Art, cults, fascism, hoaxes, care-orism, more...
Dear subscribers,
I hope you are each well, although I suspect there’s a little pipeline deep within each of us that is leaking bad gasses into the atmosphere thanks to the wounds of inter-imperialist warfare. Still, I’m wishing you all the best.
Meanwhile, I’ve have recently produced, or am likely to soon produce, some less-than-reassuring words.
A few recent publications
“An interview with Wu Ming 1 about the Qanon conspiracy fantasy, collective creativity, and the (ab)uses of enchantment” by me, A.T. Kingsmith, and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, forthcoming in Theory, Culture & Society and available now on my website. Also available as an audio interview (part 1) (part 2).
“From financialization to derivative fascisms: Some cultural politics of far-right authoritarianism in an era of unmanageable risks.” An article by me. Forthcoming in Social Text and available now on my website.
“The fate of the artist at the end of capitalism’s cosmology.” An essay by me, appearing in English on the website of Gamechanger and in German in Arts of the Working Class
A few upcoming events
I’m excited to be a part of the Berliner Gazette’s annual conference, this year on the theme of “After Extractivism”
I’ll be on a panel on “Empire and Ecology” along with Julio Linares, Aleksandar Matković and Claudia Núñez on October 13.
I’ll be co-facilitation a track of the conference on “Disarming Resource Wars” from October 13-15.
RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, which I co-direct with Cassie Thornton, is hosting the third installment of MAGMA EDITIONS, our series of salons in Berlin on October 9. This time, it’s a study day on Octover on the topic of “Care-orism” a term Cassie and I invented to describe capitalism’s weaponization of care. Registration is open, but very limited.
A few things we’re working on at RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab
GAMES: Regular readers may know that, as part of the Conspiracy Games and Countergames project I work on with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and A.T. Kingsmith (which also includes a podcast) I am developing a board game called CLUE-ANON. Well, it was so much fun that RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab is building on this success to build out an experimental critical board games lab! Stay tuned for more information.
AMAZON WORKERS’ WRITING WORKSHOP: Last year, Graeme Webb, Xenia Benivolski and I ran a speculative fiction (SF) film and media club for rank-and-file Amazon workers based on the outlanding idea that, as people forced to build someone else’s utopia (often their own dystopia, they might have something to say about the future. They did! (You can read about the project in LARB or the Sociological Review magazine). Based on that project’s success, we’re about to launch a new project: we will recruit (and pay) 12 rank-and-file Amazon workers to join us for a 4-month SF writers’ workshop to explore what the world will be “after Amazon.” Our team is really glad to be joined this time around by my colleague Sarah Olutola and RiVAL’s most excellent research assistant Stella Lawson (whom some of you might also recognize as the VAGABONDS series in-house witch consultant responsible for selecting that series’ iconic tarot card motifs)