#5 Utopia of Play: bodies on the altar

Post 5 in the series: Utopias of Play

i want to start off with a little disclaimer, i originally called this episode Oppression olympics but as i was editing it i realised that this comes across cynical and doesn't open the space to discuss the ways in which these systems exploits different people differently, and at different volume levels through intersecting oppressions. It's not competing, it's interlocking and none of us are free unless all of us are.

i ended the last post asking a question on structural violence. Who gets sacrificed at the altar of exhaustion and how this exhaustion gets distributed in our modern work culture.

Let's trace this lineage. It began, in earlier posts, with the idea that our capacity for play - for improvisation, for meaning-making, for collective joy - was first made suspicious, then sinful, and finally repurposed into a game of constant, measurable labour. We've inherited a logic born from the factory and the plantation, a dual engine of extraction that reduced human beings to units of production.

That inheritance is now a default setting: the inability to rest without guilt, the somatic memory of time-discipline. But the cage i spoke of previously, the one we were all born inside, does not confine everyone equally. Its architecture is designed to make some bodies invisible while amplifying the exhaustion of others. The structural violence that underpins our work culture is distributed with surgical precision. When we speak of the collective altar of exhaustion, we must ask: whose exhaustion is counted as virtue, and whose is simply erased? Who gets to perform the sacrifice, and who is the sacrifice itself? Whose rules are we really following?

Perhaps the most useful metaphor for this is one i learned in the games industry: sometimes rules aren't just invisible, they're deliberately obscured to challenge players. A delightful feature in a video game, a nightmare in a corporate structure.

Because in the real world, if you could see the rules clearly, you'd realise they were never designed for you to win. Work has become a broken game - opaque rules, arbitrary evaluations, joyless rewards. You do everything "right" and still lose. Meanwhile we all witness mediocre men, or even woefully unqualified or misbehaving men fail upward.

Speaking of men

i guess it would be impossible to speak about power and labour without mentioning the masculine spectacle we've all been forced to participate in. Men included. Think of the men who define our current moment: the tech patriarchs - Zuckerberg's blank detachment, Musk's erratic, 100-hour-week gospel; or just look at any successful video game who has its crunch-promoting-leader at the helm, trying to convince us this is the only way. Or, better still the brashness of political demagogues like Trump, and the orchestrated brutality of the UFC (more on this in a minute). These figures aren't just successful capitalists; they are performers of a hyper-masculine ideal that shapes all modern hierarchies. They demonstrate that true power lies not in being fully human, but in a cultivated detachment from human vulnerability.

Musk can tweet about 100-hour weeks because he has systematically outsourced the human labour of living - the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, the calendar management, the emotional regulation - to an unseen team. His exhaustion is a performance of virtue, a moral currency that buys him status and attention. Zuckerberg, in his infamous flat affect, embodies the ideal of a mind so focused on cold, hard logic that it has transcended the messiness of emotion. The UFC, an extreme ritual of commodified violence, sells the primal fantasy of domination - a rejection of negotiation, care, and cooperation in favour of absolute control.

This is the modern patriarchal script: domination as detachment. It is a performance where the highest value is placed on those who appear unburdened by the need for rest, care, or connection. For the male capitalist, work is a stage upon which he proves his supremacy by demonstrating his capacity to survive the grind he himself created. He gets to be the hero of his own exhaustion narrative. But this is theatre. The system requires a constant subsidy of human energy. This subsidy is almost always extracted from the bodies of those whose labour is culturally devalued.

In a way, i am grateful to Mark Zuckerberg for providing us all with the absurd line about companies needing more masculine energy earlier this year, to illustrate my point for me. Because what he means, what men in these positions of power always mean, is that the workplace should centre a particular performance of masculinity: aggressive, competitive, submissive to power and willing to sacrifice everything for the project, the company, the shareholders. The kind that treats empathy as weakness and care as inefficiency.

In corporate HR speak, they call it "culture fit"a nebulous quality that somehow always means "would i want to grab a beer with this person?" And somehow, magically, the people they want to grab beers with all look the same. Entire "leadership pipelines" built not on competence but on cultural resemblance. Same schools. Same backgrounds. Same Y chromosomes.

i watched this in tech companies where VPs called women "aggressive" for doing exactly what men were praised for. Slack messages accidentally revealed in screen shares showing what leaders actually thought of the women on their teams. Promotions granted to men who failed upward whilst women were penalised for identical behaviour. Men who bullied their colleagues ascended the hierarchy without resistance. Or new levels of hierarchy invented for the sole purpose of keeping someone from promotion. Different companies, different contexts, different industries - all the same playbook.

i watched it happen again and again throughout my career - video games, tech, it never mattered; every industry was agnostic to the script. The after-work drinks that quietly became the real meeting rooms, the casual mentions of strip clubs that made clear exactly what kind of boys’ club you’d stumbled into. i saw it all just after leaving my own toxic male leadership environment, which made the parallels unmistakable - the same playbook, replayed at every scale, from private boardrooms to the US government.

Nothing demonstrates this pattern more clearly, magnified to absurdity, than Trump's 2025 cabinet. The twice impeached, convicted felon himself appointing Matt Gaetz for Attorney General despite ethics investigations. RFK Jr for Health Secretary whilst spreading vaccine conspiracy theories. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy running a "Department of Government Efficiency" despite Musk torching his own companies. An entire government failing upward.

These appointments aren't about competence. They're the same boys' club logic i saw in tech, in games, in corporate environments everywhere, just louder. They're about demonstrating that rules are for other people. They're what Thorstein Veblen called "conspicuous consumption" of impunity. By appointing manifestly unqualified people, Trump performs his exemption from rules constraining others.

i was listening to Louis Theroux's interview with UFC champion Leon Edwards. Theroux compared Trump's endorsement of UFC to Roman emperors sponsoring gladiatorial games. Look at us - we've come full circle back to the games from episode 2. Like the Colosseum, UFC offers spectacle as power. The sport became a soft power platform for right-wing values: hyper-masculinity, nationalism, individual dominance. In this world, pain is glorified. Violence becomes validation. When Trump aligns with UFC, he's aligning with a mythology of merit: that the strong deserve to win because dominance is virtuous, and hierarchy is natural.

The same logic that makes strip club visits networking opportunities whilst childcare responsibilities are "personal problems." The same system where harassment complaints disappear into HR black holes whilst harassers get promoted for "leadership potential."

The boys' club isn't a deviation from how capitalism works - it is how capitalism works. The invisible rules exist to sort people. The exemptions exist to remind you who the rules are really for. And the performance exists to make resistance feel futile.

Not all men (but actually, let's talk about that)

Some men will listen or read what i've said here and feel accused of a privilege they've never experienced. They've been passed over for promotions too. They've struggled to fit in. They've felt excluded from the boys' club because they don't drink, don't watch sports, don't perform the specific brand of aggressive confidence that gets rewarded.

And they're right. Connell's framework of hegemonic masculinity doesn't mean all men benefit equally; it means there's a hierarchy of masculinities, and only certain performances get rewarded. What Connell calls "complicit masculinity" describes men who don't embody hegemonic ideals but still benefit from the patriarchal dividend - the structural advantages that come from being male in a system that privileges maleness, even if you're not alpha-male enough to run the show.

The system doesn't actually require every man to be Zuckerberg or Trump. It just requires enough men to aspire to it, and enough others to not actively dismantle it.

We're watching this play out in real time. Media executives who once condemned Trump now bow to his administration. Pundits who built careers on speaking truth suddenly discover reasons to stay silent. Tech CEOs who privately called him dangerous are now lining up to kiss the ring. Men giving up their spines for proximity to power, trading integrity for access to the table.

It's the same pattern at every scale. The man who feels uncomfortable with the strip club talk but says nothing. The man who notices his female colleague's idea was ignored but doesn't amplify it. The man who benefits from the assumption of competence whilst his female peers have to prove theirs repeatedly.

Whether it's normalising a cabinet of incompetents or staying silent when your colleague gets talked over in a meeting, the mechanism is identical: complicity dressed as pragmatism. The system doesn't need everyone to be a bully. It just needs enough people to look away while the bullying happens.

Michael Kimmel's work on masculinity shows how many men experience their gender not as power but as anxiety - a constant performance of "proving" manhood, fear of being seen as weak, feminine, insufficient. These men often feel like victims of the same system, and in some ways, they are. You can suffer under patriarchy's rigid definitions of manhood whilst still receiving advantages from being male.

Pierre Bourdieu called this "symbolic violence" domination that requires the complicity of the dominated, who often don't recognise it as domination because it's coded as natural, just how things are. The man who doesn't fit the alpha mould often doesn't see himself as complicit because he experiences his own marginalisation within masculine hierarchies. He's not wrong about his experience. But his exclusion from the top tier doesn't mean he's experiencing what women experience.

The boys' club doesn't work for every man. But it works against women in ways that have no male equivalent. And the men who feel excluded from masculine hierarchies often become the most defensive about privilege precisely because they experience their manhood as a burden and not a benefit. To acknowledge structural advantage feels like erasure of their very real struggle to fit in.

This is what makes conversations about our relationships to each other so difficult. We're asking people to hold two truths simultaneously: that they can struggle and still have advantages. That they can feel marginalised and still be structurally privileged. That their pain is real and also not the same as someone else's pain. It's cognitively difficult. It's emotionally difficult. And it's made harder by a culture that treats oppression as zero-sum, as though acknowledging someone else's disadvantage means denying your own difficulty.

Rebranding power as therapy speak

There's one more thing i wanted to cover when we talk about masculinity at work. A new found language has arrived, one that seems progressive but doesn't fundamentally change anything.

In the last decade, a strange phenomenon has taken hold, particularly among millennial and Gen Z men in professional contexts: the adoption of therapy-speak and the language of vulnerability as a performance of evolved leadership, rather than as genuine transformation.

Historically, emotional labour and introspection were dismissed as 'feminine', in other words devalued. But now, emotional intelligence is rebranded as a tool for effective leadership and productivity, commodified for professional advancement, certain men are adopting this language.

The issue is not with the language itself, but how it is used to recentre themselves within the same patriarchal scripts. They are not using "vulnerability" to challenge the systemic need for emotional labour, but to perform a more evolved, sensitive version of the patriarchal figure. The vulnerability is deployed strategically, not systemically.

i was thrown the first time i witnessed this first hand: tears weaponised as vulnerability. This isn't about men who are genuinely learning to be vulnerable, who are doing the messy work of unlearning patriarchal conditioning. But when a man in power suddenly shares a highly curated trauma - the same man whose track record of bullying and harassment speaks for itself - this isn't vulnerability.

When the story of struggle, burnout, or mental health crisis arrives not to invite mutual support or critique of the structure, but to justify his current position or shut down genuine criticism, the performance says: 'I am so emotionally evolved, I have suffered, and thus I am uniquely qualified to lead.'

And let's be clear: this weaponisation is reserved for men who already hold power. Men of colour showing emotion are read as threatening. Working-class men are told to toughen up. Only men at the top of multiple hierarchies get to rebrand tears as leadership.

When a powerful man with a track record of dominance suddenly cries, rather than vulnerability creating accountability, it often functions as rebranded power. It becomes a demonstration of emotional range that humanises him just enough to make his dominance palatable, without requiring him to concede any structural power.

It is the final, cynical frontier of male privilege: getting credit for doing the bare minimum of human introspection, without having to dismantle the system that protects his detachment.

When bell hooks spoke of love and patriarchy, she reminds us that a commitment to true, mutual care requires a surrender of the will to dominate. A vulnerability that maintains or enhances one's power is not true vulnerability; it is a calculation. It is a game played with emotional chips, where the goal is still to win.

Broken ladders, glass ceilings

The system perpetuates itself through a promise it has no intention of keeping.

The language of modern work is saturated with the promise of meritocracy. We are told that the system is a game fair enough that anyone can win, provided they work hard enough, produce results and so on. The rules of these games were not written by us and are changed on a whim by those in power. Meritocracy is not a system of advancement; it is a theatre of justification.

It is a way of convincing those at the bottom that their failure is personal, not systemic. It tells the woman who hits the glass ceiling that she simply didn't lean in hard enough, or the person of colour who is perpetually overlooked that they lacked the right "cultural fit." This narrative of individual failure provides a psychological alibi for the powerful. It allows them to maintain their position whilst absolving themselves of responsibility for the very hierarchies that ensure their dominance.

Patricia Hill Collins calls this the "matrix of domination" - overlapping systems of oppression that create different rules for different players. We all pretend the game is fair whilst knowing it isn't. The cruelty is the invisibility. If the rules were transparent - like in Destiny - we could contest them. We could organise. We could demand changes. Instead, we're told our failure is personal. We didn't "produce results" enough. We didn't network correctly. We lacked "tenacity."

The system stays blameless.

Every industry actually runs on who you know and how well you perform the acceptable identity. i've watched qualified women passed over for promotions whilst men who shipped broken features and bullied their peers got fast-tracked to leadership. i've sat in meetings where women's ideas were ignored until a man repeated them five minutes later to applause. Well, not literal applause, but still.

The racial hierarchies born from the transatlantic slave trade and the extraction of working classes didn't disappear. They became 'culture fit' and 'professionalism' words sounding neutral but functioning as gatekeeping.

Corporate Cool Girl

The theatre of meritocracy requires actors. And women, if they want to survive in this system, are offered a very specific role.

You know that speech from Gone Girl? The one about Cool Girl? "Cool Girl never gets angry; she only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner and lets her man do whatever he wants. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind, I'm the Cool Girl." Amy Dunne was talking about romantic relationships, but she could have been describing corporate culture.

There's a workplace version of Cool Girl, and she is everywhere. She laughs at the sexist jokes. She doesn't mind the strip club. She can hang with the boys, drink like them, talk like them, never once suggesting that maybe, just maybe, this environment wasn't designed for her. She's one of the guys. She's low maintenance. She doesn't make things awkward by pointing out that sexism or harassment.

Cool Girl at work is a performance designed to make men comfortable whilst ensuring you never actually threaten their position. You can be in the room, but only if you prove you won't use your presence to change anything about the room. There's always at least one Cool Girl position available at the top, but rarely more than that.

If you were "lucky" enough as a woman and happened to be invited to these after-work rituals - and you chose to go - you were "cool" but also diminished. Your presence became proof the boys' club wasn't exclusionary whilst your silence became proof you accepted its rules. If you didn't go, you were "difficult" and definitely not getting promoted. Either way, you lost.

Cool Girl makes sexism feel like your choice. You chose not to laugh at the joke. You chose to make it weird. You chose not to fit in. The structure stays invisible whilst your failure to navigate it becomes visible, personal and definitely your fault.

And we participate in this machinery - sometimes willingly, sometimes because refusal means exclusion. And sometimes we enforce it on each other. The woman who's made it pulling the ladder up, dismissing younger women as 'too sensitive,' protecting the boys' club that gave her the single token seat. This is how patriarchy recruits women into enforcing it - not through force, but through the promise of the single seat at the table if only you prove you're not like those other women.

But it's not just women who must perform to survive. The system demands performance from everyone - a collective bending of the knee that keeps the hierarchy intact.

Hollow rituals

The recruitment into our own oppression happens not just through obedience, but enthusiastic participation in rituals we know are hollow. The powerful demand not just compliance, but affirmation. We participate in ritualistic flattery, mimicking the language and mannerisms of the dominant group - the relentless optimism, the cult of the CEO, the insistence that one is "passionate" about a task that is objectively meaningless.

i've seen this ritual play out in countless corporate meetings: the junior colleague who laughs too loudly at the senior leader's mediocre joke; the manager who sends an email at 11pm just to demonstrate 'commitment'; the entire team that praises a wildly illogical strategy because it came from the top. These are not acts of sincere collaboration. They are performative loyalty - social sacrifices intended to keep the hierarchy intact and secure one's own place within it. As David Graeber showed with bureaucracy, the illogical policies are often the point. The requirement for this gratuitous performance of belief is a direct assertion of authority. It forces us to choose the system over our own critical capacity.

In this sense, the worker who performs sycophancy is performing a kind of psychological self-violence. They are sacrificing their true self - the one who sees the absurdity, the one who wishes for rest and meaning - at the altar of the manager's ego, hoping for a small portion of the system's bounty. The sycophant is a desperate artist, trying to paint themselves into the portrait of power but somehow always on the edges. The result is a culture of mimicry where genuine connection is absolutely impossible, and emotional authenticity is a liability.

Chipping away at yourself becomes a daily activity. Colleagues who'd privately complained about dysfunction publicly praise it in all-hands meetings. i saw people who knew better defend policies they'd argued against in private. Witnessed the slow erosion of integrity that comes from performing belief in systems you've stopped believing in.

And i understand it. The mortgage needs paying. The health insurance is tied to employment. Or even your visa. You learn to smile in the meetings, to enthusiastically adopt the new framework, to pretend this reorganisation will be different from the last five.

But this complicity has a cost and it's not just to our integrity, though there's that but to our capacity to imagine anything else. When you spend eight hours a day performing belief in a system you know is broken, it becomes harder to imagine what unbroken might look like.

The rituals to capitalism are everywhere once you start noticing them. The morning standup where nobody stands up and nothing new is said. The milestones that change on a whim and reinvent the meaning of time. The committees that meet but never decide. The policies announced but selectively enforced. Sara Ahmed calls this 'non-performativity' when institutions perform action whilst ensuring nothing changes

These aren't failures of implementation. The point isn't to fix anything. The point is to occupy the space where fixing might happen. To absorb the energy that might go toward actual change.

But who actually pays for all this theatre? Who bears the weight of these performances whilst others collect the applause?

The distribution of this burden follows the fault lines of all our hierarchies. The Black woman does this labour whilst also managing white colleagues' racial discomfort, code-switching, being asked to speak for her entire race in diversity meetings. The queer employee absorbs homophobia whilst making straight colleagues comfortable with their existence. The working-class person translates between worlds, hiding their background whilst the privately educated seamlessly network. The disabled worker advocates for basic accommodations whilst being labelled "difficult." The man of colour performs non-threatening masculinity whilst proving he deserves to be in the room.

Their exhaustion is not a virtue; it is merely the overhead cost of the system's smooth operation.

The cost of obedience

And this exhaustion isn't just physical. It rewires us.

To sustain this system of unequal distribution, the majority must actively participate in their own subjugation. This is where obedience intersects with capitalism and patriarchy.

The modern workplace runs on a constant fear of exclusion. We are loyal to systems that actively harm us not out of genuine affinity, but because the cost of stepping outside the circle is immediate precarity. The cost of obedience is a kind of soul-death, a calculated complicity where we trade our time, our critical thought, and our imaginative capacity for the temporary promise of survival.

Gabor Maté would call this environment traumatic. Not just personally, but generationally. When we spend decades inside systems where rules are opaque and rewards arbitrary, our nervous systems live in permanent low-grade threat. That disconnection cascades outward: from our bodies, from each other, from the work itself. And for those already on the margins, the stress compounds. We're playing on nightmare difficulty whilst being told it's a level playing field.

We're not just navigating the official rules of our jobs. We're navigating whether we're allowed to be angry (we're not), whether we're allowed to be ambitious (not too much), whether we're allowed to exist in our bodies without them becoming a topic of discussion (absolutely not).

The psychological consequences of this chronic depletion are generational. Maté's research on trauma shows how chronic stress becomes intergenerational - children of stressed parents show altered stress responses before birth. The body remembers what the mind thinks it's forgotten.

Meanwhile, those who benefit from the system perform their exemption from its violence. They work long hours by "choice." They check email at midnight because they're "passionate." They sacrifice family time because they're "committed." And somehow this performance of voluntary exhaustion justifies everyone else's involuntary grinding.

This is structural violence. The spectacle of Trumpian masculinity, the illusion of meritocracy, the self-violence of obedience, and the co-option of care language, all of it is the perfect storm for maintenance of structural violence.

Structural violence, as we learned from Nancy Scheper-Hughes in earlier posts, is the violence of social structures that prevent people from meeting their basic needs or realising their potential. In the context of work, it is the constant, crushing pressure that normalises burnout as a prerequisite for survival. We are constantly told our physical and psychological breakdown is a personal failure - a problem of poor coping, a lack of self-care - rather than a predictable outcome of a system designed to extract infinite productivity from finite human bodies. The same system trying to extract infinite resources from a finite earth.

When we talk about the factory and the plantation, we see that the logic was always about creating humans who believed they deserved no rest. The factory's time-discipline told us that idleness was sin. The plantation's racial violence told us that some bodies were made only for labour.

The modern office, the remote work environment, the gig economy platforms, these are just new arenas for that same old logic. Who pays for it? The woman who works the triple shift (paid labour, emotional labour, domestic labour). The black, brown, and indigenous bodies whose generational exhaustion is ignored whilst their cultural production is commodified. The carers, the nurses, the teachers - the people doing the essential work that actually mattered - who are paid the least, yet are constantly asked to give more.

The actors at the top, who perform detachment because their lives are subsidised by the unseen, unpaid, and unacknowledged emotional and physical labour of others. The Musk's and Trump's, who benefit from their own moral currency of exhaustion, whilst others pay in actual, quantifiable pain and precarity.

But structural violence isn't inevitable. It's maintained through our collective participation, which means it can be unmade through our collective refusal.

The collective power

When Bungie pushed too far in Destiny 2, players didn't just complain. They organised. They found exploits. They hacked the mechanics and demanded better. And they got it because game designers, unlike corporate executives, sometimes actually care whether people enjoy the experience. Although even that is no longer a guarantee against the bottom line.

Nevertheless, workers have done the same when they've recognised that the rules were rigged. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for nearly five months, demanding fair pay, protections against AI exploitation, and control over their creative labour. Studios assumed that writers would eventually fold; instead, the writers held the line, shut down productions, and weaponised visibility. The result? A historic deal that reshaped compensation, safeguarded jobs, and proved that even against billion-dollar corporations, collective action works.

Did i lose some of my favourite shows to this strike? Yes. And it was worth it.

Google employees organised against Pentagon drone contracts and forced the company to cancel them. Starbucks baristas are coordinating union drives across hundreds of stores, bypassing corporate control by using TikTok, Discord, and encrypted chats - effectively rewriting the rulebook themselves.

In games and in life, when enough players stop grinding, the system has to change.

But the system knows this. And it has a defence: exhaustion itself.

The explicit exploitation: the bad contract, the union-busting, the illegal firing - these create clear enemies and clear demands. They're organisable. But there's another layer, something harder to name and harder to fight: the ambient dysfunction. The meaninglessness. The entire architecture that makes bad policies inevitable rather than any single policy you could strike against.

You finish your shift too tired to organise. You survive your week too depleted to see your friends, let alone imagine alternatives. You make it through your month too anxious about the next one to think about collective action. This isn't accidental. Exhaustion is the enforcement mechanism. The system doesn't need to crush resistance if it can simply drain our capacity to resist.

This is why the WGA strike matters so much. The WGA didn't succeed because individual writers had superhuman energy. They succeeded because they shared the burden. Because when you're part of a movement, you don't have to carry the weight alone. When one person is too depleted to show up, another can. This is what the system fears: not our individual resistance, which it can wait out, but our capacity to sustain each other. It's why unions terrify the powerful.

And this brings us back to play. A system can absorb anger. It can isolate and blame individuals. What it cannot win against is collective effort and our capacity to imagine otherwise. To remember that none of this is inevitable. To find each other and build something different.

Glimmers of hope

This is what the power of play offered us, and still does - the practice of world-building and imagination. The space where we remember that rules can change because we're the ones who made them.

When i write this series without academic approval, when i dance without monetising it, when i learn calligraphy because the forms are beautiful - these aren't escapes from reality. They're rehearsals for a different one. When we choose joy without justifying it, we're practising for a world where joy doesn't need permission. Every time we rest without earning it, we're asserting that humans deserve to exist beyond their productivity.

The altar of exhaustion will keep demanding sacrifice. The prophets of grind will keep preaching their gospel. But we don't have to keep believing them.

What if we stopped asking how to win at their game and started asking what games we'd rather play? What worlds we'd rather build?

To reclaim play is to challenge the architecture of exhaustion itself. It is to stop participating in the theatre of meritocracy, to refuse the sycophant's ritual, and to demand that the necessary work of care - the work that keeps fragile human beings alive - is valued over the performance of domination.

But there's still one more lock on the cage - debt. The mortgage that demands stable employment. The student loans that force us into corporate jobs. The credit cards that let us perform middle-class stability whilst drowning. We can't afford to refuse because we're already indebted to the structures we'd resist.

The system doesn't just exploit our labour - it traps us in a cycle where we must continuously sell our labour to service the debt incurred by participating in the system. More on this next time.

Next: #6 Utopia of Play: Rethinking debt

References

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