reclaim the Great Zapfish from the Octarians, to exploit it for indefinite energy production. If Jet Set Radio depicted the nihilism of dispossession (a moral indignation yet to cohere into a structural critique), then Splatoon depicts the nihilism of possession—of a resigned and cruel joy in subjugation without end, and consumption blind to catastrophe.