Generation Bubble
Archive for July, 2009
Sh*t Floats: Mega-Yacht Sails as the World Economy Fails
That legislative stooges for the HMOs and Big Pharma would like to see political action limited to health coverage comes as no surprise. After all, to do otherwise would wipe out huge profit potential, and thus keep a lot of folks out of the yacht market.
The Joe You Know: On Shakespeare and "Stealth Starbucks"
It seems a growing contingent has shown itself unwilling to pony up the premium Starbucks attaches to their elaborate coffee drinks…. Duly alarmed by this defection and the dwindling flow of tribute it represents, Starbucks has thus decided to don a “more bohemian guise featuring live music performances, poetry readings and sales of alcohol as well as hot drinks ” in order to recapture the public’s fealty and shopping dollars. Such a guise goes by the name “community personality” in Starbucks’ corporate idiom.
Beggin' for a Piece of That Bubble: Macrorationality and the Limits of the Possible
Macrorationality seems like a matter of circumscribing one’s possible decisions at the broadest possible point, of eliminating individual autonomy in favor of better economic predictability at the social scale. All this while maintaining the pretense that reality is merely being measured more carefully, not being shaped, called into being, by the measuring tools.
Will Work for Work: Nouriel Roubini and Hipster Runoff’s Carles on Labor’s Future
Imagine, then, with so many workers out there laboring for free just to hang onto benefits and to keep downtime off their résumés, how attractive a job offering a wage — any wage — would appear to the many lean and hungry-eyed strivers forced into indigence by the violent economic churn now upon them. And with hotness now the cardinal American virtue, job fairs will no doubt become beauty pageants. The future, as Carles suggests, is one where people with Alpha-Plus bodies perform Gamma and Epsilon jobs, while the hordes of those arranged elsewhere on the Greek alphabet sit and suck stones.
Buy None Get One Free: Digital Research Resources and the Emerging "Freeconomy"
If these industries can’t hold the line as they’d like against peer-to-peer poachers, they may just have discard their traditional business model for one more robust to the changes which convulse culture almost daily. They might just have to entertain a business model organized around the price point of “free.”
Admirable Pluck: Hipsters Carry the Weight of the World on a Stubbled Brow
Private equity’s resounding triumph echoes in the ears of countless strivers eager to sample la dolce vita, inspiring in them the belief that they can asset-strip their way to prosperity. So keen, in fact, are people on getting into the game commenced during the Reagan years that they’re finding strippable assets in some rather unlikely places — like their own faces.
"Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be": Americans Dash for Cash after Wall Street's Crash
The Depression saw unemployment rates much higher than we’ve seen yet in this recession, and it lasted for nearly a decade. Also, American culture wasn’t nearly as integrated by various forms of media as it is now, which meant that the experience of poverty was far more isolating and devastating. So while Americans have lost confidence in the economy for sure, it’s not yet clear whether Americans have suffered enough in this downturn to confidently predict a return of the “modest consumer” who is wary of indebtedness.
A Debt to Treasure: What Makes a Bubble Generation Most?
What might the term “generation bubble” mean? I’d argue for this conception: It refers to those who have come of age in a society in which increased access to debt replaced wage growth as the key to an improved standard of living.
Special Announcement: Double the Bubble with Marginal Utility's Rob Horning
Rob Horning has agreed to a guest-posting stint with Generation Bubble. Rob’s weblog, Marginal Utility, began running at Pop Matters in August 2005 and has since become one a site mainstay…
Reading Degree Zero: Printed Matter's "IF"-fy Prognosis
Yet the object is precisely what the “engrossed reader” so deeply esteems (one is tempted to say, fetishizes). To this kind of reader, universal access to books means nothing if one cannot hold them or turn their pages. Moyer does not say it, but one need not read between the lines too strenuously to tease out a critical implication: the “engrossed-reader” position — the position that gives primacy to having over sharing books — is clearly reactionary, because it assigns more value to the material object’s preservation than to the de-materialized text’s dissemination.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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