Autonomist Marxism
Affective capitalism: Investments and investigations
Introduction
Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make. (Trump, 1987: 58)
Ethical commodities as exodus and refusal
Introduction
As we witness a rise in ‘ethical branding’, we should interrogate which practices could have any effect on ethical concerns. Capitalism generates the need for ethical consumption and benefits from its sale. Ethical practices must move beyond the sphere of consumption; likewise, analyses of ethical branding should address communication and networking. What we need is a concrete understanding of how brands communicate information about themselves. This can reveal that alternative ethical practices are not only possible, but are already occurring.
The work of games
My heart sunk as the introduction to Games of Empire (GoE) began with a recounting of scene in Second Life – was this to be an analysis of the possibilities of virtual life tempered with warnings that the means of such life are brought to you by Empire? Three paragraphs later, the simple acknowledgement that Second Life avatars consume electricity produced somehow on servers located somewhere made the stakes of the book clear and allayed any such fears.