In this episode, we talked about how fascism transforms itself in and across different historical conjunctures; how the far right uses race and gender as key points of articulation and why we should be engaging with psychoanalytic theories of fascism alongside radical anti-fascist thinkers; our current moment of transition as one of systemic instability, uncertainty and reorientation; and how in the contemporary moment of resurgent fascism, migration must be thought together with carcerality, especially when deportation has become the emblem of the Trump administration.

Alberto Toscano is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull, 2023), Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), and Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri (Brill, 2025). He is the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022), and Georges Bataille's Critical Essays, vols. I and II (with Benjamin Noys, Seagull, 2023 and 2025). He is series editor of Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books, and a columnist for the magazine In These Times. He has also translated the work of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, and Furio Jesi.

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we talked with Luce about her latest work on digitalised tyranny. About how private property structures the terms of the contract and gives rise to ever more terms; how the far right are both breaking the rules and playing by the rules to break the game; and about the overall structure of desire across society and what it’d mean to exit the transsexual contract of libidinal intelligibility, towards a horizon of hospitality and indeterminacy, driven by joy.

Luce deLire is a ship with eight sails and she lies down by the quay. As a philosopher, she publishes on the metaphysics of infinity and early modern philosophy but also on art, queer theory, anti-racism, postcolonialism, and political theory. In her performances, she embodies figures of the collective imaginary. She is currently an assistant professor at the department of philosophy at Humboldt University, Berlin. For more (including booking), see getaphilosopher.com and IG :@Luce_deLire

Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is the anti-capitalist game? For several decades, Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux of the game-changing Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination have been using play and games as methods of class war: from the disruptive frivolity of Reclaim the Streets marches to a Carnival Against Capitalism that shut down the London Stock Exchange; from the Climate Games that crowdsourced playful interventions against greenwashing to the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. On the final episode of "The Exploits of Play" we speak to Jay and Isa about their past “work” as well as their current activities, including at the ZAD: the autonomous “zone to defend” at Notre Dame de Landes, near Nantes, France, the subject of their 2021 book We Are Nature Defending Itself.

Jay Jordan is co-founder of Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000) and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, and co-author of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003) and A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible (Minor Compositions, 2011). Isabelle Fremeaux is a popular educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London. Along with Jay Jordan, she is a coordinator of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Together, they are the authors of "We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones" from Pluto Press in 2021. That book details their role in the struggle for the ZAD: an autonomous community in Western France that for decades fought back against state repression and is today a beacon of hope for radical ecological activists in that country and around the world.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if we handed some of the most consequential decisions about the future of humanity and the planet to a bunch of game-obsessed nerds? From artificial intelligence to the future of money, from the way we find love to the way we come to know our bodies and communities, Silicon Valley has become one of the most revolutionary and transformative forces of our times. What games do they play? In this episode Christian Nagler helps us understand with a deep dive into the ideology and fantasy of the “longevity community” seeking to leverage unimaginable wealth and technological utopianism to beat death at its own game.

Christian Nagler is a writer and artist. His work looks at (and performs) the imbrications of embodiment and global economics both in his everyday life and in projects like Market Fitness, and Yoga for Adjuncts he researches critical ethnography, political theory, and media and cultural studies at UC Berkeley.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an age when our most intimate connections with others are mediated by gamified interfaces, it’s high time to revisit how the game of love became the plaything of capital. Alfie Bown joins us for episode 8 to explore the joys and horrors of the ero-tech and the burning question: can hookup apps, dating sims and thirst traps can be reclaimed for the common good?

Alfie Bown is editor of "Everyday Analysis" and "Sublation Magazine". His books include Post Comedy, which is forthcoming in 2024, Dream Lovers, Capitalism and the Gamification of Relationships from 2022, Post Memes from 2019 and the PlayStation Dream World from 2017.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the blockbuster "reality" tv show "Love Island," an even number of conventionally attractive cis men and women compete to partner up and win the audience's affection in a spectacle that, like most of its kind, sees producers push heteronormative cliches to their absurd and humiliating limits. On this episode, theorist and author Sophie Lewis joins us to explore the show's popularity in a late capitalism era marked by pervasive "heteropessimism" and the relentless gamification of romance.

Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic, freelance writer, and independent scholar with teaching affiliations at Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. In 2022, they published Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation from Verso and they have an upcoming book called Enemy Feminisms set to be published in 2025 from Haymarket Books.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The worldwide gaming market is estimated at $347 billion. That's a hefty chunk of change, power and influence which lies in the hands of an exceptionally few game makers primarily in the global north. How does the culture of an industry like gaming leak into the broader political sphere? Episode 6 of "The Exploits of Play" features guest Thiago Falcão who is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Digital Media at the Federal University of Paraíba. He is the current president of the Brazilian chapter of the Digital Games Research Association - Digra, which he helped found in 2022. He researches the relationships between entertainment, video games, and neoliberal capitalism, with a broad focus on issues related to work, politics, and financialization dynamics in these media.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Race and capitalism have always shaped one another, but what do we make of their relationship in an age when both systems increasingly toy with our lives in apocalyptic ways? How has the rhetoric of the cheat become part of a vicious racist reactionary politics, and what's the role of humor and fun in the struggle for a better world? Episode 5 stars guest Gargi Bhattacharyya who writes on issues of systemic injustice, racial capitalism, social reproduction, climate crisis and collective survival. She is the author of The Futures of Racial Capitalism (2024), Rethinking Racial Capitalism (2018) and Dangerous Brown Men (2008).

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the historic archives of 15th-century Italy to the contemporary landscape of the commercial gaming industry, this episode explores the intricate interplay of power dynamics within the realm of play with our guest Mary Flanagan. Dr. Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer who pioneered the field of game research with her ideas on critical play. In this interview we dive into Dr. Flanagan's research, her books and what it takes to design and market a game today.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 3 of "The Exploits of Play" with guest Dr. Tom Boland explores how the game changes the player and how this fits into western literature's beloved 'character arc' as well as the new age obsession with personal transformation. Tom Boland is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University College Cork. His main research interests are in critique, culture, unemployment and welfare though recently Dr. Boland has been interested in the proliferance of dystopian games media such as The Hunger Games and “Squid Game”.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.