54. The Fascist Thinks He Was Cheated w/ Max Haiven

Antifascist Dad, Episode 54: The Fascist Thinks He Was Cheated Guest: Max Haiven Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski with episode 54 of Antifascist Dad. The fascist thinks he was cheated with Max Haiven. Max Haiven: 21st century fascism, as I'm describing it, reaches out and seduces and speaks to the entrepreneur in all of us, to the competitive subject and says, you are being cheated not of your entitlement to wealth and prosperity and peace and security. You're being cheated of your entitlement to compete. You know someone else is cheating at this game and that means that all of your competitive efforts are being undermined. Matthew Remski: You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name And I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And this week that episode is called the Anti-Imperialists Come to Town. And and it's about an upcoming anti-imperialism conference that takes place here in Toronto between November 6th and 8th, put on by a small Marxist-Leninist group called the Association of Workers and Students. And I chat with them about their history and their personal experiences and their strategy. So that's up now on Patreon, but I'll release it to the wild on Saturday to give people plenty of time to make plans to go to the conference again. I will refer you to the link in the show notes for my own book. It's called Antifascist Dad. Now, a little local news before I get to the show for today. This past Monday, Olivia Chow, a veteran progressive social Democrat, won re-election as Toronto's mayor and she's going to have the support of newcomer socialists on City Council Chiara Padovani and Diana Chan McNally. You can scroll back in this podcast feed for my interviews with them and also you'll find interviews with Diana Yoon and Jennie Worden, two other socialist organizers who unfortunately lost. But the thing is, they don't have to be on council to keep being awesome working for others. In fact, they might serve us all better being adjacent to the municipal system, which of course has some pretty hard limits. And I have to say I had been worried about this election. And Olivia Chow's win has only taken a little bit of the edge off because the the power of private equity, genocidal nationalism and fascization right now is just global. And On Monday, over 400,000 people in my city voted for Chow's opponent, Brad Bradford. He's a guy who has staked his claim on being the empty suit bro who would hold the door open for all of those forces, not because he believes in anything or has any discernible values, but because it seems he wants attention in his life now. Lined up behind him in what was ultimately a class war election, were some of the worst and most powerful people in the city, like the CEO of Shopify who lives here, the pro-Israel lobby, data center, investors, development companies, rich homeowners who are always whining about property tax that's actually lower on average than anywhere else in the country. And that money tried to capture the demographic of white resentment through a whole bunch of dirty tricks. And that's what worried me the most, the deployment of AI to prompt real people to flood pro-Olivia Chow media with racist and sexist comments and misinformation about her record. So every time I tried to boost the campaign a little bit, my comment threads were just filled with this racist junk and I had to block hundreds of accounts. And they weren't of bots, they were of real people because they weren't sort of body type comments. They were fleshed out. So what this app does, it's called the Victory app, is that it would send out alerts to Brad Bradford's mailing list probably every morning and let them know where the anti or the pro-Olivia Chow posts were and then give them prompts or direct them towards those posts so that they could make their own aggressive comments. And it just goes to show, I think that going forward, anyone campaigning as a socialist or progressive anywhere who doesn't make tech a focus is at this point, they're doing electoral malpractice. And that might mean hiring Gen Z hackers who can disrupt or boomerang the effects of things like this app that Bradford used. But the best people in the city did do a great job. They pushed turnout higher, up to 45%, which is still kind of low. I'm betting if all renters were mobilized in a way that reflects the urgency of the housing crisis, that number would double. And if you want to hear more about that, you can listen to my interview with Chiara Padovani. Now, the thing is, our provincial premier, Doug Ford right now is probably sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner up at his cottage and he's on the phone plotting out how to screw over this council with provincial powers, because that's been his M.O. for the last couple of years. And the Carney class has their spreadsheets open in Ottawa, figuring out what parcel of city-owned land they can partner with to privatize next on behalf of Blackstone. I talked about that with Diana Yoon. And part of that process for them is going to be about finding someone better, sharper than Brad Bradford to represent them. I was watching Bradford's concession speech on the night that he lost and he turned on some good manners. He was pleasant, he was gracious, and it kind of made me realize that, you know, he might yell at his staffers and he might call his colleagues bitches in private, but he's not quite the guy who is really up for juicing the vitriol that would have put him over the top, but that guy is out there. Oh, and by the way, if you want to hear more about Brad Bradford's character, you know, I did that interview with Inori Roy a couple of weeks back. You can pick that up too. The guy who's sharper than Bradford is out there. He's getting up at 4:30 in the morning, he's doing his body optimization regime, he's doing ice baths, he's chugging a green protein shake, and he's thinking about how to attack the wokesters all day long. So I appreciated that. Olivia Chow in her acceptance speech was gracious as well. But I think next time around the concentration is going to have to lean harder into making socialism undeniably cool and proto-fascism undeniably shameful and cringe. Because whoever that next guy is, now is the time to dissuade him from public life by staying on offense after this win. Okay, every once in a while a book really lights up my brain, and Max Haiven's The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism is one of those books, and I'm so pleased that he's with me today to help us walk through it. So The Player and the Played examines how contemporary fascistic politics emerges from what Haiven calls gamed capitalism. This is the generalized outcome of financialization, which transforms regular people into competitive speculative players in an unwinnable series of games that basically cover every aspect of life: education, fitness, relationships, even skills. These all become the chips that you're playing with. This isn't a book about games per se, but about how gamifications in everyday life allows for financialized capital to exploit people through their own agency. They and Haiven says that this creates a pervasive feeling of both unending competition but also a profound anxiety about being cheated. Now we know the game is rigged. This is the thing. And when we figure this out, you know, some of us lose our minds, but that can go in the wrong direction. And so Haiven talks about the rage of the cheated player and how it's misdirected away from ruling capital and onto the scapegoats who are other cheaters. People who cheat the borders by being migrant workers. People who cheat notions of white supremacy by being minoritized. People who cheat employment standards by being the beneficiaries of DEI in their view. And what happens then? Well, we'll get into it in this longish but very animated discussion. Derivative fascism, the empire building training of Dungeons and Dragons, conspiracy play, swarming master players like Andrew Tate, playgroms. And then what can we do to reverse the weaponization of gamed capitalism? And at the end, we both wonder whether those kids in France are getting up to just that. Max Haiven. Welcome to Antifascist Dad. Thank you so much for joining me. Max Haiven: Thank you so much for having me. Matthew Remski: Okay, so we're going to talk about your incredible book, The Player and the Played, in detail, but just as an overview, beginning statement, I wanted to ask this. You basically agree with a past century of Marxists who say that fascism emerges from capitalism and crisis. And this is in opposition to the basic liberal insistence that fascism is actually kind of like a psychosocial fever driven by bad guys. But the perennial challenge with this Marxist equation is that capitalism mutates and so the fascism it produces also mutates. And that confuses a lot of people. And it leads to superficial time wasting arguments about mismatching aesthetics and technology and whether things are really that bad. So just to start on a really clear note, let's define the central mode of capitalism you're saying fascism emerges from, which is financialization. What's the two minute pitch on financialization? Max Haiven: Well, the vanilla pitch is that it's the increasing power of the finance sector. So this is investment banks, hedge funds, insurance giants, and other sort of speculative arms of capital. And though over the last 40 years they've gained immense power, not only in terms of wealth, but also in terms of their influence over the rest of the economy. But that's just the surface of this phenomenon of financialization. It also refers to a fundamental shift in society, culture and our sense of self. In the book, I present it as transforming each of us into a player. So we all begin to speculate on the future. We begin to play a competitive game against everyone else trying to leverage our meager assets, be they what they may, in order to try and gain advantage. But we also see the financialization of social institutions. For example, post-secondary education, which might have once been considered a public good, now becomes a personalized investment in the future, or housing markets go from being a source of shelter to being an investment for you and perhaps your family into the future. Everything in our society becomes an investment. And we come to see ourselves and our engagement with society as competitive investors. Matthew Remski: Think of ourselves as financiers or gamblers. And I'm wondering what the actual mechanisms by which that happens are like. Does that begin with the crushing of labor solidarity? Is there some material sort of pathway that we can carve from, you know, this is the way money people decide to do things, and then suddenly we find ourselves thinking about ourselves differently, for sure. Max Haiven: So there's a material shift and there's an ideological shift. And as always, these two things travel side by side. On a material level. We are now in latest phase of a long-standing class war against working people and the earth that has basically meant that capital and capitalists have claimed more and more power and more and more of social wealth for themselves. And that's left the rest of us to struggle for the scraps from the proverbial dinner table. At the same time that is happening, there's been this ideological shift where we are increasingly encouraged through popular culture, through education, through this sort of ideology, machines of capitalism, to imagine ourselves as competitive agents, only in it and out for ourselves. And that's been spread ultimately through many, many different sorts of channels. But like many things that work ideologically, it gives expression to and it gives us a language to understand the actually existing material conditions, which is that essentially the rich capitalist class is taking far more than their fair share of social wealth, stashing it away in tax havens, depriving our society of social services and benefits that we could share, like healthcare, housing, et cetera. That means that we are on a material level, left, like in the proverbial Hunger Games or Squid Game, to compete against one another. And then we look to the ideological realm for narratives and explanations that can help us make sense of that. Matthew Remski: This brings up the sort of deep social relations that you're describing at the heart of 21st century fascism, which is that as we become atomized in the financialized world, we lose unions, we lose clubs, we lose church choirs, and the possibility of mass movement politics that define 20th century fascism. These become very remote. And it seems like you're describing a fascism that is really marked by this anxious and isolated quality that if its agents, if its subjects act together, it's through alliances that are really quixotic and tortured by competition. So is that a fair depiction? Max Haiven: I think that's absolutely so. And on one level, that is, as you say, the result of a, you know, a centuries-long war, but especially a concentrated war on working class people and their forms of organization. Whether they've been political parties demanding socialism or communism, or whether it's been trade unions fighting for working people's rights. It's also been accompanied by a fundamental transformation of society where people are spending more time isolated or using online platforms that, you know, make us compete with each other for a slice of the attention economy. Behind the book is also the work of my close friend and collaborator, Sarah Stein Lubrano, who is writing a book right now on social atrophy and how our, in fact, our brains are changing because we are spending so much time in isolation from each other. And not only our brains are changing, but our sense of hope, our sense of possibility, our sense of agency is fundamentally changing in isolation from one another. Matthew Remski: Notwithstanding our isolation, contemporary fascists are able to swarm. So we'll get to that. But it's not the kind of mass movement collective action that we know from the past. It's much more kind of like people gathering in a Fortnite lobby and going out to get the loot. Max Haiven: It's a good metaphor, definitely. And I think we can see that if we look at 20th century fascism and we look at the technological apparatuses that it used. You know, this was fascism built around the mass rally, built around the militarized parade. It was built around the radio broadcast, the one-to-many sort of radio broadcast. It was built around the film reel. Today's technologies and the capitalist apparatuses that surround them are very different. Today's fascism is the fascism of Uber. It's the fascism of Instagram, it's the fascism of YouTube. It's a fascism that instead of calling out to people to disappear into a mass and a mass movement says, no, indeed, be an individual, compete for attention, compete to be a little micro leader or a micro influencer in this ecosystem. And together we will swarm together to take revenge. Matthew Remski: Essentially, you know, one of the most incredible ironies, I think. As you're speaking, I'm thinking about how Trump seems to really want to call back to an era of the mass rally. And it fails utterly. Over and over and over again, he strands people in the fields, he cuts off early, he slurs his speech, he shits his pants, the teleprompter screws up, somebody shoots at him. It's like. But nonetheless, his followers wind up clipping those speeches in a way that allows for his message to be gamified. And so it's like he's working in one mode that is quite nostalgic. But then his followers are transforming it into something that's much more contemporary. Max Haiven: Yeah, I think so. He's a showman, and he first became a showman in an age of sort of analog media, but his career spanned into the age of digital media. So, you know, his beginnings in his most. Not his latest, but penultimate iteration as like the host of a reality TV show, then set him up for the age of Twitter and later Truth Social. But he sort of is quite phenomenal at being able to do this kind of intermedia merging of things. And I think those rallies are really significant, too, because one of the things that they offer their participants is pleasure. They're not coherent, they're not ideologically sensible, but they like a kind of prayer meeting in a kind of evangelical sense. They produce an incredible amount of pleasure and meaning for the people who participate, and then they go out and become vectors or agents for spreading this to the rest of the world. Matthew Remski: It makes me wonder, historically, whether we know if the old Nuremberg rallies had merch sellers outside. Max Haiven: I wonder. I wonder. Some historian will probably tell us, but I wouldn't be surprised, except I think the difference would be that in those days, and maybe I'm wrong about this, and I'm sure a historian will tell us, I would assume that that merch would have been sold exclusively the Nazi Party. Matthew Remski: Right, exactly. Not through the Trump Corporation. Max Haiven: Whereas today there's like, hundreds of merch agents, all hawking stuff that they've had made in China with offshore factories and that sort of thing. And that's really the kind of difference. There's a kind of entrepreneurialism to this era of fascism that allows for a much more nuanced and complex and diversified form of participation. Matthew Remski: Well, it allows for low barriers to entry, but then also a lot of entropy. And, you know, we saw this particularly with the QAnon influencer class that was all using the same material, but they were also all in competition with each other as to who could be the most, like, prescient baker of the drops, who could be, you know, the one who really knew the truth, who really had the sort of, like, special sauce that they could deliver to their audience. Max Haiven: Yeah. And, you know, that makes for a much more supple and agile form of fascistic influence, because you're not reliant on just one getting up there and making speeches. You actually have a wide variety of people who are able to take risk in a kind of capitalist, entrepreneurial sense and maximize their returns on that risk. Matthew Remski: Yeah, a downline. Max Haiven: A downline. Quite exactly. Matthew Remski: So financialization in your schema leads to gamed capitalism and turns people into cheated subjects. Because it's obvious to most of us who wins at the financialization game and the answer to that realization should be socialism. And yet the entire system moves people away from that. Is that fair? Max Haiven: That's fair, yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a couple of steps in this argument. And the first is that financialization, to the extent it's isolated us and individuated us and forced us to be competitive with one another, encourages us to shape in ourselves a self-image that we are a kind of player that if you, you know, you can have many different hustles, you have to make investments in your life. All sorts of things in our lives have been transformed into these kind of strange investment games, from, you know, dating to education to health and fitness. It's not just that these apps are gamified and using game-like elements to seduce our attention. It's also that they hail us and, and ask us to imagine ourselves as a kind of player of multiple different games. And yet no matter how these games, whether it's investing in crypto, whether it's trying to flip houses, whether it's trying to invest in some sort of education to get a middle class job, most of us feel like we're constantly losing because we are in fact losing. I mean, unless you happen to be a billionaire or a member of the ruling class, you are losing. We are collectively the rest of us losing. But we live in a society also that's fundamentally deprived us of the explanations for why that's the case. And in fact we live in a media sphere where we're constantly being distracted from the fact that the ruling class are getting away like absolutely criminals, like never before in capitalist history. The vast and growing divergence of wealth between the rich and everyone else. And instead we have this sort of society of cheated players who then are very susceptible to the siren song of fascist influencers and fascist politicians who offer them someone to blame, usually people they can accuse of cheating, for instance, migrants cheating the borders, benefits claimants cheating on welfare, university professors cheating students out of their right to improve their human capital by boring them with reading Critical Theory, this sort of stuff. Matthew Remski: I have to say that I think since reading Thi Nguyen maybe three, four years ago and then interviewing him back on Conspirituality, I've been hyper aware of the gamification processes at play in my own life, especially with regard to social media. And, and it seems to me that even I am susceptible to those parts of the gamified culture that seem to promise some kind of individual win from time to time. Right? Like in the broadest sense of the term, my finances, my employment capacity, my ability to communicate on social media, this is all out of my hands. But if somebody gives me this little app that lets me track how much I'm walking on my treadmill while I type out my scripts, and it can tell me at the end of the month, oh, you've walked 50 miles while you were doing your regular work. I'm like, oh my God, I'm so cool. And so there's a way in which it really gets in to this baseline sort of desire that I have for, like, oh, am I doing okay? Max Haiven: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think you shouldn't feel bad about that. I mean, we have some of the greatest minds of our generation working in Silicon Valley and its peripheries to basically hook us to do that to machines that are intended either to keep us, like, keep our attention hooked or to sell our data to unscrupulous people who don't have our interests at heart. You know, we are none of us immune to, and none of us can be immune to this. It is, you know, we are at a phase of capitalism where it is directly hooking into our social neurosystem through these apps. And even the best among us, even the most critical among us, can't imagine we're immune. I think there's a lot of content online that says, do these tricks and you'll be able to keep your attention and you'll be able to resist the kind of surveillance and attention harvesting apps. This is nonsense. We need collective solutions to these problems. But the thing that I think it also hooks into is it's not just that the apps are so well designed, it's that in a world where we increasingly rely only on ourselves or at best on our family for competitive survival, it makes sense. We would all be increasingly attached to apps that tell us we can help you improve, we can help you be more efficient, we can help you be more effective, we can help you be a better player in this game. But the game, of course, is rigged. It is fundamentally a game that is going to make the rich richer and basically ensnare all of us in a kind of Squid Game-like scenario. Matthew Remski: So I have a bunch of roll-on questions for that, but I feel like I'm so excited about all of this material. I just want to underline one point here, which is to return to the notion that because the game is rigged, the cheated subject becomes this very ubiquitous cultural figure. There's a little bit of that person in each of us. And when it reaches a certain, I don't know, critical mass, we have the kind of social anger and recrimination and resentment that rises up as a new form of fascism. I just want to underline that. Is that a good summary as we go forward? Max Haiven: Yeah, exactly. It's not that everyone who feels like they've been cheated by the system will necessarily become a fascist. It is, however, saying that there's a specific combination of things. So we've been turned into players, we feel cheated, and we've been deprived, by and large of the ideological tools to make sense of this. And that presents the metaphor I as a kind of like a fertile ground within which the seeds of fascism can easily grow, propagate, and be harvested by certain people. And maybe just to extend that metaphor briefly, this draws on a kind of long legacy of antifascist thinkers who are not satisfied. And this is kind of where we began as well, with saying that, like, oh, fascism is something that bad people over there do. Which is true, they are bad people and we need to oppose them. But also. So it draws on this long line of thinking that says, actually the seeds of fascism are in every society. They're already there. And in some ways they're in all of us. We all desire simplicity in the world. We all desire easy solutions. We all desire to be part of a group. And being part of any group means excluding some other part of society. We all have those desires. And the antifascist work, one level of it, is challenging even those fascistic desires within us. Now you can get a little obsessive about this and become kind of paranoid that secretly you're the fascist. Probably we got to take that with a grain of salt. But I think what's important in the metaphor is to say certain historical and material conditions under capitalism make that ground more fertile within which those seeds of fascism, whether they're planted in social institutions or individuals, are more likely to grow. But as every historian of fascism will say, we're very confused as to when they sprout and when they don't. Matthew Remski: Well, with regard to when they sprout and when they don't and who gets funneled where. When I think about the demographic of people who do seem to build their lives around that sense of feeling cheated, people who listened and nodded their heads to Rush Limbaugh and then Glenn Beck, and then they nodded even more vigorously to Alex Jones, they got a little bit red in the face. The effects of that resentment are clear to me. The effects and what it can agitate are super evident. But I wonder if there's a subject or archetype that comes first. Because when I was in the yoga world and I was doing journalism on yoga and wellness, the cliche was that neoliberalism was actually a form of freedom, that individual abundance was here like a blessing from the universe. And so, so I first began to critique a kind of aspirational subject that was groundless and depoliticized. And I'm wondering if that subject comes before the person realizes that they've been cheated. Max Haiven: Yes, I think certainly so I think that first we need to lose our sense that we're part of a society and that we share a common wealth and a common fate. To the extent we can be seduced into imagining we're just competitive individuals extremely susceptible to the siren song of fascism. In part because 21st century fascism doesn't primarily revolve around the kind of loss of individuality and the disappearance of the individual into the national mass, which was true of 20th century fascism. 21st century fascism, as I'm describing it, reaches out and seduces and speaks to the entrepreneur in all of us, to the competitive subject, and says, you are being cheated not of your entitlement to wealth and prosperity and peace and security, you're being cheated of your entitlement to compete. Someone else is cheating at this game and that means that all of your competitive efforts are being undermined. But I think that maybe the other important bit of this is to say that fascism, especially today, but actually in the 20th century as well, appealed to the relatively privileged but functionally powerless of capitalism. Which is to say what old Marxists used to call the petty bourgeoisie, not the big bourgeoisie, factory owners and big capitalists, but the small business owners, the professionals. People who feel like they have something to lose in this system and who feel their position declining in this society, who feel their wealth and security disappearing either materially or immaterially. So this can take the form of, for instance, many, many people who are feeling extremely insecure about the future of their jobs because they. The whole labor landscape is changing, especially with AI, but not exclusively, but it also is relative to people who have been relatively privileged within the capitalist system, who feel that privilege slipping. So that's within North America and the so-called West. White people, men, able-bodied people, people who over the where many different groups who have been excluded from those sorts of privileges have been rising up over the last decades demanding, if not equality, then even perhaps a replacement of the system with something else. Those relatively privileged but functionally powerless groups feel that their relative privilege is deeply under threat, and I think they always form the most enthusiastic early adopters of fascism. Matthew Remski: So you've alluded to a kind of fluidity in the presentations of fascism so far, and I just want to nail that down with this key element of your argument, which you share with a growing number of Marxist theorists, I think, which is that fascism is not this boundaried state. It's not like America flips a switch and suddenly Trump is elected, and then suddenly it's fascist. But there's kind of like a fluidity or a spectrum going on. And you get at this idea through the ideas of manifest, latent and microfascist categories. So can you just briefly define those and then tell me if I'm on the right track and thinking that they're really simultaneous to each other? Max Haiven: No, you're exactly on the right track. In the book, I kind of present the figure of the Sphinx, not the Egyptian Sphinx, but the Sphinx of Greek myth, which is this hybrid monster which has the legs of a lion, the head of a woman, and the wings of an eagle. And I use this metaphor in various ways, but one of them is to say that this is a kind of monstrous presence that's made up of many different things at once. So on the one hand, we have manifest fascist ideology, and these are people who explicitly say, hey, I'm a fascist. I believe fascist ideas. But there are also people who maybe would never call themselves a fascist, but everything they say is fascist. Someone like Elon Musk, for instance, who anytime anyone accuses him of being a fascist because he says fascist things, he then turns around and says, no, you're the fascist because you're somehow stomping on the freedom of speech of the world's richest man. I mean, it's so absurd. In any case, this is what I would call like an implicit manifest fascism rather than an explicit manifest fascism, but that's fairly easy to understand. And that's what I think most sort of liberal and centrist commentators are comfortable talking about. Matthew Remski: They're the ones that they are really worried about, too. Max Haiven: Right. Matthew Remski: It's like once it becomes manifest, then it's something that we really have to. Let's shore up our institutions, let's make sure that capitalism gets back on track, let's make sure that we do things in the right way, and these people will go away. Max Haiven: Yeah. And they see manifest fascism as an interruption of the liberal order, the natural liberal capitalist order. And they want to return us to that natural liberal capitalist order. But what I think they fail to see is that all of the threats to that liberal capitalist order that they perceive have actually been there for a long time. So, you know, they're very concerned about, for instance, attacks on the universities, attacks on the media, attacks on the rule of law, attacks on the global, you know, rules-based order, as they used to call it. But like, nobody who's actually been paying attention for the last 50 years has any illusions that these are in tatters, if they existed at all, long before Trump and his ilk managed to take power. I mean, who really believes that the legal system provides justice equally for the rich and the poor? Who honestly can say that the media sphere that exists, the sort of the corporate media sphere, isn't completely bought off by big money and the corporations that own it? Who can say that universities are actually there for educating the public when for the last 40 years they've been on a constant attacks both from the far right and from neoliberal cutbacks. So all of these liberal institutions that sort of liberal centrist capitalists argue are being threatened by fascism were already completely undermined long before the fascists kind of arrived and seized power. And in fact, it's partly the cynicism that many people saw of these sort of liberal centrist elites proclaiming these vaulted virtues and then obviously presiding over a system of vast and growing inequalities that actually fueled the fire of fascist sentiment. Matthew Remski: That's so interesting, because the latent fascism that you're describing in kind of very concentrated power forms of liberal democracy is both seen as hypocritical to those who know that they are losing within it, but it's also productive of the conditions that spur them towards lashing out. So it has this double function that I haven't quite been clear on until just hearing you speak. Max Haiven: Quite. And I think we see that most explicitly in the latent fascist institutions that exist within liberal capitalism that are most closely aligned with fascism. And that's institutions like the police, the border, the prison system. It's not only the case that police, border guards and prison guards happen to be some of the most ardent supporters, typically, and military folks most ardent supporters of fascist regimes historically and today. It's also that these have always represented little pockets or sort of organs of fascism even existing within liberal capitalist democracies. I mean, these are institutions, we have to be clear, are there to impose racialized class rule. I mean, what else is the prison in the United States where a vastly disproportionate number of Black people are incarcerated, or in Canada, where a vastly disproportionate number of Indigenous people are incarcerated. These institutions exist to perpetuate a kind of fascist domination of society based on racial and class ruling class rule. But they have to exist within liberal capitalist democracy in order to protect it from the demands of workers and from the demands of equality. So one of the ways of thinking about latent fascism is to say it's like fascism has been here for a long time. It's just not been evenly distributed. It's been more keenly felt by racialized people, by poor people, by marginalized people, by people who are having their lives interrupted by the border. And it's also the case that the liberal capitalist order, the rules-based order, blah, blah, blah, that was that. Now the sort of liberal centrists mourn. It was also a system that supported fascism overseas as a way as a bulwark against communism or as a way to protect the interests of corporations. For decades after the Second World War, from Uganda to Indonesia to Guatemala, Western governments have supported effectively fascist regimes in the name of keeping capitalism safe and profitable. Fascism has been with us a long time. Matthew Remski: You know, that uneven distribution aspect is where we get Aimé Césaire and George Jackson and Angela Davis saying, well, wait a minute, look at what has already existed here. Max Haiven: Yeah, exactly. And I think that it's that history being written of our world from the perspective of the oppressed that gives us a more keen understanding of fascism. And, you know, I was just rereading the work of Walter Benjamin last week where he has an amazing passage about this where he says there's this surprise, this constant production of surprise amongst the bourgeoisie in his terminology. How could this be happening? How could we have regressed so far into fascism? But what they don't realize is that this is actually the norm. It's just not been the norm for them yet. And now is the moment when we have to ask, do we just want to return to the old normal, or do we want something fundamentally different? Matthew Remski: I feel like that instinct of surprise is probably the main block to the recognition of what you describe as microfascism. Because what microfascism theorized means is that, you know, what you in your daily life are behaving in particular ways that can be easily recruited into the hierarchies of latent and then manifest fascism. Max Haiven: Absolutely. And that's the kind of the third, third face or the third monster inside the Sphinx in this case. Is that this idea of microfascism, which really speaks to the way, as I was mentioning earlier, that all of us, no matter who we are, carries within us the temptation or the desire towards fascism. And this isn't to say we will inevitably succumb to it, but it is to say that it is a lifelong struggle to deal with these desires. Our desire to either have authority over others or to supplicate ourselves in the face of authority. Our desire to fold ourselves into institutions and take the easy route, our desire to be part of an in-group and exclude an out-group, all of these are microfascist desires that as individuals but also as communities, we need to kind of work through and deal with. And I think the really important insight here is that fascism can happen to any society. There's no society that's immune, at least within capitalism, to going down the path of fascism if the conditions are right and if people are not vigilant. So I think when we combine these three elements that sort of manifest the latent and the micro, we gain a much fuller, more robust picture of what fascism is. It's not a framework that's necessarily going to answer every question, but it allows us to ask much better and deeper questions about what fascism is and also what anti- antifascist struggle is going to look like. Because my conjecture would be that, and we'll probably get to this a bit later, that if we're going to be dedicated to an antifascist struggle, we need to struggle against fascism on all three levels at once. Against the manifest fascists, against the latent fascist institutions within liberal democracy, and also against the microfascism within each of us and within our communities. Matthew Remski: And we'll probably talk about different tools for each part of the Sphinx. The thing about microfascism I want to ask about is the. That it can have. I don't think you intend this, but it can have an essentialist ring to it, as in we are burdened with these original flaws. I think that there are hints of Freud in it, for example. But then you also have a very strong proposition of a medicine that calls on the notion that humans are essentially collaborative. And so I'm wondering how you walk that. Max Haiven: Well, there's a debate within scholars of microfascism about whether this is some sort of timeless demon that will be with us for all time, or whether it's uniquely the product of capitalist social relations. So, you know, someone who's written a very good book on this, Jack Bratich, wrote a very good book called On Microfascism, appears to be arguing that essentially this emerges from the moment when the concept of sovereignty, patriarchal sovereignty, takes form in the human experience, which is like way, way, way, way back into the sands of history. Matthew Remski: Agriculture. Max Haiven: Yeah, agriculture might be an argument. Others argue that, no, this microfascist tendency is instilled in us by capitalism because it makes us particularly good. Capitalist subjects like to obey authority. You will go into work and obey the boss to demand power over others. That's precisely what capitalism is all about. So there's a debate, I think, whether it's timeless or more circumstantial, but it's bad nonetheless. And I think that means that also fascism, this is the curious thing about fascism, is it can be many things at once, which is why I kind of dwell with this weird metaphor of the Sphinx. So on the one level, fascism can manifest itself in the forms we've been talking about as this kind of reaction of the hyper individualist competitiveness subject. But fascism also appeals to people who want a kind of exclusionary and exclusivist form of collectivity and cooperation. You know, cooperation, in my view, is not necessarily the antidote to everything. I think we are a cooperative species. We should live in a more cooperative society. Right now, capitalism basically harnesses and distorts and perverts our cooperative potential and turns it into individualized competitive labor, usually for a boss for them to make money. So cooperation for me is a bit value neutral. It's a bit like it is our essence. And different systems harness it and seduce it and shape it in different ways. And we could have a system, I think, that is beyond capitalism, where we get to enjoy both cooperation and collectivism and individuality and various forms of personal expression. I think there's a dialectic relationship between the two, or always, and each different system will offer a kind of configuration of that dialectic relationship. Matthew Remski: You concentrate on the curative or the salubrious qualities of games and art. But it also seems to me that when we look for an answer to microfascism, that the world of spirituality offers us a toolbox or maybe a poison chalice. So which one do you think it is? Max Haiven: As always, when we're talking about fascism, it's both. Unfortunately, it's both. You know, we've seen spirituality, you know, be used as an incredible tool for manipulating whole populations. You know, there were many people who spoke about 20th century fascism as political theology, as a form of sort of secular spirituality where the nation replaces a supernatural being. At the same time, there's a long history of human affairs where spirituality has been a source of not only solace in dark times, but open rebellion. And in fact it's hard to look at rebellions anywhere in the world, even in the so-called West, that haven't had a spiritual dimension to them, where people have called upon ancestral spirits, where they have called upon higher powers to fortify them in the struggle for liberation. So I think in some ways it can be both. Just like games. I think a lot of the book is about how games and gamification have accelerated and normalized fascism. But then the other side of the book is to say, in fact, these give us profound playgrounds through which to experiment with new ways of being, to model new worlds, new forms of relationships, new forms of agency. So yeah, sorry not to have a more categorical answer. Matthew Remski: Well, we're going to get to the games, but I do want to ask that in part of your practice and I think you collaborate with Sarah on this, this. I think you give a workshop called Something about Dealing with Fascist Feelings. What's it called? Max Haiven: It's called Fighting Fascist Feelings. Matthew Remski: And I'm wondering if folks come to you in that kind of expectation that has built up over the last couple of decades of the wellness or sometimes spiritual mode of oh Max, you're going to help me sort out my internal life through a kind of contemplation. Like is that an element that you are sort of, I don't know, exposing yourself to or that you're treading into? Max Haiven: Yeah, we definitely get a lot of participants in our workshops who are body workers, who are doing spiritual work, who are doing artistic work, and a lot of people who are doing sort of therapeutics at various levels. So we've had a lot of people in our courses who are psychologists or working in mental. Mental health. And sometimes we do get people who are looking to us to help them overcome some sort of inner turmoil or find some sense of meaning. I think what they find when they come to our sessions, unfortunately, is that Sarah and I are both pretty hard-nosed and quite very materialist in our approach. So they don't necessarily find a lot of satisfaction in that. We're not great spiritual influencers sort of say, but we do have a great time. Matthew Remski: You're not doing intrusive eye contact? Max Haiven: No, no, we don't do that. We don't. But we do work with a lot of people who do. And you know, I have a lot of respect for some of those people who are really thinking through. They're the ones who are usually most attracted to a discourse around microfascism in our work. Matthew Remski: Right. Max Haiven: Where they're really thinking about, like, how is a tendency towards fascism lodged in the body, in the psyche, in our relationship? And I think the big struggle that they have in our sessions and that we also share with them is like, how do we then connect the struggle against microfascism to the struggle against macrofascism? Because there's another way where you can just go and, like, meditate until you die. And then you're probably not going to invade Poland, which is great, but it's maybe not as useful in terms of. Terms of what's needed for social movements. Matthew Remski: Do you know the first Tibetan Buddhist sort of lineage that I got involved with on a long, strange journey? One of the first instructions about meditation was, you might not be very good at this, but at least it's going to keep you out of trouble. The reason to meditate is so that you don't break your other vows, which have to do with basic social niceties, right? Max Haiven: Yeah. It's kind of like a harm reduction for the human species. Matthew Remski: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's get to the redemption arc of the book and games. But I want to start with fun and friendship. You say that antifascism needs to be fun. It needs to foster friendship. This is something that I feel in my bones whenever I hear Chumbawamba or whenever I listen to Carsie Blanton or when I think about, you know, the International Brigades and just the social aspect of what it means to actually be in opposition to an oppressive force. And you say that this is necessary because fascism seems to offer. That seems to offer a sense of collective belonging. At the same time, I don't think I've seen. Seen any more bitter recrimination than I have seen when watching QAnon fall apart on the day of the Biden inauguration. Right. So we're watching, as part of our reporting, we're watching these factions on Telegram discussing whether or not the SWAT team is gonna come in and arrest him. They're discussing whether or not he's actually placing his hand on the Bible or some other text. And everything is kind of unfolding as though it's both a movie but also reality. But they're not quite sure which one, and they don't know who's writing the script. And then it's all over. And Biden's president and they are tearing into each other. You made me believe this. You gave me hope in that I lost everything because of the bullshit you told me. And it really kind of, I don't know, illuminated for me the. This thing that I don't know, it feels that the fascist kind of affiliation that people can get enmeshed in is quite fragile. It is built on, maybe because it's built upon competition, maybe because it's built upon an exclusionary politics or some sort of special relationship that people have because they're white or whatever. But I just wonder about that. Is there a way in which, which we can really sort of broadcast the fact that you don't actually do. You don't make friends in a fascist affiliation? Max Haiven: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think so. But at the base of it, there's a very different understanding of the world, I would assume. I think that the vast majority of people who are probably listening to this podcast and that we would probably be organizing with, feel on some fundamental level that the human experience is one of fraught collectivity. We are social animals, we are cooperative animals. We are bound together in a web of mutuality. The most meaningful thing in our life and the fundamental ontological truth of reality is relationality. It's relationships with others and that we Matthew Remski: suffer in that, and we suffer a great deal. Max Haiven: Yeah, and I think that's actually really important to stress because. Because sometimes in leftist discourse that suffering recedes into the background. But it's inevitable. It's inevitable. But I think there's a fundamental ontological belief that animates a lot of social movements for collective liberation that is about connection and relationality. I think underneath the vast majority of fascistic ideologies is a very different ontological assumption. And that is life is struggle, competition and power. That ultimately what exists in the world is the power to have your way. And that that's all that's ever existed. And anything that might appear to be something other than that is a ruse, a sham, a game, a con, a scam, you know, so if somebody is talking to you about solidarity, what's their angle? Like, what are they trying to get out of you? You know, and even when they think about friendship, and even when intimate personal and romantic relationships, there's a kind of contractual paranoia that this is in fact a contract in order to help you achieve your own personal power and satisfaction maximization. Now, in this way, the fundamental fascist ideology has a lot in common with the neoliberal ideology, which believes essentially the same thing, that humans are self-maximizing machines that enter into, into more or less temporary contractual relationships with one another in order to maximize their pleasure, which is a great pledge to make on your wedding day. It's great. Just replace the vows with that and you've got the vision of society. And that means I think that fundamentally fascism and fascist social movements are able to provide a feeling of community, or communitas, the kind of sensation that you're part of something bigger than yourself. It can provide the illusion of friendship and camaraderie, but it's always conditional. And it's always conditional on each individual remembering at the back of their mind that fundamentally they are competitive and self-seeking. Now certain forms of fascism take that to the next level and they're like, that's the fundamental ontology of humanity. And that is therefore why we need religion or why we need the nation. Because if we don't have these strong centralized institutions, oh, we'll destroy ourselves. We will destroy ourselves. It's also the reason why some sort of like Silicon Valley folks are like, unless we allow Elon and the others to make as much money as possible and kind of run the fate for humanity, we're going to annihilate ourselves. Because fundamentally humans are competitive, self-seeking individuals. Matthew Remski: I did not realize this aspect of, of the sort of religious end timers, as Naomi Klein would put it, which is that their fundamental recognition of the competitive nature of capitalism means that they have to have something that keeps the story on some sort of track, that moves in a sensible way, because without it, there's chaos. I haven't quite caught on to that. I mean, that's probably what Thiel is going on about, is that there has to be something, some kind of mythology that holds this together, because everything that's actually in my body and my brain is chaos. Max Haiven: That's quite so. So I think Thiel's a great example. He's someone who fundamentally, from his earliest days, has believed in this incredibly grim and dark vision of human nature. And essentially, I think someone like Thiel believes there are two types of people in the world. There are the people who can accept this and take responsibility for it, who are people who like him, and then there's the great unwashed stupid masses who if they are allowed to, if they are left to their own devices, will swarm together into, you know, underneath what he calls the Antichrist, who are then going to destroy. You know, this is very common also in far right ideology generally there's like the makers and the takers. The makers are the ones who realize there are no rules, everything is permitted and the take are animated by this ontological truth, but they're too stupid to even understand it. And so they say, you rich people need to give us your tax money so we can live high on the hog. This is their fundamental view of the world and humanity and its fate. It's very, very grim, very, very dark. And I think that really fundamentally undermines any of those things like friendship, conviviality, comradeship. It's always based on, on this extremely dark vision of humanity. Matthew Remski: It's so anxious at the heart of it. I mean, I'm thinking about how maybe what I'm getting at with the recrimination in the Telegram channels during the QAnon implosion is that whatever the collegiality, whatever the friendship bonds are, there's a very low threshold tolerance for strife or for disagreement. And maybe because there is this underlying understanding that, oh, actually there's nothing underneath our feet, there's nothing actually really holding us together. And if this story falls apart, then who actually are we to each other? And this reminds me of, you know, what it was like to be in a couple of cults which I think, as I went on to study that kind of sociology are attractive because they offer an ersatz experience of communism, of shared resources, an ersatz experience of friendship. And yeah, I think that's very, very attractive. And if you don't really know what good friendship is by comparison or you somehow forget about it from your previous life, then you're gonna get sucked in. Max Haiven: Absolutely. And I think, you know, these are things that, you know, obviously cults have been with us since time immemorial in different ways. But this is, I think, the particular that these things take in such a highly individualized and frankly, sad society where, you know, we've lost the complexity of our social muscles, we've lost, so many of us have been raised in isolation and competition that we've lost the many pluralities of ways that we can be human together and in relationship with non-humans as well. You know, another place that maybe it manifests itself is in the kind of manosphere which is maybe relevant here. Like a lot of the appeal of someone like Andrew Tate or other manosphere influences is that they're like they reframe all human relationships as these contracts between self-seeking individuals, including the fundamental romantic relationships between men and women, but also the relationships between men and men. I mean, it's just kind of like ridiculous Fight Club ideology. It's an incredibly juvenile and fundamentally rotten way of seeing the world as a bunch of merciless competitive agents seeking their own satisfaction in more or less temporary alliance with each other. Matthew Remski: You turn to games, but you get there first by discussing how there is an undoing that needs to happen. Because you describe how all of our overlords played D and D in the 1980s and 1990s. And I think absolutely, you're right that there's this combination of Tolkien racism plus narrative narcissism and then world building plus autocratic rules plus magic. It sets the tone for what they wind up doing to us as NPCs. But I think that what they've done actually is to take this game logic, which can go in any direction, and they've actually enclosed closed it because it's like they were able to go to each other's houses and use paper and pen and little models and maybe even paint them and maybe create a diorama in which the characters moved around and stuff like that. But then they create digital or virtual environments in which other people are trapped doing those same actions for their benefit. And I think that seems to to be what happened. Like they had the freedom of the liberated imagination to play D and D and then they said, oh, this energy is something that we could really bottle up, Max Haiven: I think so judging by the biography of most of these Silicon Valley types, one thing that jumps out at you is the fact that most of them as young people were excluded from and confused by the world. You know, they didn't fit in. They were nerds, geeks, you know, I think, and they felt. You can really tell when you read, for instance, some of what, like Elon Musk writes about his childhood or what has been sort of gleaned about Peter Thiel's background and many the other sort of Silicon Valley titans that they were angry at the world for excluding them and for being stupid, essentially. And they found a great deal of solace in creating imaginary worlds together. And I think there's two ways that the world building impulse can go. Maybe there's more than two, but, but let's stick with two. And there's essentially the same two that we just discussed in terms of these views of the world. One of them is to say we are a world building species. We uniquely, it would appear as humans, have the ability to coordinate our imaginations in order to collaborate to build a world. We create the tools, we reshape the world around us that reshapes us. And we have a very unique power to do that and a very, very grave responsibility that I think as a species we're only beginning to grapple with the effects of climate, climate change. We've made this world to fit our needs and to fit our desires. And now, you know, we're faced with the consequences of that and the consequences of our powers. So there's one way of thinking about this world building impulse, which is about a kind of awe in the face of the majesty of our own collaborative potential and a recognition that that collaborative potential is relational and it's infinite. We could be a multitude of things, we could have a multitude relationships. There's another way of going that closes you down to the potential and that insists that in fact there's only really two types of people in the world. There are the world builders, the people who know how to step outside of history and claim power for themselves. And there are the drone-like masses who are destined to simply follow. And that's the path that I think a lot of these Silicon Valley guys have gone, gone down. And as a result, if we go with the first more humanist hopeful view, then if you approach the world as a game, you realize that it's a game where we make and break the rules together and we make and break the rules for higher purposes, to build solidarity, to build conviviality, to build abundance, to build peace, to build all these sorts of things. If you go down the path where you believe that only a handful of people really understand the game and everyone else is just a non-player character, NPC, then you're using that same recognition of the playfulness of reality and the playfulness of our human potential in order to produce domination and destruction. Even up to the point where these guys genuinely seem to believe that they are giving birth to a new form of life that may require the sacrifice of the vast majority of humanity in the form of AI. Matthew Remski: I'm thinking about how incredible it is that this psychosocial evolution happens in conjunction with these technological developments that in gaming, for instance, give us this fork in the road between, okay, well, either you're going to be PvP, you're going to play against another person, or you know, against a group of people, or you're going to be PvE, you're going to play against the environment, you're going to play against a swarm of AI characters. But both of those options take place on their platform, right? They're both, they're both in the enclosure certainly. Max Haiven: And it's also, you know, it's the worldview of colonialism come back to us as well. This sort of idea that you're the individual agent, you know, sent out into the world of darkness to create order, to use violence to produce wealth and resources, to level up your power. This is all stuff that we inherit very directly, directly from a colonial worldview as well, which also, if we look at the history of just, let's take for instance the UK or England or Great Britain. The people who were going out and doing the vanguard work of imperialism and colonialism had been raised typically in private schools, what we would in North America call private schools, elite schools essentially where they both played games all the time and they were all abusing each other other all the time. I think that's the worldview that now carries forward into most game logics. Matthew Remski: So I'm just thinking about everybody in their sort of like cricket whites. So they're playing a lot and whether it's on the cricket pitch or they are playing cribbage or they are snapping each other in the showers, it's just sort of non-stop competition and pain. Max Haiven: Hence the preponderance of the use of the metaphor of the game to describe imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century, for instance. They're always talking about the Great Game. And there's a kind of conviviality even between competitors in the Great Game, between like French and English imperialists who are competing to like, you know, the Great Game especially referred to the kind of competition for influence in so-called Asia Minor in the area that's now sort of Afghanistan and Central Asia, where basically these imperialists were turning whole tribal groups against each other in order to jockey for position in ways that had genocidal effects then and continue to have incredibly violent effects today in those areas. These really sabotaged whole civilizations in the name of this game. But that game of course begins in the private school in, in the kind of game-filled environment of the boarding school. And it's many, many different types of abuse. Matthew Remski: It gives me a new perspective on the uniforms of 19th century military as well. So D and D is still going in real life and there's been a pivot, I think around 2010 or so there had to be like a rebrand because a number of the sort of toxic elements became publicized or more known. Now everybody that I know who plays D and D is like leftist and queer. Max Haiven: Yeah. Matthew Remski: And so I wanted to ask you. And they show up at the cosplay conventions, they're like, you know, it's a huge thing at Comic-Con or like at anime fests. And then it feeds into other sort of storylines or other branded content sections too. Right. And so I'm wondering what does this tell us about the form in which a game is played played? Whether the form itself has a kind of neutral graspability to it, depending upon who owns or co-owns it. What do we know? What can we tell about this pivot in D and D? Max Haiven: Yeah, it's fascinating. And it's also, I should mention, the reason why Elon Musk had a number of tantrums where he threatened to buy the entire parent company that owns D and D, which I think is half Hasbro outright. For like. He just was like, I have the cash right now. I'm gonna buy it to get all these queers out. Matthew Remski: I did not know that he wanted to buy D and D because it was woke. Max Haiven: Yeah, exactly. Matthew Remski: Yeah. Oh, my God. Max Haiven: Yeah. So, you know, and I think. I don't know why he didn't end up doing it. I mean, it's so fruitless to speculate on his personal motivations. Although I should mention that I think Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's book Muskism, which came out earlier this year, is a great approach to him that asks not. Not like, how can we explain this guy, but how can we use him to understand the capitalism that has rewarded him and that he now is kind of the emblem of. Matthew Remski: Yeah, he's a bellwether, right? Max Haiven: Yeah, yeah, very much. I guess I'm inclined to agree with Marijam Did, who's a great theorist and thinker about games. Wrote a very good book from Verso a couple of years ago called Everything to Play For and has been doing really great work thinking about video games and politics. And her argument is like, there are probably inclinations within different types of games towards certain kinds of politics, but we shouldn't let that inclination determine what we think the political outcome is. It's less important if someone's playing a first-person shooter or a tabletop role-playing game. It's less important if they're playing Wolfenstein 3D, where you go around shooting Nazi or Grand Theft Auto. What matters more is the social contexts of play. And I think her point here is really well taken. It's about who you're playing with, who you are, what your engagement with it is. And she's really encouraged us to move a little bit away from saying, like, is this game training us to be fascists? Is this game training us to be capitalists? And recognizing that games, like all cultural texts, are very ambivalent. They open themselves up to multiple different interpretations and uses. So today it's true. There's tons of queer leftists who are playing Dungeons and Dragons all the time. And it's amazing. It's so fantastic and really liberating for people. And I'm sure there are also, at the same moment, groups of skinheads in basements playing fascist Dungeons and Dragons as well. But what seems to be more significant is where and in what social realm you encounter that game. This also helps us explain why even games like Robot Roblox or Minecraft are often like we have neo-Nazis trying to recruit in these spaces. Even though these games are very benevolent on a certain level. Matthew Remski: I really have to get this book because I have been frustrated with the almost reification of the content of games by certain critics who have a very deterministic attitude around. I don't know what the imagery programs into the brain in micro moments instead of what is the kid actually doing with their friends or what are they doing in relation to the rest of the people in the house or. I mean, you know, I have grown up now in my second childhood with two kids who are big gamers and I'm just kind of like always part of that conversation. That's a very privileged position that not a lot of people are in. But it just seems to me like that's the fundamental context in which games are played is like who's around you and how are you talking about it? And I don't think that the kids that get propagandized into alt-right pipelines through gaming necessarily have any kind of support. There are no guardrails socially for how that happens. So I've got to get this book, obviously. Max Haiven: Yeah, yeah. And you know, I think there are certain things about certain games that are very worrisome and I would like to see challenged. Like, you know, lots of people are playing 4X strategy games where you, you know, like sort of Civilization where you start out with a small little civilization and then you go and expand and kill everyone else and explore territory and exploit resources and that sort of thing, I think that's fundamentally problematic. I think that the first-person shooter where you play like this kind of paranoid super, super powered entity that goes around solving problems with violence, this is problematic. And yet we can't say that that inevitably leads someone to, you know, those game mechanics in their ideology. And similarly, I think we can see many examples of like even for instance, my favorite thing to complain about is like the obsession around cozy games. Everyone's like, ah, cozy games are antifascist because they're just about like tending your chickens or growing flowers maybe. No, this is about imposing order on the world. Yeah, I mean, as somebody who's just a, you know, invisible, inveterate conflict magnet, I'm also like, I just don't trust coziness. I don't trust the impulse towards coziness. This is to say that I think even those cozy games could lend themselves towards. They could be inclined towards a kind of fascist disposition. It's just nothing is guaranteed. I think this is one of the great insights of the field, broadly known as cultural studies. And looking at the history of cultural form, there's been a long history of people sort of when new media begin to emerge in the first 50 years or so, people constantly are pointing out that this is going to lead to inevitable political outcomes, whether that's the arrival of the written language in ancient Greece or the arrival of the novel in the 18th century, or the arrival of film and television. And inevitably, some of those more deterministic stories end up proving themselves a bit wrong again and again. I think that's the same with games and video games. Matthew Remski: You know, I think that the Legend of Zelda is a really great example here because on one hand we have the sprite who goes out and he really has to conquer the entire world on behalf of the maiden. But on the other hand, it drives towards this live action project that's going to feature a trans woman who's playing the lead. And it's this sort of lonely, but sort of adventurous and somewhat neurodivergent, wordless. You know, Link doesn't speak. And so anybody can be Link or Link can sound like anybody else. And Link figures out puzzles and there's as much cuteness as there is, like beating up on the goblins. So it's really. It goes in many, many different directions. And it seems like the engagement with the material, if it has a social sort of container for it, then it can be sensible. It can be like, you know, it can be even. Even healthy, I think. But I want to return to this issue of, like, the ownership of the platform, which I'm fixated on, because my kids started showing me these vast artworks that were created in Minecraft on private servers, I guess. I don't know if they're private servers, but they are servers that are owned by individual players. Right. And I don't know if you've seen these, but there are teams of creators. Generally they'll have like a Patreon or a Discord that funnels to a Patreon, and they get some sort of money that way. But they will build, like civilizations the size of Angkor Wat, right? Tens of millions of bricks. They're probably using some kind of coding strategy to make it go faster. But these designs. Or they'll build the Taj Mahal, right? But not only the Taj Mahal, but like all of the surrounding buildings and, you know, you can zoom in on these things and there's always more detail. It's like fractal in that way. And all of it exists on a Minecraft server. And as somebody who grew up writing poetry and novels and I'm now trying political theory, this is so offensive to me that the artist is completely at the mercy of the developers, but not even the developers, the people who own and manage the developers. That seems like hell to me. And so I think they also probably trained a Minecraft AI through that process of watching the creator build the thing, and then the hell gets deeper. So I'm just wondering whether you think that there is some sort of, I don't know, like diverted or captured creativity that is being marooned into these servers that might disappear if somebody decides to pull the plug. It's not making enough money for them or whatever, because of course it costs money to keep these servers going. What do you think is the real world, I don't know, like, manifestation of that, or is that work just condemned to be owned by somebody else? Max Haiven: Yeah, no, I think it's really well put. And I think this is part of the nugget of this sociological shift I'm trying to track in the book, which is that we are all encouraged to be players in this capital capitalist system, but we don't get to choose and we don't own the arenas in which we're playing. I mean, it's also like people in professional sports now, they get paid a lot of money to be hockey or basketball or football players, but they don't get to control the game. They get to control their own particular agency within the game, but within a much larger system that is essentially playing them. And I think the problem with these platforms is that they offer certain forms of freedom and they offer certain forms of reward. Sometimes, sometimes even there are people who are able to monetize their participation. And they're playing in some of these games in various ways, but ultimately it is playing on somebody else's platform. It is playing by their rules. It is playing, as you point out, in a way that means that your creative output could at any moment be seized and used as their intellectual property or simply shut down. Matthew Remski: I hate that. Yeah, I hate that. I mean, of all of the feelings of hatred and incipient violence that I feel, there's something about, about that that just drives me insane. Max Haiven: It's catastrophic in the sense that, like, you know, we're not. I don't want to be alarmist about this, but, you know, we're not very far from a moment in the United States, for example, where the American government could threaten to officially sanction and even shut down platforms that offer space for. For discourse that's critical of the regime, or discourse that's critical of Israel, or discourse that's critical that mentions the word communism. And immediately millions of hours of human labor will just disappear. It won't disappear. It'll be on some server somewhere, but it'll just become inaccessible. There'll be. We are headed towards a world where the greatest form of censorship will just be this kind of invisibilized shadow banning, where content and people just kind of disappear from our shared digital life. And I think it all just speaks to the fact that these need to be public infrastructure. We can't have private ownership of infrastructure which is determining the future of our species and the future of our species creativity. So somehow we need to reimagine what the Internet's going to look like if we're going to continue to even have an Internet. And we're going to have to reimagine what games look like in a way that works for human interests. And unfortunately, what I think is very difficult for those of us who might argue for something like that is that it may mean in a short term, limited way way, what feels to many people like a delimitation on their freedom and agency. For example, if we have publicly run and publicly accessible platforms, they might not allow the kind of massive proliferation of hate speech that Elon Musk has unleashed on Twitter that confines the agency of some individuals. It might also be one where we don't dedicate hundreds of thousands, thousands of years of human labor every month to refining these platforms. So they're so incredibly seductive and user friendly that it's seamless to use them. But maybe seamlessness and ease was a problem to begin with in the human creative endeavor. I mean, we've never not been a creative species. It's not like people 500 years ago were less creative than us. They just had different tools. And arguably their tools were in many ways much more democratic. Matthew Remski: As a game designer yourself, your basic advice is that designers and activists really have to go beyond the imaginary of shooting Nazis to cultivate collective interdependent agency while confronting fascism across these three paradigms that you talk about. So we've got to get back at the manifest demagogues. We have to address latent capitalism and we have to address everyday microfascist desires. So I agree with all of that. And I also think that I am trained to think in cultural terms mainly to the exclusion of maybe more severe technological interventions. And so this week I'm thinking about the fairly playful swarm that is decompiling video games, Adobe software and Microsoft software assets for free distribution. I think that this action hits back at the money making aspects of the manifest and the latent versions of fascism, but probably not the micro version of fascism. And so I'm wondering if you feel that that sort of action, that sort of guerrilla action, is a positive development or is it too volatile and undirected? Max Haiven: I think it's volatile and I think it can swing multiple different ways. I could imagine that people who are pursuing this kind of, let's call it participatory revenge game against these big media giants, I think that could, you could imagine people having a narrative of that that's highly anti-corporate and anticapitalist. And you can also imagine people doing that from the perspective of a kind of entrepreneurial player who's saying I shouldn't have to pay hundreds of dollars a year for an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. This is my labor, this is my time. I'm going to take what's mine. These guys are cheating me. I'm going to cheat them back. I kind of dwelled with this in a book I wrote that came out in 2020, unfortunately, during the pandemic, when nobody was reading sad books, which was on revenge and the politics of revenge. And in it I made this distinction between, on the one hand, a revenge fantasy and on the other, an avenging event imaginary. So we all have revenge fantasies. It's really, really common among humans. Even like children have them. It's fine. We all imagine the kind of poetic justice that could be delivered to the person who's hurt us, including systems that hurt us and regimes that hurt us. But the problem is a revenge fantasy can kind of nurse your soul in its pain, but it will not necessarily give you a vision of transformation of society. And I contrast that kind of revenge fantasy, which I'm not against, but you know, it has its limits with what I call an avenging imaginary. And the difference is an avenging imaginary also imagines a kind of vindication or recompense, but it imagines it in a way that abolishes the conditions that cause the harm in the first place. So revenge fantasy is usually about you as the person who's been harmed or perceives yourself to have been harmed, now having the power to harm the person who harmed you. An avenging imaginary imagines that the power that allowed you to be harmed is now abolished. Nobody has it and we have a different kind of world where we have to cooperate in new ways. And so what I would say about these, these decompiling Avengers whom I'm celebrating, I mean, I think it's great, you know, because I love revenge against corporations and I love revenge fantasy. I think it's, you know, there's a reason why it's so popular in our popular culture and every popular culture around the world. It's a very important part of our way of grappling with injustice and unfairness. But I think for these to move from being a revenge, sort of a playful revenge fantasy being lived out, they would need to go another step deeper. Another example is for instance, what happened with GameStop some years ago where a bunch of like little retail investors swarmed and basically crashed like a hedge fund by betting against their betting on the GameStop brick and mortar game franchise. But again, in some ways this was a revenge of the player. And similarly, I think with many of the decompiling swarms, it's the revenge of the individuated competitive player who's getting back at the person who cheated them. And what I would imagine might be possible, possible is some sort of narrative and ideological unity that might say, yes, we are taking revenge, but we're taking revenge because we want a different Internet, because we want a different software. Because ultimately, at this point in history, we are software, we are cyborgs. We are part the interfaces and technologies that we use. So what would move this into a realm that would make me really excited is if it was matched with the thing when some person who's decompiling Adobe is like, Adobe is part of who I am. I've been using this, you know me, I've been using Adobe Suite for 30 years. It's a fundamental part of my. It's always open on my desktop. Actually I've moved to another interface now, but it was for many years. It's part of my agency and capacities as a historically bound human subject. And what I would love to be able to do is look to all those other Adobe users and say, you know, Adobe digital creative workers of the world, unite. We have nothing to lose but our subscriptions. Our subscriptions. Matthew Remski: You know, I have not played your game Billionaires and Guillotines yet, but in just the title alone, I feel like you are teasing at this problem of the time that it takes to do theory and maybe even the problem of how non-fiction theory books end, which is that you give really good advice about how we should think about reversing certain cultural trends. And I always have the sense that something remains unspoken when we're speaking in a leftist revolutionary idiom, which is, is that I think we are going to do what we can to try to improve things culturally. And then every once in a while the high school students of Paris are going to erupt into a swarm of probably the inverse of what we see during January 6th. And so I just want to speak to that tension a little bit and ask people whether or not you ever feel like you're right at the edge of saying, okay, well, the game actually is going to be a training for X in which Y happens. Max Haiven: I do feel like I'm always on the cusp of that exact statement. And yet I don't know what the. I don't know. I don't have the kind of perfect revolutionary strategy and I wouldn't even trust myself if I thought I did, to be honest. Matthew Remski: Yeah, right, exactly. Max Haiven: I think the great thing of what games can do is they can help us have a suppleness and flexibility of mind and a suppleness and flexibility of the social mind, the interrelated mind. There's a fascinating book that came out a couple of years ago called the Kingdom of Play by a science writer named Toomey. And in it he goes over the last two decades of research into actual animal play. It's a delightful book, it's very well written. I reread it a couple of times. Fascinating, not particularly political in any way. But one of the things that he points out, going over all of the data and research on how animals play, is that we are under an illusion that if you ask, why does a cat play with a mouse? Many people will immediately say, ah, that's because the kitten is training to be a hunter. Turns out that cats who play with mice are no better at playing catching prey than cats that don't. It is not in fact training for hunting. Matthew Remski: Well, like statistically they actually measure that. Max Haiven: Pretty much, yeah. There's a bunch of research. They do it in very interesting laboratory-based ways. But yeah, they basically find out that play doesn't prepare you for that specific evolutionary adaptation. What play appears to do is it prepares you for the unexpected. And so when a cat is more playful or another animal, there's a lot relates a lot of research on rats, for instance. What playful rats have that unplayful rats don't have is suppleness and flexibility of mind where they can adapt to and rule with emergent situations with greater alacrity and intention. So I think ultimately that's what radical games prepare us for. There's one way you can have a radical game like Billionaires and Guillotines, and it's a satire. You play the billionaires, billionaires, and you learn something about capitalism on another level. And maybe here I'm echoing that point that I mentioned earlier from Marijam Did's book. On another level, what matters most about playing Billionaires and Guillotines is that you bring together a group of people who identify as people who want to play Billionaires and Guillotines, and you have a convivial experience that makes you. Even though it's a competitive game, it makes you more cooperative with other human beings. Because anytime you sit down to play a game, especially a board game with others, you are cooperating. You are agreeing to enter what Johan Huizinga called the Magic Circle. You are agreeing to cooperate and collaborate on the project of having fun with a bunch of other humans. You have to practice social adaptation and responsibility in the kind of more philosophical sense of the term, to be able to give a response to the other, to be able to look the other in the face and have a real interaction, a mediated one, of course, but a real interaction in any case. So I think ultimately there are, for instance, like, riot games. We were just talking about one last night called, Like Zap Games from Brussels, where they. Actually, it's not a riot game, actually, it's a subvertising game where there's a sort of gamified autonomous platform where you can be awarded points for destroying corporate advertising in the city. Matthew Remski: Nice. Max Haiven: And there's a great little booklet by Paolo Pedercini and Harry Josephine Giles called, I think it's called, like Tools for Playful Protest. I can send you the link to share with your listeners at some point. And they actually have games you can play during a riot as a way of having fun and engaging with your fellow rioters differently. And I love those things. I think they're great. But that's not the only thing that a radical game should allow you to do. It should also mean that if you go to the riot or you go to the protest with your Dungeons and Dragons, Dragons group and you get arrested by the cops, you can have the wherewithal when they say, state your name and address, you can be like, I am Swalinx the elf and I live in Middle Earth, motherfucker. Matthew Remski: You know, I think this is a great note to end on, plus just what I saw today, which I think you would appreciate, which is during one of the. In Paris there's a sign that I saw going by in one piece of social media media, where, well, not only is the pirate flag from One Piece flying in various places, but also the funniest sign I saw was the generation of 6-7 is resurrecting the generation of '68. Max Haiven: These kids, the kids are all right. This is amazing. Matthew Remski: I know, right? Max Haiven: So playful. Right. And I think that's. That's the. That's the amazing thing about it. They're. They're. They're reclaiming the streets not only as a space of, like, contention and protest, but also as a space of radical play. And I think here I take, like, you know, David Graeber was a huge influence on me, as I'm sure for many of your listeners, but he has. Yeah, I'm convinced that he had this unwritten book that he never got to write about play and the politics of play. He has an amazing essay from, you know, the early days of the anti-globalization movement, which he was a big part of, about giant puppets. Matthew Remski: Oh, right. Max Haiven: And he sort of asks, like, why do the police hate giant puppets so much? Matthew Remski: Yeah. Max Haiven: And the conclusion he comes to is really beautiful. He's like, look, you know, the role of the police is to enforce the idea that the society we have is natural, normal and inevitable. And if you don't accept that, you need to be beaten down. Matthew Remski: Yeah. Max Haiven: And the giant puppet is a God that we create that is a testimony to our own collaborative, creative power to make reality and to reality. And that's why the police cannot tolerate it. The police both as, like, individuals in riot gear, but also the police in that microfascist sense of the little fascist in our heads, the fascist that animates social institutions. And so for him, that playfulness is not just sort of incidental. It's not just the icing on the cake. It's the cake of what protest is for him. And one of the reasons that he loved being in protests, which I got to see actually personally, because we were once at a gilets jaunes protest in France, in Paris, together. He was like a child in a candy shop. Not because he loved violence and tear gas, but because in that moment, I think a lot of what he envisioned about the potential of human creative, anarchic potential was being actualized in the streets. And I see that definitely in what youth are doing in France, in Belgium, increasingly elsewhere as well. It's a kind of rejection of the reality, the fascistic reality principle that says that they need to accept a future where they're basically going to be pitted against each other like the characters in the Hunger Games, and instead this radical retaking of the creative and destructive power of play in the streets. Matthew Remski: Max Haiven, it's such a pleasure to talk with you and I think you did such a great service with this book and I really hope that it makes its way into French and very soon and into the manifs and everywhere else. It's a really great contribution and intervention. So thank you for your work on it. Max Haiven: Thank you so much for having me and continue your great work as well. Matthew Remski: Thank you Max. Such a great book. Cannot recommend it highly enough. This link will be in the show notes and you'll see that it's open access. You don't have to buy it now if you have the one wonderful digital book or reading library called Calibri or Calibre. I don't know how to say the app's name. You know you can do a lot of organization of ebooks in there, but it also will take a PDF like The Player and the Played and it will convert it into ebook format and then you can send it to your device and so you don't have to like read a PDF on a screen. You can have it in EPUB file format, which I find very helpful. So that link will be in the show notes. Notes Remember right now on Patreon there is an episode featuring my conversation with the Association of Workers and Students, three members of this small Marxist-Leninist organization. Speaking of games, these guys don't play around. They are organizing a conference here in Toronto called Beneath the Snow. It's a conference about anti-imperialism and I'll put the link to that as well in these show notes. Notes and you can catch our conversation on Patreon. The conference is November 6th to the 8th. Take care of each other.