Generation Bubble
Archive for October, 2010
Affected Affinities: Facebook and the Transformation of Liking
Though Facebook’s “Like” button may be good news for big business, it’s dreary stuff for people who actually … well … like things, because watered-down liking has changed our relationship to the world in the way that marketing, a few decades earlier, changed our relationship to consumer items. With marketing’s advent, the world suddenly fell in love with the idea rather than the utility of things; with a stroke of the ad-man’s magic pen, an automobile, that greasy machine with four wheels intended to get man (or woman) from point A to B, turned into a means of orgiastic celebration, and a carton of orange juice, the sweet fluid of squashed citrus pulp, magically transmogrified into an elixir capable of curing everything from cancer to crabs.
Flea-Market Ideology: A Review of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
Botsman and Rogers’ championing business as the solution to the social problems business has created is certainly pragmatic, but it feels a bit like surrender, an admission that the institutions of consumerism and their motivational apparatus can’t be bettered, and that they will continue to constitute our lifeworld. The authors can’t be faulted for their unmistakable enthusiasm for mitigating the selfish individualism that consumerism inherited from capitalism’s early days. But their vision stops far short of the kind of transformation that could make “sharing” and “collaboration” into something other than marketing buzzwords again.
Unmitigated Gaul: French Riots and the State of Exception
The various strikes around France, each an instantiation of this countermovement working in an inverse direction in law and in life, do indeed seek to loosen what has been artificially and violently linked, whether that be the state itself and its power or the various conceptual assemblages to which the state, in its present position of power, lends articulation: that profligacy at the highest echelon of society necessitates further austerity and privation at the lowest; that regressive revenue-generating or -saving measures are always to be preferred over progressive. This latter form of power, which for all the bland anonymity of its apparatuses — its various councils, bureaucracies, gendarmes, and prisons — are no less violent as a result, one can only meet with the ostentatious, pluriform violence of the strike.
Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown: Neurasthenia the New-Old “Americanitis”
Fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia, and depressed mood are the hallmarks of neurasthenia. The American Psychiatric Association has removed the term from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Diagnostic Disorders, but given the number of people I know who suffer from these complaints, perhaps a re-institution is in order. For if the present moment resembles anything, it resembles that time of economic chaos and the neurasthenic has the right to come out of the closet.
Great Leap Forward: Cultivating China’s Consumer Class
Unless China becomes more willing to outsource its ideology building to the West, and accept our expertise in fomenting the proper disregard for pragmatism and dismantling Confucianist anti-individualism, the global imbalances seem likely to persist, no matter how many shells are exploded in the currency war. The U.S. will continue to overconsume for the benefit of the world, until the world chooses to see that arrangement as less than beneficial in maintaining social control. At that point, exporting consumerism may no longer be an option for the West, and we’ll be forced to import authoritarianism instead.
The Empire Strikes Back: Immigration Breeds Right-Wing Resurgence in the British Isles
One could argue that cheap cosmetics are not the place to look for simmering nationalistic sentiment, but given the prominence of the Union Jack on my tube of “Strawberry Shimmer,” it’s hard not to question the motivation behind Rimmel’s emblazoning this symbol of the Empire on all their products. And though their new cover girl Zooey Deschanel is a mumblecore maven and hipster sweetheart of unabashed American vintage, her soft-as-steamed-pudding features and curious (yet curiously blank) grey eyes bespeak of a distinctly Cool-Britannia-era brand of beauty á la Jean Shrimpton. Yet, lest Deschanel’s foreign provenance cast the Rimmel’s nationalist bona fides into question, a Union Jack painted behind her head assures the viewer that the blush she is about to purchase is assuredly of an English-rose shade of red.
The Culture of Slime and Waste: Danube Blues and the Foreclosure Danse Macabre
It may not be altogether hyperbolic to say that, if the turn of the twentieth century belonged to The Culture of Time and Space, the turn of the twenty-first belongs to The Culture of Slime and Waste. In The Culture of Slime and Waste, environmental crises have grown so acute that metaphors of depletion, imbalance, and destruction proliferate to such a extent that toxicity becomes more than a state or condition. It becomes a discourse, a representation of a Foucauldian web of relations out of which precipitate objects who share a common metaphoric tenor. Today one hears mentioned not only toxic areas or habitats, but toxic assets, toxic people, toxic relationship, toxic ideas, and toxic language. The poisons to be encountered in the wider world are so multifarious and omnipresent that it’s a wonder one ever leaves his house — which doubtless contains toxic drywall.
Flying Blind: Notes on a Purpose-Riven Life
Americans young and old have sold their souls for a bill of dubious goods — and services. But at least the baby boomers were alive and kicking during decades that saw real revolutionary spirit in play; many of them got to participate in protests that were more than just excuses to don organic-fiber keffiyehs and declare a universal right to equity realization (all while shaking ineffectual fists at Wall Street). That’s got to count for something, right? That’s fodder for man’s (or woman’s) search of meaning, yes?
Eco-calypse Now: The Green Movement and the New Dark Age
When someone utters words like “sustainability” and “sustainable,” I hear “intended to technologically progress no further.” Think about it: An orchestra cannot at the same time sustain one chord and strike another. The one sustained chord thus signals the entirety of the musical piece, its beginning and its end. So, if someone presents you with a piece of sustainable technology, you can be certain that you grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren will be using the same kind of device in the same kind of form.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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