February 8, 2010 by Anton Steinpilz
If Google and its ilk deliver humanity to a post-scarcity paradise by supplanting costly, ponderous brick-and-mortar institutions with cheaper, more efficient virtual ones, what will humanity do with the surfeit of leisure such a transition entails?
(An earlier version of this essay appeared on June 12, 2009. Attention this essay has received recently [here] has prompted me to re-post it in a slightly modified form.)
Via Jos Schuurmanns’s site comes this post by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. In it, Jarvis basically offers a précis of his book, What Would Google Do?, a manifesto for the rapidly approaching post-scarcity age. (Irony: Jarvis has authorized no preview of his text on Google Books, thus making scarce what technology would make abundant and readily accessible.) Jarvis’s thesis is that Amazon, craigslist, eBay and Google have radically challenged the fundamental assumptions of current economic theory.
Most economists hew to the notion that resources are scarce, and that economies develop as a means of dealing with this scarcity. Economists of a free-market bent contend that the competition to which capitalism compels a population to leads to an adequate if not optimal allocation of resources via price discovery in the market, whereas economists of a more command-and-control sort claim that the contradictions and disequilibrium inherent in capitalist market relations tend toward squandering and waste of resources (one need only read news accounts of new housing developments being plowed under because developers can find no buyers to understand this). Yet either contingent agree on the basic fact that resources are indeed scarce. Continue Reading »
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February 5, 2010 by Ylajali Hansen
A volatile, unpredictable economy demands a new class of nomadic professionals, a wandering, unsentimental cohort of single, childless men and women willing to follow the fluctuation of the dollar’s value wherever it leads.
It is hard to even begin to gauge how much a complication of possessions, the notions of “my and mine,” stand between us and a true, clear, liberated way of seeing the world. — Gary Snyder
I’ve lived in dumpy apartments most of my adult life. I don’t find this situation fun. Yet I find myself in it more often than I’d like. I just can’t stand the tedium of dragging around to gape at apartment after disheartening apartment, knowing full well I’ll be ripped off regardless of which place I pick. So I take a quick look around the first place shown me and dejectedly sign the lease.
Because I also hate moving, I usually end up staying for a couple of years in whatever dump I’ve thrown myself. I figure that if you live a life of the mind, things like leaky toilets or storm windows that fail to keep out any … well … storms matter little. But I’ve subsequently come to realize that such thing matter quite a bit, and I’ve recently decided, after a stint in a real turd of a living space, that I’m going to put more thought into the next place I decide to call home. I have a big move coming up, so this life-changing decision I’ll have to make sooner as opposed to later. Continue Reading »
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February 4, 2010 by Anton Steinpilz
“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.
What brains they must have at Christminster and the great schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that he had never been born. — Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
A favorite pastime of mine involves cuing up on CNN.com the video feed of some major political event. As the video starts rolling, I pull up Calculated Risk’s comment page on my browser, refreshing the screen in order to keep up with the torrent of remarks. The remarks thereon counterpoise wonderfully the hackneyed phrases and strained evasions which pass for political discourse these days.
The Calculated Risk gang, its core members and supernumeraries, form the modern, cyberspatial equivalent of Greek chorus: voices unremitting in their directness and honesty, exposing foibles, mocking prevarications or temporizing, and generally calling bullshit on the elaborate make-believe by which most of the infamies masquerading as policy wriggle their way into law. Continue Reading »
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February 1, 2010 by Rob Horning
Is it possible to live a fulfilling life without participating in and elaborating a consumerist code that according to countless social theorists serves to supply us with our sense of ourselves?
In the 1968 hippie exploitation film Psych-Out, Jack Nicholson plays Stoney, a San Francisco rock musician caught up in the competing forces of hedonism, commercialism, idealism and sentimentality. Stoney has uncomplicated desires: He wants to do his thing, play his music, earn a little bread, and get some lovin’ whenever and with whomever he can. Being part of the San Francisco hippie scene seems to grant his wishes while supplying a self-congratulatory veneer for his behavior — by pleasing himself, he can believe he is changing the world, is making a stand for personal freedom.
While “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock plays on the soundtrack, Stoney pays a visit to his curmudgeonly, AWOL band mate, Dave (Dean Stockwell), who apparently lives in a rooftop lean-to built against a giant billboard overlooking Haight Ashbury. Stoney wants to convince Dave to play a gig that might secure them a recording contract. Dave proceeds to challenge several of Stoney’s articles of faith (clip): free love is nothing but a choice, he contends; selling out is irrelevant to “feeling good”; the truth is a matter of what works; common sense of the kick-a-stone variety refutes all forms of idealism. “All the games have to go, man,” Dave tells Stoney, “because it’s all one big plastic hassle.” To which Stoney retorts, “So live in a jelly jar?” Continue Reading »
Posted in consumerism | Tagged consumerism, economy, Rob Horning, theory | 1 Comment »
January 29, 2010 by Ylajali Hansen
The nation’s economy has shifted from finance to gotcha capitalism. Fees, surcharges and other juicy penalties lurk in the fine print, which has of late become exceedingly fine.
The other day a friend received a bill in the mail. It came in one of those envelopes the shade of “deadbeat pink.” It was from her HMO, which demanded $344.52 for a procedure she thought her insurance covered, insurance for which she already paid about $2,500 a year. Turns out they don’t cover such routine procedures, so, unless she wanted a credit rating like that which Greece enjoys, she needed to fork over the money. When I heard her story, I wasn’t surprised. The nation’s economy has shifted from finance to gotcha capitalism, after all. Fees, surcharges and other juicy penalties lurk in the fine print, which has of late become exceedingly fine.
The other day I also stopped by my too big to fail bank to check on a secondary account, one which I don’t pay much attention to because, well, I just have it in case my primary bank folds and I have to perhaps wait two or three weeks for the FDIC to hand over my cash or, what seems likelier, an IOU. While pulling up my account balances, a cheerful blond banker with a less than endearing Texas accent, informs me that I’m being charged twenty dollars a month. Because I had never been charged such an exorbitant amount in my entire eleven years of banking with that particular too big to fail bank, I angrily demanded the reason for the charges. Turns out my account had magically turned into one where, unless I kept at least $30,000 in it at all times, I’d be charged a twenty dollar “service fee” — because, you know, it’s so much trouble to service an account that has absolutely no activity. Continue Reading »
Posted in economy | Tagged capitalism, consumerism, economic crisis, Ylajali Hansen | 3 Comments »
January 27, 2010 by Anton Steinpilz
Sanitized funkiness and bourgeois progressivism have made Austin, Texas a veritable experimental village for the creative class. In light of this development, the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” now just seems like a cry for help.
I like Austin more now. I think the mind-set’s still the same. The campus alone takes care of that: We’ve got 50,000 young people; a certain percentage of them are gonna be cool. As we say, the only thing wrong with Austin is that it’s surrounded by Texas. — Richard Linklater
As a member of so-called Generation X, I have witnessed in my time the marketing of consumer-ready zeitgeist. I emerged into adulthood right around the time of Seattle’s ascendancy. Grunge, which to me sounded like simplified metal, was pronounced the music of a generation and heralded the end of the hair-rock–synth-pop duopoly.
But a funny thing happened on the way to cultural hegemony: Grunge, with all of its appurtenances, poses and attitude, became the very thing it’s devotees were reputed to despise. Payless Shoes soon began to carry pleather versions of Doc Martens. Hollywood soon began releasing twentysomething rom-coms wrapped in flannel and tuned to the key of angst. Confronted with such saturation of the cultural milieu, angry young refusniks found themselves in the awkward position of having to refuse the very tokens of their refusal. When Beverly Hills 90210’s troubled star Shannen Dougherty states in an interview that she intends to start an all-girl version of Pearl Jam, you know something has gone terribly wrong. Continue Reading »
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January 25, 2010 by Rob Horning
“Supermodernity” fulfills the implicit promise of the internet. Once we are everywhere and nowhere at once, fully uploaded, fully contained, there will be no place left to go.
Is there any place where we can get away from ourselves? The insistent therapeutic command to find ourselves seems to have led to a surfeit of identity, to an oppressive self-consciousness that consists mainly of an awareness that we are fundamentally threatened with the danger of being misrecognized, of being misconstrued as someone we are not.
Once upon a time, we needed to travel to escape the way our identity was inscribed in the spaces we passed through on ordinary days — the knowledge the neighborhood or small town had of us, as well as the knowledge we needed to navigate it, and all the facts about ourselves the intersection of those two bodies of knowledge revealed. The inescapable facts of our personal history — class, family background, race, nationality, that sort of thing — came back to us in the ways we found ourselves dealing with local conditions. Continue Reading »
Posted in culture | Tagged capitalism, economic crisis, Rob Horning, theory | 3 Comments »
January 14, 2010 by Ylajali Hansen
We already have our Prozac and Paxil to make us forgot about contemporary American life’s sorrows. Adding marijuana to the mix would only ensure that the American people would never rise up in revolt. They’d barely be able to rise from their La-Z-boys.
A friend of mine recently quit her job as a speech therapist in a bland Midwestern city and moved to San Francisco. Now she spends her days grilling Boca Burgers and twisting spliffs. Her life is pure sun- and THC-soaked bliss, and she needn’t worry about the law; she secured one of those medical cards that allows her a monthly dose of medical marijuana. Her affliction? PMS.
Another acquaintance gave up a successful business in Chicago to open a medical marijuana dispensary. He said the whole legalization of pot in California is akin to the Gold Rush. You gotta get in and stake your claim before every Tom, Dick and Harry grabs a store front and a grow light. Continue Reading »
Posted in economic crisis | Tagged economic crisis, economy, recession regression, Ylajali Hansen | 2 Comments »
January 13, 2010 by Anton Steinpilz
The nonsensical excesses of pataphysics one can now find in the very warp and weft of the social fabric, while pataphysics itself, appropriately enough, has sailed far out of sight of the shore of the normative values it once critiqued.
Zuckerberg Tyrannos: The improbable, baby-faced founder of Facebook — whose first name, for those who have been living in a cave (or, at least without Facebook) the past several years, is Mark — recently announced the death of individual privacy, dismissing it as a “social norm” from which the wider wired world has evolve away. Apparently now only a hoary fetish for Enlightenment political philosophers, privacy has exited with nary a tear nor lament. Today’s human, homo ostentatius, is a fundamentally different creature from her eighteenth-, nineteenth- or even twentieth-century antecedents. Or so saith Zuckerberg.”People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”
Zuckerberg’s generalization strikes one as rather sweeping. Several people of my acquaintance profess themselves not at all comfortable with the — shall I say demographic nudity? — which Facebook demands of its participants. These friends of mine not only have a problem with sharing information of any kind, but also have deep philosophical reservations about those who share this information “more openly and with more people.” Admittedly, these friends occupy (along with me) a sociocultural periphery, one occupied by those who would prove reluctant joiners to any new fad. I can’t help thinking, however, that my friends and I simply represent a contingent afflicted with a particularly acute case of self-consciousness that is more or less present in everyone, a backwardness when it comes to publicizing oneself, particularly in the manner which Facebook encourages: the revelation of personal details. Some details might be boring, others embarrassing; Facebook doesn’t discriminate. It welcomes them all. Continue Reading »
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January 11, 2010 by Rob Horning
In the era of immaterial labor, you can’t conduct a lifestyle based on expressing and displaying personal creativity without attracting predatory capital hoping to exploit it.
We all carry in us creative potential just waiting to bubble forth, right? This, anyway, is the principal ideological tenet in a time when consumption has become production and personal identity a valuable construction site not only for ourselves but for a variety of culture hucksters, trend analysts, fashion mavens and speculators in the communications industry.
Everyone should have a Facebook account. Everyone should share photos, opinions, observations, status updates. Everyone should Twitter. In the aggregation of real-time opinion, every voice counts. Failing to “tweet” is becoming equivalent to being apathetic when it comes to voting in elections. No one has any reason to feel insignificant; the media apparatus is sophisticated enough to supply the form for all of the content our simply living allows us to generate; it can make broadcasters of us all.
The widespread faith in universal creativity is part of why Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative class” can seem so repellent. Everyone can relate to wanting to be creative, but who wants to be a member of the creative class? The so-called creatives are the ones who reify creativity, subordinate it to capital, discipline it so that it pays and helps in the reproduction of the power structure as it stands. The creative class facilitates the transformation of spontaneous creation into managed innovation, assimilating various potentially revolutionary gestures to the culture and communications industries and neutralizing them, turning them into new signifiers in the game of identity projection. They produce the blandishments, the amelioratives, the apologies for consumer society. They help ensure that the incentives for creation stay the same: self-promotion, personal fame, money — not a new society. Continue Reading »
Posted in economy | Tagged capitalism, economy, Generation Y, Rob Horning | 1 Comment »
Henry Brulard
