Upstream - Gamified Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism w/ Max Haiven

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

In this episode we're joined by Max Haivan for a conversation on gamified capitalism and 21st century fascism. Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Radical Imagination at Lakehead University and author of many books, including most recently, The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism, which is open-access. He is the designer of the board game Billionaires & Guillotines and teaches a popular education course titled Fighting Fascist Feelings.   The conversation begins with a broad overview of Max's thesis connecting games and capitalism—what he calls gamified capitalism—introducing the concept of 21st century capitalism as a sort of cruel and unwinnable game in which we are all trapped. We discuss the financialization of capitalism as the foundation upon which gamification has flourished, describing the emergnce of the "cheated player" navigating a never-ending series of financialized games—from dating apps to prediction markets.  Max explains how fascism on both a micro and macro level emerges out of this material reality through a sort of revenge politics and the creation of the "cheating other" who must be eliminated from society. We go on to elaborate on this and discuss how fascism in the 20th century differs from 21st century fascism as a sort of entrepreneurial form of fascism that places the emphasis on the individual as opposed to the mass.  We situate Trump in Max's analysis of 21st century fascism as a form of revenge against the cheating other under gamified capitalism, discussing QAnon, the TESCREAL philosophies of Silicon Valley, and other fascistic phenomena along the way. We end by exploring what games can teach the left and how learning from games can contribute to our movements for liberation.  We are now on Youtube! You can find us and subscribe to our channel at youtube.com/@upstream_podcast Further resources: The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, by Max Haiven Max's work Related episodes: Capitalist Realism w/ Carlee Listen to our ongoing series on Palestine Intermission music: "Shit List" by Carsie Blanton Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This is a fascism that emerges from an economy built on platform corporations like Uber, like Google, like meta, like Airbnb. It's going to be a form of fascism that doesn't give us the sort of sick and suicidal joy of disappearing into the mass, but instead conscripts everyone as individual players as well. And what I think 21st century fascism says is not trust us, we will restore the nation, and we will restore everyone to stability and greatness. Instead, it says, join us and we're going to take aim at the parasites. And once we're done, everyone's going to be able to get back to the life and death struggle for survival. You're listening to Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Fascism in the 20th century took a very specific form and emerged at a very specific material conditions. Today's emerging fascism doesn't look the same as it did a century ago.

It has its own unique characteristics and has grown out of a very specific form of capitalism, a kind of gamified capitalism, where its subjects, all of us, have been subjected to a cruel game that is simply not winnable for the vast majority. In this episode, we're joined by Max Haven for a conversation on gamified capitalism and 21st century fascism. Max Haven is a Canada research chair in Radical Imagination at Lakehead University, and the author of many books, including most recently, The Player and the Played, from gamed capitalism to 21st century fascism, which is open access. He's also the designer of the board game, billionaire,

and guillotine and teaches a popular education course titled Fighting Fascist Feelings. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through this support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund. So thank you in advance for

the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Max Haven. All right, Max, it's wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation, a little while now. And I just want to start by apologizing to you and our listeners. If you hear any weird beeping or loud sounds in the background, I woke up this morning and they're doing, I think they're repaving the entire parking lot outside the room I'm recording in. So I have all the windows closed obviously and the blinds drawn for the most part. So hopefully it's not distracting, but just wanted to point that out before we get started. But yeah,

Putting that aside, I would love to start with an introduction for you. Can you introduce yourself for our listeners and tell us a little bit about the work that you do? Sure. Well, my name is Max Haven and I'm a professor and a Canada research chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University in Canada. I write books, including the recently published The Player and the Played from Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, which just came out, open access from MIT and will be specifically. speaking about today, I suppose. I'm also a game maker. I made a board game that was released earlier this year called Billionaires and Gillotine. You can guess how it ends. And I also organize a festival for radical games in play in London called Games Transformed. And in addition to that, I also do popular education in a platform called Sense and Solidarity, where we make critical theory irresistible to people working in social movements. Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you so much for that. And we will, of course, include a bunch of those links in the show notes so that folks can just easily find out more about what you do.

But yeah, like you said, we are going to be focusing for the most part on your recent book today, the player and the played. And I think maybe just to start before we get into more of the details of the book, I would love it if you could just kind of give us a zoomed out view of the book and sort of describe what you were ultimately arguing. and writing about in the book. Absolutely. I'm among those committed scholars who are trying to understand the rise of fascism in our times, and the particular lens I took to it in this book

is through games and gamification and something that I call gamed capitalism. So while the book isn't actually about games, like video games and board games, exactly, it is about how most of us came to feel like we're being forced to play an unwinnable game. And the way that that form of capitalism that we live under that gives us that largely correct impression

unfortunately often inclines towards fascist ideas, dispositions, and politics. So the book is a kind of investigation of how the metaphor of games can be used to unpack this very dangerous moment that we're in right now. So let's dig deeper into this idea of games. And this idea of us being players in an unwinnable game in our current capitalist society really, really resonated with me. And I don't think I'm the only one that it would resonate with. So I was really, yeah, when I read that, I felt like, okay, like, I get exactly what Max is writing about here. So you write in the book, quote, today, we almost all feel to a significant.

extent, if in different ways, trapped in an unfair, inscrutable, and unwinnable game. And that's an idea that we're going to continue to unpack, because there's many facets to it. And yeah, I think maybe if you can introduce us more to this idea that you present in the book about the significance of games and gamification and what you describe as the quote, psychogeography of unwinnable capitalism. I mean, I wanted to begin this book with a kind of anti-capitalist phenomenology. I wanted to start from the feeling that we all have, that somehow like the characters in Squid Game or The Hunger Games, which clearly are very popular texts these days,

that we've somehow been conscripted into a game that we never quite chose, that we don't seem to be able to escape, and that most of us certainly. can't win. And so I sort of began there, again, with the popularity of those cultural texts, and then began to unpack this question of how we've seen the emergence of what I call gamed capitalism. Now, I should clarify for your listeners who I think, you know, are interested in different perspectives on capitalism, that when I say gamed capitalism, I don't mean we've entered like a fundamentally new era of capitalism. There's certainly new things about capitalism, but there's a lot that's just the same that, you know, Marx and others analyzed, you know,

150 years ago, it's still a system of exploitation of people and the planets oriented around the private ownership of the means of production. But I think by adding gamed to our understanding of capitalism and thinking about gamed capitalism, we can see some things that are new that are pretty significant. So one of them is just the incredible growth of the games industry to begin with. I mean, the games industry by some estimates is the largest entertainment industry on Earth. there's estimate that somewhere between one and two billion human beings play a commercially mediated game each day, usually on their smartphones. But beyond that, the games industry is said to be larger than the music industry, film industry,

and publishing industry combined. So, you know, we just have a massive cultural industry here. And a cultural industry that's relatively new, but that has learned many lessons from other capitalist culture industries, both lessons about how to exploit. workers because the games industry is incredibly exploitative, both to the people who are making games in studios, but also to all the people digging stuff out of the ground and transporting it and turning it into Xbox consoles and factories. But also, I think as a capitalist cultural industry, the games industry has learned a lot about how to shape us ideologically. And not just shape us

ideologically through the messages it's sending in terms of characters, storylines, but also the way it's elicits and seduces our sense of agency. I mean, what makes a game fun is that it's different every time you play it, that you as a player have some influence over the outcome of the game. But I think as many people who play video games recognize, this is a very controlled form of agency. You know, some games, you have massive open worlds where you can change many things,

but most games are, to borrow a phrase from Nick Dyer-Witherford, kind of like roller coaster rides. You just kind of get on, you make maybe a couple of choices, but realistically you're sort of being forced through a very narrow form of agency, of what you can actually do, the worlds you can build, the economies you can create. So that's kind of part one is thinking about games and the games industry as part of 21st century capitalist cultural industries. And then sort of part two of my analysis is saying, well, but there's also this thing we call

gamification. And, you know, we're all subject to the inclusion and the use of game-like elements in all sorts aspects of our digital life, from dating apps to stock trading and crypto apps to education, you know, primary education, secondary education and tertiary education. All of these fields are being opened up to profit-oriented, for the most part, applications on smartphones and tablets and computers that integrate games into them. But ultimately here again, we are often being manipulated through our agency, through our attraction to fun and to our wish to be able to sort of participate and have some control over the situation. So for instance, you know, in the United States,

gamified apps have been used as a kind of spearhead in the attack on public education rather than hire more teachers and actually rethink what education would mean. There's been a push to, you know, put a tablet in front of every child and get them playing learning games, which doesn't usually contribute to a holistic kind of educational. for liberation, but, you know, basically just prepares people to be digital serfs on some, you know, platform capitalist plantation. So gamification is there, but it's also in our banking apps. It's in our, as I mentioned, in our romance apps, in the apps that we use every day. And these gamified mechanisms are used to nudge our behavior towards profitable ends, not

usually profitable for us, but profitable for someone. And in general, it gives us, the sense that everywhere we look in our society, whether it's a gamified app or the many different ways that we have of participating within capitalism, we're being invited and encouraged to take on the role of the player as if we have some chance to play this game successfully. But in fact, most of these are ultimately traps that in the end we're going to lose. And I think this leads to the kind of third and broadest level of what I'm thinking about in terms of game capitalism, which is this sense, again, that we all are trapped in a series of these kind of cruel and unwinnable games where everyone has to be a player in order to compete for survival in this capitalist economy.

And yet, if so, most of us just play to lose. And we sort of know this already. And it produces a bit of an affective or emotional pressure cooker for most people. Listening to you talk about that, I'm just reminded. I'm not sure if you're familiar. with that show, the O-A. Oh, right. I didn't watch it, but I'm familiar with it, yeah.

There's a, I watched it years and years ago, but there's a similar app in that show. It's called like Q Symphony, and it's a game, basically, that people play, and if you, like, solve a riddle, you get a certain amount of cash and stuff like that, and people get really into it, but there's this, like, larger scheme behind it that's trying to, like, lure players into basically some mysterious thing that this tech mogul is trying to accomplish. So it just kind of reminded me of that a little bit hearing you talk about that and how games are used in this way. So much. I think it's throughout our popular culture. You know, I already mentioned Squid Games and the Hunger Games, which are these massively popular franchises,

but like three-body problem, which was the somewhat failed attempt to translate the Chinese science fiction novel trilogy into an American style Amazon special. I think they spent a huge amount of money on this show, but one of the things that was most sort of telegenetic about the translation of it from novel to film was that in that there is a game that is sent to Earth by malevolent space aliens that is so captivating to Earth's top scientists and smart people that it is a kind of weapon for the aliens to gain sympathy for their cause for taking over Earth. But also in many, many other shows, we see this kind of malevolent game that is working against our interests but that we can't stop playing.

Yeah, yeah. One last thing I'll say on this point before I ask you the next question. I don't know how true this is, but do you remember that trend on like Instagram and TikTok recently where you say three sentences but with like three different tones like surprised angry, whatever it is. And it was like you say this like humorous sentence, like something absurd, but you say it in three different ways. And I don't know, it was like some weird trend.

Someone was talking about how they thought it was like a tool to train AI or something like that. So just again, thinking about how we're being tricked into playing games that all have this sort of larger monetized intent behind them by some, you know, tech moment. goal or some evil corporation of some kind. Absolutely. And, you know, the back end, like the, the creator side of all of these apps, TikTok and Instagram, are super gamified as well to try and shape the type of content that people create and provide a set of kind of enticements and rewards for playing that game well. And also, you know, for many young people, that's the game

they can imagine themselves playing, you know, leveraging their charisma and their enthusiasm. and their weirdness on those apps to try and get following in the hopes of being able to escape waged labor ultimately. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get into that a little bit more, this idea of the player in the game. So you describe a number of ways in which the extreme financialization of the economy has taken a form of a game as serious as the squid games in terms of its life or death consequences. So tell us about this idea of,

financialization as being sort of the foundational material condition upon which this gamification of society has really developed? Yeah, financialization is this widely debated term, both amongst scholars and also among critics of capitalism, but in general it refers to the increasing power and influence of the financial services sector over the rest of capitalism, such that now, you know, hedge funds, private equity funds, large commercial and investment banks, insurance companies, and also just speculation more generally has become among the most profitable sectors of the capitalist economy. And what that means is that everything in the capitalist economy is increasingly reoriented towards the needs of that sector. So you even have like manufacturing

firms, logistics firms, food production firms, you know, capitalist firms that are no longer even considering primarily offering a good or service to customers, they're mostly interested in improving their stock performance or paying back bondholders or shareholders or owners, such that the whole capitalist economy reorients itself to sort of short-term immediate gains with very little concern, not just for workers in the environment, but like no concern for the sustainability of the firm itself. That's kind of the first level of financialization, and that obviously also has a influence over politics around the world. You know, around the world, most governments rely on deficit financing every year, so they have to go cap in hand to the financial markets, essentially,

and ask for money just to keep the lights on and provide basic public services. So the financial services industry has a huge influence on government policy, which is used essentially to drive forward austerity and privatization and neoliberalism. So that's financialization on one level, but a lot of what I've done in my scholarly work is think about financialization as it affects our social institutions and our sense of self and the way that we all participate, we're forced to participate in a capitalist economy. So I look, for instance, at the way that post-secondary education, because that's the sector I work in, has been transmuted from being a sort of a public good for educating the next generation of capitalist workers, which was never great to begin with. But it's certainly a lot better than what we have now, which is that post-secondary education is reframed as a private investment of an individual in their own human capital. The idea being that if you know, you get the right university degree, you're going to be better positioned to compete with other workers for what few stable jobs still exist in the ruins of the capitalist economy. That's an example of financialization of one of our central social institutions or housing, for example.

You know, like today, buying a house, if you're lucky enough to be able to afford one, isn't just a matter of putting a roof over your head or finding a community. It's increasingly the way that families are able to gain some degree of financial capacity in an incredibly cruel and uncertain world. It becomes a mode of economic stability as an investment. And increasingly, people are being encouraged to use whatever spare money they have, if they're lucky enough to have it, to try and buy house. turn it into Airbnb's, sell more later, but in any case, this kind of financialized approach

to one of the most basic human needs. And then on a deeper level, and this is where we get to this idea that I have in my book about the arrival of the player as a kind of archetype of our participation in 21st century fascism, on an even deeper level, as we're surrounded by all these financialized social institutions, we are each asked to recast or reimagine ourselves as a kind of savvy miniature financier, even if we don't happen to have any assets or money worth speaking of. So, you know, like, if you do have some assets, then you're encouraged to play property markets. You're encouraged to invest in education. You're encouraged to invest those assets using stock trading apps in order to get rich. But like everybody knows that unless you're making investments,

if you're just relying on your wage, you're going to be left behind by the increasing inflation under capitalism, essentially, in this financialized moment, as basically people who have assets that they can invest in get higher returns than the general secular increase in wages. So essentially, if you're not investing in some way, you're going to be left behind. You have to be a player. You know, you have to learn how to play this game of investing. And if you don't have money to invest, then you need to learn how to invest other forms of what have been reconfigured in our society as sort of human capital. So, you know, maybe you're dirt poor, but you have a good laugh and a good smile. Get yourself on Instagram and see if you can leverage that into becoming an influencer to get a little extra money.

Maybe you only have a few extra dollars, but, you know, the smart money is putting that on crypto. So you're conscripted into using your sort of skills and your hope and your intelligence to navigating your own survival in an increasingly austere and hostile economy through adopting this disposition of the financialized player. And that also goes for illegal things as well. You know, like lots of people have a side hustle in many different ways from the poorest people in our society to the richest, with very different consequences. with very different consequences, but nonetheless, my argument in the book is that we've all been compelled by this system to reconfigure ourselves as this player who also realizes that's the only thing they have in common with other people is competition. And may the odds be ever in your favor. I do really appreciate how you bring this idea of financialization of society down

to sort of eye level, particularly in this passage where you describe some of the social consequences to this gamification of everyday life, which is really mirroring what you were just describing. So you write, quote, capitalism as a set of social relations expands, in part, by making each of us its pioneer tasked with, quote, colonizing new spheres of life. Now as entrepreneurs, now as influencers, now as gig workers, turning our bad, rooms into hotels, our cars into taxis, our hobbies into side hustles, our charisma or wit into content, all held to ransom by proprietary platforms that play us for fools, end quote. And I mean, so eloquently put there. And that passage really hit me hard because it's so relatable, you know,

not just to my own experience, of course, but I'm sure also to many people around us and many people I know. Like, we've been taught to normalize this kind of, you know, quite really bizarre reality, you know, how we're forced to commodify every single aspect of our lives and just the impact that that has psychologically and socially. You know, if every experience is manufactured for others as content with the intention of enriching oneself somehow, like, what is even real anymore? you know, what is authentic? Like, nothing really, you know? Like if it didn't get captured on Instagram, did it really happen?

Does it count? It's so true. And I feel like the most diabolical thing is that this is delivered to us and sold to us as if it were freedom. You know, you have the freedom to go on Instagram and TikTok and do whatever you want. You have the freedom to sell fragments of your labor power on Uber. You have the freedom to leverage. to leverage the asset of your rental property or the property that you own as an Airbnb room. And we all embrace the kind of, or we're expected to embrace the sort of gamified aspect of this

that makes us feel, or at least we feel like it should make us feel like we're a real player. And to a certain extent, we can sustain that feeling of being a player for a little while. But we always have this sneaking suspicion, which is true that like this game is rigged against us. in the limited sense that, you know, like Uber is a machine for making the shareholders and owners of Uber money, like Airbnb, like Instagram. You know, these are gamed platforms that play us. And yet they play us precisely to the extent they can convince us that we are the player. Exactly.

But we're the cheated player, right, as you as you describe in the book. And I can't help but think of some of the most glaring sort of cartoonish examples of this happening things like NFTs from a few years ago, right? Like just mind boggling how that was a thing, but it was. And lots of people lost a lot of money. And it's still happening. Like things like that are still happening. I think of Kalshi, right? And the manipulation of prediction markets, for example, is sort of happening right now. And it's going all the way up to the White House, you know, where like literal wars are being fought and announcements about those wars are being made. partially to enrich people through these apps.

Yeah. Yeah, it's horrifying. The amount of violence that's being unleashed in the name of prediction markets and the people at the top of this economy, especially in the U.S. White House right now, basically gaming the system for their own advantage. But then it's also horrifying because it produces in people a set of incredibly reactionary sentiments. Because everything in our lives has told us that we should

embrace the disposition of the player, that if we're not playing the game and if we're not playing the smart money and we're not getting on the latest trends, whether it's NFTs or prediction markets or sports betting, that we're about to lose. We're going to be left behind. But then what happens is again and again and again, we get cheated. And that produces an incredibly toxic political atmosphere, I think, within which fascism easily grows. absolutely yeah and you describe this phenomenon of like micro fascism that i want to talk a little bit about before we really get into the the broader like systemic form of fascism because you talk about how you describe the reaction to all of this as a sort of politics of revenge right on the cheating other

because when you live in a society where you're constantly having to be vigilant about am I being cheated or how do I cheat somebody else in order to get through the day or whatever it is, it creates a really toxic environment for that society. You write in the book, quote, the success of 21st century fascistic politics is based in no small part on turning the anger of the cheated player away from the ruling class who are often cheating through tax havens for one and through gaming of democracy and a multitude of ways and toward convenient minorities or cheating others. And you talk about how this brings in hallucinations about all of these other groups aside from the ruling class that are blamed essentially,

like the vast networks of Jews, immigrants, trans people more recently, and we've talked about this at length on the show recently, socialists and communists through what's kind of a new red scare, right? So, yeah, I'm wondering if maybe you can talk a little bit more about that and this idea of the politics of revenge. Yeah, absolutely. This builds on some work that I did several years ago in a book that was published called Revenge Capitalism. And there I really wanted to look at the question of, first of all, how a revenge politics emerges from financialization. again, and here I was sort of setting the stage in that book for this idea of the cheated player, that since we're all expected to now compete in this financialized economy,

we begin to breed sort of seething resentments against those who we perceive are preventing us from succeeding. And I also wanted to look at the rise of, you know, how capitalism as a system itself takes a certain kind of revenge, as well as the ruling class when it takes revenge against, you know, uprisings. and anti-colonial efforts as well. So I've been sort of following this theme of revenge and revenge politics, because unfortunately I think that there is a discourse around revenge amongst sort of like liberal critics of, for instance, the Trump regime and rising fascism,

but they tend to understand it far too narrowly as just the way that these sort of new tyrants weaponize the law against their chosen targets. I think something else much more deep is at root, which is that if we're denied, systematically in our society the means to understand the actual roots of our common problems, which are largely capitalism and its associated systems of domination, then we go in search of people to blame, and far-right and fascistic political forces can claim that there are these groups of what I call

the cheating other out there who are ruining everything for the rest of us. So, you know, famously in the United States, this takes the figure of something like Ronald Reagan's racist defamation of the so-called welfare Queen, who is the kind of cheat incarnate, who is destroying the state, destroying the Commonwealth by cheating the system and cheating the benevolence and generosity of her neighbors. Of course, Reagan introduced this racist caricature of the welfare queen. Precisely at the moment he himself was trashing the welfare state in the United States and handing over large chunks of the American economy to the ruling class.

Or in the United Kingdom, for instance, right now where I spend a lot of time. and also in the United States, there's the constant demonization of migrants, especially migrants who cross borders in irregular ways, who are said to be sort of coming to steal the wealth of society and cheat hardworking Americans and Britons of their patrimony. Or we have, you know, the fables of legions of trans people who are coming to cheat at women's sports. Or we have the idea that like university professors like me are cheating children out of their opportunity to improve their human capital by forcing socialist messages down their throat. And more generally that anyone who wants a better world, whether they call themselves a socialist or not, is themselves a cheat.

Because from the perspective that is instilled in us in this form of financialized capitalism, everybody is a cheat. That's the kind of weird irony of it. It is like, the smart money knows you have to cheat to win. That's why, for instance, when these guys in the White House right now are just explicitly cheating, you know, Jared Kushner is showing up to diplomatic meetings, asking about how the counterparty is going to sponsor his, like, his real estate games, or, you know, the whole Trump family is involved in massive insider trading. These guys are cheating in plain sight.

But I think in a world where we've all been turned into players, we have a grudging admiration and even perhaps an affiliation or an identification with these guys who seem to be the superhuman cheat. And these guys are able to then direct our anger and our resentment down the socioeconomic ladder through those channels and pathways that have been cut by hundreds of years of racism and colonialism and patriarchy to sort of channel our sentiments down the socioeconomic ladder and down the kind of social hierarchies to people who, like, realistically, even if they all were all cheating, would have an insignificant impact on the economy. Like, even if all of the

irregular migrants to the United States were actually trying to rob the country by claiming welfare payments and et cetera, et cetera, there's no way that the dilatarius effect of this is anywhere close to, you know, buyer and what it's been doing with Roundup or Giofate or the, you know, the impacts of 3M and Forever chemicals, or many of the other monumental corporate crimes that are just being done in plain sight, let alone the level of theft in general of the financialized and corporate sectors on American society. So there's this kind of massive misdirection, which is going on that I'm trying to understand in the book where on the one hand, we begin to idolize these kind of conspicuous, powerful cheats at the top and accept that that's just the way

that this game is played. And at the same time, we are encouraged to direct our anger and vitriol and indeed, you know, murderous rage down the socioeconomic ladder to people less powerful than we might be. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just something recently that happened that makes me think exactly of this, is J.D. Vance recently made some kind of announcement that because so many, quote, illegal immigrants have been forcibly removed from the country, or at least, you know, from public rent has gone down throughout the country, which is just completely fabricated. Like there's no data whatsoever to support that. And then the other side, the flip side of that is that how the refunds for the tariffs all

went to the companies who inflated their prices anyways because of the tariffs. And we as consumers were passed on the burden of those costs, but we're not seeing anything back and that's another example of a really sophisticated and successful cheat that was imposed upon all of us and you know, we all know what happened, but there's nothing that we can do except, you know, grow more and more resentful towards the people who are being scapegoated. And this idea of like the displacement of frustration and anger really resonated with me because it's not hard to to see how easily this feeling of being cheated can manifest in that way. You know, like, if you've never been given the tools to have a structural analysis and you

have no conception of class, let alone class consciousness, the truth is that it's exhausting and infuriating living in this society like you so eloquently described throughout the book. And just being a prop in somebody else's get rich scheme is inherently infuriating. And we all know that it's happening to us. And every day it's like a battle to discover who is scamming you, how they're scamming you. And of course, there's going to be other working class people who, you know, might be taking advantage of other working class people.

That's part of it. But the, this antisocial behavior, it's, it's not our fault that we're forced into that, right? Like we're being pressured to do this because of the way that society is structured. it's designed in that way like you describe in the book. And again, like you describe how we're all really in this kind of like hunger games, squid games environment. And the vast majority of us have no idea who is responsible for putting us in that arena. And I think that's why a Marxist analysis is like so, so dangerous to the system and why

we're seeing as this all these contradictions heightened and this gamified world that we're living in becomes more and more noticeable. We're seeing simultaneously this new red scare emerge because the ruling class understands perfectly well, you know, like Marxism accurately identifies the cause of our miseration. It's the system. It's the system's designers. It's the ones standing above the arena in the stands with, you know, their monocles and their parasols who have engineered the game to begin with. And one passage I wanted to bring in actually that's relevant here from your book, it's a little bit of a longer passage, not too long, but I'm just going to read it in its entirety. And I apologize to you for reading your own quotes back to you. But I want to encourage people

to definitely pick up the book as well. So the quote is, the public feeling of being cheated is ideological, not simply because it rehearses a common narrative, but because it helps all of us as players make sense of material reality. We live in a world where corporations and the powerful act largely with impunity and transparently manipulate society, the economy, and politics. But even more intimately, neoliberalism and financialization have ushered us into a world of maze-like public and private bureaucracies where we feel we are always being cheated, a labyrinth of fun. fines, fees, and penalties.

It is a digitally-mediated capitalist world where the apps, services, and infrastructures are gamed in someone else's favor, corraling or nudging us in ways we sense, but do not always know, including through the process known as gamification. There is something deeply infuriating in being an object or a non-player character,

NPC, in someone else's game. And I couldn't help but think here of that passage, that wonderful passage in Mark Fisher's capitalist realism of the call center. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. He goes on at length to describe the call center. And of course, now we have AI call centers, which Mark Fisher would have absolutely loved. But it's designed by capitalists and whoever owns these companies, that the call center is contracted through as a money saving mechanism, right? You don't have to hire someone or if you do have actual people there, you design it specifically

so that there are not enough people at the call center and that, you know, you're in this labyrinth, this Kafkaesque labyrinth and the person who designed the call center is invisible to you. They're on a yacht somewhere, right? your anger is directed towards the person that you were talking to on the phone or nowadays you're yelling at some like AI voice you know what I mean and that's how this all works right like that's how the anger is displaced onto somebody who's also a victim just like you are and so this displacement of frustration it happens in that interpersonal way like we've been discussing. And then you call that like micro-fascism, I think, if I get that right. And then it also

like manifests in a much larger way. And so here I want to switch to talking more explicitly about fascism. And I want to apologize. I have one more passage that I want to read. And then I'll shut up and I'll let you talk. You write, I have a complex, multi-layered notion of fascism. I see it. I see it, as numerous theorists of fascism advise, less as a distinct political ideology or form of government, and more as a problem we must constantly rethink, or in my terms, a riddle posed by a hybrid sphinx-like monster, a riddle that asks us something also about ourselves. In my view, fascism is not simply the re-emergence of humanity's timeless and tireless demon of murder tyranny. Rather, it is a kind of exfixating allergic reaction within capitalism to the conditions

it itself has created. Inequality, precariousness, volatility, unfairness. Fascist ideology promises to use authoritarian power and revolutionary violence to solve capitalism's contradictions and crises while still preserving the regime of private property at its core. But capitalism comes in many forms, and we cannot understand fascism, except through an analysis of the particular, historically contingent forms of capitalism from which it emerges." End quote. Okay, so I've sort of tried to set us up using really beautiful, eloquently written passages of yours.

If you can describe how fascism worked the first time around in the 20th century, and then bring us up to date on how this tendency has evolved in the various forms it has taken in today's gamified world. Yeah, I'll try and do that. And of course, when we're talking about fascism, it's one of those words that's like very confusing. It's used, especially like in the last couple of years by so many people in very different ways. So I think a lot of what I'm trying to do in this book is come to some clarity about it for myself and also how it can be a useful term still for, our movements. As that passage indicates, my position is a bit of a critique to sort of liberal and centrist people who are using the term fascism. They usually want to understand fascism merely as a

threat to democratic capitalist liberal institutions. It certainly is that, but it's also more than that. And I am among those who believe that, to paraphrase Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, you can't talk about fascism without first talking about capitalism. That's because, as that passage you read indicates, fascism emerges always within capitalism, and it emerges as a kind of violent and paranoid reaction to the crises and contradictions that capitalism inevitably produces. That doesn't mean that fascism is itself inevitable within every capitalist society, although that's an interesting argument to maybe talk about later.

But it is to say that, like, capitalism just makes life unlivable for the vast majority of people, certainly for the vast majority of workers, and fascism arises within capitalism as its own kind of demonic child to offer false solutions to real problems. So if we go back to the 20th century, we can certainly see that in both Italy and Germany, these were two countries after the First World War that were at imminent risk of communist revolution. Socialist and communist movements were extremely strong. They had incredibly powerful political parties, but also incredibly powerful street games, huge workers' organizations, high level of militancy among workers and former soldiers, a very strong base in society that had been built over decades of basically

what today we would call community organizing. And the ruling class in both Italy and Germany was very fearful that these countries would join the Soviet Union and then it would have been game over really for capitalism. So something had to be done. And there arrives Mussolini someone who was a, you know, had formerly been part of a socialist party, but then turned to his kind of bonkers hypernationalism, who basically arrives and promises to save capitalism from itself by declaring a dictatorship and basically taking over society with his totalitarian dreams of a new Rome. Or in Germany as well, you know, the period from the end of the First World War up until the moment when the Nazis took over and sort of from the Weimar Republic was one where the capitalists, especially the big industrial capitalists were extremely fearful that they would lose the country to communism. Although it should be said that in both Italy and in Germany, the major early supporters of fascism were typically the petty bourgeoisie.

So these were people, you know, small business owners, what today we might term the professional managerial class, who had very little power within those capitalist economies, but had a lot to fear in terms of their relatively privileged, position being lost to economic changes and to working class uprisings. So ultimately, in both cases of Italy and Germany, we have capitalism producing within itself this kind of violent, traconian dictatorship, fascism, that it's using to defend itself from the left, ultimately. And the form of fascism that emerged in the early 20th century, or mid-20th century, basically, in Germany and Italy, reflected the form of capitalism from which they emerged. So, you know, it's important to recall that capitalism at that time in the

1920s looked a lot different than it does today. Capitalism was largely organized in Italy and Germany around basically plantations, like large farms and industrial, big, huge industries, where workers were compelled into factories, compelled into slums. And these were also highly militarized societies coming out of the First World War. So these were societies ultimately where people were already used to in their bodies being turned into a mass and exploited as a mass, losing their individuality as they filed every day into the factory, as they were treated like garbage by the landlords,

as they were working on increasingly large and industrialized farms. And fascism that arose out of 20th century industrial capitalism also was able to capitalize on the feelings and the embodied experience of people in a society like that. So you can think about like the mass rallies of Mussolini or Hitler. These were places where people were assembled on almost industrial scale. And, you know, in a kind of way that critics have termed sadomasochistic in a certain sense, there was a desire to be annihilated in the fascist mass, to become part of something that erased your individuality, that embraced you as a kind of body within the many. And this is, of course,

one of the most diabolical aspects of 20th century fascism. You know, this was a fascism that was built by Krupp and Fiat and other huge industrialists. And it was a fascism that was driven forward by the mass rally, by the radio broadcast, by the film reel, one to many forms of communication and propaganda. Okay, let's fast forward to 21st century. Today, unfortunately, in the so-called West, the ruling class does not have as much to fear from socialist and working class uprisings. You know, socialist movements until recently have been fairly weak, and the working class has largely been divided against itself both within the global north, the imperialist core, and also globally.

There's a huge amount of divisions. And yet capitalism has not failed to produce within itself massive crises, you know, notably a sort of crisis of secular stagnation where surplus value can't be extracted at the right rate. Also crises germane to financialization that we experience on the level of rising prices, housing, becoming inaccessible, food prices skyrocketing. There is a general crisis in capitalism right now of social reproduction. People, you know, workers can literally not reproduce their lives and can't produce a new

generation of children because the ruling class has simply taken so much of society's wealth and has destroyed those few mechanisms that existed whereby society protects itself from the market, you know, in terms of the welfare state and, you know, some form of redistribution of wealth. not that I'm in favor of that necessarily, but it did produce a certain way that a certain number of workers could be exempt from the direct privations of capitalist exploitation. But a few other things have changed as well in terms of the emergence of a 21st century form of fascism. And that also has to do with the way that we interact with capitalism and the media that we use. So in the 20th century, those capitalist regimes that gave rise to fascism were these sort of massified,

industrialized worlds that capital built. Today, rather, we're in this moment of hyper-neoliberal, hyper-individualized, and in many cases, de-industrialized capitalism. Now, of course, capitalism hasn't de-industrialized at all. It's just moved industrial production to countries where it's cheaper to exploit workers in the environment. But within the imperial core, there is the sensation of de-industrialization. And it's a form of capitalism that I noted is based on turning each of us into a player, into an individual competitor, trying to, you know, fight against everyone else to survive. And a society where we don't see ourselves primarily as workers, even if we are indeed workers, but where we see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed

capitalists, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair. And that means that the form of fascism that's going to emerge from that capitalism is going to look different than the 20th century. This is a fascism that emerges from an economy built on platform corporations like Uber, like Google, like meta, like Airbnb. It's going to be a form of fascism that doesn't give us the sort of sick and suicidal joy of disappearing into the mass, but instead conscripts everyone as individual players as well. And what I think 21st century fascism says is not trust us, we will restore the nation, and we will restore everyone to stability and greatness. Instead, it says, join us and we're going to take aim at the parasites, and once we're done, everyone's going to be able to get back to the life and death struggle for survival.

There's a much more nihilistic dimension today's fascism. But it's also one that it speaks to people as if they were entrepreneurs, as if they were investors, as if they were influencers. It doesn't say, lose yourself in our movement. it says be yourself and contribute as you want, let's form a swarm that can take revenge for, you know, all of these people cheating us. And so I think we need to, if we're always just looking for the kind of jackbooted Nazis marching, you know, goose stepping in coordination in the streets, that's not what fascism looked like. Fascism today looks like a recruiting fair for ICE where if you read the people who've gone and done like undercover. research on it is a lot of people from a lot of different ways of life who are basically looking

for a side hustle so that they can make a little bit of money on the side while they try and figure out how to make a better investment in crypto or in housing or in Airbnb. It's a very opportunistic form of fascism where people are seduced into it, not as members of a great nation, but as entrepreneurs and competitors, even with each other. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Max Haven. We'll be right back. That was shitlist by Karselyt by Karsie Blanton. Now back to our conversation with Max Haven.

It's so fascinating because I know it's been said that fascism can't really emerge in an environment where there's no mass politics. And I really do think that this idea of yours in terms of how fascism emerges through this neoliberalized, individualized kind of sphere is itself, I mean, I don't know if you could describe it as a mass politics, but it is definitely like a fertile ground on which something very fascistic is very obviously emerging. And it may not look exactly like it did, you know, 100 years ago. But it definitely mirrors. a lot of different aspects of that. And, you know, as it's been said, history doesn't repeat, but it definitely rhymes, right? And I think one point I wanted to pull out to Michael Parenti famously described fascism in the 20th century as rational, you know, emphasizing its role as like a logical, calculated tool used by, you know, the corporate capitalist class to protect their wealth and power, like you mentioned from socialism and communism.

The way that you described capitalism in the 21st century, it takes a much more, if not irrational, at least sort of chaotic form that truly embraces contradiction. And you even describe it as being playful. And I would love it if you could talk a little bit more about that playfulness and how contradiction works in modern fascist tendencies and yeah, how it's playful. Well, I think even in Parenti's analysis, there's an analysis that shows us that fascism

emerges from capitalism's contradictions. And one of those contradictions is that though capitalists, if they could coordinate their efforts as a ruling class, they would be very effective. They're often competitors with one another. So, you know, there's competition internationally between different capitalist classes. There's competition between different capitalist sectors, you know, for instance, the finance sector, the tech sector, the resource extractive sector, the manufacturing sector. And then there's obviously rivalries between capitalists within each sector because they're

literally competing with one another. And one of the problems that Marx identifies and that Rosa Luxembourg, I think, writes about very well is that these contradictions within capitalism lead to all sorts of unforeseen and often chaotic and counterproductive things for capitalism. So ultimately, the preference of certain sections of the capitalist class for fascism often runs up against the fact that other elements of the capitalist class don't want fascism, either because they don't like it personally, like they just don't like demagogues and they're liberals, or structurally they don't like it. So for example, in the United States right now, the tech sector loves fascism because it's

basically hands off, right? They're not even going to regulate AI, it seems, despite the incredibly present threats to potentially human life on earth. You know, the fascist administration in the White House right now is like, no, we're not going to, we're not going to deal with that. We're going to let the boys have their fun. But, you know, the manufacturing sector is very unhappy, except with their tax cuts, because it's become almost impossible to source materials from a kind of global supply chain and to sell into international markets. It's just incredibly chaotic. So some sectors of the capitalist economy and some capitalists have a preference for fascism, but many of them don't. And I think it's important in our analysis to also recognize that capitalism is a titanic

with no captain at the wheel. There's just a bunch of officers screaming at each other trying to get in the lifeboats. So there are moments when the capitalist class can come together and coordinate, grudgingly, but they're rare and they're often very fraught as well. Now, that I think we can use the metaphor of games and play to understand that aspect of capitalism, and then we can also use it to understand the particular forms of fascism that are emerging right now. You know, it is as if every player of the capitalist game, all the capitalists, are each playing a game with their own particular set of rules and strategies, but as if they're transforming the game from within, and there's no game master.

It's like the Dungeons and Dragons game, but it's just completely chaotic, where everyone's trying to control the world and there's no person saying, like, actually, this is how it works. So the problem with capitalism and the reason that it always has all of these crises that it generates within itself

is that everyone's trying to play their most advantageous game and nobody's actually thinking about the big game until often it's too late. Now, in terms of fascism today, I think we've already talked a little bit about how fascism appeals to the cheated player. And, you know, what the promise that it's making in the 21st century is, if you put us in power,

we are going to use as much violence as necessary to make the game fair again. They're not promising, as, for instance, some elements of 20th century, fascism did to subjugate capitalism to the nation. You know, in Italy and in Germany, it's important to remember that fascist regimes implemented a kind of welfare state for their chosen citizens. They did in many ways force capitalists to contribute to society, although those regimes were, of course, extremely corrupt as well.

But today's fascist forces don't say, you know, trust us, we're going to bring capitalism to heal. They say instead, we're going to eliminate the cheaters, and then you'll all be able to compete as you are intended. You know, there is a very dark and nihilistic worldview at the heart of most of today's fascists that insists that basically the player is all that we are and all that we could be. That individual competition for scarce resources is the true ontology of the universe. And they're simply going to eliminate all of those people who are cheating the system

so that we can get back to the real hunger games. So to that extent, I think today's fascists appeal to, this kind of archetype that's been created and that's been installed in each of us by gamed capitalism. And in a weird way, it makes a certain logical sense. If all you know is the hustle, then the gangster who shows up and says that he's going to cleanse the territory of cheaters so that we can all get back to our real hustles makes a certain kind of sense. And that means that when we see 21st century fascist activism and protagonistism, it often takes a much more playful form. People are in a weird way refusing to play by the rules of, you know, liberal,

capitalist civil society, as problematic as they were, and are beginning to kind of create new whole worlds to play in. And I take in the book the Q&ONON conspiracy fantasy as a good example of this. This is a kind of swarm-like constellation, a leaderless swan. in some ways of players, you know, people who've been educated and turned into competitive subjects by financialized capitalism, who assemble together in these kind of weird amorphous constellations in order to basically fabricate a illusory double world that they could live in, where they could play this really fun and rewarding game of trying to understand the evil conspiracy that was being orchestrated in the White House to abduct children and harvest their adrena

crone and otherwise game democracy. It was a kind of playful experience of collaborative world building that became the template on which a lot of now 21st century fascist movements are being built. As an individual competitor, you can opt out of the consensus reality that binds everyone else and begin to find people on the internet or in real life who will build a world with you where things finally make sense and where in contrast to the capitalist world where we're all cheated, you can feel like you're a real player. You know, those people who are involved in Q&ONM, many of them, if you read the interviews with them, said ultimately they felt for the first time in their life like they were truly had agency, that they truly were part of

something meaningful and that they were doing something that mattered and that they had some control over things. And, you know, we can say what we want about how bonkers their stories and narratives were, but it's that feeling, the feeling of the cheated player being redeemed and being able to exercise their agency that I think is what made it so tantalizing to so many people. Wow. And of course, you know, this wider phenomenon of people who have opted out of reality, specifically the sort of QAnon sphere, are now dictating reality for the rest of us, right? quite yeah exactly exactly and you have you know I think it's it's really demonstrable that Trump for instance in the United States but also other far-right politicians elsewhere

make these kind of conspicuous shows of denying reality and insisting that their reality will rule there's a kind of what in the book I call a kind of psychedelic urge to control reality with one's mind that flexes a certain kind of fascist power that then followers see and respect, admire, and desire. You write in the book, quote, that so many of today's clownish fascist personalities are conspicuous cheats is fitting. Like the stage magician who trumps his rivals

by showing the audience how the trick is performed, the cheater-in-chief empowers his followers by promising to reveal how the game is fixed and to take revenge on their behalf. And I think one of the main mistakes that liberals make in terms of analyzing the Trump phenomenon is that somehow Trump getting elected has ushered in, right? Like Trump has triggered all of these terrible things that we now need to undo by just getting him out of office and getting another good centrist liberal in office, right?

And I think that they have it backwards. this moment chose Trump, you know, not the other way around. He's the perfect quintessential person to be the figurehead of this specific material reality that the capitalism has wrought upon all of us right now. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about Trump specifically and situate him and some of his regime's actions in terms of this conversation about fascism. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the irony is that, like, I am not against certain things that liberal centralists want.

I mean, I believe in the independence of the press. I believe that there should be an independent and fair judiciary, although it would look a lot different in my ideal world. I believe that the universities should retain their independence and their critical capacities. You know, I believe on some level that society should be fair and organized on fair institutions. But the reality is that capitalism destroyed all of the institutions of liberalism a long time ago. Like, who honestly believes that the legal system is fair? You have to be an idiot to believe that. The people who have the money to hire the best lawyers almost always win, right?

Who actually believes that the democratic system that existed in the United States before Trump arrived was fair and equal, right? We have corporations spending bazillions of dollars to buy candidates, to lobby them, and to pay for political campaigns. I mean, it's ridiculous. Who believes there was a fair and independent media before Trump arrived? You know, the media is owned by a handful of corporations and it self-selects ideological puppets in order to parrot the dominant view of society. So all of these, you know, the university, the university's basically been turned into a digital degree mill and a class stratified one of that, where people who go to the elite institutions have a direct route to working at Goldman Sachs or some other

investment bank and everyone else is basically going to end up being a sandwich artist at subway. I mean, you know, these liberal democratic institutions were already long corrupted by capitalism long before Trump and his ilk managed to arise to take advantage of the situation. And it's precisely the fact that you have liberal centrists loudly proclaiming their fidelity to liberal values and liberal institutions, while at the same time unleashing the most horrifying form of capitalism we've seen in living memory that produces the kind of cynicism on which someone like Trump can play as the kind of best cynic in the room, right? This is a guy who doesn't believe there is anything in the world except for power and his own pleasure. And that is like,

there is a kind of revenge that voters take on the cynical manipulation of the world by these centrist politicians by electing this kind of evil clown who in some ways represents the most vicious and monstrous nihilistic figure of a system that's already proven itself to be vicious and nihilistic and monstrous. So, yeah, I think that the sort of liberal pearl clutching about Trump is a bit precious. Nonetheless, he's an incredibly dangerous threat to human life on planet Earth, to the working class, to the achievements of the working class and of working people over the last few generations, in terms of how those get congealed in the form of the welfare state, which was never sufficient, but at least it was the result of the threats

that working class organizers had been able to make that demanded that capitalism in some way be tamed in the abeyance of its abolition. So ultimately, we have a figure, I think, like Trump who arises and capitalizes on that cynicism. And he does so, I think, by presenting himself as the perfect cheat. And here in the book, I rely on a distinction made by the mid-century theorist of games, Johann Huizenga, the Dutch theorist of games and historian, who argues that there's a fundamental difference between the cheat and the spoil sport. And you get this maybe distinction almost intuitively. If you're sitting down to play a game of cards with your friends and one player is like, this game's stupid, I hate it, nobody likes it, it's not fair, you know, you're going to

be like, dude, shut up, like, we're just playing a game, come on. You know, we know it's not fair. We know, we know that maybe it's like it's not the best game in the world, but like we're all here to play. And what is the spoil sport doing when they call into question the game? They're not only calling into question the game and its fairness. They're basically saying that like all of you who are playing the game are idiots and fools. We don't like how we look in the eyes of the spoil sport. Now, compare that to the cheat. The cheat continues to play the game. The cheat doesn't say that the game is rigged. The cheat doesn't say, this game sucks, I don't want to play it. The cheat just cheats, right? And if you're a good cheat, you can actually make it fun for the other players.

You know, a lot of people probably have this experience, maybe playing with kids or other people, but it's actually really fun to cheat. And people cheat at games all the time. And what Hizhinka says is like the magic circle, which is the circle within which the game is played, the kind of the setting a part of the game from the world, the magic circle can accept a good cheat, but they can't accept a bad spoil sport. And I think what you have now, politically speaking, is both in the center and to certain extent on the left, you have a lot of figures who are saying, like, this capitalist game is not fair, and we need to change this game and make it a little bit more fair, you know, by changing the rules, by maybe taxing companies a little bit more, by instituting policies

that are going to rein in corporations. And sure, all of those policies are fine. But this is the voice of the spoil sport. Whereas what I think the cheat says is, of course it's unfair. Who the hell told you it would be fair to begin with? We all know it's unfair. We all know that even all of those people who are claiming to want to fix the system, they're cheats as well, right? These people just want to employ diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that game this game in the name of racialized minorities. These people just want to give money to their friends, right? These people are cheats just like I am, but at least I'm the cheat who's going to cheat you directly. You're going to see me put the cards in my pocket.

And you too are a player. So, like, you might not be as powerful as me, but we're all playing the same game. You know, game knows game. And at least I'm not going to trick you. Now, I think lots of people are waking up to the fact that Trump has indeed tricked them and is doing massive insider trading, you know, in plain sight and enriching himself and his friends and his family. And also just, you know, basically running the White House, you know, just a house of corruption,

giving favors to people who give him money, essentially. And there is a growing anger about that. But also, I think you'd find a lot of people in American society who are like, but that's just, that's all politics ever has been, right? In liberal capitalism even, there was this claim that they were making the system fairer and more equal and giving more opportunity. But like, we all know we were being played. and I'd rather have a cheat in charge who I can see cheating in plain sight rather than these cynical centrist who are essentially still cheating and still benefiting their friends and their class fragment, but who dress it up in the cynical language that somehow this is going to be good for me.

You make me think of this image of some guy working 80 hours a week at a job he hates who's estranged from his kids and who's going through a divorce. looking at Trump on the TV saying, uh, game recognized game. Totally. Yeah, totally. You know,

it's interesting maybe to just add here that like if you watch Trump at his rallies, I mean, we tend to focus those of us who loathe the man, tend to focus on his incoherent ramblings. But he's very, very good at giving pleasure to his audience. And I use the slightly grotesque sexual tone there intentionally. Like, he's very good.

I remember one time during his first presidential run, he just sat there in front of an audience and looked at them for about 10 minutes and just kept on repeating, you are the smart people. The smart people are in this room. You're not going to be tricked. You're the smart ones. And I think, you know, more broadly, the appeal of Trump and other fascistic characters in this moment is that they make people feel good about themselves.

You know, the thing about the spoil sport, is when the spoil sport shows up and is like, this game sucks, it's rigged, you all feel like crap, right? You're all like, oh, yeah, I guess we've been tricked. This feels bad. I feel like a fool. I feel like an idiot. Whereas when the cheat shows up and is like,

we're the smart people at this table. This is where the smart money is, you know? You're like, yeah, I'm part of the smart people. I'm not just a loser. I'm not just an NPC in somebody else's game. I'm a player. And in a world where, as we were talking about before, everyone is being systematically denied the conceptual tools to understand capitalism by a completely

corrupted school system and media system, then somebody who says, you know, I might be much richer than you, but you're like me and we're the smart ones. We're the ones who understand how the system works. We're the ones who understand reality and everyone else is just living in a kind of like woke fantasy land, that, even though it's not necessarily going to make you personally richer or improve your life chances, is incredible solace for many, many people. And of course, the foundation upon which that all happens, which you couldn't really have this phenomenon without, is the complete and utter alienation of everybody from themselves, from their families, from friends, from everything, from community, from meaningful work,

from meaningful relationships, all of which has just been systematically stripped away from us over the last 50 years or however long it's been since neoliberalism has really kind of sunk its teeth into every aspect of our lives. And so, of course, yeah, people find, like you were talking about with QAnon, like people find these hollow sort of manufactured inorganic communities through these characters like Donald Trump or whoever it might be. And they just, create their entire personality around them. So it's a way of them like internally feeling some kind of substance. They create communities around them.

Just so, so fascinating to think about and just so dark at the same time. I have a couple more questions for you. You write about this idea of world building, which you brought up briefly earlier, and world raising. That's R-A-I-Z-I-N-G. And the rise of the far right in Silicon Valley specifically is a sort of realization of fascist imaginaries.

And I have been living in the Bay Area on and off for the last several couple decades. And so I've really kind of seen this firsthand in terms of both its like psychological individual manifestations, but also just how society has sort of been hollowed out by Silicon Valley. ideology, really. And yeah, I'm wondering if you can sort of talk a little bit more about this idea of world building and world raising and Silicon Valley specifically, and talk a little bit about what you described in the book as like the colonial fantasies of tech capitalism. Yeah, of course. I begin that chapter of the book with the observation that a huge number of the magnates of Silicon Valley today, the kind of huge capitalists of Silicon Valley, who in some ways are so rich that they're beginning to be able to defy the laws of capitalist accumulation and act

outside of the typical pressures that face capitalists. You know, for instance, these companies just don't need money. They just have tons and tons and tons of cash that they can spend at any time, which gives them a certain different kind of latitude within capitalism that doesn't face a lot of other companies. All of these guys, or not all of them, but a huge number of them played Dungeons and Dragons as children. And partly that has to do with the age that they are and the sort of first generation of enthusiasm for Dungeons and Dragons. And of course, it also has to do with the fact that most of them were nerds and nerds tended back then and still today to be attracted to Dungeons and Dragons. But it leads me on this question about like,

what is it about that game that contributed to their worldview? And ultimately, I, rewind the kind of narrative to say, well, look, like we are world-building animals. I mean, Marx spoke about having to come to grips with humanity's species being. Like, what are we fundamentally? And one way of thinking about our species being is that we create worlds in our imagination and then manifest those worlds in reality, not through some like bogus new age manifesting stuff, but through our labor, through our cooperation as human beings. And we were just talking, you were just mentioning how, you know, a lot of these right-wing conspiracy theories and movements allow people to create worlds to live in that feel affirming and empowering. And that is, in a way, a kind of corrupted fragment of our world-building power in the same way that a commodity you might hold, like your phone, is a corrupted fragment of our capacity to cooperate as human beings, our capacity to labor.

Capitalism appropriates our capacity to work together and transforms it into commodities that it sells back to us. But similarly, my sort of argument here is that capitalism also harnesses our ability to build worlds together and build worlds of the imagination and then offers it back to us in specific forms. Now, sometimes that takes the form of like particular commodities, like an open world video game, where our ability to build a world together, something like Minecraft or Roblox, where that is taken from us and given back to us as a commodity that we can then buy, in this case for children. But often that also takes the form that certain people within our society

manage to accumulate such vast and disproportionate wealth that they can shape how we build a world together. So Silicon Valley in some ways has been able to accumulate so much power, both in terms of wealth and also its incredible stranglehold over our digitally mediated lives. that the kind of people at the top of Silicon Valley have claimed for themselves the ability not only to imagine other worlds, but to force those other worlds into being. And here we have the emergence of like what has been called like the test creole bundle of things like transhumanism, you know, space exploration, longevity, the creation of the creation of this archipelago of escape charter cities where they can go and live out their utopian dreams. or even up to and including Elon Musk's wish to implant chips directly in people's brains or Jeff Bezos's dreams of taking us to, you know, the stars, et cetera, et cetera. So we have these Silicon Valley guys who've accumulated so much power and wealth

that they can monopolize the power of world building. And that's a power that should be in the hands of the working class. Like we as people who work for a living who contribute to society, not as parasites, but as actual people doing the work of living together in common, we have a right and a duty to reclaim that world-building power to make it work for everyone, rather than just a handful of increasingly apocalyptic assholes in Silicon Valley. But part of the argument in that chapter is that this is part of a long history of certain individuals claiming the world-building power,

and using that power to impose their imagined worlds, onto reality. So, for instance, the long history of colonialism was the European ruling class developing these utopian ideas about the kinds of societies that could exist, for instance, in Turtle Island, the indigenous term for what we call North America, and then literally sending working class Europeans over and militaries to impose that fantasy on the reality. You know, there's a long history in plantations of plantation owners during the ages of slavery coming up with this, you know, bucolic vision of southern chivalry and a new feudal age, and then with genocidal brutality imposing that on the landscape and the people.

So this is not in and of itself new. I think what is new is that today that's being aided and abetted by digital technologies and digital power, including conspicuously so-called artificial intelligence. And the flip side of it, I argue, in that chapter is that for every world-building fantasy of the ruling class, its flip side is always world-raising. A world or worlds need to be destroyed in order to make room for the worlds they imagine and impose. Now, sometimes those are imaginary worlds of what is possible. And, you know, as we were talking about earlier, the ideals and imaginaries of socialism and communism to build a world without classes where everyone has enough and everyone can contribute, that vision of a different world needs

to be erased or raised, to use the terminology of the chapter, in order to make it so that these silicon visions appear like they're inevitable and they can't be stopped. But also, as I argue in that chapter, you know, the flip side of this dream is the hellscape of Gaza after the Israeli genocidal attack. You know, a community of two million people or more that has been reduced to mostly rubble and is now the kind of imaginary playground of oligarchs who project onto it these absurd fantasies about, you know, the Gaza Riviera and how this is, you know, going to bring peace and tranquility and abundance. But it requires genocide.

It requires the elimination not only of the population that occupies that land, but also the liquidation of their dreams, the liquidation of their futures, the reduction of whole populations to essentially extras or NPCs in a game that can only be played by this tiny, digitally augmented, hyper-rich elite. A lot of this is sort of evoking for me the dark enlightenment, sort of neo-reactionary movement, which was founded by a software engineer Curtis Jarvin. And what's really fascinating to me is I'm really glad you brought up Gaza and what's happening in Gaza. And of course, one of the driving forces behind what is happening in Gaza is Zionism, right, as an ideology.

which when you look at especially the Christian Zionism version of Zionism, it is a very apocalyptic world-raising sort of vision, right? Like the whole idea is that the whole idea of Israel for Christians evokes apocalypse in the coming of Christ and this whole apocalyptic vision, right? So I just thought that was a really interesting connection. So I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, absolutely. And Zionism is precisely a kind of 19th century colonial world building project that insisted that Jews have a right to go and steal someone else's land and build their ideal community on it.

And it also reveals how appealing those visions often are, you know, and not necessarily specifically Zionism, but I think it's easy to dismiss the people who are. enthralled to the ridiculous visions of Elon Musk, for example, as being fools. But consider that they often see the same things that listeners to this podcast might see about how unrestrained capitalism is destroying the world in many different sorts of ways. And they look at that and they say, that's why we need a strong world builder. That's why we need somebody who has vision to take the lead and why we need to get behind that vision as well. So there's a kind of, there's a way that capitalism in a certain sense eats itself. It produces this kind of destroyed world that we all live in. And then it also produces the false solutions to that world, which is kind of the argument

in the book about fascism generally. Right, right. Well, we have false solutions and then we have, you know, hopefully potentially real solution. So I want to end by asking you what the response to all of this is. And the final section of your book is titled, What is the Anti-Fascist Game? So tell us about your thoughts and your vision on how 21st century fascism can be confronted and contended with. Yeah.

Well, the vanilla easy part of this chapter is to say that movements for collective liberation and for socialism probably should be a little more fun. You know, and I think that's a lesson that we can't take lightly. I think if we look at what makes the far right so appealing today, it is that it offers a lot of opportunity for community, for fun, for enjoyment, and for a certain sense of empowerment. It lets people feel like they are really players in the game rather than just NPCs. And I think one of the things that movements for collective liberation and socialism could take from that is not to emulate that, but to ask ourselves, like, what would it mean for

our movements, not necessarily to always be spaces of joy and happiness. Certainly, that's not going to be the case, nor should it be the case. You know, struggle is hard, and it requires a lot of sacrifice and seriousness. But how could we think about our movement organizing in ways that make people feel like they have some sense of agency, that they have some sense of control, and that they're regaining collectively, however, control over their reality, that we are actually building a new world, a new world where actually our capacities and energies are actually used for the, like, things that we want, rather than used against us. So it's not so much to say that organizing should be more game-like or should include more games, but it is to say that

we can learn a lot from asking questions about games, about how we can change. the effective landscape or the sense of agency and potentiality that we want people to have in our movements. That's a bit abstract, I admit, but I think it's an important lesson to take away from it. I don't think that if we could just invent a perfect anti-fascist board game or digital game, then we would solve the problem. Certainly not. Although I've certainly encouraged the creation of those games, and I make games myself and support game makers who are doing radical things in that space. I think it's important, but it's not in and of itself going to save us. What I think I end up looking at in that final chapter is to say that if we're going to

have an anti-fascist strategy, we're going to need to approach it from three intercombined aspects. On the one level, we obviously need to develop means to protect our communities from fascism and to oppose fascist ideology. That's like the baseline. And in those, struggles, we're probably going to end up working with a lot of different people who are targeted by fascism or who don't like fascism, probably including a lot of people who would be, you know, closer to a certain kind of center on that political spectrum. There's lots of people who oppose and are disgusted by fascism, and there can be a broad anti-fascist movement. But in the second place, I think probably people listening to this podcast would agree that fascism is not, as I mentioned before,

just the resurgence of timeless tyranny in human affairs. It is a particular pathology of capitalism. It emerges out of capitalism's contradictions and crises, and it provides these false, violent solutions to them. And therefore, if we really want an anti-fascist agenda, that anti-fascist agenda needs to be socialist in some way. It needs to be about replacing the capitalist economic system with a system that supports life and freedom and conviviality and cooperation rather than death and privation and competition. So as long as we leave capitalism in place, even if it's a tamed form of capitalism that provides more for people than the current kind of austere neoliberal capitalism, we are nonetheless going to need to continue an anti-fascist

fight until the source of fascism, which is capitalism's contradictions and crises, have been ended ultimately. So anti-fascism in the second sense means a renuncious. commitment to a struggle for a better, different world and system. But then third, anti-fascism is also going to necessarily mean questioning and dealing with that thing we talked about earlier as micro-fascism, which is a kind of confusing term, but ultimately means the way that the seeds of fascism are already planted within each of us. They are that part of us that yearns for authority, either to have authority and to exercise authority or to obey authority. It's that part of us that wants power. It's the part of us that fears the complexity of the

world and wants simplicity. That's a part of every human being, I would imagine. You know, it's tough being a human, and we search for certainty. And our ancestors have searched for certainty for many generations since we became humans across every civilization. And I think different civilizations and different societies have ways of dealing with the complexities of being human. But ultimately, Micro-fascism speaks to the way that fascism doesn't just emerge out of nowhere or out of the sentiments of bad and evil people. Fascism grips on to something that's already alive within each of us that can then be manipulated. And certainly the thing that fascism grips onto in each of us is enlarged within capitalism, where we're taught that the only thing that's real is competition

and protecting your group from the outside. But that kind of micro-fascism that's in all of us requires an anti-authoritarian politics in a broad sense. So that, for me, is the kind of third piece of the puzzle of what it would mean to actually have an anti-fascist game. And here I'm thinking about anti-fascist game in that broader sense of the game. It's not just like what games are we going to play at game night. It's also like, what's our game? What's the game plan? What's the strategy to get us out of this moment? And I think we can use games as a potent metaphor and also learn a lot from games about how to develop those kind of anti-fascist strategies that are layered and complex. Are there any games that you want to end on recommending or any of your own games?

Sure, I'll list a few that I think are really, really interesting. There is a great game called Antifa Le Jeux, by a French collective that does anti-fascist education. And it's a really nice game that simulates all the complexities of being an anti-fascist organizer. It's a cooperative game, a board game where you sit around and you each play characters that have different skills that they bring to the movement and you have to figure out how to combine your skills to meet a really diverse range of anti-fascist challenges from dealing with the cops to dealing with fascist organizers in the streets to doing ideological work. I know a lot of anti-fascist organizers who appreciate the game because they're like, it's a really good game, but they're like, I can't play it because it's too realistic. So that game's a lot of fun to play. There's a new game coming out that I think is really interesting. That's a computer game called All Will Rise.

And it's a kind of a legal deck builder where a corporation has murdered a river. And now you and your teammates are out for legal revenge in a kind of hallucinated future. And I think it's a really cool game by some very, very skillful radical game designers. it's going to come out soon, that I think it's not just that it has a good anti-fascist theme and anti-colonial theme. It's also that these designers are really thinking through, like, how can we use games to help people think differently about politics and what it would mean to work together? That's something I'm also interested in, and maybe I'll end here with my own games. So earlier this year, we published the game Billionaires and Gillotines with the venerable London Press, Pluto Press, who has also published a number of my own games. books. And in that game, you play rival billionaires and trying to accumulate the wealth of the

world before your actions lead to crises, and those crises lead to rebellions, and the rebellions can lead to a revolution where all the billionaires lose the game. So you're sort of in a race against time to beat your fellow billionaires before the revolution. And ultimately what that game tries to teach us is some of those lessons I was speaking about earlier drawing on Rosa Luxembourg, for instance, that like, because all the capitalists are competing tooth and nail against each other, they can't often coordinate their activities as a class, and this leads to a whole bunch of unforeseen unintended consequences, including opportunities for social movements to build power and challenge the system. So that's what I'm trying to do in that game. And then I have another game

that'll come up next year called Comrade Orca, where you play a pod of vengeful killer whales who have assembled from around the world to take vengeance upon billionaires by sinking their yachts. And it's a cooperative game. The best way I can describe it is it's like, you know, battleship, that game where you're like, you have sort of two laptop like things and you put pegs in it. It's like a cooperative version of battleship, but the only way you can communicate with your teammates is through whale sounds. So it's basically like everyone sitting around the table going like, ah, trying to tell each other

where the yacht is to be able to attack it. And what I like about this game or what I'm trying to explore in that game is like we are as humans a cooperative species like fundamentally. And our cooperation in my view, one way of approaching capitalism is to say that this is a system that conscripts and distorts our cooperative potential and turns it into commodities that it sells back to us by exploiting our labor power. So if we're going to think about post-capitalist anti-capitalist futures, we also are going to need to cultivate our skills of cooperating differently. Now, we do that in social movements all the time, right? We're cooperating, like most social movements aren't organized like a corporation. We learn to cooperate in new ways,

and part of what we're doing in social movements is building ourselves to be the citizens or the subjects of the world we want to create. And I think we can also do this in games. And what I wanted to do in this game is, like, ask, what can we learn from another cooperative species? And a really badass cooperative species. I mean, orcas are amazing. Don't even get me started on how interesting they are. But what could we learn from them in terms of how we could coordinate and cooperate differently in a way that builds anti-fascist sensibilities and anti-capitalist, let's call them like social muscles? You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Max Haven, Canada Research Chair in Radical Imagination at Lakehead University, an author of many

books, including most recently, The Player and the Plate, from gamed capitalism to 21st century fascism. He's also the designer of the board game Billionaires and Geotines and teaches a popular education course titled Fighting Fascist Feelings. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Carsey Blanton for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is entirely listed. funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper

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