Capitalist RealismCapitalist Realism

From creative mythologies to special effects, from virtual reality to climate denial, from placebo effect to religious faith, from hardcoded protocols to free floating values, form unquestioned futures to contested presents. When do things get real enough for us to act upon them? And how do we get a meaningful choice on when things are real enough? Reality Club is a series of Thursday Night on media and realities.

Reality Club launches with a talk by financial journalist and researcher Brett Scott, discussing one of the most commonly accepted, as well as destructive realities of today: the capitalist economy. In the words of the late Mark Fisher: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Or is it? Brett Scott outlines how a capitalist economy is cast as the only possible kind of economy, and addresses various ways in which alternatives could actually be realised.

Brett Scott explores economic systems, experiments with new forms of financial activism, and is involved in the social and environmental finance community in London. He wrote The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, published with Pluto Press. He has written for publications like the Guardian, The Ecologist, The New Internationalist, Naked Capitalism & openDemocracy and has appeared on shows such as BBC World Update, the Keiser Report, and Arte TV. He is a current Fellow at the WWF/ICAEW Finance Innovation Lab.

Reality club is a series of programmes about visual media and the imagination of reality. In a world in which billions of eyes, lenses and sensors consume and produce images in which people, machines, forces of nature and organisms acquire particular significance, reality is not so much seen but made. When does an image act as evidence? And when do images become reality?