“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”*…
Max Haiven has shared a provocative essay on capitalism that “moves beyond the conventional framing of cheating as the exceptional malfeasance of bad economic actors, as well as beyond the claim that capitalism’s drive to profit encourages dishonesty and manipulation (thought that is indeed true). Rather, it proposes we recognize cheating at capitalism’s ideological and operational core, not its periphery.” Haiven offers three case studies, then notes that the perspective he sketches “can help us recognize some elements of the rise of reactionary, far-right, and fascistic sentiment and politics today. These in many cases revolve around a rhetoric of cheating that misrecognizes the culprits, targeting poor and precarious minorities rather than those at the commanding heights of the economy.” From the introduction…
We are, by now, so familiar with the economy being described as a game that the metaphor often passes without notice (Cudd; Mooney). Scholars from a wide diversity of disciplines and across the political spectrum have explored the importance of metaphors to the functioning of the economy, both for economists and policymakers and for more humble market actors, including consumers, workers, and small investors (McCloskey; Gramm; Young). The metaphor of the game not only affirms that capitalism is competitive and rule-bound, it also frequently implies that it is at least ideally fair. Metaphors of a ‘level playing field’, for example, were crucial to the neoliberal project that promised that trade liberalization, privatization, and deregulation would lead to a system where hard work and talent were rewarded and where innovation would thrive (Krarup). That ideology never promised equality, and indeed inequality was crucial to the driving motivations of its actors, but it did promise fairness. And yet, forty years into the neoliberal revolution and it would be hard to find anyone who believes the game is fair.
This exploratory essay presents three scenes where cheating can be seen to be at the ideological core of the free-market project. Its purpose is to contribute to the argument that cheating is not simply, as defenders of neoliberal capitalism and financialization tend to claim, the exceptional and regrettable outcome of individual amorality or regulatory failure (see Jaeggi). Nor is it simply, as many critics of the system contend, a matter of the rich and powerful breaking or bending the rules, as for example in the use of tax havens and other tax avoidance schemes, or lobbying efforts, insider trading, or the gaming of regulations to avoid the inconvenience of human or environmental responsibility (Shaxson). It also goes beyond the Marxist supposition (with which I agree) that capitalism is fundamentally built on the inherent swindle of the wage relation, where workers, deprived of the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power in return for a fraction of its actual value, the rest being pocketed by their boss and reinvested in the expansion of capitalist accumulation (Harvey). Rather, across three cases, I seek to sketch a pattern where cheating is integrated into the very ideological and operational core of capitalism.
My purpose is not to make a moral critique of free-market capitalism or a structural analysis of financial accumulation, although both might be well-served by my argument. Rather, it is to lay the groundwork for an explanation for our present-day conjunctural political salience of the cheat and cheating. Why is it that today’s far-right, fascistic, and reactionary politicians, influencers, and personalities so successfully mobilize vitriol against supposed cheaters? Donald Trump is only the most famous example in his claims that he must be given profoundly antidemocratic powers to save democracy from cheats: political miscreants alleged to have cheated him and his supporters of the 2020 elections; migrants accused of cheating the ostensibly fair border regime; racialized grifters supposedly cheating the capitalist meritocracy with their cynical claims to oppression and demands for bureaucratic remedies (preferential hiring or university admissions, etc.); and, more generally, ‘elites’ said to have cheated the hardworking and entrepreneurial (white) American everyman of his due.
The success of Trump’s antics are all the more surprising given that he is himself a convicted cheat, and proud of it (Haberman and Feuer). His policies have hamstrung or completely eliminated many government bodies tasked with controlling corporate crime and he has used Presidential fiat to pardon multiple notorious wealthy cheats (Claypool; Goldstein and Silver-Greenberg). It appears almost certain the he cynically deployed his bellicose threats of tariffs to undertake one of the world’s most staggering acts of insider trading (Faturechi, Rebala, and Roberts) and that he has developed a cryptocurrency as a means to essentially sell political influence in plain sight (Chayka).
But Trump is only the most egregious, telegenic, and bombastic of many such characters. Many similar accusations could be leveled at Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (Nunes), South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol (Yang), Argentina’s Javier Milei (Callison and Gago), Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (Stille), or India’s Narendra Modi (Auvray). All of them are illiberal democratic autocrats who have wielded accusations of widespread cheating to fuel pro-market reactionary politics, while at the same time overseeing parties or regimes that are significantly built on cheating. These and other far-right political revanchists mobilize a public rhetoric that revolves around fostering the anger of manufactured majorities against what I will call the ‘cheating other’, minorities who are rumored to be defrauding society and refusing to play by the rules. The claim is often that this cheating has either been intentionally allowed by venal political elites or permitted because of the stupidity and gullibility of liberal or left-wing policies, and that matters have become so dire and corrupt that it requires radical actions that contravene the law, human rights, and other such inconveniences.
Meanwhile, somewhat predictably, actual well-documented cheating continues in plain sight. For example, none of these regimes have done anything meaningful to reign in the use of tax havens and other forms of tax evasion whereby the wealthiest members of society essentially use legal loopholes to cheat the common purse. Indeed, many of these reactionary political actors and their supporters are named in leaked documents such as the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers (Tax Justice Network, 2024).
However, the purpose of this essay is not to point to the rank hypocrisy of these actors, which is rarely hidden and whose revelation seems to do little good. Nor is it to provide a complete account of how we came to live under what I will, elsewhere, call ‘the rule of the cheat’ (Haiven, forthcoming). Rather, it is to try and understand a tendency deep at work within financialized neoliberal capitalism, one that has helped feed the revanchist political sentiments that gave rise to the popularity of reactionary politics (Haiven).
Those sentiments brood within financialized subjects. Forty years into the global neoliberal revolution and its accompanying processes of financialization, we have witnessed profound pressures on the formation of subjectivities, as individuals are compelled to conform to an increasingly competitive, austere, and precarious socio-economic environment (Cooper). Yet, as many theorists have demonstrated, this is rarely encountered or interpreted as the grim imposition of market domination, but rather as a set of agentic opportunities to speculate, perform, and compete (Lazzarato; Martin; Haiven). For example, while housing precariousness has increased in many jurisdictions thanks to the financialization of urban real estate, many non-elite subjects have embraced property speculation as an opportunity to profit and improve their life chances (Stein). Likewise, although work has generally become more precarious, many subjects see increased opportunities to start their own businesses or invest in financial assets, from publicly traded shares to cryptocurrencies (Lorusso). The affordances of social media and other platform corporations offer opportunities to leverage one’s personality and talents in the name of becoming an influencer or streamer, which are among the top career aspirations for young people today (Bollmer and Guinness). While these opportunities are themselves the result of the economic forces that generally tend to increase precariousness, inequality, and the domination of society by the market, they nevertheless are experienced by many individuals as pathways to freedom. This is more than ideological false consciousness in any simplistic sense. Financialized neoliberal capitalism’s unique success has been to not merely subdue but to seduce our agency.
As Wark and Jagoda note, such conscription of agency often feels like – and is frequently expressed in terms of – a game. Even though success in capitalism is extremely rare, each of us is tasked with reimagining ourselves as a ‘player’, convincing ourselves that the game is or at least ideally should be meritocratic and fair, even if far from equal. And yet most of us will fail while we watch others, whom we imagine to be less talented or hardworking, succeed. We increasingly feel cheated. This feeling is compounded by fines, fees, and costs, including inflation. These have, ironically, increased under neoliberal financialization largely thanks to the deregulation of capital and the privatization of public services, despite claims that the system would eliminate the red tape of overprotective government bureaucracy (Cooper). It is this figure of the ‘cheated player’, the financialized subject whose sense of agency and possibility has been betrayed, that is especially susceptible to the siren song of the reactionary political commentators, influencers, and political candidates who promise to apprehend and take revenge on people and populations they depict as cheaters.
This essay takes this set of problems as a point of departure, but ultimately seeks to excavate three moments in the genealogy of contemporary financialized neoliberal capitalism where we can observe cheating being at the very center of its operations, not simply because certain cheating individuals or institutions hold pivotal roles, but because forms of activity that can very well be understood to be cheating are incorporated into the core operations of the system. Such an analysis would not only undermine neoliberal claims that capitalism fulfills the liberal dream of a society built on the Rawlsian principle of procedural justice – that is, one in which markets may generate inequality but nonetheless remain fair (see Hunt). It would also contribute to a complication of Marxist approaches which, in their zeal to understand the abstract laws of capitalist accumulation and the ways these are enabled by a legal superstructure, have tended to downplay the crucial role of cheating, fraud, and criminal activity.
In the first case, I take up the imperialist ‘great game’ on which modern capitalism was founded: the operations of imperialist states and their corporations and companies. Here, the ‘great game’ was one that promised to bring freedom, ‘fair play’, and free trade to colonized people, but in fact established a rigged game. European powers imposed punitive and exploitative trade relations on their protectorates while also insisting that they submit to their colonizers’ sanctimonious tutelage.
In the second case, I take up the paradigm of game theory, which has become a pivotal element in neoliberal financialized capitalism, both as a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal as well as a crucial mechanism in financial decision-making, geopolitical strategy, public policy, and the development of digital technology. Within game theory’s, cheating has a specific meaning, namely defection from a previous agreement. But cheating is also anticipated and incorporated into game theory’s fundamental assumptions, whereby it is rational and expected that optimal players will almost inevitably ‘cheat’.
In the final case, I look much more broadly at what I would frame as the normalization of cheating in recent financial history, which we can trace via the work of acclaimed and highly influential financial reporter Michael Lewis, whose books have tended to focus on the rule-bending or rule-breaking mavericks whose defiance of the conventional norms (and sometimes laws) that govern finance quickly comes to be common practice and around which a new set of rules and norms quickly form.
In each of these three cases, I am not seeking to make a categorical historical argument. Rather, my effort is to paint, in broad strokes, an overarching pattern.
By way of conclusion, I take up Johann Huizinga’s distinction between the cheat and the spoilsport: the former may be unethical, but is often accepted and sometimes admired because they bend but do not break the rules, allowing the game to continue; the latter is loathsome because, in their (often justified) refusal to play a game they think is stupid, rigged, or fruitless, they call into question the wisdom, morality, or agency of their fellow players. This has significant consequences for our consideration of strategies against fascistic politics and for collective liberation…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Capitalism cheats: Three moments of normalized swindling,” from @maxhaiven.bsky.social.
* Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 8). to which he added (in Book 1, Chapter 11): “The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public … The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order … ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined … with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men … who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public…” As Branco Milanovic observes, the oft-called “Father of Capitalism” was no blind worshipper of the market economy.
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As we rethink the rules, we might recall that it was on this date in 2019 that Forbes annoited Kylie Jenner “the world’s youngest ever billionaire” (at age 21). A media personality and socialite, Jenner had been involved (with her sister Kendall) in the clothing company PacSun, had launched her own cosmetics line, and had, of course, featured in the reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians and had “starred” in its spin-off, Life of Kylie. A year later Forbes released a statement accusing Jenner of forging tax documents so she would appear to be a billionaire.
“Scuse me while I kiss the sky”*…
In 1967, Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler arranged for Jimi to meet Cream…
There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: “Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin’ Wolf’s] ‘Killing Floor’,” recalls [Tony] Garland, “and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that – it stopped you in your tracks.” [Keith] Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song “which he had yet to master himself”; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: “You never told me he was that fucking good.” – source
Hendrix’s extraodinary virtuosity has, altogether justly, gotten a great deal of attention; less well noted, his incredible mastery of the technology of music making, recording, and performance. Rohan Puranik explains…
3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. The pedal was a key element of a complex chain of analog elements responsible for the final sound, including the acoustics of the studio room itself. When they sent the tapes for remastering in the United States, the sounds on it were so novel that they included an accompanying note explaining that the distortion at the end was not malfunction but intention. A few months later, Hendrix would deliver his legendary electric guitar performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival.
“Purple Haze” firmly established that an electric guitar can be used not just as a stringed instrument with built-in pickups for convenient sound amplification, but also as a full-blown wave synthesizer whose output can be manipulated at will. Modern guitarists can reproduce Hendrix’s chain using separate plug-ins in digital audio workstation software, but the magic often disappears when everything is buffered and quantized. I wanted to find out if a more systematic approach could do a better job and provide insights into how Hendrix created his groundbreaking sound.
My fascination with Hendrix’s Olympic Studios’ performance arose because there is a “Hendrix was an alien” narrative surrounding his musical innovation—that his music appeared more or less out of nowhere. I wanted to replace that narrative with an engineering-driven account that’s inspectable and reproducible—plots, models, and a signal chain from the guitar through the pedals that you can probe stage by stage…
[And probe it Puranik does– fascinatingly, stage by stage…]
… Hendrix didn’t speak in decibels and ohm values, but he collaborated with engineers who did—Mayer and Kramer—and iterated fast as a systems engineer. Reframing Hendrix as an engineer doesn’t diminish the art. It explains how one person, in under four years as a bandleader, could pull the electric guitar toward its full potential by systematically augmenting the instrument’s shortcomings for maximum expression.
“Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer,” from @spectrum.ieee.org.
See also: “The Technology of Jimi Hendrix.”
* Jimi Hendrix, “Purple Haze”
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As we plug in, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to another wizard with wires, Geoff Tootill; he was born on this date in 1922. An electronic engineer and computer scientist, he worked (with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn) to design a computer memory. To that end they built the first electronic stored-program computer— the Manchester Baby— at the University of Manchester in 1948.
The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Nonethless, Baby worked: Alan Turing moved to Manchester to use it, and the following year, it inspired the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored-program digital computer.
“Eureka!”*…
Whence insight?…
New research published in BMC Psychology suggests that the structural wiring of the brain may play a significant role in how people solve problems through sudden insight. The study indicates that individuals who frequently experience “Aha!” moments tend to have less organized white matter pathways in specific language-processing areas of the left hemisphere. These findings imply that a slightly less rigid neural structure might allow the brain to relax its focus, enabling the unique connections required for creative breakthroughs.
For decades, scientists have studied the phenomenon of insight, which occurs when a solution to a problem enters awareness suddenly and unexpectedly. This is often contrasted with analytical problem solving, which involves a deliberate and continuous step-by-step approach.
While previous studies using functional MRI and EEG have mapped the brain activity that occurs during these moments, there has been little understanding of the underlying physical structure that supports them. The researchers behind the new study aimed to determine if stable differences in white matter—the bundles of nerve fibers that connect different brain regions—predict an individual’s tendency to solve problems via insight.
“For over two decades, neuroscience has mapped what happens in the brain during these moments using EEG and fMRI. We know from prior research that insight feels sudden, tends to be accurate, and involves distinct functional activation patterns — including a burst of activity in the right temporal cortex just before the solution reaches awareness,” said study authors Carola Salvi of the Cattolica University of Milan and Simone A. Luchini of Pennsylvania State University.
“But one major question remained open: what structural features of the brain might make some people more likely to experience insight in the first place?”
“Most previous white matter studies of creativity did not specifically focus on Aha! experiences. They measured how many problems people solved, or how creatively, not how they solved them (with or without these sudden epiphanies). Yet insight and non insight solutions are phenomenologically and neurally distinct processes.”
White matter acts as the communication infrastructure of the brain, transmitting signals between distant regions. To examine this structure, the researchers employed a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). This method tracks the movement of water molecules within brain tissue.
“We wanted to know whether stable white matter microstructure — the brain’s anatomical wiring — differs depending on whether someone tends to solve problems through sudden insight or through deliberate step-by-step reasoning (non insight solutions),” Salvi and Luchini explained. “Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) allowed us to examine this structural dimension directly.”…
… The findings offered a counterintuitive perspective on brain connectivity. The analysis revealed that participants who solved more problems via insight exhibited lower fractional anisotropy in the left hemisphere’s dorsal language network. This network includes the arcuate fasciculus and the superior longitudinal fasciculus, pathways that connect brain regions responsible for language production, comprehension, and semantic processing.
“One striking finding was that people who more frequently experienced insight showed lower fractional anisotropy in specific left-hemisphere dorsal language pathways, including parts of the arcuate fasciculus and superior longitudinal fasciculus,” Salvi and Luchini told PsyPost.
“At first glance, that might sound counterintuitive. Fractional anisotropy is often interpreted as reflecting the coherence or organization of white matter pathways. In many cognitive domains, higher fractional anisotropy is associated with better performance.”
“But insight may operate differently. The left hemisphere is typically involved in focused, fine-grained semantic processing — narrowing in on dominant interpretations of words and concepts. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is thought to support broader, ‘coarse’ semantic coding — integrating more distantly related ideas. Slightly lower fractional anisotropy in left dorsal language pathways may reflect a system that is less tightly constrained by dominant interpretations.
“In other words, it may allow a partial ‘release’ from habitual patterns of thought and it is in line with other studies where lesions in the left frontotemporal regions have been shown to increase artistic creativity,” Salvi and Luchini continued. “Taken together, these findings imply that left hemispheric regions play a regulatory role in creativity and that their disruption lifts this constraint, thus promoting novel ideas.”…
This somehow makes your correspondent feel better about his messy desk…
More at: “Neuroscientists identify a unique feature in the brain’s wiring that predicts sudden epiphanies,” from @psypost.bsky.social.
The journal paper: “The white matter of Aha! moments.”
* Archimedes (after one of his famous insights)
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As we ruminate on revelation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that the college fad of swallowing live goldfish began at Harvard: a freshman named Lothrop Withington, Jr., reportedly bragged to his friends that he had once eaten a live fish. They bet him 10 bucks he couldn’t do it again. Perhaps because he was running for Class President, he took the challenge…
The moment of truth came on March 3, within the hallowed halls of Harvard. Standing in front of a crowd of grinning classmates and at least one Boston reporter, Withington dropped an ill-fated 3-inch goldfish into his mouth, gave a couple chews and swallowed. “The scales,” he later remarked, “caught a bit on my throat as it went down.”
Soon the word spread to other colleges. Other students began to take up the challenge, swallowing more and more goldfish each time to top the last record. By the time students were downing dozens of live, wriggling goldfish to uphold their school’s honor, the Massachusetts legislature stepped in and passed a law to “preserve the fish from cruel and wanton consumption.” The U.S. Public Health Service began to issue warnings that the goldfish could pass tapeworms and disease to swallowers. Within a few months of its start, the fad died out.
– Source
“I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. / In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: / Plagiarize!”*…
In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. But as Joseph Howlett reports, a trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism…
When Demian Goos followed Karin Richter into her office on March 12 of last year, the first thing he noticed was the bust. It sat atop a tall pedestal in the corner of the room, depicting a bald, elderly gentleman with a stoic countenance. Goos saw no trace of the anxious, lonely man who had obsessed him for over a year.
Instead, this was Georg Cantor as history saw him. An intellectual giant: steadfast, strong-willed, determined to bring about a mathematical revolution over the clamorous objections of his peers.
It was here, at the University of Halle in Germany, that Cantor launched his revolution 150 years ago. Here, in 1874, he published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. That paper crystallized a concept that had long been viewed as a mathematical malignancy to be shunned at all costs: infinity. It forced mathematicians to question some of their longest-held assumptions, rocking mathematics to its very foundations. And it gave rise to a new field of study that would eventually bring about a rewriting of the entire subject.
Now Goos, a 35-year-old mathematician and journalist, had come to Halle — a five-hour train ride from his home in Mainz — to look at some letters from Cantor’s estate. He’d seen a scan of one and was pretty sure he knew what the others would say. But he wanted to see them in person.
Richter — who, like Cantor, had spent her entire career here, first as a research mathematician and then, after retiring, as a lecturer on the history of mathematics — gestured for Goos to sit. She lifted a thin blue binder from the scattered piles of books and papers on her desk. Inside were dozens of plastic sheet protectors, each one containing an old, handwritten letter.
Goos began flipping through, contemplating the letters with the relish of an archaeologist entering a long-lost tomb. Then he reached a particular page and froze. He struggled to catch his breath.
It wasn’t the handwriting. At this point in his research on Cantor, he’d become accustomed to the strange, nearly indecipherable Gothic script known as kurrentschrift, which Germans used until around 1900.
It wasn’t the signature. He knew that the German mathematician Richard Dedekind had been a key player in Cantor’s quest to understand infinity and solidify math’s foundations, and that the two had exchanged many letters.
It was the date: November 30, 1873.
He’d never seen this letter before. No one had. It was believed to be lost, destroyed in the tumult of World War II or perhaps by Cantor himself.
This was the letter that had the power to rewrite Cantor’s legacy. The letter that proved once and for all that Cantor’s famous 1874 paper, the one that would go on to reshape all of mathematics, had been an act of plagiarism…
The extraordinary story of unearthing this extraordinary story: “The Man Who Stole Infinity,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes?“
* Tom Lehrer (not just a glorious songwriter, but also a gifted mathematician), “Lobachevsky” (referring to the mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky— “not intended as a slur on [Lobachevsky’s] character [but chosen]”solely for prosodic reasons”)
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As we confer credit where credit is due, we might spare a thought for Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, baron de la Vallée Poussin; he died on this date in 1962. A Belgian mathematician, he is best known for proving the prime number theorem (which formalized the intuitive idea that primes become less common as they become larger by precisely quantifying the rate at which this occurs). So great was the contribution that the King of Belgium ennobled him with the title of baron.
“Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some distance, his seat”*…
Michael Wolf is an award-winning and widely-exhibited photographer famous for his documentation of big city architecture and life around the world, but especially in Hong Kong… Consider this series…
Much more at “Informal Seating Arrangements in Hong Kong” and more of Wolf’s other wonderful work on his site.
* Samuel Beckett, Watt
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As we grab a chair, we might keep our focus on Hong Kong: it was on this date in 1978 that Snake in Eagle’s Shadow was released. A Hong Kong martial arts action comedy film, it was the debut of director Yuen Woo-ping, and the breakthrough outing for its stars, Jackie Chan, Hwang Jang-lee, and (Yuen Woo-ping’s real life father) Yuen Siu-tien.
The film is the story of Chien Fu (Jackie Chan), an orphan who is bullied at a kung fu school, but meets an old beggar, Pai Cheng-tien (Yuen Siu-tien), who becomes his sifu (teacher) and trains him in Snake Kung Fu. The film established Chan’s slapstick kung fu comedy style– which he further developed with Drunken Master, also directed by Yuen Woo-ping, released in the same year, and also starring Jackie Chan, Hwang Jang-lee and Yuen Siu-tien. Snake in Eagle’s Shadow (and Drunken Master) established the basic plot structure used in many, many martial arts films internationally since then.
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