24 November 2025 - ECHO research seminar
SILICON VALLEY'S FASCISTIC WORLD-BUILDING/WORLD-RAZING
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
While not without its critics, the use of the term fascism to name today’s surge of the extreme right helps us recognize its deep entanglements with capitalism and its crises. In particular, it enables us to recon with 21st century fascism as both a reaction to and a continuation of financialization. That term refers not only to the power and influence of the financial sector, but also to profound changes at the level of subjectivity and meaning-making. 21st century fascistic politics, I argue, are both reactions to and continuations of financialization’s worldbuilding and world-razing tendencies. Taking up a labyrinthine method of critical sociological storytelling inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, this presentation takes his famous 1942 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as a point of departure. While often seen (as the author intended) as an anti-authoritarian fable about the risks of the totalitarian imagination I show how this story about an imaginary world that makes itself real has been profoundly influential to the technofascistic ideology ascendent in Silicon Valley, where technological and financial hegemony converge. By linking this to colonialism’s genocidal worldbuilding project we can also discover how such projects have, as their underside, a murderous worldrazing, such as we are today seeing being unleashed in Gaza and elsewhere. We must, therefore, complicate our enthusiasm for worldbuilding by asking: whose worlds will be built and whose destroyed, and by the power of which imagination?
About the researcher
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).
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.