Generation Bubble
Archive for January, 2010
Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves: The Rise of Gotcha Capitalism
What have I decided to do? Well, since nothing is so precious to me as my intellectual freedom, I’ve set aside 1,000-2,000 dollars a year that I can just assume will be stolen from me. It’s a special little savings account earmarked for all those banksters and pranksters that rule our economy and our country. That way I don’t have to think so hard about the possibility of being cheated, because I’ve assumed that someone already has cheated me and I just need to wait until they come to collect. It’s a form of defeatism, yes, but it’s also a recognition and acceptance of a new social and economic reality. I suspect some citizen of Soviet Russia felt much the same when he or she handed over an extra hundred rubles to procure a piece of meat or bread that should have sold at the advertised price. It was just part of life, that extra little tax to the parasites who clung to the social fabric like so many bedbugs on a futon in Queens.
Austin City Limits: Elegy for a Vanished Slacktopia
The Austin I visited bore little resemblance to the Austin I saw in Slacker. Vestiges of the old Austin (Austin 1.0?) remain, but they’ve been more or less hemmed in by legions of cookie-cutter off-campus student apartment buildings. The total effect has certainly altered the city’s character. If the slogan before was “Keep Austin Weird,” a more fitting slogan now would be “Keep Austin Wired.” It’s a city that is certainly attempting to peer further over the temporal horizon than many others. In a very real way, Austin reflects the larger cultural trend which developed as the 90s gave way to the 00s: tragically hip Gen-Xers surrendered the spotlight to merely tragic Gen-Y hipsters, who attenuated the formers’ ethic of refusal into a look and a lifestyle.
Running in Place: The Traveler’s Last Pose
In traveling, we want to discover the existence of a world beyond ourselves without leaving the world we constitute for ourselves. Consumerism, with its brands and banalities, mediates that contradiction, embedding the familiar within the extraordinary, if not refiguring the former as the extraordinary. We can assimilate everything the world can throw at us as long as it can be reducible to the game of personal identity. Or at least we can rest assured that we can always retreat into the nonplaces that are the playing field for that game.
Solvent Green: California’s Bong-Led Recovery
We already have our Prozac and Paxil to make us forgot about contemporary American life’s sorrows, not to mention the mind-addling influence of television. Adding marijuana to the mix would only ensure that the American people would never up in revolt. They’d barely be able to rise from their La-Z-boys.
Pataphysical Graffiti: Facebook and Privacy’s End
Contemporary existence has seen pataphysical logic move from the avantgardist margin to the quotidian center. The nonsensical excesses of pataphysics one can now find in the very warp and weft of the social fabric, while pataphysics itself, appropriately enough, has sailed far out of sight of the shore of the normative values it once critiqued.
Youth in Revolt: Creative Class, Creative Destruction
Creative-class cities are places where exorbitant rents and difficult-to-crack job markets are used to protect precious aggregations of human capital, nullifying the hard work outsiders put in honing their skills and the benefits they might have received from their education at non-elite institutions.
Hansen Agonistes: Consumerism, Inforrhea, and the End of the End of History
Though it’s tempting to indulge oneself in the twilight of mindless consumerism, to party like it’s (still) 1999, to do so, I’ve come to realize, is to engage in folly. Misinformation abounds, and the only way to navigate the treacherous waters of the current political situation is … well … to pay attention and to exercise discernment. For we’ve entered that stage where the electronic equivalent of propaganda pamphlets are falling from the sky like so many spent locusts. Perhaps it’s time, then, to bid adieu to a world that doesn’t seem like it’s coming back any time soon. One of those pesky historical shifts has occurred these past few years. What lies ahead is anyone’s guess.
The Body Economic: One Nation Under Finance Capital
Certainly many fortunes hung in the balance during the dark days of TARP, TALF, PPIP and the other bilious alphabet soups of the Great Panic of 2008. I can’t help but think, however, that it would’ve been better had the entire rotten edifice that is High Finance collapsed. At least then 2010 would have found America nearly two years into the rebuilding.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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