After the End, Before the Beginning: How a Spreadsheet Game, a Lonely Japanese Salaryman, and a Teenage Streamer Taught Us What Comes After Capitalism


Let’s start in 1983, with a game.

It’s called SimCity, and it’s not really a game. It’s a simulation—a spreadsheet with a user interface. No clear goals, no high score, no “win” condition. Just inputs, outputs, feedback loops. Build a city, watch it grow, and manage the balance between housing, jobs, taxes, and traffic.

It becomes wildly popular—especially among people who think cities can be solved like math problems.

But underneath the gameplay is an assumption: order is good, growth is the goal, and the invisible hand of urban planning (you, the player) will guide the system to balance.

Except in real life, cities don’t behave.

Cut to Tokyo, 1997. A salaryman—mid-40s, gray suit, briefcase, 16-hour workdays—comes home to a silent apartment. No family. No community. Just a TV, maybe a goldfish. He collapses from exhaustion, a phenomenon so common it earns its own word: karōshi—death from overwork.

Japan isn’t unique. It’s just early. Early to automation, early to isolation, early to a society where work defines worth. And when that work collapses, people don’t just lose income. They lose identity.

Now zoom to 2025.

A teenage Twitch streamer in Nebraska makes $2,000 a month reacting to TikToks and playing Stardew Valley. She has no boss, no office, and no health insurance. She doesn’t produce anything, exactly. She just performs. She vibes. Her viewers tip her in emotes and cryptocurrency.

This isn’t “capitalism” in the traditional sense. It’s attention monetization, parasocial micro-economics, algorithmic subsistence farming. It’s weird. It’s unstable. And it’s... working?

Sort of.

Because here’s the twist: for millions of people, the formal economy no longer offers a future. Wages stagnate. Jobs disappear. Gig work frays. Institutions fail. And so, like water through cracks, human creativity leaks sideways—into peer-to-peer economies, cooperative housing, open-source projects, mutual aid Discords, and strange little crypto-art communes.

The old world says: maximize shareholder value.
The new world says: start a co-op, livestream your cat, survive however you can.

And yes, some of it is cringey. Some of it is exploitative. But some of it? Some of it points forward.

Because post-capitalism doesn’t arrive with fanfare or ideology.
It arrives like a side quest. Like modding your favorite game.
Like realizing the rules don’t work anymore, and deciding to play a different game.

SimCity didn’t teach us how to fix the world.
It taught us that systems can be redesigned.

The salaryman showed us what happens when meaning is reduced to productivity.
The streamer shows us how meaning—real or performative—can be reclaimed, repurposed, re-streamed.

And that, my friend, is where Season One ends:

Not with collapse.
Not with utopia.
But with a network of glowing screens, patched-together solutions, digital campfires in the dark.

A world not after capitalism.
But beyond it.

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