"Trust Study #1 centers on a dialogue about the informal and illegal money transfer system originating in South Asia known as hawala. The conversation unfolds in silence through text against a backdrop of still images from a 1960s Pakistani travel guide. As the images move from the background to the foreground, another layer to the structure of hawala emerges. Trust Study #1 is the first in a larger body of work including sculptures, photography, and writing.”

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.

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.

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.

What I’m playfully calling sci-fi urbanism here, does not necessarily offer a design response to the immediate problems that planetary urbanisation is imposing on us. But, at the ecological crossroads we are in, it may help us shift the parameters we must embrace when addressing such problems. Using scenario thinking to look a little bit further into the future – and to consider what we already know about that future in quite certain terms – may help us avoid some costly missteps and some seriously pathological paths forward.

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?

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 to explore the joys and horrors of the erotech and the burning question: can hookup apps, dating sims and thirst traps can be reclaimed for the common good?

Using an analysis of the weapons trade’s economic ecosystem, Palestine Action finds Elbit’s weak points and applies pressure. Forcing a risky environment, so that businesses and stakeholders are discouraged from investing in Elbit and forced to pull their money from the company. This has led to the forced closure of three Elbit sites. Proving that a successful act of resistance does not consider the riches of the occupier to be a fixed reality. A good strategy can, and will, bring them down.

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).

Episode 3 of "The Exploits of Play" with 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.

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Held close to the hearts of many of today's major decision makers, fundamentally believed by most politicians and business leaders as well as the gospel truth by many of the people designing software in Silicon Valley– the influence of game theory is difficult to underestimate. Because it masks itself in the language of reason, rationality and zero sum mathematical decision making, it's very difficult to challenge those people who hold this theory as truth about human nature. In this episode we interview Dr. S.M. Amadae whose work over the last decades has set out to deconstruct game theory by offering us a really incredible intellectual history of this concept and design new frameworks for moving us forward.

Episode 1 of "The Exploits of Play", season 1 of the Weird Economies podcast hosted by Max Haiven. "We're ill-served if we imagine that play and games is alien from the major issues and crises of our times."

What happens to the negativity of the subject of chronic fatigue, whose unruly weariness, untethered from the demands of energetic expenditure and the rehabilitative promise of rest and repose, becomes a state of perpetual loss? As a fatigue which does not abate — a lack which is never replenished — so-called “pathological” or chronic fatigue forces us, if we are to engage with it seriously, to cut the umbilical tie between fatigue and its antithetical currency energy once and for all.

"My main interest is to find a way out of a very costly intellectual, cultural and political deadlock we find ourselves in between business as usual and helpless prophecies of doom, solutionism or technophobia, blind unsustainable growth and dreams of a past natural state, (proto-fascist) Climate Change Denial and naïve (liberal) environmentalism."-- Armen Avanessian

There are multiple ways to define Scheme in a Can. It can be perceived as a speculative art piece, a strategic blueprint, an online comic book, a simulator for imagined economic models, a commentary on branding in dance music, or even an introduction to cooperatives. However, the main intention behind the project is for it to be used as a pedagogical tool.

Against the backdrop of a nascent moment in cryptocurrencies, the task presented itself to leverage their speculative energy into collective action. The idea was simple: Mine cryptocurrency Monero, together, to post bail and get people out of jail.

On July 10th, 2023, Weird Economies hosted its first in-person gathering in Lisbon, Portugal inside the cavernous space of Carpintarias de São Lázaro Cultural Center extending the network of weird economic experimentation. The second half of the event centered on exploring activities in Portugal. Weird Economies invited three Lisbon-based participants to provide localized perspectives on art, economy, and infrastructure.

One question that lies at the forefront of much recent attention to supply chains and commodity flows is; ‘can the current map of financial flows survive a remapping of the world’s shipping system?’. A more pragmatic question might be whether the shipping system can survive its own financially-minded, oligopolistic death drive — or even, in its current bloated state, if it should.

This project, titled Institute of Care, takes the position that there must be an increase in the care labour force, that work conditions must meet the nature of care, and that a new kind of pension fund based on this labour can be constructive to these changes. Importantly, it takes the stance that simply increasing pension payments, whether from individual contributions or state subsidies, will not solve the problem because it does not address the labour that is critical to care. 

As a means to secure financial stability in retirement, private pension funds have been replacing public pensions around the world. In order to provide sufficient funds for a reasonable quality of life in retirement, individuals need to make monthly payments from salary for typically 35 years. Payment contributions differ between countries, ranging from 5% plus 3% from the employer in the UK,  to 18.6% in Germany, with half the contribution paid by the employer. The funds then invest these monthly payments into a variety of assets in order to make a profit to pay these individuals at retirement. 

In the five years since Russia interfered in the US elections, cyberwar has continued to permeate digital platforms. Unfolding on social media, this mode of combat is governed by private companies rather than sovereign nations. The Facebook Papers, by revealing how the platform is wired for misinformation, illustrate how it operates as a digital battleground where conflict generates revenue. Therefore, to engage with the logic of cyberwar, we must examine the market rules the platforms obey. In the interview, Anna Engelhardt invites Rosamond to elaborate on the key economic principles of reputation warfare. In particular, Engelhardt will connect Rosamond’s thinking with the understanding of cyberwar as an economic enterprise, as analysed by Svitlana Matvyienko and Nick Dyer-Witheford in their 2019 book Cyberwar and Revolution.

We exist within narratives in that it is impossible to exist outside of culture; rationality is just one narrative that is often presupposed to be objective truth, and it is a specific logic that can exclude other forms of knowledge and experiences.

Speculation has been a hot topic, a nebulous yet mostly negative concept, and occasionally a swear word. Associate Professor of Sociology at UCL Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou dissects speculation with more attention and precision, looking at its historical genealogy and how it percolated from the financial world to our everyday lives. In this interview he tells us about the motivations and frustrations behind his newly published book “Speculative Communities” in which he investigates the financial world’s influence on the social imagination, unravelling its radical effects on our personal and political lives. 

What did it mean that someone deeply involved in the very activities and legitimizing structures of what would pass any rough definition of neoliberalism was himself engaged in exposing the “invention of the economy” and denouncing both GDP and the unemployment rate as “zombie numbers”? It should at least prompt a moment to reflect. What does it mean when an act of ideological critique becomes itself naturalized? Why is it that the invention of the economy has been absorbed relatively seamlessly into mainstream discussions? It might be helpful to recall then-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s quotable prediction from 1991 that soon “there will no longer be national economies, as least as we have come to understand that concept.” What parallel tendencies might the act of deconstructing the economy be coasting next to, and perhaps inadvertently feeding off of--and in to?

The rural locality becomes a thing to be consumed by the cultural elite, hence a potential arbitrary asset; while at a similar pace, its value deteriorates as the lure of the island is directly linked to its exoticism and mystical scarcity. The encompassing access and commodification of landscapes contradict the need for the discovery of unknown mystique on the island.

Kim Stanley Robinson describes his latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, as a sustained thought experiment that is designed to articulate a “best case [climate] scenario that you can still believe in.” One aspect of this "optopian" scenario concerns the creation of a worldwide Carbon coin, backed by the central banks and issued in order to finance the great ecological transition.

In March 2022, Colin Drumm, a scholar and educator who focuses on monetary history and political philosophy, hosted us in Mimbres Valley, New Mexico where he lives and works. "In Mimbres Valley” is a conversational video that came out of a walking tour of a site surrounded by arid hills and ranches that is slated to be an alternative school that Drumm is founding. In a commissioned text “What Good is Education”, Drumm asks what kind of economic good is education. Is it a capital asset, a positional good, or is it a consumption good? These questions are duly answered by Drumm who concludes with a proposal for teaching the arts and humanities beyond the profit motives that have undone the American university system. For Drumm, the pleasure of reading and learning in itself is a consumption good worth paying for.

I’ve been thinking about what I call femmunism, which is neither feminist nor communist... What’s a sort of femme rather than feminist aesthetic, and that’s not all utopian, femmes have rivalries, are bitchy. There’s bad affect in it as well, but there is attention to surfaces, to effective connections and spaces, there’s decentering of certain kinds of aggression. How would we recenter forms of interaction around femme values? That seems to me to be an interesting project.

In Justice is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the 21st century (2021), Robert Meister presents capitalism as an injustice-compounding machine that we can only hope to reprogram if we start conceiving of justice as a financial option.

The mechano-vampiric paradigm of proof-of-work is a growing threat to planetary ecology: Bitcoin exists in competition with natural life for the harvestable energy this side of the Sun, and it will continue to outbid nature as time and capital accumulate in its ledger. This is the Faustian reality of proof-of-work: it works, and works, and works, and works…

What surfaced with the 2007 crisis is the fact that the derivative has taken hold outside the arcane world of financial speculation: exploiting algorithmic processes that leverage the dynamic recalibration of contingent claims (another term for derivatives) is not only characteristic of finance. Rather, its performative language has become the template for a technocapitalism (i.e., data-driven financial and platform capitalism) in which the future turns from an uncertain and unknown horizon to a trajectory to directly act in and on the present. In a nutshell, the future emerges today within a derivative paradigm. 

White Cube (2020) is a powerful and provocative dissection of art, class and decolonisation. The film follows the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), a plantation workers’ cooperative based on a former Unilever plantation in the Congolese town of Lusanga, as they attempt to end the destructive system of monoculture on their lands – by building upon it a gallery, the ‘white cube’ of the title.

Martijn Konings is Professor of Political Economy and Social Theory at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Development of American Finance (2011), The Emotional Logic of Capitalism (2015), Neoliberalism (with Damien Cahill, 2017), Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal reason (2018), and The Asset Economy (with Lisa Adkins and Melinda Cooper, 2020). He is currently working on a book on the politics of asset inflation. He is also the co-editor of the book series Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times. at Stanford University Press. During the 2021-22 academic year he holds a fellowship at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.

With each passing year, the danger of drowning in our own liquidity is growing exponentially. Staying afloat in these exceptional times requires exceptional measures. What if you could start making money? Like, literally?

Artist, technologist and software developer Sarah Friend works on the imbricated fringes of art, finance and blockchain technology. From an NFT marketplace incentivizing coordination to scaling trust with the crypto-UBI project Circles, Friend uses software as a medium to parody, question and re-invent value and our social behavior towards capital.

Creativity is the capacity human beings have to generate new ideas. This capacity tends to flourish in extremes or times of crises, although not exclusively. When creativity emerges as a response to conditions of emergency or scarcity, it acquires predominance in all areas of cultural, economic, and social organization, as is the case of Cuba.

Creating an NFT from an art work on a Blockchain known to require the energy expenditure rivaling that of most countries where people will begin to suffer exponentially and extraordinarily is to assume the final evolution of artist as entrepreneur: No longer creator of beauty or meaning but of value.

Carmen is a 15 year-old GCSE student and content creator based in London. Since 2018, she has made over a 100 videos for her Youtube channel. Alongside Will, she also co-hosts "The Overthinking Podcast". @carmennyt / @theoverthinking.podcast

Interview with Evgeny Morozov

In order to turn the world into a swarm of living commons rather than self-abstracting, debased corporate entities, we need to engage further into how monetary systems, financial apparatuses and business models actually work.

Before the virus there was tear gas. Before tear gas there was flaming trash. Bassem Saad makes specific figurations with our grief.