Max Haiven (and company)

We speak to Brian van Slyke of the TESA Collective about how board games have become an important part of the social movement ecosystem and what it takes to design a game that contributes to today's struggles for racial, social and economic justice.

The TESA Collective is a 10-year old worker cooperative that designs and manufactures games for social movements. Their most recent game, “STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion,” builds on a long legacy including “Space Cats Fight Fascism”, “Rise Up: The Game of People & Power”, and “Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives.” Brian Van Slyke is a co-founder, lead designer and head of games for the collective.

Is it wise to approach today's rise in conspiracy fantasies as a form of dangerous play? The Conspiracy Games and Countergames team (Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, A.T. Kingsmith and Max Haiven) kick off the inaugural session of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab's 2021 Summer Institute (reimaginingvalue.ca/cgcg). They discuss anxiety, financialization and the game they're working on: DEEP STATE.

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College London, where he leads the Sociology and Social Theory Research Group. He is the author of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (University of Chicago Press, 2021). His current book project, tentatively titled ‘Winning in the Real Fake’, is an intellectual history of conspiracy in finance capitalism.

A.T. Kingsmith is PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at York University and Co-founder of EiQ Technologies, an emotion-AI start-up based out of the Design Fabrication Zone in the Creative Innovation Studio at Ryerson University. His forthcoming monograph, Anxiety as a Weapon: An Affective Approach to Political Economy, explores new modes for transforming the mental health landscape. For more, see atkingsmith.com.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) at Lakehead University. His recent books include Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts and Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. More information can be found at maxhaiven.com.

Rebecca Rouse joins us to discuss the use and misuse of empathy in games and the ways games and gaming can be profound platforms for individual and social transformation.

Rebecca Rouse, PhD is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Game Development at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Rouse’s research focuses on both the history and practice of storytelling with new technologies. Rouse creates projects for museums, heritage sites, interactive installation, movable books, and theatrical performance, all with the thread of investigating and inventing new modes of storytelling, as well as accompanying historical research into connections of today’s emerging media with technologies of the past. If you’re curious to learn more about Dr. Rouse’s work, check out her website at RebeccaRouse.com.

Marcus Gilroy-Ware explores how conspiratorial thinking thrives in a digital neoliberal world where truth is sold to the highest bidder and where alienation is rampant.

Marcus Gilroy-Ware is a writer and scholar-activist who is focused on understanding how people learn about the world they live in through media. His work draws connections between a variety of fields, from political economy, to psychology, to journalism studies, to theorise the status of information in the late-capitalist public sphere. He is senior lecturer in digital media at UWE Bristol and author of Filling the Void - Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media (2017) and After the Fact - The Truth about Fake News (2020)"

More information: http://www.mjgw.net/

Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit http://conspiracy.games

Writer and activist Arun Kundnani helps us unpack over two decades of Islamophobic conspiracy fantasies of the War on Terror and think about radical responses to a world of neoliberal warlordism.

Arun Kundnani writes about racial capitalism and Islamophobia, surveillance and political violence, and Black radical movements. He is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain (Pluto, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept.

More info: https://www.kundnani.org/

Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit http://conspiracy.games

Game designer, writer and researcher Jess Rowan Marcotte joins us to discuss the importance of community, connection and queerness in game design.

Jess Rowan Marcotte (they/them) is a queer mixed white-passing Mi’kmaw game designer, writer, maker and Doctor of Philosophy (Critical Interaction Design, Individualized Program). Their work focuses on interactive experiences of all sorts. They are the lead co-organizer of the Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) and one-third of Soft Chaos, a worker’s co-op that designs intimate, vulnerable interactive experiences. Their most recent solo work includes TRACES, a hybrid game about trans experiences and time travel, and UNLOCK. UNPACK., exploring carry-on suitcases, puzzles, and written messages as tools for creating intimacy between strangers who may never meet face to face.

More information: http://jeka.games/

Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit http://conspiracy.games

In the conclusion of our two-part interview, Wu Ming collective member 1 discusses the power of narrative and games in driving conspiracy fantasies and the forms of activism that have risen to confront a system that gives rise to them.

Wu Ming 1 is an original and ongoing member of the Wu Ming collective, which was founded in Bologna in 2000 and has, since that time, published several collaboratively written novels including 54, Manituana, Altai, The Army of Sleepwalkers, and The Invisible Everywhere, which have been translated into many languages. Wu Ming evolved out of the experimental collective project Luther Blisset whose famous 1999 novel Q focused on conspiracies of liberation and of repression during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. More recently, that novel and the Wu Ming Collective have been the subject of a great deal of speculation around the rise of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy. Regarding that, Wu Ming 1 has just published a book in Italian, La Q di Qomplotto (The Q in Qonspiracy: How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System), which presents a highly original and important analysis of the genesis and dangers of this strange hallucination.

Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit http://conspiracy.games

In the first of our two-part interview, Wu Ming collective member 1 discusses his new book La Q di Qomplotto (The Q in Qonspiracy: How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System).

Wu Ming 1 is an original and ongoing member of the Wu Ming collective, which was founded in Bologna in 2000 and has, since that time, published several collaboratively written novels including 54, Manituana, Altai, The Army of Sleepwalkers, and The Invisible Everywhere, which have been translated into many languages. Wu Ming evolved out of the experimental collective project Luther Blisset whose famous 1999 novel Q focused on conspiracies of liberation and of repression during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. More recently, that novel and the Wu Ming Collective have been the subject of a great deal of speculation around the rise of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy. Regarding that, Wu Ming 1 has just published a book in Italian, La Q di Qomplotto (The Q in Qonspiracy: How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System), which presents a highly original and important analysis of the genesis and dangers of this strange hallucination.

Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit http://conspiracy.games

* Hannah Appel (UCLA/Debt Collective)

* Max Haiven (Lakehead)

* Denise Ferreira da Silva (UBC)

* Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia)

* Facilitator: Catherine Cumming

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- How do debts function, yesterday and today, as racial capitalim’s revenge?

- Can debt be a grounds for emergent solidarities, today and tomorrow?

- What are the oppressed owed?

-How might those debts be reclaimed?

As the late David Graeber’s bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years taught us, unpayable debts have long been a tool that the powerful used to subjugate the oppressed. No less today when, as Denise Ferreira da Silva shows, the weight of debt disproportionately falls on the shoulders of those already encumbered by the burdens of racialization. But da Silva also encourages us to recognize the kinds of unpayable debts we owe to one another, to ancestors and to common struggle that might be the grounds of (re)emergent solidarity. Likewise Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s investigation of Puerto Rico’s colonial unpayable debt reveals that artists, activists and intellectuals are seizing the moment to ask profound questions of who really owes whom what. Likewise, the activist group Debt Collective is seeking to organize otherwise isolated debtors into a union of collective refusal and reinventing solidarity along the way. Can such efforts truly challenge a form of global racial capitalism that appears, as Max Haiven argues, to be taking a kind of nihilistic revenge on the planet?

More information: https://reimaginingvalue.ca/The-vengeance-of-unpayable-debts-Racial-capitalism-and-the-reclaiming-of-debts-from-below-efffbe8fcab24298adf5d6ef2a2263e5

Recorded April 7 as part of the “Pivot(al): Possibilities for a Post-pandemic World” lecture series of the Third Age Learning program of Lakehead University --> https://www.lakeheadu.ca/about/orillia-campus/community-programs/tal

What if we imagined the imagination as the basic building block of our society and everything in it? Take today’s increasingly digital form of money for example: an imaginary substance given value by our shared imaginative energies, but with a profound power over life and death around the world. Money is only one of many social and political institutions that depends on the imagination. Indeed, most of what we consider normal, necessary or eternal is imaginary. In the face of the urge to return to a “normal" that was destroying the planet and so many lives, how can we orchestrate the imagination more fair, peaceful and abundant ways of living together?

Dr. Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University, where he co-directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization.