Generation Bubble
Generation Y
Vile Bodies: Schadenfreude, Status Anxiety and Walmart Shoppers
Who are the people of Walmart, really? Are they truly deluded sorts who invite our sneers by jealously clinging to the trappings of their hair-metal glory days against the better advice of the fashion industry? Yes, many of them are gun-toting hicks and dentally challenged methheads, but they’re also the victims of a system of economic relations that forsakes broadly shared prosperity for the blasé depredations of crony finance. They’re overweight, undereducated untouchables, a contingent so abject and so abandoned to their low, catchpenny existences that they’ve even forfeited the right not to have their pictures snapped by snot-nosed postcollegiate pricks. Indeed, this accursed share of humanity is one of the few things still made in America.
All This Useless Duty: The Publish or Perish Imperative and Value Erosion in Higher Education
The perception that higher education has become an increasingly elaborate and costly hustle is perhaps to be expected in era when no one’s ever quite sure if her pension is perched on a Ponzi scheme that’s ready to blow. In an economy in which few actual things are made, and in which more experiences, services and social relations are monetized, value calculations begin to admit more variables, and people become more suspicious.
Super-Surprise Me: Boston University Pimps Students to McDonalds Guerrilla Marketing Campaign
This upping of the ante represented by McDonalds’ latest ad (and by guerrilla marketing generally) exacts a terrible price, one well beyond that of a venti McSpresso. It induces a form of epistemological vertigo that comes when we can no longer trust our own experiences, when we innocently sign up for a course and are made complicit in a spectacle that will earn millions for the company advertised, while we walk away with only crap-ass swag and lattè-foam moustaches for our trouble.
Tweet Nothings: Twitterrhea and Monetized Friendship
Twitter foments the fantasy of our vast influence, our endless relevance to everyone, and enlists more or less meaningless numbers to sustain it. Following people and being followed doesn’t signify any kind of commitment, any reciprocal responsibility — it’s just an effortless way to give and receive empty recognition. It’s a devalued currency, hyperinflated. But we can use that number nonetheless as a focal point, a kind of mandala for our self-worship.
Will Work for Work: Nouriel Roubini and Hipster Runoff’s Carles on Labor’s Future
Imagine, then, with so many workers out there laboring for free just to hang onto benefits and to keep downtime off their résumés, how attractive a job offering a wage — any wage — would appear to the many lean and hungry-eyed strivers forced into indigence by the violent economic churn now upon them. And with hotness now the cardinal American virtue, job fairs will no doubt become beauty pageants. The future, as Carles suggests, is one where people with Alpha-Plus bodies perform Gamma and Epsilon jobs, while the hordes of those arranged elsewhere on the Greek alphabet sit and suck stones.
A Debt to Treasure: What Makes a Bubble Generation Most?
What might the term “generation bubble” mean? I’d argue for this conception: It refers to those who have come of age in a society in which increased access to debt replaced wage growth as the key to an improved standard of living.
Crummy Day Real Estate: Williamsburg's Demise Leads to Hipster Diaspora
In Billyburg, however, it’s not so much sour grapes as grapes of wrath that are the order of the day, as hipsters hightail it out of the borough like so many latter-day Joads. Sadly, Steinbeck’s California no longer beckons, its waving grain and musky grapes now themselves but figments of a fever dream — or, worse, collateral for IOUs.
Literary Adaptation: Michael Bérubé and William Deriesiwicz on Darwinian Criticism
Over at Crooked Timber (truly a trove of timely tidbits, as blogs go), Michael Bérubé offers some remarks on William Deriesiwicz’s Nation article discussing a voguish strain of literary criticism. This strain’s presiding deity is not T. S. Eliot or Jacques Derrida, but Charles Darwin. As the name suggests, Darwinian literary criticism approaches written texts [...]
Bubble Culture: MC Hammer Flash Mob Proves Capitalism Is 2 Legit 2 Quit
A question we at Generation Bubble ask ourselves time and again is: When will Americans emerge into consciousness of their real situation? Each day’s news cycle presents a smorgasbord of recreancy, infamy, fraud, casual brutality and magnified trivia. Wars dribble on without ever petering out, wealth flows out of treasuries and pockets without ever flowing [...]
I Peggior Fabbri: Millenial Versifiers and the Decline of Poetry
For today’s post we at Generation Bubble hand the reins over to a guest editor, a certain individual who came to us looking to air his opinion on contemporary poetry. Emboldened by our tangle with poet Annie Finch a month ago, we were eager to jump back into this subject to see what further controversy [...]
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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