Generation Bubble

Holiday Hiatus

Today begins Generation Bubble’s holiday hiatus. We’d like to thank our readers for helping GenBub grow by leaps and bounds in the months since its inception.

Look for posts to resume after shortly after January 1, when we’ll return refreshed and ready for what promises to be a tumultuous 2010.

Until such time, we invite newer readers to peruse our back pages. They offer, we think, a unique chronicle of the events of the past nine months or so.

And we encourage you to consider following Generation Bubble’s link feed on Twitter (account name “GenBub_tweed“) and joining us on Facebook (group name “Generation Bubble“).

Dupe Deluxe: The Sucker's Market for Financial Innovation

The suppliers in markets for health insurance and mortgages (and so on) have reason to keep their products complex and their customers ignorant, and will continue to produce more complexity and call it innovation, moving the goal posts as consumers struggle to educate themselves. That in turn gives us consumers incentive to hop off the learning treadmill and either hire an expert, opt out and subsist as a second-class citizen, or resign ourselves to be taken advantage of by a variety of fat cats.

Brokedown Palace: Higher Education À La Carte

For the shock troops who have been drafted into doing the teaching at nonelite universities — the graduate students and adjunct professors — there may be troubled times ahead, as the demand for their labor is consolidated in various online-education sites. If community-college students are to become clients, and college can be supplanted with watching videos of old lectures and exchanging emails with a generic instructor out in the cloud of computer servers, then fewer adjuncts will be necessary (and those university departments that have traditionally taken in large number of grad students to teach undesirable undergrad courses will shrink — and perhaps as fewer are accepted into literature programs in graduate English departments, the topics of dissertations will become less ludicrous). Adjuncts could find themselves in the same situation as reporters, as local colleges go the way of local newspapers — to extinction.

A Life Best Ordinary: Social Reproduction of the Status Quo

Within the context of democracy, our indifference can be made to seem like dignified political participation, while those inflamed with the passion to address problems are seen as dangerous maniacs who want to “punish” us with change. Usually, in consumer capitalist society, change is only perceived as nonthreatening and natural if it is belched up by the market under the guise of healthy competition, as something new and improved to beat existing options. The only permissible revolutions are commercial ones.

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.

Confidence Games: Keynes and the Casino Economy

At a certain point, development itself will seem to consist in contriving more and more elaborate means for manipulation and control of others: that economic growth lies in the production of new media forms and techniques, and the use of these purposely to create financial bubbles.

The Knack … and How to Forget It: An Inquiry into Consumption Deskilling

Contemporary capitalism seeks to make us all into rabid collectors, constantly crossing off items of a list we think we’ve devised but is actually just an edit of a list dictated by retailers to suit their own ends. Overall, consumption goods, like labor in the production process, become somewhat generic; demand becomes perfectly fungible, ready to soak up the ever-increasing amount of stuff that will be dumped on the market as capitalist production necessarily expands.

Beggin' for a Piece of That Bubble: Macrorationality and the Limits of the Possible

Macrorationality seems like a matter of circumscribing one’s possible decisions at the broadest possible point, of eliminating individual autonomy in favor of better economic predictability at the social scale. All this while maintaining the pretense that reality is merely being measured more carefully, not being shaped, called into being, by the measuring tools.

"Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be": Americans Dash for Cash after Wall Street's Crash

The Depression saw unemployment rates much higher than we’ve seen yet in this recession, and it lasted for nearly a decade. Also, American culture wasn’t nearly as integrated by various forms of media as it is now, which meant that the experience of poverty was far more isolating and devastating. So while Americans have lost confidence in the economy for sure, it’s not yet clear whether Americans have suffered enough in this downturn to confidently predict a return of the “modest consumer” who is wary of indebtedness.

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.