capitalist realism

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Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Indeed, many no longer even considered them to be rules but rather reality itself, with alternative political systems viewed as either futile or incomprehensible. Here, liberal capitalism went from a contingent project to a reality principle. Welcome to the world of capitalist realism – where the map is the territory and nothing really matters. Capitalist Realism Capitalist realism is best summed up with a single sentence: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’* For Mark Fisher – the British theorist who coined the term – that catchphrase captures the very essence of our era, with capitalism not only viewed as the exclusively ‘viable political and economic system’ but also one where it is ‘impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative’.

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And yet in a strange way, despite their markedly different forms of presentation, Obama and Trump shared a similar faith in the unique ability of markets to find solutions. After all, anything else is tantamount to heresy in a world of capitalist realism – where the end of the world is more plausible than the end of capitalism. This condition presents arguably the most pressing crisis of all: an absence of collective imagination. It is as if all humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, capitalist realism making us believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it – as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds.

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Capitalism, at least as we know it, is about to end. What matters is what comes next. The claim that capitalism will end, is, for capitalist realism, like saying a triangle doesn’t have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree. Rather than understanding the present as one historical period among many, like Victorian England or the Roman Republic, to be alive at the end of history means presuming our social systems to be as unchanging as the physical laws that govern the universe. And yet the truth is capitalist realism is already coming apart. The fact you are reading these words at all is proof.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher described our inability to think outside a liberal capitalist framework as “capitalist realism”, a play on the idealist art known as socialist realism which reflected how an economic ideology permeated every aspect of existence, including culture. Fisher also understood why capitalism has done so well at resisting alternative narratives: If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism.

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Fisher ends Capitalism Realism not with nihilism but with anticipation of what was yet to come: The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.27 One positive development is that certain dogmas of progress are now thoroughly discredited.

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Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible “realism” turns out to be nothing of the sort.2 The starting point of any new economic framework should be to reform its main economic institution: the firm. Just as democracy distributed power to disenfranchised citizens, whatever economic model succeeds capitalism must be capable of distributing wealth just as effectively to disenfranchised workers.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The owners of capital became unimaginably wealthy on the back of this broken system, but when it collapsed under the weight of its own excesses, it was ordinary working people who were forced to bear the costs. The death of capitalist realism has led to the rebirth of ideology, and of history. The political upheaval of the last decade is a response to the re-emergence of fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in. Politics is no longer a question of making technocratic tweaks to a stable system; it is once again a great battle of ideas and the movements that champion them. But with the death of capitalist realism, the greatest challenge faced by contemporary capitalist societies is no longer imagining a different kind of future, it is getting from here to there.

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Beyond all this, perhaps the most important role of a British democratic socialist government would be to provide the rest of the world with a beacon of hope. A socialist government in one of the most heavily financialised states in the global economy would seriously undermine international financial capital, concentrated as it is in the City of London — but it would also rally socialists all over the planet. After decades of capitalist realism, it would be possible to imagine a world based on cooperation rather than competition, on mutual aid rather than exploitation, and on stewardship of our common resources rather than ruthless extraction. CONCLUSION There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle.

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History was over. Capitalism had won. Globalisation — constructed as a neutral, inevitable process — would bring the benefits of the free market to the more backwards parts of the world if they would only let it in. The planet was suffering from an acute collective depression that Mark Fisher termed “capitalist realism”: it would have been easier for most people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Seven years later, those same people could have been forgiven for thinking that they were living through both. The financial crisis of 2008 rocked the global economy to its core, exposing the economists’ dreams of taming the economic cycle as pure fantasy.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Walt, ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won’t spread’, ForeignPolicy.com, 16 January 2011. 3.Reuters, 25 January 2011, 18:25 GMT. 4.Jonathan Lis, ‘New IDF intelligence chief failed to predict Egypt uprising’, Haaretz, 30 January 2011. 5.Edward Said, ‘Islam through Western eyes’, Nation, 26 April 1980. 6.Tarek Masoud, ‘The road to (and from) Liberation Square’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 22, no. 3, July 2011. 7.Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21, May—June 2003. 8.Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, London 1998, p. 59. 9.N. Chomsky and E. Herman, ‘Preface to the 2002 Edition’, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, London 2002, p. xii. 10.Quoted in Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Ropley 2009. 11.Fisher, Capitalist Realism, pp. 3–16. 12.Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush’, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004. 13.Anthony Giddens, ‘My chat with the colonel’, Guardian, 9 March 2007. 14.Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, London 2010, p. 233. 15.Quoted in Y.

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Indifference to class, the one-dimensional mindset of the professional ‘Arabists’ and outright self-interest all played a part in misleading the political right. But the left, too, was disoriented. The key problem was spelled out by the theorist Fredric Jameson in 2003: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’7 Twenty years of capitalist realism When a cheetah catches a gazelle there is always a moment where the prey gives up: it goes floppy, bares its neck, becomes resigned to its fate. You have got me, it seems to say, but now you have to kill me; in the meantime I will try to think about something else. This has been the relationship between the right and the left since the early 1990s.

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This is no longer the external control of Orwell’s 1984, but a pre-programmed alternative reality against which the hero cannot deploy core human values like love and decency. In an influential essay, cultural commentator Mark Fisher describes the impact of all this on a generation that has known nothing else. He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’, defined as the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.11 Up to 2008, the left’s inability to imagine any alternative to capitalism was like a mirror image of the right’s triumphalism.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

For a lengthy critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse-based hegemony theory, see Geoff Boucher, The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek (Melbourne: re.press, 2009). 14.David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 40. 15.This concept was originally devised by Joseph Overton, in relation to the proper operational purpose of a think tank. See Nathan J. Russell, ‘An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibilities’, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 4 January 2006, at mackinac.org. 16.This can be conceived in cultural terms as the creation of ‘capitalist realism’. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009). 17.‘In such a situation, hegemony has nothing to do with the capacity to make people believe in you; it has everything to do with the strategic capacity to render their belief or disbelief irrelevant.’ Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Hegemony Now’, 2013, at academia.edu, p. 16. 18.David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 159. 19.Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 35. 20.Jonathan Joseph, Hegemony: A Realist Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2002). 21.Thomas Hughes, ‘Technological Momentum’, in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds, Does Technology Drive History?

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Fuelled by a widespread belief that the new industrial capitalism was temporary and that a better world would soon emerge, workers militantly struggled for this new world. In a climate far more hostile than our own, labour was able to create an array of strong organisations and exert significant pressure.31 The successes of this time were inseparable from a broader utopian culture. By contrast, today’s world remains firmly confined within the parameters of capitalist realism.32 The future has been cancelled. We are more prone to believing that ecological collapse is imminent, increased militarisation inevitable, and rising inequality unstoppable. Contemporary science fiction is dominated by a dystopian mindset, more intent on charting the decline of the world than the possibilities for a better one.33 Utopias, when they are proposed, have to be rigorously justified in instrumental terms, rather than allowed to exist in excess of any calculation.

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But this argument neglects alternative ways in which that crisis could have been resolved and attributes immense clarity of self-interest to capitalists. 53.Philip Cerny, Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 139. 54.David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee, ‘Mass Privatisation and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: A Cross-National Analysis’, Lancet 373: 9,661 (2009). 55.Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 41. 56.This is one source of the common claim that postmodernism is the cultural expression of neoliberalism. 57.Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 53. 58.Dardot and Laval, New Way of the World, p. 3. 59.Ibid., p. 265. 60.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009), Chapter 4. 61.Wanda Vrasti, ‘Struggling with Precarity: From More and Better Jobs to Less and Lesser Work’, Disorder of Things, 12 October 2013, at thedisorderofthings.com. 62.Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 61. 63.For evidence of the austerity narrative and its adoption in popular consciousness, see Liam Stanley, ‘“We’re Reaping What We Sowed”: Everyday Crisis Narratives and Acquiescence to the Age of Austerity’, New Political Economy 19: 6 (2014). 64.Ernesto Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2011), p. 50. 65.The classical mark of ideology today is that it feeds on cynicism, or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, ideology works even (and especially) if you do not believe in it.

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Hilary Osborne, ‘Call Centres in BBC3 Programme Hit with £225,000 Fines’, The Guardian, 18 June 2013, www.theguardian. com/money/2013/jun/18/call-centres-bbc3-programme-fines 11. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), p. 63. 12. Ibid. 13. Franz Kafka, The Castle (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 65. 14. Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009), p. 65. 15. Ibid., p. 64. 16. Enda Brophy, ‘The Subterranean Stream: Communicative Capitalism and Call Centre Labour’, Ephemera, Vol. 10, No. 3/4 (2010), p. 471. 17. The Call Centre (2013). 18. Phil Taylor and Peter Bain, ‘“An Assembly Line in the Head”: Work and Employee Relations in the Call Centre’, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1999), p. 109. 19.

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Angela Tinwell, Mark Grimshaw, Debbie Abdel Nabi and Andrew Williams, ‘Facial Expression of Emotion and Perception of the Uncanny Valley in Virtual Characters’, Computers in Human Behaviour, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2010), p. 741. 63. Office Space [Film] Twentieth Century Fox, 1999. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009), p. 40. 67. Marx, Capital ([1867] 1976), pp. 279–80. 68. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 12. 174 Notes 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., p. 18. 71. Paul Thompson, The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 123. 72.

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., Bentley, P. and Osborne, L. (2015) ‘Shame of the Charity Cold Call Sharks’, Daily Mail, 7 July, available at: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-3151533/Shamed-charity-cold-call-sharks-Britain-s-biggestcharities-ruthlessly-hound-vulnerable-cash-try-opt-receiving-calls. html Fernie, S. and Metcalf, D. (1997) (Not) Hanging on the Telephone: Payment Systems in the New Sweatshops, Centre for Economic Performance: London School of Economics. Fischer, C. S. (1992) America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester: Zero Books. Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin. Fredman, S. (2003) ‘Women at Work: The Broken Promise of Flexicurity’, Industrial Law Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 219–399. Friedman, A. L. (1977) Industry and Labour: Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Capitalism, London: Macmillan.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

Phil Connor’s new-found communist ethic of social love, learning and laughing is our only hope too for breaking the life sentence of late-capitalist employment relations. Fundamentally, it consists of a critique of everyday life through radical remembrance. Phil knew exactly what was coming. However, is it really possible to break the spell of capitalist realism with some sort of inspired social love? Learning From the Falling Banker Let us delve a little further into this strange Groundhog-Day-like impasse that has lured so many into the closed universe of work today. As is often the case, we can learn some axiomatic principles about the late capitalist mindset by examining its fullest embodiment.

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It simply pulls off the sham in a different way. The use of truth in this manner is quite different to the regimes of truth that Foucault (1977) once announced were decisive in modern Western society. This has nothing to do with philosophical relativism. Indeed, while Bruno Latour is sadly not much of a critic of capitalist realism, he was fairly accurate a few years back when he argued that relativism has been successfully co-opted by the pundits of neoliberalism to serve their own agenda (see Latour, 2004). Postmodernism as an era and intellectual movement is thankfully over. But so is modernity. Many social divisions and sources of authority exude a regressive pre-modern flavour that many of us find utterly stifling and archaic (even in the technologically advanced metropolises of late-capitalism … perhaps especially here).

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Once again critical admission mutates into a pro-capitalist stance and begins to serve an ‘I, Job’ function that is experienced as more inescapable than before. By facing the appalling truth these individuals paradoxically become more astute and willing investment bankers. Again we witness a rather schizophrenic and demented feature of capitalist realism today. Because its revelatory contradictions are no longer hidden but expressed, the grit that dialectical analysis relies upon to force the synthesis is circumvented or even dissolved. This post-dialectical expression of power immunizes both patent falsehoods and plain-speaking corporate truthfulness from true radical criticism.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

In these dark moments, it was only this faint hope that sustained the left: where neoliberals, convinced of the permanence of their triumph, talked of the end of history, the left clung to the idea that history had a habit of coming back. But, in the early 1990s, it didn’t look likely any time soon. A new consensus had been forged, one defined by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher as ‘capitalist realism’, or ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’.6 Len McCluskey, a thick-set Scouser whose rectangular spectacles give him the air of an intellectual bouncer, is the most influential trade union leader of modern times.

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A more fragmented working-class has meant less of a sense of collective identity – or of a class with a common purpose, which could pool its strength to extract concessions from bosses. This in turn fuelled a feeling that class politics no longer served a practical purpose for many people: it was out of date, the relic of a bygone age, pointless. This belief would prove a fundamental pillar of capitalist realism – and few clung to it more fiercely than New Labour, the party remoulded in the image of its leader, Tony Blair. When Blair became leader in 1994, the Labour left had been more or less extinguished, along with the politics it espoused. The Blairites ‘wanted Year Zero: they wanted to change the party for ever’, says former Tribune editor Mark Seddon.

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Their protests centred on global institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization – which they accused of fostering policies of privatization and deregulation, of favouring the interests of capital over labour, of forcing poorer markets open to multinational corporations at the expense of domestic industries, and of destroying the environment – making the lives of billions immeasurably poorer in the process. Their placards and banners summed it up: ‘Our Resistance Is As Global As Their Capital’; ‘Say No To The WTO’; and most enduringly – in a defiant, desperately hopeful rejection of capitalist realism – ‘Another World Is Possible’. These movements were diffuse and disconnected and, without the ability to build a coherent alternative to the established order, their moment soon passed. Nonetheless, they revealed a deep well of discontent with the established order, and new radical voices – Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a cri de coeur against modern consumer capitalism, became the defining book of a generation – found a mass audience.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Mindfulness needs to be embedded in the organic histories and local knowledge of communities, empowering them to see how things are. When we recognize that disaffection, anxiety and stress are not just our own fault, but are connected to structural causes, this becomes fuel for igniting resistance. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, “Affective disorders are form of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outward, directed towards its real cause, Capital.”30 The liberation of mindfulness depends on building solidarity out of the ruins of McMindfulness, assisting victims of exploitation to resist the inhuman demands of capitalism.

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Beacon Press, 2018. p.59. 27 Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation. Palgrave, 2008. p.29 28 Robert Hattam, Awakening Struggle: Towards a Buddhist Critical Theory. University of South Australia Press, 2002. p.228 29 Erich Fromm, Beyond The Chains of Illusion, Abacus, 1989. pp.131-132 30 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Zero Books, 2009. p.80 31 http://nomosjournal.org/2013/08/searching-for-integrity/ 32 https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/conscientious-compassion/ 33 Peter Gabel, The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self. Routledge, 2018. p.210 34 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/themindfulrevolution Acknowledgements I would like to give special thanks to my publisher, Tariq Goddard, who took an immediate interest in my book and has been a champion of promoting it.

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The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree. Published by Repeater Books An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd Unit 11Shepperton House 89-93 Shepperton Road London N1 3DF United Kingdom www.repeaterbooks.com A Repeater Books paperback original 2019 1 Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

“Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul,” Thatcher said. 16 Thatcher is most famous, perhaps, for her declaration that “there is no alternative.” She meant it as a preference—communism was still kicking at the time, and social democracy still had a grip on much of Europe. But TINA was the foundation of the phenomenon the British theorist Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”—the idea that it is impossible to imagine any other way that the world could be organized. Neoliberalism relies on such realism, even when—or perhaps especially when—it is faltering. 17 In the United States, Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s “shock” in 1980, limiting the money supply and hiking interest rates, put tens of thousands of companies out of business.

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The flood of new, desperate workers into the low-wage labor market—often, once again, into jobs mirroring the work they were expected to do in the home—helped to hold wages down for all while improving profits for those at the top. 59 In the decades following welfare reform, labor in the paid workplace has been made cheaper because certain work remains unwaged and in the home. In Kathi Weeks’s words, neoliberalism’s “romance of the capitalist market” as the site of freedom “is coupled with a revived romance of the privatized family as the necessary locus of social reproduction and a haven in a heartless world.” The collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalist realism has led to diminished imaginings, too, of how domestic work could be done differently. Instead, in the age of the “two-earner family,” we hear a lot about “work-life balance,” but not enough about how, for everyone, “life” (code for “family”) often means “unpaid work.” 60 And only some people even get to consider such balance.

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Moreover, Gilmore noted, progressive funders, in particular, want their money to go to programs rather than to core operations. The right, meanwhile, she wrote, spends freely on ideas. As a result, people like Ashley Brink work long, grueling schedules to make up for the work that should be done by a much larger workforce. 35 Indeed, in the era of capitalist realism, charity itself became a business model. Perhaps the most famous example of this was Project (RED), U2 singer Bono’s branded clothing and tchotchke line that raised money for AIDS research. (RED), Bono and his colleagues insisted, was not a charity but “hard commerce,” a thing the pop star incredibly likened to “punk rock.”

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

But it was saved at the expense of ordinary people. As a result of that assault, the political status quo went out the window. The comfy ride of ruling-class domination turned into a rollercoaster. Between 2010 and 2015, protests, strikes, social movements, and revolutions swept the world. What the cultural theorist Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’ – the assumption that capitalism is the only way of organizing human social life – began to fall apart.13 The technical and social composition of the working class had changed, and the political composition was transformed as a result. Now, finally, the morbid symptoms of a collapsing consensus are obvious.

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Notes from Below. www.notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition; S. Wright (2002) Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism. Pluto Press. 11. F. Fukuyama (2012) The end of history and the last man. Penguin Books. 12. M. Roberts (2016) The long depression. Haymarket Books. 13. M. Fisher (2009) Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? Zero Books. 14. N. Srnicek (2017) Platform capitalism. Polity. 15. J. Woodcock and M. Graham (2019) The gig economy: a critical introduction to platform work. Polity. 16. Some estimates claim that 2.8 million people worked in the gig economy at some point in 2017.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

In the wake of neoliberalism, we are constantly told about the virtues of work—not only while we are doing it, but needing to constantly prepare and train for it too. Play appears to run against this. It is often viewed as wasted time that could be better spent developing our own “human capital” or some other bleak management-speak. However, despite this emphasis on productivity through “capitalist realism,”7 play is still viewed as important in the context of human development. Because play has a recognized role in childhood, it is often diminished, relegated to a developmental life phase, not as a serious activity. As Johan Huizinga argued, “Play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex…it is a significant function—that is to say, there is some sense to it….

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,” Twitter, May 14, 2018. 2Quoted in Chris Kohler, “On ‘Videogame’ Versus ‘Video Game,’” Wired, November 12, 2007. 3“Game Definitions,” Molleindustria, http://www.gamedefinitions.com/#. 4Nicolas Esposito, “A Short and Simple Definition of What a Videogame Is,” Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play, 2005; italics in the original. 5Jesper Juul, “Introduction to Game Time,” in First Person, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 140. 6Richard Rouse, Game Design (Sudbury, MA: Wordware Publishing, 2004), xx. 7Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 8Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2006), 1. 9Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9. 10Notes from Below editors, “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition,” Notes from Below, January 29, 2018, www.notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition. 11Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. 12Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 94. 13Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 147. 14Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 95. 15Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxxiv. 16Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 5–6. 17Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 9–10. 18Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 12, 13. 19Lars Kristensen and Ulf Wilhelmsson, “Roger Caillois and Marxism: A Game Studies Perspective,” Games and Culture 12, no. 4 (2017): 388. 20Kristensen and Wilhelmsson, “Roger Caillois and Marxism,” 388. 21Kristensen and Wilhelmsson, “Roger Caillois and Marxism,” 393. 22Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001), 258. 23McLuhan, Understanding Media, 259. 24“Video Game History Timeline,” National Museum of Play, www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg/video-game-history/timeline. 25Claude E.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

Paperback: 978-1-78535-699-5 ebook: 978-1-78535-700-8 In the Dust of This Planet Horror of Philosophy vol. 1 Eugene Thacker In the first of a series of three books on the Horror of Philosophy, In the Dust of This Planet offers the genre of horror as a way of thinking about the unthinkable. Paperback: 978-1-84694-676-9 ebook: 978-1-78099-010-1 The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement Lauren Elkin, Veronica Esposito Paperback: 978-1-78099-655-4 ebook: 978-1-78099-656-1 Capitalist Realism Is There no Alternative? Mark Fisher An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system. Paperback: 978-1-84694-317-1 ebook: 978-1-78099-734-6 Rebel Rebel Chris O’Leary David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn’t know.

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art by Michael Shnayerson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, banking crisis, Bonfire of the Vanities, capitalist realism, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Etonian, gentrification, high net worth, index card, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, mass immigration, Michael Milken, NetJets, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, rent control, rolodex, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

Joseph Beuys, Unschlitt/Tallow, 1977, stearin, tallow, chromel-alumel thermocouples with compensating cables, digital millivoltmeter, and alternating current transformer, 955 cm x 195 cm x 306 cm, Skulptur Projekte Archiv, www.skulptur-projekte-archiv.de/en-us/1977/projects/82/. 47. Andreja Velimirovic´, “Joseph Beuys,” Widewalls, November 3, 2016, www.widewalls.ch/artist/joseph-beuys/. 48. Capitalist Realism, Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/capitalist-realism. 49. Elizabeth Day, “Marian Goodman: Gallerist with the Golden Touch,” Guardian, October 11, 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/12/marian-goodman-gallerist-golden-touch. 50. “About,” Sperone Westwater, www.speronewestwater.com/gallery. 51. Schjeldahl, “Dealership.”

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Georg Baselitz, who hung his double portraits upside down—a simple but radical and disquieting choice intended to draw attention to the painted surface—was another of the German artists who showed at d’Offay in London. So was Sigmar Polke, who did paintings of historical events. And so was Gerhard Richter. By the mid-1980s, Richter was one of Europe’s most celebrated artists, though no one could have predicted how high he would rise. Starting as a humble sign painter, he had appeared in a show called Capitalist Realism, a German send-up of Pop art, because “the artists associated with it were similarly interested in mass media and the banal.”48 Soon, he became known for putting print photographs onto canvas and painting over them to create his “blur” paintings, before exploring both landscapes and abstract work.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Recent bestsellers from Zero Books are: In the Dust of This Planet Horror of Philosophy vol. 1 Eugene Thacker In the first of a series of three books on the Horror of Philosophy, In the Dust of This Planet offers the genre of horror as a way of thinking about the unthinkable. Paperback: 978-1-84694-676-9 ebook: 978-1-78099-010-1 Capitalist Realism Is there no alternative? Mark Fisher An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system. Paperback: 978-1-84694-317-1 ebook: 978-1-78099-734-6 Rebel Rebel Chris O’Leary David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn’t know.

Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (Arlesford, Hants: Zero Books, 2011), 15–6 (which, by the way, is a terrific book); Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015), 93; Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: O Books, 2009), 32–37. Chapter 13: Causes Eight and Nine: The Real Role of Genes and Brain Changes Marc Lewis’s friends thought he was dead. Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011), 139–42.

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If you kept your hand on the stove, it would burn This image comes from Stephen Grosz’s wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (London: Vintage, 2015). Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have. Mark Fisher talks about this interestingly in his excellent book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: O Books, 2009)—see pp. 18–20. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them This idea—that we need to come home—was influenced by Naomi Klein’s writing in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Design Act: Socially and Politically Engaged Design Tod ay-Critical Roles and Emerging Tactics. Berlin: laspis/ Sternberg, 2011. Feenberg, Andrew. Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1991]. Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. Winchester: 0 Books, 2009. Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Fogg, B.J.Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003. Fortin, David T.Architecture and Science - Fiction Film: Philip K.Dic k and the Spectacle of the Home.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

In the same way that neuroscientists have in recent decades stolen debates over the theory of mind away from philosophers, complexity theorists and computer scientists are stealing this debate away from economists and political scientists. However, the discussion still largely remains hidden within the realm of scientific journals—and even there, for many, it has become something of a mathematical parlor game. There is no active audience outside a tiny sprinkling of academics. Again, it’s capitalist realism: “Of course a nonmarket economy is absurd, Jim, but just as an exercise for my students …” Published just a bare two years after the 2008 financial crisis, Francis Spufford’s novel about economic planning, Red Plenty, prompted a burst of responses, particularly online. Perhaps the most interesting among them was a lengthy essay from self-decribed “vaguely lefty” Carnegie Mellon statistician Cosma Shalizi, who “learned linear programming at my father’s knee as a boy.”

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

Psychologisation in Times of Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2012. de Waal, F. The Age of Empathy: nature’s lessons for a kinder society. New York: Harmony Books, 2009. Feynman, R. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: the best short works of Richard P. Feynman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 2000. Fisher, M. Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative? Winchester, United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2009. Flyvbjerg, B. Making Social Science Matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Foucault, M. Breekbare vrijheid: teksten & interviews. Amsterdam: Boom/Parrèsia, 2004. ——.

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

If a bee only behaves, and if a bee is a worker, a robot (from the Czech term for “worker”), then the bee is already as if alienated in a capitalist structure, one which doesn’t even need human input, but which spreads throughout the symbiotic real, reified as Nature: “the way things are,” which is to say, how they predictably behave. This is capitalist realism applied to nonhumans. It’s a bug, not a feature, of Marxism. The bee is permanently caught in the past, because if it only executes an algorithm, it’s executing some past state of the bee genome. So, not only is Nature mechanical and reified (no matter how squishy and green it looks), Nature is also frozen in the past.

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In the fractal stage of value that he describes, signs are arranged in haphazard and arbitrary fashion, and they mutate through contact. In Baudrillard’s terms, inflation does not make money less valuable and therefore less “real.” Rather, it makes money more real; that is to say, money is hyperreal. Couched in these terms, it is intriguing to consider Baudrillard’s argument in light of the notion of capitalist “realism” recently advanced by Mark Fisher. According to Fisher, neoliberalism produced a form of reality closure in which its major actors and institutions articulate a single version of capitalism’s reality and a definite, inexorable, vision of its future. There is, Fisher suggests, “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action” (Fisher 2009: 18).

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Economy and Society 29 (3): 357–82. Finley, M. (1982). Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, London, Chatto and Windus. Fisher, I. (1933). “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions.” Econometrica 1 (4): 337–57. Fisher, I., H. R. Cohrssen, et al. (1933). Stamp Scrip, New York, Adelphi Company. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London, Zero Books. Foster, W. and W. Catchings (1926). The Dilemma of Thrift, Newton, MA, Pollak Foundation for Economic Research. Foucault, M. (2005). The Order of Things, London, Routledge. Foucault, M. (2008a). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

Fernie, S. and D. Metcalf (2000) ‘(Not) Hanging on the Telephone: Payment Systems in the New Sweatshops’, in D. Lewin and B. Kaufman (eds) Advances in Industrial and Labour Relations, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Fevre, R. (2003) The New Sociology of Economic Behaviour, London: SAGE. Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Alresford: Zero Books. Fiske, J. (1989) Reading the Popular, London: Routledge. Fleming, P., B. Harley and G. Sewell (2004) ‘A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Getting Below the Surface of the Growth of “Knowledge Work” in Australia’, Work, Employment and Society, 18, 4, pp 725–747. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0950017004047951 Fleming, P. and A.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

I admire those people, but I think the shameful problems of our larger society will capsize this movement if it attempts to solve them on its own, rather than channeling energy into changing a political structure that creates and ignores these human tragedies. Meanwhile, the more the camps attract troubled and violent people, the more they alienate the vast majority of the 99% the Occupy movement is trying to speak for, and leave those comfortable with violence and disorder in control.’3 The logic of capitalist realism is overwhelming here – in which the desire to include homeless people is ‘admirable’ but unrealistic – but what interests me in such rhetoric (and Walsh is pretty representative) is the explicit privileging of ‘the movement’ over the claims of those it seeks to speak for. Not only have the homeless and chronically unemployed suddenly ceased to be a part of ‘the vast majority of the 99%’, but she’s telling a revisionary history.

Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

And in a normal political situation, Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t be electable. The ‘common sense’ of the media and political class should prevail. Too bad for normality. Too bad for common sense. The credibility crunch has destroyed tons of political capital. At first, it seemed that normality, or what the late Mark Fisher called ‘Capitalist Realism’, would prevail. Corbyn was polling poorly, unable to expand Labour’s base beyond the approximately 30 per cent support that it had had since the 2015 election.29 He was confronting a centre-seeking Conservative Party, detoxified by the Liberals, and subtle enough to steal Labour’s ideas while trashing Labour: whether on the ‘living wage’ or claiming to represent workers.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

He was inspired to study the impact of advertising because “I did not have an adequate response” to students who asked why companies would spend so much on ads if they got little return. In the book he would write about the industry, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion,* Schudson explored advertising’s sins. He compared advertising to the art of socialist realism because “it does not claim to picture reality as it is but reality as it should be.” He labeled it “capitalist realism” and said ads are designed, whether successful or not, to “subordinate” messy reality in order to spike sales of a product. Among the hidden efforts of advertisers, critics most often latch on to how marketing manipulates our emotions. Industry leaders don’t deny this, they extol it. Jack Haber, who retired as CMO of Colgate in 2017, says, “I’m a believer that consumers make decisions emotionally.”

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide, 6. 9. Wieringa, Propaganda, 2. 10. Part of this is adapted from my article “Stuck in the Shopping,” Popula, December 18, 2018. 11. “Foreign Researchers’ Access to TNI Museums Restricted,” Jakarta Post, February 9, 2018. 12. Recently she was raving to me about Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. Map Citations Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay: Estimates vary, with a low number of at least 50,000 offered in 1992 by Archivos del Terror. See National Geographic Resource Library, “Archives of Terror Discovered;” A higher number of 90,000 is offered by La Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (FEDEFAM), but that includes other countries, such as Colombia, not a party to Condor.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“Abuse of power begets conspiracy”: Marcus Gilroy-Ware, After the Fact? The Truth About Fake News (London: Repeater Books, 2020), 169. Italics in the original. impunity for real conspiracies: Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent (New York: Flatiron Books, 2022). “Does anyone really think”: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 68. “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion”: “George W. Bush Confuses Iraq with Ukraine in Gaffe,” Associated Press channel on YouTube, May 19, 2022. “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring”: Gilroy-Ware, After the Fact?, 169. “You are stuck in your body”: Daisy Hildyard, “The Second Body,” The Learned Pig, November 15, 2017.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

It is also a (perhaps more learned) variation on the predictable tendency to romanticize (both positively and negatively) the presumed depth of faith and conviction of jihadists, radicals, and especially suicide bombers. For this, “we” who are too cynical to believe in anything other than fatal self-interest and the impossibility of something other than capitalist realism are in awe of the resolved single-mindedness of “their” unwavering fanaticism. Their naiveté, so unencumbered with the burden of postmodern nuance and ambivalence, signifies the remaining possibility of actual, ecstatic effervescent experience in the direct midst of global malaise. As Slajov Žižek jokes, “they have faith for us” in perfect inverted symmetry of our own secular disenchantment.

Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Richter, who was born in Dresden and fled to West Germany in the early 1960s, created a major new work in Cologne’s cathedral in 2007 – a vast stained-glass window consisting of 11,500 mesmerising square pieces. Polke, along with Richter and others, relied heavily on pop art and what they dubbed ‘capitalist realism’ – which they used to describe a counterbalance in the West to socialist realism. The influence of the two is as immeasurable as the prices their works command at auctions today. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is where you can see a good range of Polke’s works. Bulgarian- American artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude were responsible for possibly the best known piece of public art of recent times in Germany.

Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Richter, who was born in Dresden and fled to West Germany in the early 1960s, recently completed a major new work in Cologne’s cathedral Click here – a vast stained-glass window consisting of 11,500 mesmerising square pieces. Polke, along with Richter and others, relied heavily on pop art and what they dubbed ‘capitalist realism’ – which they used to describe a counterbalance in the West to socialist realism. The influence of the two is as immeasurable as the prices their works command at auctions today. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne is where you can see a good range of Polke’s works. * * * For a comprehensive low-down of Germany’s contemporary art scene and events, see www.art-in.de (in German)