COWBOY POSTCAPITALISM
A performative lecture in the game world of Dying Light 2.
COWBOY POSTCAPITALISM is a live in-game lecture by the artist collective Total Refusal (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner), which focuses on the aesthetic and political landscape of post-apocalyptic open-world games. The starting point is Dying Light 2, a game set in the ruins of a collapsed civilization, which casts its players in the role of the individualistic “cowboy capitalist” – a lone frontier hero who fights for survival with hyper-masculine values. The zombies, once a symbol of anti-capitalist critique, become a resource here, material to be overcome. The setting evokes colonial narratives of conquest and taming, while simultaneously reproducing the ideologies of the system it supposedly outlived. The lecture analyzes how games and mass media discard utopian visions of the future and instead design “retrotopian” scenarios where progress is replaced by survival fantasies. COWBOY POSTCAPITALISM shows that the post-apocalyptic game world offers no escape from capitalism, but rather performatively continues its undead logic – an endless loop in survival mode.
In English.
Total Refusal is a pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla that focuses on artistic intervention and the appropriation of mainstream video games. The collective “upcycles” games to make visible the political mechanisms hidden behind the glossy, hyperreal surfaces of this medium.