Guido Bandido: MTV’s The Jersey Shore and Neoliberalism

March 10, 2010 — Anton Steinpilz


Does The Jersey Shore, MTV’s latest pop-cultural sensation, purport to reveal the ways of East Coast “Guidos” and “Guidettes” or the ways of neoliberal economics?

To anyone living outside the northeastern United States, MTV’s The Jersey Shore, the cable network’s latest reality-television offering, is an encounter with the strange and unfamiliar. In my own experience as someone born in the Rust Belt, reared in the Midwest and educated in the Southwest, seldom did I encounter so-called “Guidos” and “Guidettes.” I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with “Guido” stereotypes; they were just rather remote from my experience — until I moved to New England, that is. Here the landscape crawls with Guidos. One can usually find them on the main drag of my neighborhood, leaning on Katana bikes and menacing popped-collared Ivy Leaguers. Or one can find them at the beach, again leaning against said Katana bikes.

Casually observing Guidos while conducting my own life’s business revealed to me nearly nothing about their folkways. MTV’s The Jersey Shore therefore held for me all the exotic appeal of an ethnographic document. Yet I have to say that after having watched the entire season run the show disappointed rather than satisfied my curiosity. The Guido demimonde does have its peculiarities (the impression I got of it is that of traditional family-centered Italian-American culture to which elements of hip-hop culture have been superadded), but these were relatively minor, and ultimately incidental, compared to the actual premise of the show, which seems to be: find people who like to drink, screw and fight; put them in a position to drink, screw and fight; and then film them drinking, screwing and fighting. This premise certainly holds some amusement value, but only so much. In fact, I found myself forgetting that the reason I was watching the show was to glimpse the unique customs of East Coast Guidos and Guidettes, because the incidents and escapades the show’s subjects found themselves in I found immediately — and depressingly — familiar. Read the rest of this entry »

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Stuck in Idle: Odd Jobs in the Social Factory

March 8, 2010 — Rob Horning


Has the cunning of history masterminded not the elimination of drudgery and labor, but in fact their greater saturation of cultural milieu via the capillaries of online social-media networks?

Asking people why they work is sort of a dumb question. Capitalism promulgated the idea that work has little to do with personal development and instead presented it as an obstacle, a burden one would shoulder only because it is a means to secure the true vehicle of self-actualization — money. Work time is wasted time, a period of bondage to be slogged through to reach the golden shore of leisure. At that point one can test the very limits of freedom by using his purchasing power to get whatever — and thereby become whomever — he wants. If working for wages has so corrupted the meaning of work, should one look for alternatives? Is raising non-participation in the workforce to be celebrated as a good omen of things to come? After all, if employment in a capitalist system is basically wage slavery anyway, then doesn’t it follow that unemployment is emancipation?  Work could be severed from income and thereby have meaning restored to it beyond myopic money grubbing. Do away with unnecessary accumulation, pursue the steady-state economy, minimize exploited labor as a macroeconomic imperative, organize society so as to make the bulk of human effort non-compulsory and see what the fruits of liberty could really be — such is the essence of Herbert Marcuse’s utopian vision in Eros and Civilization.

Capitalism needs workers who believe they have no choice but to sell their labor power to survive. Yet the sort of work most are compelled to do is not a life or death matter; growth for its own sake has become the guiding imperative, but not from some transcendental necessity. Capital succeeds, however, not because it presents specific tasks as socially necessary, but because compulsory work itself is mystified. This translates as: “I don’t care what I do, as long as I am getting paid.” One works not because he produces useful stuff, but because he must be disciplined to conform to the existing order, or to “civilization,” as Freud would have it. Compulsory work and programmed leisure come to form a unified, inseparable whole; the pleasures of consumerism rely on the structure supplied by the pressure to work and the pliant, receptive passivity that carries over from workplace discipline to color one’s “free” time. Outside of this structure, what we enjoy now — our “repressive needs,” Marcuse calls them — may cease to satisfy us. Read the rest of this entry »

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Waiting for the End of the World: Politics, Finance and the Gnosis of Crisis

March 4, 2010 — Anton Steinpilz


Do crises in political and financial domains mean the suspension of business as usual, or simply its consolidation?

How does one resign himself to existing affairs? What sort of self-deception must he engage in to be able to say to himself, “Truly, my condition is mete and just?” Goethe once wrote, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” I wonder, however, if this maxim admits of its inverse: “None are so hopelessly free as those who falsely believe they are enslaved.” But what possible hopelessness could one possibly find in freedom? Even the mind-bendingly obscure German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel believed that history moved toward the goal of human emancipation, while the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that freedom ameliorates despair. It does not cause it.

Citizens of the United States pride themselves on their historically unprecedented degree of political freedom. They consider themselves — perhaps justifiably — the embodied telos of a certain conception of history, wherein sovereignty passes from nature to god to chief, to king to eventually the people themselves. What a blow it would be, then, to learn that in truth individual sovereignty has instead passed into the annals of history along with spontaneous generation, phlogiston, the philosopher stone, and other such fanciful chimeras.

For years it seemed that the U.S. managed to preserve something of the form, while all the while jettisoning the substance, of individual liberty. Recently, however, the form itself, having become too ragged and threadbare to conceal Oz any longer, has more or less been dispensed with. Someone of a strict Marxist bent might claim that the contradictions characteristic of capitalism have heightened to an unsustainable point, and now the bourgeois ranks simply find themselves whipsawed by the resulting tensions. I find it hard to disagree with this assessment. The entire economy, now financialized to an absurd extent, has moved to what I like to call a “Whaddya-gonna-do-about-it?” stage. The cops have arrived. They’ve restored power to the bank building and the lights therein, exposing the robbers in the vault. Yet the robbers know that all is not lost — though they will have to raise the stakes. The heist, according to the robbers’ assessment, has taken twist for the worse, but it hasn’t necessarily gone bad. Take hostages. Kill a few to show the cops they mean business. Head for South America with the loot.  A dicier, bloodier and more difficult proposition than straightforward safecracking, certainly, but not an impossible one. Or so the thinking goes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Limited Inc.: A Jobless Future and the Narcissist Economy

March 1, 2010 — Rob Horning


Do the redundancies made necessary by economic recession and technological advancement throw workers into unemployment or simply into a new form of unpaid labor?

Unemployment in the United States marches on and shows no sign of abating. Don Peck’s article in the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic about the worsening labor situation offers stark details of what the grim consequences might follow prolonged joblessness. Chief among them is the prospect of an entire generation of newly graduated college students unable to find work. “When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left for newly minted B.A.s,” Peck writes. “Yet if those same B.A.s don’t find purchase in the job market, they’ll soon have to compete with a fresh class of graduates — ones without white space on their résumé to explain.” Peck observes that “[t]his is a tough squeeze to escape, and it only gets tighter over time,” because “[s]trong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves.” These unfortunate souls thus become “different — and damaged — people.” One imagines a tribe of broken youths wandering around muttering, “Confused, I’m confused, don’t want to be confused,” à la Black Flag’s “Damaged.” But does today’s damaged generation (Peck suggests they are “temperamentally unprepared” for our economic reality) share the hardcore commitment to apathetic nihilism? “I no longer feel a thing / I no longer want to see / But you can’t make me long / For your life and security.”

Peck does note the advent of so-called “funemployment,” in which younger workers with no responsibility regard joblessness as semi-voluntary. But he is quick to argue that term simply disguises rationalization as insouciance, and that the real damage to “earning potential” and chance for corporate promotion these funemployed folks will likely never recover from. He quotes a university career-placement counselor who worries that many recent graduates are “not even engaging with the job market.” As Black Flag lead singer Henry Rollins says in the song: “stupid attempts, no conclusions.”

Young adults’ refusing to enter corporate America could potentially hinder the latter’s ability to reproduce itself for future generations. But at the same time, corporations need to eliminate jobs or to send them overseas in order to compete in a tough economic climate. What, then, must hegemons do? How do they try to whip joblessness now depends on whether they believe cyclical unemployment confronts them, in which case workers can expect jobs to return in familiar sectors when the recession ended, or structural unemployment, in which case there must appear entirely new kinds of jobs to replace ones permanently destroyed by technological change. The economy must recalculate how to reallocate labor, and unemployment lingers during the lag time. Peck writes:

New jobs will come open in the U.S. But many will have different skill requirements than the old ones. “In a sense,” says Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over. They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next.” And as a spell of unemployment lengthens, skills erode and behavior tends to change, leaving some people unqualified even for work they once did well.

Peck doesn’t really try to explain why these changes take place. Instead he indulges the widespread tendency to regard technological change as inevitable and see the jobs lost on its account as the necessary price for efficiency, modernity, and a better standard of living across the board in the long run — provided it’s not the Keynesian sort of long run in which we are all dead. “Ultimately, innovation is what allows an economy to grow quickly and create new jobs as old ones obsolesce and disappear,” he writes hopefully, espousing the “lean and mean” interpretation of economic contraction. “Typically, one salutary side effect of recessions is that they eventually spur booms in innovation.” New technology improves productivity, meaning we produce more from less, which will ultimately enlarge the social surplus. If that surplus is distributed unfairly, we should attend to that problem rather than, say, mount Luddite-like attacks on server farms. Read the rest of this entry »

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Millennial Tension: The Generation-Y Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

February 26, 2010 — Ylajali Hansen


How do Generation Y reconcile their inflated sense of their own economic value with the looming prospect of ever declining incomes and living standards?

I recently had the chance to briefly talk to the son of one of my colleagues. He stopped by the office the other day to have lunch with his mother. He was noticeably giddy with the prospect of his impending graduation from college. Always interested in what members of Generation Y imagine the future to bring, I asked him what career he’d like to enter into upon graduating. With a self-satisfied smile on his face, he proudly exclaimed, “Finance!” When I asked why he wanted to go into finance, he answered, “Because I’ll be able to go into the office for maybe five or ten hours a week and bring home about $200,000 a year — to start.” He then proceeded to enumerate all the baubles he was going to buy with his easily-earned pile of cash: Beamers and bottles of Moët, silicon-enhanced female chests straining against blouses, yachts, private coves and all the rest. He was going to live the Goldman Sachs dream, he declared, and he wasn’t going to have to lift a finger to do it.

Perhaps this prodigal son of my co-worker can achieve such a standard of living skimming the American economy for its rapidly dwindling social surplus, but I doubt he can do it in five to ten hours a week. Yet it seems members of Generation Y are convinced they can do it, despite one of the worst recessions in recent American history. The March 2010 edition of The Atlantic Monthly features an article by Don Peck entitled “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.” Peck reports:

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”

This profound disconnect characterizing Gen-Yer’s self-perceptions is partly due to the absurd tendency of modern parents constantly to enforce that sense that their child is unique and special even when the child in question might be quite unremarkable. Peck goes on to cite Jean Twenge and he her 2006 book, Generation Me:

Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.) Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.

Certainly this is a disaster in the making. When an entire generation (Yes: there are always exceptions) expects instant success and riches, but then lacks the problem-solving and coping skills to handle not getting those riches immediately, well, there’s not a WPA-like organization powerful enough to channel the impotent and muddle-minded rage that is bound to result. Which is sad, because while recessions tend to demoralize as they impoverish, they also force one to fall back upon certain intellectual and spiritual resources. Long bouts of unemployment (eased, one hopes, by benefits extended into the far future) can allow a formerly overworked person to pursue hobbies and intellectual avenues they otherwise lacked time for — avenues that might empower and enlighten. But according to Twenge, Generation Y lacks the very intellectual stuff to pursue those avenues; they’re too busy mirror-gazing, Facebooking and waiting for that dream job to bounce into their laps. Read the rest of this entry »

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Theory of the Leisure Class: Middle-Class Jobs and Responsibility Arbitrage

February 24, 2010 — Ylajali Hansen

Does the penetration of communication technology into work- and life-spaces call for a new hedonic calculus based on relative levels of responsibility?

I worked for time at a university library. It was a job that I realize now was really quite perfect: I met interesting people and discovered thousands of interesting books. Each evening, after clocking out, I’d browse through the stacks, looking for something to take home. I was never disappointed. Indeed, I think I checked out about five hundred volumes the year I worked there.

I was a student worker, so the job wasn’t something I could make a career. My head was filled with visions of graduate school, the means, I thought, of vaulting into a higher tax bracket (though, I probably should have studied something more useful than English literature). As much as I loved my job, I knew I had to acquire more education so I could occupy a more professional position.

There was one student worker there who seemed to defy the logic under which I was operating — concerning salaries, careers and such. His name was John and, at the what I considered the advanced age of 38, was a career shelver. It wasn’t that he lacked education. He already had a degree, but each semester he would sign up for something like beginning pottery or the fundamentals of Mexican flute just so he could keep his job at the library. I thought he was crazy. Each day I’d see him come to work, happy and without a care in the world, and set about returning books to their rightful places on the shelves for eight hours, earning eight dollars for each and every one of those hours. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t moving and shaking his way to a bourgeois’s jackpot of 40- or 50-thousand-dollar salary package, complete with 401K and dental insurance. It seemed perverse, absolute madness (because this was back in the glory days of the bubble when seemingly any nincompoop could pull down at least $70 grand).

I wasn’t the only one with this opinion of John. One day I overheard one of my colleagues ask him why he didn’t apply for a “real job.” “Why should I?,” he responded, “I’m perfectly happy. I have a place to live, everything I need to be comfortable, and, most importantly, I have my freedom.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Ghosts in the Machine: Lonely Consumers Find Social Networks

February 22, 2010 — Rob Horning

Have Web 2.0’s innovations in social media urged on individual self-expression or simply accelerated the stint of capital-friendly identity production?

A bald assertion: Consumerism is an opaque and frustrating mode of social communication. It devises a language it compels us to speak, and whose meanings, simplistic and one-dimensional to begin with, are continually shifting, like a code changed on a nearly daily basis as if to thwart some unknown enemy.

At best, these shifts seem arbitrary, a nuisance that requires us to constantly update our lexicon of goods. At worst, they seem motivated by a caste-based scheme to exclude us and devalue whatever social capital we have painstakingly managed to amass. Styles change to spite us, it seems; our identity appears to change even though we have not changed. Moreover, some of the words of this language — brands — are proprietary, giving our communication an inescapable economic dimension and burdening us with the uncomfortable sense that we must speak with words that ultimately belong to someone else.

Many of us have a hard time coming to terms with this loss of autonomy. Consumerism, after all, has been successfully sold as the great carnival of personal sovereignty, the sphere of social life where our individual choices are supposed to matter the most, where we can use what purchasing power we have (far more significant than political power, of course) to pursue whatever goals we devise for ourselves. Yet we inevitably find the dictates of fashion encroaching on that sphere, circumscribing it; or, more depressingly, we begin to realize that keeping up with trends has become the most relevant personal goal that we can come up with. Read the rest of this entry »

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Abiding Interest: Utopian Visions and the Mortgaged Future

February 17, 2010 — Anton Steinpilz

The nearly total financialization of the U.S. economy leads one to wonder whether limits to growth owe more to “banker’s arithmetic” than to ecological pressures.

Nothing brings a breezy read to a halt quicker than a gesture to leftist political theory. Beyond a tiny coterie of (mostly tenured academic) partisans, whose livelihood depends on occupying the extreme margin of political discussion, leftist theorists win precious few readers. And with good reason. Their writings are formidably inaccessible, freighted with abstractions and often presuming detailed familiarity with the finer points of some past internecine debate. At a moment (one is tempted to write conjuncture) when time and its corollary, attention, are the scarcest resources of all, leftist political theorists can seem downright profligate, scoffing at economies of expression or communicative action. Tweets their works most definitely are not.

Yet among the rococo elaborations of abstract concepts, among the arabesques of jargon, the occasional lapidary phrase — remarkable in its own right, but thoroughly miraculous when compared to the rest of the text in which it’s discovered — presents itself. At any rate, this has been my experience engaging the work of Ernesto Laclau, an Argentine “post-Marxist” theorist. Not particularly known for the crystalline clarity of his prose, whether writing alone or with French political theorist Chantal Mouffe (as they did in their seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, published in 1985; a case where double the authorial effort meant double the impenetrability), Laclau presents a formidable challenge.* Yet there it was, in the midst of a dense thicket of theorization — this wonderful formulation: “The future is indeterminate and certainly not guaranteed for us; but that is precisely why it is not lost either.”

Laclau holds out for no messianic intervention of the sort Walter Benjamin invokes in his famous (and utterly remarkable) “Theses on the Concept of History.” Events constantly open on to the future no matter what occurs in the present, so each moment presents not a doorway through which some savior may enter, as Benjamin would have it, but presents a fighting chance for those who would upend the status quo in order to establish a more just and equitable polity. Each moment, in other words, affords people of goodwill the opportunity to become their own messiahs. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Rag and Bone Shop of the Self: Social Media and Networked Subjectivity

February 15, 2010 — Rob Horning

Postmodern alienation has given way to computer-age integration as social media like Facebook and Google Buzz encourage us reduce, reuse and recycle the trappings of identity.

To much ballyhoo, a lot of fanfare, and some consternation, Google rolled out last week a new service, Google Buzz, in an apparent effort to bring some of the dynamic of social networking and twittering directly into an email client and thus bringing users “beyond status updates.”

Gmail users logged in to their accounts only to be hijacked to an explanatory introduction page, which bluntly declares, “Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting.” Without warning, Buzz seizes upon a number of your previous correspondents from your address book and transforms them into “followers,” and it provides you a broadcasting space from which to address them en masse. And it simultaneously makes you into a follower as well. Follower is quickly supplanting friend as the key operative term in social life.

Google Buzz, whose name — perhaps by design — evokes the noxious concept of buzz marketing, works by automatically creating something like status updates out of our activity on other sites. Any tweets can be duplicated in Buzz. If you post a picture to any of several photo sites, it can be sent automatically to your followers as well. If you like an article in your RSS feed, you can redistribute  it with a click. If you write a blog post, it can be sent out to everyone on your list as its published. Basically it assumes that we want the broadest audience for anything we contribute to the internet; otherwise we wouldn’t be bothering. We are always in the process of manufacturing buzz for ourselves. To a degree buzz is our public selves. As far as Google is concerned, built into the notion of “sharing” is “sharing with everybody.” So naturally, the service requires you to opt out of many of its various features and to specifically bar those contacts with whom you are not particularly interested in sharing. Read the rest of this entry »

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Destructive Creation: Internet Disintermediation and the Rise of Efficiency

February 8, 2010 — 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. Read the rest of this entry »

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