"How do we think through the relationship between these two processes? It is with this question the following pages are largely concerned, but they merely scratch the surface. There is nothing here in the way of exhaustive inquiry. The text seeks to approach Palestine as a microcosm of larger processes, focusing on a historical moment in 1840 that I believe has particular importance. Still, the story of what happened then is only told with brevity. There are troves of primary and secondary sources – not least in Arabic – that would have to be plumbed for the whole picture to emerge. Work on other projects has prevented me from giving more than a rough (and lightly referenced) account."

"Fifty-seven years before the first Zionist congress, seventy-seven years before the Balfour declaration, 107 years before the partition plan, the chief architect of the British Empire near the summit of its power here laid down the formula for the colonisation of Palestine. For some reason, this particular document appears to have never been cited in the entire historiography.

53. Broadlands Archive: Lord Palmerston to Lord Ponsonby, 25 November 1840, GC/PO/755-769."

"...the relentless expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure beyond all boundaries for a liveable planet. The initial purpose of the act is not to kill anyone per se. The goal of extracting coal or oil or gas is to make money. Once it becomes fully established that this form of money-making actually kills multitudes, however, the absence of intention begins to fill up. As a corollary of the basic insights of climate science, the knowledge is now more or less universally spread: fossil fuels kill people, randomly, blindly, indiscriminately, with a heavy concentration on poor people in the Global South; and they kill in greater numbers the longer business as usual continues... Mass casualties are then an ideologically and mentally processed, de facto accepted result of capital accumulation."

"More than 5 per cent of annual CO2 emissions stem from the militaries around the world. We often talk about flying and how bad it is for the climate, and it is bad, but civil aviation accounts for about 3 per cent of the total. And the 5 per cent that comes from militaries precede actual war: these are peacetime emissions, made in the process of maintaining the logistical apparatuses and fighting capacities of armies before they go to war."

"Ecocide here fuses with genocide in a manner never seen before. Bosnia was not a less habitable land after 1995 than before 1992. Rwandan soil and water and air went relatively unscathed through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. But will people ever be able to live again in Gaza?"

"Destruction and construction are interpenetrating opposites that presuppose one another: the destruction of the planet is the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure; the destruction of Palestine is the construction of racial colonies – or as Theodor Herzl put it in 1896: ‘If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.’ Limiting, stopping, reversing the destruction of Palestine and the planet therefore require, as a logically unassailable condition, the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure and racial colonies – not necessarily their physical destruction; but necessarily their decommissioning and repurposing, in the cases where that is possible, and where not, on the path to their abolition, yes, their physical destruction."

"Perhaps we can then specify this as the first technogenocide. A technogenocide would be defined as a genocide that is 1) executed by means of the most advanced military technology, and 2) at least party animated by the drive to restore it's supremacy after a humiliatingly successful challenge."

"We are grappling with a structural deficit of climate subjectivity and a structural surplus of objective forces of destruction; and perhaps the imbalance is nowhere as extreme as in the Middle East. (Latin America is far richer on the subjective side.)"

"Nelson Mandela - Choose peace, rather than confrontation – except in cases where we cannot proceed, where we cannot move forward. Then, if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence."

• 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
• Reports from The UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese
• Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, of antisemitism: ‘antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews’, ... ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’.
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, 2020

"The notion of consent probably requires some clarification. There are two distinct dimensions to it. The first is passive: not opposing a project, whose realization is thereby facilitated. The second is active: approving that project, whose realization is thus supported."

"Faced with this refusal of history, it must be recalled that to understand is not necessarily to condone, and that one can attempt to analyse an act even though one condemns it."

"Palestinian resistance is in a catch: when it uses violence it is oppressed, and when it uses diplomatic negotiations it is ignored."

"The point is not to use history to relativize the violence of political organizations classified as terrorist by Western nations, yesterday or today. It is, rather, to conceive that they might be seen differently elsewhere in the world, and that their very status can change over time depending on the balance of forces they have succeeded in establishing in international relations."

"Words matter, especially when they have historical resonance, political meaning and legal implications"

"This querying of the number of dead is a double punishment for the victims of war. Their life has been taken; their death is denied."

"Barbara Cassin has identified the three conditions of success that had to come together to make the transition from war to reconciliation, and thereby deal with hatred: ‘a policy of remembrance, a policy of justice, and a policy of speech’."

• Introduction
• Tutorial - What videogames are, their importance, and how they fit into our culture
• Level I - History of development, narratology, ludology, political & civic impact, persuasive games
• Level II - Immeterial labour, free speech, the importance of mods, social capital, recuperation,  software modes of production, relational aesthetics, comparison with fine art industry examples
• Level III - Further examples of art and politics being used for material political goals, self criticism/evaluation in the gaming industry, social theory, intellectual property
• Level IV - unions, hardware modes of production, game development, publication, finance and income models, global south workers' labour conditions, climate change & e-waste pollution, instability of the world wide web, and AI (briefly)
• Conclusion 

"What would a mass version of such manufacturing ethics look like? How could we have computer operating systems and other software that would somehow not perpetuate capitalist practices? These are momentous questions without easy answers; the aim must be to shift gaming and many other digital practices away from their participation in the whirlpool of harm."

..."The scale of the problem only creates a wealth of openings for involvement. If, in the making of a pencil, there exist numerous parts of production and hence numerous points for sabotage, in games and their cursed hardware, there are that many more! The avenues for impact, revision and subversion are ample, and many are revelling in them."

"In order to imagine a new kind of politics in videogames and in the way they are marketed, perceived and critiqued, we must first reflect on the modes of production of gaming. Videogames are the future of art, entertainment, sports, and community organising, no matter how reluctant some people are to accept it. They are shaping the world around us culturally, economically, linguistically, aesthetically and politically. Our mission, then, is not to opt out, ignoring this gargantuan industry and its effects on the people we love and the people we fear, but to start taking the industry very seriously. Only by injecting fresh, progressive energy into the gaming world can we truly enjoy this invigorating, sensually unmatched medium and its liberatory attributes."

"For anyone who wishes to be called progressive, politics must maintain an open-ended and experimental edge, where attempts are made at reimagining the world beyond the current circumstance. Games are uniquely placed to offer this, by requiring interaction and participation and being themselves ‘places’ where new rules can play out"

"Theodor Adorno would remind us here that much of entertainment is a ritual in which the subjugated celebrate their subjection."

"Workers with discretionary leisure income pay to be entertained, to be compensated for the boredom of their working lives. Collectively hallucinating and preoccupied with survival instead of overthrowing the structures that engender our suffering, we are stuck in pockets of culture as the only space we have any chance of controlling."

"Cultural theorist Walter Benjamin warned that it is not enough to pass something off as having ‘revolutionary content’ while still utilising contemporary relations to production."

"The late academic Mark Fisher wrote extensively about the narrowing of culture and, by extension, pop culture, and his findings can most certainly be applied to videogames. Under a consolidation of political systems (i.e., semi-democratic state market economies), the boundaries for citizen expression are predefined, reducing the plurality of cultural expression as well."

"Crudely speaking, this is art for the sake of its own spectacle and the artist’s material gain, rather than for a change of heart."

[In reference to unions]... "They are often seen by game workers as a service rather than a space for solidarity or for building a movement."

"And while people from ever more diverse demographics are developing more varied games, this centralisation is still likely to shrink the choice of games overall. Bigger and bigger companies are busy working on a smaller catalogue of old intellectual property assets, or even on a single, financially evergreen game. At the same time, most app stores are steadily removing old games from their digital shelves. Other IP never sees the light of day – projects are discontinued mid-production, and the IP is bought so that another company cannot profit from it. This echoes the wastefulness currently rampant in the film industry, where big-budget projects are scrapped before release."

"Industry insiders must agitate for change, but that we also need more direct action, protests and substantial grassroots pressure to turn things around."

"Culture now abandons aspirations to innovation and puts itself in the corner of conformism and profitability."

"This arena is bursting with politics – from the code written, to the theme portrayed, to the human cost of the objects on which games are played. Nothing short of an international worker-led takeover of this industry will suffice to save it, and the planet, from its own greedy, destructive tendencies. Resistance will be fierce – from a brutal last squeeze of the existing extractive practices, to a debasement of the workforce, to attempts to whitewash status-quo gaming and depoliticise union-busting. For the people embedded in the industry, this change must take place to salvage what is to be enjoyed here, not to take it away.

And what can players do to help the people in the industry win the battle for the soul of gaming? Some solutions for more ethical consumption, of course, come to mind – check the source of a game’s materials, the conditions in its factories and the sustainability of its components. Upon purchasing a videogame, consider seeking out information about its makers and their record of treatment of the game’s devs"

"Raymond Williams, ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing'."

"The ethical scale will not tilt towards equity if we do not employ force."