Adam Kingsmith, Max Haiven & Aris Komporos-Athansiou present to the Lab

We approach contemporary reactionary conspiratorialism as a dangerous form of play that emerges from gamified neoliberal financialization. Our examples are (1) the siege of the US Capitol of January 6 by those loyal to outgoing president Trump and (2) the “GameStop frenzy” that saw small-time investors use retail stock trading apps to inflate the price of shares in certain recognized but underperforming corporations. We see these conspiratorial events as emerging from a financialized and technologically accelerated capitalist society where many (if not most) non-elites see the economy and politics as a rigged game, but also one in the grips of gamification, where the logic and enticements of play are increasingly integrated into the circuits of accumulation and everyday life. We propose that to challenge these cultural politics and material structures it is imperative to take seriously how to otherwise meet the need for non-instrumental play that reactionary conspiratorialism today fulfills.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) at Lakehead University. His recent books include Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts and Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization. More information can be found at maxhaiven.com.

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College London, where he leads the Sociology and Social Theory Research Group. He is the author of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World (University of Chicago Press, 2021). His current book project, tentatively titled ‘Winning in the Real Fake’, is an intellectual history of conspiracy in finance capitalism.

A.T. Kingsmith is PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at York University and Co-founder of EiQ Technologies, an emotion-AI start-up based out of the Design Fabrication Zone in the Creative Innovation Studio at Ryerson University. His forthcoming monograph, Anxiety as a Weapon: An Affective Approach to Political Economy, explores new modes for transforming the mental health landscape. For more, see atkingsmith.com.