The Player and the Played

In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Gam...

Video Game Monetization | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Welcome. I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I direct the Media Economies Design Lab and teach and learn from our students. I’ve written a book each on online democracy, cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and I’ve edited ones about solidarity economies, crypto, and co-ops. Reporting articles for both magazines and academic journals keeps my notebooks filled. Working with others to build a democratic economy keeps me accountable.

Guide to Incrementals/Appeal to Players | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colors all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged. It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions. New Edition includes:Forward by Zoe Fisher, Mark’s wife, talking about Mark as a personIntroduction by Alex Niven, his friend and colleague, talking about the political significance of the book thirteen years after it was writtenAfterword by Tariq Goddard, the original editor and publisher, describing the writing and editing of the book, its original reception, and Mark’s own view of it"A quick and entertaining read." Socialist Standard "A provocative and necessary read...for anyone wanting to talk seriously about the politics of education today. " Times Higher Educational Supplement

The Breakdown of Capitalist Realism | Mediations | Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

Benjamin Noys examines the “substance” of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in order to argue that the text serves more than a diagnostic function in our…

Capitalist Realism and the Eviction of Culture: Notes from Ljubljana

I’d like to thank everyone who came out to Nova pošta last Thursday evening to my lecture on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, recently translated into Slovenian by Pika Golob and Nina …

Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score | Aeon Essays

We are most human when we play freely, imaginatively, pointlessly. Gamification risks atrophying that most precious capacity

Hype, financial narratives, and self-fulfilling prophecies in surveillance capitalism

The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies, geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.

The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos

How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?

Fast Capitalism | Mavs Open Press Open Access Journals | University of Texas at Arlington

Fast Capitalism is an academic journal aimed at describing the current moment of capitalism. We publish peer reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century. Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism. This makes it difficult for people to shield themselves from subordination and surveillance. The working day has expanded; there is little down time anymore. People can 'office' anywhere, using laptops and cells to stay in touch. But these invasive technologies that tether us to capital and control can also help us resist these tendencies. People use the Internet as a public sphere in which they express and enlighten themselves and organize others; information technologies afford connection, mitigate isolation, and even make way for social movements. We are convinced that the best way to study an accelerated media culture and its various political economies and existential meanings is dialectically, with nuance, avoiding sheer condemnation and ebullient celebration. We seek to shape these new technologies and social structures in democratic ways. We look at technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), global flows, political economy, culture and cultural studies, social theory, political theory, intersectionality, and the envionrment.

Cognitive Capitalism - Public Seminar

There are broadly three ways of thinking historically about capitalism. One draws on Marx’s value theory and pretty much treats...Read More

‘What is it actually about?’ Asymmetric mobilisation and the defeat of wage-earner fund policies in Sweden

‘Wage-earner funds’, an ultimately-defeated idea for union-controlled funds to develop stakes in Swedish companies, dominated Swedish politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are regularly cited as a prominent attempt to introduce economic democracy. However, factors behind the funds’ defeat are often under-analysed, with the sequencing of events particularly neglected. This article corrects for this. It seeks to explain the defeat of wage-earner funds by tracing decision-making processes in the Social Democratic Party. It argues that the funds were defeated due to asymmetries in mobilisation, which were connected to asymmetries in everyday experiences. While capital owners mobilised strongly against wage-earner funds as an existential threat, most Social Democratic leaders, voters and union members saw the issue as detached from their everyday concerns. This points to the importance that asymmetries in experience and mobilisation can have in policy contests, which provides an advantage to capital in contests over investment control.

The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals

A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of conflicting signals they have been sending