By this time, Toffler had long since given up on influencing policy by appealing to the general public; he was making a living largely by giving seminars to CEOs and corporate think tanks. His insights had been privatized.

[...] The old, materialist Industrial Society, where value came from physical labor, was giving way to an Information Age where value emerges directly from the minds of entrepreneurs, just as the world had originally appeared ex nihilo from the mind of God, just as money, in a proper supply-side economy, emerged ex nihilo from the Federal Reserve and into the hands of value-creating capitalists. [...]

[...] by the seventies, even basic research came to be conducted following military priorities. One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.

[...] “Corporations see a vibrant cultural landscape as a magnet for talent,” goes the thinking behind Kansas City’s vibrancy, according to one report; it’s “almost as vital for drawing good workers as more-traditional benefits like retirement plans and health insurance.” (Did you catch that, reader? Art is literally a substitute for compensating people properly. “Let them eat art,” indeed.) [...]

Crystal Bridges is a sleek “starchitect”-designed facility—two armadillo-like structures connected by galleries around a reflecting pool—where visitors can admire the apparently bottomless self-regard of a retail colossus made fat on a global low-wage, nonunion labor force.

Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendancy via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper. Forget that E. L. James’s three-book series captures the intricacies of BDSM about as effectively as a “Whip Me!” Barbie doll decked out in a ball gag, dog collar, and assless leather chaps. Although admirers of the series sometimes credit it with liberating female desire by reimagining pornography for ordinary women (and introducing them to the unmatched thrills of leather riding crops and hard spankings), the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey isn’t really about dominance or bondage or even sex or love, despite all the Harlequin Romance–worthy character names. No, what Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs. Just as magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui (speaking of aspirational names) have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ultimate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is just that: the moment when our heroine realizes she’s been ushered into the hallowed realm of the 1 percent, once and for all.

Like the most loyal and dedicated refugees from Downton Abbey, every one of the series’ cooks and chauffeurs and security guards and assistants demonstrates polite restraint and obedient discretion in Christian and Anastasia’s presence. Every careful movement and gesture, each bland remark and well-timed retreat into the background, evokes the ultimate service-economy fantasy. These interchangeable, faceless humans, whose ubiquity and professionalism we’re meant to marvel over repeatedly, represent luxury possessions. They are warm but impassive, friendly but reserved, omnipresent but invisible. They register no disputes, no grudges, no rolled eyes, no missed days of work. Nothing seems to bring these strange, shadowy figures more satisfaction than serving Lord Grey and his Lady. Like the growing pile of high-end watches and cars and bracelets that the mildly transgressive power couple accumulates, these humans start to melt into an idealized mass of blindly loyal subservience, bestowing upon their masters an oversized sense of power. And in the midst of these deferential encounters, the long-suffering reader of the series finds some bitter and fugitive consolation in recalling that Anastasia’s Russian royal namesake was exiled by the Bolsheviks.

[...] He bought into Harvard’s great enabling social myth at face value: the notion that twenty-first-century meritocratic advancement is available to all through the procurement of a college diploma. Like any rational economic actor, he sought to procure a diploma from the finest college, with maximum efficiency. Wheeler’s crime, in the institution’s eyes, was that he saw Harvard degrees for what they are—items for purchase that cloak the owner with a manufactured prestige that, in our pretend meritocracy, automatically raises one’s market value upon the deal’s closing. The only thing propping up that value is the admissions office’s carefully maintained scarcity of supply—a luxury good ostensibly awarded to society’s most able. [...]

It’s quite apparent that Harvard administrators couldn’t merely expel Wheeler and demand he return the money when they finally noticed the obvious lies on his academic résumé. There was an urgent example to be set here, after all: enterprising young minds watching the news coverage might have reasoned that the people who run Harvard are utter morons who caught Wheeler only after a final fabrication so flamboyant that he must have wanted to get caught. With the great meritocratic ruse at last exposed in the light of day, young strivers might well give it a go themselves. Even better, forget going to Harvard—why not simply throw “BA, Harvard” on the ol’ résumé right now and start making tons of money playing financial computer games tomorrow? All Wheeler did, anyway, was spot major systemic inefficiencies and disingenuously exploit them for personal financial reward. And if Harvard is a place that would expel such a Capitalist of the Year, then it’s everyone else’s moral duty as Americans to pick up where he left off, and continue looting the place until it reaches a competitive market-clearing equilibrium: when looting a Harvard degree would no longer be worth the trouble—when Harvard, horror of horrors, becomes but one college of many!

Amid the smoldering ruin of the post-meltdown American scene, the popular mind now sees one last means of ascending the ladder of social mobility: obtaining a four-year college degree. As more and more rush to climb it, scarcity sets in, and tuition spirals. You, the graduate, soon recognize that there aren’t many jobs out there paying enough to allow you to service your six-figure debt load. College may be worth it now only if you can get accepted into what we call top-tier schools. But they’ve got no space for you—the children born into upper-middle-class families have taken those spots, and they’ve kicked down the ladder behind them. They will hoover up your money, present and future, and, eventually, they will lose it all playing financial computer games. The crimes of larceny, fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, and bad taste will not apply to them. They will blame you for taking out loans that you couldn’t afford, even though they were the ones who approved them and pushed them on you.