Max Haiven
Game designer and radical social theorist Max Haiven as guest in the frame of Wassim Alsindi’s residence
April 28th-29th
Monday 28th, doors open at 6 pm
The Player and the Played: How Financialization Incubated 21st century Fascism
Max Haiven in conversation about his current book project (tentative release date in 2026)
The process of capitalist ruination known as financialization, which has vastly enriched the wealthy and despoiled the earth, has also delivered us a world where a huge number of people feel like cheated players and want revenge. A uniquely 21st century fascist politics and culture finds a welcome reception among social subjects who, over the last three decades of gamified capitalism, have been compelled to imagine themselves and behave as competitive “players” in what feels like an unwinnable game, as is perhaps revealed in popular fables like Squid Game and Hunger Games. What role, if any, might games play in antifascist and anti-capitalist thought and action?
Pre-Release of Billionaires & Guillotines
by Max HaivenApril 28th | 8 pm
In the board game Billionaires & Guillotines, players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
Will you play the aristocrat or the war profiteer? The tech overlord or the property speculator? In any case, you’ll try and build a private space program, marry (and divorce) a celebrity spouse and start your own scam charity in this raucous game for aspiring billionaires and their enemies.
As the revolution approaches, the billionaires have one chance to cooperate to delay their downfall… but otherwise, may the best (or worst) tycoon win.
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Game-Making-Workshop
April 29th | 17:00Games are fun artificial structures within which players encounter and express unusual agency. This makes them excellent vehicles for exploring the nuances of our social world.
In this workshop, Max Haiven shares some examples and theories of how games might be used for the radical imagination. With a focus on in-person procedural games (as opposed to role-playing and storytelling game), we drill down into how a subtle change in a familiar game’s mechanics can be a method to subvert expectations and generate transformative estrangements. Participants are guided through a process of thinking (together) with games to make fun and strategic interventions against systems of domination.
The workshop will be followed by a FAU0X SALON play session hosted by Wassim Alsindi and food & drinks.
About:
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.
His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). He is currently working on a book for MIT Press tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines. He led a team that recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024).
His writing has been published widely for both academic and non-academic readers on topics including the imagination, (anti-)capitalism, social movements, art and financialization.
Max has produced several research-driven podcasts about themes including financialization and anxiety (2020-21), conspiracy theories and cultures (2021-22), Amazon and science fiction (2023-4), capitalism and play (2024), and social movements and psychology (2024).