Generation Bubble
trends
Distant Listening (1): The Laid-Back Labor of Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right”
Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right” encapsulates an entire generation staring down adulthood, waiting to see if it would blink, if it would reveal some gaps in which a sense of freedom could be retained in the face of its mounting sense of responsibility and disillusionment.
Lost Recordings: Elegy for the Mix Tape
The mix tape left room for the accidental, for the clumsy-fingered pauses, the crackle of worn vinyl, the skipping of a needle, the crimping of metal ribbon, the intrusion of a voice once loved. Accidents that resist replication on a mass scale, but that exist side-by-side with the products of mass reproduction.
Nothin’ for Money: On the Possibility of Weimar America
Whether the crisis is one of hyperinflation or intractably deep recession, the result is the same. You need only recall the words of Überbanker Andrew Mellon: “In a depression assets return to their rightful owners.” He certainly wasn’t talking about the poor schmucks manning the teller windows.
West of Eden: The Allure of East-Coast Urban Life
Walkable cities radiate an organic vibrancy. They have dense roots in neighborhoods of storied provenance, have complex zones of eclectic social and economic activity. City planners are beginning to see the virtues of these version–1.0 cities, metropolises that have more in common with the Paris of the Second Republic (minus the smog and the hordes of irredeemable poor) than the indifferent, anomic settlements of the American West.
Commodity Futures: The Self as Advertising Agency
By facilitating the process by which goods cycle through meanings, we start to function like little advertising agencies, sending out marketing messages of our own, with our personality as the medium and our friends as the audiences whose attention we broker. We consume the identity that we hope the goods will convey in the process of broadcasting it to others. The greater the scope of our broadcast, the quicker the goods exhaust their signifying potency for us. We then need a new message to send, new consumer goods to send them with.
Body Talk: Contemporary American Gymnosophy and Economic Decline
I have nothing against running, or exercise in general. I wake up every morning at six and wearily lift my dumbbells, thinking all the time of Winston Smith, the main character of George Orwell’s 1984, whose knee bends weren’t deep enough for his telescreen trainer. It’s a lonely activity, and most times, given the current cultural and economic realities, I’m not sure why I do it. Will having a toned body help me pay off my student loans faster? Will my bank stop charging me so many absurd fees if I can claim well-defined quads? Will having a low resting heart rate help me find a white-collar job in a moribund economy? Yes, I’ll be healthier for it, and perhaps live somewhat longer, but do I really want to be that spry octogenarian working at Walmart? Given the state of Social Security and retirement packages, I’d be better off greeting the sun with a pack of Virginia Slims and a fifth of Wild Turkey.
Limited Inc.: A Jobless Future and the Narcissist Economy
Perhaps a certain slice of unemployment — for the current generation of well-educated 20-and30-somethings, former publishing professionals or not — is actually an unanticipated career shift, into the full-time job of broadcasting ourselves, of being ourselves for public consumption. In a sense, the over-coddled “damaged” youth now displaced from the traditional workforce have been perfectly trained for “work” in the information-services field, provided it is sublimated as a rococo mode of elaborate self-fashioning. They only seem unemployed, but they are busy self-branding. Viewed optimistically, the immaterial labor they perform online for various internet companies by using social networks, writing unsolicited reviews and essays, recommending products and links, and “sharing” in a host of other ways, could be regarded as new kind of meaningful work that is supplanting the old kind which involved bosses, hierarchies, assignments, deadlines, bullying, commuting and so on. Sure, the new work doesn’t pay, but with a generous enough social safety net, it wouldn’t need to. In the post-work utopia, we’d meet our expenses through a government-issue living wage, energetically promote ourselves and lifestyles online, and consume “free” entertainment product to keep ourselves busy in the interim. Forget the culture of narcissism. Welcome to the economy of narcissism.
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 Curse of the Gift: Toxic Robot Hamsters and American Infantilism
Though I hardly believe the Chinese industrialists have much to teach us, save that the business practices of the nineteenth century should have never been revived, the continuing lack of interest as to how exactly they produce those robotic hamsters, suspiciously inexpensive fillets of salmon, or plasma screen television seems indicative of the worst sort of naricissism, as though we weren’t complicit in how their poisonous crap finds its way to our shores by demanding goods below a certain price point. The average consumer, too busy gazing at her own image as reflected through the eyes of her Zhu Zhu hamster, never stops for a moment to consider all those eyes gazing at her from across the Pacific, eyes that are probably tired, hungry and filled with disdain, but most likely satisfied that they made her what she asked for.
Spin Cycle: Biking D. C. Hipsters Revive Dandyism
The biking dandies and quaintrelles invoke a narrow spectrum for their rainbow coalition. Hip-hoppers and heshers, one gathers, need not apply. How this wished-for amalgam of social cliques is supposed to happen within the dissolving medium of dandyism is not entirely certain. One imagines that all this supposed de-cliquing can only lead to dislocation and anomie, as hipsters parasitize preppiedom and preppies extract some of the value hipsters have added to the preppie look. A climate of antagonism, recrimination and refusal would likely follow, proving ruinous to the urbane charms of a Saturday’s cycling.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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