The Hunger Games Part 1: The Cannon of Silicon Valley

Extract from L. Howie and P. Campbell’s Essay Wear a Necklace of h(r)ope Side by Side with Me

Editors note: a particular word has to be edited out of this piece, as my blog has regularly been caught up in algorithms designed to pick up certain themes. I have deliberately replaced this word with the substitute word used by young people to dodge the algorithm. The word I will use is “unaliving”, and it replaces a word starting with ‘s’. Unfortunately it breaks up the power of the piece, but needs must as the devil drives, as they say. Having said that, there is a chance that it is not an algorithm, but a person reporting the article. If it is, and if you are tempted to do this now, know that this piece is not designed to encourage unaliving or suggest that I want to unalive myself, but rather it is an attempt to help young people PREVENT unaliving. To give them a reason to have hope.

This is the first part of a two-part series which interprets The Hunger Games as a serious piece of anti-neoliberal political fiction. It comes from the conclusion of the article. I’m placing it here first because it shows quite clearly the connections made by young people in Silicone Valley between The Hunger Games and the pressures they are put under to perform in a highly competitive environment.

Additionally, I want you to think about what it means to have world changing technology produced and deployed by a community that is so deeply sick that some of the most ‘privileged’ children in the world are driven to self-unaliving (I use quotation marks because a child driven to unalive themselves is by no-means privileged).

I think it’s also important that less privileged young people can see that kids from well-off families may have a lot of advantages, but that does not mean they do not suffer. In some ways I feel they suffer worst of all. For many of them privilege is a prison, tying them to the wants and needs of their parents, isolating them from their peers and suffering the worst kind of existential pain. Young people need to work together for a better future for each other.

The second part will be an invitation to do some homework, and will include the full essay. Not everybody will be up for the task, as it requires reading a reasonably long essay and a full rewatch of the Hunger Games series. But I’m sure fans of the show that connect with its ideas will be happy to take part. It will be a de-programming exercise designed to break through neoliberal conditioning and have hope for a better future.

That will take a little while to prepare, so in the meantime, I just want you encourage you to take a moment to muse on what the essay describes as

“...the tragic plight of some of the highest achieving young people in the USA. Silicon Valley, in the bohemian ‘bay area’ of Northern California, is the corporeal and geographical home of the social media revolution. It is also home to what is known as a ‘unalive cluster’—a concentration of self-unaliving in a particular geographic region, often linked by particular socio-cultural conditions (Rosin 2015). Indeed, it is also home to an ‘echo cluster’—an extraordinarily rare occurrence where the same geographical location is subject to a second unaliving cluster within a decade. These clusters were found in high schools where the demands imposed by Silicone Valley parents—many of whom moved to the area to give their children elite education and employment opportunities—were, simply put, pushing their children over the edge through a ‘competitive insanity’ that ‘breeds competition, hatred, and discourages teamwork and genuine learning. … We are sick. … Why is that not getting through to this community?’ (Walworth in Rosin 2015). The favourite method for unaliving among young people in this region was to throw themselves in front of the Caltrain. One student compared the train’s ‘warning whistle’ to the ‘cannon that goes off in The Hunger Games every time a kid dies’ (in Rosin 2015).”

Just take a little time to let that sink in.

I’ll be back in a little while with part two: Wear a Necklace of Hope.