Activity

p,,,[ Audaciously taking its name from the shops it set out to displace and superfluous if not sinister in the actual service it purported to offer - a sort of glorified vending machine with facial recognition software - Bodega crystalllized the venality of the tech economy. All that technical ex...

[...] Relentlessly busy, visionary, and creatively enterprising, speculating upon the future appreciation of one's present (educational and material) assets, the financially leavened-self treats work as a way to pursue one's purpose. Work as labor - exhausting, exploitative, but performed with an...

"Noeliberalism" is sometimes used in a similar shorthand way - basically, to name everything bad about the contemporary world - and there is considerable disagreement about the term's meaning and scope. Some dismiss it as leftist jargon, meaningful in too many different ways to be useful. David H...

[...] Schools like Wework are ultimately invested in reproducing a kind of ideal personality suited to the alternately dystopian and Pollyana-ish mindset of today's US elite: an autonomous individual entrepreneur built from kindergarten, whose potential can only be realized in the struggle for we...

[...] "hegemony" shows us how the interests of a ruling class become the commonsense of others. Hegemony, he argues, comes to "depend for its hold not only on its expression of the interests of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as 'normal reality' or 'commonsense' by those in practice sub...

[...] Are we living in a new stage of capitalism, though, or are today's digital technologies just a different version of our ancestors railroads and six-shooters, our Silicon Valley titans just the newest update to the ketchup and steel tycoons of an earlier, east-coast fantasy of wealth and opp...

As a predictable result, Greece's economy shrivelled, the debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketed, and the political system began to fly apart. Obviously, the austerity agenda was never about paying off the unpayable debt. Austerity is never about paying off the debt. There is no such thing as 'expansionar...

[...] It’s a wonder that anybody manages to raise any money at all in the whole mad profession, let alone eke out a living.

Of course, management knows all this perfectly well. Gig economy jobs like this—designed to be temporary, ad hoc, offering little in the way of advancement, security, ove...

The logic of the corporate enclosure of the public sphere is truly a neoliberal wonder to behold. As our power elite steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any broader responsibilities or demands than the mandate to continue amassing ever greater quarterly returns, the rest of us meekly pantomime an ...

The logic of the corporate enclosure of the public sphere is truly a neoliberal wonder to behold. As our power elite steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any broader responsibilities or demands than the mandate to continue amassing ever greater quarterly returns, the rest of us meekly pantomime an ...

[...] As digital monopolies steadily enclose whatever still remains of a public sphere, an impressive array of PR professionals have worked overtime to make it all sound liberating and democratic. Press releases gush out of all available servers, print articles and op-eds consistently reminding u...

Behind all this frenetic policing of culturalized class authenticity is a deep and worsening contradiction at the heart of Anglo-American politics on the right. Modern conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic has frequently bedecked itself in an of-the-people rhetoric in the face of a range of ...

[...] the only time the economic circumstances of the people become important is in their cynical and strategic deployment as cultural signifiers enabling the conspicuous display of a political leader’s putative earthiness.

Exiting the social-democratic nightmare meant, in part, learning, and teaching, a new language. The socialistic shibboleths of “security,” “planning,” “economic democracy,” and “full employment” would have to be confronted and countered with new ideals of competition and entrepreneurship. People ...

Also under Eisenhower, USIA sent hundreds of thousands of books overseas to USIS libraries, subsidizing the U.S. publishing industry in an effort to woo the world’s readers away from the lures of communism. USIA officials carefully vetted books to ensure that only those that supported official U....

This leaves me with the thought that the problem and possibilities of the contemporary social novel are not exclusively tied to genre—i.e., they are not the classical problems of the novel, per se. They aren’t exactly the problems and possibilities offered by the familiar challenge of maintaining...

You’re supposed to thank the fumes. To be grateful for the toxic patch on the rail track. For the craquelure in the asphalt, seeping green— it reroutes you, proffers with each commute a forced adventure. Who’s to say what you’ll find in your course of avoidance? Ideally a willing stranger....

Khiara Bridges—a law professor (also a professor of anthropology) at Boston University—takes the question of the constitutional rights of poor people one step further in her book The Poverty of Privacy Rights. Here, she makes the case that “wealth is a condition for privacy rights, and that, lack...

[...] Their research is another expression of Silicon Valley’s fake-it-til-you-make-it culture of denial and opportunism. Yet the outsize hype attached to these projects breeds problems of its own. Regardless of machine-learning “gaydar’s” efficacy, James Vincent wrote at The Verge, “if people be...

Journalism, too, is in crisis amid the economic and technological riptides and judicial rulings that treat information as another commodity. The First Amendment rightly bars government from abridging “freedom of the press” because, as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen notes, good...

I had studied English because I wanted to be a writer. I never had an expectation of becoming rich. I didn’t care about money. [...] Once I could no longer delay and the payments began, a question echoed through my head from the moment the day began, and often jolted me awake at night. I would lo...

After the dust settled on the collapse of the economy, on my family’s lives, we found ourselves in an impossible situation: we owed more each month than we could collectively pay. And so we wrote letters to Citibank’s mysterious P.O. Box address in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, begging for help, let...

I had studied English because I wanted to be a writer. I never had an expectation of becoming rich. I didn’t care about money. [...] Once I could no longer delay and the payments began, a question echoed through my head from the moment the day began, and often jolted me awake at night. I would lo...

After the dust settled on the collapse of the economy, on my family’s lives, we found ourselves in an impossible situation: we owed more each month than we could collectively pay. And so we wrote letters to Citibank’s mysterious P.O. Box address in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, begging for help, let...

[...] College, which cost roughly $50,000 a year, was the only time that money did not seem to matter. “We’ll find a way to pay for it,” my parents said repeatedly, and if we couldn’t pay for it immediately, there was always a bank somewhere willing to give us a loan. This was true even after my ...