Generation Bubble
neoliberalism
Manufacturing Ascent: Elite Institutions and Social Mobility
The very idea of human capital suggests that the human in question has in her possession something that will entitle her to profits down the road. But I’m afraid that “human capital,” for all of its jazzy, ultra-contemporary ring, is just a version of Marxian labor power gussied up for a techno-oligopolic age. Being a locus of human capital doesn’t necessarily make one a capitalist. Her capital, like the worker’s labor power of Karl Marx’s time, depends on being sold into a market in which the advantage accrues to those with good old-fashioned capital.
Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves: The Rise of Gotcha Capitalism
What have I decided to do? Well, since nothing is so precious to me as my intellectual freedom, I’ve set aside 1,000-2,000 dollars a year that I can just assume will be stolen from me. It’s a special little savings account earmarked for all those banksters and pranksters that rule our economy and our country. That way I don’t have to think so hard about the possibility of being cheated, because I’ve assumed that someone already has cheated me and I just need to wait until they come to collect. It’s a form of defeatism, yes, but it’s also a recognition and acceptance of a new social and economic reality. I suspect some citizen of Soviet Russia felt much the same when he or she handed over an extra hundred rubles to procure a piece of meat or bread that should have sold at the advertised price. It was just part of life, that extra little tax to the parasites who clung to the social fabric like so many bedbugs on a futon in Queens.
The Body Economic: One Nation Under Finance Capital
Certainly many fortunes hung in the balance during the dark days of TARP, TALF, PPIP and the other bilious alphabet soups of the Great Panic of 2008. I can’t help but think, however, that it would’ve been better had the entire rotten edifice that is High Finance collapsed. At least then 2010 would have found America nearly two years into the rebuilding.
Building the Mystery: Social Media as Collective Epic
Weblogs, Twitter and Facebook become much more than communication devices; they become the very means by which people secure an effective ontology: “I tweet, therefore I am.” The daily output of one’s tweets or of one’s Facebook updates becomes the stuff of the first-person-corporate novel, which seduces one into thinking she is the hero of, while positioning her as merely one of many others in an anonymous collective, meeting over virtual conveyor belt of successive tweets or updates that get pushed down the screen.
Fall into the Gap: A Parallax View of Employment
If the current recession has offered people any lesson, it has shown to what degree parallactic antinomies rule their lives. They must somehow hold in their mind rather massive contradictions. They must recognize, for instance, that from one point of view, that of most Establishment economists, capitalism, though imperfect, offers the best system for allocating scarce resources, thus bringing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. And they must also recognize that capitalism immiserates untold numbers of people, subordinating them to a regime which cheats them of the fair value of their labor. (What, after all, does the perma-intern model accomplish beyond the outright theft of interns’ time and effort?) From one point of view, the former appears valid; from another, the latter. And they appear so because they are so — equally incontrovertibly, yet equally irresolvable in terms of the other.
Artificial Paradises: The Shopping Mall as an Aesthetic Category
The endgame for the benevolent authoritarianism implicit in shopping-mall hegemony is, of course, the “totally administered life” Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer variously warned of. The mallification of all shared spaces, from airports to campus bookstores, sure seems like one more step in this direction. According to the ideology of the shopping-mall aesthetic, every bystander or traveler is a potential consumer. Our previously unique and interesting spaces have been Haussmannized into vast boulevards of cheaply-made goods, wherein government officials and market researchers conspire to keep us shopping so that we may always be disgorging both precious dollars and vital demographic data, the blood and lymph of the contemporary body economic.
King Rat: Mickey Mouse’s Neoliberal Makeover
It stands to reason then that newest incarnation of Mickey Mouse was developed to reflect the tastes of its audience. The boisterous, sweet-tempered mouse is now a law-breaking, egocentric rat. And while Mickey’s newest incarnation may be the stuff of nightmares, it certainly isn’t anything new. In fact, it is eminently fitting. We have the Mickey Mouse we deserve. We are no longer that charmingly boisterous (and yes, sometimes devilishly devious) nation that smashed National Socialism and inspired the likes of Jack Kerouac to drive across the country and then come home, drop some speed, and write about his wonderful adventures in a strange land, but an ill-tempered, duplicitous empire on the decline, ravaged by the boondoggles and Ponzi schemes of a financial sector run amok, bereft of the hope of regaining any kind of cultural or intellectual prominence.
Children of a Lesser God: The Global Precariat and the Goldman Sachs Gospel
Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein and Metropolitan‘s Charlie Black share the sort of myopically grandiose perception of their class. For them, the value their class is made plain by its continued existence. Should their class disappear, Armageddon would ensue. Seas would boil. The moon would turn to blood. Stock options would go unexercised. It’s this inflated sense of vital necessity which lay behind Blankfein’s bloviation and Charlie Black’s lucubration. Ultimately, it underwrites the sense of the unique tragedy attending the urbanite bourgeoisie’s decline, as well as the logic of “Too big to fail” and the ex cathedra decree of “doing God’s work.” Apparently no longer content with being known as “Government Sachs” for the various former executives who now stride Washington D. C.’s corridors of power, Blankfein and his merry band seek nothing less than the foundation of one holy catholic and apostolic church, consecrated to Mammon, their tribal deity, who demands regular bloodletting and smoldering hecatombs.
Dies Irae: Vaccinated Inmates, Public Outrage, and the U.S. Prison Industry
The nineteenth-century Russian novelist and one-time convict Fyodor Dostoevsky famously remarked, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If our correctional institutions do in fact present this absolute measure, then we are confronted with the sad truth that the United States isn’t terribly civilized. This is especially true if we Americans consider that, as sociologist Barry Glassner famously pointed out, ours is a culture of fear. A culture of fear in many respects represents a return to primitive stage of cultural development, one subject to forces and vicissitudes beyond that culture’s control or comprehension. A culture of fear makes for a collective Imaginary populated by all sorts of malign powers. Every stranger (particularly if said stranger has brown skin) is a potential demon, goblin, bugbear or ghoul intent on harming others simply to satisfy his devilish impulses. Inner-city “superpredators” lurk in every alley, middle-eastern terrorists down every jetway. People subject to culture of fear rationalize the inherently irrational simply as a matter of reflex. The barbarities — and the profits — which flow from this reflexive tendency are appropriately staggering.
Fly Away Home: Anthony Toth’s Pan Am Glam
Around Mr. Toth’s hobby one senses an air of melancholy. His garage he has transformed into a cenotaph to a technological optimism whose final death throe came when the Concorde was decommissioned in 2003 (futuristic supersonic flight is now a thing of the past). Perhaps Mr. Toth, an employee of United Airlines, chose to render immortal the glittering past of a defunct competitor because that competitor died an innocent’s death of virginal purity, never having sullied itself in the trenches of the fare wars. No, Pan Am’s eopch is one of crystalline integrity and specificity, like a beautiful insect trapped in amber, into which the materialist historian Anthony Toth seeks to breathe life into once more — at least until his condo is foreclosed on.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
© 2012 Generation Bubble. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 