Will Jordan · Writing · Projects
I completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, in 2014, with a Critical Theory emphasis and a specialization in software and game studies.
“Ludocapital: The Political Economy of Digital Play” (2014) advances a critical theory of ludocapitalism: the incorporation of play into capitalism in contemporary technoculture. Its premise is that play no longer sits outside the field of productive capital, but has come to occupy a central role in productive activity and social organization, superseding Weber’s Protestant ethic as the source of rationality within capitalism.
I map that transition across four categories of liberal humanism (play, property, literacy, and money), developing correspondences between the liberal human subject of classical modern capitalism that was the target of Marx’s critique of political economy, and the technoliberal, posthuman subject underlying contemporary technoculture. The method is a comparative form of immanent critique for digital media: historically contextualize the categories that make up technoliberal subjectivity, then develop tactical responses from inside the technological environments themselves. Chapters take up serious games, Tetris, procedural literacy, and Bitcoin.
Committee: Eyal Amiran (chair), David Theo Goldberg, James Steintrager.