Generation Bubble
Archive for March, 2010
Degrees of Desperation: University Education and Human Capital
If GDP is the only social aim worthy of a state’s attention, then this would seem good, inevitable advice. Forget the metaphysical mumbo jumbo and concentrate on what can be counted. But asking the government to scale back educational subsidies is hard advice to accept, even if it would end the arms race in advanced degrees and the credentialing inflation that makes a master’s a prerequisite for more and more jobs. To pursue such a course is to dismiss the idea that education enriches human potential altogether (or, if you prefer, it defines human potential in terms of industrial output alone). But it’s far preferable to believe that higher education can help people live richer, fuller lives and can make us aware of new possibilities and different ways of thinking.
Prague Rock: George Michael’s "Freedom ’90" and the Velvet Revolution
The Czechs say that Prague was founded by Princess Libuše, when she stood at the fortress of Vyšehrad and had a vision: I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars. Archaeological evidence shows that the time-lines don’t correspond; the princess was nowhere near Vyšehrad. It didn’t even exist during her reign. But it’s legend, therefore it stays. So when I read of the Velvet Revolution and think of the students being beaten but showing up again day after day to fight for their freedom, I see Princess Libuše pointing skyward. And then I talk with a classmate who tells me that her husband was one of the protesters. “You want to know what Velvet Revolution was? Velvet Revolution was a bunch of students in the pub, going to visit a bunch of other students in the pub, then doing it again the next day. They were beaten, yes, but they came back because they knew that Communism was on its way out. Every year my husband goes out and drinks to mark the anniversary,” she says, then rolls her eyes. Archaeological evidence.
The Uncommercial Traveler: A Review of Helen Rappaport’s Conspirator: Lenin in Exile
Upon finishing Conspirator one cannot help but feel a certain admiration for Lenin, even if his politics stand at the very antipodes of Lenin’s own. The unflagging discipline with which Lenin pursues his life in exile reminds one of the real transformative effect devotion to an idea can have, and of the undeniable aesthetic power to be felt from witnessing that transformation unfold. For Lenin, a democratic-socialist Russian state was more than simply an idle dream of bohemian dilettantes; it was an ascesis in precisely Foucault’s sense of the term.“Purity of the heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard once wrote. And the fact that Conspirator calls to mind Foucault, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s ideas more so than Marx’s attests to the fresh life Rappaport has breathed into the career of one of history’s most notorious figures.
Obscured by Clouds: The Virtualized Ego and Online Sociality
The automated platforms we are using to be social cannot recognize nuances of trust or the situational ethics of disclosure. It only understands on or off. It fails to distinguish between contexts; its uniformity across the network is designed to eliminate the existence of context. The context is presumed always to be self-presentation; as far as the platforms are concerned, any information given is divulged precisely because it will be attached to the divulging person’s record. It recognizes no other function. It relates data to a user and stores it.
Manifest Density: The Recession and the Weight of History
I’ve read enough H.P. Lovecraft to know that New England during earlier centuries wasn’t much fun, but the absolute blight and violence of the present condition of late-capitalistic disintegration makes anything that occurred in centuries past look … well … like a tea party in comparison. For the barbaric disintegration of the contemporary New England city doesn’t leave room for hope. It is final, and it’s hard not to think these cities have breathed their last — cultural treasures and all.
6.4 Equals Makeout: Facebook and Algorithmic Relationships
Every relationship has its own specific character, its own lifespan, its own seasons. Some bloom, then wither quickly, while others root themselves deeply in the years. Facebook aims to do nothing less than deny relationships their specific character submitting them to its algorithmic regime of prompts, goads, alerts and suggestions. Facebook seeks nothing less than to discipline friendships to the demands of the marketplace, which places an ever-increasing premium on the production of consumer data. Facebook gets you to work on relationships by making relationships into work. And even if the relationship no longer exists, even if you no longer exist, one imagines humming servers dumbly issuing their commands over the transmission lines
Vagina Splendata: Beauty-Obsessed Women Exercise the "Pubic Option"
Bejeweled vaginas do not cyborgs make, of course; and I don’t believe they will pave the way to yet another weapon of mass destruction, but they do indicate a society that is growing increasingly discontented with the merely human, adorning itself with implants intended to make our cheekbones larger or our noses smaller, our genitals look less like genitals and our faces look less like ourselves. All that is fine so long as we don’t start to fetishize the uncanny result of such operations, where we forget the imperfectly human in favor of the perfectly artificial. Because then those that can only afford to be human, and given the recession, it looks like more than a few will fall into that category, will be seen as second-class citizens, as people not quite alive, or worthy of life, because they can’t afford the latest supplemental technology to their bodies.
Guido Bandido: MTV’s The Jersey Shore and Sexual Neoliberalism
To me, very little distinguishes Mike’s romantic maneuverings from Goldman Sachs’ behavior in finance markets. What difference is there, for instance, between Mike’s surreptitiously approaching other women than the ones he’s entertaining in his beach house and Goldman Sachs’ dealing with the Greece’s bond market, in which Goldman Sachs gave Greece financial advice while at the same time short selling Greek bonds? Fucking or finance, it’s all the same — just business.
Stuck in Idle: Odd Jobs in the Social Factory
Once, the struggle was to articulate a real, authentic-seeming identity within a work work dictated by the needs of capital. It was a matter of “not selling out” even though one sold his labor power in a way which perpetuated the system. Now, the problem is different. Before workers developed identity and a sustaining culture in opposition to management, subverting the workplace by ingraining within it a kind of resistance, a conspiracy against capital that played out as the preservation of one’s own personal aims. But in the new system of immaterial labor, social networking and the pseudo-employment of public self-fashioning, making one’s identity is part of the production process that is subsumed under capital. It proceeds within commercial spaces, to suit the mutual ends private citizens share with businesses. Their respective brands become co-extensive.
Waiting for the End of the World: Politics, Finance, and the Gnosis of Crisis
Crises in the political domain tend to throw a spanner in the workings of government. The institutions of this form of government, which regulate, modulate and constrain the exercise of political power fall into disarray. Power thus springs free the mechanisms of governmental institutions, showing just how excessively saturated these institutions were with it. This is another way of saying that, in the political arena at least, the opportunities presented in a crisis usually come at the expense of the existing constitution. True gnostics of crisis understand this intuitively in much the same manner as Thulsa Doom of the 1981 film Conan the Barbarian understands “the riddle of steel.”
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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