The death race is nothing new to the American experience, but the latest installment of Death Race strikes at the heart of futurist visions of an online video utopia. In this remake, which opened in theaters last Friday, digital technology quantifies all that rests in its path. It's not just video that gets blown to bits. It's also our standards. For entertainment, the ruthless measurement of content's mass appeal leads to the ultimate in mathematical reductionism — monetization, as YouTube's product managers might put it. As such, Death Race is more mockumentary than science fiction. Because its dark, profit-driven Web-video future is not just inevitable. It's already happened.The theme of people killing people with cars has been explored as fantasy in American motion pictures for years. The car chase is at the very core of popular cinema. Just as the camp of Ben Hur's chariot race was dispensed with in the first scene in Rome's arena from Gladiator, so does Death Race dispatch with the camp of Roger Corman's earlier production, Death Race 2000. Then, "T-video satellite" broadcast the race. Now? Choose from a hundred different angles and follow the driver you most closely identify with, all for the low, low price of $99 a heat or $250 for the full package. Mario Kart-style power-ups on the track complete the illusion of "interactivity," allowing viewers the visceral feeling that they alone decide who lives and who dies — just like in a videogame. The stargazing optimists at our sister site io9 noted that buried beneath the subtext of Death Race's villain, a prison warden played by Joan Allen, lay the hungry heart of a pageview baiter: