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4th Year HTS: Form Follows Malfunction Edward Bottoms Final Essay Submission
6 December 2019
Gaming for Food, Not for Fun When a day of gaming is more lucrative than a month of employment
Food in the supermarket, money in the banks, electricity in the home — these are things many of us take for granted, in fact, their absence seems unimaginable. For some, however, their absence is a daily reality. The other networks that surface (from them and by them) reveal themselves to be incessant in their survivalist adaptability — forever indicative of existing contradictions between official and actual norms. These instances reflect the seemingly idiosyncratic ways which arise from necessity, from when the shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line, and is in fact, a complex, cyclical network of goods exchanged, sold, purchased, lost, and acquired. Venezuela, once South America’s richest nation, has been steeped in one of the worst economic and humanitarian crises ever seen in the continent. Its marked downfall began almost two decades ago, following Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” which managed to keep a democratic facade while surreptitiously undermining political institutions. The country’s economic collapse, despite having the largest proven oil resources in the world, can be traced to the increasingly politicised oil industry.1 Poor economic policies and flagrant corruption ultimately left Venezuela completely vulnerable to the fluctuating oil market. Whilst the beginning of Chávez’s government in 1999 benefitted from high oil prices, allowing the allocation of royalties towards the upkeep of unsustainable Bolivarian social missions, it also set the course for accelerated economic ruin in the years to come. “From 2000 until Chavez’s death in 2013, the government increased spending as a share of GDP from 28 to 40 percent” and underinvestment in the oil industry caused a drop in production, whilst conversely, dependence on it increased from 77 percent of export revenue to more than 96 percent today.2 Renée Die-Girbau
1 Gonzalez, Juan S. “The Venezuelan Crisis and Salvador Allende’s Glasses.” PRISM 8, no. 1 (2019): 40-55. www.jstor.org/stable/26597309. 2 Haley Zaremba, “Venezuela: The Brutal Consequences Of Oil Addiction,” May 22, 2017, available at <https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Venezuela-The-Brutal-Consequences-Of-Oil-Addiction14123.html>.