Apr'25 ::: Speculative Economies residency @ Au Jus, Brussels

13/4 Meme Economies presentation

28+29/4 events with Max Haiven
28th and 29th April, au JUS, Brussels

I'll complete my current residency at au JUS in Brussels in a couple of weeks, with a double-header of events together with Max Haiven. Max will be launching his new anticapitalist board game Billionaires and Guillotines (Pluto Press), and hosting a game-making workshop. I'll be in conversation with him about his upcoming book The Player and the Played (MIT Press), and I'll give an update of my current project The Chain Mail Gaze. We'll also hold a Fau0x Salon card game roleplay session.

FAU0X SALON - https://0xsalon.pubpub.org/fau0xsalon
FAU0X SALON is an evolving techno-esoteric cartomancy system developed by 0xSalon. Taking the form of a bespoke card deck, FAU0X SALON acts as a ludic-pedagogic mechanism for participants to role-play the initiation and steering of post-disciplinary conversations from a variety of perspectives outside and beyond their own opinions and beliefs. FAU0X SALON proposes itself as a narrative device for the hypothetical exploration of emergent consensus and dissensus, agreement and conflict, concerning both the sacred and the profane. By operating as an anticipatory mechanism for the simulation of possible scenarios, FAU0X SALON allows participants to think, feel, and act through strategies and solutions without the burden of connecting hypotheses to their lived realities and identities.

In this session, we will channel the FAU0X SALON deck to facilitate counter-factual discursive explorations around au JUS' previous lives, present circumstances, and possible futures through the chaotic and autonomous moderation of a deck of tarot-style oracular cards. Participants may adopt the personas of characters such as Rhizome Negarestani and The Xenofeminist, brainwashed by ideologies such as Acid Communism and Narcissist Realism, in order to explore discourses that resist linearity, false binaries, and institutional capture. We invite you to take a ride in our dissonance engine.

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THE CHAIN MAIL GAZE - https://folklore.mirror.xyz/nQ30ZabiOnn4BEtvGf1jPAjMYMCtMoFALDeo8wh4yQM
Today, new forms of imperialism are emerging, led by a cabal of messianic technology elites who seek to remake our planet, its territorial divisions, and its populations. These would-be patriarchs wish to challenge the very foundation of the nation-state system through the creation of privatised zones of exception known as Network States. Through a psycho-political analysis of scarcity, chauvinism, and colonialism, this The Chain Mail Gaze links the Crusaders' lust for land, blood, and plunder to present-day colonial frontiers emerging through networked finance and technology.

What if the mediaeval Crusades never truly ended? Instead, what if the brutal campaign of conquest by Latin Christian zealots became the template upon which modern finance and the capitalist economy was modelled: a blueprint that reveals its true horror in our current age of tech-fascism? The Chain Mail Gaze posits that the libidinal forces within mediaeval Christendom, which fuelled militarised pilgrimages to the ‘Promised Land’ of Palestine in the late 11th century onwards, persist today, haunting contemporary politics and technology a thousand years later. The spectre of these forces manifests in the theatres of perpetual enmity that capital orchestrates, manipulating the occidental institutions of crown, church, college, and state to wage its battles. What lessons can be drawn from Athenian democracy and piratical governance to counter The Chain Mail Gaze of today’s captains of industry and their masculine (demi)urges?