Generation Bubble
Anton Steinpilz
Bubble Living: DC by a Nose for Cocaine Use
One wonders how bad things really are if can still find money for an eight-ball. At any rate, cocaine is not necessary a drug associated with economic downturns. Smack, certainly. Crack, definitely. But blow retains too much of an uptown aura really to be associated with hard times. One thinks of all the 80s cocaine glam: Delorean car tires, shitters in some Manhattan or Miami nightclub, the backseat of a BMW 500 series — all mis en scènes for a drug that defined a decade. If crystal meth is the poor man’s cocaine, then cocaine remains the rich man’s cocaine.
Et in Academia Ego: The Humanities, Consilience and the Cash Nexus
Students’ professed love of art, literature or language does not oblige instructors to limit themselves to only the sort of teaching that leaves this love undiminished (whatever sort of teaching that might be). After all, this seeming innocence conceals within it all kinds of assumptions — perhaps consciously made, perhaps not — which betray privilege, security, affluence and other similar advantages necessary for the cultivation of this love. To call students’ attention to these implications is not to murder love, but is simply to establish the fact that their love does not really proceed from any ineffable affinity or oogy vibe. This is what humanities instructors mean when they talk about “challenging students’ assumptions” — an incredibly valuable service by any measure.
Cheats, Shoots and Thieves: The No-Depression Gang's New Slang
The whole “green-shoots” things puzzles me particularly, predicated as it is on an even more puzzling “jobless recovery” (another meme that’s been rattling around the blogosphere). The latter seems to range beyond the strange late-70s phenomenon of stagflation. It suggests that market rallies now enjoy absolutely no relationship to conditions on the ground — job growth, credit expansion, consumer spending (all of which have stalled or contracted).
Screw U.: Higher Learning, the Humanities and "Total Quality Management"
“[Adding] fresh value to the subject of his labours,” whether that subject be bedsheets or spreadsheets, certainly makes a diabolical kind of sense; if the object is maximizing profit while minimizing costs, then every nickel squeezed or saved here and there does its humble part in contributing to the bottom line. All that remained to executives was to find hatchet men and women to do the dirty work of putting the screws to the workers. Once they did, “management culture” was born.
Automatic for the People: Remotely-Sensed Hedonometrics and the Politics of Well-Being
Whether Dodds and Danforth’s hedonometer proves boffo or bunk remains to be seen. It does, however, throw a penetrating light on present circumstances. It reveals an unsettling general trend toward the conversion of the social sphere into a mis en scène of manipulation — a giant Skinner box of subtle complexity and variety, but a Skinner box nonetheless.
Sh*t Floats: Mega-Yacht Sails as the World Economy Fails
That legislative stooges for the HMOs and Big Pharma would like to see political action limited to health coverage comes as no surprise. After all, to do otherwise would wipe out huge profit potential, and thus keep a lot of folks out of the yacht market.
The Joe You Know: On Shakespeare and "Stealth Starbucks"
It seems a growing contingent has shown itself unwilling to pony up the premium Starbucks attaches to their elaborate coffee drinks…. Duly alarmed by this defection and the dwindling flow of tribute it represents, Starbucks has thus decided to don a “more bohemian guise featuring live music performances, poetry readings and sales of alcohol as well as hot drinks ” in order to recapture the public’s fealty and shopping dollars. Such a guise goes by the name “community personality” in Starbucks’ corporate idiom.
Buy None Get One Free: Digital Research Resources and the Emerging "Freeconomy"
If these industries can’t hold the line as they’d like against peer-to-peer poachers, they may just have discard their traditional business model for one more robust to the changes which convulse culture almost daily. They might just have to entertain a business model organized around the price point of “free.”
Special Announcement: Double the Bubble with Marginal Utility's Rob Horning
Rob Horning has agreed to a guest-posting stint with Generation Bubble. Rob’s weblog, Marginal Utility, began running at Pop Matters in August 2005 and has since become one a site mainstay…
Little Big Home
Dances with mortgage wolves leavin’ you dizzy? Seeing your equity scalped settin’ you on the warpath? An uptick in your ARM got you feelin’ all Wounded Knee? Dr. Free’s your medicine man when it comes to subprime blues. His Tipi Life has the cure for what ails ya (our thanks to Gross nOOdz for the [...]
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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