Morty Can Die: Radical Freedom, Programmed Death, and Algorithmic Subjectivity in the Animated Series Rick and Morty as Speculative Fiction

liberdade radical, morte programada e subjetividade algorítmica na animação Rick and Morty como ficção especulativa

Abstract

This article What if Rick Sanchez were real? What if his absolute freedom, indifference to pain, and refusal of relational ties were not narrative exaggerations but extreme manifestations of a subjectivity already at work? This article adopts speculative fiction as a philosophical methodology (Uckelman, 2024) to interpret the animated series Rick and Morty as a critical allegory of radicalized neoliberalism. The central hypothesis is that Rick does not embody a dysfunctional individual, but rather the systemic effect of an ontopolitical regime that dissolves the commons in the name of total autonomy. Structured in four interlinked sections, the article begins with freedom as its foundational axis and explores its consequences: the erosion of social bonds, necropolitics as the management of the disposable, algorithmic technogovernance of experience, and comedy as an anesthetic for collapse. Rather than satire, the series offers a speculative mirror — a philosophical experiment that compels us to confront the implications of freedom detached from recognition of the other. This is not a moralizing reading nor a conventional sociological critique, but a conceptual intervention: Rick and Morty does not project a dystopia — it reconfigures the present. If Rick persists, it is because his logic already inhabits us. And perhaps the most unsettling question is not “What if Rick were real?”, but “What if we already were Rick?”