What is cheating?

In legal philosopher and expert on corporate criminality Stuart P. Green’s (Reference Green2004: 137) rigorous definition, cheating:

The first part of this definition helps us understand the nuanced nature of cheating: it is located in the murky and potent territory between unfair and legitimate strategy, between law and norm, between discipline and governance. Most of what we call cheating occurs in the realm of unwritten rules, in the violation of law-like norms.

The second part of this definition adds further nuance. Cheating must be intentional (even if done semi-consciously) and have the objective of gaining some advantage. But importantly, for Green and other liberal theorists of cheating, it is a violation of a ‘rule [that] must be fair and enforced even-handedly’ where all the proverbial players are in a ‘cooperative, rule-governed relationship’.

This abstract view of cheating is complicated by empirical research in the study of games. Mia Consalvo (Reference Consalvo2007) frames her pathbreaking ethnographic and participatory-observational work on cheating in videogames as concerned with the negotiation of what she, following Pierre Bourdieu, calls ‘gaming capital’: the way that players produce, share, and contend the co-production of esteem, respect, and status. These social values are negotiated in tension and dialog with the industries that produce the game commodities or that provide the platforms but are not, in the final instance, completely determined by those powerful actors. Indeed, the value that gamers produce within those frameworks, which in turn help these companies generate economic value, is a complex negotiation. Cheating, for Consalvo, has no strict definition in gaming worlds. Rather, it is a term that reveals frictions between different orders of value and evaluation. For example, some player communities contend that status, esteem, and praise should be reserved for players who only rely on skill to win, while others admire the daring ‘exploit’ of the rules.

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux (Reference Boluk and LeMieux2017) go further in identifying cheating as one among many methods of metagaming, which is to say playing games with games. Proposing that videogames are instruments or game pieces with which many games are played, they reframe cheating as a means by which players take back the ludic, playful, and transgressive impulses that have been enclosed by the gaming industry in commodified games. Breaking, bending, and exploiting the rules can be part of metagame that exceeds the confines of the game itself, one that paradoxically makes the game worth playing. In the everyday social contexts of play, in online debates about games, in the communities that modify games, and in so many other practices, it is the semi-autonomous co-creation of metagame spaces (physical, virtual, and discursive) by players that has always given games their value.

But we ought to also take inspiration from Aaron Trammel’s (Reference Trammell2023) important corrective to a study of games that celebrates cooperative creativity, consent, and benevolent competition. The history of the oppressed (specifically, in Trammel’s study, the legacies of transatlantic and chattel slavery) demonstrates that games are often unfair, exploitative, non-consensual, and torturous from the outset. Indeed, one player’s power is often such that they can determine what does and does not count as a game (see Pearce, Reference Pearce2024), and what does and does not count as fair. This might help us reframe cheating as not only a method by which the oppressed reclaim agency, but by which the powerful exert domination.

Critics might charge that I risk stretching the definition of cheating too far. I would respond that cheating is always already a somewhat arbitrary concept, one whose definition depends much more on the prevailing relations of power in a society than it does on strict categories. As we will see, the gray area that separates acceptable cunning from dubious cheating from possibly illegal activity is never quite clear. And it is precisely this lack of clarity that makes cheating so lucrative for so many people, and such a vexing and seductive political category.

The Great Game

The history of colonialism is inseparable from the history of capitalism, and it is often in the excesses of empire that we witness the rule, rather than the exception, of accumulation (Byrd et al., Reference Byrd, Cacho, Jefferson and Koshy2022). In the final quarter of her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt2004) traces the murderous dehumanization of fascism back to its birthplace in European colonialism and imperialism. In particular, she takes up the metaphor of the Great Game, widely used in Britain and elsewhere in the nineteenth century to refer to the way empires played out their rivalries on a world imagined as a giant chessboard, drawing on that term’s most famous (and cynical) exponent, Rudyard Kipling. In Kim, Kipling (Reference Kipling1901) means many things by the ‘Great Game’. On the most transparent level, it refers to the jockeying for position between the British, French, Turkish, and other empires in Central Asia, executed occasionally through open warfare but more commonly through manipulative diplomacy, the bribing and counter-bribing of local officials, and the use of secret agents to sew distrust, whip up rebellions, and stir ethnic and religious antagonisms (Hopkirk, Reference Hopkirk1994). As Arendt confirms, these were done not simply in the interests of imperial rule, but also to secure profitable opportunities for the extraction of resources and the exploitation of labor by corporate and business interests.

The Great Game is one ‘whose rules permitted and even dictated the consideration of whole nations as stepping-stones, or as pawns… for the riches and the rule over a third country, which in turn became a mere stepping-stone in the unending process of power expansion and accumulation’ (Arendt, Reference Arendt2004: xviii). Arendt takes up the writing and projects of several quite different British imperialists to make the point about the spectrum of players of the Great Game: the earnest ‘dragon slayers’, the obtuse bureaucrats, and the megalomaniacal worldbuilders. In the first case, the ‘dragon-slayers’ often genuinely believed they were bringing and maintaining a fair set of rules to territories and people whom they imagined were previously ruled by despotic potentates. As Edward Said (Reference Said1979) makes clear in Orientalism, European imperial rule largely hallucinated the cruel and tyrannical regimes that preceded them. Many British and other imperialists sanctimoniously pronounced that they came as saviors, to bring the values of ‘fair play’ (including ‘free’ market competition) and to impose the ‘rule of law’ wherein all subjects have formal equality.

Of course, this was a lie, even if many imperialists were delusional enough to believe it. The game was rigged. It was a sine qua non of early European imperialism to impose preferential or exclusive trading treaties or relations on the territories they dominated, and also to insist that Europeans be immune to the laws that governed local non-European populations. Lisa Lowe (Reference Lowe2015) has explored how the liberal rhetoric and ideals of ‘free trade’ and economic ‘fair play’ were mobilized by British philosophers, politicians, and imperialists during the conquest of China through the two Opium Wars (this, while Britain was forcing the world’s most populous country to import massive quantities of a ruinous narcotic that they, themselves, banned from import). This was among the most egregious examples of the use of gunboat diplomacy to force patently unfair and often ruinous trade relations on vassalized sovereigns, a technique which had the added benefit of being relatively cheap: the empire was able to extract huge amounts of wealth from the colony while an installed or propped-up local despot took care of the enforcement. No doubt, some imperialists recognized the rhetoric of freedom and fair play to be transparently manipulative, but Lowe’s work demonstrates that the imperial project was able to cohere itself around the prominent ideas of luminary scholarly, legal, and clerical figures who presented it as Britain’s vocation to bring white fairness to a world of racialized corruption.

As Arendt notes, when unfair treaties and gunboat diplomacy gave way in the nineteenth century to direct colonial administration of territories, governing bureaucracies ruled without the consent or input of those whose lives they dominated. Under the promise of delivering a modern, rule-bound form of enlightened government – that is, a fair game for all – Europeans typically imposed a form of capricious, bureaucratic, self-serving, and increasingly violent tyranny. This was conventionally justified in one of two ways: either as stern but necessary tutelage for a backwards people, who were deemed ‘not ready’ to play the real game of civilization, or simply by insisting that colonized people’s inherent racial inferiority required European powers to protect them from predation. Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2000: 8–9) has depicted the imperial injunction ‘not yet’ as one that places colonized people in the perpetual ‘waiting room of history’.

Arendt is centrally concerned with the bureaucratization of violence, which she sees as reaching its climax in the Shoah and which would be the subject of her most famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem (Reference Arendt2006), where she introduced the concept of the ‘banality of evil’. This section of Origins therefore tries to unpack how a bureaucratic structure of empire, which at least nominally exists to ensure the fair and impartial administration of life in a colony, produces an even more nefarious mode of dehumanization and instrumentalization.

Arendt (Reference Arendt1998: 215) goes on to insightfully point out that the license with which imperialists granted themselves the power to play with the fates of those in their colonies quickly gave way to a kind of proto-fascist, hallucinogenic megalomania which she personifies in the figure of with Cecil Rhodes:

Here, the cheat lionizes himself as animated by an ancient and timeless, if ultimately nihilistic, wisdom: power rules, and power is all that that has ever been or ever will be. Cheating is merely the natural expression of power, the prerogative to flaunt or ignore the laws and rules set in place based on the delusion that the world could be fair. Here, Rhodes gives us in naked form what Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt would later dress in Hugo Boss philosophical livery: power ultimately is getting to make rules (and punish transgressors), but never having to obey them (see Agamben, Reference Agamben2005; Bratich, Reference Bratich2022).

Arendt (like Kipling) spends countless pages mulling over the fate of the courageous and conflicted European individuals caught up in the Great Game, rather than the millions upon millions of colonized people who paid a much higher price: whole civilizations eradicated, millions murdered or starved to death, racial and religious divisions sewn to divide and conquer, which continue their lethal work to the present day (Davis, Reference Davis2000). As with so many European critics of her generation, the concern with colonialism and empire is how it exposed Europe to a ‘heart of darkness’ and led to a kind of ‘regression’ into Nazi barbarism.

The idea that racialized and colonized people are cheating, or cannot be trusted not to cheat, or are too benighted to be able to truly understand or respect the rules of ‘the game’ (and therefore need to be excluded, protected, or eliminated) remains with us to this day. It is part of the racist ideological reservoir on which contemporary reactionary, ethnonationalist, and fascistic politicians and commentators draw when they point to migrants ‘cheating’ the system. They stoke fears that too many immigrants will jeopardize not only the economies but also the values of Western democracies – values often framed through notions of fair play and the level playing ground of the market (see HoSang and Lowndes, Reference HoSang and Lowndes2019). In many countries, the figure of the state benefits cheat is racialized, notably in the US where Ronald Reagan popularized the term ‘welfare queen’ with conspicuous reference to a Black woman, or where the term ‘anchor baby’ is indelibly associated with racialized women who allegedly plan to deliver children in the US to game the birthright citizenship statutes of that country’s immigration system (Foster, Reference Foster2017). In the UK, the figure of the ‘benefits scrounger’ cannot be separated from racialized implications, even if many of the journalists, politicians, and blowhards who mobilize it insist they are color-blind (Shilliam, Reference Shilliam2023). In Italy, the figure of the state welfare cheat is frequently racialized, and typically held to be guilty of a worse form of cheating than those many normalized malfeasances undertaken by politicians, businesspeople, and mafiosi in a culture where, since the early modern period (if not since ancient times), the clever cheat has otherwise been celebrated (Guano, Reference Guano2010).

In the post-war period, this association of non-European others as incompetent players or cheats has also been a justification for new forms of neo-imperialism. Many of the brutal policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which railroaded governments in the Global South into adopting neoliberal policies, was imposed in the name of fighting or preventing corruption – that is, the alleged cheating of the free-market system (Reinsberg, Kentikelenis, and Stubbs, Reference Reinsberg, Kentikelenis and Stubbs2021). For a century, the ‘West’ has supported dictatorial, authoritarian, and fascistic regimes in the Global South based on the presumption that the nation in question was ‘not ready’ to play the game of democracy fairly. In fact, the goal has either been to ensure countries in the Global North (or their corporations) maintained access to resources or to prevent socialist governments from being elected to power (Chomsky, Reference Chomsky2024).

My purpose here is neither to litigate the past nor to highlight the hypocrisy of the imperialist worldview. Rather, I am seeking to excavate a moment when the global capitalist system has integrated a form of cheating into the very core of its operations, not simply in terms of the secret malfeasance of rogue opportunists, but in terms of its dominant logic of accumulation and its prevalent ideological justifications.

Game theory

It is difficult to overstate the importance of game theory to the operations of present-day capitalism. Game theory refers to a set of mathematical tools that purport to model rational decision-making. The nuances and complexities of game theory today are impressive, largely because it is no niche academic curiosity: its influence has profoundly shaped some of the most important sectors of capitalist society, technocracy, and economics, from its original deployment as a tool for Cold War and nuclear military strategy to its centrality in neoliberal economic thought and governance to its pivotal role in the development of the financial models that rule our world and of so-called artificial intelligence (Amadae, Reference Amadae2016). It is this influence, and the underlying ideological assumption that game theory depends on and normalizes, that are the subject of this section, rather than the fascinating particularities of its various iterations, theories, debates, and concerns. Much like Edward Said’s (Reference Said1979) analysis of orientalism, I am less interested in the (often quite impressive, earnest, and functional) innovations and developments within the field but, rather, the world that made the field and how that field has remade the world in its own image.

Here, I am following the excellent work of S. M. Amadae (Reference Amadae2016), whose Prisoners of Reason demonstrates that we must locate game theory at the heart of the neoliberal revolution, both historically and ideologically. Game theory is remembered as central to the West’s victory in the Cold War, insofar as it informed a US and NATO strategy that would eventually articulate itself as MAD: the principle that the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction through the proliferation of ever more powerful nuclear weapons would, counterintuitively, be the best way to prevent a nuclear war. As the West emerged triumphant, game theory migrated, thanks to its massive military influence, into spheres of corporate governance, public policy, and macroeconomics such that it came to shape the key institutions of post-Cold War American global hegemony, including the co-evolution of finance and networked computing (Jagoda, Reference Jagoda2020).

Briefly, game theory’s modern origins are credited to the early interwar work of Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann who, during his exile at Princeton during the Second World War, would collaborate with economist Oscar Morgenstern to publish the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), which laid out a series of logical models for rational and strategic decision-making. The field was inspired by von Neumann’s forays into gambling in his attempts to understand the mathematics of probability and uncertainty. The most famous articulation of the theory, first developed at the RAND Corporation, a military think tank, is the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ which presents a hypothetical ‘game’ in which two accomplices to a crime are arrested and interrogated in separate cells and offered a choice: if they rat the other out (‘defect’, in the model’s terminology), their compatriot will be imprisoned for a long time and they will walk free. If both stay quiet, they will each serve a short sentence, but if both defect, they will each serve a long sentence. The notorious Princeton mathematician John Nash, perhaps the most influential proponent of game theory as a paradigm for micro- and macroeconomic decision-making, demonstrated that defection is always the most strategic choice. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in part for demonstrating logically that a system made up of ruthlessly competitive agents could produce stable equilibrium. This would become key to neoliberalism’s ideological justifications and technocratic operationalization.

Ultimately, at the core of game theory is a model of the ideal human ‘player’ as a completely selfish, ruthlessly, rational, self-maximizing, and competitive agent. To ‘play’ as anything ‘less’ is irrational and counter-productive. Game theory as a method basically brackets out other motivations, which cannot be modeled except in the negative (the amount one would be willing to sacrifice, subtracted from the potential gains of one’s optimal position). Ultimately, as Amadae notes, the player of game theory is the personification of the perfect neoliberal subject, the idealized homo oeconomicus. This is a figure Sylvia Wynter (Reference Wynter, McKittrick and McKittrick2015) called ‘Man 2’, the abstract ideal telos of the colonizing, white supremacist, masculine figure against whom all the other people of the earth are judged and found wanting.

Game theory is not a reliable model for how people actually behave, and not even a particularly good model for how most people play games (see Jagoda, Reference Jagoda2020). Extensive research shows that not only humans but many other animals play both unstructured and structured games based on a much more complex set of behaviors and motivations (Huizinga, Reference Huizinga1971; Sicart, Reference Sicart2017; Toomey, Reference Toomey2025). Like the players of a competitive game of Monopoly or dogs wrestling, players frequently sacrifice their own rational self-interests for reasons that include personal honor, care for their opponents’ wellbeing, long-term relationships, or simply fun. An entire field of behavioral economics has emerged and thrived to demonstrate the limits of the model of homo oeconomicus. And economic sociologists and anthropologists have decades of research within and across cultures that demonstrate economic behavior is deeply socially embedded, governed not simply by cold rational self-interest but also norms, institutions, and values (McMahon, Reference McMahon2015). Nonetheless, as Amadae argues, the paradigm that game theory presupposes is expedient for proponents of a neoliberal ideology, in part because it reiterates the basic assumptions of that worldview about human nature and in part because it makes these accessible in a mathematical language that can be integrated into other systems.

Game theory came to be taught in university economics classrooms in the 1950s and 60s, during a time when the discipline was moving away from its concern with the more sociological study of political economy and towards a more mathematical focus on microeconomics and econometrics. This was the case at the University of Chicago, where a cluster of thinkers affiliated to or inspired by the Mont Pelerin Society free-market think tank were becoming increasingly influential. As is now well-known, these thinkers not only pioneered the models that would become central to the policy revolution of neoliberalism (though they never used the term, which they consider pejorative), they also became key consultants to regimes around the world that were using natural or unnatural disasters to impose market-oriented regimes, notably Pinochet’s fascistic regime in Chile (Klein, Reference Klein2007; Slobodian, Reference Slobodian2020). They would later play starring roles in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and their approach would fundamentally reshape the policies and orientations of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that essentially leveraged their stranglehold over international credit to set the economic policy for the ‘developing world’ since the 1970s. Game theory was merely one weapon in the neoliberal arsenal, but one that lent mathematical precision and prestige to a set of policy orientations that were based, fundamentally, on the belief that economies and the societies of which they were a part were reducible to the aggregate behavior of economic actors who were, in the last and ideal instance, homo oeconomicus.

Amadae goes on to show that this set of presumptions, and game theory itself, quickly migrated into the realm of public policy and administration. Under the previous Keynesian regime the state took on a paternalistic role, providing regulation, care, and stability for (some, typically white) citizens such that they could more securely participate in the capitalist economy as workers and businesspeople, based on the presumption that universal public services (health, education, transit, old-age security, etc.) were both fairest and most efficient. Here, the normative subject was the dutiful, well-intentioned citizen. The neoliberal revolution not only demanded drastic cuts to public services (in the name of offering tax cuts) or their privatization, it also led to a set of changes to how public services and institutions were managed. These included the importation of market measurements of productivity and efficiency, in which the presumed normative subject was modeled on game theory’s ruthless, self-maximizing player. The recipient of state assistance and public services came to be distrusted as a pitiless homo oeconomicus whose urge to cheat the state’s generosity was only rational, but nonetheless costly and potentially ruinous to the economy. Amadae notes the shift in neoliberal policy away from the provision of the common necessities of life and towards tax cuts, subsidies, and incentives for competitive market behaviors (see also Cooper, Reference Cooper2017). Here, game theory was often explicitly used to model and justify a shift towards a more minimalist and market-oriented form of government intervention. Game theory’s implicit agent or subject, homo oeconomicus, is motivated by the same fundamental drives regardless of whether they are a Fortune 500 corporation with an army of lobbyists in Washington or a destitute migrant in rural Nebraska. But, of course, the consequences and capacities could not be more different.

But perhaps most consequentially, game theory became a crucial component in the building of mathematical computerized financial models (Allen and Morris, Reference Allen, Morris, Chatterjee and Samuelson2002; Ganti and Singhania, Reference Ganti and Singhania2025). The complex algorithms that, today, execute a huge percentage of global trades, or that advise market analysts at the world’s top investment banks and private equity firms, are built, fundamentally, on an adversarial paradigm that is calibrated to outmaneuver other market actors who are assumed to be playing the same game (Grindsted, Reference Grindsted2016). With a huge proportion of global financial trades made autonomously or semi-autonomously by rival supercomputers, and with these actions in many cases determining the flow of global goods and services, it is not such an exaggeration to propose that we are, indeed, living in a kind of gamified simulation, much of it built on game theory.

Within game theory, cheating is defined narrowly as the strategic choice of one player to deviate from a previous cooperative agreement for their own benefit. It is, ultimately, synonymous with defection. For example, if the two accomplices in the prisoner’s dilemma promised before their arrest to not confess, but one then confesses based on their assumption the other will remain loyal to the promise, the first player can be said to be cheating. And yet in this case and seemingly all cases in game theory, cheating does not actually involve a breaking or bending of the rules, but rather a kind of amoral but not illegal deception of another player. This is not actually cheating at all within the shrunken moral world of game theory: it is perfectly rational if it maximizes a player’s advantage. In fact, one might say that within the paradigm of game theory, cheating per se is impossible: the logical model cannot comprehend a deviation from its rules that is not already anticipated within the model.

Another way of looking at this is that, within game theory, cheating is always already normative: advantage-seeking players will naturally (indeed inevitably) defect and deceive when it is in their interests, otherwise they are playing with a suboptimal strategy or (and this is often more practically the case), they are actually playing the wrong game.

The upshot of this is that, while game theory has in many ways taken over the world, it is a paradigm within which cheating is both impossible and normalized. On a systemic level, one cannot cheat free-market capitalism because, outside of laws that prevent fraud and theft, the game (recalling Green’s definition of cheating above) has no mandatory prescriptive, regulative, and conduct-governing rules that cannot be broken in the name of personal advantage. Indeed, the breaking of these rules is key to success and innovation within the system.

My argument here is not that game theory is somehow the secret code or grand conspiracy that has guided the neoliberal revolution. Game theory has, above all else, been useful to various actors who have, collectively, both driven forward and benefited from that revolution without always being aware of it. Game theory is an elegant and sophisticated set of mathematical tools that present themselves as pure logic and claim to derive from natural laws (see Sun Reference Sun2023). And yet it in fact functions as part of an ideological substrate. It came to prominence because it mirrored a market-oriented thought-world of competitive individualism and it offered various actors (military, corporate, financial, and technological) a set of tools that helped them navigate and reproduce the reality that this thought world created in its image. But most significantly for our purposes, game theory helps us delineate some of the ideological and material consequences of the neoliberal revolution, which articulates itself in terms of games. They help us see the underlying tendencies and modes of justification for a system that, while allegedly based on liberal values of fairness based on individual opportunity, normalizes and makes a virtue out of cheating from the very outset.

Finance’s normalization of cheating

This is in large part the gospel of billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist and far-right éminence grise Peter Thiel, an avid chess enthusiast who has often compared his manipulation of markets and politics to a kind of game (Chafkin, Reference Chafkin2021). As one of the founders of PayPal, he presided over and enriched himself through a business plan that took advantage of the loose and outdated regulatory framework around emerging digital network technology to conspicuously cheat the system by essentially creating an unregulated bank. The plan, which he would repeat subsequently (notably with his AI-driven surveillance and security firm Palantir) was to scale up the enterprise and userbase rapidly by any means necessary so that, when finally regulators responded, it would be too late: millions of people would rely on the infrastructure and the firm would be rich and powerful enough to undermine any attempt to regulate it or interrupt its enjoyment of a monopoly. Later, this strategy (which would be sloganized by early Thiel acolyte Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, as ‘move fast and break things’) would also include scouting out potential competitors in their larval phase and buying them outright, poaching their staff, or destroying them before they could become a threat.

For Thiel and his many devotees and proteges (including current US Vice President JD Vance), presumably this behavior can only be said to be cheating if one fails to understand the true game that is being played. Like the mind-bending, seemingly chaotic moves made by chess- and go-playing AI (some of Thiel’s favorite pet investments), his business model does not explicitly break any rules or laws, just conventions and norms (Thiel and Masters, Reference Thiel and Masters2014). In fact, they are, according to this philosophy, a more perfect strategy for playing the game of capitalism by its natural and eternal rules. Those who fail to do likewise are cheating themselves by clutching on to an outdated, outmoded set of pieties and expectations. Indeed, within Thiel’s influential worldview, these pieties and expectations are far from innocent: they functioned to protect and enshrine an older, equally manipulative (but far less honest) elite, who were served well by a mutual agreement to uphold those norms and keep challenging any innovative newcomers out of the game, like snobbish imperial universities of old who claimed they were open to anyone, so long as they could speak basic Latin and Greek, knowing full well only elites would have been educated to do so. Indeed, within this worldview, it is the old residual elites who are cheating: they are bending the game around an unspoken set of non-transparent norms that, effectively, become rules. He and those like him are merely playing the game as it was always intended to be played, ruthlessly.

In this as so much else, Thiel is not original. In fact, one might make the argument that the whole history of major turning points in so-called ‘financial innovation’ can be narrated as a series of normalized cheats (see Klaus, Reference Klaus2014). When the joint stock corporation emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, allowing many investors to pool resources under a new legal meta-entity, it was decried by contemporaries. It was seen as a legal but dubious effort to cheat not only the conventional rules of trade (which at the time were very deeply tied to notions of honor, character, Christian ethics, and fraternal relationships) but also to cheat God’s exclusive right to create new life (see Perelman, Reference Perelman2000). Similarly, established and conservative bankers and traders were horrified when, in the moment of European powers’ ambitious imperial expansion in the early eighteenth century, class-transgressive ‘stock-jobbers’ cheated the norms of finance (though not the law) and pioneered what would come to be known as retail trading, where securities (in this case investments in dubious colonial ventures) were sold directly to consumers (Dale, Reference Dale2004). In the industrial age, market insiders likewise condemned ‘innovative’ traders’ manipulation of new telegraph technologies to game the markets with complex forms of arbitrage, or to use increasingly integrated and connected global markets to speculate on land or buy and sell derivative contracts tied to the fruits of imperial pillage (de Goede, Reference de Goede2005). In all these cases and many more the cheat became the rule: within months or years (although often only following scandal and, occasionally, regulation) these techniques would become standard conventions. The same holds for the twentieth century’s increasingly complex mathematical models, such as those that priced derivatives or portfolios, which enabled powerful trading strategies that upended financial markets and forever changed the way finance operated. These contributed to a transition from a conservative, staid, and prudent world of bourgeois civility to a crude game now famous from films like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) (on this cultural shift, see Zaloom Reference Zaloom2006).

The trading computers that today execute the vast majority of global financial exchanges, or that guide the decisions of the world’s investment banks and asset management companies are all built implicitly on the logic of game theory, where the presumption of an equivalent adversary or adversaries is part of the code (Khan and Bao, Reference Khan and Bao2021). Within such a system, all else being equal (as it so rarely is), the only way to beat the market is to find a way to cheat: a legal (or at least ostensibly legal) method to gain a slight advantage (Angel and McCabe, Reference Angel and McCabe2013). This, for example, happened in the case of the development of high frequency trading algorithms, as famously retold by luminary financial journalist Michael Lewis (Reference Lewis2015) in Flash Boys. Here, high-tech investment firms competed with one another to ‘game the plumbing’ of the American digital financial infrastructure by placing their servers mere meters closer to major data centers, gaining millisecond advantages on their rivals that, over the span of millions of trades, resulted in tremendous windfalls (Toscano, Reference Toscano2013).

Indeed, Lewis’s whole profoundly influential oeuvre since the success of his breakout semi-autobiographical hit Liar’s Poker (1989), has been dedicated to what, in a later book (this one about American football) he calls The Blind Side (Reference Lewis2006): the unseen gap, liability or exploitable opportunity hidden within a competitive system that some clever innovator recognizes and seizes upon, and thereby changes the game (for good and for ill). In both The Blind Side and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004) (both made into hit Hollywood films), the ‘game’ is a sport and the cheat involves coaches, investors, and players looking at the game from a completely new angle. In Moneyball, for example, this meant eschewing the typical strategy of recruiting expensive star baseball players and, instead, using statistical data and models to create a portfolio of mediocre and inexpensive players whose skills counterbalance to produce a winning team.

These activities, at the seam between cheating and strategic innovation, are perhaps best explored through the idea of the exploit. As Alexander Gallow and Eugene Thacker (Reference Galloway and Thacker2007) note, the term (as a noun) was coined by hackers to describe a program that takes advantage of a flaw, mistake, or oversight in a network or system, but it can now be used to identify a much broader trend: computer, financial, legal, and other systems in a complex and competitive capitalist society are the result of past exploits (or attempts to prevent them), and produce new opportunities for future exploits.

Finance capital, historically and in the present, is built on the normalization and incorporation of what might well be considered cheating: actions that do not necessarily explicitly break laws (although sometimes they do) but take advantage of gray areas, loopholes, unrecognized vulnerabilities, and back doors, and that, more generally, defy the norms rather than the explicit rules of the proverbial game (Calathes and Yeager, Reference Calathes and Yeager2023; Klaus, Reference Klaus2014). But this tendency has only intensified in the past 40-year period of financialization. The subprime mortgage scandal was paradigmatic: on multiple levels, a wide array of financial actors sought to ‘game the system’ to return profit to their investors (Lapavitsas, Reference Lapavitsas, Yagi, Yokokawa, Shinjiro and Dymski2013). The fact that almost none of them were ever brought to justice indicates not simply corruption, but the deeper truth: it is, from one perspective, a system ruled by and for cheats. The cheats in this case may have been intentionally unethical, passive, or even benevolent (such as those who genuinely if misguidedly thought they were doing good work by providing poor people access to housing), or simply following explicit or implicit orders; cheating here is not a description of intentions, but rather, a quality of the system itself.

Before and since, examples abound. The LIBOR scandal, for example, saw financial insiders at some of the world’s leading investment banks conspire to fix the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) of interest at which banks lend to one another in the very short term, a rate that serves as an important reference-point for many other processes in the global financial economy, including an estimated $350 trillion worth of financial derivatives (yes, that is indeed four times the global GDP) (Calathes and Yeager, Reference Calathes and Yeager2023). Such manipulation allowed huge banks, who were essentially part of a rate-setting cartel, to subtly but consequentially influence other deals, contracts and instruments that might include a reference to LIBOR. Even though the orders to game the rates were authorized by the field marshals of the world’s leading investment banks, a seven-year British investigation (costing some £60 million) was only able to convict five foot soldiers. Their cases largely hinged on whether their actions were exceptionally dishonest or simply represented normal practice in the industry at the time (their eventual convictions were later overturned). Several banks were fined or settled their cases for what amounted to tiny fractions of the profits they had earned through the manipulation. The power to set the LIBOR rates was handed over to a UK regulatory body.

The case is noteworthy because it was such an egregious conspiracy to cheat, hidden in plain sight, with massive consequences, and because, shockingly, it actually led to (paltry) fines, convictions, and new regulation. The vast majority of cases do not (see Culpepper and Lee, Reference Culpepper and Lee2026). State financial regulators are typically overwhelmed, not only by the scale of cheating but also by its complexity, and by the recognition that much of it has become so normalized that to take action against it would jeopardize the financial system and risk plunging already volatile financial markets into chaos, something most capitalist governments are loathe to risk. Further, many regulators have been (or are likely to be) employees of the same financial firms they scrutinize (Brezis and Cariolle, Reference Brezis and Cariolle2019). This is perfectly legal, but it represents a kind of cheating in plain sight. Beyond the direct incentives for regulators to look the other way, it also means that many have already been party to this kind of malfeasance and might fear that pursuing punishing it (even if it were feasible) might adversely affect them or their friends and associates. But more generally, having worked in the financial sector, they are part of a culture where such cheating is not only accepted but often celebrated. As former star financier Gary Stevenson’s (Reference Stevenson2024) recent autobiography The Trading Game demonstrates, traders, analysts, and managers who discover new cheats and exploits are often handsomely rewarded.

To witness the consequences, we might follow Hudson’s (Reference Hudson2012) proposal that we see financial markets as, essentially, the decentralized but massively consequential engine of capitalist economic planning, one so powerful it would be the envy of the most megalomaniacal dictator. The financial sector ultimately determines the global flow of goods and services, the price of food, the accessibility of housing, the kinds of technologies that will be developed, the way cities and countries will grow, what governments will be allowed to rule and which will be starved of access to the credit that is the lifeblood of any administration. The LIBOR scandal was indeed, explicitly, an illegal conspiracy. But the thousands of other similar cheats, revealed or still undertaken in the shadows, are the normal operations of this global governance structure.

There is of course, nothing new about corruption, and many regimes throughout history have run on it. But my argument here is that neoliberal financialized capitalism makes the cheat central to its operations as never before. Partly this has to do with the sheer complexity of a system built on a rapidly evolving network of on extremely sophisticated and multilayered private financial institutions, byzantine and contradictory sub-national, national and supra-national governance institutions, and rapidly advancing technology, all of which offer innumerable opportunities to find niches, gray areas, hacks, exploits, and cheats that play off one part of the apparatus against another. It also has something to do with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an ever-smaller number of individuals and corporations (and the diminishing power and capacity of the regulatory state). This means the cheat or exploit is no longer simply the tactic of the marginal gangster or opportunist, but the strategy of many of the firms that control the commanding heights of the economy. But, as we have seen, it is also something at work within the core logic of the system itself. Cheating is the rule, and cheats rule.

Conclusion: Of cheats and spoilsports

To conclude, I want to turn to some of the fascistic consequences and resonances of such a system. In The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, I argue that financialization has compelled most people to adopt the agency of the player: the savvy, risk-taking, exploit-seeking homo oeconomicus, competing to survive and thrive in an austere world (Haiven, Reference Haiven2026, forthcoming). It is in this context that a reactionary politics takes root around the feelings of being related to feeling cheated – not cheated of one’s entitlement to a share of social wealth, but of one’s right to compete.

Writing in the late 1930s, shortly before the brutal occupation his native Netherlands and his own brief incarceration by the Nazis, Johann Huizinga (Reference Huizinga1971: 11–12) made the important distinction between two key figures that might occupy a magic circle, the term he gives to the consensual orbit of play:

Ultimately, part of the charm of the cheat is that they do not unduly disturb the game, whereas the spoilsport makes it impossible or unsavory to continue playing. The cheat, after all, is just another player, just like the rest of us, until their malfeasance is revealed. When their cheating is discovered, the other players are faced with a choice. Do we refuse to play any further, or kick the cheat out and thereby jeopardize the game? Or do we all now begin to cheat, reasoning that it is the only way to win? Part of us even admires the cheat for their cunning. Ultimately, what makes a cheat acceptable is that they have walked the tightrope between a normative and a legal breach, and in so doing they have simply elevated the logic of the game to its next level. In their attempt to win, they have transgressed the norms of fair play, but not catastrophically. They did as any player would have done, had they the courage or intelligence. Ultimately, we accept the cheat because they do not call into question the motivations, legitimacy, and sense of agency of us as players; they in fact vivify it in magnified form.

Meanwhile, the spoilsport must be excluded and castigated not only because they make the game unfun, but because they call into question the game itself and, more vexingly, the subjectivity and sense of agency of the other players. If we are all playing (and enjoying, and betting on) a broken or rigged game, what does the spoilsport’s refusal imply about the rest of us? We are dupes, or complicit, or both.

And what if the game were compulsory, and its outcomes determined our lives? What if we had come to imagine that the game was natural, normal, and eternal? In that case, the cheat’s actions and motivations would certainly be understandable, given the stakes. And the spoilsport? What good would their complaints about the game’s inherent injustice or unfairness do any of us? The spoilsport may indeed tell us we ought to play a different game. They might argue that the game relies on us, the players, more than we, the players, depend on the game. And yet for those of us who play and imagine we have a chance to win, or even those of us who acknowledge the game is rigged but still are not the greatest of all of its losers – for us, the spoilsport is at best a hopeless romantic and at worst that most reprehensible of cheats: one whose criticism of the game is just a ploy to distract us from our competitive pursuits with sanctimonious pieties, or to hoodwink us into come kind of doomed collaboration from which they will no doubt come out ahead. If we are all cheats at heart, then the spoilsport is either the worst cheat (in denial of the fact) or the very best, for which they can never be forgiven.

To return to the key point with which I began, this might help us understand the success of far-right, reactionary, and neofascist political actors who promise to take revenge on those whom they present as cheats: welfare claimants allegedly gaming the system; migrants who cross borders outside the legal frameworks; nebulously defined ‘elites’ (a term that conveniently often conflates or substitutes cultural for economic capital) who manipulate the otherwise fair and meritocratic system; and minorities that manipulate the guilt of majorities to gain special advantage. Numerous prominent left-wing and progressive parties and commentators have, rightly, observed that these targets of reactionary rage are almost insignificant in their effects on the economy and working peoples’ lives. This is especially so compared to the massive forms of corporate and financial cheating happening in plain sight. The world’s real economic elites today squirrel hundreds of billions away in tax havens; golden visa programs allow them to avoid the law; corporations hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to sabotage any efforts to hold them to account for labor, environmental, and other infractions.

And yet, these facts, even when widely reported, appear to have little influence. Instead, conspiracism is mushrooming: a general paranoid search for nefarious actors who are cheating the system, rather than a reckoning with a system that is built on cheats and makes cheats of us all (see Haiven, Kingsmith, and Komporozos-Athanasiou, Reference Haiven, Kingsmith and Komporozos-Athanasiou2022; Haiven, Reference Haiven2023).

Perhaps this is because subjects habituated to a form of gamified capitalism distrust and resent the spoilsports who call into question the legitimacy of the game. To play the game of neoliberal, financialized capitalism is to be afforded a sabotaged agency. One clings to it not because it promises redemption and success, but because without it one cannot imagine what agency would be: one would be a loser, not a player. Everybody has a sneaking suspicion the game is rigged, but few are afforded the systematic opportunities to imagine a dignified life beyond the game. We are, then, inclined towards the emotive claim that some people are cheating. And we are resentful toward those who (rightly) point out that the game is rigged, which we all know but cannot truly admit.

Meanwhile, the charismatic cheat, who promises that, by cheating, they will make the game fair, holds a special and dangerous place in our political imagination.