Generation Bubble
Archive for February, 2010
Millennial Tension: The Generation-Y Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Anyone who has had a job in the real world can report that bringing one’s personal life into the workplace is strenuously discouraged as a drag on one’s productivity. But one would never know this if all she had to go by was Hollywood. And, lacking much sustained or significant engagement with the real world for having been cosseted and micro-parented by their anxious Boomer parents, Gen-Y’ers seem incapable of drawing a clear distinction between their personal and professional lives largely because of all the television and cinema they’ve imbibed. They are thus nonplussed when hotness and ample self-esteem don’t send them hurtling pass their co-workers into the executive boardroom.
Theory of the Leisure Class: Middle-Class Jobs and Responsibility Arbitrage
Keep it simple, stick to a simple job, and you’ll be able to go home at night and be alone with your thoughts. No one needs to hold an emergency meeting with a waitress or postal clerk after the office has closed. A janitor doesn’t need to brown-nose via Facebook while camping with his kids. That guy at the DMV who takes your (always unflattering) driver’s license photograph never worries about all those urgent emails flooding his work inbox. No, in those jobs you put in your eight hours of hard, shitty work and then you leave it.
Ghosts in the Machine: Lonely Consumers Find Social Networks
The social hierarchies reproduced by consumerism are also engineered to suit capital, naturalizing the sorts of ritual consumption that suit its perpetuation: rather than potlatches and festivals, we orient our consumption through such ideas as invidious comparison, competitive conspicuous consumption and self-presentation as branding. Rather than use consumption to stabilize identity and render it secure, we end up using consumerism to chase the impossible dream of unfettered individuality, of identity that is entirely free of contingencies, of finding the goods that represent us and no one else for only those rare soul mates who can interpret them. We search and search for these people, destined never to find them, no matter how many fleeting glimpses of them we catch in the mirror.
Abiding Interest: Utopian Visions and the Mortgaged Future
With the economy financialized to its current extent there’s a lot of interest to be paid. How does the economy grow, then, and where does it grow? Experts say the United States is headed for a situation where its current debt will soon equal the sum total of its gross domestic product: one dollar owed for every one dollar earned. If this isn’t a murrain on the sheep or rust on the needle, I don’t know what is.
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Self: Social Media and Networked Subjectivity
We outsourced to the people we share with the work of assembling who we are, as they are invited to sort through the data and see only the person they want to see, brushing past the details they deem irrelevant, scanning and responding just as rapidly as one sorts through an interminable list of Facebook updates. As we grow accustomed to sharing everything to everyone as a default, a new and unprecedented kind of public identity will begin to be fashioned for us: the garbage-dump self. We pile up the information about ourselves out in the open for everyone to see, and our followers, like the dustmen in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, scramble about the heap looking for useful bits among the dross.
Home Cheat Home: Against Property Ownership
In days past (say, the 1950s or -60s) we might of been rewarded for trying to put down foundations — a warm hearth, a solid education, a happy family, a fruitful career with a reliable company, a rewarding retirement and then off into the sunset. But life’s different now, far more different than it was even five years ago. The man or woman with the fewest ties, someone who refuses to sign contracts, create dependents and make promises, is going to come out the winner in this seemingly winnerless economy. A volatile, unpredictable economy demands a new class of nomadic professionals, a wandering, unsentimental cohort of single, childless men and women willing to follow the fluctuation of the dollar’s value like so many sharks in search of the elusive bait ball of whiting. They will comprise our new middle class.
Manufacturing Ascent: Elite Institutions and Social Mobility
The very idea of human capital suggests that the human in question has in her possession something that will entitle her to profits down the road. But I’m afraid that “human capital,” for all of its jazzy, ultra-contemporary ring, is just a version of Marxian labor power gussied up for a techno-oligopolic age. Being a locus of human capital doesn’t necessarily make one a capitalist. Her capital, like the worker’s labor power of Karl Marx’s time, depends on being sold into a market in which the advantage accrues to those with good old-fashioned capital.
Dig a Phony: Identity, Consumerism, and the Jelly-Jar Problem
Consumerism has the capability now of fixing us in a particular position in a class hierarchy while stifling any discontent we might have had at being so fixed. Social class remains palpable and lived in, everywhere obvious yet at the same time elusive and implicit, deviously flexible. Because its meanings are always changing, because our own identity becomes so fluid within it, the code permits us to believe that we are always on the cusp of inclusion, or perhaps worse, that we are where it’s at rather than right where they want us. It serves up so many modes for making distinctions for ourselves that we can always believe we are atop the pile that matters specifically to us, allowing the fact we are at the bottom of other piles that matter more broadly to society to seem less troublesome.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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