In this episode we discuss the contradiction within games between gender play and fantasies to control and order; video games as reproductive technology; the playfulness of the far right which could be characterised as play without pleasure; how rulebreaking and gamebreaking play out in liberal democracy and fascism; and the possibilities of play and protest in antifascist practices and riotous revolution.

If we were looking at history for the way through, where is it? We think it exists in different modes in different periods, coming and going, strong then weak, never disappearing, just evil physics, pulls exerting pushes as time bends on itself and gravity shakes itself to pieces here. By the 70s Addington Square was classic dilapidation. We know from many photos that the posh Georgian square turned shit post-war square turned posh square once more, is the tale here. Uppers and downers shown in pictures of commercial premises and businesses and broken down cars around the streets of the busted up central public park. Ruination now abolished and the asking price for houses there are astronomical. Heaven's money needed. Even the railings around the central park are Grade 2 listed. So there are periods like now where we are disappeared but periods also come and go where we ruled.

In this episode, we discussed the concept of microfascism, which refers to everyday life practices, and intersubjective relations that establish power dynamics and form the organisation of desire. The yearning for and supplication to power is at work in everyone and must constantly be guarded against, for these are easily amenable to fascist organisations and movements. As the saying goes: “Kill the cop in your head!” We also discussed martial masculinity as it manifests in combat sports such as Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), as well as figures of such franchises such as Dana White, who is a close associate of Trump and many other fascist personalities.

Following the money that propels organised transphobia illuminates the material foundations that are at stake beneath the hallucinatory moral panic. Prominent lobbying organisation the LGB Alliance, for example, rents an office at 55 Tufton Street. The Georgian townhouse, just parallel to Millbank, is also home to the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, Leave Means Leave, Migration Watch UK, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Global Warming Policy Foundation, New Culture Forum, BrexitCentral and the Institute for Economic Affairs. The Institute for Economic Affairs is a particularly significant office-mate: inspired by Friedrich Hayek, founded in 1955 by businessman and battery farming tycoon, Anthony Farmer, the IEA was central to the development of neoliberalism and its adoption in Britain. In Thatcher’s own words, the IEA ‘created the climate of opinion which made [her] victory possible.’ We can read the tenants of 55 Tufton Street as a guide to the connections between, on the one hand, financialisation, deregulation, and the destruction of the welfare state and, on the other, the culture wars that dominate public discourse. The LGB Alliance, of course, are keen to downplay any connection, with their managing director, Kate Barker saying, ‘our detractors will seek to draw conspiratorial conclusions from our address. I can tell you that the office was chosen because it, handy, flexible and that it became available at the right time.’

In this episode we talked about how we got from Gamergate to the far right fascist politics we’re seeing unleashed today. Gamergate refers to a strange phenomenon that occurred in 2014, where a group of video game fans used online platforms - from Reddit to 4Chan to Craigslist - to create a harassment campaign against feminist gamemakers and critics, making tactics like doxxing and shitposting widespread. Gamergate is a signature moment in the ascendency of the new far right. We spoke with Adrienne about how Silicon Valley and its economic framework gave rise to the platforms implicated in fascist movements like Gamergate; whether we are embroiled in the normalisation of dark play; and what the Left should be doing in the face of our servitude to privatised digital infrastructure.

From a small spot in a small place, large reworkings of the world are not just dreamt up, but financed. This financialisation comes to suffuse worlds and bodies and minds. Locally it is aligning the area more and more into that one it conjured up, of Palo Alto, bristling with digital platform capitalism, networked with local and national government. Another name the venture capitalists float for the area is New City of London, everything a hashtag for social media, a snappy name, a concept title. Is it that the fleshy, grounded people of that old named place Somers Town – named after the aristocrat who possessed the land – now stand in the way of something bigger, better, shinier.

Creative professionals find themselves ‘attracted to these inauthentic capitalist shadows of progressive spaces because genuine progressive spaces in London are now almost nonexistent. The criminalisation of residential squatting in 2012 effectively ended the possibility of young people starting cohabitation projects in the city without serious financial investment.’ Emerging from a profound crisis in housing affordability, schemes like The Collective seek to absorb the energy of experimental communities and politically conscious forms of cohabitation, in order to package it up as a ready-made, rentable commodity, allowing developers to extract maximum revenue from minimal space. So, while we can indeed see a shift in emphasis away from isolated private spaces, owner-occupation, and the nuclear family here, I would argue that what we are witnessing is (at best) a kind of monkey’s paw version of public luxury. We wished for more communal ways of living and for an alternative to domestic realism, and sure, commercial co-living offers us that, but it does so in a horribly twisted manner – one that not only accelerates gentrification and repackages unaffordable housing as a “lifestyle choice”, but which also relies upon a thoroughly depoliticised vision of community.

The meaning of images, of testimony, of evidence, of rights, of medical integrity, of journalistic responsibility and the discursive frameworks that govern their production and circulation are foreshadowed by the excessive interiority of Palestinian life we’ve been witnessing for a year and a half, daily, hourly. As we find ourselves at this historical turn that both brings the question of Palestine to the fore, and exposes Zionism as the frontier of imperial dominance today, we must ask ourselves: what does the anticolonial struggle for the liberation of Palestine reveal to us about global understandings of race, property, and capital? What are the political openings and new internationalisms that emerge from within this moment of fascist-liberalism and foreclosure? If crisis [as genocide, and genocide as crisis] is a moment when the sustained violent order of things can no longer resume in the same manner, how do we forge a way forward? What are the considerations and relationships that we have with one another, our professions, and our thinking, our very lives that must be rearranged, given up, and radically reconstructed? The exchanges below attempt at identifying these stagnancies and foreclosures, in order to offer a renewed historical and materialist reading and understanding of how and why we shall overcome the present. 

This episode was recorded as part of a live panel event at Pelican House on the 13 April 2025 celebrating the London launch of Max’s board game Billionaires and Guillotines, published by Pluto Press. In this episode we talked about the role of games and play in the coming revolution; the game mechanics of Billionaires & Guillotines and what its format might offer players; why Max chose the guillotine as the instrument of abolition; and we even played a game role-playing a war profiteer, an aristocrat and a tech overlord.

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.

The following conversation first started in August 2024. Conditions continue to change across Palestine, but the issue of Palestinian prisoners remains urgent and the struggle against carcerality - as an expanded tool of administration, control, and elimination - continues to guide the struggle for liberation.

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.

The poisoning-by-plume and tainted groundwater demands an understanding of Forever War–the ceaseless reproduction of an enemy, of territory/property to defend, of contracts to secure–as enmeshed, as cellularly possessed, and now inseparable, from living in the Sonoran Desert. Meanwhile, the munitions manufacture at Raytheon presses on at breakneck pace; impacting communities nearest to its production site in addition to the catastrophic devastation wrought on those thousands of miles away. This, as part of the long history of ecocide against Indigenous land and its people.

This essay is titled in the spirit of the Weird Economies glossary for the breadth of meanings we can extract from a single word captured by economic use – in this case, exchange. That is, to change one thing for another. As we have, by trading one atmosphere that allows a habitable planet for all life, for one that threatens all life. Exchange also means reciprocation—you give one thing and get another in return. From this perspective, atmospheric exchange lends itself to two connotations: a market exchange based on atmospheric gases; and climate change itself. 

"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.

Now I just do my thing. I walk around, I spend money. I see hungry people. I give them money. I create markets. And that turned out to be what it was, or at least as far as I can understand it. I’m here to create markets, markets for dollars. I have an infinite supply, so I spend it into the system. The people who they want to have the dollars I spend are the ones they tell. They track down whoever I spend it with. They shake them down. They probably steal it. Maybe they set up a local economy around me: I need this, I need that… They find someone to sell it to me, buy the dollars off them in local currency. Then they use the dollars to buy what They want them to buy. I’m just the first node in a system. Foucault’s pendulum, I learned about those when I was decorating a house I bought in the Hamptons. I’m the disturbance that gets conducted through the system to the other end. I only know when the wave moves back to me, pushes me out to somewhere else. Somewhere else I’m supposed to be. Endlessly until they tire of me, or maybe kill me.

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.

A new landscape is taking over the dense Amazon rainforest. Where before one’s gaze could get lost among the different shades of green forest that was imagined to be endless, today it comes across a sad reality: small patches of forest, here and there, surrounded by vast fields of soybean monoculture. A forest in ruins. This is the landscape that dominates the Lower Tapajós, located in western Pará (Brazil), especially on the right bank of the river. But how was this landscape formed? What are the social, political, and ecological dimensions implicated in the shaping of this landscape? What forms of violence were involved?

For the past eight years, the Hodeidah port lay dormant, devoid of maritime activity, following a brutal war and a suffocating siege instigated by the Saudi-led coalition backed by the US. But amidst this desolation, it unexpectedly became the stage for a remarkable trajectory of asymmetric maritime warfare. On November 19th of the preceding year, Houthi rebels seized the Galaxy Leader, the vehicle carrier of a British company owned by an Israeli businessman, on its way to Jeddah. Prompted by Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza, Yemen’s Ansarallah-led armed forces declared on November 14th their intent to target any Israeli-affiliated ship traversing the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea. This vital water passage serves as the entry point to the Suez Canal, facilitating approximately 10 percent of global trade and the transit of 8.8 million barrels of oil daily. On December 9th, Ansarallah expanded its operations to target any vessel in the Red Sea destined for Israel, irrespective of its nationality. "If Gaza's essential supplies of food and medicine are not ensured, all ships bound for Israeli ports in the Red Sea, regardless of origin, will be deemed targets by our armed forces," stated an Ansarallah Armed Forces spokesperson. The Houthis have pledged to maintain this blockade until Israel ceases its genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza. 

When revisiting the events that took place during the 26 attacks in Chiapú-Xingu, it is important to highlight the difficulty of drawing a timeline due to the structural and health chaos triggered by the attack. To draw this timeline, documents from both perspectives of the conflict were crossed: both the minutes of the CUX (Xingu Unified Command), and the logs of the Catre Base of the Ministry of Brazil, as well as less implicated perspectives of observers and survivors. All documents used in this report are under the seal of the Disclosure Law promoted by the Responsibility Board.

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?

It’s hard to imagine a 7-foot tall bronze statue materialising overnight in Downtown New York, but suddenly, there it was. Harambe was back. The Gorilla was shot dead in Cincinnati zoo in 2016 when a three-year-old crawled through a gap and fell more than 10 feet into his enclosure. Harambe’s final moments are probably stored somewhere in your memory, the silverback pulling the toddler through shallow waters or holding his hand, fixing his clothes almost paternally, or seeming to shield him from the screaming crowd and their outstretched iPhones. Facebook petitions called for ‘Justice for Harambe’. But hysterical virtue signalling quickly gave way to online parody. “We comin’ with them dicks out to avenge harambe !!!”, wrote one Twitter user calling himself @sexualjumanji.

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).

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.

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.

Dear applicant, Our services combine the latest cutting-edge predictive technologies with an exclusive and dynamic global geographic intelligence database to provide you with an optimised and fully-customised migration scheme that is suited to your profile and financial means, whatever they may be. We know that the world is full of choices. We thank you for choosing our services and eagerly await your response.

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, the author of The Net Delusion (2011), To Save Everything, Click Here (2013), and the founder and the publisher of The Syllabus, a knowledge curation initiative.

N.B. terra0's original concept was developed 2015/16 by Paul Seidler and Paul Kolling in the New Media class of Joachim Sauter at the Berlin University of the Arts. The artists researched crypto-governance, economics and questions about the representation of natural systems in the techno-sphere. The result was a theoretical framework describing how a plot of forest could become an autonomous economic actor through technological and economic augmentation. The framework allowed for a forest to log its own trees through automated processes, smart contracts and blockchain technology. In doing so, it shifted the typical valorization through third parties to self-utilization and accumulated capital. As soon as it was able to procure its real exchange value, it bought itself and became legally and economically independent.

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.