Generation Bubble
Archive for April, 2010
Rigged to Explode: Late-Stage Capitalism’s Daily Disasters
It seems cruelly ironic that a vacation intended to aid in forgetting just how shitty the world has become will only serve as a reminder of that shittyness. So far, there have been no plans to call off the beach vacation. I can now only imagine myself sitting on the porch of the house upon the beach, gazing out over the oil slicked ocean, and ruminating on how humanity has become an absolute virus upon the world. Nihilistic thoughts, yes, but this most recent twist of fate has reminded me that there is no “getting away from it all” anymore. Everything essentially sucks. A walk in the woods is now accompanied by the buzzing of cell towers disguised as trees. A trip to the beach involves stepping over puddles of unrefined crude oil or buying antibiotics for the conjunctivitis the untreated sewage in the water gave you. And in order to even begin your desultory vacation, you’ll soon have to be body scanned by surly terminal tecurity agents and then climb aboard a jam-packed commuter jet captained by some twenty-year old pulling down less a year than a fry cook at McDonald’s.
Class Struggle: Corporatized Higher Education and Symbolic Power
The ideology of corporatization, which to all outward appearances has consolidated it dominion over institutions of higher learning across the nation, now sees to the apportioning of spoils to the victor and the hindmost to the devil (the devil being the common rout of humanity), while the hapless majority have been snookered into believing that critical thinking and writing are simply passé, like the talents of the blacksmith or wheelwright, which find a market only in the incredibly small domain of touristy pioneer village mock-ups. Perceived as the relic of an era in which people had little else at their disposal to beguile their leisure, academics becomes as obsolete as the dusty Commodore VIC-20 in one’s parents’ attic. Thus confronted with having to deal with the rigors and demands of a mode of inquiry that to them has no perceivable connection to the cash nexus, today’s university student reacts with impatience and hostility, itching to move on to the more practical concern of enhancing his future earning power, which, though he may not have the foggiest idea how this is acquired, to his mind certainly does not involve Avogadro’s number, the Battle of Hastings or iambic pentameter.
Sartorial Tender: Fashion as Leveraged Social Capital
Fashion tells you that you are a fool to prefer the experiences to the range, and it applies “social pressure” to make you change your view. By following fashion and disseminating its dictates and by innovating on its terms, we create additional value for the retailers of fashion-oriented products — a description that is coming to embrace virtually everything that can be bought and sold.
Static Airplane Jive: The Bliss of Volcanically Induced Travel Paralysis
With just a modest amount of money, you can travel almost anywhere nowadays. The ease and relative cheapness of travel gives one the illusion of freedom. But when everyone can travel everywhere, that which made those elusive destinations seem attractive gradually begins to disappear. Don’t get me wrong: I love traveling, and I’m happy I live during a time that allows me — a person with little financial clout — the ability to wander the globe. Yet the price we’ve paid historically, environmentally and emotionally for such privilege makes me reconsider it. For the ease and speed with which we can travel points to an ease and speed with which information can also travel, and thus our lives, whether we like it or not, are also placed under the yoke of increased productivity and profit making.
The Safety of Objects: Design and "Inverted Totalitarianism"
A symptomatic reading of Objectified reveals an urge for impeccable order, an incurable desire to purge from public view the irregular, the odd, the heteroclite, and even the excessively ornate or strictly utilitarian, in order to place in their stead a whole array of everyday things boasting clean lines and soothing orbicularities — a regime of Platonic functionality, in other words, vouchsafed to an auxiliary of designers equipped with the latest drafting software and laser-guided precision instruments. Objectified comes across as a fever dream of the sort which brings the sufferer visions of the world to come: namely, the dictatorship of the creative class.
Locomotional Rescue: Americans (Casey) Jonesin’ for Real Rail Options
I hope they have fun in Washington D. C. on National Train Day, with its toy models and prime-time television cheerleaders. If anything, it will be a collective effort in the most perverse form of make-believe. While other nations go ahead with their plans for national high-speed trains that can shuttle large amounts of people for very little cost (to both the individual and the environment) across wide swathes of land, we Americans get to sit and suck stones while pretending the clever marketing ploys depicting a first-world America have magically supplanted the shattered, Wall-Street-ravaged hulk we currently inhabit.
Compound Fracture: Student-Loan Debt Relief Reserved for Millennials
The idea that an entire generation of college graduates, their bones picked clean by the financial sharks let lose during the end of the last century, should be swept into the dustbin of history strikes me as a muted form of generational warfare. Those hapless casualties of the wilderness years of two (!) George W. Bush administrations — and they are legion — deserve debt relieve as much as, if not more than, late millennials. For the former had their temerity to make a bid for middle-class status as opposed to simply going gently into that good burger-flipping night, repaid by a spike in student-loan interest rates, a bewildering list of middlemen to choose from, and a padded bill from some newly brand-conscious liberal arts colleges or a state university which brazenly violated charters by running up tuition and attendant fees exponentially beyond rates of wage growth and inflation. These uppity plebes therefore had to hop into bed with dame Sallie Mae because their Baby Boomer parents (who got to graduate with very little debt, thanks to Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative) thought a sailboat or new Corvette a better investment than their children’s education. They are the graduates who also need to benefit from these reforms, because they are the very people who are curtailing the spending that drives the infernal getting-and-spending engine of late-stage finance capitalism.
You Forgot It in People: The Enduring Allure of The Tragedy of the Commons
Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” heuristic’s chief virtue is that it flatters the vanity of the elite, supplying them with grim fairy tale of the deplorable consequences of a world without them. The heuristic assigns the elite supreme socioeconomic, if indeed not metaphysical, importance. Yet Hardin or his well-heeled fans appear to overlook the irony that the TragCom scenario features an individual — the overreaching herdsman with the extra cow — in a bid to become an elite member of his herdsmen community by chasing more wealth than his peers and thereby upsetting the economic equilibrium resulting from common title. One suspects that the elite see in this overreaching herdsmen a simplified, allegorical version of themselves: individuals having given the lie to Marxian socioeconomically determined epistemology by achieving the particular gnosis of capital accumulation. Thus TragCom assembles a logic where elites are needed to protect the commons from those who would make themselves the elites. Elites save the commons from the peons by saving the commons from themselves, and in so doing save the peons from themselves.
Commodity Futures: The Self as Advertising Agency
By facilitating the process by which goods cycle through meanings, we start to function like little advertising agencies, sending out marketing messages of our own, with our personality as the medium and our friends as the audiences whose attention we broker. We consume the identity that we hope the goods will convey in the process of broadcasting it to others. The greater the scope of our broadcast, the quicker the goods exhaust their signifying potency for us. We then need a new message to send, new consumer goods to send them with.
Body Talk: Contemporary American Gymnosophy and Economic Decline
I have nothing against running, or exercise in general. I wake up every morning at six and wearily lift my dumbbells, thinking all the time of Winston Smith, the main character of George Orwell’s 1984, whose knee bends weren’t deep enough for his telescreen trainer. It’s a lonely activity, and most times, given the current cultural and economic realities, I’m not sure why I do it. Will having a toned body help me pay off my student loans faster? Will my bank stop charging me so many absurd fees if I can claim well-defined quads? Will having a low resting heart rate help me find a white-collar job in a moribund economy? Yes, I’ll be healthier for it, and perhaps live somewhat longer, but do I really want to be that spry octogenarian working at Walmart? Given the state of Social Security and retirement packages, I’d be better off greeting the sun with a pack of Virginia Slims and a fifth of Wild Turkey.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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