Max Haiven's Blog, page 4

Climate Workers of the World Unite? (BG)

This text was commissioned by the Berliner Gazette for their 2023 project Allied Grounds. It is in English here and German here.

Climate Workers of the World Unite? The Quest for Affective Connections, Common Enemies, and Shared Narratives

In their provocation for the 2023 project “Allied Grounds,” the Berliner Gazette challenges ‘us’ to imagine the scope for solidarity and action if ‘we,’ workers of the world, in all ‘our’ diversity and with all ‘our’ divisions, come to see ‘ourselves’ as co-creators of the climate. Here, co-creation is not a voluntary or intentional process, at least not yet. Today, ‘our’ cooperation on a global scale is mediated and largely commanded by capitalism. It is this capitalist world system that shapes ‘our’ scope of action, that provides incentives and punishments that constrain ‘our’ agency and arrange ‘us’ into hierarchies of power and privilege. In so doing, capitalism conditions and even leads ‘us’ to destroy the life support systems of the planet and also the lives of most people.

It is this assemblage of human and non-human life support systems and human socio-economic spheres that the authors of the call have in mind when they speak of the climate. In this sense, the climate is not only the literal gaseous atmosphere that enfolds the planet, where concerns about greenhouse gasses and other pollutants have captured our attention and fear in recent years. Additionally the climate is, seen through a kind of intersectional lens, those shared but segregated spheres that ‘we’ all inhabit and shape through politically and economically interconnected systems of which ‘we’ are each a product, and producer and a part. In this sense, ‘we’ climate workers of the world are producing the climate even when we engage on social media, or go shopping, or build new forms of neighborhood-level mutual aid. This is especially so as capitalism expands to consume ever more of the life-world and seeks to transform nearly all human activity into some form of work: activity mediated or shaped by market forces.

“How can the global proletariat emerge from new class struggles that derive their vitality from the multiplicity of laboring subjects – from gig jobbers in Bucharest, agricultural workers in the eastern region of Ghana, electronics manufacturers in Zhengzhou, coders in Mumbai, illegalized migrants in Berlin, Black and Latinx cleaners in Los Angeles, sex workers in Nairobi, care workers in Barcelona, teachers in Tehran, and no-bodies… managed as a surplus population and disposable labor pool in detention centers, hotspots, and camps around the world.”

I want to hold on to the radical potential of ‘us’ mobilizing around the notion ‘we’ are all, no matter what work ‘we’ do (paid or unpaid, formal or informal) climate workers. I believe this approach has a great deal of potential and so I want to give it close attention. In particular, I would like to constructively challenge this optimism by looking at what has made the labor movements of the past strong and what, in contrast, makes the climate workers of the world look rather weak. This said, I am not nostalgic for the workers’ movements of the past: they had many failings and we are in a very different moment, a moment where we have to truly think and act on a planetary scale. However, in bringing up those qualities that previous ‘workers of the world’ possessed, I want to open the door to future conversations about what we contemporary climate workers of the world might have to do.

Affective connections and common enemies

In the heyday of the labor movement in Western Europe, during the rise of industrial capitalism, workers had a great deal in common, including their enemies. Unlike today, when many workers sympathize with their bosses or believe that, if they work hard, they too could be a boss, in those earlier days class antagonism was rather sharp. Workers often lived in decrepit tenements owned by the same individuals who owned the factories where they toiled (or to people who belonged to the same private clubs). Class stained almost every aspect of life: not only how people worked or where they lived or where they lived, but also what they ate, how they entertained themselves, how families were organized, what love and sex looked and felt like, how people talked, joked and expressed emotion. Hatred of the owning class was palpable, only tamed by religious indoctrination (usually in churches controlled by the ruling class), a sense of isolation and futility, and racism – e.g., the British working class was not so ‘British’ after all, as Cedric Robinson has shown.

Labor organizers did not need to convince workers they were being oppressed and exploited but, rather that they could do something about it, and that there were millions of other oppressed people just like them around the country who could rise up together. If they did so in unison or in solidarity, they would be unstoppable. If they did so internationally, they would transform the world. There was more than a small element of revenge in these narratives, and justifiably so: most workers had seen friends or family killed or maimed in machines and would have first hand experience of the sneering impunity of bosses and overseers; sexual exploitation was rampant. Workers could literally look across the shop floor at their exhausted co-workers and see their common cause, could witness, first hand, how their creative and cooperative energies were being channelled and drained by factories that operated purely in the interests of private profits.

Can you mobilize a global movement on the basis of a common dread?

Today’s ‘climate workers’ have no such clarity. Certainly, most of the world’s working population continue to labor in factories or extractive operations where hostile relations with bosses and corporations are palpable. However, today, corporations that are owned by thousands of anonymous shareholders do most of capitalism’s dirty work, offering no clear villain. An increasing number of people also work in the formal or informal service sectors, or in public sector jobs where ‘the boss’ is less clear. Further, the global individualistic neoliberal revolution has encouraged most people to see themselves not as an oppressed worker but an entrepreneur. Many workers in the Global North also have pension, bank or other investments, which on some level make them petty owners of capitalist firms, or own houses which they see as investments. Beyond this, given the vast inequalities within the international division of labor, it is difficult for workers in enriched colonial countries and impoverished post-colonial countries to see eye-to-eye, especially given that the labor of those in the Global South in everything from mining to food production to manufacturing to services (like caregiving) tends to enrich the lives of white Northerners, though some benefit much more than others.

Further, while the workers of industrial capitalism in Western Europe, could watch their time and energy transmuted by capitalist institutions into profit, could bear direct witness to the alienation of their own powers, ‘we’ climate workers of the world hardly recognize ‘our’ own powers to collectively produce the climate. It is hard even in theory to make clear that we all possess an abstract alienated cooperative power to generate the climate, let alone to make this power tangible to rank-and-file workers. Older notions of the working class were frequently built on the physical experience of exhaustion, unfairness, and class hatred. What are the shared, embodied experiences of climate workers on which organizers can build? I suspect that what we share is terror at being on the runaway ghost ship of capitalism that, in areas as diverse as inequality, international nuclear conflict, climate chaos and AI development threatens to destroy life on earth. Can you mobilize a global movement on the basis of a common dread?

This brings me to the final point: ‘we’ climate workers have no clear common enemy. Certainly there are convenient climate villains: the CEOs of fossil fuel corporations, for example, or the executives of the banks or the politicians who enable them. But each of these individuals would claim, not without justification, that they are simply following the rules of the globally competitive market and responding to consumer demands. Each knows they are completely and immediately replaceable and thousands of competitors are waiting for their chance to do the same or worse. Further, although it’s clear consumer activism is an utter dead-end, there is a truth to the rejoinder that we all, to different extents, bear some culpability for the climate crisis because we are all enmeshed in a consumer capitalist system that forces us all to participate in our own collective destruction whether we want to or not, often in ways we don’t even know about.

Such a critique rarely rises above the level of moralism, and has also been shaped by a neoliberal culture that sees the individual consumer or economic actor as the only source of meaningful agency. Still, however, it makes the question of responsibility blurry. It presents a considerable challenge for thinkers and organizers who would try and show ‘us’ how all ‘us’ climate workers share a single common struggle. Often we default to naming capitalism itself as the guilty party, but capitalism is not a thing with motivations or beliefs: it is a set of socio-economic relationships, a kind of vicious feedback loop within the circuitry of society, or perhaps a kind of virus that is quickly devouring its host. But how can ‘we’ climate workers of the world be mobilized to rebel together against a system of which we ourselves are a part?

The linchpin

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx provided an influential theoretical framework for understanding the labor movements during the rise of industrial capitalism. And while their primary concern was with workers in the industrialized Global North, their writings became important to various figures in the Black Radical Tradition, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Cedric Robinson, who appropriated historical materialism as a theory of decolonization in the Global South. It is not my goal here to rehearse these important discourses, and even less to provide an inventory of the theoretical problems and mistakes. Rather, I am interested what the framework of historical materialism offered with regard to previous ‘workers of the world’ and what in turn could be useful as food for thought for today’s climate workers of the world.

Let us start by asking what it is that makes the class-organized social system, capitalism, so special and so vulnerable. In other class-based systems (for example European feudalism or the medieval Hindu caste system) there was certainly a tiny ruling class that organized and benefited from the work of the vast majority. But there the working class was profoundly geographically divided and had difficulty recognizing itself. Further, these earlier systems were not animated by the same spirit of relentless modernizing capitalism, which was, during Engel’s and Marx’s life, transforming nearly all aspects of life including farming, industrial production, household management, logistics, global trade, communication, and transportation. But in order to be so dynamic, capitalism was forced to rely on its own ‘gravediggers’: industrial workers. Rather than peasants or serfs isolated on estates, millions of industrial workers were crowded in slums and factories, increasingly in metropolitan cities in Western Europe.

Isolated peasant and plantation uprisings have been common around the colonial world, but were relatively easily repressed through brutal violence, leaving the blood-soaked land to be harvested the following year by their replacements. By contrast, uprisings of urban industrial workers not only saw coordinated action among thousands of workers but also often destroyed the technology and infrastructure of capitalist production. Further, capitalism’s relentless economic and technological ‘progress’ meant that large numbers of workers were routinely thrown out of work. It’s economic volatility led to price and wage fluctuations that threatened to starve workers. This led to unprecedented uprisings.

Is there some special power in the strike or riot or refusal of ‘climate workers’ that strikes deep at the heart of capitalism? If so, what is it?

As Harry Cleaver notes in his famous worker-centric “Reading Capital Politically,” Karl Marx wrote “Das Kapital” to place a weapon in the hands of the industrial working class: it explained why capitalism was unique among all class systems in human history, and uniquely vulnerable to the very people it exploited: mass workers. Indeed, at the time Marx and Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto” they were in the minority even among radicals in seeing any revolutionary potential among mass workers: skilled industrial workers appeared to be the real revolutionary protagonists, at the forefront of strikes, riots, and uprisings in the momentous first half of the 19th century. Marx and Engels were relatively solitary in seeing the mass, deskilled, hyper-exploited, often migrant worker as having truly structural revolutionary potential, even though at the time there were seen by many radicals as a reactionary force, willing and even eager to break the strikes of skilled workers in their desperation for wages.

Attempting to show how the industrial working class had the power already within their hands, Engels and Marx were seeking to demonstrate how capitalism uniquely depended on this class, and therefore how this class’s protagonism could uniquely bring down that system while preserving its technological advances in the name of a future, classless society. In short: From one fundamental contradiction within the system crucial strategic possibilities emerged: capitalism was destined to generate a working class on which it was dependent, and that could destroy it.

Do ‘we’ climate workers of the world have any such narrative or theory? Certainly we can say that climate-chaos capitalism depends on harnessing our creative-cooperative powers as workers to generate shared but segregated spheres that, by and large, deliver profit to capitalists at the expense of everyone and everything else’s well-being. But this is not quite the same, especially at a moment when it capitalism’s technological push threatens to make it possible (though rarely profitable) to replace human workers with robots and artificial intelligence (although one should take such prophesies with a large grain of salt).

In recent years, theorists informed by Marxist feminism have encouraged us to shift our attention to capitalism’s primary reliance on the reproductive labor typically forced onto women, both the caring labor done in the home to reproduce life as well as in the formal and informal labor market as more and more acts of care are commodified and rendered services. Anti-colonial theorists and activists have drawn our attention to the way capitalism has always relied upon racial and geographic hierarchies to render up cheapend labor and resources. These have both been efforts to refocus our attention on what is often framed as the strategic lynchpin of capitalist accumulation, which can inform our priorities in theorizing and organizing against capitalism.

It remains an open question if the climate crisis can provide such a lynchpin, and to what extent the term climate workers names a strategically significant category around which we can mobilize. In “Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet” Matt Huber focuses our attention on the crucial role of highly-unionized energy sector workers. But this is a much more limited notion of both ‘workers’ and ‘climate’ than the Berliner Gazette has in mind.

Is there some special power in the strike or riot or refusal of ‘climate workers’ that strikes deep at the heart of capitalism? If so, what is it? If not, is ‘climate worker’ just one more identity among many to be taken up voluntarily by people (and which people?), and therefore perhaps just as easily cast aside at the end of the day when a new identity feels more appropriate or when a new crisis looms larger on the horizon? Perhaps it is that ‘the climate’ represents one of the truly unified existential threats to the future of all workers. But then we are back at where we started, the problem whether and how climate workers of the world can be mobilized around dread. And, further, there is probably nothing about workers dread that would in and of itself cause capitalism to crumble – probably quite the opposite as such anxieties are easily and tragically mobilized by reactionary and fascist forces promising stability and revenge.

A prophetic narrative?

For over a century, Marx and Engels’s theories were appropriated and adapted to inform militant and revolutionary working class agitation (and its reformist rump) as well as strategic analysis. It was not simply that these theories showed the weak points of capitalism, they also promised the near inevitability of proletarian revolution. Capitalism’s industrial workers not only could overturn capitalism, they were, in this view, uniquely situated in world history to liberate humanity from class altogether and create the first truly classless society. It offered theorists and organizers a prophetic narrative that helped create movements capable of tremendous ambition and self-sacrifice. And my concern here is with what such a narrative makes possible in terms of theorizing and organizing, and if the suggested approach to see ourselves as climate workers of the world has or needs any similar prophetic narrative.

Today, the only thing that feels inevitable about the climate catastrophe is that it’s going to get worse. Most projections into the future see life getting harder as crops fail and ‘natural disasters’ plague vulnerable populations, leading to greater migrations and hardships for billions of people. We are asked to take action not for a bright and promising future, but simply to mitigate the worst impacts. Can such a grim narrative mobilize a sufficient number of people around the world, or even in any one jurisdiction, to take the considerable risk of fighting for a revolutionary change? Nothing less than a revolutionary change is needed today, though what form that revolution will take is uncertain.

This gloomy narrative certainly pales in comparison to those of previous ‘workers’ of the world.’ These triumphant prophesies foretold the proletariat’s destiny to seize upon its unique world-historical mission and overthrow capitalism and liberate that system’s technological and productive apparatuses for the common good. In the most mystical reaches of Marxism, including the famous Walter Benjamin, this historic task was nothing less than messianic: the redemption of the dreams of the dead, the arrival of God’s kingdom on earth. Russian cosmism even anticipated a horizon where the liberated sciences of communism would allow the dead to live again alongside the living, among the stars. While these may seem outlandish, they indicate the kind of modernist optimism that was so inspiring not only to workers themselves but intellectuals who saw in the proletarian struggle the only escape from the deadlock of capitalism. Anti-colonial thinkers and organizers took up these ‘scientific’ methods to demonstrate how decolonization was inevitable and thereby inspire a generation of freedom fighters.

For workers themselves, this narrative not only served to justify incredible risks and self-sacrifice, it offered a heroic and triumphant vision of collective action. Even if you were to fall in revolutionary struggle (even if you were to fall to the machinations of your own overzealous comrades), your life would have been part of the redemption of humanity, the world-historical overthrow of exploitation once and for all. When this narrative of sacrifice became folded into Stalinist or Maoist statecraft, it became one of the most oppressive and terrifying weapons in the hands of leaders, who could use it to justify profound injustices. Many people still have resentful memories of being force-fed this dogma.

A triumphant, heroic narrative dignifies itself and its protagonists… It’s less about concrete hope for this or that future. It’s more about embodied feeling in the present, a sense that you have value, that your life has meaning, that the struggle is worth it not because it will deliver a better world but because it fills you and transforms you. Can ‘we’ climate workers of the world ever generate such an empowering narrative? And can we succeed in its absence?

Yet I wonder, aloud, if a new workerist narrative focused on climate protagonism could ever generate such a narrative, and if it should? Can we do without it? The dominant narrative today is tragic, it promises a life of struggle among ruins or, at best, an ambiguous future of degrowth that offers to exchange the unequally distributed material gratifications and ease of capitalism with a more universal and sustainable simplicity. Has any movement in history mobilized around such narrow and grim horizons? It’s not just that the future on offer appears lean and hard, however. That problem is less important than another: A triumphant, heroic narrative dignifies itself and its protagonists. In a world where ‘we’ are systematically devalued, it can give ‘us’ a story that valourizes ‘us.’ This can potentially give ‘us’ incredible courage and conviction, and fill ‘us’ with a spirit of sacrifice and potential. It’s less about concrete hope for this or that future. It’s more about embodied feeling in the present, a sense that you have value, that your life has meaning, that the struggle is worth it not because it will deliver a better world but because it fills you and transforms you. Can ‘we’ climate workers of the world ever generate such an empowering narrative? And can we succeed in its absence?

The post Climate Workers of the World Unite? (BG) appeared first on Max Haiven.

Sacrifice (Finance Aesthetics)

An edited version of the following text will be published in 2024 as part of Goldsmiths Press’s Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, edited by Frederik Tygstrup, Torsten Andreasen, Emma Sofie Brogaard, Mikkel Krause Frantzen and Nick Huber.

SacrificeMax Haiven

2023-04-19

In a sense, the conspiracy theorists are right: we do live in a world of hideous human sacrifices, superintended by a financially enriched elite. But whereas the conspiracists hallucinate a coordinated cabal of evildoers, the more complex and the more disturbing truth is that the forms of human sacrifice that characterize financialization do not require (and would, in fact, be imperiled by) any such intentional orchestration of efforts. Rather, financialized capitalism must be reckoned as a system, one that reproduces a set of imperatives, enticements, rewards and punishments for competitive economic behaviour that, in only sum, creates an overall movement of capitalism towards a sacrificial world order. No individual needs to utter the prayers or wield the dagger for this system to enact human sacrifice. And whereas the conspiracist imagination fixates on the purity of the innocent victim, notably children, today’s sacrifices are not only individuals in all their complexity, but messy and entangled entities: the climate, the biosphere, the cultural fabric, the very possibility of the future.

The urge to misimagine systemic violence as the work of wicked individuals is not new; it is both symptomatic and constitutive of capitalism’s development. Marx and later Marxist analyses of anti-Semitism indicate how residual racist myths can furnish an explanation for socioeconomic pain and uncertainty among both elites and the exploited.[1] The recent Q-Anon “conspiracy fantasy,” which has gained terrifying worldwide popularity, rehashes many of these tropes with its seductive participatory narrative about a secret war being waged by the righteous against a cabal of blood-drinking child abusers.[2] Michael Taussig has likewise accounted for in his study of the reappearance of the devil in rural Latin America during periods of seismic economic change and social dislocation.[3] Silvia Federici’s account of the role of the witch trials in the development of capitalism’s phase of “primitive accumulation” likewise details how accusations that specific people (mostly but not exclusively women) were engaged in ritual and conspiratorial human sacrifice was key to the destruction of the commons and the uniquely capitalist renovation of patriarchy.[4] In all these cases, a charismatic narrative of human sacrifice, focusing on the evil intentions of individuals or groups, distracts political attention from the broader sacrificial social order. 

The rise of conspiracism is typically the result of a combination of, on the one hand, a genuine effort by suffering people to understand a world that seems to be collapsing all around them and, on the other hand, the efforts of predatory manipulators, grifters and entrepreneurs. The line between the two is rarely sharp. This line is even more blurred in an era of financialization, where each subject is exhorted to recast themselves as a speculator and manipulator. The QAnon phenomenon, for example, sees a fluid movement between true believer and online huckster, thanks in no small part to the opportunities provided to monetize attention by corporate social media platforms.[5] But to focus on the cynicism and opportunism is to lose sight of the reality that such theories in fact take root not in obedience to dogma but in a misaimed critical thinking, in a skepticism towards dominant narratives, in a desire to discover and interrogate the workings of power, and in a more or less genuine humanitarian wish, all gone terribly wrong.

 At stake is the poverty of a conspiratorial theory of power, which, in line with dominant neoliberal narratives, sees the world as defined by the intentional actions of powerful individual actors, rather than a more capacious critical theory that can analyze systemic and institutional power and, crucially, their contradictory nature.

Yet on a discursive level, a narrative of sacrifice has important systemic functions within such a system.[6] As Wendy Brown notes, under both the economic and cultural shifts of financialization, the notion of sacrifice has been crucial.[7] Individuals are expected to sacrifice time, energy, pleasure and health on the altar of homo oeconomicus in the hopes that idealized figure of competitive risk taking might offer his dark blessing in the form of a return on investment. On a broader political level, the forms of neoliberal policy and austerity, which might have once been cloaked in a rhetoric that suggested that a sacrifice today might bring better tomorrows, now admits that sacrifice is here to stay. In reaction, resurgent far right and fascist political formations today thrive in the environment of endless sacrifice. They gain traction by claiming only they can clearly see and manage the sacrifices that must be made for security: the restoration of the patriarchal family, murder on the border, expulsion, war.[8] It’s sacrifice or be sacrificed.

And yet behind and beyond these more ideological mobilizations of sacrifice is a deeper truth: the term financialization indicates what can be framed as a vast global order of human sacrifice. Here, thanks to the abstract movements of gamed markets, millions of people are condemned to death from completely preventable diseases or privation, or by the effects of anthropogenic climate chaos derived almost entirely from the past centuries of capitalist accumulation. Encoded in the interlaced digital legers of this financial empire is an authorless, decentalized sacrificial order with a metahuman bloodlust, hidden in plain sight. It’s a truth both obvious to everyone and also somehow unspeakable that the poor will die and suffer to protect the privileges of the rich and the competitive vitality of corporations.

Perhaps, however, while sacrifice offers an evocative and provocative metaphor for financialization’s forms of lethal indifference and unintended humanitarian and ecological catastrophes, it is a poor analytic tool. After all, can it be said to be human sacrifice if it is not intentional and not accompanied by religious ritual? Does the spectre of human sacrifice simply rehearse a longstanding vulgar critique of capitalism that, by calling up the spectre of an allegedly premodern barbarism, seek to cast down a hyper-modern political-economic system?

But maybe we have learned to think of human sacrifice the wrong way. Most of what we know about the practice of human sacrifice is irredeemably clouded by modern colonial prejudices that have sensationalized the violent practices of non-Western human sacrifice while ignoring or rationalizing Western, modern forms of human sacrifice. A vast diversity of civilizations practiced some form of human sacrifice at some time in their history, and for very different reasons.[9] While the practice perhaps seemed normal or at least justified in the eyes of those who practiced it, it has perennially been used by outside observers as evidence of barbarism. More often than not, it has been pointed to by outsiders and rivals as a justification for war or in some sense as a distraction from the accusers’ own sacrificial practices. As Tvetan Todorov noted, the sensational scenes painted by the conquistadors of the Aztec “society of sacrifice” helped justify that empire’s liquidation while at the same time mystifying the Spanish “society of massacre.”[10] I have written elsewhere about how the human sacrifices practiced by the Edo Kingdom (located in what is today Nigeria) was used by the British Empire as a justification to, in 1898, invade and destroy that Kingdom, part of a broader tendency towards a kind of capitalist imperialism that sacrificed millions of lives around the world on the altar of white supremacy Christianization and “free trade,” though of course it never understood itself as such.[11]

 It is often assumed that the heinous practice of human sacrifice originated in the dark crypt of prehistoric mysticism. But recent evidence seems to suggest that, more often than not, orders of human sacrifice took form as societies became more stratified and imperialistic.[12] Though it may have been disguised in the trappings of religious necessity to appease fickle gods and ensure the continued vitality of the nation, typically elites used human sacrifice as a dramatic means to intimidate the lower classes, vassals and enemies. It was a convenient method for eliminating potential rivals and usurpers and for disguising state terror as cosmological necessity.

If such arguments are to be believed, human sacrifice was always already about what we, today, might call “risk management” on at least two levels. On the one hand, the elites who practiced it used it as a means to eliminate risks to their continued dominance and enrichment; on the other, they presented it to the world as an act undertaken for the public good, a regrettable necessity to control the uncertainty of supernatural providence. Were the sacrifice not made, the Gods might be angered, or might starve, portending doom for a whole society. It helps that, often, those sacrificed are not even considered fully human at all.

How unfamiliar and exotic to us are these metaphysical justifications, really? Today, defenders of global financialized capitalism legitimate its profound sacrificial violence with recourse to the idea that, somehow, to interrupt or intervene in it would be to jeopardize the spirit of economic growth: progress that is said to be universally beneficial. Few today would earnestly parrot the maxims of turn-of-the-millennium capitalist optimism, (eg. “a rising tide lifts all boats”). Yet in the dominant neoliberal ideological framework the progress of the market (its “creative destruction” and “disruptive innovation”) is said to lead to greater overall economic growth, technological innovation and a higher standard of living. It is even rumoured to lead to a  “capitalist peace” and the “end of history,” where humanity’s inherent competitive and acquisitive urges are safely sublimated into market activity which, in aggregate, are universally beneficial.[13]

At stake for me in this comparison is the possibility that the cosmological dimensions of financialized capitalism might come into better view. Of course, financial markets are, in an extreme way, made up of a multitude of competing hyper-rational decisions.[14] Yet, while market philosophers like Hayek predicted that, left to their own devices, such markets would usher in a rational political-economic order, the reality is a largely irrational order where growing gaps in wealth are accompanied by profound ecological sacrifices as well as humanitarian catastrophes.[15] According to those thinkers, the market represented the apotheosis of reason, the emergence, for the first time in human history, of a kind of metahuman intelligence free of prejudice, superstition and bias.

At some level a global market-dominated society justifies the human sacrifices it demands in terms of a kind of regrettable but ultimately providential cosmological necessity: it is indeed terrible that those children died of malnutrition or preventable disease, but to prevent it would be to disrupt the transit of the holy market (by, say, raising taxes or by regulating free trade). Such profane actions would, ultimately, have more catastrophic consequences. Such consequences, we are told, might not only include the stagnation of economic growth but the appearance of the demonic forces of unfreedom.

If we look at the global financialized capitalist system from the right angle, squint and defamiliarize ourselves with the normalized justifications, it appears as an empire built on human sacrifice not unlike any other. But what is perhaps different is how the reigning cosmology of the market is how it shapes our actions and dispositions, whether we believe in the finer points of its theology or not. Financialization encourages each of us to adopt the dispositions of the imagined financier, the risk manager.  I have suggested that this contributes to the conditions within which certain far-right and postfasicst ideologies can find footing.[16] The daily experience of uncertainty, insecurity, individualism and competitiveness reinforces a cosmological view of a universe made up of similarly uncertain, competitive, speculative beings.[17]

Within such an imagined world, ever greater human sacrifice can be envisioned and justified. The losers of a competitive system are now recast not as momentarily unlucky but fundamentally flawed, poor imitations of the idealized figure of financialization. Worse still, the dependency of the losers of financialization on the winners is, in a world of increasingly scarce resources and relentless competition, a threat to the continued success (and survival) of the winners.  Financialization is in some sense a global order of human sacrifice in which we are all both participants and potential victims. Like the sacrificial empires of old, ours justifies its bloodletting in the name of cosmological necessity: the market demands it, and to fail to heed or feed the market would be to invite both personal and collective doom. In other sacrificial empires elites use mystical theology and gory spectacle to consolidate their rule, and claim that their sacrificial acts are in the public interest. Today, the sacrificial blade and altar are dematerialized and diffused. We are all, to greater or lesser extents, compelled to participate, even those who are destined to be sacrificed. Their sacrifice will typically take the form of invisibilized abandonment, rather than hypervisible ritual. Yet like other orders of sacrifice it stems from a largely unquestioned cosmology, a cosmology no one might actually fully believe in and yet which still structures our imaginations.

For Sylvia Wynter, the cosmology of homo oeconomicus is one whose origins stem from the Euroepan colonial project and transatlantic slave trade at the birth of the capitalist-imperialist system.[18] This cosmology, which I am here associating with sacrificial financialization, is both fundamentally built on racist notions of what it means to be human but also, in a global neoliberal age, suggests that homo oeconomicus is a model that all people can and should strive to emulate and embody. But its success in capturing the imagination and shaping the material world is bound up with the way it vanquishes or delegitimates many other “genres” of being human practiced by other civilizations, which it takes to simply be poor, unreflexive emulations of the truth of homo oeconomicus.If we are to have a chance of surviving cosmology of financialization we must, do nothing less than reimagine what it means to be human. Such a reimagining would be a material practice of rebellion and experimentation and would necessarily imply not the end of sacrifice, but a different mode of sacrifice, perhaps more in line with George Bataille’s theories that understand sacrifice as among the highest purposes for any society.[19]

Notes

[1] Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.”

[2] Wu Ming 1, La Q Di Qomplotto.

[3] Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.

[4] Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

[5] Wu Ming 1, La Q Di Qomplotto.

[6] Wang, Legal and Rhetorical Foundations of  Economic Globalization.

[7] Brown, “Sacrificial Citizenship.”

[8] Haiven, “From Financialization to Derivative Fascisms.”

[9] Bremmer, The Strange World of Human Sacrifice.

[10] Todorov, The Conquest of America.

[11] Haiven, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire.

[12] Watts et al., “Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies.”

[13] Schneider and Gleditsch, Assessing the Capitalist Peace; Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man.

[14] LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk.

[15] see Martin, Knowledge LTD: Towards a Social Logic of the Derivative.

[16] Haiven, “From Financialization to Derivative Fascisms.”

[17] Komprozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities.

[18] Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?”

[19] Bataille, The Accursed Share.

Works cited

Bataille, George. The Accursed Share: An Essay on the General Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Rob Hurley. New York: Zone, 1988.

Bremmer, Jan Nicolaas, ed. The Strange World of Human Sacrifice. Leuven: Peeters, 2007.

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Board games as social media: Towards an enchanted inquiry of digital capitalism

The following text will appear in a forthcoming issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) later in 2023.

Abstract

Can board games be part of challenging the dangerous tide of reactionary cultural politics presently washing over the United States and many other countries? We frame this threat to progressive social movements and democracy as entangled with a cultural politics of reenchantment. Thanks in part to the rise of ubiquitous digital media, capitalism is gamified as never before. Yet most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game. Here, a gamified reactionary cultural politics easily takes hold, and we turn to the example of the Q-Anon conspiracy fantasy as a “dangerous game” of creative collective fabulation. We explore how critical scholars and activists might develop forms of “enchanted inquiry” that seek to take seriously the power of games and enchantment. And we share our experience designing Clue-Anon, a board game for 3-4 players that aims to let players explore why conspiracy theories are so much fun… and so dangerous.

Keywords

Games and gamification; digital capitalism; disenchantment; conspiracy theories and conspiracism; board games 

Board games as social media within, against and beyond reactionary capitalism: Towards an enchanted inquiry

Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

2023-02-18

This essay argues that, in a moment when capitalism integrates games and gamification, cultural politics are increasingly marked by the appearance of participatory forms of play that seek to re-enchant a disenchanted world. Games have played a significant role in the social, political, and technical reproduction of late capitalism, especially its digital social media platforms. This occurs at the same time that life under neoliberal capitalism is felt by many as if trapped in an unwinnable game in a disenchanted world. This feeling is important to the cultural politics of our current moment. We take up the Q-Anon conspiracy fantasy as an important example of the way people play “dangerous games” together in (reactionary) response to this state of affairs. We also explore some of the ways the urge towards re-enchantment and participatory play elsewhere along the political spectrum. We conclude by previewing an experimental board game we developed, titled CLUE-ANON, which is intended to provide an alternative critical scholarly intervention: a form of play that moves away from the urge to debunk and disenchant by engaging instead with participatory reenchantment head-on.

Games, the first social media?

The common use of the term social media refers to the engagement with recent digital platforms. But this approach unfortunately tends to obscure many of the other social activities that the digital revolution has enabled and their consequences for politics and activism (Fuchs 2021). This paper focuses on board games, a social media avant la lettre, and one that has quietly become consequential to an emerging cycle of movement struggles. 

The kinds of objects and activities we, today, understand as board games have an ancient lineage (Masukawa 2016). The progenitors of board games may predate written language, and variations are abundant around the world. In another sense, board games as we know them are quite recent, with origins dating back to the commercial printing press (Flanagan 2009). Recent years have seen a massive expansion of the industry and the popularity of board games among a variety of consumers (Lutter and Weidner 2021). This process was well underway even before the Covid-19 pandemic and was spurred by the development of popular new games (notably the blockbuster success of Settlers of Catan) and the ways new digital retail platforms like Amazon circumvented the gatekeeping function of brick-and-mortar stores. User-driven platforms like the dominant  Board Game Geek also helped players discover new games and develop a fan-base that encouraged independent designers and publishing companies to develop more specialized products (Wachs and Vedres 2021). The development in the 2010s of online platforms for playing board games remotely amplified this trend. Crowdfunding platforms have allowed independent game-makers and small game companies to produce high-quality games in ways that were not possible before, when the costs of developing, testing, designing, manufacturing and distributing board games placed the industry in the hands of a few dominant companies.

Of the many gaming subcultures to emerge over this period, several oriented themselves towards social movements for collective liberation and struggles for radical progressive social change. Already in the earliest days of commercial board games, the medium was recognized as a platform for efforts to educate players about politics, history, morality and appropriate behavior. It was also widely used as a platform for satirical social commentary (Booth 2015). In 1908, first-wave feminist activists in England published Suffragetto, which simulated the struggle between the London police and  militants for women’s right to vote. The most famous example of a board game as a vehicle for social commentary was The Landlords’ Game, a critique of the rapacious greed of property speculators, which was later bastardized into a glorification of economic parasitism and marketed as Monopoly (Donovan 2017, 71–88). In 1978 Marxist philosopher Bertel Olman (2002) notoriously published Class Struggle, a Monopoly-like board game in which players take on the role of bourgeoisie and proletariat who seek to make alliances with other class factions (small business, farmers, students). The game ends either in revolution or nuclear annihilation. 

By the 1980s, many social movement-aligned game makers were eschewing the conventional competitive idiom and designing cooperative games that aimed to instill feminist and other social justice values (Ross n.d.). In the 2010s and early 20s social justice and activist oriented companies like TESA and games like Bloc-by-Bloc (which simulates anarchist urban insurgency) or Spirit Island (which reverses the colonial narrative of Settlers of Catan and sees players act cooperatively as Indigenous people working with powerful spirits to clear an island of settlers) were common in North Atlantic activist circles (Fair 2022). At the same time LARPing (Live Action Role-Playing) grew increasingly popular as a means to both have fun and think anew about social justice topics (Torben 2020). We are currently amidst a renaissance of independent game design, partly enabled by digital platforms for playing and sharing games. Independent designers self-publish print-at-home games that profoundly challenge the competitive, individualist, accumulative and heroic idiom that we associate with conventional board games. Their games focus instead on (anti-)colonialism and Global South perspectives on disability, on queerness, and that advance with feminist principles (Fair 2022; Mukherjee and Hammar 2018; Ross n.d.).  

Board games appeal to advocates and allies of movements for radical social change for a number of reasons. Successful games are easy to learn, quick to play and, importantly, fun. They promise to convey an underlying message in an attractive and charismatic form. The turn towards board games was motivated in part by the concern of movement organizers for the education of young people, who typically enjoy and learn through games. Further, as game theorist Ian Bogost (2010) suggests, games teach not only through their particular manifest narratives and self-evident design features, but through their “procedural rhetoric”: the way the playing of the game itself, and the strategic thinking it demands of players, implicitly teaches players something relevant about their social world. Particular games are, in some sense, always taking place within bigger social, political and economic “games,” and often it is the broader, unacknowledged “game” that is the real focus of the players attention (Boluk and LeMieux 2017).

Importantly, on a deeper level, games offer their players access to a primordial human passion for seemingly purposeless play, something that pivotal game theorist Johannes Huizinga (1971) sees at the core of society. The ability to draw what he calls a “magic circle” around a group of consenting players and define a mutually pleasurable parallel world may be older than language and is not only evidenced in humans but many other species as well. Education theorists have noted that games offer one of the most effective venues for learning, and indeed structured play is arguably the most important method by which humans learn from infancy onward (Crocco 2011). It should then come as no surprise those involved in  struggles for radical social change should gravitate to what might well be considered the first among social media. 

Indeed, the first generation of social media as well as its later forms drew implicitly and explicitly from games and gaming (Hristova and Lieberoth 2021). Notoriously, Facebook was first developed in a college dorm room as a game through which male students could rank the attractiveness of their female counterparts. Twitter’s development drew on insights from game design and the company hired game designers to help make their platform more attractive. Instagram continues to advertise itself as a “fun” game-like environment for online play, even though it has become seriously personally and professionally consequential to hundreds of millions of users and the lucrative platform for the careers of “influencers.” And TikTok, most explicitly, fosters a game-like experience of back and forth performative play, a kind of participatory “infinite game,” to draw on James Carse’s (1986) terminology: a game where the primary objective is to keep playing. 

Dangerous Games in the reactionary cultural politics of late capitalism

It is not surprising  that both establishment-oriented and reactionary forces have gravitated towards the power of games. Over the last four decades, capitalism has become an increasingly gamified force (deWinter, Kocurek, and Nichols 2014; Jagoda 2013; Tulloch and Randell-Moon 2018). 

On the one hand, we have seen the explosion of gaming industries, notably the video game industry, which today rivals other major entertainment media like film, television, sports and gambling (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009). The board game industry is nowhere nearly so large or concentrated, in part because board games require vastly fewer resources to create and bring to market, encouraging more diversification. But it nonetheless cannot be easily separated from the profit-driven pressures that shape the broader games industry of which it is a part.

On the other hand, as digital gaming advances and handheld digital devices become ever more ubiquitous, all manner of corporations and social institutions have gravitated towards using the protocols, methods and idioms of gaming to stimulate particular behaviors and dispositions in consumers, usually in the name of making money (Hon 2022). This builds on a long history of companies advertising their products in games or sponsoring the creation and marketing of games as a means to attract consumers (Terlutter and Capella 2013). But something today is different. The handheld devices that are increasingly ubiquitous, as well as the apps created for them were inspired by a previous generation of gambling machines (Schüll 2014). Based on careful study of neurosciences and usage patterns, these machines aim, among other things, to encourage dependency and sustained focus among users (Zuboff 2019). 

But we must also broaden the scope when we think about games, gamification and digital capitalism. As we have argued elsewhere (Haiven, Kingmsith, and Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022), capitalism feels, to many if not most working- and middle-class people, as if it were an unwinnable, compulsory game. The post-war compromise of Fordism suggested that those (in the so-called First World) who obeyed legal and social conventions and “played by the rules” could be relatively certain of some meaningful if modest share of growing prosperity, at least for white male workers. In the neoliberal period, however, social and economic risks were shifted onto consumers and workers, sold as the freedom to compete in an all-powerful market presented as a “level playing field” (Littler 2017). Far from rewarding hard work, cunning and determination, most workers’ real wages declined during this period, as economic life increasingly felt like a rigged game. 

Unfortunately, given the state of media and educational institutions, a large number of people affected by these conditions have been deprived of, or are unconvinced by, critical analyses of the political and economic source of these frustrations. Because of this, many were and are seduced by reactionary narratives that insisted the unfairness of the situation was due to specific groups cheating or rigging the game (Hochschild 2016). The far right has made and continues to make considerable gains in the public imaginary by fostering narratives that frame “special interest groups” as sabotaging the field of fair play. In the United States, accusations of welfare fraud, the misappropriation of state assistance, the cynical manipulation of “affirmative action” policies, the cheating of the criminal justice system and the abuse of guilt-inducing social justice rhetoric have renovated anti-Black racism with murderous effect (HoSang and Lowndes 2019). Fears that millions of unregistered migrants are cheating what many erroneously imagine to be a “fair” immigration system have been manipulated with devastating efficacy. Avowed white supremacists fearing a “great replacement” but also many people of non-white migrant backgrounds, have come to  resent those assumed to  have “cheated” in the game they themselves won by hard work and sacrifice (Brass 2021). Such fears also fuel a resurgence of  anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that present Jews as sadistic secret game-masters, pulling the levers of an infernal machine intended to both seduce and cheat honest gentiles (Wu Ming 1 2021).

Within this context, the right-wing and reactionary turn to games and gaming is hardly surprising. Gaming subcultures had long been hostile to women, but this exploded onto the public stage in 2014 with the infamous #GamerGate phenomenon, which saw legions of gaming fans, almost all of whom identified as men, orchestrate a decentralized but highly effective campaign of life-threatening harassment of women and feminist game designers and critics (Massanari 2017). Recognizing the demographic significance of gamers as a constituent base and admiring their vitriol, far-right strategist Steven Bannon pivoted towards courting these communities through the now-infamous Breitbart news enterprise and later mobilized them in the successful presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (Warzel 2019). 

Both these far-right initiatives relied upon game-themed tropes that insisted that good, hard-working, honest people had been cheated out of their right to participate in the economic game of neoliberal capitalism. The implicit feeling was not that they had been derived of their inherent entitlements, but of their right to compete, fairly, for success. They also invited far-right activists to mobilize in game-like formations, including crowd-sourced social media mobbings reminiscent of #GamerGate, where targets were identified from the bully pulpit to be harassed. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign can fruitfully be seen as a kind of spectacular (and spectacularly dangerous) game. The crass and bombastic candidate constantly “broke the rules” of acceptable politics to court both, on the one hand, far-right stalwarts who agreed with his racist ideology and, on the other, unaffiliated but disaffected voters who generally felt cheated. For both admirers and critics, consuming and reacting to Trump’s atrocious virtuosity had a game-like quality, a vivified, high-stakes version of the “reality TV” game-show The Apprentice that had returned the iconic player to the limelight. 

Meanwhile, the same “whitelash” culture of resentment was giving rise to previously unseen monsters. As early as 2017, in the netherregions of the dark-web, a mysterious character who named himself “Q” began to post cryptic messages about current events, building a small subcultural following that quickly went viral as Q claimed to be an insider in the Trump administration, part of a top-secret taskforce helping the then-President uncover and wage war on a secret conspiracy (Rothschild 2022). In this conspiracy, senior members of the Democratic Party, along with seemingly random A-list celebrities, corporate power-holders and other people and institutions were part of a global cabal dedicated to kidnapping, abusing, murdering and harvesting the vital fluids of children. 

During the pandemic the Q-anon conspiracy fantasy grew quickly in popularity, perhaps thanks to the support of Trump insiders and sympathizers who saw it as a vehicle to rally support to the embattled President. As it moved from the subcultural margins to the mainstream, numerous game designers noted the unsettling game-like qualities of the phenomenon. Q’s dark-web messages to his followers were profoundly cryptic and suggestive, encouraging online communities to form dedicated to a kind of participatory hermeneutics. A group of derivative social media and video platform celebrities emerged as trusted interpreters. Some crusading fans would take it upon themselves to gather at sites they imagined were soon to be crucial locations in the great war on the pedophile conspiracy, as prophesied by Q. Game designer Reed Berkowitz (2020), who specializes in the design of augmented reality games, presented the term “guided apophenia” to describe how the protagonists behind Q-Anon were taking advantage of the human capacity to see or imagine patterns, even where none exist. For Berkowitz and others, Q-Anon was nothing so much as a massive, largely decentralized participatory online game, with very dangerous consequences (Davies 2022). 

Tensions came to a head on January 6, 2020, when supporters of the unseated President stormed the US Capitol building, leading to the deaths of six people and one of the most infamous cases of civil insurgency in living memory. News reports during and after these grave events made much of the strange costumes and playful demeanor of many of the “insurgents,” as well as the prevalence of self-identified Q followers who believed the final confrontation with the evil cabal was finally at hand. In the media and congressional inquiries that followed, much of the discussion focused on to what extent the mob had been orchestrated and encouraged by the Trump administration campaign, and the extent of the involvement of organized white supremacists and other extreme right groups. 

What has, however, fallen by the wayside, is a sociological investigation of the playful motivations and subjectivities of not only the particular participants, but the many supporters of the events. To be curious about the ways that the events of January 6 represented, for many, a game gone horribly wrong is not to diminish it as a failed far-right putsch, but to recognize the way that it was also symptomatic of the cultural politics of gamified neoliberal capitalism. 

An age of reenchanted cultural politics

Our argument is that such gamified cultural politics has been not only indispensable to the rise and spread of reactionary conspiracism, but also part of a wider set of attempts to re-enchant the world. Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) famously built on Max Weber’s (2001) theory to argue that, while technocratic, scientific and actuarial logics of protestant-led European capitalism had stripped the world of its enchantments, the instrumentalization of life had  displaced the need for enchantment to a new level. While a number of theorists have challenged this view (McCarraher 2019; Josephson-Storm 2017), we still find much merit in such a description, especially as it helps us reflect on the cultural politics of the neoliberal age where each individual is intended to adopt the dispositions of the financier, craftily transmuting all aspects of life (relationships, housing, pastimes, talents) into assets to be leveraged under the sign of the indifferent market (Haiven 2014). The neoliberal dream of pursuing peace, prosperity and freedom through universal competition and a market-driven society turned out to be just as enchanted a worldview as any other. Beyond the pretensions of the self-deluding middle classes (who believe that they, too, can be rich, if only they play their cards right) the imposition of an austere market logic affects nearly every person, normalized through “high-functioning” anxieties that internalize the dominant capitalist narrative of productivity above all else (Kingsmith 2022). Even for the poor and economically marginalized, the figure of the hustling petty criminal, or the rags-to-riches reality TV starlet, offer a model for how to transmute life into a series of market plays and puts for “players” who can “game the system.” The fact that, today, a huge proportion of adolescents aspire to be influencers via monetized and gamified social media platforms indicates how deeply a game-like market logic has saturated social life. 

It is amidst widespread disenchantment that we contextualize the game-like turn described above and, in particular, the appeal of what at first glance seem like absurd conspiracy fantasies. Part of this has something to do with the narrative tropes and simplified feelings of ideological closure propounded in popular cultural texts (notably Hollywood films), with their stark, manichean depictions of good and evil. The plot line that sees a small band of misfits coming together against insurmountable odds and the skepticism of their fearful compatriots to bring down a cruel regime is now extremely common in film, television and video games, including in children’s content. In a disenchanting world where one’s sense of purpose is reduced to participating in what feels like a rigged economic game, it should not be particularly surprising that individuals take up these tropes to craft immersive and enchanting parallel worlds. When economic reality becomes a near-impossible yet compulsory game, many people escape into or create games that feel empowering, prosocial and at least theoretically winnable. 

Here, the Q-Anon participatory fantasy is only the most stark example, relatively easy to recognize because it sits so squarely on the absurd far-right of the political spectrum. Yet those who preen themselves as centrists are no less culpable for creating participatory fantasies. While Trump’s policies were atrocious, and while the  fascistic political culture he presided over are extremely dangerous, the “centrist” loathing of him that reduced the problems of late capitalism to his particular evil exemplified a kind of enchanted and enchanting narrative just the same (Bratich 2020). Anti-Trump online politics even included forms of politicized witchcraft (Fine 2021), but this is only the most extreme example of the turn towards game-like re-enchantment.

Meanwhile, we should not ignore the many ways that those on the radical left, those who advocate for radical social change, are also attracted by a cultural politics of re-enchantment. For example, in recent years many young people on the Left have turned towards astrology and divination, including horoscopes, tarot cards and more (Komprozos-Athanasiou 2021; Sparkly Kat 2021). This is part of a wider trend towards a cultural politics that centers healing and “the work” of inward-facing subjectivity transformation, based on the recognition that systems of oppression work, in part, on the level of the subject. It is also based on a growing skepticism of the white-supremacist mobilization of tropes of objectivity and rationality. Critics may be tempted to bemoan the “weird” turn in the Left as a departure from not only reason but also the working class, seeing it as purely a self-indulgent middle-class narcissism. However, we prefer to read it sociologically as emerging from, and as a (dubiously effective) response to, the same political economic circumstances that give rise to the “cosmic right” (Milburn 2020; O’Donovan 2021). 

Forms of reenchantment present themselves as resistance, even though in many cases they help perpetuate, reinforce or defend dominant structures and systems of power. We have opted for a language of enchantment, rather than simply fantasy, to signal the way that this tendency is not simply a completely fictitious parallel world but a set of dispositions that incorporate and offer interpretive frames for real-world events to animate a wide diversity of groups and orientations across the political spectrum in  ways that rely not simply on the individual fabrication of a “common sense” imaginary, but operate through participatory social frameworks (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014). 

There are many critics who, in the face of reenchanting politics, call for a return to a civics of disenchantment. Across the political spectrum we can hear clarions to return to Enlightenment principles that encourage the disinterested adjudication of evidence over fantasy. Stephen Pinker’s (2018) Enlightenment Now is only the starkest of these arguments. More generally, the rise of conspiracy theories and post-truth politics has seen a wide variety of commentators raise the tattered banner of reason against the hydra of reenchantment. Yet as Marcus Gilroy-Ware (2020) argues, such efforts come after years of conspicuous mistruth and fabrication by governments (around, for example, the War on Terror) and the everyday cynical manipulation of truth and perception by the marketing and public relations industry. 

In this context, calls to “return to reason” are not only ineffective, they are themselves another example of a game of neoliberal reenchantment: performative speech acts that serve to align the author and his (for it is almost always a man) readers as self-ennobling reasonable subjects, beset on “all sides” by unreasonable, monstrous zealots. In other words, from one angle the advocates of disenchantment invite their audience into a kind of heroic narrative game every bit as enchanting as the game-like enchantments they decry. 

Clue-Anon and the promise of enchanted inquiry

What, then, are critical scholars, working in solidarity with radical movements, to do in such a material context? If even calls to “return to reason” are themselves a kind of re-enchanting game, where do those of us stand who are reproduced by and who are tasked with reproducing the university, that bastion of disenchantment? We have no clear answers, but we have experiments, and these experiments try to inhabit and leverage, rather than condemn and dismiss, the urge towards reenchantment.

In 2020 our research team began to experiment with creating a board game intended to harness the power of participatory reenchantment. It was motivated in part by testimony from our students that revealed many of them feared visiting their families at holidays to find their loved-ones in the grips of powerful and seemingly unshakable conspiracy fantasies. Several of these students reported that board games offered a collective pastime that avoided inflammatory conversations. Based on these reports, and on our ongoing research, we began to develop a game (designed by Max Haiven and refined collectively with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and A.T. Kingsmith) that, after several iterations finally arrived at the name CLUE-ANON.

This four-player competitive game is intended to take 90 minutes and is played over three rounds. In each round, the players seek to deduce the identity of three hidden “real conspirators” from a set of nine possible suspects. To do so, they pay in-game resources (money and followers) to look at the remaining six suspects. However, to gain sufficient money and followers, and to fool others, players must prematurely declare their conspiracy theory, well before the evidence warrants it. At first glance, it seems that the objective of the game is to correctly guess the “real” conspirators. However, in a twist, each player is assigned a secret character with a unique motivation. These characters have been drawn from the mediasphere that surround contemporary gamified, digitally-driven conspiracism. While the Independent Journalist gains extra points if their opponents also learn the real conspiracy, the Troll Army gains extra points if they can lead their opponents to guess incorrectly. The Social Media Corporation wins if they accumulate a lot of money, while the YouTube Grifter seeks to accumulate money and followers, the truth be damned. 

What results is a fast-paced, somewhat chaotic game of deduction, bluffing and  role-playing. In the process of play, the players learn that, in the conspiracy game, the truth is rarely anyone’s first objective. Role-playing characters with different but obscured motivations encourages a creative estrangement from one’s own position. The game is designed to be fun and easy to learn. The conspiracy theories, characters and scenarios in the game are comical, but based on real-world examples (who created the SARS-COV2 virus? Who faked the moon landing?), opening the doorway after the game for stimulating conversation. The experience generated by the game is non-didactic, in the sense that it does not explicitly attempt to teach a message but, rather, to create a space for critical conversation. Yet through the playing of the game, players come to understand that conspiracy theorizing is a fun, prosocial activity, and that one can easily become enchanted with the creative inventiveness of shared, competitive storytelling.

The game has now been played by hundreds of people, including groups at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Singapore Civil Service College, University College London’s Institute of Advanced Studies, the ephemera journal’s “Games, Inc.” conference and the Copenhagen IT University’s Centre for Digital Play. Many players and designers find the game overly complex: it’s hard to strategize when there are so many motivations, elements and narratives in play; that’s quite the point, we reply.

Our hope is that the game can provide an important tool for educators and activists to catalyze conversations not only about the dangers and seductions of conspiracism, but its lures and emancipatory possibilities too. We see it as the first step towards a methodological orientation we have speculatively named enchanted inquiry, for which we would like to set out some hallmarks.

First, enchanted inquiry does not primarily seek to debunk, disenchant or dispel misinformation. Rather, it begins from the premise that globalizing neoliberal capitalism gives rise to the urge to reenchant the world. Without letting go of a sanguine assessment of the profound dangers such tactics of reenchantment might awaken or exacerbate, enchanted inquiry begins with the question: how might this propensity be redirected or channeled towards more critical, illuminating and generative ends? It aims, in other words, to demonstrate that we are always in the process of reenchanting the disenchanted world and to make this process more democratic, egalitarian, responsible, care-full and non-coercive.  

Second, in this regard, enchanted inquiry draws on and helps develop the scholarly dispositions encouraged by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish in their 2014 book The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity. There, they argue it is not sufficient for researchers simply to observe and report on social movements in the name of valourizing them in academic contexts (a strategy they call invocation), nor to simply collapse themselves into social movements in the name of solidarity (a strategy they call avocation). Rather, scholars can adopt a strategy of convocation, “calling together” diverse social movement actors to deepen their conceptual, theoretical and political understandings and practices–the radical imagination–through facilitated discussion, debate and deliberation. Here, the scholar-activists recognize themselves not only as the outside expert or the embedded participant but (also) a third thing: a facilitator of the radical imagination, that tectonic force at the core of all societies and all subjects that arises to challenge the given reality in the name of manifold possibilities for changing society (Castoriadis 1997). Enchanted inquiry is one method (or perhaps an orientation that might inform many methods) for embracing this strategy of convocation with a particular focus on games, mystery, magic, myth and speculative imagination. 

Finally, enchanted inquiry is fun, in the nuanced, plural and collaborative sense. Enchanted inquiry draws on theories of play and games in order to create seductive circumstances where participants can learn about the world together and change their minds in non-trivial ways. Fun here does not mean simple, easy or uncritical. The ambivalence of the word speaks to the challenge of making activities that are both challenging and rewarding, prosocial and deeply reflexive, enjoyable and disruptive. Enchanted inquiry aims to mobilize fun as a means to catalyze the radical imagination. 

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The post Board games as social media: Towards an enchanted inquiry of digital capitalism appeared first on Max Haiven.

Board games as social media within, against and beyond reactionary capitalism

The following text will appear in a forthcoming issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) later in 2023.

Abstract

Can board games be part of challenging the dangerous tide of reactionary cultural politics presently washing over the United States and many other countries? We frame this threat to progressive social movements and democracy as entangled with a cultural politics of reenchantment. Thanks in part to the rise of ubiquitous digital media, capitalism is gamified as never before. Yet most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game. Here, a gamified reactionary cultural politics easily takes hold, and we turn to the example of the Q-Anon conspiracy fantasy as a “dangerous game” of creative collective fabulation. We explore how critical scholars and activists might develop forms of “enchanted inquiry” that seek to take seriously the power of games and enchantment. And we share our experience designing Clue-Anon, a board game for 3-4 players that aims to let players explore why conspiracy theories are so much fun… and so dangerous.

Keywords

Games and gamification; digital capitalism; disenchantment; conspiracy theories and conspiracism; board games 

Board games as social media within, against and beyond reactionary capitalism: Towards an enchanted inquiry

Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

2023-02-18

This essay argues that, in a moment when capitalism integrates games and gamification, cultural politics are increasingly marked by the appearance of participatory forms of play that seek to re-enchant a disenchanted world. Games have played a significant role in the social, political, and technical reproduction of late capitalism, especially its digital social media platforms. This occurs at the same time that life under neoliberal capitalism is felt by many as if trapped in an unwinnable game in a disenchanted world. This feeling is important to the cultural politics of our current moment. We take up the Q-Anon conspiracy fantasy as an important example of the way people play “dangerous games” together in (reactionary) response to this state of affairs. We also explore some of the ways the urge towards re-enchantment and participatory play elsewhere along the political spectrum. We conclude by previewing an experimental board game we developed, titled CLUE-ANON, which is intended to provide an alternative critical scholarly intervention: a form of play that moves away from the urge to debunk and disenchant by engaging instead with participatory reenchantment head-on.

Games, the first social media?

The common use of the term social media refers to the engagement with recent digital platforms. But this approach unfortunately tends to obscure many of the other social activities that the digital revolution has enabled and their consequences for politics and activism (Fuchs 2021). This paper focuses on board games, a social media avant la lettre, and one that has quietly become consequential to an emerging cycle of movement struggles. 

The kinds of objects and activities we, today, understand as board games have an ancient lineage (Masukawa 2016). The progenitors of board games may predate written language, and variations are abundant around the world. In another sense, board games as we know them are quite recent, with origins dating back to the commercial printing press (Flanagan 2009). Recent years have seen a massive expansion of the industry and the popularity of board games among a variety of consumers (Lutter and Weidner 2021). This process was well underway even before the Covid-19 pandemic and was spurred by the development of popular new games (notably the blockbuster success of Settlers of Catan) and the ways new digital retail platforms like Amazon circumvented the gatekeeping function of brick-and-mortar stores. User-driven platforms like the dominant  Board Game Geek also helped players discover new games and develop a fan-base that encouraged independent designers and publishing companies to develop more specialized products (Wachs and Vedres 2021). The development in the 2010s of online platforms for playing board games remotely amplified this trend. Crowdfunding platforms have allowed independent game-makers and small game companies to produce high-quality games in ways that were not possible before, when the costs of developing, testing, designing, manufacturing and distributing board games placed the industry in the hands of a few dominant companies.

Of the many gaming subcultures to emerge over this period, several oriented themselves towards social movements for collective liberation and struggles for radical progressive social change. Already in the earliest days of commercial board games, the medium was recognized as a platform for efforts to educate players about politics, history, morality and appropriate behavior. It was also widely used as a platform for satirical social commentary (Booth 2015). In 1908, first-wave feminist activists in England published Suffragetto, which simulated the struggle between the London police and  militants for women’s right to vote. The most famous example of a board game as a vehicle for social commentary was The Landlords’ Game, a critique of the rapacious greed of property speculators, which was later bastardized into a glorification of economic parasitism and marketed as Monopoly (Donovan 2017, 71–88). In 1978 Marxist philosopher Bertel Olman (2002) notoriously published Class Struggle, a Monopoly-like board game in which players take on the role of bourgeoisie and proletariat who seek to make alliances with other class factions (small business, farmers, students). The game ends either in revolution or nuclear annihilation. 

By the 1980s, many social movement-aligned game makers were eschewing the conventional competitive idiom and designing cooperative games that aimed to instill feminist and other social justice values (Ross n.d.). In the 2010s and early 20s social justice and activist oriented companies like TESA and games like Bloc-by-Bloc (which simulates anarchist urban insurgency) or Spirit Island (which reverses the colonial narrative of Settlers of Catan and sees players act cooperatively as Indigenous people working with powerful spirits to clear an island of settlers) were common in North Atlantic activist circles (Fair 2022). At the same time LARPing (Live Action Role-Playing) grew increasingly popular as a means to both have fun and think anew about social justice topics (Torben 2020). We are currently amidst a renaissance of independent game design, partly enabled by digital platforms for playing and sharing games. Independent designers self-publish print-at-home games that profoundly challenge the competitive, individualist, accumulative and heroic idiom that we associate with conventional board games. Their games focus instead on (anti-)colonialism and Global South perspectives on disability, on queerness, and that advance with feminist principles (Fair 2022; Mukherjee and Hammar 2018; Ross n.d.).  

Board games appeal to advocates and allies of movements for radical social change for a number of reasons. Successful games are easy to learn, quick to play and, importantly, fun. They promise to convey an underlying message in an attractive and charismatic form. The turn towards board games was motivated in part by the concern of movement organizers for the education of young people, who typically enjoy and learn through games. Further, as game theorist Ian Bogost (2010) suggests, games teach not only through their particular manifest narratives and self-evident design features, but through their “procedural rhetoric”: the way the playing of the game itself, and the strategic thinking it demands of players, implicitly teaches players something relevant about their social world. Particular games are, in some sense, always taking place within bigger social, political and economic “games,” and often it is the broader, unacknowledged “game” that is the real focus of the players attention (Boluk and LeMieux 2017).

Importantly, on a deeper level, games offer their players access to a primordial human passion for seemingly purposeless play, something that pivotal game theorist Johannes Huizinga (1971) sees at the core of society. The ability to draw what he calls a “magic circle” around a group of consenting players and define a mutually pleasurable parallel world may be older than language and is not only evidenced in humans but many other species as well. Education theorists have noted that games offer one of the most effective venues for learning, and indeed structured play is arguably the most important method by which humans learn from infancy onward (Crocco 2011). It should then come as no surprise those involved in  struggles for radical social change should gravitate to what might well be considered the first among social media. 

Indeed, the first generation of social media as well as its later forms drew implicitly and explicitly from games and gaming (Hristova and Lieberoth 2021). Notoriously, Facebook was first developed in a college dorm room as a game through which male students could rank the attractiveness of their female counterparts. Twitter’s development drew on insights from game design and the company hired game designers to help make their platform more attractive. Instagram continues to advertise itself as a “fun” game-like environment for online play, even though it has become seriously personally and professionally consequential to hundreds of millions of users and the lucrative platform for the careers of “influencers.” And TikTok, most explicitly, fosters a game-like experience of back and forth performative play, a kind of participatory “infinite game,” to draw on James Carse’s (1986) terminology: a game where the primary objective is to keep playing. 

Dangerous Games in the reactionary cultural politics of late capitalism

It is not surprising  that both establishment-oriented and reactionary forces have gravitated towards the power of games. Over the last four decades, capitalism has become an increasingly gamified force (deWinter, Kocurek, and Nichols 2014; Jagoda 2013; Tulloch and Randell-Moon 2018). 

On the one hand, we have seen the explosion of gaming industries, notably the video game industry, which today rivals other major entertainment media like film, television, sports and gambling (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009). The board game industry is nowhere nearly so large or concentrated, in part because board games require vastly fewer resources to create and bring to market, encouraging more diversification. But it nonetheless cannot be easily separated from the profit-driven pressures that shape the broader games industry of which it is a part.

On the other hand, as digital gaming advances and handheld digital devices become ever more ubiquitous, all manner of corporations and social institutions have gravitated towards using the protocols, methods and idioms of gaming to stimulate particular behaviors and dispositions in consumers, usually in the name of making money (Hon 2022). This builds on a long history of companies advertising their products in games or sponsoring the creation and marketing of games as a means to attract consumers (Terlutter and Capella 2013). But something today is different. The handheld devices that are increasingly ubiquitous, as well as the apps created for them were inspired by a previous generation of gambling machines (Schüll 2014). Based on careful study of neurosciences and usage patterns, these machines aim, among other things, to encourage dependency and sustained focus among users (Zuboff 2019). 

But we must also broaden the scope when we think about games, gamification and digital capitalism. As we have argued elsewhere (Haiven, Kingmsith, and Komporozos-Athanasiou 2022), capitalism feels, to many if not most working- and middle-class people, as if it were an unwinnable, compulsory game. The post-war compromise of Fordism suggested that those (in the so-called First World) who obeyed legal and social conventions and “played by the rules” could be relatively certain of some meaningful if modest share of growing prosperity, at least for white male workers. In the neoliberal period, however, social and economic risks were shifted onto consumers and workers, sold as the freedom to compete in an all-powerful market presented as a “level playing field” (Littler 2017). Far from rewarding hard work, cunning and determination, most workers’ real wages declined during this period, as economic life increasingly felt like a rigged game. 

Unfortunately, given the state of media and educational institutions, a large number of people affected by these conditions have been deprived of, or are unconvinced by, critical analyses of the political and economic source of these frustrations. Because of this, many were and are seduced by reactionary narratives that insisted the unfairness of the situation was due to specific groups cheating or rigging the game (Hochschild 2016). The far right has made and continues to make considerable gains in the public imaginary by fostering narratives that frame “special interest groups” as sabotaging the field of fair play. In the United States, accusations of welfare fraud, the misappropriation of state assistance, the cynical manipulation of “affirmative action” policies, the cheating of the criminal justice system and the abuse of guilt-inducing social justice rhetoric have renovated anti-Black racism with murderous effect (HoSang and Lowndes 2019). Fears that millions of unregistered migrants are cheating what many erroneously imagine to be a “fair” immigration system have been manipulated with devastating efficacy. Avowed white supremacists fearing a “great replacement” but also many people of non-white migrant backgrounds, have come to  resent those assumed to  have “cheated” in the game they themselves won by hard work and sacrifice (Brass 2021). Such fears also fuel a resurgence of  anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that present Jews as sadistic secret game-masters, pulling the levers of an infernal machine intended to both seduce and cheat honest gentiles (Wu Ming 1 2021).

Within this context, the right-wing and reactionary turn to games and gaming is hardly surprising. Gaming subcultures had long been hostile to women, but this exploded onto the public stage in 2014 with the infamous #GamerGate phenomenon, which saw legions of gaming fans, almost all of whom identified as men, orchestrate a decentralized but highly effective campaign of life-threatening harassment of women and feminist game designers and critics (Massanari 2017). Recognizing the demographic significance of gamers as a constituent base and admiring their vitriol, far-right strategist Steven Bannon pivoted towards courting these communities through the now-infamous Breitbart news enterprise and later mobilized them in the successful presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump (Warzel 2019). 

Both these far-right initiatives relied upon game-themed tropes that insisted that good, hard-working, honest people had been cheated out of their right to participate in the economic game of neoliberal capitalism. The implicit feeling was not that they had been derived of their inherent entitlements, but of their right to compete, fairly, for success. They also invited far-right activists to mobilize in game-like formations, including crowd-sourced social media mobbings reminiscent of #GamerGate, where targets were identified from the bully pulpit to be harassed. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign can fruitfully be seen as a kind of spectacular (and spectacularly dangerous) game. The crass and bombastic candidate constantly “broke the rules” of acceptable politics to court both, on the one hand, far-right stalwarts who agreed with his racist ideology and, on the other, unaffiliated but disaffected voters who generally felt cheated. For both admirers and critics, consuming and reacting to Trump’s atrocious virtuosity had a game-like quality, a vivified, high-stakes version of the “reality TV” game-show The Apprentice that had returned the iconic player to the limelight. 

Meanwhile, the same “whitelash” culture of resentment was giving rise to previously unseen monsters. As early as 2017, in the netherregions of the dark-web, a mysterious character who named himself “Q” began to post cryptic messages about current events, building a small subcultural following that quickly went viral as Q claimed to be an insider in the Trump administration, part of a top-secret taskforce helping the then-President uncover and wage war on a secret conspiracy (Rothschild 2022). In this conspiracy, senior members of the Democratic Party, along with seemingly random A-list celebrities, corporate power-holders and other people and institutions were part of a global cabal dedicated to kidnapping, abusing, murdering and harvesting the vital fluids of children. 

During the pandemic the Q-anon conspiracy fantasy grew quickly in popularity, perhaps thanks to the support of Trump insiders and sympathizers who saw it as a vehicle to rally support to the embattled President. As it moved from the subcultural margins to the mainstream, numerous game designers noted the unsettling game-like qualities of the phenomenon. Q’s dark-web messages to his followers were profoundly cryptic and suggestive, encouraging online communities to form dedicated to a kind of participatory hermeneutics. A group of derivative social media and video platform celebrities emerged as trusted interpreters. Some crusading fans would take it upon themselves to gather at sites they imagined were soon to be crucial locations in the great war on the pedophile conspiracy, as prophesied by Q. Game designer Reed Berkowitz (2020), who specializes in the design of augmented reality games, presented the term “guided apophenia” to describe how the protagonists behind Q-Anon were taking advantage of the human capacity to see or imagine patterns, even where none exist. For Berkowitz and others, Q-Anon was nothing so much as a massive, largely decentralized participatory online game, with very dangerous consequences (Davies 2022). 

Tensions came to a head on January 6, 2020, when supporters of the unseated President stormed the US Capitol building, leading to the deaths of six people and one of the most infamous cases of civil insurgency in living memory. News reports during and after these grave events made much of the strange costumes and playful demeanor of many of the “insurgents,” as well as the prevalence of self-identified Q followers who believed the final confrontation with the evil cabal was finally at hand. In the media and congressional inquiries that followed, much of the discussion focused on to what extent the mob had been orchestrated and encouraged by the Trump administration campaign, and the extent of the involvement of organized white supremacists and other extreme right groups. 

What has, however, fallen by the wayside, is a sociological investigation of the playful motivations and subjectivities of not only the particular participants, but the many supporters of the events. To be curious about the ways that the events of January 6 represented, for many, a game gone horribly wrong is not to diminish it as a failed far-right putsch, but to recognize the way that it was also symptomatic of the cultural politics of gamified neoliberal capitalism. 

An age of reenchanted cultural politics

Our argument is that such gamified cultural politics has been not only indispensable to the rise and spread of reactionary conspiracism, but also part of a wider set of attempts to re-enchant the world. Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) famously built on Max Weber’s (2001) theory to argue that, while technocratic, scientific and actuarial logics of protestant-led European capitalism had stripped the world of its enchantments, the instrumentalization of life had  displaced the need for enchantment to a new level. While a number of theorists have challenged this view (McCarraher 2019; Josephson-Storm 2017), we still find much merit in such a description, especially as it helps us reflect on the cultural politics of the neoliberal age where each individual is intended to adopt the dispositions of the financier, craftily transmuting all aspects of life (relationships, housing, pastimes, talents) into assets to be leveraged under the sign of the indifferent market (Haiven 2014). The neoliberal dream of pursuing peace, prosperity and freedom through universal competition and a market-driven society turned out to be just as enchanted a worldview as any other. Beyond the pretensions of the self-deluding middle classes (who believe that they, too, can be rich, if only they play their cards right) the imposition of an austere market logic affects nearly every person, normalized through “high-functioning” anxieties that internalize the dominant capitalist narrative of productivity above all else (Kingsmith 2022). Even for the poor and economically marginalized, the figure of the hustling petty criminal, or the rags-to-riches reality TV starlet, offer a model for how to transmute life into a series of market plays and puts for “players” who can “game the system.” The fact that, today, a huge proportion of adolescents aspire to be influencers via monetized and gamified social media platforms indicates how deeply a game-like market logic has saturated social life. 

It is amidst widespread disenchantment that we contextualize the game-like turn described above and, in particular, the appeal of what at first glance seem like absurd conspiracy fantasies. Part of this has something to do with the narrative tropes and simplified feelings of ideological closure propounded in popular cultural texts (notably Hollywood films), with their stark, manichean depictions of good and evil. The plot line that sees a small band of misfits coming together against insurmountable odds and the skepticism of their fearful compatriots to bring down a cruel regime is now extremely common in film, television and video games, including in children’s content. In a disenchanting world where one’s sense of purpose is reduced to participating in what feels like a rigged economic game, it should not be particularly surprising that individuals take up these tropes to craft immersive and enchanting parallel worlds. When economic reality becomes a near-impossible yet compulsory game, many people escape into or create games that feel empowering, prosocial and at least theoretically winnable. 

Here, the Q-Anon participatory fantasy is only the most stark example, relatively easy to recognize because it sits so squarely on the absurd far-right of the political spectrum. Yet those who preen themselves as centrists are no less culpable for creating participatory fantasies. While Trump’s policies were atrocious, and while the  fascistic political culture he presided over are extremely dangerous, the “centrist” loathing of him that reduced the problems of late capitalism to his particular evil exemplified a kind of enchanted and enchanting narrative just the same (Bratich 2020). Anti-Trump online politics even included forms of politicized witchcraft (Fine 2021), but this is only the most extreme example of the turn towards game-like re-enchantment.

Meanwhile, we should not ignore the many ways that those on the radical left, those who advocate for radical social change, are also attracted by a cultural politics of re-enchantment. For example, in recent years many young people on the Left have turned towards astrology and divination, including horoscopes, tarot cards and more (Komprozos-Athanasiou 2021; Sparkly Kat 2021). This is part of a wider trend towards a cultural politics that centers healing and “the work” of inward-facing subjectivity transformation, based on the recognition that systems of oppression work, in part, on the level of the subject. It is also based on a growing skepticism of the white-supremacist mobilization of tropes of objectivity and rationality. Critics may be tempted to bemoan the “weird” turn in the Left as a departure from not only reason but also the working class, seeing it as purely a self-indulgent middle-class narcissism. However, we prefer to read it sociologically as emerging from, and as a (dubiously effective) response to, the same political economic circumstances that give rise to the “cosmic right” (Milburn 2020; O’Donovan 2021). 

Forms of reenchantment present themselves as resistance, even though in many cases they help perpetuate, reinforce or defend dominant structures and systems of power. We have opted for a language of enchantment, rather than simply fantasy, to signal the way that this tendency is not simply a completely fictitious parallel world but a set of dispositions that incorporate and offer interpretive frames for real-world events to animate a wide diversity of groups and orientations across the political spectrum in  ways that rely not simply on the individual fabrication of a “common sense” imaginary, but operate through participatory social frameworks (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014). 

There are many critics who, in the face of reenchanting politics, call for a return to a civics of disenchantment. Across the political spectrum we can hear clarions to return to Enlightenment principles that encourage the disinterested adjudication of evidence over fantasy. Stephen Pinker’s (2018) Enlightenment Now is only the starkest of these arguments. More generally, the rise of conspiracy theories and post-truth politics has seen a wide variety of commentators raise the tattered banner of reason against the hydra of reenchantment. Yet as Marcus Gilroy-Ware (2020) argues, such efforts come after years of conspicuous mistruth and fabrication by governments (around, for example, the War on Terror) and the everyday cynical manipulation of truth and perception by the marketing and public relations industry. 

In this context, calls to “return to reason” are not only ineffective, they are themselves another example of a game of neoliberal reenchantment: performative speech acts that serve to align the author and his (for it is almost always a man) readers as self-ennobling reasonable subjects, beset on “all sides” by unreasonable, monstrous zealots. In other words, from one angle the advocates of disenchantment invite their audience into a kind of heroic narrative game every bit as enchanting as the game-like enchantments they decry. 

Clue-Anon and the promise of enchanted inquiry

What, then, are critical scholars, working in solidarity with radical movements, to do in such a material context? If even calls to “return to reason” are themselves a kind of re-enchanting game, where do those of us stand who are reproduced by and who are tasked with reproducing the university, that bastion of disenchantment? We have no clear answers, but we have experiments, and these experiments try to inhabit and leverage, rather than condemn and dismiss, the urge towards reenchantment.

In 2020 our research team began to experiment with creating a board game intended to harness the power of participatory reenchantment. It was motivated in part by testimony from our students that revealed many of them feared visiting their families at holidays to find their loved-ones in the grips of powerful and seemingly unshakable conspiracy fantasies. Several of these students reported that board games offered a collective pastime that avoided inflammatory conversations. Based on these reports, and on our ongoing research, we began to develop a game (designed by Max Haiven and refined collectively with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and A.T. Kingsmith) that, after several iterations finally arrived at the name CLUE-ANON.

This four-player competitive game is intended to take 90 minutes and is played over three rounds. In each round, the players seek to deduce the identity of three hidden “real conspirators” from a set of nine possible suspects. To do so, they pay in-game resources (money and followers) to look at the remaining six suspects. However, to gain sufficient money and followers, and to fool others, players must prematurely declare their conspiracy theory, well before the evidence warrants it. At first glance, it seems that the objective of the game is to correctly guess the “real” conspirators. However, in a twist, each player is assigned a secret character with a unique motivation. These characters have been drawn from the mediasphere that surround contemporary gamified, digitally-driven conspiracism. While the Independent Journalist gains extra points if their opponents also learn the real conspiracy, the Troll Army gains extra points if they can lead their opponents to guess incorrectly. The Social Media Corporation wins if they accumulate a lot of money, while the YouTube Grifter seeks to accumulate money and followers, the truth be damned. 

What results is a fast-paced, somewhat chaotic game of deduction, bluffing and  role-playing. In the process of play, the players learn that, in the conspiracy game, the truth is rarely anyone’s first objective. Role-playing characters with different but obscured motivations encourages a creative estrangement from one’s own position. The game is designed to be fun and easy to learn. The conspiracy theories, characters and scenarios in the game are comical, but based on real-world examples (who created the SARS-COV2 virus? Who faked the moon landing?), opening the doorway after the game for stimulating conversation. The experience generated by the game is non-didactic, in the sense that it does not explicitly attempt to teach a message but, rather, to create a space for critical conversation. Yet through the playing of the game, players come to understand that conspiracy theorizing is a fun, prosocial activity, and that one can easily become enchanted with the creative inventiveness of shared, competitive storytelling.

The game has now been played by hundreds of people, including groups at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Singapore Civil Service College, University College London’s Institute of Advanced Studies, the ephemera journal’s “Games, Inc.” conference and the Copenhagen IT University’s Centre for Digital Play. Many players and designers find the game overly complex: it’s hard to strategize when there are so many motivations, elements and narratives in play; that’s quite the point, we reply.

Our hope is that the game can provide an important tool for educators and activists to catalyze conversations not only about the dangers and seductions of conspiracism, but its lures and emancipatory possibilities too. We see it as the first step towards a methodological orientation we have speculatively named enchanted inquiry, for which we would like to set out some hallmarks.

First, enchanted inquiry does not primarily seek to debunk, disenchant or dispel misinformation. Rather, it begins from the premise that globalizing neoliberal capitalism gives rise to the urge to reenchant the world. Without letting go of a sanguine assessment of the profound dangers such tactics of reenchantment might awaken or exacerbate, enchanted inquiry begins with the question: how might this propensity be redirected or channeled towards more critical, illuminating and generative ends? It aims, in other words, to demonstrate that we are always in the process of reenchanting the disenchanted world and to make this process more democratic, egalitarian, responsible, care-full and non-coercive.  

Second, in this regard, enchanted inquiry draws on and helps develop the scholarly dispositions encouraged by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish in their 2014 book The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity. There, they argue it is not sufficient for researchers simply to observe and report on social movements in the name of valourizing them in academic contexts (a strategy they call invocation), nor to simply collapse themselves into social movements in the name of solidarity (a strategy they call avocation). Rather, scholars can adopt a strategy of convocation, “calling together” diverse social movement actors to deepen their conceptual, theoretical and political understandings and practices–the radical imagination–through facilitated discussion, debate and deliberation. Here, the scholar-activists recognize themselves not only as the outside expert or the embedded participant but (also) a third thing: a facilitator of the radical imagination, that tectonic force at the core of all societies and all subjects that arises to challenge the given reality in the name of manifold possibilities for changing society (Castoriadis 1997). Enchanted inquiry is one method (or perhaps an orientation that might inform many methods) for embracing this strategy of convocation with a particular focus on games, mystery, magic, myth and speculative imagination. 

Finally, enchanted inquiry is fun, in the nuanced, plural and collaborative sense. Enchanted inquiry draws on theories of play and games in order to create seductive circumstances where participants can learn about the world together and change their minds in non-trivial ways. Fun here does not mean simple, easy or uncritical. The ambivalence of the word speaks to the challenge of making activities that are both challenging and rewarding, prosocial and deeply reflexive, enjoyable and disruptive. Enchanted inquiry aims to mobilize fun as a means to catalyze the radical imagination. 

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Clue-Anon, gaming conspiracy, and the anti-authoritarian imagination

An edited version of following text will appear later in 2023 as part of the Global Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Counterstrategies, published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. It offers a glimpse of the game Clue-Anon, developed by Max Haiven with Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and A.T. Kingmsith.

Clue-Anon, gaming conspiracy, and the anti-authoritarian imagination

Max Haiven, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, and A.T. Kingsmith

11 theses on gaming conspiracies

1. In a disenchanted era of relentless work and worry, the lure of reactionary conspiracy theories is driven by the promise of meaning and community.

2. Capitalism’s advocates claim it provides humanity’s first and only level playing field. But most people feel trapped in a ruthless game they have no hope of winning.

3. In the condescending view of the dominant intelligentsia, the conspiracist is a lonely crank, bordering on psychotic. But conspiracists often build worlds that foster pleasure, collective fun and connection. Their worldbuilding is a dangerous form of play.

4. The powers-that-be tell us education is the key to remedying conspiracism; but hegemonic education is part of the problem that gives rise to conspiracism in the first place.

5. Corruption and collusion have always been part of capitalism’s systemic contradictions. To deny this is foolish. But to simply imagine capitalism is simply one big conspiracy is dangerous, misleading and intoxicating.

6. If conspiracy fantasies are the “poor person’s cognitive mapping” in the disorienting totality of capitalism, then the role of intellectuals cannot be to merely provide more accurate maps. It must be to convoke experiences of radical map-making.

7. Liberal critiques of conspiracies admit that inequality breeds resentment, which in turn fuels disinformation. But capitalism is also inherently alienating, and its enclosure of the human desire for play drives us towards dangerous conspiratorial play.

8. Mainstream commentators bemoan the “falling rate of reason” in what they see as a world beset by irrationality. But they refuse to recognize this is symptomatic of an irrational profit-driven system, where reason is everywhere instrumentalized.

9. In a disenchanted world, the far right has weaponized conspiracy theories to destroy the thing we call reality and open new theatres of violent play and revanchist re-enchantment.

10.  Our work as counter-conspiracists, who believe a better world is possible, must include seizing the means of enchantment.

11. So far critics have only tried to debunk the worlds of conspiracies, the point, however, is to game them.

Clue-Anon: An experimental board game about why conspiracy theorizing is fun… and dangerous

Clue-Anon is an anti-authoritarian board game for up to four players.

We developed it at a time when more and more digital and tabletop games are being released that aim to teach players that conspiracism is dangerous. In contrast, our game recognizes that conspiracism is often attractive because it is playful and creative, and because it harnesses people’s skepticism and critical thinking, albeit towards nefarious ends.

The game is inspired by the rise of the Q-Anon conspiracy fantasy, which repackages heinous anti-Semitic myths to suggest a vast global conspiracy to abduct and torture children. In particular, Clue-Anon reflects on the game-like nature of this fantasy, where believers/players use digital media to create conspiracist communities that manifest in the offline world, sometimes violently.

The game asks players to take on the role of media manipulators, who each have something to gain from spreading the conspiracy: the social media corporations is eager to make money; the megalomaniacal YouTube grifter wants followers; the troll armies is just in It for the laughs; true believers want to grow their cult; only the independent journalist seems to want to learn the truth.

By imagining themselves in these roles and strategizing accordingly, players learn that conspiracies can be fun, but are also the product of intentional manipulation.

A Clue-anon prototype in the wild Scenario

The following scenario is a fictional composite of real playtesting experiences. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, we do not record playtest sessions of player responses but, rather, rely on fieldnotes and participant-observation.

Sam, Des, Vish and Moos sit down to play Clue-Anon.

They are met with an enigmatic board. In each match, the players must try to discover which three parties are engaged in a nefarious conspiracy, this case, say “who unleashed the global pandemic?” 

In each match, the same nine cards, representing nine conspirators (including the Military Industrial Complex, Aliens, Satantists, the Deep State) are dealt: three “real conspirators” are hidden underneath the board; the six remaining are placed face-down on spaces on top of the board. The players won’t know until the end of the match (after six turns) who the three “real conspirators” are. How will they find out?

On the surface, the objective of the game is fairly simple: players must take turns spending in-game resources (money and followers) to look at these six face-down suspect cards on top of the board, in order to deduce the remaining three “real conspirators” beneath the board. But things are a little more complex!

Players start the game by drawing character cards, which they keep secret. These characters have special objectives beyond just guessing the conspiracy correctly. Sam draws the Independent Journalist character: she will get a bonus if the other players guesses the true conspirators. By contrast, Des drew the True Believers character: their goal is to accumulate as many followers as possible. Meanwhile, Vish draws the Social Media Corporation character: he’ll be trying to make as much money as he can. And Moos is playing the Intelligence Agent, whose trying to guess everyone else’s secret character. But all of them will be pretending to be an Independent Journalist: everyone wants their opponents to believe that all they care about is the truth. They’ll only reveal their characters at the end of the game. If other players guess their identity, they’ll lose points.

As the game begins, each player gets resource tokens representing one dollar and one follower, and they’ll get this amount again at the outset of each turn.

In the first rounds, players use their resources to take a look at the six conspirators on top of the board, noting who isn’t part of the “real” conspiracy on private pieces of paper.

Each round, an event card is revealed, changing the flow of the game and introducing more chance. For example, players can “sell their followers’ data” to make money, or gain followers from a celebrity endorsement.

The event cards represent things that might happen in the story of a conspiracy theory’s rise to prominence.

It soon becomes clear to all the players that they simply don’t have enough resources (money and followers) to look at all six face-down conspirator cards in the six rounds of the match. How to get more resources? They must lie.

In the second round, even before it’s possible to know who the three hidden “real conspirators” are, Vish places a token face up in front of him, announcing he believes the Evil Corporation is one of the three conspirators.  Is he lying? Is he guessing? At the end of the match, if Vish is right in his guess, he’ll earn points; if he’s wrong, he’ll lose them. But maybe he’ll change his guess before the end of the match. Or maybe he’s the True Believers character, and his special power is that he doesn’t lose points for wrong guesses… The other players are left to wonder: should they follow suit and also guess that the Evil Corporation is in on the conspiracy? In any case, every turn from now until the end of the match, Vish is going to get extra money and followers as a reward for propounding his public guess, and he’ll use them to look at more conspirator cards.

Soon almost all the players have made public guesses and are raking in the resources, but not Sam. Does that mean she’s the Independent Journalist? Or maybe she’s just bluffing… Meanwhile, Des has placed three public guesses and seems really confident… What’s their game? Moos decides to bet on Des: with that kind of confidence, Des must be the Journalist. But then, when Des makes a guess that Moos knows is wrong, their confidence is shaken. Meanwhile, Vish has accumulated tons of money and only late in the match do his opponents realize that he must be the Social Media Corporation. Had they known earlier, they might have taken steps to undermine his strategy…

The match ends and the three “true” conspirators are revealed. Each player is awarded points for their correct guesses and penalized for their incorrect guesses. Perhaps they play another match and add their points to their tally. After 2 or 3 matches, the game ends and the players finally reveal their secret characters and gain (or lose) extra points, depending on bonuses: Sam, the Independent Journalist, gets extra points for every time the other players correctly guessed the real conspiracy…  Vish, the Social Media Corporation, gets extra points for his huge stash of money…

A sketch of an early version of the game.What do players think?

After the match, the four friends talk it over.

Sam enjoyed playing the Independent Journalist and reflects on how hard it was to convince other players she was genuine, when Des and Moos were also falsely claiming to be the Journalist.

Des was initially frustrated because they realized they would never be able to get enough resources or have enough time in a match to look at all six face-down suspects, and so deduce the three “true” conspirators: they tend to like games where the path to victory is clear. But after a round or two they got into the hoaxing and really sunk into their Government Agent character. It reminded them of stories they’d heard from their grandmother about growing up in an authoritarian state, where the government purposely spun conspiracy theories in order to defame opponents and distract people from their own nefarious activities.

Vish reflects that the character of the YouTube Grifter was the most important, because it revealed how monetized social media platforms encourage conspiracism that starts as entertainment but quickly descends into paranoia… or worse.  

Sam thinks the game is useful because it teaches people to be sceptical and think critically about who is propounding conspiratorial narratives and why. But Moos reflects that the game teaches a dangerous lesson: that all conspiracy theories are equally baseless and that anyone who propounds them is crazy or manipulative. What about the conspiracies that we know are true, such as those that go on all the time in capitalism where powerful people meet in secret to maintain and extend their power? The game might reinforce a kind of liberal cynical distance that presumes that the official narrative, propounded by the media and politicians, is genuine and that all conspiracy theorizing is pathological.

Could they play it with their families or friends who are in the grips of conspiracy fantasy?

The question evokes nervous laughter. Yeah, says Des. My brother spent all his time during the lockdown rabbit-holing into weird conspiracy theories on YouTube… but he got there through his love of games, so maybe this would be a way to start a conversation.

Moos feels his family, who are refugees, would find it too confusing: they’d definitely get the concepts, but the rules are a bit too complex and clunky.

Sam is going to bring the game to her next board games nights with her friends, who work together in a feminist collective. She wonders if the game could be adapted to help them think about how to combat the anti-feminist and anti-trans conspiracy theories they encounter.

Vish wants to see if he can play it with teenagers in the community centre where he volunteers, who often come to him with wacky conspiracy fantasies which they mostly think of as jokes, but that sometimes lead to obsessions.

An early prototype for a worksheet that enables players to keep track of what they’ve seen in order to make better guesses.

Clue-Anon is currently under development and will be released as a print-at-home game under Creative Commons licensing later in 2023. For updates, please subscribe to the designer, Max Haiven’s newsletter.

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Launching: Worker as Futurist, an SF group for Amazon workers

Amazon is one of the world’s largest corporations, with an aggressive and charismatic agenda to reshape the future. Amazon, by some estimates, provides key services to half the internet (including, probably, Substack), and in is the world’s largest retailer. But the American firm is also aggressively “disrupting” the fields of logistics, robotics, workplace and supply-chain surveillance and more. From food to gig work, from healthcare to film and TV, Amazon’s empire is vast. While the company’s founder has made headlines by joining the dispicable billionaire space-race, on the proverbial shop floors workers are paying the price. Workers are rising up, unionizing and organizing for their rights, and civil society coalitions are forming to Make Amazon Pay. But what do rank-and-file workers themselves think of the future they are being forced to create at their expense, for someone else’s benefit? Can workers reclaim not only their dignity and power, but their right to determine our collective future?

We want to find out!

In 2021, we organized a little club for rank-and-file Amazon workers to watch and speculative/science fiction (SF) TV and film (and play video games) and discuss them. We wrote about it, and the aims of the of the broader project, here:

“From the Belly of the Beast: Amazon workers, sci-fi and the space between utopia and disaster” in The Sociological Review Magazine.“Is Amazon the Borg? We Asked Their Workers” in The Los Angeles Review of Books“ Recasting the future with Amazon workers ” in the Routledge Handbook of Creative FuturesToday, we are launching recruitment for the next phase of the project, a paid SF writing group for rank-and-file Amazon workers!

I’m thrilled to be working with Xenia Benivolski and Graeme Webb on this project, and to welcome Sarah Olutola and Stella Lawson to our team!

More information is below, and on our website, and I’d be very grateful if you could share it with any current or former Amazon workers you know.

Worker as Futurist Would you like to be paid to write speculative or science fiction?Are you a current or former Amazon Worker?Apply to join our online workshop!What do Amazon workers think about the future?

The Worker As Futurist project is seeking 12 current or former Amazon workers to join an online writers workshop from February to July, 2023.

Get paid to participate in six skill- and knowledge-building sessions on zoom, February-April (every Tuesday at 12-noon Eastern)Work with professional writing teachers and editors to develop a short story about “the world after Amazon” in April and MaySee your work published in a book and possibly in magazinesGet coaching and assistance to publish your other writingWho can participate?Open to both new and experienced writersOpen to unpublished, self-published and published writersOpen to anyone who works for or whose income primarily depends on Amazon ( including warehouse workers, MTurkers, subcontracted delivery drivers, contract workers, etc), but NOT to management.All online, you can be located anywhere in the worldYou have to have to be able to write very well in EnglishAlsoWe are not in any way and will never be affiliated with AmazonWe’ll protect your privacy and you can use a fake name.We are a research and community-building project based at a Canadian public  university, funded entirely by public funds. Our goal is to encourage the imagination.Interested?

Please visit reimaginingvalue.ca/WAF to learn more and fill out an application (including sending us a 1-page story) by February 10.

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Zero Credit: Countering the Dreams of Techno-Finance (TOPIA)

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies has published its 45th issue, mostly made up of a section edited by Benjamin J. Anderson, Enda Brophy and I (Max Haiven) and made up of some very compelling work.

You can find the issue here: https://utpjournals.press/toc/topia/45

I’ve linked here to PDFs of these articles, which are unfortunately otherwise paywalled.

“Introduction: Zero Credit” (Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy, Max Haiven)Themed articles“‘Into Human Flesh and the Human Heart’: On Promotionalism and the Long Con of Fintech Credit-Scoring” by Alison Hearn“Notions of the Possible: Smart-Contracts and the Obscene Sign of (Racial) Freedom” by Ian A. McKenzie“#buildbanksbetter: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Public Banks and Money’s Potential as a Non-Scarce Medium of Communication and a Source of Local Self-Determination” by Matthew Tiessen“Dangerous Play in an Age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree” by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou“Capitalist Telepathics, Psychic Debt and the Search for Collective Intelligence” Jacquelene DrinkallThemed commentaries and roundtables“The Pandemic as Financial Laboratory” by Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero, translated by Liz Mason-Deese“COVID-19 and the Care of the Financialized Self” by Kelly Gates“The End of Abstraction? The Triumph of Abstraction? A Prospective Dilemma” by Franco Bifo Berardi, translated by Enda Brophy

This project is the culmination of a several-years long collaboration between me, Ben and Enda. It also included…

Digital/Debt/Empire short interventions series (2019)

One of the first manifestations of our collaboration was a special stream of the New York’s New School’s online platform Public Seminar in 2019. It included:

Art, Research and Action Against Debt’s Digital Empire ,
Max Haiven, Enda Brophy, Benjamin Anderson (April 4, 2019) Stolen Land, Standing Ground, and the Viral Spectacle of White Entitlement ,
Alyosha Goldstein (April 4, 2019) Artist-as-Debtor, Debt-as-Creator ,
Noah Fischer (April 15, 2019) Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt ,
Ann Larson (April 22, 2019) The Violence of Abstraction ,
Alberto Toscano (May 9, 2019) Debt: A Lever of Dispossession ,
Iolanda Fresnillo (May 22, 2019) (Sur)real Estate, Speculative Capital and Housing Displacement ,
Cassie Thornton, (May 22, 2019) Accumulation by Education: White Property and Racialized Debt ,
Iyko Day (June 14, 2019)The Digital/Debt/Empire symposium (2019)

In April of 2019 we held a three-day event of public talks, workshops and a symposium in Vancouver, including presentations and participation from people including Brenna Bhandar, Glen Coulthard, Iyko Day, Noah Fischer, Alyosha Goldstein, Iolanda Fresnillo, Peter James Hudson, Anne Larson, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Jerome Roos, Cassie Thornton and Alberto Toscano.

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The fate of the artist at the end of capitalism’s cosmology

This essay was commissioned as the inaugural input to Gamechanger, a Berlin-based platform to “explore contemporary mindsets and cultures of self-organization and work in the cultural field.” https://gamechanger.land/resources/max-haiven-piece-for-gamechanger

The conditions that shape artistic collaboration and the survival of cultural workers today occur within a profound contradiction:

On the one hand the global system of capitalist exploitation is stronger and more pervasive than ever. It of course dominates the global economy, although today that economy seems to be reorganizing in increasingly belligerent regional imperialist blocs. But its logic of competition and accumulation also saturates nearly every social institution and shapes each individual’s imagination.

On the other hand, capitalism’s cosmology is collapsing. On the surface level, this collapse is indexed by the growing disenchantment, unease and cynicism with the ideological claims of capitalism’s post-1989 champions. No one today seriously believes that “rising tides” of economic growth will “lift all boats” and lead to general prosperity shared by all. Very few people imagine that those who work hard and play by the rules are destined or even likely to succeed. The myth that infinite economic growth is possible on a finite planet or that capitalism will create technological fixes to its ecological crises sound increasingly absurd or frantic. Something is happening here that goes beyond cynicism. It’s not simply that the ideological stories some individuals told to justify capitalism are no longer convincing. The broader cosmology, the framework it provided for making sense of the world and our places in it,is falling apart.

The global system of capitalist exploitation is stronger and more pervasive than ever… [but] capitalism’s cosmology is collapsing.

Artists and culture workers had a role or a spectrum of roles under the cosmology of capitalism. Today their meaning is in flux as that cosmology crumbles. But they also afford one of the few legitimate venues through which we are permitted to think cosmologically from within our cosmology.

As a result, one of the things that defines the condition and challenge for artists and cultural workers today is to help envision and put into practice what might yet come after capitalism catches up to its cosmology and collapses inward on itself. While some artists and culture workers are turning to face this problem directly, my argument here is that all are, in some way or another, contending with it indirectly or unconsciously, and this contention appears in the ways they are organizing, collaborating and collectivizing.

This can be exciting, but to what end?

The end of a cosmology

In using the term cosmology I have in mind goes beyond the particular stories and myths we tell ourselves about the system under which we live. I mean the overarching notion of a totality, the sense of the kosmos, within which those myths and narratives come to make sense. A cosmology is a shared sense of context that offers a map of a totality of which we are each a part and allows us to predict the plausible outcome of our actions within it. It is not a myth but a kind of meta mythscape, not a single ideology but the ideological gestalt within which particular ideologies come to make sense.

In the cosmology of capitalism, we have learned to see the world as the domain of individuated economic actors, interacting like atomic particles or objects in motion in finite space. This is not a cosmology of complex reciprocity and care but of force and coercion. This is a Newtonian worldview that Bichler and Nitzan identify as having emerged alongside the secularization of “Western” society, with its upending of a medieval cosmology and the replacement of an all-powerful God with the figure of the all-powerful individual. This cosmology, they argue, arose to offer a flattering reflection of and a justification for the rule of the bourgeois, competitive, patriarchal capitalist individual. He not only placed himself at the centre of the human story but also the centre of the proverbial cosmos, the template for not only all human behaviour but through which the laws of the universe might be imagined.

It’s not simply that the recent development in quantum physics have rendered this narcissistic cosmology uncertain. As Sylvia Wynter argues, the planetary struggles against colonialism and racism that crescendoed in the 1950s and 60s and continue to reverberate around the world have also called into question the claims to universality of what is, in fact, only one particular “genre” of being human. That hegemonic genre of homo oeconomicus, the hyper-rational, competitive subject, is, in fact, the particular domineering ideal crafted within and to help reproduce five centuries of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. It is organized around a cosmogony, an origin story, that skews Darwin’s theories of evolution to insist that this global capitalist order of inequality, oppression, exploitation and necropolitics is natural, normal, and necessary, that it had to be this way, that the past inevitably or providentially led to the present, and that all other peoples, all other worlds, all other cosmologies, are nothing but unreflexive imitations of its truth.

The artist and the cult

The global capitalist empire is declining, though that decline may take decades or centuries. It might take the world’s ecosystems down along with it. Or it may be replaced by something even worse. As the sun slowly set on the Roman empire (a process which took centuries) cults and “mystery societies” began to flourish like weeds in the ruins of the Empire’s cosmology. These rites, which not only replaced old gods with new ones but experimented with new forms of organization, new hierarchies of value, new rhythms of worship, were mostly practiced by those who had customarily or legally been excluded from access to power or to social mobility within the Empire.

At the time of the decline of Rome, of course, artists-as-such did not exist. Sculptors, poets and others we would, today, associate with the term were important members of society, but the notion of the individual creative genius whose role it is to produce “new” symbolic objects for consumption was alien. It was only with the rise of capitalism that the figure of the artist appeared as a glamorized ideal of homo oeconomicus, a daring risk-taker, a competitive individualist, making order out of chaos.

The collective now emerges as a key protagonist in the worlds of art and culture [as] spaces of cosmological experimentation.

Yet with the slow implosion of the capitalist cosmology, the halo projected onto the figure of the unique artistic genius is dimming. While that aura of the genius remains the thing that adds value to art commodities and attracts most consumers to art, artists and culture workers themselves are increasingly skeptical. In part, this has to do with the emergence of new generations of art workers raised on feminist, queer, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial critiques of this aura. In part it has to do with survival: in an arts and cultural market where the vast majority of workers are destined to remain obscure and precarious “dark matter” so that a few stars may shine, it makes sense to, in various ways, abandon the quest for star status and band together into new cooperative configurations. Whatever the case, the collective now emerges as a key protagonist in the worlds of art and culture.

My suggestion here is that we can and should fruitfully imagine the emerging collective configurations of artists and culture workers as not only spaces their protagonists create to pool resources, redistribute opportunities, and collaborate in new ways. They are, I think, even when they do not intend it, spaces of cosmological experimentation. They are, often in spite of themselves, spaces of alternate worldmaking.

documenta 15 and the revenge of the ancien régime

The rise of the collective has been profoundly punctuated on the world stage by documenta 15, thanks to its visionary artistic director, the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa. At their invitations, up to 1,500 artists, the majority coming from racialized or global-South positions, descended on Kassel in various amorphous configurations. Some were part of long-standing, decades-old collectives. Other collectives were of more recent vintage, but all were microcosmic experiments in what it might mean to eschew the triumphal heroism of the individual artist and embrace some form of cooperation and codependency. Ruangrupa’s concept of the Lumbung, or communal rice shed, offered a Global South reply to Western notions of the commons, which Mao Mollona shows has animated radical artmaking with a notion of a shared territory of care and support.

This decidedly anti-capitalist and anti-colonial approach trespassed in what had, since 1955, been one of the world’s foremost temples to the figure of the artistic genius, clashing with the entrenched cultural administration and documenta staff and grievously upsetting the expectations of the Germany’s political elite, the art world, and visitors to the 100 day festival. For their heresies, Ruangrupa could never be forgiven. The scandals that are, at the time of writing, plaguing the festival have the sulfurous smell of revenge.

The stage was set even before the festival began by a series of bad-faith rumours and absurd accusations targeting Palestinain artists. When, upon the opening of the festival, two minor images (out of thousands) appeared on a mural that could be construed, in the German context, as anti-Semitic, the gates of hell opened. The images and associated artwork were promptly and rightly removed. Regardless of intent, the images should not have appeared in Germany. The apology from the artists and the curators should be studied as potent examples of how to express contrition for a symbolic harm while also opening a fruitful space for critical conversation. But that was not to be enough and the scandal spiraled out of control.

An honest forensic investigation of how Germany’s political parties and media, as well as other cynical actors, fomented and exploited the scandal is urgently needed, but will never happen. It would have to include a careful unpacking of difficult truths. Among them, the ways that Germany’s unique and horrifying history of anti-Semitism (of which my family were victims) and the associated public memory are so fraught that they preclude precisely the kind of mature conversation about the race and culture that they demand. It might include a reckoning with Germany’s deplorable and racist attacks on free speech regarding Palestinian human rights and its cryptoauthoritarian blacklisting of those who speak out on the matter. It might dwell with the persistence of a largely unquestioned and unacknowledged white supremacy throughout German society that, for example, sees nothing wrong when the exclusively white political elites arrived in Kassel to scold the mostly non-white and global-South artists and curators of documenta 15 about racism, as if the former had anything to say on the matter and as if the latter were misbehaved children who threw a party while the adults were away at the opera. It might include noting the inconsistencies between the national elite’s phobia of any imagery reminiscent of anti-Semitism at the same time as it tolerates, defends, and even celebrates dehumanizing representations of Islam and of Black people in artistic and popular culture as democratic virtue.

The attack on documenta 15 has been accelerated and fueled by a reactionary, rear-guard loathing for Ruangrupa and friends’ iconoclastic upsetting of the figure of the artist as such.

Anti-semitism is real and dangerous, as the present author, who is among its targets, knows all too well. But the attack on documenta 15 had little to do with it. At least in part, that attack has been accelerated and fueled by a reactionary, rear-guard loathing for Ruangrupa and friends’ iconoclastic upsetting of the figure of the artist as such. They could not be forgiven for their insistence that this documenta, in the spirit of honouring “the contemporary,” would prioritize creating lasting connections between racialized, radical, and global-south artists and collectives, rather than pleasing the European gaze. Whether the curators and their comrades succeeded in their goal is another matter; only time will tell. (As of writing there are many rumours, controversies, hard feelings, and ambiguities about the process, the compensation system, the hosting, and more). But it was the goal itself that enraged the high priests of the ancien régime, who insist they are the defenders of civilization but whose murderous cosmology is dying.

In fact, the slanderous, almost maniacal vociferousness with which art’s ancien régime and their allies attacked documenta 15 has much in common with the reactionary zeal with which, at various points, the Roman empire sought to stave off internal implosion by persecuting those dissidents from its cosmology. In this sense, the attacks on documenta 15, although they seek to monopolize a rhetoric of anti-racism and pluralism, have much in common with the far-right and postfascist wave that is threatens to engulf the world. These reactionary forces also mobilize around the tarnished icons and disenchanted fetishes of the old cosmology: patriarchal gender regimes, ethnonationalism, competitive individualism. The far-right find themselves in a bad romance with their competitors for dominance within the political machinations of capitalism: those more liberal and “centrist” factions of the elite. In turn, these “centrists” (who are, in fact, reactionary from any reasonable standard), look longingly to the discourses of those long marginalized from it to revivify their fortunes, parroting social justice rhetoric to sustain their increasingly implausible positions. The revanchist right and the revanchist centre, who insist they are enemies, in fact find common cause in episodes like the scandal of documenta 15..

Collective visions at the end of the worlds

As David Graeber noted, reflecting on the movements that gave inspiration to and formed in the wake of the Occupy uprisings and the movements of the Squares, the particular political demands of many of today’s radical protagonists are less significant than the very fact that they gather: their politics are the way they experiment with and instantiate new forms of social organization and cooperation.

This is also true of the rise of the collective as the format of “political” art in our moment. They are, as Stevphen Shukaitis notes, imaginative ventures in reorganizing social life that, even if they burn out quickly and without measurable immediate impact, may, with a kind of historical spooky action at a distance, make their vibrations felt years or decades in the future through processes we as yet barely understand. As my metaphors here indicate, I also see these collectives as venues for the experimentation with parallel cosmologies.

True, some collectives merely represent mercenary and expedient mechanisms by which artists and cultural workers can pool resources, diversify risk, and otherwise create a proxy corporation or family. But more often than not they are laboratories for pluralizing the ways we might re-become human, which is to say cooperate and reflect our cooperation back to ourselves so that we can change, as Wynter teaches. The ancien régime of the old, decaying capitalist cosmology insists that there is only one real way to be human, that all cooperation is disguised competition, that all kinship is patriarchal, and that all people want to become a white man. The urge towards collectivity that so animates artists and culture workers today defies this cosmology and invents new ones. But with what means and towards what ends?

From January to July of 2022 I took up a live-in residency at a yet-unnamed and largely unfinished program near Berlin’s Treptower Park, located in an old bathtub factory converted into apartments and workshops known as Moos (after the street on which it is found: Moosdorfstr.) I joined the experiment, and offered to bring my experience as a community organizer and theorist of the commons. I wished to place myself in a context that I did not understand, a kind of gonzo sociological fieldwork. I wanted to understand something of the way people younger than myself (born in 1981) found hope in the world in the wake of the pandemic. I was at once fascinated and repelled by the way the space brought under one roof experimental artists, alternative health practitioners, crypto-currency evangelists, social activists, new age spiritualists, privileged nomads, and more. How did these fit together? For me, the space was characterized by an ideological dissonance, but I was curious about how it might reveal something about the cosmological shifts occurring at a broader level and about the way creative people are imagining and practicing collectivity in this moment.

Setting aside the questions of vision and organization that plagued the residency program from the beginning, what I learned is that, for an emerging generation, the rapid decomposition and recomposition of what we might have once called “subcultures” is not only normal but celebrated. Perhaps this has something to do with the ease with which a generation raised on social media can move between cultural spaces and idioms. Perhaps it has something to do with the way capitalism itself is constantly combusting and resynthesizing social life. But what struck me quite profoundly is the fluidity with which collectivities form and dissolve, and how in each instance working and living together generates and organizes itself around new, synthetic cosmologies. It seemed plausible to many in that space to imagine that DeFi and Web3 might be used to elevate humanity to higher levels of consciousness, that experimental music could heal intergenerational trauma, that psychoactive substances could help us develop a revolutionary new relation to the more-than-human world, that polyamory could advance climate justice. Many younger participants felt both the presence and the abandonment of their ancestors. They were both post-hopeful and post-cynical. Yes, to some extent such optimistic belief reflected a kind of youthful exuberance in a “post”-pandemic moment. But my curiosity turns towards the broader paradigm of which such (to my mind overly exuberant) thinking is a symptom. One could, of course, successfully critique any one of these positions, but that was and is not my goal. I am curious about the paradigm within which they take root, grow and cross-pollinate.

As the capitalist cosmology crumbles, new cults and mysteries proliferate with amorphous borders and uncertain durations.

As the capitalist cosmology crumbles, new cults and mysteries proliferate with amorphous borders and uncertain durations. As we each live through the profound dissonance between capitalism’s persistent and deepening power and the collapse of its structures of belief, the collapse, even, of the way it explains how the world and the cosmos work, we, all of us, at any age, reach for the fragments and, in more or less coherent ways, try and reassemble a sense of the totality in which we live and our place in it. It’s not only that our beliefs about the economy and our places in it are shifting; so too is our fundamental sense of how the world works. Spirituality merges with science, the personal and the political collapse in on one another. Technology and society become indistinct. The lines blur between physics and emotions.

For a person of my age, who remembers a moment when the capitalist cosmology felt more or less coherent, this task is a melancholic, confusing, and often infuriating one. For many younger comrades, this kind of neverending pastiche, the constant combination and recombination of cosmological fragments into a bricolage, is the only normal they’ve ever known.

The (re)assembly of cosmologies is not, for any of us, a purely or even primarily conscious cognitive exercise: it is fundamentally social, a shared work that emerges from interactions and relationships. As a result, it should not surprise us that “the collective” emerges as the paradigmatic format of social organization in this moment. The collective is not so much a particular strucure: after all, they can be small or large, open or closed, democratic or authoritarian. The collective names an aspiration to come together to remake the world.

A prediction and a question

In the future which is also already here, all people will be artists and all artists will be in collectives (maybe multiple contradictory collectives). These collectives will be cult-like spaces, laboratories for new and resurgent cosmologies crafted not only through discourse but, rather, through the experimental relationship between people.

As the empire slowly crumbles, a million quasi-systems of sense-making and worldmaking will proliferate precisely in the spaces that capitalism prepared and cultivated for “art” or “culture.” This is not only because this is one of the last venues to obtain funding to do weird stuff. It’s also because those spaces are strangely amenable to cosmological heresy and experimentation. In the future which is also already here, all art will be ritual, and all cultural spaces will be altars, often in spite of themselves. To whom will the sacrifices be made?

For some, this proliferation of cults will be joyful, affirming and generative, especially those whose racial, gendered, or sexual positionality have seen them and their ancestors subordinated to homo oeconomicus. For others, this future will feel profoundly confusing, alienating, and vertiginous. Many will flee into the certainties of the old cosmology and join the revanchist rump of the ancien régime. New cultish fascisms are already rising.

As the empire slowly crumbles, a million quasi-systems of sense-making and worldmaking will proliferate precisely in the spaces that capitalism prepared and cultivated for “art” or “culture.”

But to imagine that all such formations will be reactionary, regressive, or misguided would be wrong. The collective is emerging as the pivotal idiom of radical culture-making because it provides laboratories for new, post-capitalist imaginaries and forms of relation.

The question underneath it all is the terrifying one: is there any way such collectives can make common cause to bring down the material power structures and entrenched elites of the capitalist empire before they destroy the world on which everyone depends? We should never have imagined that it was art’s job to change the world. But is it the job of the collective? And is making a new world from the fragments of the old good enough?

As its cosmology collapses, capitalism appears to offer more and more space and time for collective freedom and less and less scope for collective transformative power. How can this freedom become powerful?

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CBC interview on Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and other interviews and reviews

Last month, my book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire was published by Pluto Books. Since then a number of interviews and reviews have come out, including a feature conversation on the CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) widely-heard Sunday Magazine.

Using radical imagination to confront our reliance on palm oil
CBC’s Sunday Magazine – 24min

It follows on a number of other recent interviews:

Max Haiven unmasks the global entanglement & human sacrifice that the palm oil industry demands
Pretty Heady Stuff podcast – 92min Grease Of Empire: Palm Oil & Regimes Of Human Sacrifice
Last Born in the Wilderness podcast – 63min To Be Human in this Age is to Be Frustrated
House of Modern History podcast – 49min Palm oil is everywhere–what can it tell us?
Earth Eats podcast (WFIU) – 52min Palm Oil, Empire and Globalized Capitalism
Gateway podcast (Al Bawaba) – 32mins

These are joined by several very gratifying reviews:

[Haiven’s] Palm Oil is a compelling and illuminating call to action by an author at the top of his game.

Sidebar (1 May 2022)

Packed with searing data points, rich case studies, and emotive prose, Haiven’s Palm Oil offers an accessible, almost bite-sized, if mind-bending in scope, introduction to the ways that transnational capital shapes our world. Tentatively, too, it charts a path forward, with our foodways and their workers at its center.

Life & Thyme (29 April 2022)

Haiven’s book is woven through with threads of resistance, tracing the victories of trade unionists, Indigenous protesters, and others who have dared to imagine an alternative to environmental vandalism, suffering, and death… His message is clear: our species built this network of human sacrifice, and we have a responsibility to face its full implications. If, through collective effort, we can bring it about, we also have the power to end it.

Protean Magazine (28 April 2022)

The post CBC interview on Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and other interviews and reviews appeared first on Max Haiven.

Is Amazon the Borg? We Asked Their Workers (LA Review of Books)

This essay was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books on May 7, 2022.

Is Amazon the Borg? We Asked Their Workers

By Max Haiven, Graeme Webb and Xenia Benivolski

Enter, futurekiller

In Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, literary critic Mark McGurl notes that the corporation, which in 25 short years has become the world’s largest retailer and one of its largest private employers, has been guided by a self-aggrandizing science fiction narrative. The firm has in numerous ways been inspired and shaped by the favorite genre of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who has famously used his massive share of its profits to finance his own private space program. Amazon flatters itself as an angel of capitalism’s creative destruction, wielding the flaming sword of digital technology to liberate humanity from the clutches of the past.

The company has transformed how we buy books but also how and what we read. Today it is one of the world’s largest publishers, with a jealous hold over tens of millions of Kindle readers as well as over writers who pen novels (typically genre fiction) on its exclusive platform. Via its subsidiary Audible, Amazon is unrivaled in the realm of audiobooks. Beyond the written and spoken word, Amazon’s digital streaming services are among the most popular, and it has ambitiously sought to finance award-winning films and TV serials to announce itself as a leading studio and media producer. Once a platform to merely buy books, the company has become a content creator across multiple media. It shapes the stories we tell ourselves about our world. It is also quickly becoming the United States’s leading retailer, gobbling up market share in the sale of everything from garments to video games, from household staples to office supplies. Tens of thousands of smaller businesses now compete with one another to use Amazon’s order and fulfillment platforms to sell their goods and services to the giant’s dedicated customers — a kind of walled garden version of the free market.

But the firm has not been content to stop there. It has also leveraged its early success to become the world’s largest provider of web services and data management. Amazon servers are the back-end of a huge proportion of the internet, and they manage the data of many of the world’s top companies, public institutions, governments, and even military and security forces. It has also transformed the logistics industry through its advanced employment of machine learning and revolutionized how warehouses work through its extensive use of robotics. The company has sought to become a ubiquitous presence in our lives: in 2017 it acquired the American grocery giant Whole Foods, and in 2019 it introduced Amazon Care, a digital health-care service aiming to disrupt that industry in the United States as well.

While capitalist firms by their nature compete by predicting the future to capitalize on new markets and manage risk, Amazon is actively seeking to leverage its massive wealth and power to create a future in which it is dominant. Their corporate slogan “work hard, have fun, make history” indicates the kind of relentless, progressivist jouissance that animates the company’s strategy. Communication scholar Alessandro Delfanti and Bronwyn Frey’s recent study of Amazon and its subsidiaries reveals the wide array of patent applications held by the firm and indicates the type of mind-bending future they envision for us all.

Who makes the future?

And yet who is building that future? Recent years have seen numerous stories about the horrors endured by workers throughout Amazon’s operations. Workers in the firm’s corporate offices report a culture of overwork, stress, and verbal abuse. But these white-collar workers have it relatively easy. Delivery drivers work punishing schedules, often forced to compete with one another to quicken their pace, at the expense of their own health, safety, and well-being. Even the independent packages endure punishing forms of self-exploitation in the name of the massive corporation’s profits. In what could have been taken directly from Orwell’s cautionary tale of the future in Nineteen Eighty-Four, warehouse workers toil under conditions of staggering surveillance and micromanagement, often at a pace set by robots, and are forced to wear sensors that track their every gesture and vital sign to maximize efficiency. Then there are the gig workers on the firm’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, who compete from home against one another for digital micro-contracts often denominated at cents-per-second ratios and usually taking the form of medial data entry or simple coding tasks. Often this work trains the very algorithms that will eventually replace them or other workers. If Amazon is building the future, it is building it on the backs of its workers. And, indeed, many of its techniques seem the stuff of dystopian fantasy.

Around the world, workers are rebelling, forming trade unions and workers’ organizations. However, the infamous union-busting techniques of the firm in Bessemer, Alabama, indicate its violent and ruthless allergy to this kind of worker activism. To push back against these Pinkerton-esque strategies, efforts are afoot, under the banner of the global Make Amazon Pay coalition and the American Athena coalition, to coordinate efforts of unions, workers’ centers, civil society organizations, and other progressive forces to challenge Amazon’s power — and some of these efforts have recently achieved success.

Even with such preliminary victories, however, these struggles are so deeply in the trenches they have a hard time making space and time to see the horizon. Beyond defending workers’ rights and seeking to halt the relentless advance of Amazon, it is imperative to envision alternate futures. The technology and wealth that, today, Amazon and other “technofeudalist” firms monopolize can and should be used to liberate humanity from toil, not institute an even more punishing and exploitative regime of exploitation.

How might such a future be envisioned, let alone instituted? What role will workers themselves have to play in imagining and stewarding its birth? What do workers themselves have to say? Strangely, few people seem to ask. But we did.

Studying science fiction with Amazon workers

In November and December 2021, we recruited around 24 rank-and-file Amazon workers to watch science fiction shows with us and talk about the future. We met on Zoom once a week and workers were remunerated for their time. Together, we watched films including Snowpiercer, TV shows like Squid Game, Black Mirror, and Star Trek, and played games from radical gamemaker Molleindustria that reflect on the conditions of digital workers. We asked the workers if and how this media content helped them reflect on their work at the corporation. The purpose wasn’t so much to gather data for academic research but to create a space where workers could theorize their experiences for themselves. It was open to both current workers and those who had recently left the company’s workforce, but not to managers. Participants were invited to use false names or no name to protect their identities.

The first thing we learned is that there are a lot of different kinds of workers at Amazon. In our group, we had warehouse workers, delivery drivers, content writers, MTurk workers, and data analysts from all across the United States, and some from Canada. They had vastly different cultural, linguistic, educational, and economic backgrounds, which sometimes made dialogue challenging. Some were huge science fiction fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the genre. Others were casual consumers. While some had clear political views on capitalism, in general they seemed happy to lead respectfully non-partisan discussions framed by the collective desire for a better future. Most were forthcoming about how difficult it was to work at Amazon and how demanding they found the company’s management tactics and relentless surveillance. But many were also happy to have the work, either because it provided a stable income or, in other cases, because it provided flexibility.

Most of the participants tended to identify strongly with the dystopian themes in the films and TV series we watched and the games we played. They almost universally felt that the future looked pretty bleak for workers (not only Amazon workers) and that it was likely that technological changes would serve the interests of the rich. Revealingly, many questioned the relevance of wealth in a crumbling world: would class make much of a difference in the dismal, ecologically ravaged, war-torn future? But others were exasperated this pessimism and encouraged us to think about what could be done today to prevent both a terrible future and continued hyperexploitation.

One contradiction that came up again and again was that, while many workers spoke to the dystopian present and future, they also expressed an abstract optimism about their own personal circumstances. Several participants expressed the sentiment that we should stick together and help each other in facing the oppressor — which was not necessarily Amazon, but systems of inequality at large. Teamwork and working together to overcome challenges were big themes in our conversations, and often reflected in the media we watched together. Most workers also told us that feeling part of a team was the best thing about their job. They were almost all skeptical that Amazon management would ever recognize or appreciate their hard work. They talked a lot about how unfair they found the system of rewards and punishments on the job. In its factories, Amazon brought back the ’80s bastion “employee of the month” to encourage hard work, but the workers we talked with felt this was a largely dystopian gimmick. They also resented the constant technological “nudging” toward reward-seeking behavior. For example, employees with repetitive positions are encouraged to fill out surveys while they work to earn minutes of vacation time.

Many watched or read science fiction, or they played sci-fi-themed games as a way to escape from the demanding world of work itself, and so they were less enthusiastic about taking critical positions on the content we watched together. Compounding this, some reacted so strongly to the dystopian themes (a few even calling it “triggering”) that they admitted to having difficulty watching or playing the games we had selected. And yet, there was a clear sense that sci-fi, especially dark and dystopian science fiction, was appealing to the group. Why would people who already lived and worked in what would probably appear to a time traveler from the past as a dystopian sci-fi scenario enjoy the genres? What interest did these texts offer to workers who are relentlessly surveilled, measured, controlled, and pitted against one another by a huge corporation that literally uses their exploited energies to realize the megalomaniacal fantasies of their CEO to go to space?

In our discussion, it became clear that watching SF film and TV was a form of escapist entertainment, a way of winding down after a hard day (or night, or week) of work. But why not romcoms, or period drama, or soap operas? Or why not more optimistic SF, like Star Trek? Certainly the answer was different for all of the workers we spoke to, but we wonder if, on some level, the dystopian SF was somehow validating.

Toward a futurist workers’ inquiry

Our approach was deeply influenced by a new wave of an old method that intellectuals have used to collaborate with working people. What came to be known as Workers’ Inquiry emerged in Northern Italy in the 1960s as the country underwent a rapid postwar industrialization and migrants flooded from the poor agrarian South to cities like Turin and Milan. For radical intellectuals, who were increasingly disappointed with the Italian Communist Party’s slide into compromise and complacency, these new workers represented a revolutionary constituency, but one that was very different from the proletariat of Marx, Lenin, or Antonio Gramsci’s day.

These thinkers, many of whom were renegades from Italy’s highly conservative academic system, set out to study how capitalism was transforming workers and how workers, through their struggles, were forcing capitalism to transform. They did so in part by setting up study groups with workers that placed in their hands the tools for understanding their own conditions as in some sense emblematic of the capitalism of which they were part. Theorizing from the proverbial “shop floor” offered both workers and intellectuals not only an ant’s-eye view of capitalism, it also revealed workers’ power. The goal of this action research was to see how the exploitative machinations of capitalism were not the ingenious orchestrations of the powerful but, in fact, the desperate, rear-guard attempt by capital writ large to contain and combat new forms of worker militancy.

A later generation of radicals who carried forward the spirit and practices of Workers’ Inquiry combined it with a theoretical orientation that built on the “fragment on machines” found in Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, the notebooks the radical philosopher made as he prepared to write his massively influential Kapital. For Marx scholars, the Grundrisse, which was not published until well after his death and decades after the formation of the Soviet Union (and was not even translated into Italian until the 1970s), maintained a more youthful, humanitarian dimension. The text was concerned not only with the way capitalism thrives on the exploitation of workers but also how it foments and depends on their alienation. Alienation from the things they create, from one another, but also from their “species being” (their human capacity to transform the world). Also, importantly, alienation from their capacity to co-create their future. Within those notebooks, the “fragment on machines” offered radical Italian theorists a language to speak of the way that workers under capitalism were part of and also shaped the “general intellect.” Typically understood to be shaped and monopolized by capitalist institutions, this aggregate sum of knowledge, science, technology, and art was also seen to be a product that workers helped to create. The fruits of modernity were the product of the labor of a whole society and shaped that society. But under capitalism, only a handful of individuals, usually of the ruling or middle class, ever have the opportunity to become intellectuals, technologists, and scientists. As such, the ideas and technologies they develop are hoarded by capitalist enterprises where the labor of the masses is used to transform ideas into commodities. Italian Marxist activists and theorists envisioned, by contrast, a form of socialism that included a “mass intellectuality” where the power to imagine and create was democratized.

More recently, scholars, activists, and labor organizers around the world have rekindled the Workers’ Inquiry method. This resurgence stems from a recognition of the necessity to trust and empower workers to become researchers and the way it centers workers as the driving force. Academic work must be done differently and democratized if there is a chance to challenge existing structures of power. But while the original Workers’ Inquiry in Italy focused almost exclusively on male industrial workers and the conditions of exploitation in the factory, we draw from more subsequent updates to this approach that see workers’ relationship to capitalism as occurring in many places and in many ways: the extraction of value through rent, for instance, or the unpaid reproductive labor workers’ must perform in the home (cooking, shopping, cleaning, caring for children and loved ones), work still disproportionately expected of women and, today, often commodified as discounted “services” on transnationalizing markets.

As the investigation of Amazon has become the forefront of research on the intersection of labor and capitalism, there have even been several recent approaches in using workers’ inquiry to understand the changing nature of capitalism through an investigation of Amazon warehouses and work on the Mechanical Turk microtask platform. Our project takes inspiration from these projects and seeks to extend this research. It departs from conventional Workers’ Inquiry in that our project isn’t exactly worker-led and, at this point, it’s more about discovering if it’s possible to think with science fiction about the challenges workers face today, rather than about shop-floor resistance. But our hope is that this research might inspire rank-and-file Amazon and other “platform capitalism” workers to undertake similar initiatives, or that labor organizers might also see some value in using the genre to explore the new dimensions of work and resistance.

Is resistance futile?

The career of Amazon and its founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is intimately connected to the science fiction genre. Bezos has at many points identified Star Trek as his single most important inspiration. So much so that he considered naming Amazon makeitso.com after the catch phrase of his hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired new episodes from 1987 until 1994, the year Amazon’s predecessor company was founded. Bezos even styles his appearance on that of Patrick Stewart and is unabashed in his embrace of the thriving and obsessive nerd culture around the franchise. According to his own testimony, and those of other founders and executives, Bezos would regularly make reference to Star Trek episodes in corporate strategy meetings and the series was in some senses pivotal to the internal culture of the company.

In fact, it is strongly suspected that Amazon was really an effort by the former financier to generate the wealth to launch his own private space program. In 2000, these efforts became reality with the creation of Blue Origin, whose mantra is “Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place.” When the company was finally successful at launching manned rockets in 2021, one of the first “guests” was the actor William Shatner, famous for playing the maverick Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series, which a young Bezos watched with an almost religious fervor.

It is, then, both ironic and telling that the empire Bezos created in some ways resembles a kind of dystopian world that his idolized intergalactic explorers might encounter and seek to liberate. In each incarnation of the franchise, Star Trek has dwelled on the social and philosophical issues related to the prospects of freedom, the nature of exploitation, and the possibilities of peace and cooperation across cultures. The noble United Federation of Planets was dreamed up by the series’s founder, Gene Roddenberry, as an antidote to the culture of fear and xenophobia fostered by the Cold War. He envisioned an interstellar alliance of species, including a multiethnic mix of humans, that, together, dedicated themselves to peace and exploration. In the journeys of their flagship Enterprise across multiple different series, the Federation encounters numerous planets and societies that act as allegories for our present-day earthly concerns. Critics have noted that, in the Cold War, Star Trek often appeared as a benevolent fantasy of the American Empire, championing notions of individualist “freedom” in contrast to the collectivist pathologies of alien species. But as the series developed, it would also, at times, come to critique the kind of ruthless and reckless profiteering associated with capitalism. However, the Federation is, ultimately, a postcapitalist fantasy based on the presumption that the development of technology will, by the 24th century, have largely eliminated the need for human toil and create a world of abundance and peace.

If it is Bezos’s dream to create such a world, he seems to be more than willing to sacrifice the lives, health, and well-being of millions of workers to achieve it. A recent leaked memo reveals that Amazon executives worry that, in many of the locales where there warehouses are located, they fear that the grueling pace of work and high rates of workers’ physical and emotional burnout will mean that the company will soon experience profound workers shortages as there are not enough new (and desperate) would-be workers to exploit. The exploitative and abusive practices of the company, combined with the larger-than-life corporate culture and megalomaniacal (former) CEO all feel like they were scripted with a heavy hand in the Star Trek writing room: some producer evidently let the concept slide by, without sending it back with a note saying, “Too on the nose: make the allegory for the evils of capitalism more subtle or we’ll lose the audience.”

If Star Trek has been such a large influence on Amazon’s development, perhaps there are clues within its plot lines and tropes that might help us unpack the firm’s deeper dimensions. In 1997, two years after it started selling books online, Amazon was publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In that same year, Star Trek: Voyager, then in its fourth season of network syndication, introduced the character Seven of Nine. Seven was a cyborg that the ship’s crew rescued from the Borg, a hive-minded alien species that, since their first appearance in the series in 1989, have terrorized the Federation and its heroes. Like her counterparts in The Collective, before being “assimilated” Seven was once an intelligent, independent human. However, upon being abducted as a child by the virus-like horde they were transformed into a powerful robotic drone dedicated to their collective mission of doing the same to all intelligent, independent lifeforms in the universe. Their monotone mantra, “resistance is futile,” has become so stitched into popular culture its origins have been largely forgotten.

Separated from her fellow drones, Seven eventually reclaims some sense of her individuality and morality and joins Voyager as part of its diverse crew. Her humanity recaptured, she becomes an invaluable strategic asset, not only for her superior strength, endurance, and intellectual capacities, but also because, having once been part of the hive mind, she has special insight into and even contact with it. Now part of the resistance to the Borg’s endless, viral growth, her intimate, embodied knowledge becomes a source of hope.

Is Amazon the Borg? In another chilling mantra of this intergalactic horde, will they continue their parasitic advance, seeking to: “Add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own”? Will our culture be made to “adapt to service us”? As more and more industries fall to its relentless, digitally augmented expansion or recast themselves around its model, the metaphor is tempting. Certainly it resonates with scenes of warehouses where workers wear sensors linked to Amazon servers, measuring and subtly “correcting” their movements to ensure efficiency in the service of profit. Though they retain their individuality and are framed by the company as “entrepreneurs,” the image of thousands of MTurk workers at computer terminals around the world racing to fulfill endless, mundane digital microtasks fed to them by an Amazon proprietary system transforms these workers into something not unlike drones. Amazon’s fleet of delivery drivers, who are constantly being nudged to do their work faster through arcane digital systems, is not altogether foreign. Sure, all these workers are allowed to retain their sense of individual selfhood. Unlike the Borg, they are technically free to quit at any time. But how much does that matter in an economy where increasingly every firm is learning from or being “disrupted” by Amazon’s model?

Worker as futurist

We speculate that, like Seven of Nine, Amazon workers may have some special insight and intuition of how to resist and rebel not only at the level of their conscious intellectual reflections, but also encoded in their very bodies. Workers are, of course, categorically excluded from management decision-making and strategy. The algorithms that govern their bodies and time are opaque. And yet our sci-fi-inspired conjecture is that workers intuit something about the firm and the future it is building by virtue of having been bodily assimilated into spaces and mindsets prescribed by Amazon’s corporate demands. Though their access to and power over Amazon’s “collective intelligence” is limited, they are still in some sense possessed by it and so have some preternatural awareness of it.

If that’s the case, then rank-and-file Amazon workers themselves may have the most important insights about how to challenge the company’s future-making machine. The wager of our project is that, by creating welcoming, convivial, and creative spaces we can work with Amazon workers to awaken their secret insight into the future-making (or future-killing) power of their exploiter. By using the genre of science fiction, so pivotal to Amazon’s foundation and operations, we might be able to labor together to envision a near-future world beyond Amazon’s grasp, where the potential to co-create a future is shared democratically, rather than hoarded by a corporate oligarchy.

In the next phase of our project, we will invite (and pay) 12 rank-and-file Amazon workers to become or hone their skills as writers of science fiction. We will offer a series of writers’ workshops and collaborative study sessions where, together, we can come to understand Amazon and the future it is creating. And beyond this, to develop our own powers to imaginatively seek out and share strange alternate visions of our new world. We will challenge our guests to develop short stories about a world beyond Amazon: utopian, dystopian, optimistic, or pessimistic. Amazon workers will workshop the stories together and we will work with publishing partners, including LARB, to bring them to the public.

We should, of course, not expect that the science fiction texts Amazon workers write will give us a blueprint for a universal future. Rather, their writing might invite generative public conversations and awaken the radical imagination in new ways. Another collective intelligence is possible. Resistance is far from futile.

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A version of this essay is forthcoming in Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures, edited by Alfonso Montuori and Gabrielle Donnelly and due out in late 2022.

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Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University and author, most recently, of the book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020).

Graeme Webb is an instructor in the School of Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He recently completed his dissertation, Science Fiction(ing): The Imagination, Crisis, and Hope (2020), which focuses on discourses of technology and social change.

Xenia Benivolski is an organizer, researcher, and art writer based in Toronto. Her writing appears in e-flux journal, Scapegoat Journal, and C magazine.

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Featured image: “Amazon España por dentro (San Fernando de Henares)” by Álvaro Ibáñez is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Image has been cropped.

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