Dangerous conspiracy games, collective dreaming, and more...
New writing+ in a moment when writing+ feels useless and belated in the face of...
Dangerous play
I’m very pleased to present an early version of a peer-reviewed paper, “Dangerous Play in an age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the GameStop Frenzy to the Capitol Hill Jamboree” that I wrote with my collaborators A.T. Kingmsith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou.
It’s part of our joint Conspiracy Games and Countergames project. Focusing on the intersection of “conspiracy theories”, necrotic capitalism, and games and gamification, this project already includes
a 20-episode research podcast featuring interviews with scholars, game designers, artists, and activists
some public writing, including a recent piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books
a board game, CLUE-ANON, which is currently in development.
Here’s the abstract for the paper:
In this paper we explore one dimension of the contemporary cultural politics that gives rise to reactionary formations and movements: the desire for a kind of dangerous play within a financialized world where most people feel trapped in a game they can’t win. We take up three interwoven phenomena from the recent past in the United States, though with implications beyond that context: (1) the GameStop stock-buying frenzy of early 202l, (2) the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6 of that year, and (3) the dramatic rise in popularity of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy that appeared in 2017 and gained significant influence since. By locating these complex participatory phenomena in the context of digitized financialization characterized by gamification, alienation and profound inequalities, we supplement efforts to understand today’s reactionary imagination. We argue that all three might be seen as, in part, forms of dangerous play that both emerge from, rebel against and also, contradictorily, help to reproduce or entrench dominant inequalities. Hence those who wish to counter these reactionary tendencies or propose more radical responses cannot limit themselves to critique; they must also recognize what animates these forms of alienated play.
“Dangerous Play in an age of Technofinance” represents our first sustained academic article on the subject and is forthcoming in a special issue of the journal TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies on the theme of “Zero Credits: Countering the Dreams of Technofinance” that I am editing with Enda Brophy and Ben Anderson. After a lot of delays, it’s due out later this year. More on that soon.
Our team is hard at work developing the next stages of the Conspiracy Games and Countergames project, including a chapter in the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s forthcoming Global Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Counterstrategies, more academic articles, the publication of the CLUE-ANON board game, and a series of workshops for artists, activists and researchers in early 2023.
Relatedly, a peer-reviewed article that led to this project, “An ‘anxiety epidemic’ in the financialized university: Critical questions and unexpected resistance,” by me and Aris should appear any day now in the journal Cultural Politics. We made a similar argument more briefly and for a broader argument a few years ago in an article titled “From anxiety to revolt? Against the financialized university” in ROAR Magazine.
Palm oil video and interviews
I’ve been really gratified by the reception, so far, of my new book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, out since April from Pluto. Recently, I was interviewed by a number of outlets:
CBC’s Sunday Magazine - “Using radical imagination to confront our reliance on palm oil”
KPFA’s Against the Grain - “Oily business”
Rosano’s Strolling - A conversation about the imagination and co-living
Connected Sociology’s The Environment and Climate Change curriculum - “Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire”
And more…
Dreaming together
Later this year, or perhaps early next, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry will publish a future iteration of my paper “Dreaming Together: Artists Mobilizing Collective Dreaming Methods for the Radical Imagination.”
This essay explores how artists both historically and in the contemporary moment have sought to mobilize dreams as a collective method for cultivating and convoking the radical imagination, framed as a collective process rather than an individual quality of mind… After briefly exploring dreams as social (rather than simply individual) phenomena, this essay turns to the way Western artists have approached dreams as a gateway to the radical imagination. It then explores the work of several artists who mobilize dreams as a way to work through systems of gentrification, settler colonialism and white supremacy.
The examples and theories presented in this essay strongly suggest that collective dreaming practices can be important methods for cultivating the radical imagination. Artists build on a variety of traditions to reconceptualize dreams beyond an modern, Enlightenment Eurocentric epistemology that would see them as merely the colourful exhaust of the brain machine. However, the artists discussed in this paper do not pursue the romantic or metaphysical notions that see dreams as sources of supernatural insight into the self or the world. Rather, in ways that resonate with and, in some cases, draw on recent insights from neuroscience and related fields, these artists approach dreams and dreaming as important processes by which humans process and come to learn about the changing, complex social world.
This work stems from inquiries undertaken by Phanuel Antwi, Cassie Thornton and I as part of our Strange Bedfellowship project. You can listen to a conversation we three had, along with Ben Evans James, as part of last year’s transmediale festival’s online almanac.
If you’re interested, also check out our friends Michelle Teran and Marc Herbst’s really interesting project(s) on dreaming together, as well as this fascinating work by Daniel Godínez Nivón.
More!
I was in conversation with the artist Paolo Cirio and writer/editor Alex Estorick of Right Click Save about NFTs, Web3 and the imagination for the online magazine .
Leigh Claire la Berge and I are gearing up to host the Genres Against Markets writing workshop in Berlin, July 11-15. I can announce we have a wonderful group of writers joining us at moos.space as well as conversations lined up with the likes of Jordy Rosenberg, Wu Ming 1 and Vijay Prashad!