[...] 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 opportunity? Identifying what makes our moment unique (or not) is no easy task, in part because we are living in it, and in part because the language we have to understand and describe our era's inequality is itself one of the instruments of perpetuating it. How can we think and act critically in the present when the very medium of the present, language, constantly betrays us?

[...] "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 subordinated to it." [...]

[...] 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 wealth accumulation, and whose creativity can only be productively exercised for profit. [...]

"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 Harvey defines it rather succinctly, though, as "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade," all of which are to be enforced by a strong state. Quinn Slobodian's recent intellectual history of neoliberalism has emphasized the project's goals - primarily the "complete protection of private capital rights" from democratic interference - and the importance of "extra-economic" means to secure these rights. These extra-economic means can include, for example, global institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which can override national laws that restrict capital's power. [...]

[...] 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 and for others - fades into the background of work as the acquisition of self. [...]

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 expertise, and for what?

Today, empowerment is most common as a feminist concept - or at least as a brand identity alluding to feminism. Here as well, the discourse of empowerment is driven by a celebration of individual participation in structures of authority, and less by a critique of the structures themselves. [...] what arose as a critique of the insidious operation of power at the level of the street, the school, the home, and the body - grasping the political in the personal, in short - has become another way of disguising the political by exalting the personal. As Tolentino puts it, "'empowerment' invokes power while signifying the lack of it. It functions like an explorer staking a claim on a new territory with a white flag."

[...] The cult of entrepreneurship's commodification of imagination, its celebration of self-sacrifice, and its bootstraps individualism make it a perfect ethic for social disinvestment masquerading as reform and profiteering disguised as charity. Entrepreneurship means that now you're on your own, kid.

[...] Sophisticated scheduling software allows managers to plan their employees' schedules days or hours in advance, calibrating them to respond immediately to the smallest fluctuation in demand for labor. Here, it is the employees' time that is made flexible, not the firm's, and workers who want to maintain school commitments, family responsibilities, or even regular free time away from work must bend into shape. Flexible employees, who are ostensibly "free" from managerial pressure to conform to a standard working day, are in fact valued insofar as they assimilate to it.

[...] Grit literature also reassures the desperate and frustrated that their situation is still within their control: a few tweaks or a new attitude are all you need to triumph in a job you love. One can imagine, however, how the payoff of such a philosophy could be pointless when it is not cruel. [...] In neither case is there anything different you could now do about it. In other words, grit offers an explanation for what exists rather than giving us the tools to imagine something different.