Gamified Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism w/ Max Haiven

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, and sort of describe what you were ultimately arguing and, and, um, 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, I don't think I'm the only one that it would resonate with.

[laughs]

So I was really-- Yeah, when I read that, I, I felt like, okay, like, I, 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 gonna continue to unpack 'cause 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 in what you describe as the, quote, "psychogeography of unwinnable capitalism."

[laughs] 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, a hundred and fifty years ago.

It's still a system of exploitation of people and the planet 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 estimates 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, and turning it into Xbox consoles in 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 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.