At the same time, a significant number of young writers—many of them teenage girls—are chatting online with Tao Lin or some other depressed man in his early 20s. They call this “Alt-Lit.” This is before one Alt-Lit woman turns up in an anarchist space in San Francisco & starts sleeping with one of the editors of a communist journal called Endnotes but after Kenneth Goldsmith “transcribes” the September 11, 2001 issue of the New York Times. publishes The Day & writes about being the most boring writer that ever lived. At the same time, more & more young artists & writers move to East Austin. It is recommended that you spend a few good years teaching English in Korea or Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by the United States. If talking about the past historically doesn’t mean recognizing it “the way it really was,” to what extent does it involve something like translation?

Does translation require a person or just language anymore? What is the legal age of consent in New Jersey & New York? These, perhaps, were some of the big questions some people were asking. “Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South?”—that was another. Aaron Swartz left Reddit. Open access is nothing like an exhibit at a museum. It’s not even like a museum membership. Not even like a highway shut down. The tech buses have been around longer than many people think. Fukuyama had predicted an obsession with form removed from anything like political life, as if the hipsters of the mid-aughts would invent nihilism. Some poets begin to speak in terms of a sincerity / irony binary. It’s possible the binary doesn’t apply to anything of note—not even in the always late United States where young people in black fuck up Starbucks & the Gap during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Then again some of them claim a swastika can be ironic, while others claim it’s merely cultural, which is to say marginalized people should calm down, which is to suggest a swastika is a swastika is a swastika, which is to say it’s the swastika you’re afraid of, what the swastika can do & not the history of the people who make it what it is, which is not over, which is dead wrong.

[...] Louis Althusser (2014) spoke of ideology as an imaginary relationship to the realities in which we live, a false cohesive worldview that covers over the inherently partial, fractured and contradictory nature of our consciousness. In this sense, ideology is not some passively received, generic, prepackaged simulacrum dispensed from on high and swiftly internalized. Rather, as Eagleton explains, ideology is an active creation whereby individuals and groups are constantly in the process of making sense of their world with the intellectual and cultural resources that they find at hand. Likewise, Fredric Jameson (1981; 1984) has approached ideology as a false or fragmentary synthesis based on real experience, or an inherently limited attempt to grasp the unfathomable complexity of capitalist totality. Hence, ideology is not simply “false consciousness,” nor is it merely a “top-down” imposition. Rather, it is a field of contestations and activities, an evolving and emerging set of meanings and explanations created by people as they make sense of their world. But, importantly, it is not a totally free or unmediated process: to build ideology, we draw on those cultural and social resources at our disposal (from fiction to films, from metaphors to measurements) that are, themselves, ideological. We are unduly influenced by those forces of cultural production and social institutions that monopolize meaning and broadcast knowledge: the media, religion, schools, fiction and so forth.

So, perhaps, we can understand financialization as an ideological process, if we apply this expanded definition: it is a process whereby a set of narrative, metaphoric and procedural resources imported from the financial world come to help explain and reproduce everyday life and the capitalist totality of which we are a part. But, in so doing, they also transform that reality more broadly. To the extent that we see ourselves as miniature financiers, investing in and renting out our human capital, we act, behave, cooperate and reproduce social life differently. To the extent that we see health, education, government programming, relationships, games, shopping and work as investments and see our lives as fields of paranoid securitization, we build up an ideological armature which occludes certain aspects of social reality and precludes certain futures. But, further (and this is crucial), financialization also means a moment when the financial system, and the capitalist economy of which it is a part, is dependent on and invested in the ideologies, practices and fictions of daily life as never before. In a moment characterized by ubiquitous debt, escalating consumerism and political quietism (or, worse, reactionism), and by a highly volatile financialized economy, the realms of culture and ideology can no longer be said to be merely the superstructure of a “real” economic base. [...]