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“).

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.

Point Break: Modern C(r)apitalism's Plastic Fantastic and the Good Enough Revolution

What the the Good Enough Revolution aims for is absolute immediacy via the dissolution of any obstacles, impediments, contrarieties or difficulties that in the friction they create might alert us to our exploitation. In an age of cloud computing, we ourselves become like clouds, drifting from device to device, app to app, each seamlessly and unassumingly integrated into our environment, which they have transformed into a turnkey milieu of worktainment and sweated leisure. If in years past we were encouraged to be good stewards of the things that enhanced our productivity — keeping our cars running, making sure we have internet access at home, regularly upgrading to more powerful laptops — the Good Enough Revolution relieves us of even this responsibility. By recovering minutes and seconds from boot-ups, file accessing, uploads and whatnot, the Good Enough Revolution valorizes prevailing worklife trends, in which constant, frenzied activity replaces deliberate.

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.

Arabian Bites: It's Rich Eat Rich in the Saudi Kingdom

Such Olympian rifts among the super-rich seem like they’ll become the new normal, giving the lie to the incredible esprit de coeur and sense of shared purpose writer David Rothkopf credits them with in his depressing, dispiriting paean to plutocracy, Superclass. Yes, it appears that those “differently sheltered” populating tent cities and Hoovervilles across this great nation who are otherwise occupied with stirring watery pots of squirrel soup over fires fueled by shredded 401K-earnings and Social Security statements can look forward to a little old-fashioned skullduggery among the sheikhs of Araby.

No Preservatives: Whole Foods and the Right-Wing Prescription for Health Care

The genius of a health-savings plan is that it dodges the politically explosive charge of rationing by foisting the rationing on the covered individuals. A $2,500 deductible is a king’s ransom in a country where the saving’s rate is a negative percentage, and in which consumer debt is the economy’s life’s blood. Notice how Mackey refers to employees’ “own health-care dollars” as if they have any such thing. Where do these health-care dollars come from anyway, if not from employees’ pay? What Mackey proposes essentially amounts to a surreptitious clawback of his workers’ wages in the form of premium defrayment.