The Exploits of Play podcast; Berlin activism workshops (29.04-03.05)
Plus, "Color, Corporations and other Fictions"
I usually limit myself to one bulletin a month, but…
Exploits of Play
It has been a treat to work with the wonderful Weird Economies project on a new 10-episode podcast, The Exploits of Play, which launched today (26 February 2024), with new episodes to be released bi-weekly until May.
This series of ten podcast episodes explores how games and gamification have moved from the margin to the centre of the weird capitalist economy.
It jumps beyond the commonplace and largely uninteresting observation that video games have become a major entertainment industry. It also takes for granted that tech and speculative capital have invested heavily in technologies of gamification as a means to gain and hook new users. Instead, it looks to the deeper sociological roots and effects of these trends and the way they are reshaping many spheres of life, from economics to sexuality. And it meditates on what this means for resistance… the good, the bad and the ugly.
Join us for episodes on the gamification of love, on the playfulness of conspiracism, on the myth of the “cheating other,” on the tyrannical rise and rule of game theory, on the appeal of the Hunger Games… and much more!
The podcast is based on research I’m doing currently for my next book The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism.
Listen online and learn more: https://weirdeconomies.com/podcasts/exploits-of-play
The podcast is also being mirrored on the podcast of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, which can be found in most podcast apps by searching for “RiVAL Radio”
Episodes
[OUT NOW!] Ep01 - Conspiracy Plays - Hugh Davies on the temptations of alternate reality
Ep02 - The Game at War with the World - S. M. Amadae on the powers behind the prisoner’s dilemma
Ep03 - All Against All - Tom Boland on our modern gladiators and the real world hunger games
Ep04 - Frontiers of Play - Mary Flanagan on games, colonialism, and the playful imagination
Ep05 - The Cheating Other - Gargi Bhattacharyya on how racial capitalism scams us twice
Ep06 - Gaming Authority - Thiago Falcẫo on exploitation and far-right politics in the games industry
Ep07 - “It Is What It Is” - Sophie Lewis on Love Island, game shows, and the banality of capitalist eros
Ep08 - Toyed With - Alfie Brown on the gamification of affect and love’s digital futures
Ep09 - The Singularity Bluff - Christian Nagler on Silicon Valley’s dangerous dreams of cheating death
Ep10 - Our Moves and Movements - Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux on the playfully subverting capitalism
Exploits of Play Launch
Join us at 19h30 February 26 at Berlin’s diffrakt: centre for the theoretical periphery for the podcast’s launch with me, the producer Halle Frost, and podcast guest Jay Jordan (co-author of We Are Nature Defending Itself for the VAGABONDS series). After the discussion, we’ll be playing spicy games like my prototype Billionaires and Guillotines (stay tuned for more exciting news about that soon)
Berlin Mayday Movement Academy - April 29-May 3
Sarah Stein Lubrano and I have founded Sense & Solidarity, a platform where people who want to radically change the world can learn together and build individual and collective capacity to change hearts and minds.
Building on Sarah's focus on cognitive dissonance and ideology and my focus on social movements and the radical imagination, Sense & Solidarity aims to create bridges between critical theory and activism/organizing.
As dedicated readers (and generous funders) know, Sarah and I recently successfully raised money to produce a podcast, What Do We Want?, that explores what the stories and challenges of social movements for collective liberation teach us about what it means to have a mind in a bonkers stage of capitalism. It should be ready to share in April or May.
I bet you’re already excited to listen to us, but probably also asking yourself: how can I hang out in person with these charming nerds? Well, you’re in luck!
Applications are now open for Sense & Solidarity’s Mayday Movement Academy in Berlin! Join us for four days of workshops and communion!
We’re providing a space for new and established educators, activists, artists, thinkers and organizers to assemble to discuss topics including (but not limited to):
How can we see (the good kind of) emancipatory social change within our lifetimes?
How can we create arguments and infrastructures to change hearts and minds and overcome fatalism, fear and factionalism?
How can we strategize to make the best use of our very limited resources and energies?
How can we cultivate the radical imagination in ourselves and those around us?
How can we avoid burning out?
Tentative schedule
Monday, April 29, 1-7pm – Changing hearts and minds in bonkers-stage capitalism
How does ideology work today?
What actually works to break through cognitive dissonance?
When to walk away?
Tuesday, April 30, 1-7pm – Developing strategy and building capacities and relations
Mapping our resources, assessing our capacities
Recognizing and specifying our goals
Summoning a transformative vision
Wednesday, May 1 – No session:
Instead, loosely coordinated fun, dancing, riots, etc.Thursday, May 2, 1-7pm – Mobilizing and maintaining allies and supporters
Having better fights and arguments
Taking care seriously
Non-hierarchical leadership?
Friday, May 3, 1-7pm – Disrupting an demoralizing opponents
Sharper tactics with better aim
Doing a lot with a little
Getting strategic
Color, corporations and other fictions
My short essay “Color, corporations and other fictions” was published in the catalogue that accompanies Danish artist Hannibal Andersen’s 2023 exhibition The Abstract Expression of Privatization at Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenberg. In that work, an installation and a large mural explored corporate claims to the ownership of certain colours. You can read the essay over at my website.
In seeking to use law (state power) to enforce the exclusive use of a certain range of [light] frequencies, notions of property deconstruct themselves, revealing their dependency on profound contradictions, contradictions that can only be sustained through real or symbolic violence, or the threat of it.