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.

I remain unsure whether The Jersey Shore’s producers wished to elicit the viewing audience’s contempt for their featured Guido and Guidette subjects. Narcissistic, aggressive, incontinently foul-mouthed, almost sociopathically inconsiderate, they had a hard time winning this viewer’s sympathy. Then again, these qualities of theirs that repulsed me I have encountered in people other than Guidos, people who have likely never set foot on the eastern seaboard. In the Southwest, for instance, I’ve seen people just as deplorable as those of The Jersey Shore, it’s just that their conduct is in a mellower key. Being laid back, westerners’ signal characteristic, can often come off as just a sun-kissed kind of passive aggressiveness.

But what struck me most forcefully about the guys and gals of The Jersey Shore was how joylessly they went about their hedonism. Between Ronnie and Mike “The Situation” — a nickname that indiscriminately applies to a) Mike, b) Mike’s toned abs or c) just about any impending set of circumstances of indeterminate pleasurable promise (a quintessential floating signifier!) — two alpha-male housemates whose testosterone-fueled pas de deux is one of the more interesting things about the show (no doubt later in life Ronnie and Mike will end up lovers — a situation indeed!), talk frequently turns to the subject of “pounding out” women they meet in nightclubs or on the boardwalk.

I leave it to the reader’s imagination as to what this activity of “pounding out” involves. Suffice it to say, however, that what most remarkable is not the activity associated with the expression so much as the expression itself. “Pounding out” to me suggests activity one engages in not because one wants to, but because one has to. And this expression is fairly emblematic of the peculiar spirit of The Jersey Shore. The pursuit of pleasure on the show has a strangely workmanlike cast to it. One witnesses this in Ronnie, Mike and their Guido housemates Vinny and Pauly D. (whose name readies him for the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I’m convinced he’s fated to attend). Their approach to an evening’s clubbing closely resembles a contractor’s approach to a construction project or a plumber’s approach to a stopped toilet. The show’s Guidos come off as too detached, too pragmatic, too metacritical to persuade one that they are absorbed in the moment. For them the thrill, at once nerve-wracking and exhilarating, of meeting someone to whom one’s attracted seems beside the point. Getting a woman’s attention represents but one stage in the night’s business of eventual joyless pneumatics — like putting a sedan on the lift and poking it underside. These Guidos seem wholly uninterested in courtship as lived experience. To them it’s a game, or, perhaps more accurately, the expected work of leisure.

It was this air of unsentimental sexual pragmatism that eventually got me hooked on the show. Indeed, I quickly came to forget the original reason why I tuned in: to glimpse the unfamiliar ways and deeds of East Coast Guidos. Whatever sets The Jersey Shore cast apart as a representatives of a particular American subculture I came to consider irrelevant, because, fundamentally, they showed themselves to be more creatures of their historical moment than of their region of habitation. Perhaps accidents of geography did add something to the mix. A strange intensity attends the Guido and Guidettes’ activities, it’s true, and maybe their distinction rests solely on this. Such intensity remains, however, a difference in degree, not in kind. They embodied a certain more or less universal ethic, and simply expressed it their own uptempo way. This ethic I can’t help but think binds the cast of The Jersey Shore to their generation. They are ultimately less Guidos and Guidettes than they are sexual neoliberals.

Now by “sexual neoliberals” I don’t mean people who have affirmed anew a spirit of broad tolerance for things connubial, but people who have internalized certain principles that, though they first found articulation in another social register, have found wider application through having been transformed into a general disposition. The best definition of neoliberalism I’ve read comes from theorist and economic geographer David Harvey, whose 2005 book  A Brief History of Neoliberalism anyone interested in understanding current conditions must read. Harvey writes:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

If one aspect of human well-being is sexual fulfillment, then the individual seeking sexual fulfillment must be liberated in order to engage in the enterprise of seeking this fulfillment, even if it means liberation from conventions and norms governing sexual behavior. Mike “The Situation,” perhaps the worst offender in this respect, sets about finding partners of the opposite sex in a textbook neoliberal manner. He patrols the boardwalk and nightclubs for willing women. When he finds some, he squires them to the beach house he shares with Ronnie, Vinny, Pauly D., and also the show’s Guidettes — Sammi, JWoww, Snooki and Angelina. Once at the beach house, he plies his fair charges with booze and soaks with them in a hot tub.

Enviable "Situation": The Jersey Shore's Mike schools viewers on neoliberal principles.

Yet Mike, ever vigilant, doesn’t content himself with the ladies he’s just brought to the house. Every so often he sneaks away from his hosting duties to scan the boardwalk from the beach house’s second-story balcony. Whenever he spot prospects more appealing than the ones he currently has in the house he slides downstairs to the street and invites his new discoveries into the house. Often these new discoveries know that Mike has already had women in, having heard them cavorting in the rooftop hot tub. If these new discoveries intimate they are unfazed by this knowledge, Mike offers to kick out the women he’s already invited in. But if these new discoveries demur, Mike oh so subtly rejoins the festivities, acting as if his overtures to the women he spotted on the boardwalk never happened.

Mike employs this stratagem more than a few times during the course of The Jersey Shore’s run. Eventually I came to realize precisely what Mike was up to: He was trying to establish a hedge position. As if concerned that his current assets could possibly underperform, Mike felt the need to diversify. This of course presented some risk, as the change in his position, done too obviously or abruptly, could make his current assets disappear. Thus, if the more appealing investments he spots on the boardwalk prove unpromising, he can always retreat to his original position. Perhaps this is the ultimate meaning of his nickname, “The Situation.”

To me, very little distinguishes Mike’s romantic maneuverings from Goldman Sachs’ behavior in finance markets. What difference is there, for instance, between Mike’s surreptitiously approaching  women other than the ones he’s entertaining in his beach house and Goldman Sachs’s dealing with the Greece’s bond market, in which the firm gave Greece financial advice while at the same time short selling Greek bonds? Fucking or finance, it’s all the same — just business. I’m reminded of that famous passage in The Communist Manifesto wherein Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declare:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Of course, The Jersey Shore’s Mike “The Situation” and Goldman Sachs lend these prophetic words a more pessimistic air than their authors likely intended. Constant flux and upheaval do indeed compel people to face the real conditions of their lives. But what are these, exactly? If one is to follow the example of Mike “The Situation” or Goldman Sachs, these real conditions would seem to be those of thoroughgoing reification of human individuals and inexorable instrumental rationality. Money is how one gets rich, women how one gets off. The sad economism of everyday life. Markets in everything.

Truly, then, one may declare ours a consummately neoliberal age. What was once simply a set of economic principles has metastasized into a dominant ideology, a hegemonic worldview that shapes and choreographs even the most seemingly insignificant transactions of its unwitting subjects. This is Mike “The Situation’s” situation — and everyone else’s as well.

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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.

That prospect, not surprisingly, terrifies most people. No one wants to be obliged to invent new pleasures, even if that would make us more “authentic” or autonomous. As Marcuse explains:

The ideology of today lies in that production and consumption reproduce and justify domination. But their ideological character does not change the fact that their benefits are real. The repressiveness of the whole lies to a high degree in its efficacy: it enhances the scope of material culture, facilitates the procurement of the necessities of life, makes comfort and luxury cheaper, draws ever-larger areas into the orbit of industry — while at the same time sustaining toil and destruction. The individual pays by sacrificing his time, his consciousness, his dreams; civilization pays by sacrificing its own promises of liberty, justice and peace for all.

Sacrificing the joys of administered leisure seems unimaginable. Instead the logic of the work ethic snares all those who find themselves in its path. Unemployment becomes a crushing psychic burden, and is rightly reviled across the political spectrum. Refusing to sell one’s labor power is seen as somewhat inexplicable (if one isn’t already absolved by wealth, that is). Common sense dictates that if one had enough money (as if there were such a thing as “enough”), he wouldn’t bother to go to work and would instead bang on his drum all day. Such is the argument not only for the righteously idle rich, but also against a guaranteed minimum income or “social wage.” If you paid people to do nothing, then nothing is what they will do. Just ask Jim Bunning and his friends in the Republican party who think unemployment benefits encourage laziness.

The time-honored strategy for compelling work under capitalism is to leverage the reserve army of the unemployed — which has swelled to a mighty force in recent months. In Capital, Karl Marx argues such an army is useful for capitalists in keeping workers under their thumb:

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labor-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus-population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labor works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.

But the reserve-army strategy works only insofar as labor is a commodity, with workers interchangeable, their skills transferable. The more specific the labor, the more likely the workers in that field will retain bargaining power, and not only that, some residual pride in what they do, an identification with their work that makes more of it than a disutility, a necessary evil. Thus it has been beneficial for capitalists to make work drudgery, that is, to make it more efficient through the hierarchical division of labor and technological deskilling innovations, so as to subsume labor under capital more thoroughly, and at the same time offer the end products of the production process as compensation for workers’ loss of meaning in their work. Work made to suck proffers only the pale fruit of a wage with which to buy the exciting crap that other drudges have made or have offered on the market.

In a chapter called  “Why Work?” from his 1992 book The Politics of Identity, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz argues that productivity enhancements have to some degree eliminated the possibility of worker autonomy within the work world, and the prevailing ideology of consumerism has helped to make leisure the more pressing and meaningful engagement in everyday life. As a result the workplace is where domination is established and reproduced — not a place where skills are learned, social ties are developed and human nature and will to mastery is expressed. Aronowitz elaborates how capitalist management techniques succeeded in making work into empty “unwork” in the modern era, while producing enough goods and “repressive needs” to make consumerism appear to compensate for the emptiness. But, he argues, people will only accept consumerism  — as they are encouraged to by mass media representations and by their inculcated insecurity about social belonging — if they are unnaturally isolated from their natural companions in society, those with whom they would once have had solidarity with in the workplace.

Indeed, millions still seek jobs, but only to earn a living. Few jobs still carry with them the idea of a vocation such as is usually associated with professions or genuine crafts (neither of which correspond to their contemporary practices). Even much industrial labor of the past — mining for example — was closely linked with work cultures that far overshadowed the semi-skilled character of the work itself. The sense of vocation experienced by workers in retail trades or civil trades (two of the most important service sectors) was long eclipsed by the advent of corporate selling.

Work once provided a culture and a sense of belonging, an identity derived not only from the skills required but from the social rituals enacted on the proverbial shop floor and the cooperation and collaboration that takes place there and after hours. These social bonds are the ultimate source of the “general intellect” from which social value ultimately springs.

Marx argues in Capital that “social contact begets in most industries an emulation and a stimulation of the animal spirits that heighten the efficiency of each individual workman.” He offers a ringing paean to the “social productive power of labor, or the productive power of social labor. This power is due to co-operation itself. When the laborer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.” Aronowitz, for his part, claims that “Work is that human activity which expresses creative achievement and corresponds, therefore, to part of desire, our will to objectivate ourselves individually and collectively by creating objects or social relations.” At work in such an environment, we embrace a subjectivity that has joy in collaboration and reciprocity woven directly into its fabric along with a clear sense of purpose, a lived sense of a vocation rather than a vicarious one.

Workplace solidarity offered a potential source of resistance to administered consumerism — which itself is an appealing meme to consume: From the ideal of workplace cooperation stems the sentimental, nostalgic representations of lost working-class culture, as well as the tropes of contemporary workplace-based sitcoms, which offer a fantasia where the only work that takes place is the elaboration of each employee’s personality. In real life, Aronowitz cites the example of furloughed longshoremen in the late 20th century, whose experience in underemployment demonstrated

that the shift from production to consumption as the locus of everyday life is by no means automatic when “free” time dominates “necessary” labor time. When the workplace and the neighborhood are spatially contiguous and workers have succeeded in preserving an institutional equivalent of the shop floor to provide for the basis for their social interaction, consumerism is relegated to a subordinate place in their everyday experience.

But the production of identity, though it relies on an audience, is no longer a collaborative project undertaken at work. Suburbanization and commuting have all worked to destroy work-life integrity — often under the ironic banner of convenience. Here’s how Aronowitz describes the transformation, which was fairly complete in the United States by the end of the Reagan–Bush era:

The classic model of contemporary mass society is provided by the suburban or exurban location of industrial and commercial working spaces. The horizontal patterns of home construction produce low density living arrangements. Hence the nuclear family, the shopping center, the mass media constitute the nexus of social relationships that often effectively countervail the collective tasks performed at the workplace.

Aronowitz’s analysis sounds a lot like what I grew up with in a 1980s exurb. Work was regarded as a drag, identity hinged on what you could get at the mall (by far the most significant and most anticipated destination in everyday life), and the overriding problem was to find ways to connect meaningfully with peers and to escape the sense of being marooned with family in a detached, isolated house.

In a sense, such feelings of disconnected isolation manifest one of the vintage contradictions of capitalism: the tension between the need to commoditize labor yet still capitalize on labor cooperation in the workplace. By streamlining work processes in order to deskill them, workers themselves began to become superfluous, and work deadening. But capital needs to extract the surplus value workers produce when they collaborate. They can’t be demoralized to the point where they become unprofitable. This capitalistic dead-end loomed in the 20th century as “Fordist” industrialism no longer could cohere.

A delicate balance, then, must be struck between making work suck for workers (to keep it unfulfilling and alienating for them so they remain willing to sell off their labor power cheaply and seek life satisfaction in consumerism), but at the same time making being with one’s fellow workers seem fun (so we will inadvertently create value through our collaborative relations with them). And yet we mustn’t get so cozy with co-workers as to start figuring out we could be productive without bosses — especially since the “means of production” for postindustrial work can be no more expensive than a laptop and an internet connection.

Who's the boss?: social networks' new paradigm of "play-bor."

The advent of networked sociality offers a new way for capitalism to strike the balance. Enthusiasts for online culture often present it as though it offers a solution to the problems of atomization and the  “crisis in leisure” Aronowitz describes: “the effort of people to regain their sense of craft, and liberate themselves from their complete dependence on the wage relation for personal and social meaning.” And in a sense the crisis in leisure has done just that. People no longer have the sense that they live in a world in which “friendship and community-making have become as rare talents as good cabinet-making,” as Aronowitz writes. Instead we are increasingly connected in social networks and may thereby seem to have more community in our lives than in the days of suburban angst and dyadic withdrawal into the claustrophobic nuclear family. It has opened a whole new space in which people can construct identity, replacing what was lost as the workplace became deadening.

So it seems that the wage relation may no longer define people, and not only because fewer of them are drawing wages. It used to be that what compelled work was the threat of starvation. Now it is “compelled” as immaterial labor, by the promise of being someone and earning social recognition on terms favorable to the existing social order. The surplus generated by human cooperation can be harvested online without people even realizing they are working — that is, social life can become a covert job regardless of whether or not people think they are employed or getting a wage. They just need to be maintaining their friendships and their creativity online — escaping the alienation and isolation brought on by suburbia, by meaningless work, by anomie and loneliness.

These same ideas also emerged earlier, in the workplace, to complement the shift to a postindustrial service economy. The product manufactured, more often than not, is affect — emotions, pleasures, the other side of the coin of domination. Maurizio Lazzarato, in Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labor details this shift in broad terms. Immaterial labor — “audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, etc.” — makes apparent consumption into a form of production. It “gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers, and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes.” Work becomes a matter of creating an environment in which these things can flow.

To that end, management encourages communication and networking within the workplace, which would seem like a good thing if it weren’t merely a higher form of compulsion:

The management watchword “you are to be subjects of communication” risks becoming even more totalitarian than the rigid division between conception and execution, because the capitalist would seek to involve the very subjectivity and will of the worker within the production of value. He would want command to arise from the subject himself, and from the communicative process : the worker controls himself and makes himself responsible within his team without intervention by the foreman, whose role would be redefined as a role of an animator…. What this phase of transformation still succeeds in hiding is that the individual and collective interests of the workers and those of the company are not one and the same.

Web 2.0, likewise, is not a solution to the atomization problem but is instead its apotheosis, the social factory. Its space is preformatted, proscribing autonomous spontaneity. People can only express their being as media — as digitized, quantifiable expression. It makes life pursuits into odd jobs of consumerism — shaping a fashion trend here, hyping a band there, making connections between disparate products, orchestrating synergies. Online sociality materializes the notion that people are no more than a series of signifiers articulated serially, in prescribed, administered commercial spaces, that they are nothing more than their latest status update, and whatever response this managed to generate. Selfhood has become a broadcasting project, not the holistic, lived experience one might wish it to be.

Once, the struggle was to articulate a real, authentic-seeming identity within a work world dictated by the needs of capital. It was a matter of “not selling out” even though one sold his labor power in a way which perpetuated the system. Now, the problem is different. Before workers developed identity and a sustaining culture in opposition to management, subverting the workplace by ingraining within it a kind of resistance, a conspiracy against capital that played out as the preservation of one’s own personal aims. But in the new system of immaterial labor, social networking and the pseudo-employment of public self-fashioning, making one’s identity is part of the production process that is subsumed under capital. It proceeds within commercial spaces, to suit the mutual ends private citizens share with businesses. Their respective brands become co-extensive.

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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.

The analogy here highlights the peculiar rationality characteristic of extraordinary circumstances — a sort of logic of crisis, one might say. This rationality generally finds one those with sufficient nerve; in a crisis, only the coolest heads prevail, while most others tend to go to pieces, regarding the unfolding catastrophe as upsetting the game board, scattering the pieces. One can perhaps attribute this reaction to the fact that the onset of a crisis carries the bulk of the crisis’s significance and force, just as a storm front brings the greatest fury of a storm. The onset of a crisis, in other words, people tend to consider equivalent to the crisis as completely realized fact.

But those in the know understand the central tenet of what one could call the gnosis of crisis: a crisis is an event that occurs in time and space. This may strike one as a trivial insight, but it nonetheless carries serious implications. The Wall Street Journal, in a story appearing in the January 28, 2009 edition, quotes Rahm Emmanuel, then newly named chief of staff for President Obama, as saying: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” Emmanuel was speaking, of course, of the Great Bank Bailout of late 2008 and its immediate aftermath, a deep recession which beset the U.S. despite the assurances of those who pushed for said bailout. (Most I’m sure know the details by now, so I will refrain from rehearsing them). Emmanuel thus recommends himself as just one of these gnostics of crisis. While most everyone else raged at at colossal swindle of the whole affair, circled their financial wagons for a long bout of dearth, or feverishly burnished résumés in anticipation of impending layoffs, Emmanuel delighted over the uncommonly good luck that found him. To individuals of Emmanuel’s turn of mind, crisis is capital. Inaction during crisis, meanwhile, amounts to squandering of this capital.

In the financial sector, where capital of every stripe is king, the beneficence of crisis is somewhat of an axiom, even a business model. Movers and shakers in the financial class, perhaps plagued by impulse control problems, perhaps drunk with the arrogance of power, even engage in what magicians or spell casters call “revelation of the method.” These grandees of lower Manhattan give away the game, revealing everything involved in their misdeeds, albeit in a subtle, casual manner (so as not to arouse suspicion or alarm). Titans of finance often remark dryly, almost off-handedly, this bromide: “There’s money to be made on the way up, and money to be made on the way down.” Business cycles and crises set in motion a version of what French theorist and historian of philosophy Michel Foucault calls “microphysics of power,” an opportunity of a particular duration resulting from what one says or does and its effects. A commonplace of stock-market trading is that there’s money to be made on “the way up” (as a stock price ascends) as well as “on the way down” (as a stock price descends). This saying gets closest to what “microphysics of power” entails — a kairos, a seasonability to a particular advantage which from moment to moment undergoes alterations and variations until such time as the advantage disappears. The concept of microphysics of power considers an opportunity’s specific duration as a concatenation of moments, each of which is a complex of particular configurations and possibilities for action whose outcomes are more or less predictable. When, for instance, a sponsoring senator or congresswoman insists that a particular legislative bill must be passed into law in two weeks because she knows that beyond such time other legislators will have had time to study the bill and consider its more distasteful elements, she is employing a strategy that proceeds from microphysics-of-power type calculations.

Profits of doom: crisis as capital.

Considered holistically as an event which in it particulars arranges a sequence of moments each with its own kairos, a crisis presents unprecedented opportunity in how it configures circumstances, situations and actors. Ordinary protocols speed up, slow down, break down, or indeed, disappear altogether, and as they do they strip away familiar contexts. This acceleration or suspension typically disorient those involved (except, of course, those like Emmanuel who have been wishing for just such an event). Actors and institutions find themselves in peculiar situation: exposed, confused, but also empowered, provided they have the presence of mind to seize the initiative presented by crises. French philosopher Alain Badiou gives this phenomenon a more theoretical articulation. In Metapolitics he writes:

[W]henever there is a genuinely political event, the State reveals itself. It reveals its excess of power, its repressive dimension. But it also reveals a measure for this usually invisible excess. For it is essential to the normal functioning of the State that its power remain measureless, errant, unassignable. The political event puts an end to all this by assigning a visible measure to the excessive power of the State.

Crises in the political domain tend to throw a spanner in the works of government. The institutions thereof, which regulate, modulate and constrain the exercise of political power fall into disarray. Power thus springs free the mechanisms of governmental institutions, showing just how excessively saturated these institutions were with it in the first place. This is another way of saying that, in the political arena at least, the opportunities presented in a crisis usually come at the expense of the existing constitution. Opportunists like Emmanuel, true gnostics of crisis, understand this intuitively, in much the same manner as Thulsa Doom of the 1981 film Conan the Barbarian understands “the riddle of steel.”

Those prophets of the computer age who frequently claim that the various wefts of the World Wide Web will ineluctably entangle us all in a global village whose economy is that of information exchange — and thus one can only assume that with the establishment of this village will come increased understanding and a great info-commonwealth of humanity — I find go against the constructs currently promulgated in contemporary discourse. The folks at the magazine Adbusters recently joined the fray (which includes my fellow GenBubchiks Rob Horning and Ylajali Hansen) of commentators knocking the so-called Millennials, or Generation Y. Generation Y, word has it, though they do perhaps reject the impositions of the dominant ideology, seem extremely reluctant to reject its splendors. They want the butter, but they don’t want to do the necessary churning. Instead of inventing a new iconography of cool, instead of elaborating new categories of meaning, they remain content with sign system into which they’ve emerged.

The constant refrain of the ideology of the self-esteem movement which underwrites the child-rearing strategies of Gen-Yers parents is not “You deserve better than capitalism,” but rather, “You deserve better than the jerks exploited to serve the interests of those to whom falls the lion’s share.” The broad tendency among the popular-culture-derived Gen-Y outlook is that singular specialness as an a priori (again, an ideological construct of the self-esteem movement) finds its only just correlative in some sort of rentier position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. After all, those t-shirts popular a few years ago among teenage girls read “Princess,” not “Paper-pusher.”

In Cyberia, everyone is a petty despot, a tinpot dictator, exploiting crises as they fall his way.

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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.

A version of the “inevitable technological change” argument is often deployed with regard to the demise of print media, which has fallen victim of internet media which have brought more information more cheaply to many more people. Yes, many of those people who once made their living working at newspapers and magazines must now find something else to get paid for, but in the meantime they should quit grumbling and use their unemployment as an opportunity to take advantage of the digital surplus that has put them out of work: stream movies and TV shows all day long and work on getting the personal iTunes library over a million songs; spend the time fixing up the old Facebook profile and reconnecting with forgotten friends.

But it is not as though God decided to unleash new technologies on capitalist economies. These innovations are driven not by fate or a teleological vision of progress but by the pursuit of profit. A recent New York Times article explains structural changes slightly differently:

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

The pursuit of innovation then is not the quest for social benefits so much as it’s the search for a way to replace expensive and unpredictable labor (to whom companies may incur longstanding responsibilities) with cheap, docile machines (to which they owe nothing in return for unlimited proprietorship over them). As Stephen Marglin argued in his 1974 article, “What Do Bosses Do?” (pdf), technology gets developed not to make all of our lives better but to make capitalists more secure in their authority.Workers don’t need bosses, he contends, but the capitalist way of structuring  production necessitates hierarchy and the curtailment of workers’ autonomy. His examples suggest that hierarchy and its technological apparatuses may actually impede production efficiency. “This perversion of the competitive principle, which lies at the heart of the capitalist division of labor, made discipline and supervision a class issue rather than an issue of technological efficiency; a lack of discipline and supervision could be disastrous for profits without being inefficient.” In other words, workers must be bossed around not because it improves a firm’s output but because it gives the managers a better stake in the proceeds. What gets called technological improvement  is often an improvement in the stability of hierarchy, typically a matter of deskilling workers along the lines Harry Braverman details in Labor and Monopoly Capital.

Marglin traces capitalist interloping to the days before factories, when “putter-outers” interposed themselves between the workers who made things and the market. “Separating the tasks assigned to each workman was the sole means by which the capitalist could, in the days preceding costly machinery, ensure that he would remain essential to the production process as integrator of these separate operations into a product for which a wide market existed.” With the advent of machinery, capitalists could use expensive equipment to assure their necessity, but machines also meant they needed to keep on fewer workers. (This is one of the classic “contradictions of capitalism” Marx identified. Surplus value can theoretically only be extracted from living labor, so replacing people with machines — dead labor congealed into capital — will presumably hurt profits eventually when all the productivity gains are squeezed out of the workers that remain.)

Recessions have the effect of pitting workers against one another rather than management. As work becomes more provisional — contract-based, freelance, or part-time — and union-style labor protections vanish, workers who manage to hold on to full-time jobs can begin to seem like a mysteriously fortunate elite, with ineffable, nontransferable qualities that make them eminently employable when so many others are not. Rather than skill-rich employees with useful knowledge to offer, they become entitled insiders who focus their efforts on further mystifying the tactics and connections that have allowed them to survive, and pressuring employers systematically to favor them over new hires. Drawing on the work of several economists, Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution suggests the unemployment story may be seen as a struggle between insiders and outsiders — insiders’ advantages discourage firms from hiring as they would if the labor pool was undifferentiated. (This paper [pdf] summarizes the insider-outsider hypothesis.)

It would suit business fine, however, if the struggle between insiders and outsiders were resolved by making everyone essentially an outsider — reducing labor turnover costs to the firm closer to zero. If  skills could be made into capital and workers deskilled to the point of interchangeability, then all workers could be treated equally poorly as they would be shuffled in and out of the reserve army of the unemployed. But such a thorough deskilling is impossible to imagine, and likely counterproductive for capitalists, who are able to extract more value from the skills workers develop but fail to value properly the labor market. Thus a more lucrative arrangement is for workers to continue to develop skills, but outside of markets and in forms that workers do not recognize as labor skills. And then, if capital could devise a way to exploit those skills without having to hire them or grant them insider status, it will truly be the best of all possible worlds.

This may help explain the dissolution of the old culture industries and the rise of communications companies. Culture industries sought to lock up talent and exploit the intellectual property they generated; communications companies are content to provide platforms and harvest the valuable information generated as a by-product of customers’ leisure activities. The key is to increase the amount of leisure time for those who create more value in their leisure through immaterial labor than they would through more traditional forms of work.

And so certain dog-whistle messages begin to filter through the culture: Isn’t work sort of a bummer anyway? Isn’t that what “funemployment” is all about? To put these lures into econospeak, the issue may not be one of labor demand but of the labor supply curve bending backward. Aren’t some workers apt to substitute leisure for wages, if only they could? Haven’t wages become less important, thanks to past overproduction, easier credit, and rampant sharing online and elsewhere. The substitution effect is the supposed selling point of the “gig economy” (working only when you feel like it) and is implicit in “funemployment.” According to an L.A. Times article on the subject, the funemployed “thumb their nose” at work, “send a message to corporate America,” and spend their time pursuing higher goals of self-actualization: “They can post online photos of globe-trotting vacations, blog about their long lunches and broadcast via Twitter the day’s weighty choices, as @james6378 did last week when deciding between Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes cereals.”

Perhaps a certain slice of unemployment — for the current generation of well-educated 20-and 30-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.

Sight maintenance: "funemployed" twentysomethings the backbone of the narcissist economy.

Why would capitalism want such a cohort of identity-conscious semi-slackers? Mainly because the “work” of their extended leisure time develops a set of consumption skills for the entire consumer society. Their labor has the critical function of not only of demonstrating how to consume more, but also categorizing the meanings of goods and services, helping manage the ever-accelerating turnover in significations. In The World of Goods, Baron Isherwood and Mary Douglas argue that goods, regardless of their putative use value, have the chief social function of offering marking services: “Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid processes of classifying persons and events.” By consuming things along the lines of the rituals prescribed by society, we mark a social agreement about the meanings of those things.

In order for goods to serve as markers, they must make up a coherent system — one must know with certainty what it means to wear certain brands of clothes, listen to certain sorts of music, espouse certain ideas about art, wine, furniture and so on. But the meanings, traveling through society like currency, are always changing, and the pace of change is always accelerating, as Douglas and Isherwood explain:

In the top consumption classes the attempts of some to control the information scene are being foiled by others who stand to gain by changing it. But since this is the class that both uses and fabricates the information, naturally they cannot help but outbid each other and speed up the game, turning the society into  a more and more individualistic and competitive scene. As they do, something quite simple happens which increases the differences between their class and those at the bottom.

In a consumer society, power stems from being able to “choose rationally in an intelligible world” — to be able to make the choices that enable us to “share names” of things while signaling entitlement and securing deference. Whoever controls the way meanings change controls the social hierarchy, and the faster meanings change, the wider the gulf grows between classes. “Ethnography suggests that competition to acquire goods in the information class will generate high admission barriers and efficient techniques of exclusion,” Douglas and Isherwood write. Speeding up consumption and the redefinition of its rituals is one of those techniques. Another: “Consumers will tend to create exclusive inner circles controlling access to a certain kind of information.” Information, then, does not necessarily want to be free. It wants to be managed.

Society needs people to elaborate the rituals, to espouse the markers, to prove them in the public process of consumption. As the process accelerates, this becomes more and more difficult and time-consuming to keep up with. Enter Web 2.0, a real-time trend tracker and data harvester, and enter the newly “unemployable” youth leisure class, which may actually be busily working on reproducing the ideology of consumerism online. When a self-conscious group of hyperconsumers take to the internet to chart their retail course among friends and stake out their identity, they are simultaneously working as cultural functionaries, taming the promiscuous field of goods, doing the grunt work in developing the marking services that help the haute-consumer classes perfect its privilege. They secure the appropriate set of meanings to preserve the status of the class to which they have pretensions of belonging. Though outside the traditional job market, we may be able to feel like we are insiders with respect to consumption — true connoisseurs, with rich inner lives we share on Facebook, no matter our level of income. But in fact we may only be guards and servants for the consumerist castle.

Online sociality facilitates new ways to mediate this meaning-making process, partially privatizing and capitalizing it. It’s a new arena for money-making, and also simultaneously a reinvigoration of the old means for reproducing the capitalism’s class structure in the information age. Immaterial labor in social networks and the like naturalize and render concrete the various class-association patterns as information networks, formalizing what has always been true about the cliquishness of status. The networks will help assure that only the right people receive the crucial and ever more timely information about opportunities and about how to communicate social meanings that will attract favorable attention rather than ridicule and exclusion. Class barriers that are technologically mediated like this may be more insurmountable since they are not dependent on cold hard cash but are meted out in terms of online identity and attention, things we are likely to hold ourselves personally culpable for.

But rather than a liberation of a fortunate generation of gadget-happy narcissists, these changes in the structure of the work world may merely be the latest iteration of the logic of capital. Writes media-studies professor Trebor Scholz, “It is crucial to understand that pleasurable cultural production and sociality is turned into capital” by social-network participation. “Today we witness a centrality of proprietary platforms online, which substantiates that the Internet embodies a complex continuation of capital.” Our social behavior is taken away from us, in the sense that it is turned to account by capital. Consider sociologist Stanley Aroniwitz’s claim in The Politics of Identity that “Just as property is the theft of the labor of the immediate producer in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, so technology is the theft of the artisan’s craft in the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labor under capital.” It seems as though this could be extended to cover a more recent transformation, a new dimension, enabled by networking technology, of the logic of capital: the subsumption of immaterial labor under capital, which plays out as the theft of friendship.

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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.

Generation Y is the largest generation yet. There’s a lot of potential for political change tied up with them because of sheer numbers alone. The shock of not landing that $175,000 a year job by age 24 might just catapult them into some sort of consciousness, but it also might just make for an embittered, paralyzed mass of unweened adults instead.

Road to nowhere: Generation-Y career hopeful spins his wheels.

But it’s hard not to imagine that their expectant indolence was constructed from outside. They are, after all, a generation fully immersed in the wide and deep stream of junk culture. From day one, they’ve been the captive audience of the mass marketers and social psychologists, so their optimism isn’t surprising, given that they’ve been trained from the get go to be cheerful consumers until the end.

And yet, Gen-Yer optimism remains weirdly decoupled from any real sense of what it means actually to have to work for a living. The wage system is something altogether alien. The wildly inflated salaries this cohort pay themselves in their imaginings they regard simply as a sinecure or annuity owed them by a world undeservingly graced by their fabulousness. If such fabulousness comes at a price in the low six figures (to start, of course), then the world has gotten off cheap. At the risk of reductive thinking, I can’t help but think that television and cinema are to blame for this staggeringly delusional, unfathomably narcissistic way of thinking. If one derives her worldview, at least in part, from the kinds modeled for her most frequently, then one need look no further than the various dramas and comedies of the large and small screen. Despite their differences in setting, situation and conceit, these movies and programs display a single common tendency, which involves the representation — or, more accurately, non-representation — of work. Very little does one see of people engaged in the drudgery necessary to keep the power on and food on the table. Rather, what little is seen of the workplace (the work in most cases is of a glamorous sort) usually involves those odd moments of goofing off, goldbricking and whatnot. No sooner is the office or studio glanced at than the story hurries to another scene — a character’s home, a bar, what have you — as if made anxious to linger so long over anything which even offers the merest suggestion of economic necessity.

If, on the other hand, the film or program cannot easily repress suggestions of economic necessity for practical reasons (the show may be set in a workplace, or may involve people of a certain profession), then it effects its bit of labor-denying legerdemain by making actual work incidental to the real matter of the show. The duties characters were ostensibly hired to perform become incidental to the personal drama, the various couplings, pairings, divisions and intrigues among the characters: Reviving a gunshot victim occasions Dr. Studly’s confessio amantis to Nurse Lonelyheart as they lean over a sucking chest wound and gaze meaningfully at each other. The push to assemble a blockbuster legal defense leads to an all-nighter with ordered-in Chinese food and domestic beer. Two rival associates, both promising young hotshots, drop the cudgels of their long-standing rivalry and learn that they need to cooperate. You get the picture.

Regardless which narrative tack a film or program takes, the emphasis is the same: Personal matters are the real business of life, and work is that thing one does — offscreen — in the downtime between soul kisses, trysts or other escapades. Anyone who has had a job in the real world can report that bringing one’s personal life into the workplace is strenuously discouraged as a drag on one’s productivity. But one would never know this if all she had to go by was Hollywood. And, lacking much sustained or significant engagement with the real world for having been cosseted and micro-parented by their anxious Boomer parents, Gen-Y’ers seem incapable of drawing a clear distinction between their personal and professional lives largely because of all the television and cinema they’ve imbibed. They are thus nonplussed when hotness and ample self-esteem don’t send them hurtling pass their co-workers into the executive boardroom.

And how different child-reading modes were during yesteryear! I recently came across a 1933 home economics manual, within which was a chapter on the proper means of raising an American child. The first mistake in child rearing, the manual suggests, is “inviting whims”: the early-twentieth-century child had to conform to the realities of family life, realities that were usually quite harsh because of … well … the bad economic depression going on then. That didn’t mean that children were denied pleasure — quite the opposite, in fact. The depression-era child was, at least according to ideal situations depicted in home economics textbooks, a valued and respected member of the family. But it was not considered an always already special, unique human being; it had to learn to craft that uniqueness and specialness through discipline and restraint. It’s hard not to imagine this lesson in “bucking up” came in useful during the years following the depression and well into the war years.If anything, it made for a generation responsible for the American glory years, the dessicated carcass of which the current generation wishes to scavenge — with a minimum of effort but a maximum of gain.

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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.”

At the time, I couldn’t quite understand what John meant by “freedom.” Earning under $30,000 a year at age 38 seemed like a death sentence to my twenty-something mind. But now, more than a few years later, I think I understand what John meant. Last night I watched Frontline’s Digital Nation (video), an exposé of how absolutely wired we’ve become as a society. I cringed as I saw Korean men lined up like bowling pins in front of computer screens, senseless to everything but the inane game they were playing. Images of dead-eyed Gen-Yers, twitching from too much Ritalin and too little frontal-lobe activity, glued to their Facebook sites filled me with stomach-burning bile. I smiled a bit at the World of Warcrafters who had found romance in their online world — there at least was a touch of the human amid the simulacra. But it was the bourgeois professionals attached to their Blackberries, planning meetings after dinner in Second Life, checking their email while on a hard-earned vacation to Mexico and networking while on a weekend family outings that made me want to blow my brains out across my futon.

Nowadays, that plum of a compensation package, with 401ks and free composite fillings, comes at a terrible cost. Upward mobility no longer signals increasing freedom, but enslavement. When you receive your hard-earned white collar (a bit dingy now, after the recession) and free Blackberry, you’re agreeing to a life of constant harassment, of thoughts never finished and moments devoid of meaning because they come second to work. Never again will you be able to step on a five-hour flight and just stare out the window contemplating a perspective so unprecedented in human history, so godlike it boggles the mind. No, the airframes are wired now, so you’ll have to check your email in case Big Boss decides you need to pull a report out of stale air sometime between gulping down peanuts and a ginger ale and landing. And vacation? Forget about getting away from it all — those two weeks of vacation could cost you your job, so you’ve got to “keep in touch” lest you find your position has been outsourced to Bangladesh because, well, the downtrodden denizens of the developing world aren’t so uppity to demand things like two weeks of peace a year.

Cleaning up in the New Economy: a responsibility arbitrageur.

And it seems like people are starting to catch on — at least as far as other reaches of the net are concerned. USA Today reported last week that some souls have decided to jump the social-networking ship. Sites that specialize in erasing one’s online persona are growing in popularity:”That desire to unplug has made an unexpected success out of websites such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and Seppukoo (a play on the Japanese word for “suicide”), free sites that automate and turbocharge the otherwise laborious manual process of scrapping your online self.”

While I’m not one for social networking, I can understand the impulse to unplug from all those sites demanding constant updates and feedback. More than that, however, I understand the impulse to make yourself totally unavailable at times. Because I now realize John was a sage. He glimpsed the future. Keep it simple, stick to a simple job, and you’ll be able to go home at night and be alone with your thoughts. No one needs to hold an emergency meeting with a waitress or postal clerk after the office has closed. A janitor doesn’t need to brown-nose via Facebook while camping with his kids. That guy at the DMV who takes your (always unflattering) driver’s license photograph never worries about all those urgent emails flooding his work inbox. No, in those jobs you put in your eight hours of hard, shitty work and then you leave it.

I really wanted to become a white-collar professional (honest!), and I do like to work hard like any red-blooded American, but the technological developments of the past few years have got me doing a complete 180. Now instead of dreaming of being a college professor (young Gen-Yers never know when to stop with the illiterate emails, and their being the new student-consumers and all, you can’t just hit “delete” when you’ve had enough of their blarney) or head honcho at some big business or another, I dream of how I can erase the degrees off my résumé and perhaps slip into a position that garners little notice and little hassle. I’ve dropped my dream of making the big bucks and am now figuring out how I can earn my freedom during the hours I’m not at work. In my more disheartened moments, I’ve visions of opening a little shop on the side of the interstate, selling Mexican pottery, Austrian pastries and homemade soap and never answering another email or cell phone call again.

Obviously I see the merits of certain technological innovations. I’m a blogger, after all. But it’s an uneasy relationship. Sometimes it takes me days to check my personal email or voicemail because, well, the act fills me with a strange anxiety. I’m still not used to it, despite having had the internet in my home since I was fourteen years old (I have fond memories of AOL 1.0 and The Cure chatroom). But I can deal with those things, and sometimes even enjoy them. A Blackberry, or iPhone, on the other hand, would kill me only because I know they are vehicles for constant harassment — there’s no excuse for not answering your email when everyone knows you have an iPhone. So I’m now determined to make under $30,000 a year, which shouldn’t be a problem in light of the fact that the current recession is gutting the middle class. With my luck, however, $30,000 a year will become the marginal tax bracket, bringing with it all kinds of stress and responsibilities, and like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III, I’ll say, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in!”

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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.

Despair over this loss of control prompts the fantasy of the return to use value: the longing to acquire only goods that are “really” necessary and that we will use strictly according to their function. “I just buy what I need. I don’t care about trends.” This is slightly strange, because for most of history humans have sought to escape the constraints of necessity so that their true individuality could emerge beyond the collective instincts for survival. Only when our needs are met does our behavior become truly free. But the conundrums of identity-driven consumerism have managed to prompt a reversal of that. Tyrannized by what our disposal of discretionary income says about us, some of us choose to pretend that we have no such discretion.  The various anti-branding screeds, austerity cults and voluntary simplicity movements that have emerged since the 1990s are an expression of this. They build on the somewhat shaky logic that holds that if somehow everyone could recognize that we are consume only what we have to, they won’t be allowed to judge what the consumption is meant to represent. The goods we have will no longer be seen as signifying anything about our identity. Everyone will recognize a purity and a discretion in our minimalism, and the sanctity of the private self, a self free to express itself however it sees fit through its actions, will prevail.

The myth of use value has its empirical basis. In their 2007 paper, “Where Consumers Diverge from Others: Identity Signaling and Product Domains,”  Jonah Berger and Chip Heath sought to determine which sort of goods people see as saying something about themselves. They found that functional goods are less likely to be used to signal identity, and the functional attributes of goods are less likely to be read in terms of their potential meanings.

Based on psychological discounting (Kelley 1973), people should find it easier to attribute someone’s choice to individual characteristics when the choice does not produce obvious functional benefits. Backpacks and pens have an obvious functional component that is missing from music, indeed the very afunctionality of music makes it a stronger signal of identity. Afunctionality also illuminates which product attributes are more likely to serve as signals. Clothes are functional, but their color and style are less functional.

But the escape to use value is nonetheless a fantasy, akin to those early 1990s bands that sought to have “no image” — as if that then did not become their image. Pretending we can hide behind the functionality of our goods and our behavior is ultimately an extension of the untenable individualist ideology that has helped elevate consumerism to such a prominent place in our culture. The zeal for rejecting “trends” is generally fueled by the fantasy of being able to reject society altogether and live a Crusoe-like lifestyle of untainted self-sufficiency. Consumerism, by letting us purchase goods that can seem to supplant human relationships, is a providential means by which we can abstract ourselves out of social norms and responsibilities, with what we consume having no ramifications for anyone but ourselves. It’s akin to the Hummer-driver mentality, the curious attitude of “my status symbols are none of your business.”

Living by such principles as those attempts to solve the problems inherent in social communication by pretending that there is no such thing, and that all communication is interpersonal, if not entirely solipsistic. The communication methods enshrined in Web 2.0 applications take this to its logical conclusion, presenting personal communication as asynchronous broadcasting. When we speak, we speak to everyone with no particular concern for context or for when our updates will actually be received. The idea of community gets re-branded as “social network,” with each of the network’s nodes safely insulated from the others to which it’s linked.

If, through a rigid dedication to use-value functionality, our consumption becomes free of unwanted meanings, it’s only because we have effectively prevented it from have any meaning for ourselves. In The World of Goods anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood take great pains to debunk the view that consumption can ever merely be a matter of sating individual needs, arguing that consumption is essential to establishing and maintaining communities. That is to say, despite consumerism’s promise to elevate us above society into a hedonistic world of private convenience, consumption is actually a fundamental way we participate in our society. Consumption choices, in their view, are a  basic unit of culture out of which necessary categories and boundaries are built. “Consumption is a ritual process whose primary function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events,” they write. “Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid processes of classifying persons and events.” Therefore consumption will always bring us up against exercises in exclusion and inclusion, of group delineation.

Often consumption choices will signal inclusion and exclusion simultaneously, or they come together in clusters that signal any number of “truths” about ourselves in a given moment. The different levels of meaningfulness in these choices allow for the coherence of certain behavior that can otherwise seem contradictory. The pursuit of conformity and individuality often occur simultaneously, because we are placing ourselves in different groups at the same time, and those levels of identification are themselves hierarchical — some identities are more important to us than others, are more important socially than others, and so on. What sort of music player you have is less important than what sort of music you play, even though the signals in the latter domain are harder for people generally to accurately decode (making for a more ineffable, satisfyingly unique-seeming self). Berger and Heath write:

Although certain domains tend to be used in identity inference making, that does not mean that people cannot express identity in other domains. These identity signals are probably less likely to be picked up by the population at large, but they may be helpful in coordinating with other members of a highly sophisticated in-group. Buying a very high-end stove may not be a good way of signaling identity to most people because most people do not look to stoves for identity signals. But the high-end stove may be a good way to signal to interior designers or kitchenophiles. Even in functional domains, extremes — extreme knowledge, purchasing an extremely costly item, or attending to fine details — may be good signals because they separate sophisticates from the general population.

The less obvious the signal, the more refined the identity, and the higher that identity domain is in the hierarchy of signification. The retreat to use value, then, may only masquerade as proclamation of transcendent individuality. Instead it may be a mystified attempt to climb that hierarchy of identity domains, to signify personal identity with dog-whistle goods that only the right people will be able to recognize and interpret.

Mirror stage: consumerism mediates the "ideal-I."

Consumerist ideology promotes the notion that “pure” needs never involve gaining social recognition or a sense of how we fit in, even as it supplies the goods and meanings that mediate identity. It urges us to think that we can have some sort of social identity without bothering to be social, but by dealing entirely with the market instead as isolated, exalted individuals. Advertising is a chief means for conveying this ideology, primarily because its ubiquity has led us to conclude that we are impervious to it, that it doesn’t persuade us. But ads do more than try to sell a particular product; they offer a widely dispersed set of ideas that seem like common social ground, that substitute themselves for the long-lost public sphere.

In Decoding Advertisements, Judith Williamson argues that “advertisements are selling us something else besides consume goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.” Even when we aren’t convinced by a particular ad to buy anything, we are nevertheless led to assume that other people are convinced, and that from the totality of ads we can deduce social norms and salient lifestyle distinctions that are operating generally, even as we hold ourselves above them. The goods become shorthand for inferences and judgments that we can make about other people but that we can believe we are immune from. Ads lift us above the other people who are duped by them. That is how they persuade us.

That elevation is the way in which ads stake their claim for shaping our subjectivity. It is one of the means by which they flatter us. Another way is how ads call out to us, seem to address us specifically. Williamson points out that “there is no logical reason to suppose that the advertisement had ‘you’ in mind all along. You have to exchange yourself with the person ’spoken to,’ the spectator the ad creates for itself.” Ads turn us into their implied reader when we consume them, an apparently attractive bargain because the “you” of ads is always an important person with money and taste whose decisions about breakfast cereals or watch brands are held to be earth-shatteringly important.

Of course, part of us sees through the ads ploys to hail us and flatter us into malleability. We recognize their insincerity. But insincere flattery can still be effective, as marketing professors Elaine Chan and Jaideep Sengupta demonstrate in a recent paper (“Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective,” Journal of Marketing Research 47, 122–133). They report that their findings “are consistent with the premise that the implicit favorable reaction to flattery, instead of being replaced by the discounted explicit judgment, continues to exist along with it.” Not only that, the implicit attitude is “more resistant to subsequent negative information” than the explicit one. The overt rejection of insincere flattery serves as a screen to permit us to accept the flattery at a deeper level, because it provides an occasion to indulge in unearned recognition.

Advertisements have always exploited this principle, intimating that we have magically earned a right to think of ourselves as special and significant. Most importantly, it allows us to feel for a moment as though we have garnered social recognition without having to do anything socially useful. Then, so flattered,we don’t question some of the other assumptions about us that ads establish as social facts. As Williamson explains:

Ads create an ‘alreadyness’ of ‘facts’ about ourselves as individuals: that we are consumers, that we have certain values, that we will freely buy things, consume, on the basis of those values, and so on. We are trapped in the illusion of choice… [Ads] invite us ‘freely’ to create ourselves in accordance with the way in which they have already created us.

Williamson argues that ads work mainly by creating an arena into which we can enter and make meanings, and it’s that meaning-making process that traps us, not any specific ad-based purchases.

Nothing [in the ad] even ’says’ that Catherine Deneuve is ‘like’ Chanel no. 5, or that they have a similar aura. We are given two signifiers, and required to make a ’signified’ by exchanging them. The fact that we have to make that exchange, to do the linking work which is not done in the ad, but which is only made possible by its form, draws us into the transformational space between the units of the ad. Its meaning only exists in this space: the field of transaction; and it is here that we operate — we are this space.

There are clear parallels between the transformational space of ads and the interactive spheres opened up by commercial social networks — in which brands intermingle with people on equal terms and data about the sort of connections we make are carefully aggregated. Much of our behavior online consists of this “linking work” — a form of immaterial labor which strengthens the consumerist code of meanings for goods while presenting that work as the strengthening of ties between friends and family. We are recognized as subjects by virtue of performing this sort of work.

It may be that the internet is expanding the kinds of domains that can signal identity, driving the domain hierarchy to ever further reaches of minute refinement. Berger and Heath claim that the product choices that are typically used for identity signaling are “publicly visible and made from a large choice set and take time or effort to make.” Web 2.0 services seemed to make more product choices visible and thus potentially identity-signaling. Social networks also help give shape to the groups that we seek to belong to through consumer goods — the networks produce and disseminate meanings for goods that need not be engineered in advance but that add value to the products. Social networks give us a field to display our identity in and a compendium from which to learn possible meanings that can be displayed. These are becoming more and more refined all the time, so that everything has an identity component, and everything must be “shared” in order for the consumer to realize what identity value is there to be realized in a good.

At this point, identity itself becomes a highly wrought, labor-intensive product. It begins to play as a status good, helping others signal belonging and uniqueness through association with us, with our reified identity, and so on. It has become an object among objects in the field of advertising, of which social networks are merely an extension. This is what Web 2.0 is ultimately all about — making everything part of the code of identity and stripping away the autonomy of any of our choices. Instead, they all mean something that we may or may not intend, we may or may not want to have to worry about. 

That ties in to what is most disturbing about consumerism: how it appropriates consumption rituals and commercializes them, building in the priorities of capital directly into the social world and its material culture. It promises a paradoxical escape from being labeled by what we consume, by suggesting we can consume in isolation from society. But at the same time, that isolation makes us vulnerable, more prone to turn to advertisements in lieu of communities for a quick infusion of the social meanings none of us can exist without, regardless of what ideology tells us. The social hierarchies reproduced by consumerism are also engineered to suit capital, naturalizing the sorts of ritual consumption that suit its perpetuation: rather than potlatches and festivals, we orient our consumption through such ideas as invidious comparison, competitive conspicuous consumption and self-presentation as branding. Rather than use consumption to stabilize identity and render it secure, we end up using consumerism to chase the impossible dream of unfettered individuality, of identity that is entirely free of contingencies, of finding the goods that represent us and no one else for only those rare soul mates who can interpret them. We search and search for these people, destined never to find them, no matter how many fleeting glimpses of them we catch in the mirror.

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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.

Time remorselessly, ceaselessly marching represents the one intransigent condition of social, cultural, political and economic life — a condition felt all the more acutely today, as modern technology appears to increase its tempo. Vying for attention has become as fierce a competition as “keeping up with the Joneses” used to be. Each moment fractures into ever proliferating communiques, data packets, alerts, tweets and dispatches, the sheer volume of which one doubts even the all-seeing eye of providence can adequately con. And along with this burgeoning quantity of information comes its ever quickening velocity. Humanity — the internet enabled portion of it anyway — is only years, perhaps only months, away from real-time communication of just about every conceivable kind.

What happens, though, when this real-time-all-the-time global synchronization actually comes into being? Will humans have finally, once and for all, reached the absolute limit of communication? After all, the only possibility for further acceleration will then be communication before the fact: receiving an e-mail before it’s sent, re-tweeting a tweet before the original tweeter tweets it. You say good-bye, and I say hello.

Of course, humans have devised ingenious methods of hedging against this at once both wasting and inexhaustible asset called time. Phrases like “time savers,” “saving time,” “wasting time” are of course misleading; one can no more save time than waste it. One can, however, arrange things so as to maximize the opportunities of the present moment. Time, for instance, lies at the heart of Karl Marx’s analysis in the first volume of Capital. And, in one of Marx’s few gothic touches in Capital, capital itself Marx regards as dead labor re-animated and restlessly wandering the earth in search of exchange value, for which this undead capital has an insatiable appetite. In law, one speaks of mortmain (“dead hand”), in banking, of a mortgage (“dead pledge”) — the latter perhaps suffering unfortunate tic(k)s of an upward sort as an additional grotesque flourish.

Death underwrites capital, death is capital, if Marx is to be believed. And, like all restless (un)dead in story or fable, capital refuses to be bound to its particular temporal ambit. The most annoying thing about the restless (un)dead is that they demand more time than their time, more than the time alotted them, more than their own lifetimes.

Grateful dead: capital's abiding interest in the living.

A conversation fellow GenBubchik Rob Horning and I recently had with Mike Konczal who, among his other pursuits, keeps the blog Rortybomb, naturally led to discussion of the present world-economic situation. Konczal expressed his desire to see Generation Bubble address a subject that greatly dismayed him: the financialization of the economy. No longer predicated on making stuff that people need to survive in life, the U.S. economy has become simply a welter of scrip, of notes of all sorts and shades. This development, Konczal firmly believes, can only lead the country down the road to serfdom. Or worse.

When it comes to matters of economy’s financialization and the fine-grained analysis thereof, Konczal far surpasses me (I won’t speak for Rob). When Konczal broached this subject with Rob and me, however, my mind immediately flew to Ezra Pound’s enormously difficult and much derided masterwork, The Cantos. The particular canto I had in mind was Canto XLV, commonly known as “With Usura.” In it Pound, echoing the medieval Catholic church’s prohibition against the practice of usury (lending money at interest), catalogues in learnedly terse and cranky fashion the consequences visiting anything this practice touches. “Usura is a murrain, usura / blunteth the needle in the the maid’s hand / and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning,” Pound writes. It also “rusteth the chisel, “rusteth the craft and the craftsman,” “gnaweth the thread in the loom,” and also “slayeth the child in the womb,” as well as “stayeth the young man’s courting.” Indeed, anything coming under the influence of “usura” is doomed from the get-go — hung fire, an abortion.

The medieval prohibition against charging interest has its origin in the writings of Aristotle, who claimed that only a living being can beget more living beings. Money, considered a means of exchange, or, as Marx’s characterized it, “the general equivalent,” is a human instrument, in itself inert, non-living. The generation of a greater sum of money from a smaller sum, incubated solely by the passage of time, thus violates this absolute difference between the living and non-living. It is, as Pound so emphatically points out, CONTRA NATURAM (“against nature”). It is the stuff of horror stories par excellence. “Corpses are set to banquet” at usura’s invitation, as Pound writes.

This rather dogmatic notion of interest charging as an indefensible abomination is one I don’t necessarily share, but it does lend itself to a consideration of Laclau’s claim, “The future is indeterminate and certainly not guaranteed for us; but that is precisely why it is not lost either.” Upon the tabula rasa of a future moment, just about any event can certainly inscribe itself. But, I’m led to ask, though this is theoretically true, is it practically true, in light of the dead yet unshakable hand usura places on the future? With the economy financialized to its current extent (I believe that Konczal told Rob and me that financial services counted for something like 80 percent of gross domestic product), there’s a lot of interest to be paid. How does the economy grow, then, and where does it grow? Experts say the United States is headed for a situation where its current debt will soon equal the sum total of its gross domestic product: one dollar owed for every one dollar earned. If this isn’t a murrain on the sheep or rust on the needle, I don’t know what is.

It seems, then, that Laclau’s words might be a bit too optimistic for me to get behind. The future to me looks as determinate as a payment schedule. Mortgages and mortmain. The inexorable living dead, refusing to be exorcised — or amortized.

__________

*This is of course not surprising, because Laclau has spent a good part of his career in dialogue with Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who spawned deconstruction, the shock of which academic humanities is only beginning to recover from. Laclau has sought to adapt the central tenets of deconstruction (if, indeed, deconstruction can be said to have tenets) to issues surrounding a radically democratic polity — the conditions of its emergence, as well as the very possibility of its emergence. Laclau’s espousal of deconstruction stems from a desire to get beyond the monolithic totalities which Marxist thought tends to produce if left to its own conceptual categories — something Laclau and his cohort of soixante huitards (whether they were thus in spirit or in actuality), smarting from the failure of the student-worker strikes in France and recoiling from Stalinism’s many horrors, wished to temper. For his part, Laclau looks to Derridean deconstruction as a means of redressing this unfortunate tendency in conventional Marxism. Bringing deconstruction to bear on a radically democratic political program proves a tall order, the former, with its repudiation of all things fixed, immutable and unitary, mingles but uneasily with the former’s macro-scale outlook. Such a difficult balancing act perhaps explains why Laclau, with or without Mouffe, makes for rather tough reading.

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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.

It seems innocuous enough. Who doesn’t want new ways to share? But the generous spirit of universal sharing Google seems eager to promote of course has its commercial underbelly. It’s not surprising  that Buzz’s launch coincided with the company’s announcement that it was moving into the broadband business. By offering us easier ways to distribute the content we produce, Google is encouraging us to generate more content, which, unlike Facebook, it need not own and control. The more content that’s out there, the more we need Google’s search capabilities to navigate it. And just as important, Buzz offers Google another source of attenuated relational data — who is connected to whom, how much do they share with one another, what demographic and geographic aspects do they have in common — that can be turned into useful market research as the statistical tools are developed to tease out the meaningful patterns in the deluge of information.

So one of the primary goals of social networks is to encourage us to move faster though a tracked and monitored world, generating more quickly a data trail that can be monetized and exploited, that can be used for consumer profiling and the development of more granular demographic cohorts. The longer the data trail we create through our online peregrinations, the more data amasses that can be associated with our particular profile and then extrapolated to deduce information not only about ourselves and those who evince similar traits in their online behavior, but also everyone who chooses to associate themselves with us in networks, or through blog links or through other tokens of online connection.

Google Buzz is just the most recent example of a broader transformation in the developed world, ushering us out of the postmodern era and into what Kazys Varnelis in this Eurozine essay labels “network culture,” following Manuel Castells and his description of the “network society.” In the realm of aesthetics, network culture replaces “the populist projection of the audience’s desires onto art with the production of art by the audience and the blurring of boundaries between media and public. If appropriation was a key aspect of postmodernism, network culture almost absentmindedly uses remix as its dominant process.” At the level of the subject, network culture moves beyond the fragmented postmodern self, which was still haunted by the loss of a unitary identity, and presents an entirely flexible self constituted perpetually and provisionally within the network.

In postmodernism, Jameson explains, these pressures couple with a final unmooring of the self from any ground as well as the undoing of any coherent temporal sequence, forcing the subject to schizophrenically fragment. With network culture, these shards of the subject take flight, disappearing into the network itself. Less an autonomous individual and more of a construct of the relations it has with others, the contemporary subject is constituted within the network…. In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things…. Like the artist, the networked self is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others, a switching machine.

With Buzz (along with the services it emulates and extends) accelerating our consumption of culture online, we fashion more of these relationships and imbue them with information that can be harvested by third parties — like Google. By virtue of our identity work, we perform the labor of expanding the terrain, as well as mapping out the roads and intersections of these multiple networks, pointing the way toward how they may be profitably traversed. This amounts to the  subsumption of mediatized identity labor, continuous and accelerating, under capital in the form of media companies. Capitalistic creative destruction plays out at not at the level of the firm so much as at the level of the individual, appearing as compulsory personal reinvention. Our own psychic survival begins to depend on the accumulation of cultural capital, on thriving as a personal brand. We run our self-fashioning as a business, and use the networking tools provided us for marketing purposes.

"I, refuse": trash is treasure in an age of fungible identities.

The internet has thus become a field of simultaneous solipsism; it presents itself as infinitely amenable to users’ desire. We quickly become habituated to shaping our internet experience to suit us, to customize everything to our needs, to our tastes, to suit our ideological proclivities. As Varnelis warns, “It is entirely possible to essentially fabricate the outside world, reducing it to a projection of oneself.” But there’s another way of understanding that solipsism. The mission of Google and the like is to bring all aspects of our lifeworld under their auspices. The flattery we feel at entering a world in which are at the center of everything masks the apparatus that maintains the machine and ultimately establishes the horizons of what is possible within it. (That is Althusser’s basic point in his famous essay about Institutional State Apparatuses.) Identity production appears at first as a more “meaningful” form of work than wage slavery, though eventually the compulsory self-production starts to feel coercive. At that point we may begin to dream of becoming no one, of de-individualizing into the mass, of dissolving in collective experience, in tea party rallies and the like. (See: Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom; or Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.)

The sum effect of participation in such services as Google Buzz, Twitter and Facebook is to increase the rate at which we believe their is important news about ourselves to share. It is not sufficient to update our status once and leave it for days. The formal qualities of these services help persuade us that we have something new and important to say about ourselves every hour, or every 15 minutes, or every other minute. These gestures intertwine with token efforts to keep up with the updates of everyone else. “Affirming one’s own identity today means affirming the identity of others in a relentless potlatch,” Varnelis notes. We become acculturated to a new speed for the identity production line. From the outside this can seem to betoken a loss of perspective that smacks of clinical narcissism, but from the inside it may well be experienced as a survival instinct, a compulsion to remind the world of one’s continued existence, which is tolerated only on the condition that we are not what we were but have become something else, always.

In some ways, social networking has taken over for the fashion cycle, the legacy modality for the acceleration of culture. The advent of consumer capitalism prompted the pursuit of novelty for its own sake, as obsolescence became a necessary ingredient for the continued expansion of markets. Before the digital era, advertising-supported mass media served the purpose of keeping the fashion wheel turning and coordinating the public toward newly prescribed aspirations. But new technology has removed the need for the mass media to serve as intermediary; the lifestyle advertising it once existed to carry can now be borne by individuals themselves, operating within social networks and defining themselves in terms of brands and commercialized experiences. Thanks to the digitization of sociality, our lifestyle choices can serve as advertisements of themselves whose efficacy can be tracked and modulated and amplified by the purveyors of the networks, while disciplinary voices from the infrastructure of digital friendship can issue friendly warnings to speed up the pace of our consumption of one another. “So-and-so hasn’t posted in a while. Why don’t you prod her to make more updates?” “So-and-so seems to have trouble adding friends. Why don’t you suggest friends for him to connect to and share with?”

One of the most obvious effects of this ideologically compelled cultural acceleration is the sudden surge in attention problems, the sense that “Google is making us stupid,” as Nicholas Carr argued in this Atlantic article. Our ability to concentrate on one particular thing begins to register in our consciousness as an anxious sacrifice, our potential to achieve flow states starts to threaten us, as it entails attentional opportunity costs: If we concentrate on one thing, we are wasting the time that could be spent taking in so many other things pressing on the outer edge of our focus.  We have been moved from discrimination to distraction, from contemplation to consumption through increasing fragmentation of thought and constant stimulus to move “forward” to the next thing.

So even though we are presented with complete autonomy in self-creation online (and that promise shores up the ideology of the sovereign individual), the experience of overwhelming choice swamps us, dissolves the self into a series of tentative feints. “As the subject is increasingly less sure of where the self begins and ends, the question of what should be private and what not fades,” Varnelis writes.  This is in keeping with the Zuckerbergian assertion that “public” is now the default option. We should share everything without ever stopping to worry whether anyone out there is actively interested. In the emerging social mores, it’s the responsibility of the other (or their automated filters) to decide what to pay attention to. In fact, it is their privilege to have a wealth of detail to sort through, manufacturing serendipity when something delightful is found amidst it all. We share without believing we place a burden on those we share with. We come to fully expect that a good percentage of what we say will be ignored, just as we ignore a good portion of what we are exposed to.

To a degree, we outsourced to the people we share with the work of assembling who we are, as they are invited to sort through the data and see only the person they want to see, brushing past the details they deem irrelevant, scanning and responding just as rapidly as one sorts through an interminable list of Facebook updates. As we grow accustomed to sharing everything to everyone as a default, a new and unprecedented kind of public identity will begin to be fashioned for us: the garbage-dump self. We pile up the information about ourselves out in the open for everyone to see, and our followers, like the dustmen in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, scramble about the heap looking for useful bits among the dross.

But as the data we generate online is more efficiently analyzed, it will be used more and more to predict our proclivities and in some ways determine what we experience online in advance. The web pages become prepared for us, anticipating our desires, if not ultimately determining them. Will this predictive filtering feel like imprisonment, or will we regard it as a useful aid in our efforts to appropriate the “cognitive surplus” that stems from all the reflexive sharing? Google Buzz promises that it “recommends interesting posts and weeds out ones you’re likely to skip,” learning apparently from our attention patterns to show us “just the good stuff.” But once we start seeing “just the good stuff,” we won’t be able to change Google’s notion of what we think is good. We won’t see anything else to prod us out of their rut. At that point, Google will be dictating our sense of others and our sense of self according to the design of its proprietary algorithms, whose ultimate goal can only be guessed at as they assiduously, relentlessly pick over our respective garbage dumps.

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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.

According to Jarvis, however, Google et al. have, not to put too fine a point on it, put paid to these fundamental assumptions. Making good the pronouncement that the internet will prove “The Great Disintermediator,” web powerhouses have carved out substantial cyberspatial niches for themselves not by managing scarcity, but by circumventing the structures that make for scarcity. Jarvis puts it this way:

as I thought through the major innovations of the last decade, many of them have not led to economic growth; they haven’t added money to the economy but left it in the economy. Thus measuring innovation’s impact in the revenue, growth, productivity, and market cap of large companies may not be valid. Instead, we are seeing innovation take money out of their pockets, leaving it with their customers. What they, in turn, do with that extra money and what impact it has on the economy is an entirely different question – and that impact is likely seen in any case not in large companies but in individual consumers and in small businesses. But I think the proper measure of the changes in the last decade is the innovation dividend.

One notices a homology here between the way internet entities engross the economy and the way many Republicans (of all people!) propose to do the same: namely, by reducing the number of claimants on one’s bank account. For Republicans, it’s public interests, i.e., governmental bodies, that are the greedy culprits looking to beggar the citizenry. But seldom do they direct their polemic at the private interests seeking to do the same (nothing says “bloat” like an HMO bureaucracy). Into this ideological blindspot swoop online entities like Amazon, craigslist, eBay and Google, literally decimating exchange value, and in so doing, saving consumers a bundle. Jarvis offers some hard numbers drawn from craigslist’s success:

craigslist is blamed for destroying (that’s from the publishers’ perspective) $100 billion in classified ad value, replacing it with its reported $100 million revenue. Newspapers act as if that was their money — as if they had a God-given right to it — but, of course, it wasn’t. When Craig Newmark spoke with my students at CUNY, and they asked him why he didn’t maximize revenue at craigslist and sell it for billions and then use that money for philanthropy, he told them that he thought he was doing more good for the country and the economy by leaving more money in the pockets of the people who were doing the transactions he now enabled. He cut out a gross inefficiency born of the monopoly that newspapers held over the means of production and distribution. If you try to measure his innovation’s impact on the economy with old methods and metrics — built on the assumptions of the old economy— you can’t see it. He didn’t make companies grow or become more productive. He added efficiency.

Adding efficiency represents a sort of immanent growth as monolithic, revenue-hungry institutions are progressively undermined by swiftly running data-streams. And immanent growth makes sense in these times of ecological and economical poop-out — peak oil, real-estate collapse, financial meltdowns and whatnot. Verily, the Big Three automakers would do well to emulate these practices, if they are to satisfy President Obama’s demand that they become “leaner and meaner”; or even the U. S. itself, if it is to transition to a zero-growth economy, which economic geographer David Harvey says it’s high time it did.

"What, me worry?": the internet's post-scarcity revolution.

If nothing else, the internet and its progeny have forced folks on both the left and the right to reconsider their core ideological convictions. Hidebound notions as to whether it is the transnational corporation or the state that safeguards opportunity or prosperity slouch toward obsolescence. And it’s a good thing, too; all of Thomas Friedman’s stumping for Pax Corporaticana ultimately won him a pie in the face, and the Obama administration has shown a strong distaste for New-Deal-style dirigism, opting instead for the soft power of libertarian paternalism. Such events are to Jarvis harbingers of change — change as a force of revolutionary transformation, and not as simply a hollow slogan:

capital, once freed, may not go to building huge new ventures. It may go to building small new ventures. It may stay in the pockets of people doing transactions and now instead of spending it on Toyotas, it may go to banks. You won’t see all the impact — except negatively — on the Dow Jones Average and the Fortune 500; those were the measures of the old economy. We need new measures.

Jarvis would likely agree with the line from Fellini’s 8 ½ ,“It’s better to destroy than create what’s unnecessary.” The question becomes, then: 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? It will find itself confronted with the problem of technological unemployment. John Maynard Keynes addressed this problem back in 1930. His outlook was decidedly gloomy:

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

[…]

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard — those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me — those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties — to solve the problem which has been set them.

Whether the proles can handle their free time is something only time will tell. Unlike Keynes, I see no reason not to let them try. Life is short, and the world is large and wonderful — not just hot and crowded, as Friedman would have it. Even an ordinary person with no special talents can be made to appreciate this!

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