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You are reading issue #15 of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter.

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Every two weeks this newsletter brings links, snippets and interesting facts about technology from a left perspective. It hopes to spark a greater discussion among the left about the opportunities and threats that tech brings.



This week I interview Marijam Didžgalvytė, a freelance journalist who worked extensively on video games and how the left should relate to them. We talk about gaming, fully automated luxury communism and forming an anti-fascist esports team.



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Tech & the left interview: Marijam Didžgalvytė

"I'm a freelance journalist specialising in the intersection of gaming, technology and progressive politics. Recently, I've been focusing on my online video series called 'Left Left Up' on the subject.

You can find the archive of my work here:

and I tweet at:

"For a long time, I also didn't think it was a fertile political and cultural ground – gaming was just something I did to unwind after a long day. In fact, I felt judged by my lefty friends when I chose gaming as a mode to relax instead of more 'wholesome' activities like gardening, cycling or craft-making. It was after the election of Donald Trump that I had this 'eureka' moment – his right-hand men Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos used to be openly disparaging towards gamers as these no-lifers until they realised they can manipulate these communities for their own populist needs. In 2014 #Gamergate happened - the first and biggest professional online harassment and doxxing campaign targeting women in games, all engineered by these Breitbart characters. How did we arrive here?

. Of course there's a 40-year old history behind this, so I basically made it my mission to try and reverse this trend."

"Yes and no. As a medium that has recently overtaken film industry in terms of profit, it only makes sense to use it for a means of political dissemination. Something the right has been doing quite effectively for years. If done too explicitly it's likely to simply end up preaching to the converted though. To avoid this, it is not thematics necessarily that we should be obsessing about, but modes of distribution – for instance an

being released via the Financial Times, a centre-right publication, was a brilliant move, I thought. The big elephant in the room when discussing political utility in video gaming is the means necessary to even engage with this medium - one would be correct when stating that video gaming can never be truly appropriated for radical purposes due to its sheer dependency on consoles/PCs and their production in the Global South, often in appalling conditions. The ethics behind the manufacturing of these devices has been a growing subject of concern for years, with

or conflict minerals required for most micro-chips that have

.

These are all the issues I'm insisting the liberal nerds to wake up about."

"It is an incredibly exciting time, especially since it could be the beginning of the games industry addressing the issues I mentioned before i.e. modes of production etc. So during the yearly Game Developer Conference in San Francisco this March there was an unexpectedly huge contingency of industry folk discussing, for the first time, the idea of unionising their workforce. Games developers experience months of unforgiving workload before the release of games i.e. 'crunch time' – we're talking 18-hour days. Furthermore, big games companies are now routinely reducing work contracts to self-employment, or they outsource the work to the game community – modders, who work for free. Increasingly, gig economy is entering the games industry and it is high time for the workers to leverage their power. To me this process is also fascinating as it is seemingly terrifying the alt-right characters of the gaming world – you see no amount of sexism or racism will really improve their admirers' conditions, but forming into trade union – probably will do!

. The

group is having its inaugural meeting in Manchester, watch this space! Also, go follow

twitter feeds etc."

"As I mentioned before, big portions of the left may often seem quite technophobic – the pure form of radicalism by some is seen as scaling back. I say good luck to that –

. A much more realistic prospect is that of FALC (fully automated luxury communism) - machines could provide for all our basic needs and humans would be required to do very minimal work .

. As a good anarcho, I worry this project sometimes overlooks social relations as a crucial aspect of the post-capitalist society. I can also see a situation arising where perhaps people from more affluent parts of the world could benefit from such a system and it would be once again built on the backs of the countries assembling the actual product. That would be catastrophic, but not surprising and something that should be fought against. I'm sure all these points will be neatly addressed in

on the subject."

"Re: gaming / tech – Simon Saunders's blog

has been truly formative to my own opinions,

brings the sharpest industry analysis,

always has top-end tech journalism. '

' by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter is still the best book out there on games and capitalism. Shameless plug, but the tech issue of

that I helped curate is truly stellar too.

Everything else: A bit of Marx always brightens the day – I found 1844 Manuscripts a great place to start. Benjamin's '

' has been crucial to my understanding of what it means to be a politically-conscious creator. '

' by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek has been an eye-opening read about the need to scale up our politics and that it is our duty as progressives to be much more ambitious than we have been lately. I also just finished '

' by Carol Anderson which is just an extraordinary text bringing the history of structural racism sharply into focus. And fairy tales, don't forget fairy tales – I find Brothers Grimm and Hans Kristian Andersen most soothing."

"Legalise squatting in residential premises again. To be fair to him and McDonnell, they have been probably the only two MPs publicly opposing the ban."