Fun

What is fun? Hedonic moloch vs slack. Protestant work ethic versus the dilemmas of collective hyperactivity. Free energy vs freeNRG. Gamification versus a temporary autonomous zone. Spectacle. PLUR, summers of love, Situationists, Marcuse, Lettrists, punks, voguers and ravers. Culture jammers, adbusters, zinesters, tactical media. Netcultures. Guerrilla gardeners. DIY. Grime and hip hop. Leisured classes. Commodification of dissent. Mishan. Bey. Jaromil. Gentrification, hypergentrification, hipsterism. The problem of proponents of this kind of engagement interacting with (and idolizing) people who might not have a choice about their “playful” engagements — e.g. remember the hipster currency of the Zapatistas? Dominant forces mining creative resistance for new strategies. Crunkczar. Political power on the dance floor.

“How do the Rave-o-lution of 12 March 2018 in front of the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi and anti-fascist protests in Berlin relate to ancient Dionysian rituals, and why does the soundtrack to these events come from the drums of African Americans? And to what extent does dance club culture reflect the current socio-political situation and the struggle of individuals or of groups?”

• Machine empowerment might be the robot version of fun.

• Alison Gopnik writes interesting things and is a co-author on a paper about fun (Chu et al. 2025)

• Against Toil — Jeremy Hadfield

• David Graeber, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

  I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here—that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality—is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.

• Scott Alexander, Those Modern Pathologies

  […] a sort of productivity fetish, a mindset where anything that doesn’t leave a material token didn’t really happen. Enjoyed the company of your closest friends? Not real unless you put the pictures on Facebook, tagged #bestiesforever. Broadened your horizons with a trip to another culture? Not real without crushed pennies or some other gift-shop tchotchke. Met your soulmate? Not real unless you’ve got a lump of screaming flesh to show for it.

• Anna Khachiyan, Open Marriage is a Neoliberal Pathology:

  […] because I can’t ever seem to keep my dick in my pants when it comes to the liberal media’s pseudoscientific warblings on love and sex, here’s my unpopular opinion: the marriage institution is in some ways preferable to the sexual gig economy of neoliberal hookup culture because, if nothing else, it frees people from the tyranny of choice and forces them to subordinate their will to others, both of which are essential parts of becoming an adult.

  Open marriage, on the other hand, is a uniquely modern pathology in that it appeals to those who resent having to conform to a standard but for whom the existential terror of not conforming to any standard is too great. Like so much of our culture—co-working arrangements, the self-help and self-care industries, service apps, etc.—it encourages people to dwell in a state of perpetual adolescence, enjoying all the comforts of the old way of doing things while discarding all of the inconveniences (which are repackaged as, in the trendy, millennial market lingo of Silicon Valley, as “inefficiencies”).

• How to Make Trouble and Influence People

• Terre Thaemlitz:

  • …on Praxis and Revolutionary Music

  • …In Conversation with DJ Sprinkles

    Thaemlitz’s approach to DJing is uncomfortable, because it doesn’t just question our aesthetics, but forces us to re-think our entire notion of the dancefloor experience, to leave our comfort zones and become active participants instead of passive consumers. If that doesn’t sound like an explosive cocktail, then you clearly haven’t been out dancing for a long time.