anarchySF - an anarchist, science fiction podcast · Yanai Sened / Eden Kupermintz

Can we fix it? Maybe! Kinda! With Ixion

·1 hr 1 min·5 clips

The Ixion engine traps you on a fiery wheel, symbolizing humanity's endless repetition of extractivist capitalism in space.

The premise starts clean. Yanay asks whether people can organize without a commanding hierarchy, and Eden answers with the show's dry political shorthand. The joke lands because it has bite. They treat hierarchy as something neoliberalism often hides: the structure stays put, but nobody wants to say what it is. Then Ixion wanders in from the side. The myth gives them a way to talk about punishment, repetition, and being stuck on a wheel forever. Zeus orders the binding. Hermes fixes Ixion to a fiery solar wheel, and Orpheus can only stop the motion for a little while with music. The game makes that image very literal. The station is a wheel too, so the player's administrative role starts to feel less like control and more like endless rotation. The choices get ugly fast. Keeping or killing the dog becomes a blunt little test of how management logic can turn care into risk math. Their answer is not subtle. Keep the dog. They also note that the game does not punish that choice mechanically, which makes the whole thing sharper. The larger problem keeps spreading. To reach the ending, survival has not really broken the old system, because colonizing just repeats the extractivist ideals that caused the disaster. That is the sting. The administrator may save the station, but the structure keeps asking for the same sacrifices somewhere else. The closing comparison pulls it back down to earth. Wanting to confront whoever caused the harm runs into a system where power is scattered through banks and ownership. Nobody is easy to shoot. So the episode ends grim, but useful: hierarchy can be everywhere because no single boss has to stand in view.

As heard by us

A sharp conversation that uses Ixion to push on power, fate, and repetition.

AnarchySF uses Ixion to think aloud about command pressure, hierarchy, and the way a survival game can end up looking like the systems it claims to outrun.

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Want Ixion read as a wheel of power, myth, and bad choices?

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