Distinktion Special Issue proposal
Silicon Valley, Imaginative Speculations, and Financialization
Ali Rıza Taşkale
Introduction
Silicon Valley has long been regarded as a symbol of innovation and progress, shaped by the fusion of countercultural ideals from the 1960s and free-market optimism. Emerging from this historical ethos is a narrative of entrepreneurial individualism and technological utopianism, where the Valley is imagined as a site of creativity and transformative potential. In recent years, however, Silicon Valley has transcended its geographical roots, becoming a powerful conceptual framework that signifies the intersections of technology, culture, and finance.
This special issue examines Silicon Valley not just as a geographical region but as a cultural and representational construct. By exploring how it is imagined, narrated, and contested in cultural production, the issue highlights how these narratives shape broader discussions on progress, labor, value, and equity. It emphasizes how Silicon Valley’s image influences public perceptions of innovation and success, while often masking the inequalities and labor dynamics that support its narrative. Through this lens, the issue aims to challenge the dominant portrayals of Silicon Valley, offering a critical perspective on its role in shaping contemporary economic and cultural norms.
State of the Art
This special issue situates Silicon Valley within a broader ideological framework, one that relies on fantasy to both inspire and obscure. Narratives of AI, digital innovation, and automation often present technological advancements as inherently progressive, masking their material consequences—such as labor disempowerment and entrenched racial and class inequalities. As Elin McElroy (2023) explains, automation fantasies, rooted in science fiction, perpetuate ‘racial capitalism’ by exploiting colonial divisions of labor. In this sense, Silicon Valley’s technological narratives are far from neutral; instead, they actively sustain and legitimize existing power structures.
At the same time, Silicon Valley’s cultural imagery—drawing on countercultural aesthetics and popular science fiction—serves as a strategic narrative tool. Scholars like Fred Turner (2006) and Wendy Liu (2020) demonstrate how these narratives position tech leaders as visionary figures, obscuring the racialized and gendered labor dynamics underpinning their enterprises. This imagery helps construct an idealized vision of progress and innovation that often overlooks the exploitative foundations of Silicon Valley’s success. For example, the gig economy, platform labor, and workplace feminism are frequently framed through the aspirational lens of Silicon Valley, which not only distracts from the inequalities at play but also perpetuates the notion that these practices represent empowerment and freedom, despite their underlying inequities. Building on this critique, Cedric Durand’s recent work (2024) deepens our understanding by linking Silicon Valley’s aspirational narratives to its role as a central node in financial speculation. This utopian vision—projecting a sanitized future that prioritizes imagined growth over material realities—systematically excludes marginalized communities while extracting value from speculative imaginaries rather than tangible outputs.
At the same time, Silicon Valley’s ideological claims of democratization and disruption resonate with critiques of ‘surveillance capitalism’, as articulated by Shoshana Zuboff (2019). These claims obscure how technological developments bolster capital accumulation while reconfiguring power structures. For instance, the algorithmic mechanisms identified by Gillespie (2018) and Eubanks (2018) reveal how innovation narratives conflate progress with control, embedding surveillance and exclusion into everyday life. These dynamics are further reinforced by the myth of the ‘fiscalmancer’ CEO, who merges speculative finance with speculative fiction. Adrian Daub, in What Tech Calls Thinking (2023), further explores this ideological construct through the Founder myth. He argues that the celebration of innovation in Silicon Valley mirrors eugenicist and racial capitalist ideas. As Daub (2023: 110) notes, ‘confronted with the fact that the platforms that are making them rich are keeping others poor’, Silicon Valley elites ‘come up with stories to explain why this must necessarily be so’, erasing the reality that, for many, these ‘stepping-stones’ lead nowhere. This myth of innovation serves as a veneer that obscures the more exploitative structures at play, which are also visible in how digital economies are framed and shaped.
This framework extends beyond Silicon Valley, highlighting its adaptability as a cultural and economic imaginary. The emergence of the Silicon Prairie exemplifies how Silicon Valley’s libertarian ethos is transplanted to new geographies, blending innovation rhetoric with ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2017). Initiatives like the Endless Frontier Act further demonstrate how financial capitalism encloses new frontiers under the guise of democratization. This geographic expansion reinforces Silicon Valley’s dual role as a driver of innovation and a perpetuator of inequities.
Contribution to the Literature
In analyzing Silicon Valley as a cultural and representational phenomenon, this special issue contributes to a growing body of literature on critical finance studies, speculative fiction studies, and cultural production. Unlike the 2022 Distinktion special issue on the Asset Economy, which focused on the broader logic of assetization, this issue zeroes in on Silicon Valley’s cultural representations and their role in shaping productivity. While the Asset Economy special issue considers assetization as a process rooted in speculative finance, posing a conceptual challenge to traditional economic theory, my proposal begins with a specific premise: that Silicon Valley has evolved beyond a technology hub to become a powerful imaginary, using narratives of the future to promote the neoliberal ethos that Mark Fisher (2009) defines as ‘capitalist realism’. Thus, drawing on Mark Fisher’s critique of capitalist realism and Cedric Robinson’s (2019) concept of ‘racial capitalism’, the issue illuminates how Silicon Valley’s narratives sustain socio-economic inequalities while constraining alternative futures.
As it stands, no existing special issue explores the representational and cultural constructs of Silicon Valley. By critically engaging with its cultural contradictions, this special issue aims to provide theoretical tools to reimagine Silicon Valley’s impact on contemporary imaginaries and economies. Understanding these narratives is crucial for imagining alternatives to Silicon Valley’s pervasive influence on life, culture, and economic structures. This approach not only challenges techno-neoliberal ideologies but also advocates for more inclusive and equitable futures.
Daub, A. (2020). What Tech Calls Thinking. Macmillan US.
Durand, C. 2024. How Silicon Valley unleashed techno-feudalism (D. Broder, Trans.). London: Verso.
Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
Liu, W. (2020). Abolish Silicon Valley: How to liberate technology from capitalism. Repeater.
McElroy, E. 2024. Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times. Durham: Duke University Press.
Noble, D. (1977). America by design: Science, technology, and the rise of corporate capitalism. Oxford University Press.
Robinson, C. J. (2019). On racial capitalism, Black internationalism, and cultures of resistance. Pluto Press.
Sadowski, J. (2020). Too smart: How digital capitalism is extracting data, controlling our lives, and taking over the world. MIT Press.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. University of Chicago Press.
Vint, S. (2024). “The future as aspiration.” Unpublished conference paper.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
Full manuscript submission deadline: June 2025
Special issue organizer bio: Ali Rıza Taşkale is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research has been published in journals such as Utopian Studies, Distinktion, Thesis Eleven, Rethinking Marxism, Northern Lights, New Political Science, Contemporary Political Theory, Third Text, Theory, Culture & Society, and Journal for Cultural Research. His book Post-Politics in Context is published by Routledge (2016). Currently, he serves on the editorial board of Distinktion, overseeing special issues and the forum exchange section. He is actively engaged in a project exploring the logical and structural relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance.
Submitted Abstracts
- Hugh C. O’Connell, Disruption as Preemption, Preemption as Enclosure: Silicon Valley as Financial Science Fiction
This essay takes up the way that recent sf mediates the abstract forms of datafication and speculative finance that are at the heart of the Silicon Valley ethos of disruption. Less a concrete geographical designation than a business model that functions as a powerful cultural formation in what Ed Finn refers to as the age of the algorithm, Silicon Valley is synonymous with the Internet Age of connective computing and datafication. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the financialization of data began with Google, the apotheosis of the Silicon Valley startup model, through their capture, enclosure, and privatization of users’ experience data. First is the period of ‘discovery’ of behavioral surplus, where companies like Google or Facebook realize the market potential of the vast stores of non-market behavior (experience and information) that they accrue through users’ interactions with them. It is the discovery that we live amongst an inexhaustible slew of data (our likes on Facebook, the mapping of our homes by Roombas, or the measuring of ocean currents) that can be made financially productive. This hard, non-productive data is mined by digital interfaces and then processed and reconstituted as proprietary behavioral information by AI/Algorithms. Such information is then bundled into the creation of proprietary “prediction products” and then priced and marketed as derivatives of behavioral surplus that are then sold on newly constituted behavioral futures market. This process soon became the modus operandi of tech companies (internet or otherwise) far and wide (from Cisco, Apple, and Microsoft, to the makers of connected devices like Samsung smart refrigerators and Nest thermostats). In this way, the Silicon Valley business model stands in for a new mode of financialized accumulation, a modular business practice that is as deterritorialized, abstract, and digitally ubiquitous as the Internet of Things itself.
For this essay, then, I allege that this cultural formation of Silicon Valley with its cult of the CEO “fiscalmancer” can be read as a financial science fiction. As such, it can be analyzed as part of a larger cultural (trans)formation in which the properties of speculative finance and speculative fiction have become dialectically intertwined. In this sense, the quasi-occultic veil that covers both finance and the tech-CEO is comprised of and pierced by the genre protocols of science fiction. Turning to Alex Garland’s Devs (2020) and Joanna Kavenna’s Zed (2019) to flesh this out, the essay interrogates how the cult of the fiscalmancer CEO is directly linked to the processes of disruption, preemption, and enclosure that undergird datafication. What first appears as disruption, I argue, is really preemption: the opening of a space for the gathering of profit from financially speculative futures. This preemption, then, is re-read as ultimately performing an act of enclosure, a delimitation rather than an opening of the future as possibility. Within this model, the fiscalmancer CEO is then presented as the lone figure capable of spinning and mastering the complex algorithms necessary to perform these functions of disruption, preemption, and enclosure. Exploring these two texts together, this essay helps to expose the dialectical relationship undergirding speculative finance’s turn to sf and sf’s turn to speculative financial novums.
Short bio:
Hugh C. O’Connell [he/him] is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His current research examines the relationship between speculative fiction and speculative finance. He is the editor of Disputing the Deluge by Darko Suvin, and co-editor with David M. Higgins of Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review 19 (1). His essays on contemporary science fiction have appeared in Literary Geographies, Uneven Futures, Extrapolation, Utopian Studies, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Modern Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, Science Fiction Film & Television, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Jeannette Alden Estruth
Cubicle, Sweet Cubicle: Workplace Feminisms in Silicon Valley, 1970- 2013
In the fall of 1992, female libertarian candidates represented Silicon Valley across California state election ballots. If the 1970s had seen the height of second-wave feminism in Silicon Valley, 1992 documented the rise of self-identified libertarian feminism. Why did the 1992 election, a race defined by the ascendance of Bill Clinton and the breakthrough candidacy of information technology billionaire and NAFTA opponent Ross Perot, also pose an opening for the emergence of a new, distinct brand of Silicon Valley’s workplace feminism? This article will analyze this election closely, exploring the relationship between the various coalitions that defined workplace feminism in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It will excavate self-described libertarian feminists to examine the distinct strands of feminism that emerged out of the Silicon Valley from the 1970s through the 1990s. The work will show how Silicon Valley libertarian feminists’ beliefs around social reproduction, remote work, computation, and alternative forms of productivity ideologically undergirded corporate labor restructuring, increasing financialization, the remaking of the workplace, the ‘familial’ corporation, and gig labor as the inevitable ‘future of work’. It will show how the Silicon Valley technology industry transmuted the right-wing and center elements of California’s Reagan-era feminist movements to promise that Silicon Valley’s corporate feminism was a liberatory innovation, exclusively conceived in the forward-thinking politics of the technology industry, and thus uniquely positioned to be the dominant feminist tradition for the corporate North Atlantic world. More broadly, it will explore how the historical context of the 70s, 80s, and 90s Silicon Valley connects to the question of financialization in the contemporary moment. Based in an archival collection that, to the author’s knowledge, has never previously been used, the article will be theoretically informed by the work of Nancy Fraser, Allison Elias, Ritu Birla, Sarah Sharma, Bethany Moreton, and Melinda Cooper. Defined by a combination of this set of literature, this new archival collection, and an eye towards the animating questions of the special issue overall, ‘Cubicle, Sweet Cubicle,’ will conclude with a gesture to Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which became the standard bearer of white-collar feminism by the end of the Obama era.
Short Bio:
Jeannette Alden Estruth is an Assistant Professor of American History at Bard College, and a Faculty Associate at the Harvard University Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was the 2021-2022 American Historical Association Jameson Fellow at the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress. Estruth received her doctorate in History, with honors, from New York University in 2018. In 2019, her book project was a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Huntington Library, the University of Virginia Miller Center, and the Berkshire Conference. Estruth’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The Drift, Business Insider, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, California History, the Business History Review, Public Seminar, and Enterprise and Society, among others. Prior to her doctoral work, she worked at Harvard University Press and the Radical History Review. Estruth is currently working on her book manuscript, Think Different: Silicon Valley Activism and the Making of Modern American Politics, which explores the history of social movements, the technology industry, and economic culture in the United States.
- Sherryl Vint
Becoming Capital: Platform Capital’s New Class Relations
This article brings together two sides of the new class relations created by the platform economy promoted by Silicon Valley, focusing on the outsized role of Silicon Valley today, specifically its promotion of neoliberal fantasies that conflate technocapitalist products and the lifestyles they promote with the betterment of humanity as a whole. Drawing on Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s notion of technoliberalism, and critiquing the ideologies dubbed TESCREAL by Gebru Timnit and Emile P. Torres, I argue that it is urgent to rethink the category of anti-capitalist struggle, through the framework of racial capitalism, via an understanding of the importance of popular fantasy (as much as structural positionality) as a vector in the formation of an anticapitalist-class identity. The TESCREAL acronym names a range of transhumanist and ultra-rationalist ideologies embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires which also constitutes both a significant force in global economies (billions of dollars are directed toward future-value promised by technologies such as AI) and an aspirational class identity (propelled by propagandistic structures such as Peter Thiel’s fellowship to promote entrepreneurship rather than education). These ideologies, and their stock-option compensation structures, encourage one class of Silicon Valley workers to see themselves as aligned with the eternity of capital, relegating non-privileged tech works to the status of machines premised on built obsolescence. While critique of TESCREAL has focused on its eugenic implications, less attention has been paid to its continuity with racial capitalist histories, specifically the ways it repeats the liberal production of ‘freed’ human potential through the dehumanization of colonised peoples and their labour. By focusing on the science-fictional underpinnings of Silicon Valley futurism, I suggest the need for increased attention to discourses of futurity in how we understand class today.
Short Bio:
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021) and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science in Popular Culture.
- Susannah Glickman
The Path Cold War Military Keynesianism to the Military Keynesianism of Big Tech
This essay will discuss an important coalitional change that made the massive political-economic shifts in US political economy, especially around high-technology, possible. Toward the end of the 1960s, there were several efforts, some sponsored by the Johnson administration, others undertaken privately, to wind-down military Keynesianism. Combined with highly-disruptive anti-Vietnam activism, these events led to series of crises among scientists and engineers—most of whom were funded by defense projects. Fears about runaway technology abounded during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These fears were in fact, I argue, a type of reckoning with the establishment and self-perpetuating expansion of the national security state through the Cold War. Massive decreases in federal funding for science and defense during the same period led to extreme several regional depressions. In response, engineers and scientists began significant new organizing as a political block. The conditions of the crisis in many ways primed them for solutions that looked like high-tech entrepreneurship and made them sympathetic to right-wing priorities like deregulation, decentralization, and other modes of dismantling the New Deal paradigm. When the Casey task force on small business and venture capital assembled in the mid-1970s, these groups found common cause. Together, they formed the small business pressure group that successfully reshaped federal infrastructure around science and technology and inaugurating the rise of Silicon Valley.
Short bio:
Susannah Glickman is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University. Her research and teaching focus on the history and political economy of computation and information through the transformations in global American science that occurred at the end of the Cold War. She also writes about risk and uncertainty in other fields (for example, in the history of economics). Her current book project examines the infrastructures that make ever-improving semiconductors and quantum technologies possible historically, with particular attention to how ideology and other kinds of narratives get translated into policy and granular practices, and how reciprocally those material practices get translated back into ideology. She has a background in mathematics and anthropology and works between the fields of science and technology studies and history, mixing archival and oral history methods. Specifically, she is broadly interested in how institutions deal with the category of the future and the origins of the category of “tech.”
- Erdogan H. Sima
Silicon Leviathan: a police order?
That we are normally exposed to the logic of finance should not blind us to our implicatedness in this speculative logic. Thus, where the normalised sense of top-down financialisation prevails, the proposed paper rather perceives a normative sensibility that coheres around the intricate web of reciprocities codenamed Silicon Valley. At hand is a code by which the public sphere survives its fading into algorithmically empowered communities. And, reciprocally, ‘algorithm’ denotes an agency that normally projects viral effectiveness—a non-binary power which contradicts the top-down agency financialisation projects. Just as the iconographic Leviathan performs the disruption of the binary sense of sovereign power (but only to normalise itself as the avatar of empowerment) the mythic Silicon Valley encodes the disruption of the subject/object binary (but so as to enforce a viral subjectivity). By foregrounding this very ambiguity, the proposed paper is seeking to unpack the financial sway normally attributed to Silicon Valley. The latter is to be examined as an aesthetic configuration that privileges the viral over the political. In that, the paper is leaning on Jacques Rancière’s thesis of police order precisely as a de-politicised response to political disruption. We survive the ongoing fragmentation of the normative order obviously by blaming it on a virally effective capital-accumulation machine. Much less obvious though is the way the ‘we’ is implicated in that totalising virality. This is to argue that the speculative agency Silicon Valley deploys normalises our exposure to an ambiguous ordering mechanism, so much so that the algorithmic agency normally stands to disrupt and to police the fragmented order. For it depends on the fragile relations of power Silicon Valley encodes, the algorithmic agency belies an ambiguous standing despite its forceful claim to freedom from political bias. For us, surviving the Silicon Valley seems to be premised on taking its algorithmic sensibility for granted, notably as a police order.
Short Bio:
Erdogan Sima is a Ph.D. researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland. The focus of his research is on the emergent subjectivities that challenge the ontological coherence of the neoliberal conception of security. His research has been published in journals such as New Political Science, Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook and Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. He is currently completing a dissertation titled ‘“Placeless” defense: The normative turn in military technology.’
- Matthew Darmour-Paul
Frontiers of the Silicon Prairie: Techno-nationalism in America’s Heartland
The Silicon Prairie is a techno-nationalist development agenda for the American Midwest. It is an appeal to Middle Americans who have borne the brunt of de-industrialisation; a reversal of the globalisation of electronics supply chains in response to Chinese global leadership in clean tech and manufacturing; and a call to action on climate change. It is driven by varying types of industrial nationalism and technofuturism, sometimes associated with Bidenomics, sometimes aligned with the nativist right. In this paper, I will explore the Silicon Prairie as an ideological bridge between Silicon Valley libertarianism and Midwestern conservativism, contextualising this 21st century frontier within American domestic and foreign policy. The frontier thesis, first posed by Frederick Jackson Turner at the end of the 19th century in the Chicago Stock Exchange, sought to explain American character through the ability to expand its material footprint whenever an economic depression occurred. For the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli (2018), the lawlessness of the frontier continually appeals to a certain kind of man, ‘powered by fear of the toxicity he has produced and left behind in so many sacked worlds.’ This is expressed in the ideology of techno-libertarians like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andriessen, who invoke the frontier as a proxy for liberation: synonymous with the possibilities of modern life and the rejection of death. For these libertarians and their supporters, the Silicon Prairie provides a frontier where they can mine, farm, harvest, and log data. It also provides an ideological base for their isolationist and ethnonationalist leanings. To better understand the Silicon Prairie as a frontier imbued with Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism, I will analyse the Endless Frontier Act and the CHIPS for America Act against the Midwestern context which they are affecting. The Midwest, primed for economic protectionism after decades of disastrous free trade agreements (enabled, in part, by Silicon Valley liberalism), provides a new spiritual and material origin point for Silicon Valley imaginings.
Short bio:
Matthew Darmour-Paul is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Australian National University. His research explores place-based computational practices and techno-nationalism in the American Midwest. His research has been published by the Sydney Environment Institute, the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC), Hatje Cantz, Dixit and Flash Art. He teaches architecture at the University of Sydney and works as a public artist and exhibition designer in support of architects and social scientists in the UK, Europe and Australia. He coordinated research projects for the Sharjah Architecture Triennale (2019), the Tin Sheds Gallery at Sydney University (2021-2024), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), and was recently an artist in residence at Spreepark Artspace Berlin (2024).
- Max Haiven,
The Speculative Imagination within, against and beyond Amazon: The Worker as Futurist Project
This paper focuses on the efforts of the Worker as Futurist project to support rank-and-file Amazon workers (warehouse staff, delivery drivers, etc.) to reclaim the power of the speculative imagination in defiance of their employer. Though technically headquartered in Seattle, Amazon represents the quintessence of the Silicon Valley ethos. Like so many of those firms, it is a corporation that has, for three decades, used speculative fiction (SF) narratives, tropes, ideas and rhetoric to advance and expand. In Amazon’s case, SF idealism has powered the firm its takeover of many key capitalist industries, from retail to logistics to film to web services and cloud computing. While the corporation presents itself as a visitor from a bright future of capitalist progress and efficiency, its workers labor today in dystopian conditions and build a future in which they are disposable.The Worker as Futurist project offered creative writing workshops that enabled nine workers to publish short stories in a 2024 collection The World After Amazon. That effort was undertaken in solidarity with worker- and community-led efforts to contest Amazon and tech capitalism’s growing power.
In this essay, we reflect on the project and the importance of reclaiming the speculative imagination from capital. In the first section, we discuss how Amazon’s SF-inspired “corporate storytelling” has enabled the firm to enchant journalists, regulators, policy-makers, (some) workers and, importantly, financiers, who have pumped the firm with cash that has enabled its rapid and aggressive global expansion. We argue that Amazon’s unique but indicative marriage of Wall Street and Silicon Valley (two crucial elements of present-day American capitalist hegemony) has been enabled in part through the mobilization of the genre of SF. In the second section, we explore why workers’ and communities’ struggles within, against and beyond Amazon (and tech-finance capitalism more broadly) can be fruitfully supplemented through an engagement with SF and especially the writing of SF. Writing workshops can be a vital part of reclaiming the dignity of labor in the 21st century, generating new forms of solidarity across a fragmented workforce and cultivating the radical imagination that might inspire not only resistance to but visions for a world beyond “Amazon capitalism.”
Short bio:
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 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). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.