Debt isn't just what you owe - it's an architecture of obedience. It colonises your time and keeps you trapped in bullshit jobs. But in ancient societies, they knew permanent debt would destroy citizenship, so what can we learn from that?
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32:00
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32:00
Utopia of Play: bodies on the altar
We all live inside the cage of modern work culture, but that cage doesn't confine everyone equally. This episode asks: whose exhaustion counts as virtue, and whose is simply erased? Who gets to perform the sacrifice of overwork, and who is the sacrifice itself?From the masculine spectacle of Musk and Zuckerberg's 100-hour weeks to the corporate Cool Girl who laughs at sexist jokes to survive, we trace how the system recruits us - all of us - into performing our own oppression. We explore the invisible rules that were never designed for most of us to win, the sycophantic rituals that keep hierarchies intact, and why the WGA strike matters as proof that collective action works even when we're exhausted.
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31:15
Utopia of Play: the altar of exhaustion
Why are we so exhausted we can only imagine how to hustle harder rather than imagine alternatives? In this episode, i explore how corporate culture transformed exhaustion from side effect to strategy. From the absurdist theatre of return-to-office mandates to tech billionaires who preach 100-hour weeks whilst paying others to play their video games, i examine how the weaponisation of work keeps us too tired to resist. Drawing on Graeber, Arendt, and my own experience in toxic tech culture, i explore how arbitrary rules, hyperemployment, and the performance of busyness create an altar of exhaustion we're all sacrificing to.
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28:56
Utopia of Play: games we're forced to play
What makes play different from games? Play and craft offer the power to transform us. Work used to house the technology that allowed us to transition from childhood into autonomous adulthood. But today's work no longer delivers transformation, instead we are stuck in a perpetual adolescence.
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Utopia of Play: playing with the gods
This episode is historical - what was the role of work in early societies? How did Christianity influence labour and play? And what does the modern workplace have to do with plantations?Watch a Kwakiutl potlatch here Full show notes per post found at YourLocalAnthropologist.com
Utopia of Play - an anthropological lens on the modern workplace - exploring play, work, and the worlds we can build when we stop to edit the script.
Each episode weaves together personal experience, academic insight, and cultural analysis to trace how we resist invisible rules, reclaim agency, and begin to edit the scripts we’ve inherited.
For anyone who's ever felt slightly out of step with the world's rhythm and wondered if that's a place worth pursuing.
Ascolta Your Local Anthropologist with Elina, Scientificast, la scienza come non l'hai mai sentita e molti altri podcast da tutto il mondo con l’applicazione di radio.it
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