late capitalism

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Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

He was a star undergrad, the kind who published dense articles in scholarly journals about the way pop culture shaped new kinds of identities in “late capitalism.” Jonah struck Haraway as a deep reader, curious and open to criticism. She wasn’t surprised that he became a “generative and also controversial figure in technoculture and culture at large.” Jonah struggled to merge his playful interest in media with loftier ideas about late-stage capitalism. Soon after he graduated in 1996, he published a dense article in the philosophical journal Negations about the links between capitalism, media, and the formation of identity in an already disorienting media age.

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See also Jezebel Fey, Tina, 82 filter bubbles, 180, 183 Financial Times, 14–15, 62, 221, 286 Fineman, Howard, 70 Finke, Nikki, 44 Finnegan, Leah, 216 First Amendment, 214 First Tuesday, 15–16 FishbowlNY blog, 58 Fleshbot porn site, 57, 143 Flickr, 49 Forbes, 147 Ford, Rob, 216 Forget-Me-Not Panties, 48, 50 ForwardTrack, 27–28 4chan, 117, 126–27, 290 Foursquare, 61 Fox News, 135, 186 Frank, Ze and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 167 and BuzzFeed’s video content, 264–65 and Contagious Media Showdown, 48 and devaluation of traffic, 267 and Disney’s bid to buy BuzzFeed, 197–98, 202 and Gionet, 291–92 and Peretti’s move to Los Angeles, 264 and social engagement on Facebook, 273 fraud, 284–85 French Revolution, 262 Frenkel, Sheera, 276 Friedman, Thomas, 223 Froelich, Paula, 60, 105 Frumin, Michael, 48, 72, 103 FSB, 252 Fuller, Bonnie, 88–89 Fusion GPS, 247 G Gab, 298 Galbraith, David, 17 Gallagher, Aileen, 138 gambling blogs, 55–56 García Martínez, Antonio, 242–43 Gateway Pundit, 277 Gauthier, Andrew, 294 Gawker and backlash against media companies, 217–18 book release, 76–77 and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 166 Coen’s influence at, 53–56 competition from AOL blogs, 147–48 and Daulerio’s background, 137–38 and Daulerio’s influence, 137–38, 174–76 decline of, 214–16 Denton’s life after, 260–63 and Denton’s wedding, 213–14 drug use at, 56 gambling blog, 55–56 and Hollywood blogs, 38 and Huffington Post’s launch, 45–46 and Jezebel’s style and content, 87, 90–91, 94–97 lawsuits against, 214–15, 231–35, 247 and New York blogging scene, 21–23 and New York tech environment, 61 and political content, 29 and revival of legacy media, 220, 223, 230 and right-wing media, 193 rivalry with BuzzFeed, 170–71 and sale of Huffington Post, 149 sexual content, 63–64, 138–43 and splintering of internet media, 298–99 and the Steele Dossier, 246–59, 260 and Thinking and Drinking controversy, 99–100 traffic gains, 57 and “unique visitors” metric, 128 and Valleywag’s launch, 62 The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media, 76 Gawker Media, 128, 144, 169, 177, 217–18 Gawker Stalker, 46, 139 gay Republicans, 190 Gchat, 96, 185, 236 Geffen, David, 32, 118 Gehry, Frank, 211 Gerson, Jennifer, 91, 94, 98 Gingrich, Newt, 32 Gionet, Anthime Joseph (Baked Alaska), 265, 275, 290–97, 298 Gizmodo, 20, 21–24, 57, 90 Glamour, 87–89, 96, 151 Goldberg, Bryan, 298 Golden, Michael, 222 Goldman Sachs, 118, 286 Google and ad tech advances, 106, 169 and Armstrong’s background, 147 Blogger sold to, 21 and BuzzFeed’s traffic, 151–55, 161–62, 204 and Demand Media, 118 Google Analytics, 204 and growth of BuzzFeed, 128–29 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 51, 79–81 and international media environment, 267 and revival of legacy media, 230 and shifting media environment, 84 and tagging search terms, 104 Gothamist, 18 Gould, Emily, 76, 96 Gowrappan, Guru, 287 GQ, 137 Grassegger, Hannes, 261 Gray, Rosie, 166 Grazer, Brian, 33 Green, Joshua, 117 Greenring, Tanner, 192 Group Nine, 302 Guardian, 16 guerilla marketing, 221, 279 Guevara, Oscar Morales, 112–14 gun culture, 187, 191–92 H Haber, Leba, 50 Halperin, Mark, 33 Hannity, Sean, 256 Haraway, Donna, 7 Harder, Charles, 233 Harman, Fred, 118–21, 123, 149, 153 Harner, Andrea, 27, 78 Harper’s Magazine, 3 Harvard Business Review, 29 Harvard University, 5, 221 Haugen, Frances, 275–76 Hearst Ventures, 75, 122, 152, 270 Heat Street, 255 Hegeman, John, 273–74 Herbert, Bob, 28 Herrman, John, 171 Hill, Faith, 92, 99 Hilton, Paris, 57, 63–64 Hilton, Perez, 90 Hilton, Shani, 194, 246, 251–52 Hogan, Hulk (Terry Bollea), 63, 175–76, 214–15, 231–35, 247 Holderness, Cates, 209–10 Holiday, Ryan, 234, 262 Holmes, Anna, 87–98, 100, 112, 151, 203, 290, 303 Hong, James, 49 Hourihan, Meg, 17, 19, 21, 46, 71 How to Murder Your Life (Marnell), 175 Huffington, Arianna and Breitbart’s political background, 42 and Breitbart’s salary, 40 and Coen’s career, 60 and Contagious Media Festival, 72 criticism of Hillary Clinton, 102 and Denton’s parties, 53, 56–58, 58–59 departure from HuffPost, 286 and Drudge’s influence, 38 and Huffington Post’s investors, 117–18, 120 and Huffington Post’s launch, 44, 46 and Huffington Post’s political content, 107 and Huffington Post’s shifting strategy, 79–81 influence with Lerer, 32–34 and Iraq War coverage, 78–79 and online political engagement, 105–6 and Peretti’s role at BuzzFeed, 123 and sale of Huffington Post, 147–50 and 2008 financial crisis, 118 and Weiner scandal, 144 Huffington, Michael, 32 Huffington Post (later HuffPost) acquired by Verizon, 286–87 and backlash against Breitbart, 135 and banner ads, 266 and breitbart.com’s growth, 131–33 and Breitbart’s background, 35 and Breitbart’s role, 39–42 and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 159–61 and BuzzFeed’s traffic sources, 155–56 competition from Gawker, 76–77 and Contagious Media Showdown, 48, 51 and Daulerio’s influence at Gawker, 139 and Denton’s parties, 58 and devaluation of traffic, 268–69 and Disney’s bid to buy BuzzFeed, 196 and Gawker’s decline, 260 Harman’s investment in, 120–21, 123 launch of, 44–51 and online political engagement, 102–8 and origin of social media politics, 111, 113, 115 and Peretti’s role at BuzzFeed, 122–24 and post tech-crash environment, 61 and revival of legacy media, 223, 228 and right-wing media, 255, 290 sale to AOL, 147–51, 157 search for investors, 116–20 and shifting media strategies, 78–82 and Silicon Valley financing, 62 and social engagement on Facebook, 183–84 and Thinking and Drinking controversy, 99 and traffic monitoring tools, 76 traffic trends after launch, 67–73 and “unique visitors” metric, 128 and Valleywag’s launch, 65 and Weiner scandal, 145 Hughes, Chris, 109–11, 181 Hunch, 127 Hurricane Katrina, 57 hyperlinks, 81 I IAC, 149 identity politics, 100, 124, 152, 186–87 Iger, Bob, 116, 118, 195–201, 203, 268 influencers, 26, 52, 295 Innovation (report), 228 Instagram, 206, 270 InStyle website, 89 Internet Explorer, 80 io9, 77 Iowa Federation of College Republicans, 189 Iraq War, 29, 31, 41–42, 67–68, 78–79, 94, 102, 180 Isikoff, Michael, 249 The Isis (student magazine), 14 iSyndicate, 15 J Jackass franchise, 291 Jackson, Janet, 38 Jam Master Jay, 221 January 6 US Capitol attack, 291, 295 Jarvis, Jeff, 226 JavaScript, 73 Jefferson, Whitney, 171 Jezebel and backlash against media companies, 217–18 and Daulerio’s background, 140 and Denton’s political engagement, 102 and Gawker’s decline, 260 and Gawker’s sexual content, 143 and Holmes’s influence, 87–97 and origin of social media politics, 111–12 and right-wing media, 290 and shape of today’s internet media, 303 and Thinking and Drinking controversy, 98–101 and Valleywag’s launch, 62 Jobs, Laurene Powell, 195 Johanesen, Chris, 73–75, 123, 125, 151, 165, 266 Johnson, Benny, 185–94, 255, 275–77, 290, 300 Johnson, John, 10, 18, 20, 27, 34, 67–68, 71, 149, 181 Johnson, Zach, 188–89 Jolie, Zahara Marley, 91 Jones, Star, 59 Jurassic Park (film), 191, 219 K Kaczynski, Andrew, 166 Kafka, Peter, 287 Kamer, Foster, 54 Kane, Will, 216–17 Kang, Cecilia, 276 Kaplan, Peter, 156, 159 Karp, David, 28 Kaufman, Ben, 280 Keller, Bill, 224 Kerry, John, 31, 33 The Kingdom and the Power (Talese), 222 Kinja, 55, 62, 71, 215, 217, 260 Kirk, Charlie, 277 Klein, Ezra, 298 Koechley, Peter, 180 Kottke, Jason, 16, 19, 48, 126 Kramer, David, 248, 250 Kushner, Jared, 156 Kutcher, Ashton, 124–25, 168 L Lacy, Sarah, 66 LADbible, 274 Lafayette Project, 20 Lamb, Scott, 76, 129, 168, 180–81, 210 Landman, Jon, 223, 224 late-stage capitalism, 7 Law, Jude, 57 lawsuits, 176, 214–15, 231–35, 247 Lear, Norman, 33 Ledger, Heath, 104 Lehman Brothers, 119 Lehmkuhl, Vance, 71, 72 Leitch, Will, 138 Leno, Jay, 50 Leopold, Jason, 257 Lerer, Ben, 283 Lerer, Kenneth and anti-NRA efforts, 25–28 and author’s background, 159–60 and Breitbart’s influence, 36 and Breitbart’s role at Huffington Post, 42 and BuzzFeed board meetings, 152 and BuzzFeed’s financial pressures, 122, 283 and BuzzFeed’s role in social media, 269–70 and BuzzFeed’s SPAC deal, 300 and BuzzFeed’s traffic sources, 155–56 and Coen’s career, 60 and competition from Gawker, 77 and Disney’s bid to buy BuzzFeed, 196, 199–201 and Drudge’s influence, 38 and Huffington Post’s investors, 116–19, 120 and Huffington Post’s launch, 46–47 and Huffington Post’s political content, 102, 313n102 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 67–71 and Huffington’s influence, 32–34 and online political engagement, 105–8 opinion of Breitbart, 39 purchase of Breitbart’s Huffington Post shares, 119, 131–32 and revival of legacy media, 228 role at BuzzFeed, 78–79 and sale of Huffington Post, 147–49 and shape of today’s internet media, 303 and strategy at Huffington Post, 82 and Valleywag’s launch, 62 Lessin, Sam, 160 Levin, Gerald, 25 Levy, Cliff, 220 Levy, Steven, 115 Lewinsky, Monica, 37, 102, 132 LexisNexis, 223 Lifehacker, 57 LilyBoo, 168, 172–73, 181, 191, 208 Limbaugh, Rush, 37 Locklear, Heather, 4 Lodwick, Jakob, 59 Los Angeles Times, 281 M Maddow, Rachel, 98 Magician (bar), 19 Major League Baseball, 140 Maker Studios, 201, 272 Manafort, Paul, 254 Marlow, Cameron, 1–2, 8–9, 11, 20–21, 49, 162, 302–3 Marnell, Cat, 175 Maske, Joel, 15 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 126.

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Jonah’s approach was a radically new and abstract way of thinking about media—to focus on its psychological effect rather than on what it was actually about. This was the stuff he’d been thinking about since his time at Santa Cruz, the applied version of all that abstract talk of identity formation in late capitalism. Jonah’s experiments didn’t always work. Sometimes, they looked insane. Like when he tweeted in quick succession, “RT if you love Jesus!” and “RT if you think Jesus had some good ideas but is totally overrated,” getting a total of three retweets and much head-scratching. A prank that worked better came in May of 2009, when he latched on to the mechanics of ego and celebrity that had motivated Blogebrity years earlier.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

And Florida has said in a series of articles for The Atlantic that some cities, including Detroit, are beyond salvation by the creative class: “We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.” Detroit was one of the places Florida mentioned. But believing that hipsters can reverse the consequences of late-stage capitalism is a more attractive thought for city planners in cash-strapped cities than realizing that many American cities are, for now, screwed thanks to postindustrial decline and growing inequality. Gentrification may provide a new tax base, but it also reshapes what cities are, turning them into explicit supporters of inequality, reliant on it to self-fund, yet still unable to meet the needs of their poor.

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This focus is not the result of a philosophical bug that’s somehow spread to the brains of city managers everywhere. People such as Richard Florida make the city-as-business philosophy seem appealing, but there’s something bigger going on. Logan and Molotch argue that the city-as-growth-machine is an inherent feature of late capitalism in the United States. Cities, more than being places for people to live, have become ways to produce, manage, attract, and extract capital. Under capitalism, there’s an inherent tension between what Marxist academics call “use value” and “exchange value.” Use value means the value a place is given by being useful to people—because it houses them, because it gives them a sense of community, a place where they can work, a sense of identity.

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Before Katrina, the New Orleans public school system: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 6. “This is a tragedy”: Milton Friedman, “The Promise of Vouchers,” Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005. Research from Tulane University: Adrienne Dixson, “Whose Choice? A Critical Race Perspective on Charter Schools,” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 135. Activists called the takeover an educational land grab: “The Educational Land Grab,” editorial, Rethinking Schools 1, no. 21 (Fall 2006). Some data suggest the RSD is indeed successful: Alan Greenblatt, “New Orleans District Moves to an All-Charter System,” National Public Radio, May 30, 2014.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

This analysis is a subjective description of what I have seen during my career and draws on lots of research done by the High Pay Commission which I chaired in 2010–11 and the High Pay Centre think tank which I set up in 2012. Dysfunctional pay structures and the gulf between income for those at the top and the rest are not the inevitable products of late-stage capitalism. They are the outcome of choices made by governments and company boards about markets, incentives, tax rates and regulation. In many ways, they are also a fundamental misreading of human motivation. 1 Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? In a world where just forty-two people have as much wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion and the lion’s share of income generated in recent years has gone to those at the very top,1 it is important to ask why the global economy operates in this way.

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Company bosses in most Western societies are cashing in untold riches for just a few years’ labour in stark contrast to those who work for them, who have not had a real-terms pay rise for years. The Brexit vote in Britain, the election of Donald Trump in the US, as well as the rise of populism in Europe, are commonly seen as an expression of frustration by those ‘left behind’ by the current economic structure and moves towards greater globalization. It is worth asking how late-stage capitalism in the West has created the conditions that hand so many benefits to the ‘few’: those at the top of the income scale and the wealthy. The economic changes that have enriched the top 1 per cent have come since the 1980s and the rise in inequality over the past 25 years risks taking us back to a Dickensian-style divergence in incomes and lifestyles if we do nothing to reverse it.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Still, the weak point in his strongly Marxist account of recent culture has been his relatively thin description of the economy, the mode of production. It is too easy to read much of his work and conclude that a given film or novel could indeed be read as a blind allegory of “late capitalism,” without late capitalism meaning anything much more distinct than “the economy” or “the system.” In such cases it has been far easier to accept his Marxism in an axiomatic sense—a product of late capitalism will necessarily be about late capitalism too—than to see how the axiom could be embodied in persuasive local analyses of this or that cultural artifact or tendency. And yet it isn’t as if Jameson can’t do that too.

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In the novelists, however, allusion to the great ensphering system often took the form of paranoia. As a Marxist, Jameson was calmer and more forthright: he simply called the system “late capitalism,” after the book by Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Trotskyist, which provided the base, as it were, to his own cultural superstructure. Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972) had offered a magnificently confident and pugnacious argument about the nature of postwar capitalism, but he regretted “not being able to propose a better term for this historical era than ‘late capitalism.’ ” In Mandel’s usage, “late” simply meant “recent,” but the term naturally also suggests obsolescence. This implication of an utterly misplaced Marxist triumphalism probably had consequences for the reception of Jameson’s theory (and Mandel’s).

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Who could believe in 1991, when Jameson published Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that capitalism was on its last legs? In fact, Jameson didn’t think it was either. His actual claim was more like the opposite: with the postwar elimination of precapitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe, with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism.

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

After a while I started to pretend to be a robot and then … I sort of couldn’t remember if I was a robot or not and so I had to get out of there. Humour aside, this exchange nicely expresses some interesting dynamics concerning the ‘social factory’ of neoliberal capitalism. So-called non-work time is a resource to be used up, especially with the help of mobile technology. This is what gives late capitalism a strange sense of permanence – we are never not at work. Even if we are not being formally paid, that is no longer an excuse for deserting one’s role. The time of labour curves back on itself, with only the happy occasion of a funeral partially exempting you from the injunction always to be on call.

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The evidence suggests that this trend has certainly been important, especially regarding self-managing teams, autonomy and so forth. But I would say that the focus on ‘the subject’ actually camouflages a more significant force indicative of capitalism today: namely, rationalization. For all the talk about individuality, difference, personal authenticity and plural identities, late capitalism is extremely one-dimensional, revolving almost singularly around questions of efficiency, utility and input–output effectiveness. And society doesn’t function very well when organized exclusively on these principles: it bends and groans under the pressure as faceless technocrats further rationalize our worlds so that our bodies absorb the costs of an unworkable system.

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Work has become a virtual portmanteau that weighs upon our shoulders, its negative energy swallowing everything around us like some perfidious black hole. And, as I explore in more depth in Chapter 2, this demented generalization of the will-to-produce that has captured the social imaginary of late capitalism represents first and foremost a class offensive. As Keynes anxiously admitted, what would we do with all that free time? What is striking about the cultural idiom of our workers’ society is the compulsive obsessiveness that it inspires. If its justification has long been emptied of pious assurance, that void has been stopgapped by a certain social sickness: a liturgy of inwardness that is exaggerated by an ‘all or nothing’ attitude towards the empty grammar of labour.

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

This is not contradicted by the fact that Adorno introduced ‘late capitalism’ into social theory as a ‘Frankfurt School’ concept, using it in the title he chose for the German Sociological Congress in 1968 and in his opening report ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’ (T. Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, in Volker Merja et al., Modern German Sociology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Adorno distinguished ‘late capitalism’ from what he called ‘liberal capitalism’, which, following Pollock, he regarded as a historically prior form of capitalism now superseded by state intervention and organization. Late capitalism was thus essentially identical with what others had been calling ‘organized capitalism’.

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For this reason alone, the point at issue cannot be who then was more right than others. The theoretical endeavours of the Frankfurt years also demonstrate how social-scientific knowledge is unavoidably tied to its time. Nevertheless, it might be possible to link up with 1970s theories of the crisis of ‘late capitalism’ in grappling with present-day events – and not only because we now know again, and are again able to voice, what was forgotten for decades or dismissed as irrelevant: that the economic and social order of the wealthy democracies is still a capitalist order and can be understood, if at all, only with the help of a theory of capitalism.

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– social trends of development repeatedly come up against counteracting factors that may slow them down or divert, modify or halt them.12 Societies observe the trends at work in them and react to them. In doing so, they display an inventiveness far beyond anything imagined by social scientists, even by those who have correctly identified the (socially contentious) underlying trends. The crisis of late capitalism in the 1970s must have been visible even to those who had no interest in its downfall or self-destruction. They too sensed the tensions more or less accurately diagnosed by crisis theory, and acted in response. From today’s vantage, such reactions appear as successful attempts – stretching over more than four decades – to buy time.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Bruce Norton, “Late Capitalism and Postmodernism: Jameson/Mandel”, in ed. Antonio Callari & Stephen Cullenberg & Carole Biewener, Marxism in the Postmodern Age—Confronting the New World Order (New York: Guilford Press, 1994). 18. “Late capitalism, far from representing a ‘post-industrial society’, thus appears as the period in which all branches of the economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could further add the increasing mechanization of the sphere of circulation […] and the increasing mechanization of the super-structure.” Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Thetford Press limited, 1978), 191, italics in original; hereafter cited in text. 19.

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In this task, lead will be taken from the Belgian Trotskyite Ernest Mandel. Mandel covered roughly the same terrain as Antonio Negri; studying the increased use of scientific labour in a period which he tentatively labelled ‘late capitalism’. Later on, Fredric Jameson based his acclaimed study of post-modernity on Mandel’s analysis, declaring post-modernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”.17 Jameson was attracted to the Marxist version of an epochal breach in capitalism because it provided him with a position from which the post-industrialist notions could be countered. This vantage point was succinctly phrased by Ernest Mandel in the saying that the superstructure has been mechanised.18 By that he meant that the economic instrumentality previously perfected in the factory had now embarked upon culture, law, politics, and society at large.

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Unless this process is continually repeated, surplus value cannot be continuously created, and the total mass of profit must ultimately fall.”34 She calls this state of affair the perpetual innovation economy. Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s reasoning provides a theoretical backbone for understanding the heightened relevance of innovation and collective learning processes in late capitalism. Valorisation of capital is concentrated to the starting-up of a production line, rather than the running of the production line. Capitalism has always sought to increase profitability by accelerating product cycles. When this logic turns on the innovation process itself, creative destruction enters ‘warp speed’.

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Propelled by media machinations, sport has risen to replace work, religion, and community as the cultural “glue of collective consciousness in latter twentieth century America,” while simultaneously becoming the “most potent of global ‘idioms.’”4 Hence, this essay focuses on the popular cultural phenomenon variously described as “mediasport,” the “sports/media complex,” the “sport-business-TV nexus,” “sportainment,” or “the high-flying entertainment-media-sports industry.”5 Far from providing a comprehensive overview of the subject, this essay analyzes the relationship between contemporary sport culture and the media industry.6 Despite the growing awareness of what one writer calls the “institutional alignment of sports and media in the context of late capitalism,”7 sport continues to be fetishized by large sections of the general populace as a cultural form somehow removed from the invasive influences of late capitalism. Even the most critical of cultural commentators can slip into a whimsical romanticism whenever sport is mentioned, thereby totally ignoring its broader social and economic derivations or ramifications. Countering such naïveté, and invoking Marshal McLuhan’s dictum “fish don’t know water till beached,”8 this discussion encourages readers to think outside commonsense, uncritical, and myopic understandings of sport by highlighting two exemplars of this most evocative of late-capitalist synergies (that between sport and the commercial media), namely, News Corporation and the Olympic Games; for, the minimum requirement for becoming a productive contributor within the sport industry, an accomplished sport studies scholar, and— perhaps most important—an informed sport consumer, is the ability to discern and dissect the political economic nexus of sport-media-commerce.

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Once conclusively appropriated by corporate capitalism, the very constitution and delivery of sport culture became dialectically implicated in subsequent changes in the economic order. Today’s media-driven sport culture can only be understood in relation to what Jameson famously described as the cultural logics of late capitalism that crystallized in the final decades of the twentieth century.19 Before this phase of late capitalism, the political economy had been dominated by mass material manufacturing carried out by large-scale manual workforces, in traditional factory settings, using heavy industrial machinery. During the 1970s, declining industrial productivity rates, and the inflationary effects of global oil crises, incited the gradual unraveling of industrial capitalism after almost a century of relatively stable growth.

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Although losing portions of its core male viewership to the media culture phenomenon that is TNT’s WCW Monday Nitro and USA Network’s WWF Raw,38 ABC’s Monday Night Football continues to preoccupy the American male adult gaze to such a degree that it receives a staggering $380,000 for every thirty-second advertising spot.39 Lower down the television sport food chain, despite being expected to garner modest viewing figures, the very fact that approximately 40 percent of the audience for its telecasts is drawn from the cherished eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male demographic means that ABC’s NHL television coverage commands between $30,000 and $35,000 per thirty-second spot.40 138 Sport In addition to the regular network coverage catering to televised sport’s traditional adult male constituency, sport programming targeted at specific market niches has recently come to the fore. Whereas Monday Night Football’s adult male demographic was once the almost exclusive quarry of sport programmers, now late capitalism’s broadening exploitative reach has brought female, youth, ethnic, and gray markets into the televised sport universe, as evidenced by the presence of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) on NBC and Lifetime; the X Games on ABC/ESPN/ESPN2; Major League Soccer (MLS) on ABC/ESPN/ESPN2; and numerous Senior Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) events on various channels.

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Thus Sombart distinguishes between ‘early’ (merchant), ‘high’ (industrial) and ‘late’ capitalism, the latter referring to the 1920s and 1930s. For Hilferding, the transition he observed during his lifetime from liberal to organized and from industrial to financial capitalism was a transition out of capitalism into something else. Marx and Engels, just as after them Rosa Luxemburg, expected the socialist revolution to take place while they were still alive. Polanyi believed he had seen the end of capitalism, coincident with the end of the Second World War. The ‘Frankfurt School’ located ‘late capitalism’ (Spätkapitalismus) in the 1970s, having taken the place of liberal capitalism or free market capitalism after 1945.

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See, among others, Kocka, Geschichte des Kapitalismus. 11To get an idea of the magnitude of the about-face that took place, although only gradually and thus for a long time imperceptibly, see Sombart’s model of the ‘form of economic life’ under ‘late capitalism’: ‘Freedom from external constraint characteristic of the period of full capitalism is superseded in the period of late capitalism by an increase in the number of restrictions until the entire system becomes regulated rather than free. Some of these regulations are self-imposed – the bureaucratization of internal management, the submission to collective decisions of trade associations, exchange boards, cartels and similar organizations.

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In the 1970s, however, what had with hindsight been called the ‘post-war settlement’ of social-democratic capitalism began to disintegrate, gradually and imperceptibly at first but increasingly punctuated by successive, ever more severe crises of both the capitalist economy and the social and political institutions embedding, that is, supporting as well as containing it. This was the period of both intensifying crisis and deep transformation when ‘late capitalism’, as impressively described by Werner Sombart in the 1920s,11 gave way to neoliberalism. Crisis Theory Redux Today, after the watershed of the financial crisis of 2008, critical and indeed crisis-theoretical reflection on the prospects of capitalism and its society is again en vogue. Does Capitalism Have a Future?

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Again, one may make the analogy that this transformation is the transformation from centralization (singular meaning) to decentralization (meaning’s replication). In the sociopolitical realm many thinkers have also charted this same periodization. Ernst Mandel uses the concept of Kondratieff waves to examine what he calls the era of late capitalism beginning in approximately 1945. “As far as I can see,” writes Fredric Jameson, “the general use of the term late capitalism originated with the Frankfurt School; it is everywhere in Adorno and Horkheimer, sometimes varied with their own synonyms (for example, ‘administered society’).”36 Jameson states that the concept is ultimately Mandel’s: “There have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage.

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Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, pp. 206, 210, 211–212. 35. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, p. 192. 36. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. xviii. Introduction 23 capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might be better termed multinational capital,”37 or to use Mandel’s terminology, late capitalism. Like other social critics of late-twentieth-century life, Jameson looks to the economic crisis of 1973 as a turning point, a moment that “somehow crystallized”38 these new currents of postmodernity.

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Jameson admits that Mandel’s work “is what made [his] own thoughts on ‘postmodernism’ possible.”39 Sociologist Manuel Castells has also documented this transformation out of decentralization into new distributed, flexible economies in his threevolume treatise The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Using the term “network society” (rather than Deleuze’s “society of control” or Jameson’s “late capitalism”), Castells shows with extensive quantitative documentation that today’s sociopolitical space is dominated not by robust national economies and core industrial sectors but by “interactive networks” and “flexible accumulation.” Charting the same periodization that I rely on in this book, Castells shows how, for example, corporate business structures have changed in the last several decades from a decentralized “vertical” corporatism to a more distributed “horizontal” meshwork: “The corporation itself has changed its organizational model, to adapt to the conditions of unpredictability ushered in by rapid economic and technological change.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

He was not the first to do so: Freud’s disciple Wilhelm Reich had made the same attempt, much to Freud’s disgust and fury.38 But whereas Reich limited himself to insisting that the end of capitalism would mean the end of neurosis, Fromm and his supporters at the Institute of Social Research gave the merger of Freud and Marx a more analytical thrust. They tried to describe the social psychology of late capitalism by revealing its supposedly distorting effects on the individual and the family, particularly among workers. “The more a society collapses economically, socially and psychologically,” Fromm wrote in 1937, “the greater are the differences in psychic structure in the various classes.” The modern family, like late capitalism itself, was “in crisis,” Fromm and Adorno concluded in their Studies on Authority and the Family. The effects were far-reaching and deadly, particularly on the individual.

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Marcuse stridently expounded on this theme in his most widely read work, One-Dimensional Man (1964), which is largely an expansion of The Dialectic of Enlightenment’s grim picture of the nature of late capitalism, what others were now referring to as “the affluent society” and “postindustrial civilization.” Soul-destroying Zivilisation had turned into the “consumer society,” which disguises its true repressive nature behind a cornucopia of goods and services. As with Adorno and Horkheimer’s totalizing late capitalism, what seems to be increasing personal freedom is actually the opposite; the middle class and workers often remain blissfully unaware of how unhappy they really are.* However, “the extension of exploitation to a larger part of the population, accompanied by a higher standard of living, is the reality behind the facade of the consumer society.”54 “In the affluent society,” Marcuse wrote, “capitalism has come into its own.”

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He had learned a good deal about Marx during his stay in Germany in 1892 to ’94 and visited the Soviet Union in 1924. His own analysis of imperialism had anticipated V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued (wrongly) that the scramble for Africa was due to surplus capital, and that late capitalism could only derive its profits from an expanding colonial empire.* For a time after World War II, Du Bois even worried that the capitalist world, in its final death agonies, would crush out the cause of liberation of nonwhite people.72 Then the British granted independence to India, the United States forced the Dutch to leave Indonesia, and the European powers began to shed their colonies—and prospered.

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In her o -referenced essay “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Tiziana Terranova discusses free labor's complex relationship to capitalism. Free labor is a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to underretribution and exploitation in the cultural economy at large. Late capitalism does not appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force and its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from the larger network economy of late capitalism.

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In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from the larger network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet is always and simultaneously a gi economy and an advanced capitalist economy. The mistake of the neoliberalists (as exemplified by the Wired group), is to mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence. As Terranova shows, we cannot pretend the gi economy of free (unpaid) collaboration exists totally apart from, untainted by, neoliberalism. The two are deeply interconnected, and becoming more so. Perhaps this is what our collaborative future really looks like.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

This way of determining price gets asymptotically close to one of the golden assumptions of classical economics, the frictionlessness of information about a commodity. Consumers could be sure of getting something very close to the best price consistent with the seller's reasonable expectation of profit. In this sense, everyware would appear to be late capitalism's Holy Grail. And where sharing such information was once anathema to business, this is no longer necessarily true. Google and yahoo! already offer open application programming interfaces (APIs) to valuable properties like Google Maps and the Flickr photo-sharing service, and the practice is spreading; business has grown comfortable sharing even information traditionally held much closer to the vest, like current inventory levels, with partners up and down the supply chain.

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Entire sectors of the economy are already looking to the informatic colonization of everyday things, and not merely as part of an enhanced value proposition offered the purchaser of such things. For manufacturers and vendors, the necessary gear represents quite a substantial revenue stream in its own right. The logic of success in late capitalism is, of course, continuous growth. The trouble is that the major entertainment conglomerates and consumerelectronics manufacturers have hit something of a wall these last few years; with a few exceptions (the iPod comes to mind), we're not buying as much of their product as we used to, let alone ever more of it.

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For example, designers Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri EngestrÖm, working with economics student Adam Wern, have proposed something they call a "free product identifier." Their ThingLinks offer an equivalent of the familiar UPC or ISBN codes, specifically designed for the "invisible tail" of short-run, amateur, or folk productions previously denied a place in the grand electronic souk of late capitalism. Anyone, at no charge, can generate a code, associate it with an object, and fill out some basic information relating to it, and forever after that object can be looked up via the net—either the one we enjoy now, or whatever ubiquitous variant comes afterward.* * Each ThingLink is technically a valid Uniform Resource Identifier, albeit one refined down to the "scheme" and "path" semantic elements.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

So, there are strong norms in advanced industrial nations that ablebodied people ought not to live off public assistance, which, in effect, means that there is a strong norm that almost everyone should work. (The case of the idle rich is not an exception to the claim that most should work, since the idle rich are always a minority.) This leads to the contradiction of late-stage capitalism. To understand the contradiction, we need to recall from chapter 5 the relationship between “ought” and “can” statements: “ought” implies “can.” The point was made with the following example: Suppose someone says that you ought to save a drowning child. In your defense, you point out that you cannot swim, and even if you could swim, to save the child would mean swimming against a ten mph current.

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Given the pay differential and the difference in job satisfaction between roboticists and fast-food workers, it is safe to assume that any decline in the workforce participation rate is more likely to come from the ranks of the latter. The Rawlsian view that threatens the perennial Malibu surfer is badly mistaken. Perennial surfers ought to be celebrated as heroes of the nation. Without them, the contradiction of late-stage capitalism is only exacerbated. The Future of Capitalism The argument for BIG offered here seems to have hitched its fortunes to that of capitalism. In chapter 3, we argued that BIG might be seen as a dividend on shares in state capital. And in chapters 6 and 7, we looked at ways to utilize the productivity of capitalism to generate more GNH and GNF.

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South End Press, 1980); for James O’Connor, see ‘‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,’’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1, no. 1 (1989), 11–38. 19. ‘‘Late capitalism thus appears as the period in which all branches ofthe economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 7 2 – 2 7 8 459 further add . . . the increasing mechanization of the superstructure.’’ Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 190–191. 20. ‘‘This purer capitalism ofour own time thus eliminated the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way.’’ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 36. 21.

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See Avery Gordon, ‘‘The Work ofCorporate Culture: Diversity Manage- ment,’’ Social Text, 44, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 1995), 3–30. N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 5 3 – 1 6 6 441 25. See Chris Newfield, ‘‘Corporate Pleasures for a Corporate Planet,’’ Social Text, 44, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 1995), 31–44. 26. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 2 . 5 N E T W O R K P O W E R : U . S . S O V E R E I G N T Y A N D T H E N E W E M P I R E 1. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Max Beldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), p. 37.

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For Foucault and Blanchot, see Foucault’s essay ‘‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,’’ trans. Brian Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987). For Derrida, see Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982). 6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. ix. 7. We are thinking here primarily ofHannah Arendt’s notion ofthe political articulated in The Human Condition (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1958). 8. For Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 221–263. For Sa˜o Paulo, see Teresa Caldeira, ‘‘Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,’’ Public Culture, no. 8 (1996); 303–328. 9.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

The more I considered the ways in which the stories of America and Russia have been intertwined, the more I realized that our bigger failures lay in choices made by Americans without Russia in mind. After the end of the Cold War, we often failed to elevate America’s purpose in the world above the methodical expansion of global markets, allowing America to become tethered to the dislocations and inequality produced by late-stage capitalism. Our embrace of a global War on Terror created a basis for leaders like Putin to securitize their own grip on power, while the invasion of Iraq introduced a destabilizing new normal to global politics: Laws and norms were for the weak, and the strong could do anything they wanted, even invade and occupy a foreign country on a false pretense.

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The Disney movies that my daughters watch are made as much for Chinese kids as for them, drained of democratic values. Technologies created in Silicon Valley become perfect tools of surveillance in Xinjiang. Along the way, the ideological conflicts of the last century were being subsumed by a blend of late-stage capitalism, older nationalism, and China’s newer techno-authoritarianism. The only permanence was in the landscape around us and the human beings who moved within it, and the hope that they’d insist on a different direction of events. The ferry reached the dock and I joined an orderly procession of people walking onto the shore

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

He responded raspingly to word opposite prompts by the ICU speech pathologist when she covered the open valve in his throat with her index finger while four or five of us, who’d been haunting these hallways all winter, stood around listening—all this only days before we were going to take him off the feeding tube. We had help from extended family, but Sweeney and I were the main agents of care and coordination for the years to come, and the labor and grieving and rehab and bureaucracy-fighting was relentless, on top of all the ordinary economic precarity of late-stage capitalism into which we had come of age: the housing bubble burst during my first year of college, and the fall after I graduated had seen the Occupy Wall Street uprising. Our cumulative debt-to-income ratio had relegated my peers and me into veritable serfdom by the time we were eighteen. We’d watched the expansion of the for-profit prison industrial complex.

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Despite all my certainty of folly, I am also sincerely seeking models, skimming communities—both historical and contemporary—for what might be useful or replicable in my own life, or in the lives of my friends, or (however crazy this sounds) more generally for my country people in all of their variety. What are the constant forms, the possible architectures, of developing a happy or ethical life under late-stage capitalism? What do you have to give up, or reduce, or invent? What does a shared ideology provide, and what does it threaten when it becomes the bedrock upon which the project exists? Could the basis of a utopian community be purely material then—co-housing, school, organization, residency? Or just a shared car and washing machine?

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

It is thus not only about more time for leisure as the term is traditionally conceived. It could instead be articulated as time to explore and expand what Rosemary Hennessy describes as “the human capacity for sensation and affect” that has been corralled within and reified by the logics of commodity production, consumer culture, and identity formation in late capitalism (2000, 217). Contrary to those critics of consumer society who fear that shorter working hours would create only more time for mindless consumption, thereby ensuring our further descent into commodity fetishism, there is reason to expect that if given more time, people will find ways to be creative—even if those ways do not necessarily conform to traditional notions of productive activity.

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The pressures of getting by in hard times tend not, as Robin Kelley notes, to be generative of the political imagination; instead, “we are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present” (2002, 11). Consumed by the here and now, the possibilities of alternatives to the ever more reified structures of late capitalism come to seem more distant in such periods. “The leaner and meaner world of the 1980s and 1990s was,” as Tom Moylan describes it, “marked by anti-utopian deprivation rather than utopian achievement” (2000, 103). These same developments fueled an assault on many of the bases of political movements in the 1960s and 1970s, including feminism.

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Contemporary Sociology 27 (1): 28–32. ———. 2003. Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hemmings, Clare. 2005. “Telling Feminist Stories.” Feminist Theory 6 (2): 115–39. Hennessy, Rosemary. 2000. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge. Henwood, Doug. 1997. “Talking about Work.” Monthly Review 49 (3): 18–30. Higbie, Toby. 1997. “Crossing Class Boundaries: Tramp Ethnographers and Narratives of Class in Progressive Era America.” Social Science History 21 (4): 559–92. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. 1987. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Working via initiatives like Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that aims to curb the design of addictive technology, former Facebook president Sean Parker and ex-Google employees Tristan Harris and James Williams have become fervent opponents of the attention economy. But Tanner is unimpressed: They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor.62 For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial.

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It is also important because in a time of shrinking margins, when not only students but everyone else has “put the pedal to the metal,” and cannot afford other kinds of refusal, attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw. In a cycle where both financially driven platforms and overall precarity close down the space of attention—the very attention needed to resist this onslaught, which then pushes further—it may be only in the space of our own minds that some of us can begin to pull apart the links. In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes sleep as the last vestige of humanity that capitalism cannot appropriate (thus explaining its many assaults on sleep).65 The cultivation of different forms of attention has a similar character, since the true nature of attention is often hidden.

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Grafton Tanner, “Digital Detox: Big Tech’s Phony Crisis of Conscience,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August, 9. 2018: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-detox-big-techs-phony-crisis-of-conscience/#!. 63. Navia, 141. 64. Ibid., 125. Navia notes that the language for “sea of illusion” also translates to “wine-colored sea of fog,” yet another image of typhos. 65. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso Books, 2013), 17. 66. Jacobs and Bass, Tehching Hsieh: An Interview. Chapter 4 1. John Cage, “Four Statements on the Dance,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 93. 2. Lawrence Weschler, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 6. 3.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Companies also found novel ways to undercut unions rather than confront them head on, decentralizing and outsourcing production, offering job security for older workers while eliminating jobs for new workers, and increasing technology to replace workers altogether. In the end, they often simply stopped producing things, opting to earn money through the financial markets instead. By the 1990s a different kind of capitalism had emerged, one that scholars have described using various terms: post-Fordism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, late capitalism, and even neoliberalism or globalization. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s persisted, but their radical vision had vastly diminished. People began retelling stories about better times, when people were engaged in a vibrant civil society. As sociologist Francesca Polleta argues, many stories treasured by civil rights activists and progressive scholars—such as those told about the Montgomery bus boycott and Freedom Summer—began to serve a commemorative purpose rather than as a blueprint for changing society.4 Today these stories have even become fodder for the Right: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin quote Martin Luther King without batting an eyelash.

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“Exercising consumer choice appears as both a viable and convenient strategy—particularly when compared to the onerous demands of social movement organizing or trade unionism.” Lifestyle politics also provides an extremely wide scope for expressing more general feelings of angst and unhappiness with “late” capitalism. People who are stressed about personal debt, aghast at unfair trade policies, or newly interested in free food movements and global social justice are told they can make a difference by buying better things like organic food and sustainably produced furniture. “By harnessing the power of consumer choice, ethical consumption appears to shape the market in a way that preserves the environment, addresses poverty, and promotes democracy.”

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Samuel Brittan, who praised many of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies, predicted that the dominance of liberal representative democracy “is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult.” But then Willy Brandt, a man of the democratic left, was said to have predicted much the same. In some Marxist circles, ungovernability was seen as a manifestation of “late capitalism,” the stage in which the political order would lose its legitimacy before capitalism would finally collapse of its own contradictions. For libertarians, on the other hand, ungovernability was merely further evidence that governments had no means to deliver all that they had promised their citizens.7 IT WAS NOT JUST THE WEALTHY MARKET ECONOMIES THAT SEEMED to have become ungovernable.

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The theme of ungovernability, much discussed in the 1970s, emerged again in the twenty-first century as political leaders struggled to communicate convincing visions of a better future. It is easy to read the economic changes that began around 1973 as a perversion of the postwar social contract. The German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, for example, interprets what he calls “the crisis of late capitalism” in the final decades of the twentieth century as “an unfolding of the old fundamental tension between capitalism and democracy—a gradual process that broke up the forced marriage between the two after the Second World War.” But the evident popular despair about economic decline in Japan, North America, and Western Europe reflected an entirely different problem: the difficulty of writing a social contract able to respond to demographic change and technological innovation.16 The arrangements that brought peace and prosperity after World War II have often been portrayed as imposing limits on the power of capital for the benefit of labor.

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See also productivity labor share, 141–142 labor/trade unions, 10, 270; in France, 202, 208, 213; in Germany, 169; in Great Britain, 169–171; income distribution and, 137–138; manufacturing and, 137; in the Netherlands, 169; in Scandinavia, 169; in Spain, 211, 213; state-owned companies, privatization, Thatcher and, 190, 191–194, 214; state-owned companies and Thatcher and, 186–191; ungovernability and, 160; in West Germany, 137 Laffer, Arthur, 227–228 Laffer Curve, 227–228 Landy, Harry, 90–91, 92 Lange, Anders, 153, 154 late capitalism, 160, 267–268. See also capitalism Latin America, 35–36, 241; cause of poverty in, 39; Cold War and, 40–41; debt crisis in, 245, 252–253; economic slowdown in, 4; economic survey of, 38; economy of, 37; importance of industrialization in, 39–40; income per person in, 6; population growth in, 60–62.

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

Similarly, in 1949 Orwell had placed his futuristic dystopia, 1984, only thirty-five years in the future. 79. In fact, video telephones had first been debuted in the 1930s by the German post office under the Nazis. 80. From Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 36–37. The original essay was published in 1984. 81. The original book, in German, came out as Der Spätkapitalismus in 1972. The first English edition was Late Capitalism (London: Humanities Press, 1975). 82. Probably the classic statement of this position is Space and the American Imagination, by Howard McCurdy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1997), but other versions of this sort of rhetoric include: Stephen J.

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It’s worthy of note that in the earliest formulations of postmodernism, which largely came out of the Marxist tradition, a lot of this technological subtext was not even subtext; it was quite explicit. Here’s a passage from Frederick Jameson’s original Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in 1984: It is appropriate to recall the excitement of machinery in the moment of capital preceding our own, the exhilaration of futurism, most notably, and of Marinetti’s celebration of the machine gun and the motorcar. These are still visible emblems, sculptural nodes of energy which give tangibility and figuration to the motive energies of that earlier moment of modernization … the ways in which revolutionary or communist artists of the 1930s also sought to reappropriate this excitement of machine energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society as a whole … It is immediately obvious that the technology of our own moment no longer possesses this same capacity for representation: not the turbine, nor even Sheeler’s grain elevators or smokestacks, not the baroque elaboration of pipes and conveyor belts, nor even the streamlined profile of the railroad train—all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest—but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself.80 Where once the sheer physical power of technologies themselves gave us a sense of history sweeping forward, we are now reduced to a play of screens and images.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Not in the sense of the old classist stereotype that ‘the poor love their cellphones’: no powerful group would turn down the opportunities that smartphones and social media offer. The powerful simply engage differently with the machine. But any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed. What Bruce Alexander calls the state of permanent ‘psychosocial dislocation’ in late capitalism, with life overrun by the law of markets and competition, is the context for soaring addiction rates.28 It is as if the addictive relationship stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism. The nature of this social poverty can be recognized in a situation typical of a social industry addict.

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The fantasy is that it is possible to know, through scientific research, what is good and how people ought to live. It is a fantasy in which meaning is replaced by technique, and all that is contrary, disputatious and unpleasant in social life is replaced by a smooth surface and flow. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that the aesthetic of late capitalism, and particularly of smartphones and apps, is so obsessed with smoothness and flow.)47 This requires relentless intrusive surveillance and laboratory-like manipulation of the entire population. But the secret of the good life is not something that can be known, it being different for everyone.

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In the mathematical language of informatics, collective wants can be manipulated, engineered and connected to a solution. And new technologies have only been as successful as they have been by positioning themselves as magical solutions. Not just to individual dilemmas, but to the bigger crises and dysfunctions of late capitalism. If mass media is a one-way information monopoly, turn to the feed, the blog, the podcast. If the news fails, turn to citizen journalism for ‘unfiltered’ news. If you’re underemployed, bid for jobs on TaskRabbit. If you’ve got little money but own a car, use it to make some spare money on the side.

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

At the same time, we’ve been told that work itself is supposed to bring us fulfillment, pleasure, meaning, even joy. We’re supposed to work for the love of it, and how dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay rent and barely see our friends. Like so many things about late capitalism, the admonishment of a thousand inspirational social media posts to “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” has become folk wisdom, its truthiness presumably everlasting—stretching back to our caveperson ancestors, who I suppose really enjoyed all that mammoth hunting or whatever.

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Exercising them is what is supposed to make work less miserable, but instead it has helped work to worm its way deeper into every facet of our lives. 12 The political project that brought us here is known as neoliberalism, though it sometimes goes by other names: post-Fordism, maybe, or just “late capitalism.” As political philosopher Asad Haider explained, “neoliberalism… is really two quite specific things: first, a state-driven process of social, political, and economic restructuring that emerged in response to the crisis of postwar capitalism, and second, an ideology of generating market relations through social engineering.”

…

In the iconic industrial city of Manchester, one writer described a working class that had turned from factory labor to care work; in fact, many of the carers are looking after the very men and women who worked in those factories, but for lower wages and fewer benefits than the factory workers once had. 33 In late capitalism, as more and more people have had to take on paid work, more and more of the work previously done in the home has been commodified and is now done for a wage. And in an increasingly globalized world, much of this work is done—not just in the United States but in many other wealthy countries as well—by immigrants from the Global South.

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

In recounting Therrien’s now commonplace economic and social precariousness, Kim illuminates a crucial part of what drives Occupy’s creation of spaces that resist ‘the money-form and hierarchy’. Ira Livingston, by contrast, in Twitter-inspired 140-character lines echoing the way information circulates about Occupy, meditates on the impossibility of inhabiting neoliberal late capitalism. Deploying the fantasies of omnipotence that in US commercial culture carry fascist overtones, but in lived experience provide the possibility for social agency, he considers how we move from a sudden sense of political vitality to an active political stance. Naomi Klein, recalling the successful direct action that shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle and the less successful subsequent actions at international financial institution summits that followed, addresses the difference that unlimited time and a changed target makes.

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But this is not only a matter of tools, of instrumental strategies. Surrealism arises when what counts as reality itself is so impoverished, when what passes for intelligible politics, viable social identities, reasonable careers and aspirations are so hobbling, corrosive and suffocating as to make the reality of neoliberal late capitalism uninhabitable. When you can’t inhabit it, occupy it! 5 Over all the conversations, under them all, behind them all, running through them all there is at least – a vitality. As Brooklyn artist Dread Scott said about OWS: ‘there’s oxygen in the room again’. Of course, I have to point out, you can’t recognize constructive politics by vitality alone.

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The mask means more than just anonymity, it is strength in numbers. In one of their calling-card phrases, Anonymous say: ‘We are Anonymous, We are legion.’ It answers a human need to sometimes be one of many, not just a ‘self’. In anonymity, people can hope to escape the exhausting egoism of our age, the atomizing force of late capitalism where the pressure is all on the self and particularly the self-image. Retreating into the crowd can feel like a relief. But within the theme of disguise there also exists a paranoia and suspicion not just within the Occupy camps but within all direct action movements at the moment. I have been accused of being both undercover police and also an Evening Standard2 reporter!

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

Is this gonna be on the Internet now?” “Not if you do me a big favor.” “Uh-oh.” “Seriously, you’re a CFE, right?” “They pulled my certificate, I’m freelance now.” “Whatever. I have to pick your brain about something.” “Should we have lunch someplace?” “I don’t do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?” She’s smiling, however. It occurs to Maxine that contrary to the speech she just gave, March isn’t a crone, she’s a dumpling. With the face and demeanor of somebody who you know within five minutes of meeting them will be telling you to eat something. Something specific, which she will have on a spoon already on its way to your mouth

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“So far,” Rocky murmurs, “the cop has not been invented who could get these guys any more than maybe faintly annoyed.” In the booth adjoining, Maxine notices two young torpedoes of a certain dimension, busy with handheld game consoles. “Doom,” Igor waving a thumb, “just came out for Game Boy. Post–late capitalism run amok, ‘United Aerospace Corporation,’ moons of Mars, gateways to hell, zombies and demons, including I think these two. Misha and Grisha. Say hello, padonki.” Silence and button activity. “How nice to make your acquaintance, Misha and Grisha.” Whatever your real names may be, hi, I’m Marie of Roumania.

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“Igor says you saved them a shitload of money.” “You think that ‘them’ includes Igor himself?” “He’d be too embarrassed to tell anybody. What was going on?” “Some kind of pyramid racket.” “Oh. Something a little different.” “You mean for Igor? like he has some history with—” “No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.” “Too heavy-duty for me, even the scale Igor’s on makes me nervous. I’m more comfortable with people who hang around at ATMs, that level.”

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

Behind whatever fanciful thematic facades these new casinos bore—Polynesian rainforest, ancient Egypt, Italian lakeside—their interior design followed a standard blueprint for revenue maximization, offering a different kind of “learning from Las Vegas.”5 As Frederic Jameson suggested in his 1991 critique of Learning from Las Vegas, its authors’ eagerness to dismiss modernism had blinded them to the “cultural logic of late capitalism” nascent in the architectural forms they encountered.6 Although the aspirations of these forms were not modernist in that they were neither moral nor civic, they were nonetheless unabashedly instrumental; in place of self-mastery and social harmony, they promoted self-abandon and corporate profit.

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The activity distills these aspects of life into their elementary forms (namely, risk-based interaction, actuarial economic thinking, and compressed, elastic time) and applies them to a course of action formatted in such a way that they cease to serve as tools for self-enterprise and instead serve as the means to continue play. The process of distillation and suspension amounts to “a mutation that is totally immanent to late capitalism,” as Tiziana Terranova has written of a similar phenomenon; “not so much a break as an intensification, and therefore a mutation, of a widespread cultural economic logic.”49 In this mutation, the suspension of the actuarial imperative is never entirely complete. This incompleteness is reflected in the ambivalence that gamblers express toward the “choices” they face while gambling, describing them as at once emancipatory and entrapping, annihilatory and capacitating, reassuring and demonic.

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By the 1990s, over two hundred self-help groups modeled on Alcoholic Anonymous had been formed to help those who believed they were addicted to such activities as shopping, watching TV, exercising, eating, using computers, and having sex. A number of scholars have approached the expansion of addiction as a lens through which to consider the broader predicaments of late capitalism. Eve Sedgwick, in her essay “Epidemics of the Will,” notes “the peculiarly resonant relations that seem to obtain between the problematic of addiction and those of the consumer phase of international capitalism” (1992). Along similar lines, Frederic Jameson has written of America that “no society has ever been quite so addictive, quite so inseparable from the condition of addictiveness as this one, which did not invent gambling, to be sure, but which did invent compulsive consumption” (2004, 52). 9.

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

But it differed from charades in that the iPhone camera records these performances. Unlike the other demeaning games, the trainer could then replay the most embarrassing moments. The glee with which supervisors started this game was an uninviting start to the buzz session. While these encounters seem bizarre and ‘remote from the large-scale shifts reshaping a waning late-capitalism’ there is an interesting insight captured here. These attempts at enthusing workers are ‘novel forms of regulation’ focused ‘on those moments of life that once flourished beyond the remit of the corporation’.25 The challenges of management in the call centre thus feed into the buzz sessions. There is a twofold realisation.

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However, rather than this being an incisive analysis of work, it is indicative of the reality-TV format in general as ‘it was clear that working class participants were being recruited for entertainment purposes’.10 Therefore it is no surprise that a format which created a series like Benefits Street11 is unlikely to offer an insight into working-class self-activity and the possibility of social or political change. The narrative of Benefits Street reinforces the class-based notion of an undeserving poor; in The Call Centre resistance to Nev seems futile. The cold call has become part of the experience of living under late capitalism. The regularity with which I receive unsolicited calls from anonymous workers trying to peddle some pointless product is astonishing: PPI repayments, accident compensation claims, mobile or broadband packages, even some which are more straightforward scams. I seem to invariably get sales calls while writing.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

To put that more starkly, these are seriously morbid symptoms, in which all productive opportunities have already been seized, no new ideas or technologies are likely, and there are no new spheres of social or environmental life left to exploit and commodify. These are socially nihilistic interests whose only concern with the future involves their children and grandchildren, but otherwise believe that everything good is in the past. The term ‘late capitalism’ has been over used, but this certainly feels like very late capitalism. From this perspective, the present looks like the outcome of past investments. If you’re rich, it’s because you invested well thirty or forty years ago. You don’t owe anything to anyone, and have no obligation to invest anything more for the future. It’s your money, because of the time that elapsed while it was accumulating.

Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

airport security, Burning Man, call centre, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, failed state, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Jane Jacobs, Julian Assange, late capitalism, megacity, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, place-making, shareholder value, Stephen Fry, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, white flight, WikiLeaks

Although, to clarify, most explorers would not make such claims – they simply want to learn more about the world around them through experiences they would otherwise be denied access to.8 By sneaking past security guards and photographing the secret city, we take back what we didn’t know we’d lost, reclaiming the places hidden from our everyday view.9 As a result, urban exploration becomes a political act, despite claims of apolitical motivations from many involved. Going beyond normally circumscribed boundaries forces one to rethink not just one’s own identity but also the relationship between power and urban space.10 It is at the same time a subversive response to the imperatives of late capitalism that encourage spectatorship over participation and, as an explorer called Peter bluntly put it, ‘just a bit of fucking with people’s heads to help them understand how much they’re missing every day’.11 The most well-trodden avenue into urban exploration is through a fascination with ruins – buildings and places that have been left and are considered useless.

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But exploration of liminal space, and the patience, persistence and creative thinking it requires to hack places also multiply the possibility for affective engagement in relation to people, places and things.96 Multiplying possibilities, and creating opportunities that are not offered, is always a political act.97 Children are born into a world, into a body, with a vast range and potential for affective engagement.98 However, as the social body begins to condition the individual body, the range of affective possibility narrows according to the range of possibilities accorded by the dominant society, in this case late capitalism and its insistence that relationships and activities be profitable and serve national and economic interests, often at the expense of community and/or individual freedom.99 By infiltrating the material social body, the urban body, by entering the metropolitan metabolism and jittering its internal organs, undertaking pointless subversive play in the veins and arteries of the city, we create alternative pathways, little fragments of possibility.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

On the problems of mapping population and social geographies in verticalising cities, see Nicholas Perdue, ‘The Vertical Space Problem: Rethinking Population Visualizations in Contemporary Cities’, Cartographic Perspectives 74, 2013. 20See, for example, Judith Dupré, Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013; Francesco Passanti, ‘The Skyscrapers of the Ville Contemporaine’, Assemblage 4, pp. 52–65; Gail Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 21Ole Bauman, ‘In the Age of Horizontalization’, in Ally Ireson and Nick Barley, eds, City Levels, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2000, p. 4. 22See, for example, Ada Louise Huxtable, The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered, University of California Press: Berkley, 1992; Thomas Van Leeuwen, The Skyward Trend of Thought: The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper, Bambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988; Scott Johnson, Tall Building: Imagining the Skyscraper, New York: Balcony, 2008. 23See Andrew Harris, ‘Vertical Urbanisms: Opening Up Geographies of the Three-Dimensional City’, Progress in Human Geography, December 2016. 24Shelton et al., Making of Hong Kong, p. 20. Author’s emphasis. 25A ‘cognitive map’ is a mental representation that humans hold of the world around them that helps them to navigate and make sense of the wider environment. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 44; Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1960. See also David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso, 1989. 26Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall’. 27See Nanna Verhoeff, Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. 28Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall’. 29See, for example, Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso, 2012. 30Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall’. 31Pierre Bélanger, ‘Altitudes of Urbanization,’ Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology, January 2016. 32See, for example, Gavin Bridge, ‘Territory, Now in 3D!’

…

., Up, Down, Across, pp. 173–95, 22Merrill Schleier, Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 68. 23On the depiction of elevators in film, see Alanna Thain, ‘Insecurity Cameras’. 24Cited in Umbro Apollonio and Leonardo Mariani, Antonio Sant’Elia: Documenti, Note Storiche e Critiche a Cura di Leonardo Mariani, vol. 18, Milan: Il Balcone, 1958, p. 200. 25See Fredric Jameson’s extraordinarily influential discussion of the façade elevators in Portman’s Los Angeles’s Bonaventura Hotel in his Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. p. 578. 26Cited in Phil Patton, ‘Hovering Vision’, in Goetz, ed., Up, Down, Across, pp. 110–11. 27Ibid., p. 106. 28Matt Bodimeade, ‘Global Elevator Market Led by Otis Elevator Company’, Companies and Markets, 2012, available at companiesandmarkets.com. 29Koncept Analytics, Global Escalator and Elevator Market Report: 2010, London: Koncept Analytics, August 2010. 30Sayre ‘Colonization of the “Up”’. 31Ibid. 32Tom Van Riper and Robert Malone, ‘The World’s Fastest Elevators’, Forbes, October 2007, available at forbes.com. 33Peter Swan, David Raitt, Cathy Swan and Robert Penny, Space Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility and the Way Forward, London: Virginia Editions, 2013. 34See Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, London: Routledge, 2001. 35Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven, p. 192. 36Jim Armitage, ‘Trouble at the £1bn Burj Khalifa Tower: Spiralling Service Costs See Landlords Falling Behind on Their Bills’, Independent, 13 February 2014. 37Jane M.

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As we shall see in chapter 11, this is perhaps ironic given that Hong Kong is also a city which rests increasingly on manufactured ground ‘reclaimed’ from the ocean. 41Nathan Costa Ferreira, Stephanie Rose Lesage, Jordan Daniel Vishniac and Zibo Wang, ‘Principles of Comprehensive Pedestrian Networks in a Multi-Layered City’, report for Designing Hong Kong and the Harbour Business Forum, February 2013, p. 20, 42Ibid., p. 28. 43Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 44. Since Jameson wrote those famous lines, as we saw in the introduction, the sense of a disorientating loss of a stable ground and horizon has been a major feature of recent philosophical debates surrounding the links between urbanisation, globalisation and technological change within postmodern cultures.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

For businesses like mine, it means our global customers have less to spend on emerging technologies that could make them more productive. That is what’s happening today. There is a sagging line below Gini’s perfect 45-degree angle that represents growing inequality. I want to avoid the pitfalls of what Marx described as late-stage capitalism—a theoretical time when economic growth and profits collapse—and get back to the returns enjoyed in early stage capitalism. But how? That’s the question most heads of state around the world are also grappling with. In computer science and engineering, we search for something called the global maxima.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

Greenberg, ‘The Limits of Branding: The World Trade Center, Fiscal Crisis and the Marketing of Recovery’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (2003), 386–416. 12. Tabb, The Long Default; On the subsequent ‘selling’ of New York see Greenberg, ‘The Limits of Branding’; on urban entrepreneurialism more generally see D. Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, in id., Spaces of Capital (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), ch. 16. 13. Tabb, The Long Default, 15. 14. Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, 128. 15. Court, Corporateering, 29–31, lists all the relevant legal decisions of the 1970s. 16. The accounts of Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, followed by Blyth, Great Transformations, are compelling. 17.

…

——The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). ——‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils’, in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) 271–310. ——‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, in id., Spaces of Capital (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), ch.16. ——The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). Harvey, D., The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). ——‘The Right to the City’, in R. Scholar (ed.), Divided Cities: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

A can of tuna isn’t always just a can of tuna, but, on certain days, an interface between me and a matrix of culpability, doubt and helplessness. The thing is always more than itself. Although object-oriented philosophers are interested in the ‘withdrawal’ of things into themselves, in the commodity culture of late-capitalism, it can be unethical to preserve the privacy of objects, to imagine them as coherent, isolated creations. And so here we’ll live, until things become different again, with these new kinds of intimacy, with dizzying connectivity. The old literary device of pathetic fallacy – that poetic connection between the human and the inanimate world – no longer seems so fallacious.

…

We are living in an age when it is possible to commercialise our personal experiences on an unprecedented scale. Private life isn’t only there to be shared with our followers, but also to open up a space for publicity. In this economy of publicised privacy, the social-media influencer is our age’s figurehead, an icon of late-capitalism’s intensely porous relationship between fantasy and reality. I love the blatancy of the term ‘influencer’, which lays all its cards on the table. It doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that our view of the world is manipulated by external agents. Influencers, such as the disgraced and ‘demonetised’ Logan Paul, are private citizens of a new kind.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Because the ideologies failed, they lost most of their adherents, and so few ideologue politicians were available to lead this revival. Those that were belonged to tiny residue organizations: people with a taste for the paranoid psychology of the cult, and too blinkered to face the reality of past failure. In the decade preceding the collapse of communism in 1989, the remaining Marxists thought they were living in ‘late capitalism’. The public memory of that collapse has now receded sufficiently to support a revival: there is a new flood of books on the same theme.4 Rivalling the ideologues in seductive power is the other species of politician, the charismatic populist. Populists eschew even the rudimentary analysis of an ideology, leaping directly to solutions that ring true for two minutes.

…

., 120–21 business zones, 150 ‘Butskellism’, 49* Cadbury, 77 Cameron, David, 205 Canada, 22 capitalism competition, 21, 25, 56, 85, 86 ‘creative destruction’ concept, 21 current failings of, 4–5, 17, 25, 42, 45–6, 48, 201, 212–13 and decline of social trust, 5, 45–6, 48, 55, 59, 69 as essential for prosperity, 4–5, 18, 20, 25, 201 and families, 37 first mover advantage, 148 and greed, 10, 19, 25–7, 28, 31, 42, 58, 69, 70†, 81, 95 and Marx’s alienation, 17–18 and oppositional identities, 56, 74 vested interests, 85, 86, 135–6, 207 see also firms Catalan secession movement, 58 causality, narrative of, 33, 34 CDC Group, 122, 149* Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, 129 Chicago, University of, 166 childhood adoption, 110–11 children in ‘care’, 104, 105, 110, 111, 157 children ‘reared by wolves’, 31–2 cognitive development, 105–6, 170, 175–6 fostering, 104, 105, 111 identity acquisition, 32 impact of parental unemployment, 160–61 learning of norms, 33, 35, 107–8 non-cognitive development, 105, 163, 169–70, 171–3, 174, 175–6 ‘rights of the child’ concept, 103–4 in single-parent families, 101, 102, 104–5, 155, 160 trusted mentors, 169–70 see also family China, 118–19, 149, 203 Chira, Susan, 52–3 Chirac, Jacques, 14, 120–21 Christian Democratic parties, 5, 14 Citigroup, 186 Clark, Gregory, The Son Also Rises, 106–8 Clarke, Ken, 206 class divide assortative mating among new elite, 99–100, 154, 188–9 author’s proposed policies, 19–20, 21, 183–4, 187–8, 190, 207–8 and breadth of social networks, 169 and Brexit vote, 5, 196 and cognitive development, 105–6 divergence dynamic, 7, 18, 48, 98–108, 154–61, 170–71, 172–80, 181–90 ‘elite’ attitudes to less-well educated, 4, 5, 12, 16, 53, 59, 60–61, 63 and family life, 20, 98, 99–106, 157–62 and fracture to skill-based identities, 3–5, 51–6, 78 and home ownership, 68, 181, 182–3 need for socially mixed schools, 164–5 and non-cognitive development, 105, 163, 169–70, 171–3, 174, 175–6 and parental hothousing, 100, 101, 105–6 post-school skills development, 170–76 pre-emptive support for stressed families, 20, 155, 157–60, 161–3, 208 and reading in pre-teens, 167–9 and recent populist insurgencies, 5 retirement insecurities, 179–80 and two-parent families, 155–6, 157 unravelling of shared identity, 15, 50, 51–6, 57*, 58–61, 63, 215 see also white working class climate change, 44, 67, 119 Clinton, Hillary, 5, 9, 203–4 coalition government, UK (2010–15), 206 cognitive behavioral therapy, 160 Cold War, 113, 114, 116 end of, 5–6, 115, 203 Colombia, 120 communism, 32, 36–7, 85–6 communitarian values care, 9, 11, 12, 16, 29, 31, 42, 116 fairness, 11, 12, 14, 16, 29, 31, 34, 43, 116, 132–3 hierarchy, 11, 12, 16, 38–9, 43, 99–100 left’s abandonment of, 16, 214* liberty, 11, 12, 16, 42 loyalty, 11, 12, 16, 29, 31, 34, 42–3, 116 new vanguard’s abandonment of, 9, 11–13, 14–15, 16, 17, 49–50, 113, 116–18, 121, 214 post-war settlement, 8–9, 49, 113–16, 122 and reciprocal obligations, 8–9, 11–12, 13, 14, 19, 33, 34, 40–41, 48–9, 201, 212–15 roots in nineteenth-century co-operatives, 8, 13, 14, 201 sanctity, 11, 16, 42–3 Smith and Hume, 21–2† values and reason, 29–30, 43–4 see also belonging, narrative of; obligation, narrative of; reciprocity; social democracy Companies Act, UK, 82 comparative advantage, 20, 120, 192, 194 Confederation of British Industry (CBI), 79 conservatism, 30, 36 Conservative Party, 14, 49, 205, 206 contraception, 98–9, 102 co-operative movement, 8, 13, 14, 201 Corbyn, Jeremy, 202, 204–5 Crosland, Anthony, The Future of Socialism, 17, 18, 19 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 114 debutante balls, 188 Denmark, 63, 178, 214* Descartes, Rene, 31 Detroit, 128, 129, 144 Deutsche Bank, 78, 185 development banks, 149–50 Development Corporations Act (1981), 150 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 108 digital networks detachment of narratives from place, 38, 61–2 economies of scale, 86–7 global e-utilities, 37, 38, 86–7, 89–90, 91 social media, 27, 61, 87, 173, 207, 215 value-based echo-chambers, 38, 61–2, 64–5, 212, 215 Draghi, Mario, 153 Dundee Project, 161–2 Dutch Antilles, 193 East Asia, 147, 192 eBay, 87 economic man, 10, 19, 25, 26–7, 31, 34–5, 196, 209, 210, 215 economic rent theory, 19, 91, 133–9, 140–44, 186–8, 192, 195, 207 education and collapse of social democracy, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 63 and empathy, 12 and European identity, 57* expansion of universities, 99–100, 127 and growth of the middle class, 100 inequality in spending per pupil, 167 mis-ranking of cognitive and non-cognitive training, 174–6 need for socially mixed schools, 164–5 post-school skills development, 170–76 pre-school, 105–6, 163–4 quality of teaching, 165–6 reading in pre-teens, 167–9 and shocks to norms of ethical family, 98, 99–105 symbols of cognitive privilege, 175 teaching methods, 166–7 vocational education, 171–6 zero-sum aspects of success, 189 electoral systems, 206 Emerging Market economies, 129, 130–31 empires, age of, 113 The Enigma of Reason (Mercier and Sperber), 29 enlightened self-interest, 33, 40*, 97–8, 101, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117, 184, 213 Enron, 80 ethnicity, 3, 20, 56, 62, 64, 65, 211 Europe Christian Democrats in, 5, 14 class divides, 3, 4, 5, 125 decline in social trust, 45 and knowledge industries, 192 metropolitan-provincial divides, 3, 4, 125 and migration, 121, 197 and shared identity, 57–8, 64, 66, 125 social democracy in, 8–9, 49, 50 European Central Bank, 153 European Commission, 57 European Investment Bank, 149 European Union (EU, formerly EEC), 66, 67, 114, 115, 116, 117 Brexit vote (June 2016), 5, 125, 131, 196, 215 Eurozone crisis, 153 public policy as predominantly national, 212 universities in, 170 evolutionary theory, 31, 33†, 35–6, 66 externalities, 145–6 Facebook, 87 Fairbairn, Carolyn, 79 fake news, 33–4 family, 19 African norms, 110–11 benefits for single parents, 160 Clark’s ‘family culture’, 107–8 entitled individual vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 equality within, 39, 154 erosion of mutual obligations, 101–2, 210 identity acquisition, 32 ideologies hostile to, 36–7 impact of unemployment/poverty, 4, 7, 160–61 importance of, 36, 37 and increased longevity, 110, 161 in-kind support for parenting, 161 nuclear dynastic family, 102, 110, 154 one-parent families, 101, 102, 104–5, 155, 160 parental hothousing, 100, 101, 105–6 post-1945 ethical family, 97–8, 99–105, 108, 210 pressures on young parents, 159–60, 161–3 and public policy, 21, 154–5, 157–70, 171–3, 177, 209 and reciprocity, 97–8, 101, 102 shocks to post-1945 norms, 98–105 shrinking of extended family, 101–2, 109–10, 161 social maternalism concept, 154–5, 157–8, 190 two-parent families as preferable, 155–6, 157 see also childhood; marriage Farage, Nigel, 202 fascism, 6, 13*, 47, 113 Federalist papers, 82 feminism, 13, 99 Fillon, François, 204 financial crisis, global (2008–9), 4, 34, 71, 160 no bankers sent to gaol for, 95–6 financial sector, 77–9, 80–81, 83–5 asymmetric information, 88, 185 co-ordination role, 145–6 economies of scale, 87 localized past of, 84, 146 toxic rivalries in, 189 trading in financial assets, 78–9, 84, 184–5, 186, 187 Finland, 63 firms, 19, 21, 69 CEO pay, 77–8, 79, 80–81 competition, 21, 25, 56, 85, 86 control/accountability of, 75–81, 82–5 cultures of good corporate behaviour, 94–5 demutualization in UK, 83, 84 deteriorating behaviour of, 18, 69, 78, 80–81 economies of scale, 17–18, 37, 86–7, 88–91, 126–7, 144–5, 146–7 ethical, 70–71, 172, 209–10 and ethical citizens, 93–4, 95, 96 failure/bankruptcy of, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75–6 flattening of hierarchies in, 39 Friedman’s profit nostrum, 69–70, 71, 76, 78–9, 210 global e-utilities, 37, 38, 86–7, 89–90, 91 ideologies hostile to, 37, 81 low productivity-low cost business model, 173–4 ‘maximising of shareholder value’, 69–70, 76, 79, 82–3 ‘mutuals’, 83 need for bankslaughter crime, 95–6 new network features, 86–7 policing the public interest, 93–4 public dislike of, 69, 95–6 public interest representation on boards, 92–3 regulation of, 87–90, 174 reward linked to short-term performance, 77, 78–81 sense of purpose, 39–40, 41, 70–75, 80–81, 93–4, 96 shareholder control of, 76–7, 79, 80, 82–3 societal role of, 81–2, 92–3, 96, 209–10 utility services, 86, 89, 90 worker interests on boards, 83, 84–5 Fisher, Stephen, 196* Five Star, 125 Ford, 70, 71 France, 7, 63, 67, 114 écoles maternelles in, 164 labour market in, 176, 189 pensions policy, 180 presidential election (2017), 5, 9, 204 universities in, 170 working week reduced in, 189 Frederiksen, Mette, 214* Friedman, Milton, 15, 69–70, 71, 76 The Full Monty (film), 7, 129 G20 group, 118 G7 group, 118 G8 group, 194 Ganesh, Janan, 125 Geldof, Bob, 169 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 114, 115, 116–17 General Motors (GM), 72, 73–4, 75, 86, 172 geographic divide, 3, 16, 18, 19, 215 author’s proposed policies, 19, 207 and Brexit vote, 125, 196 broken cities, 4, 7, 19, 48, 125, 129–30, 147–9 business zones, 150 co-ordination problem over new clusters, 145–50, 207 decline of provincial cities, 4, 7, 19, 48, 125, 129–30, 131, 144–5 economic forces driving, 126–30 and education spending, 167 first mover disadvantage, 148–9 ideological responses, 130–32 investment promotion agencies, 150–51 and local universities, 151–2 and metropolitan disdain, 125 need for political commitment, 153 as recent and reversible, 152–3 regenerating provincial cities, 19, 142, 144–50 and spending per school pupil, 167 widening of since 1980, 125 George, Henry, 133–6, 141 Germany 2017 election, 5, 205 local banks in, 146 Nazi era, 57 and oppositional identities, 56–7 oversight of firms in, 76 post-war industrial relations policy, 94–5 and post-war settlement, 114 re-emergence of far right, 5 rights of refugees in, 14 ‘social market economy’, 49 TVET in, 171–2, 174, 175 vereine (civil society groups), 181 worker interests on boards, 84–5 global divide, 7–8, 20, 59–60, 191–8, 208 globalization, 4, 18, 20, 126–7, 128, 129, 130–31, 191–8 Goldman Sachs, 70†, 83–4, 94 Google, 87 Great Depression (1930s), 114 Green, Sir Philip, 80 Grillo, Beppe, 202 ‘Grimm and Co’, Rotherham, 168–9 Gunning, Jan Willem, 165 Haidt, Jonathan, 11–12, 14, 16, 28, 29, 132–3 Haiti, 208 Halifax Building Society, 8, 84 Hamon, Benoît, 9, 204 Harvard-MIT, 7, 152 Hershey, 77 HIV sufferers in poor countries, 120–21 Hofer, Norbert, 202 Hollande, Francois, 9, 204 Hoover, 148 housing market, 181–4 buy-to-let, 182, 183, 184 and lawyers, 187 mortgages, 84, 176, 182, 183–4 proposed stock transfer from landlords to tenants, 184 Hume, David, 14, 21, 21–2†, 29 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (1932), 5 Iceland, 63 Identity Economics, 50–56, 65–7 ideologies based on hatred of ‘other’ part of society, 43, 56, 213, 214 ‘end of history’ triumphalism, 6, 43–4 hostile to families, 36–7 hostile to firms, 37, 81 hostile to the state, 37–8 and housing policy, 183 and migration, 198 New Right, 14–15, 26, 81, 129 norms of care and equality, 116, 132–3 polarization of politics, 38, 63, 202–5 pragmatic eschewal of, 17, 18, 21, 22, 29–30 and principle of reason, 9, 13, 14, 15, 21, 43 Rawlsian vanguard, 13–14, 30, 49–50, 53, 67, 112, 113, 201, 202, 203, 214 return of left-right confrontation, 5, 6, 81, 202–5 and rights, 12–14, 44, 112 seduction of, 6 and twentieth century’s catastrophes, 5–6, 22 views on an ethical world, 112 see also Marxism; rights ideology; Utilitarianism IFC (International Finance Corporation), 122 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), 69–70, 75 India, 118–19 individualism entitled individual vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 fulfilment through personal achievement, 28, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 108–9, 213 New Right embrace of, 14–15, 53, 81, 214–15 as rampant in recent decades, 19, 214–15 reciprocity contrasted with, 44–5 and withering of spatial community, 61–2 industrial revolution, 8, 126 inequality and assortative mating among new elite, 99–100, 154, 188–9 and divergence dynamic, 7, 18, 48, 98–108, 154–61, 170–71, 172–80, 181–90 and financial sector, 185 and geographic divide, 3, 7–8, 20, 125 global divide, 7–8, 20, 59–60, 191–8, 208 persistence of, 106–8 Rawls’ disadvantaged groups, 3–4, 13–14, 16, 50, 53, 121, 203–4, 214 and revolt against social democracy, 15–16 rising levels of, 3–5, 106, 125, 181, 190 and Utilitarian calculus, 132 innovation, 185–6, 208 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 114, 117 international relations achievement of post-WW2 leaders, 113–16, 122 building of shared identity, 114–16 core concepts of ethical world, 112, 113–14 erosion of ethical world, 116–18 expansion of post-war ‘clubs’, 116–18, 210 new, multipurpose club needed, 118–19, 122 and patriotism narrative, 67 situation in 1945, 112–13, 122 investment promotion agencies, 150–51 Irish Investment Authority, 151 Islamist terrorism, 42, 212, 213 Italy, 4, 58, 160 James, William, 29* Janesville (US study), 178 Japan, 72–3, 94, 101, 149, 192 John Lewis Partnership, 83, 172 Johnson, Robert Wood, 39–40, 72 Johnson & Johnson, 39–40, 41, 72, 74*, 79 Jolie, Angelina, 112 JP Morgan, 71* Juppé, Alain, 204 Kagame, Paul, 22 Kay, John, 82*, 84, 211 Keynes, John Maynard, 115 General Theory (1936), 47 kindergartens, 163 Knausgård, Karl Ove, 173 knowledge revolution, 126, 127–8 Kranton, Rachel, 35, 50–51 Krueger, Anne, 141 Krugman, Paul, 47 labour market flexicurity concept, 178 function of, 176–7 and globalization, 192, 194–6 and immigration, 194, 195, 196 investment in skills, 176–7 job security, 176, 177 and low productivity-low cost business model, 173–4 minimum wage strategies, 147, 174, 176, 180 need for reductions in working hours, 189 need for renewed purpose in work, 190 regulation of, 174, 189 and robotics revolution, 178–9 role of state, 177–8, 189 see also unemployment Labour Party, 49, 206 Marxist take-over of, 9, 204–5 language, 31, 32, 33, 39–40, 54, 57 Larkin, Philip, 99, 156 lawyers, 13–14, 45 Buiter’s three types, 186 and shell companies, 193, 194 surfeit of, 186–7 taxation of private litigation proposal, 187–8 Le Pen, Marine, 5, 63, 125, 202, 204 leadership and belief systems, 41–2, 43, 95 building of shared identity, 39–42, 49, 68, 114–16 changing role of, 39 and flattening of hierarchies, 39 and ISIS, 42 political achievements in post-war period, 113–16, 122 and pragmatist philosophy, 22 and shared purpose in firms, 39–40, 41, 71–5 strategic use of morality, 39–40, 41 transformation of power into authority, 39, 41–2, 57 League of Nations, 116 Lee Kwan Yew, 22, 147 Lehman Brothers, 71*, 76 liberalism, 30 libertarianism, 12–13, 15 New Right failures, 16, 21 Silicon Valley, 37–8 lobbying, 85, 141 local government, 182, 183 London, 3, 125, 127–8, 165–6, 193 impact of Brexit on, 131, 196 migration to, 195–6 Macron, Emmanuel, 67, 204 Manchester terror attack (2017), 212, 213 market economy, 19, 20, 21, 25, 48 and collapse of clusters, 129–30, 144–5 failure over pensions, 180 failure over skill-formation, 173–4 mutual benefit from exchange, 28 market fundamentalists, 147, 150 marriage assortative mating, 35, 99–100, 154, 188–9 cohabitation prior to, 99, 100 as ‘commitment technology’, 109, 155–6 divorce rates, 98, 99, 100–101, 102, 103 and female oppression, 156 religious associations, 109, 156 and rent-seeking, 141 ‘shotgun weddings’, 103 and unemployment, 103 Marxism, 13*, 26, 30, 43, 47, 113, 203, 214 alienation concept, 17–18 and the family, 36–7 late capitalism concept, 6 takeover of Labour Party, 9, 204–5 and ‘useful idiots’, 205* view of the state, 37 Maxwell, Robert, 80 May, Theresa, 205 Mayer, Colin, 18, 70 media celebrities, 6, 112, 204 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 5, 202, 204 mental health, 157, 158–9, 162 Mercier, Hugo, 29 meritocratic elites, 3–4, 5, 12–17, 20 Rawlsian vanguard, 13–14, 30, 49–50, 53, 67, 112, 113, 201, 202, 203, 214 Utilitarian vanguard, 9–10, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 52, 53, 59, 66–7, 209 see also Utilitarianism WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Developed), 3–4, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 116, 121, 133, 214* and white working class, 5, 16 Merkel, Angela, 14, 205 metropolitan areas, 3, 4, 7, 16, 19, 48, 125 co-ordination problem over new clusters, 145–50, 207 economies of agglomeration, 18, 19, 129, 131, 133–44, 195, 196, 207 gains from public goods, 134–5, 138–9 migration to, 195–6 political responses to dominance of, 131–2 scale and specialization in, 126–8, 130, 144–5 and taxation, 131, 132–43, 187, 207 Middle East, 192 Middleton, Kate, 188–9 migration, 121, 194–8, 203 as driven by absolute advantage, 20, 194–5, 208–9 and housing market, 182, 183 Mill, John Stuart, 9–10 minimum wage strategies, 147, 174, 176, 180 Mitchell, Andrew, 188 Mitchell, Edson, 78 modernist architecture, 12 Monarch Airlines, 75 monopolies, natural, 86–7, 88 and asymmetric information, 88, 90 auctioning of rights, 88–9 taxation of, 91–2 utility services, 86, 89, 90 ‘moral hazard’, 179 morality and ethics deriving from values not reason, 27, 28–9, 42–3 and economic man, 10, 19, 25, 26–7, 31, 34–5 and empathy, 12, 27 evolution of ethical norms, 35–6 Haidt’s fundamental values, 11–12, 14, 16, 29, 42–3, 132–3 and market economy, 21, 25, 28, 48 and modern capitalism, 25–6 and new elites, 3–4, 20–21 Adam Smith’s theories, 26–8 use for strategic purposes, 39–40, 41 and Utilitarianism, 9–10, 11, 14, 16, 55, 66–7, 209, 214 motivated reasoning, 28–9, 36, 86, 144, 150, 167 Museveni, President, 121 narratives and childhood mentors, 169–70 and consistency, 41, 67, 81, 96 conveyed by language, 31, 33, 57 detachment from place by e-networks, 38, 61–2 and heyday of social democracy, 49 and identity formation, 32 mis-ranking of cognitive and non-cognitive training, 174–6 moral norms generated from, 33, 97–8 and purposive action, 33–4, 40–41, 42, 68 and schools, 165 of shared identity, 53–6, 81 use of by leaders, 39–42, 43, 49, 80–81 see also belonging, narrative of; obligation, narrative of; purposive action National Health Service (NHS), 49, 159 national identity and citizens-of-the-world agenda, 59–61, 63, 65 contempt of the educated for, 53, 59, 60–61, 63 and distinctive common culture, 37†, 63 established in childhood, 32 esteem from, 51–3 fracture to skill-based identities, 3–5, 51–6, 78 legacy of Second World War, 15, 16 methods of rebuilding, 64, 65–8, 211–15 and new nationalists, 62–3, 67, 203, 204, 205 patriotism narrative, 21, 63, 67, 215 place-based identity, 51–6, 65–8, 211–14, 215 and polarization of society, 54–5 and secession movements, 58 unravelling of shared identity, 15, 50, 51–6, 57*, 58–61, 63, 215 and value identity, 64–5 National Review, 16 nationalism, 34 based on ethnicity or religion, 62–3 capture of national identity notion by, 62, 67, 215 and narratives of hatred, 56, 57, 58–9 and oppositional identities, 56–7, 58–9, 62–3, 68, 215 traditional form of, 62 natural rights concept, 12, 13 Nestlé, 70, 71 Netherlands, 206 networked groups as arena for exchanging obligations, 28 and ‘common knowledge’, 32–3, 34, 54, 55, 66, 212 decline of civil society networks/ groups, 180–81 and early man, 31 evolution of ethical norms, 35–6 exclusion of disruptive narratives, 34 families as, 97–8 leadership’s use of narratives, 39–42, 49 narratives detached from place, 38, 61–2 value-based echo-chambers, 38, 61–2, 64–5, 212, 215 see also family; firms Neustadt, Richard, 39* New York City, 5, 125, 128, 143–4, 193 NGOs, 71, 118, 157–8 ‘niche construction’, 35*, 36* Nigeria, 58 Noble, Diana, 149* Norman, Jesse, 21–2† North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 114, 115, 116, 117 North Korea, 85 Northern League, Italy, 58 Norway, 63, 206, 208–9 Nozick, Robert, 14–15 obligation, narrative of, 11, 12–13, 16, 19, 29, 33 and collapse of social democracy, 53–6, 210 entitled individual vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 in ethical world, 112, 113–22 and expansion of post-war ‘clubs’, 117–18, 210 fairness and loyalty instilled by, 34 heyday of the ethical state, 48–9, 68, 196–7 and immigration, 196–7 and leadership, 39, 40–41, 49 ‘oughts’ and ‘wants’, 27, 28, 33, 43 and secession movements, 58 and Adam Smith, 27, 28 see also reciprocity; rescue, duty of oil industry, 192 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 114–15, 125 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), 5 Oxford university, 7, 70, 100 Paris, 5, 7, 125, 128, 174, 179 patriotism, 21, 63, 67, 215 Pause (NGO), 157–8 pension funds, 76–7, 79–81, 179–80, 185 Pew Research Center, 169 Pinker, Steven, 12* Plato, The Republic, 9, 11, 12, 15, 43 Playboy magazine, 99 political power and holders of economic rent, 135–6, 144 leadership selection systems in UK, 204–5, 206 minimum age for voting, 203 need to restore the centre, 205–7 polarization within polities, 38, 63, 202–5 polities as spatial, 38, 61–2, 65, 68, 211–13 and shared identity, 8, 57–61, 65, 114–16, 211–15 transformation into authority, 41–2, 57–8 trust in government, 4, 5, 48, 59, 210, 211–12 populism, political, 6, 22, 43, 58–9, 202 and geographic divide, 130–31 headless-heart, 30, 60, 112, 119, 121, 122 media celebrities, 6, 112, 204 pragmatism as opposed to, 30 and US presidential election (2016), 5, 203–4 pragmatist philosophy, 6, 9, 19, 21, 21–2†, 46, 201 author’s proposed policies, 19–20, 21, 207–15 limitations of, 30 and Macron in France, 204 and migration, 198 and post-war settlement, 113, 116, 122 and social democracy, 18, 201–2 successful leaders, 22 and taxation, 132, 207 and teaching methods, 166–7 values and reason, 29–30, 43–4 proportional representation, 206 protectionism, 113, 114, 130–31 psychology, social, 16, 54 co-ordination problems, 32–3 esteem’s trumping of money, 174 Haidt’s fundamental values, 11–12, 14, 16, 29, 42–3, 132–3 narratives, 31, 32, 33–4, 38, 39–42, 49, 53–6 norms, 33, 35–6, 39, 42–3, 44, 97–8, 107–8 ‘oughts’ and ‘wants’, 27, 28, 33, 43 personal achievement vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 ‘theory of mind’, 27, 55 Public Choice Theory, 15–16 public goods, 134–5, 138–9, 186, 202, 213 public ownership, 90 Puigdemont, Carles, 202 purposive action, 18, 21, 25, 26, 34, 40*, 53–4, 68, 112, 211–13 autonomy and responsibility, 38–9 and belonging narrative, 68, 98, 114, 211, 212, 213 in Bhutan, 37† decline in ethical purpose across society, 48 and heyday of social democracy, 47, 49, 114 and narratives, 33–4, 40–41, 42, 68 in workplace, 190 Putnam, Robert, 45–6, 106 Bowling Alone, 181 ‘quality circles’, 72–3 Rajan, Raghuram, 178 Rand, Ayn, 32 rational social woman, 31, 50–51, 196 Rawls, John, 13–14 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 26 Reback, Gary, 90 reciprocity, 9, 19, 31, 212–15 and belonging, 25, 40–41, 49, 53–6, 67, 68, 98, 181, 182, 210–11, 212–13 and collapse of social democracy, 11, 14, 53–6, 58–61, 201, 210 and corporate behaviour, 95 in ethical world, 112, 113–15, 116 and expansion of post-war ‘clubs’, 117–18, 210 fairness and loyalty as supporting, 29, 31, 34 and the family, 97–8, 101, 102 and geographic divide, 125 heyday of the ethical state, 48–9, 68, 96, 196–7, 201 and ISIS, 42 Macron’s patriotism narrative, 67 nineteenth-century co-operatives, 8 rights matched to obligations, 44–5 and three types of narrative, 33, 34, 40–41 transformation of power into authority, 39, 41–2, 57–8 Refuge (Betts and Collier), 27 refugees, 14, 27, 115, 119–20, 213 regulation, 87–90 and globalization, 193–4 of labour market, 174 religion, 56–7, 62–3, 109, 156 religious fundamentalism, 6, 30, 36–7, 212, 213, 215 rent-seeking concept, 140–41, 150, 186, 187–8, 195 rescue, duty of, 40, 54, 119–21, 210, 213 as instrument for ethical imperialism, 117–18, 210 as not matched by rights, 44, 45, 117 and post-war settlement, 113, 115–16 restoring and augmenting autonomy, 121–2 and stressed young families, 163 term defined, 27, 112 value of care as underpinning, 29 retirement pensions, 179–80 rights ideology and corresponding obligations, 44–5 emergence in 1970s, 12–14 human rights lobby, 112, 118, 118* individualism as rampant in recent decades, 19, 214–15 and lawyers, 13–14, 45 Libertarian use of, 12–13, 14–15 natural rights concept, 12, 13 and New Right, 12–13, 14–15, 53 Rawls’ disadvantaged groups, 3–4, 13–14, 16, 50, 53, 112, 121, 203–4, 214 ‘rights of the child’ concept, 103–4 and Utilitarian atate, 12–14 see also individualism Romania, communist, 32, 36 Rotherham, ‘Grimm and Co’, 168–9 rule of law, 138–9, 186 Rwanda, 22 Salmond, Alex, 202 Sandel, Michael, 105 Sanders, Bernie, 9, 64, 202, 203 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 204 Schultz, Martin, 14 Schumpeter, Joseph, 21* Scotland, 58 Seligman, Martin, 108–9 sexual behaviour birth-control pill, 98–9, 102 and class divide, 99, 102, 155–6 concept of sin, 156 and HIV, 121 and stigma, 156–8 sexual orientation, 3, 45 Sheffield, 7, 8, 126, 128–9, 131, 151, 168, 192 shell companies, 193, 194 Shiller, Robert, 34 Sidgwick, Henry, 55 Signalling, Theory of, 41, 43, 53, 63, 95 Silicon Valley, 37–8, 62, 145, 152, 164 Singapore, 22, 147 Slovenia, 58 Smith, Adam, 14, 21, 21–2†, 174 and mutual benefit from exchange, 28 and pursuit of self- interest, 26–7, 40 on reason, 29 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), 27, 28, 174 Wealth of Nations (1776), 26, 28, 174 Smith, Vernon, 28 social democracy ‘Butskellism’, 49* collapse of, 9, 11, 50, 51–6, 116–18, 201–2, 210 communitarian roots, 8–9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 48–9, 201 and group identities, 3–4, 13–14, 51–6 heyday of, 8–9, 15, 17, 47, 48–9, 68, 96, 196–7, 201, 210 and housing, 181–2 influence of Utilitarianism, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 49–50, 201, 203, 214 Libertarian challenge, 12–13, 14–15 New Right abandonment of, 14–15, 16, 26, 53 and Public Choice Theory, 15–16 replaced by social paternalism, 11–13, 49–50, 209–10 and rights ideology, 12–14 and secession movements, 58 shared identity harnessed by, 15, 196–7 unravelling of shared identity, 15, 50, 51–6, 57*, 58–61, 63, 215 and Utilitarianism, 214 social maternalism concept, 21, 154–5, 190 free pre-school education, 163–4 mentoring for children, 169–70, 208 support for stressed families, 20, 155, 157–60, 161–3, 208 social media, 27, 61, 87, 173, 207, 215 social paternalism backlash against, 11–13, 15–16 as cavalier about globalization, 20 and child-rearing/family, 105, 110, 154–5, 157, 158, 159, 160, 190, 209 replaces social democracy, 11–13, 49–50, 209–10 ‘rights of the child’ concept, 103–4 and Utilitarian vanguard, 9–10, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 66–7, 209 social services, 159 scrutiny role, 162 Solow, Robert, 141 Soros, George, 15* South Africa, 85 South Asia, 192 South Korea, 129, 130–31 South Sudan, 192 Soviet Union, 114, 115, 116, 203 Spain, 58, 160 specialization, 17–18, 36, 126–8, 130, 144–5, 192 Spence, Michael, 41, 53, 95 Sperber, Dan, 29 St Andrews University, 189 Stanford University, 145, 152 Starbucks, 193 the state, 19 ethical capacities of, 11, 20–21, 48–9 failures in 1930s, 47, 48 ideologies hostile to, 37–8 and pre-school education, 163–4 and prosperity, 37 public policy and job shocks, 177–8 public policy on the family, 21, 154–5, 157–70, 171–3, 177, 209 public-sector and co-ordination problem, 147–8 social maternalism policies, 21, 157, 190 Utilitarian takeover of public policy, 10–12, 13–14, 15–17, 18, 49–50, 113, 201 Stiglitz, Joseph, 56 Stoke-on-Trent, 129 Stonehenge, 64 Sudan, 8 Summers, Larry, 187 Sure Start programme, 164 Sutton, John, 151* Sweden, 178 Switzerland, 175, 206 Tanzania, 193 taxation and corporate globalization, 193, 194 of economic rents, 91–2, 187–8 ethics and efficiency, 132–43 on financial transactions, 187 generational differences in attitudes, 59 Henry George’s Theorem, 133–6, 141 heyday of the ethical state, 49 issues of desert, 132–3, 134–9 and the metropolis, 131, 132–43, 187, 207 and migration, 197 of natural monopolies, 91–2 ‘optimal’, 10 of private litigation in courts, 187–8 and reciprocity, 54, 55, 59 redesign of needed, 19 redistributive, 10, 11, 14, 49, 54, 55, 60, 197 of rents of agglomeration, 19, 132–44, 207 social maternalism policies, 21, 157 substantial decline in top rates, 55 tax havens, 62 Venables-Collier theory, 136–9 Teach First programme, 165–6 technical vocational education and training (TVET), 171–6 technological change, 4 robotics revolution, 178–9 and withering of spatial community, 61–2 see also digital networks telomeres, 155–6 Tepperman, Jonathan, The Fix, 22 Thatcher, Margaret, 15, 26 Thirty Years War, 56–7 Tirole, Jean, 177, 178 Toyota, 72–3, 74, 94, 172 trade unions, 173, 174, 176 Troubled Families Programme (TFP), 162 Trudeau, Pierre, 22 Trump, Donald, 5, 9, 63, 64, 86, 125, 136, 202, 204, 206, 215 Uber, 87 unemployment in 1930s, 47 and collapse of industry, 7, 103, 129, 192 impact on children, 160–61 older workers, 4, 103, 213 retraining schemes, 178 in USA, 160 young people, 4 Unilever, 70, 71 United Kingdom collapse of heavy industry, 7, 103, 129, 192 extreme politics in, 5 and falling life expectancy, 4 financial sector, 80, 83, 84–5 IMF bail-out (1976), 115 local banks in past, 146 northern England, 3, 7, 8, 84, 126, 128–9, 131, 151, 168, 192 shareholder control of firms, 76–7, 79, 80, 82–3 statistics on firms in, 37 universities in, 170, 172, 175* vocational education in, 172, 175† widening of geographic divide, 125 United Nations, 65, 112 ‘Club of 77’, 116 Security Council, 116 UNHCR, 115 United States breakdown of ethical family, 104–5 broken cities in, 129, 130 extreme politics in, 5, 63 and falling life expectancy, 4 financial sector, 83–4, 186 and global e-utilities, 89–90 growth in inequality since 1980, 125 heyday of the ethical state, 49 and knowledge industries, 192 labour market in, 176, 178 local banks in past, 146 oversight of firms in, 76 pessimism in, 5, 45–6 presidential election (2016), 5, 9, 203–4 Public Interest Companies, 93 public policy as predominantly national, 212 ‘rights of the child’ concept in, 103–4 Roosevelt’s New Deal, 47 statistics on firms in, 37 taxation in, 143–4, 144* unemployment in, 160 universities in, 170, 172, 173 weakening of NATO commitment, 117 universities in broken cities, 151–2 in EU countries, 170 expansion of, 99–100, 127 knowledge clusters at, 127, 151–2 low quality vocational courses, 172–3 in UK, 170, 172, 175* in US, 170, 172, 173 urban planning, post-war, 11–12 Utilitarianism, 19, 30, 49–50, 55, 108, 112, 121, 210–11 backlash against, 11–13, 201, 202 belonging as absent from discourse, 16, 59, 66–7, 210–11 care as key value, 12 and consumption, 10, 11, 16, 19–20, 209 equality as key value, 12, 13, 14, 15, 116, 132–3, 214 incorporated into economics, 10–11, 13–14, 16 influence on social democrats, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 49–50, 201, 203, 214 origins of, 9–10 paternalistic guardians, 9–10, 11–13, 66–7, 210 takeover of public policy, 10–12, 13–14, 15–17, 18, 49–50, 113, 201 and taxation, 10, 132*, 133 vanguard’s switch of identity salience, 52, 53, 59 Valls, Manuel, 204 Venables, Tony, 18, 136, 191* Venezuela, 120, 214 vested interests, 85–6, 135–6, 165, 166, 207 Volkswagen, 74–5 Walmart, 87 Warsi, Baroness Sayeeda, 65 Wedgwood, Josiah, 129 welfare state, 9, 48–9 unlinked from contributions, 14 well-being and happiness belonging and esteem, 16, 25, 27, 29, 31–3, 34, 42, 51–6, 97–8, 174 entitled individual vs family obligation, 108–9 and financial success, 26, 94 ‘ladder of life’, 25* poverty in Africa, 37 reciprocity as decisive for, 31 Westminster, Duke of, 136 white working class ‘elite’ attitudes to, 4, 5, 16 falling life expectancy, 4, 16 pessimism of, 5 William, Prince, 188–9 Williams, Bernard, 55* Wittgenstein, 62, 63 Wolf, Alison, 52–3, 155 World Bank, 115, 117, 118, 118*, 122 World Food Programme, 115 World Health Organization, 115 World Trade Organization (WTO), 116–17 Yugoslavia, 58 Zingales, Luigi, 178 Zuma, Jacob, 85 Copyright THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Such an impediment, that is to say, to producers who sell products consumers want but are likely to buy only if they can be persuaded they “need” them—in the way that, to take but one example, men now “need” not one or two or three blades, but the Gillette five-blade Fusion razor to secure a clean shave.33 Weber imagined a capitalist world in which the cash nexus triumphed over investment, anticipating that late capitalism’s managerial overseers were likely to be more interested in liquidating than in creating and investing capital and more concerned to sell unneeded goods to those who could afford them than to produce needed goods for those without the means to purchase them. Hence he envisioned a world where capitalists were transformed into “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart,” women and men singing their own praises yet constituting in truth “this nullity” which “imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”34 Not everyone who admires capitalism welcomes its decline into the nullity of compulsory consumerism or spiritualizes its coercive kiddie culture.

…

Consumers are not citizens, and when a system pretends that they are, peculiar and even perverse things happen to decision making and to democracy, as well as democracy’s commitment to diversity. Critics of capitalism in the postwar period, especially those German neo-Marxists associated with the so-called Frankfurt School, were already worrying—a little hysterically if also rather presciently—about the ways in which the successes of late capitalism seemed to them to be cloaking new and subtle forms of repression in the marketplace. If the market, with its hidden monopolies and invisible coerciveness, was “free,” then maybe freedom had (as the French philosopher Michel Foucault suggested) become a smoke screen for repression. The Enlightenment had created worlds of liberty, privacy, and tolerance unknown to earlier societies.

…

The new culture industry, purveying the myth of what I have called consumer empowerment, claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs…[a] circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.5 In 1964, with this postwar leftist ambivalence about Enlightenment as backdrop, Herbert Marcuse proposed the controversial thesis that late capitalism was producing “one-dimensional men.” Nurtured by a society in which “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails,” one-dimensional men were being molded by a “productive apparatus [which] tends to become totalitarian,” especially inasmuch as it determines “individual needs and aspirations.”6 Marcuse resorted to the hyperbole of totalitarianism to portray what he called “a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”

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

As Ramin Ramtin bluntly puts it, ‘The fact that [full automation] would result in explosive socioeconomic and political contradictions does not make it impossible’ (Ramtin, Capitalism and Automation, p. 103). The simple wager of the demand for full automation is that wealth can be produced in non-capitalist ways. For representative critiques of full automation, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1998), p. 205; George Caffentzis, ‘The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri’, in In Letters of Blood and Fire (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), p. 78. 46.It should be mentioned that, increasingly, tacit knowledge tasks are being automated through environmental control and machine learning, with more recent innovations eliminating even the need for a controlled environment.

…

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Prometheus, 1976), p. 54. 18.This appeal to a humanity outside of capitalism is one of the more problematic aspects of Jacques Camatte’s work, for instance. See Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave (Brooklyn: (Semiotexte), 1996). 19.Weeks, Problem with Work, p. 169. 20.Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 394–5. 21.Translation slightly modified – from ‘human energy’ to ‘human powers’. Marx, Capital, Volume III, p. 820. 22.Federico Campagna, The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure (Winchester: Zero, 2013), p. 68. 23.For some investigations into what these could look like, however, see Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings, transl.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

And as much as we like to believe in a society where a person’s value is found in the strength of their character, or the magnitude of their service and kindness to others, it’s difficult to even type that sentence without being confronted with how little it reflects our current reality. To be valuable in capitalist society is to be able to work. Historically, more work, more toil, more commitment, more loyalty, more grit—all of that could make you more valuable. That’s the very foundation of the American Dream. But in our current economic moment—often referred to as “late capitalism,” to evoke how much of the economy is predicated on the buying and selling and leveraging of things that aren’t, well, things—hard work only becomes truly valuable when accompanied by existing connections (a.k.a. class status and privilege) or credentials (diplomas, recommendations, resumes).

…

How Work Stays So Shitty 1. Hyman, Temp, 82. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ho, Liquidated, 89. 5. Ibid., 90. 6. Ibid., 56. 7. Ibid, 95. 8. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015. 9. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014), 13. 10. Jia Tolentino, “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” The New Yorker, March 22, 2017. 11. Sarah Krouse, “The New Ways Your Boss Is Spying on You,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2019. 12. Ibid. 13. Ruppel Shell, The Job, 128. 14.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

Look at what we learn by doing, by making things, by producing the world we inhabit rather than passively consuming goods made by others. Fuck that, too? No, to all of the above. There’s plenty of socially beneficial work to do, but it’s no longer socially necessary, which means it doesn’t pay. The labor market is broken, and it can’t be fixed. Or it’s been perfected at this outer edge of very late capitalism, where the “elasticity of substitution” between capital and labor—between machines and real, live human beings—approaches equivalence. Translation: we lost our race with the machine, but in doing so we won our freedom from the iron grip of economic necessity. Ask yourself, why is information free?

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

Namely, what he’s done is connect the rise and discourses of both jihadism and the alt-right to the alienation and lack of shared purpose endemic to hyper-consumerist societies like the United States of America and Saudi Arabia. Consideration of this point leads us right back to the core contradiction in Peterson. Though he affirms that he’s deeply disturbed by the alienation, fragmentation, and disruption of cultural continuity brought about by late capitalism, he nevertheless expresses an enthusiastic commitment to “free markets.” This leaves him without any mode of response more useful than an addled combination of conspiracy theories and self-help advice about lobsters and chaotic women. While I don’t agree with Atran about everything, he approaches the problem of male alienation from the correct starting point, recognizing that fostering “sacred meaning” and “group bonds” in liberal market societies is a defining challenge of our era.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

The term “robber baron” originally came from the medieval German lords, the Rauberitter, who charged illegal tolls on the roads crossing their lands without providing any improved roads in exchange. The tolls operated as taxes, transferring money from the common man to nobles. As Americans go about their daily lives, they have the illusion of choice, but they spend their days paying tolls to a few companies that lack any real competition. Late capitalism resembles Soviet logic when it comes to consumer options. When Americans wake up each day, they can get their cereal from Kellogg's, General Mills, or Post, who all together have an 85% share of the cereal market. At breaks from work, they might want a soft drink. The top three firms dominate more than 85% of the market.12 Coca Cola is the leader, followed by PepsiCo and Dr.

…

., Chapter 11 reorganization, 170 Kraft Foods, H.J. Heinz Company (merger), 4 Krueger, Alan, 39, 74 Kuhn, Raymond, 36 Kuhn, Thomas, 165 Kulick, Robert, 43 Kwoka, John, 13, 42, 164 L Labor capital ownership, 246 concentration, increase, 73f markets, 72-73, 73f Larkin, Yelena, 8, 13 Lasch, Christopher, 58 Late capitalism, Soviet logic (relationship), 115 Lazonick, William, 208 Leaf, Charlie, 28 Levenstein, Margaret C., 25 Lewis-Mogridge Position, 19 Lew, Jack, 192 Licensing, increase, 84f Life expectancy, health expenditure (contrast), 132f Lilburne, John, 235–236 Lind, Michael, 6, 52 Lindsey, Brink, 174, 188 Litan, Robert E., 46 Littunen, Matti, 100 Lobbying feedback loop, creation, 188 impact, 186–187 incentive, 189 regulation/profits, correlation, 188 Localism, impact, 58–61 Local monopolies breaking, 244 impact, 116–122 Loewe v.

Meantime: The Brilliant 'Unputdownable Crime Novel' From Frankie Boyle by Frankie Boyle

Big Tech, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, printed gun, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, Turing test, WikiLeaks

I got curious looks from some people, and tried to calibrate how much of this was paranoia, and to what extent my mental state was obvious to the vulgar, misaligned faces that occasionally leered at me. A scream went up a few streets away. A feature of Glasgow city centre was that you often heard shouting in the distance; often – but not always – a woman’s name. What if this is not late-stage capitalism? What if it’s just warming up? What if the point in history we occupy is right at the end of the good old days? I tried to push all thoughts from my mind. The steps up to my flat felt like they took place in a much higher gravity. After a futile trawl through the suitcase, I found the Rohypnol in my bedside drawer.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

If, instead, you’re just as constrained by the law as everyone else, it’s harder. Your best option may be to hack the economic, social, and political systems that limit your behavior. I don’t have any proof, but I believe hacking has become more common in recent decades because of this dynamic. It’s my personal explanation of “late-stage capitalism” and all the problems it brings: finding loopholes in the rules is now regularly the path of least resistance. When those with means or technical ability realized that they could profitably hack systems, they quickly developed the resources and expertise to do so. They learned to exploit vulnerabilities.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep Jonathan Crary for Suzanne Or else we make a scarecrow of the day, Loose ends and jumble of our common world W. H. Auden Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am especially gratefully to Sebastian Budgen for his support of this project and for his valuable suggestions during its completion. The opportunity to test out parts of this work in lecture form was enormously helpful to me. I would like to thank Jorge Ribalta, Carles Guerra, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art for providing me with the venue where I first presented some of this book’s content.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Gran (London: SAGE Publications, 2017). 9.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert J. Hurley (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 10.Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 2019). 11.David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 12.It is unclear whether the general population shared either this perception of society or the skepticism about Enlightenment values it induced in certain thinkers, but something significant was changing, particularly within the academy. 13.Brian Duignan, “Postmodernism,” Encyclopædia Britannica, July 19, 2019, britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy (accessed August 15, 2019). 14.Paraphrased from Walter Truett Anderson, The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 10–11 15.Steinar Kvale, “Themes of Postmodernity,” in The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed.

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London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991. Jackson, Stevi. “Why a Materialist Feminism Is (Still) Possible—and Necessary.” Women’s Studies International Forum 24, no. 3–4 (2001): 283–93. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2010. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York: Verso Books, 2019. Jolivétte, Andrew. Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2015. Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Kid, Ian James, José Medina, and Gaile Polhaus.

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Alvin Toffler, Day of the Dead, edge city, Jaron Lanier, late capitalism, Mondo 2000, telepresence

A gap. "Nope. Saw 'em." "Has it occurred to you that you wouldn't be here right now if Lucius fucking Warbaby hadn't taken up rollerblading last month?" "How's that?" "He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can't drive, you wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?" "Tell me about what?" "Don't they teach you anything in that police academy?" "Sure," Rydell said, "lots of stuff." Thinking: how to talk to crazy fuckers when you're being held hostage, except he was having a hard time remembering what they'd said. Keep 'em talking and don't argue too much, something like that.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

We avoid responsibility for the future, thinking, Hey, we won’t be around to deal with the consequences, anyway! Some might call this human nature—the dark side of the evolutionary forces that favor survival of the fittest. Others might point to the corrupting effects of social media. Still others may blame it on late-stage capitalism. Regardless of the cause, the result of such behavior could easily be unbreathable air, undrinkable water, power hoarding, wealth disparity, bankrupt social institutions, and loss of free will. I perfectly understand why critics of longevity come locked and loaded with so many objections to radical life extension.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

CHRISTMAN: So this is the revelation I had about this—say you’re a young subject of late capitalism. It doesn’t work for you in any meaningful way. Your life is shit, you have three or four awful part-time jobs, you have no health insurance, you have half a million dollars in unsecured student-loan debt— OSWALT: That you’ll never pay off. CHRISTMAN:—you have no future in any meaningful sense. All the avenues that you were brought up to believe were going to lead to prosperity and stability—gone. But the one thing late capitalism promises is that every stupid, shitty, nostalgic indulgence you can think of is yours, at your fingertips.

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Ballantyne

dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, late capitalism, means of production, plutocrats, Stewart Brand, the built environment

The houses of the rich and famous often do not conform to the established canons of respectable taste, and may not be treated seriously by architectural historians now, but in the future, looking back, they will look as astonishing and unrepeatable as the houses of the 18th-century landed aristocracy. And strange as it may seem, we could find our own era represented in the architectural history books by these outlandish creations that seem utterly remote from our own experience of living now. Written up with one critical agenda the story might be called ‘Late Capitalism and the Triumph of Kitsch’. From another, imbued with the values of the new age, the same buildings could be exhibited as evidence that ‘Your Dreams Can Come True’. What I am trying to do here is to give a sense of how different perspectives influence what it is that we see when we see buildings.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

That is the desperation of people who have been dumped out of the working-class lives of industry and aspiration they once knew and into the humiliating experience of being discarded as human set-aside. We should not underestimate the extent to which Trump and the Brexiteers feed off the sheer anomie of life in these left-behind communities. Yes, this is a politics that thrives on anger, but it also thrives on boredom. Working-class communities have been taught by late capitalism to consume fantasies. They know very well that buying and wearing an acrylic T-shirt with the colours and advertising logos of Manchester United or the Cleveland Browns doesn’t really make you one with the multimillionaire sports star whose name is on the back. And they know that cheering for Trump or having a selfie taken with Boris doesn’t actually make you one with these entitled scions of the ruling class.

…

And this hope is concrete: it provides the sense of direction from which realistic maps of the future can be made. Hopeitude is the political gambler’s bluff. You don’t have two cents’ worth of real hope in your hand, so you put a big pile of hopeitude chips on the table. It’s a perfect parallel to the diet of empty calories that late capitalism has devised for the poor – instead of feeding the body politic, it bloats it with corny emotional syrup and cheap rhetorical trans fats. Consider Andrea Leadsom’s ludicrous speech last Thursday, setting out why she should be the next prime minister of the UK, delivered with the weird rictus of a beauty pageant contestant: ‘You see, I am an optimist.

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics 2007 by Sylvere Lotringer, Christian Marazzi

anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, business cycle, collective bargaining, dematerialisation, disinformation, do-ocracy, feminist movement, full employment, Great Leap Forward, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, social intelligence, wages for housework, women in the workforce

On the one hand, it may crystaHze and perfect itself as a separate populist practice with self· determined forms, timing, and objectives, by, for example, insisting obsessively on the theme of the release of prisoners. In thi~ case, as has already happened elsewhere, the political phenomenon of violence will end up In the category of the case study of social malaise In the age of late capitalism; and thus It will be interpreted as one of the prices to be paid for the survival of the status QUo. On the other hand, it may move toward forms of real guerrilla action, and It may can· sciously set down its roots within the new spcntaneity. In reality, this operation of death and restoration must be based Immediately on the social network, represented politically by the Italian Communist Party.

…

Now, the only essential thing that, for those who work within Marxism, must be done is analyzing more deeply the political make·up of productive "social" work, that of the worker who, socially, produces surplus value and Is therefore socially explOited. This is, I believe, the only recognizable PutBov of late capitalism. And it Is here that aU thOse problems arise, of organization, of the State, of transition, that are-In spite of the obtuse ideology reproposed by the party central commit· tees-the center of attention for the Communist militants of Autonomy. For how long do "the repression people" think they can hold out in the face of the degraded life conditions of "social" workers?

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

In theorizing contemporary privatization as a consequential form of enclosure, I am consciously echoing the arguments of David Harvey and others. For Harvey, privatization, and the more general dispossession (by whatever means) of assets held publicly or in common, is not some marginal feature of late capitalism. It is, rather, at the very forefront of modern capitalist accumulation and growth, an essential mechanism of what Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’.1 And Harvey sees this contemporary accumulation by dispossession explicitly as a revivification of the original enclosure movement. A ‘new round of “enclosure of the commons”’ has, he says, been made into a central objective of state policies not just in the Anglo-American world but also farther afield.2 In the context specifically of land privatization in post-1970s Britain, I am saying much the same thing.

…

A ‘new round of “enclosure of the commons”’ has, he says, been made into a central objective of state policies not just in the Anglo-American world but also farther afield.2 In the context specifically of land privatization in post-1970s Britain, I am saying much the same thing. This privatization is indubitably a form of enclosure; and it epitomizes key developments in late capitalism more generally. Enclosure, as Harvey insists, is not merely a thing of the past in the Global North. (That it is current in the Global South is much more widely acknowledged, as evidenced in the voluminous literature on ‘land grabs’ and the like.)3 Furthermore, and no less importantly, enclosure is not ‘just’ privatization.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

With the nation’s youth adrift in much the same way their Japanese counterparts were during their Lost Decades, it seemed to some that America, too, was becoming “a nation composed wholly of otaku”—or people who thought like them: self-described outcasts and underdogs hyperfocused on their own personal spheres of interest, their favorite websites and YouTube channels, heads down in their personal niches and plugged in to networks of like-minded folks who reinforced their beliefs, whatever they might be. Japan’s otaku were more than superfans; they were canaries in the coal mine for late-stage capitalism. The bursting of the bubble prophesized similar downturns in economies around the globe. That gave its citizens a nearly two-decade head start in developing cultural tools for living in an era of less, with fantasies playing an even more key role when hope was in increasingly short supply.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

., accessed June 30, 2020, https://s2.q4cdn.com/056532643/files/doc_financials/2020/ar/Walmart_2020_Annual_Report.pdf. If it were a country: “Global 500,” https://fortune.com/global500/; “GDP (current US$),” World Bank, accessed June 30, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true. As Cory Doctorow wrote: Cory Doctorow, “The People’s Republic of Walmart: How Late-Stage Capitalism Gives Way to Early-Stage Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” BoingBoing, March 5, 2019, https://boingboing.net/2019/03/05/walmart-without-capitalism.html. Walmart executives committed: Marc Gunther, “The Green Machine,” Fortune, July 31, 2006, https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/07/8382593/index.htm.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

"British Industrialization and the Profit Constraint Hypothesis: The Case of a Manchester Cotton Enterprise, 1798-1827," University of Hartford economics department (Internet: http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eprints/eh/papers/96l2/ 96l2003.abs). Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Jaroslovsky. Rich (1989). "Washington Wire," Wall Street fournal, February 17, p. 1. Jaspersen, Frederick Z., Anthony H. Aylward, and Mariusz A. Sumlinski (1995). Trends in Private Investment in Developing Countries: Statistics for 1970-S>4, International Finance Corp.

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MonitoriJig the World Economy, 1829-1992 (Pans: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Malkiel, Burton G. (1990). A Random Walk Down Wall Street (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.). Mamis, Justin, and Robert Mamis (1977). When to Sell: Inside Strategies for Stock-Market Profits (New York: Cornerstone Library). Mandel, Ernest (1978). Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso Press). — (1983). "Keynes and Marx," in Bottomore et al. (1983), pp. 249-251. Mankiw, N. Gregory (1989). "Real Business Cycles: A New Keynesian Perspective,"/owrn«/ of Economic Perspectives} (Summer), pp. 79-90. — (1990). "A Quick Refresher Course in Macroeconomics,"/owrna/ of Economic Litera- ture 28, pp. 1645-1660.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

Most people who pass him think he is Neptune, understandably, because of that dolphin, but no, in fact he is a Moor, not in the literal sense of being a Berber Muslim, he is one of those decorative Negroes common in Renaissance art, and looking up at him, I had a strange feeling. I saw myself as some kind of a decorative Moor, the kind who does not need to wrestle dolphins or anything else, a Moor of leisure, a Moor who lunches, a Moor who needn’t run for her livelihood through the public squares. A historically unprecedented kind of Moor. A late-capitalism Moor. A tourist Moor. The sort of Moor who enters a public square not to protest or to march (or, in an earlier age, to be hanged or sold) but simply to wander about without purpose. A Moor who has come to look at the art. A Moor who sits on the lip of a fountain and asks herself: “What, if anything, is the purpose of the artist today?”

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

Pope Francis, in his first encyclical in 2013, lamented the poison caused by the market economy that puts profit ahead of people. His lament is echoed by the protesters around the world, angered by the growing gap between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. We have to ask, has capitalism overreached itself? Can we put it back in its box without losing its vigour and creativity? Is it already too late? Capitalism was given its huge boost by two creative social inventions back in the mid-19th century, when the twin ideas of the joint-stock company and limited liability were first widely applied in Britain. Their combination fuelled the Industrial Revolution by sharing and limiting the risk of investment.

In the Flow by Boris Groys

illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Julian Assange, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, WikiLeaks

But the Communist Party practiced the same sovereigntist reading of Marxism as the Russian avant-garde. Accordingly, Friche and his school were proclaimed to be an expression of vulgar (in other words, critical) Marxism and removed from positions of power, together with the artists of the Russian avant-garde. Now, Lissitzky by no means saw himself in the context of developed or late capitalism but, rather, as a part of the vanguard of communist society. His artistic attitude, however, did not quite harmonize with the role of the artist in a communist society as envisaged by Marx and Engels. In the context of their discussion of Stirner’s unorganized, that is, artistic work, they write: The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of division of labour.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The speech act in this case is aggressively locked down, underlining how subjectivity in the form of the voice is somehow captured and fragmented in the use of these telecommunications devices. The digital network more generally facilitates the spatial and temporal globalization and precaritization of labor, but it is the “cellular” qualities of this that recombine semiotic fragments endlessly to produce semiocapitalism, according to Berardi.123 The most important commodity of late capitalism, the mobile phone, is the instrument through which this takes place, melting our brains both literally and metaphorically through its use of microwave radio frequencies. 68 Chapter 2 But all is not lost. Berardi reads the present financial crisis as a precondition for the return of the soul, like the return of the repressed.

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

These deep links have endured, intensifying as the military has directly and indirectly intervened in the production of games, with this relationship now also shaping the military in return. This accelerating feedback loop stands as a metaphor, defining the contours between technological innovation and the organization of work in late capitalism. There is a struggle over what kinds of videogames we play and how we play them, as well as a struggle between labor and capital in the process of actually producing them. Videogames can therefore “also serve a critical purpose, introducing uncomfortable facts, unmasking social foibles, encouraging oppositions, and even presenting alternative futures.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

It was too big to inhabit rapidly, but the increasing speed of space travel meant that over the course of the twenty-second century the entire solar system came within easy reach. It is not a coincidence that the second half of this century saw the beginning of the Accelerando the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils one of the most influential forms of economic change had ancient origins in Mondragon, Euskadi, a small Basque town that ran an economic system of nested co-ops organized for mutual support.

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The resulting qube-programmed Mondragon, sometimes called the Albert-Hahnel model, or the Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model, could be if everyone had been working in a programmed Mondragon, all would have been well; but it was only one of several competing economies on Earth, all decisively under the thumb of late capitalism, still in control of more than half of Earth’s capital and production, and with its every transaction tenaciously reaffirming ownership and capital accumulation. This concentration of power had not gone away but only liquefied for a while and then jelled elsewhere, much of it on Mars, as Gini figures for the era clearly reveal in residual-emergent models, any given economic system or historical moment is an unstable mix of past and future systems.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Convestment The Way We Earn and Spend Back in 1976, Fred Hirsch put his finger on one of the essential paradoxes of consumption in the post-industrial era. In earlier epochs, economic production was based on fulfilling basic material needs for survival. However, as we entered what some folks have dubbed “late capitalism,” an increasing amount of economic activity is now devoted to fulfilling social-psychological needs. Ronald Inglehart called this “post-materialism,” in his 1997 book, The Silent Revolution.1 The critical issue is that an increasingly larger share of the goods or services we produce and consume in a post-material economy are what Hirsch termed positional goods.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

(eds) (1999), The Foundations of Long Wave Theory, International Library of Critical Writings in Economics, Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Mackay, James (1997), Sounds out of Silence: A Life of Alexander Graham Bell, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Co. Mandel, Ernest (1975), Late Capitalism, London: New Left Books. Mandel, Michael J. (1997), ‘The New Business Cycle’, Business Week, Latin American edition, March 31, pp. 38–54. Marichal, Carlos (1988), Historia de la Deuda Externa de América Latina, Buenos Aires: Alianza Editorial. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1847), The Communist Manifesto.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

“It’s not just that we need more sustainable work schedules,” she told me. “It’s that we need way more control over our workweeks.” But such changes, while helpful, would not ameliorate the catastrophic loss of worker power seen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They would not address the root causes of what young Lefties like to term “late capitalism,” an age typified by corporate dominance, social-media ubiquity, miserable work, and a certain postmodern ironic fatalism. They would not solve the problems in the Rust Belt’s job market. They would not end poverty wages for home health work, the physically taxing and emotionally wrenching jobs needed to manage the aging of the baby boomers.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

William Langewiesche, "The Million Dollar Nose;' A tlan tic Monthly 286: 6 (December 2000): 1 1 -22. 1 2. Bob Jessop, "An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong's Emerging Strategies in Preparation for ( Inter-) Urban Competition;' Urban Studies 37: 1 2 (2000): 2,287-3 1 3; David Harvey, "From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism;' Geografiska A nnaler 7 1 B ( 1 989): 3- 1 7; Neil Bren ner, Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restucturing in North A merica and Western Europe, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. 1 3. See Kevin Cox, ed, Spaces of Globaliza t ion: Reasserting the Power of the Local, New York: Guilford Press, 1 997. 1 4.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

This was no accident: Yogi Tea was created and owned by Yogi Bhajan. It’s not 3HO’s only corporate endeavor—among the group’s many enterprises is the half-billion-dollar company Akal Security, which holds contracts with everyone from NASA to immigration detention centers. (What’s the word for “late capitalism” in Gurmukhi?) * The infatuation with cult garb runs deep: In 1997, thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate, a UFO fringe religion we’ll talk about in part 2, participated in a mass suicide, all wearing matching pairs of black-and-white ’93 Nike Decade sneakers. Two surviving Heaven’s Gate followers maintain that their leader chose the footwear for no particular reason other than that he found a good bulk deal.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning—A Selection of Writings, 1952–2011. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2007. ———. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 4. ———. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jasper, Simone. “He Took Video Outside an ICE Raid in Sanford. Now He’s Charged with Communicating Threats.” Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, February 7, 2019. Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.”

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

See, for instance, Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, New York: Henry Holt, 2004; and Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. 33 Amy Myers Jaffe, “United States and the Middle East: Policies and Dilemmas,” in Bipartisan Policy Center, Ending the Energy Stalemate, Washington, DC: National Commission on Energy Policy, 2004, pp. 1–2. 34 See Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Conflict and Discord in the World Political Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. 35 Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten, Changing Fortunes: The World’s Money and the Threat to American Leadership, New York: Times Books, 1992, pp. xiv–xv. 36 See Ernest Mandel, Europe vs. America: Contradictions of Imperialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970; and Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1975, esp. Chapter 10. 37 Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 87. Poulantzas understood clearly what the series of successive European “withdrawals” on capital controls, monetary policy, and the oil crisis in the early 1970s meant: “These withdrawals are generally interpreted as an ‘offensive by American capital designed to restore its tottering hegemony’ . . . these people simply cannot see the wood for the trees; American capital has no need to re-establish its hegemony, for it has never lost it.”

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Kobrin, “Expropriation as an Attempt to Control Foreign Firms in LDCs: Trends from 1960 to 1979,” International Studies Quarterly 28: 3 (September 1984), p. 333, Table 1. 5 The newly emerging academic field of international political economy was almost entirely focused on the threat to liberal multilateralism posed by a declining US hegemony, but see also H. L. Robinson, “The Downfall of the Dollar,” in R. Miliband and J. Saville, eds., Socialist Register 1973, London: Merlin, 1973; Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “The Doccar Crisis,” Monthly Review 28:1 (May 1973); and Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1975, esp. Chapter 10. 6 Eric Helleiner in particular has presented the outcome of the Bretton Woods crisis in terms of the American state—well-armed with neoliberal Friedmanite ideas under Nixon and his successors—imposing its free-market will against European and Japanese states who were more prepared to use multilateral capital controls.

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

East Village, forensic accounting, gentrification, global village, late capitalism, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Snapchat

When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive. There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

In short, the enemy is the other who rises above the convolutions and complexities of the present, who grasps the totality of the situation and is capable of manipulating it in ways the rest of us are not. Conspiracy theories are the extreme resort of the powerless, imagining what it would be to be powerful. This theme was taken up by Fredric Jameson, when he wrote that conspiracy ‘is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content’.30 Surrounded by evidence of complexity – which for the Marxist historian is emblematic of the generalised alienation produced by capitalism – the individual, however outraged, resorts to ever more simplistic narratives in order to regain some control over the situation.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

“There’s Blackstone, and then there’s everyone else,” one manager told me. In the era of Twitter, blogs, and constant instant commentary, Schwarzman is shorthand for the private equity industry and its excesses, real and perceived. A posting in the online magazine Salon in September 2011 referred to him as “a living symbol of post-industrial late capitalism’s gaudy depravity.”2 Later in 2011, no less than Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer who famously described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” characterized Schwarzman thusly: “one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world.”3 What perpetuates Schwarzman’s profile is his tendency to go off script.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Banks, “Subscriber City,” Real Life, October 26, 2020, Reallifemag.com. 12 Jathan Sadowski, “The Internet of Landlords Makes Renters of Us All,” Reboot, March 8, 2021, Thereboot.com. 13 Banks, “Subscriber City.” 14 David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Human Geography 71:1, 1989, p. 12. 15 Sharon Zukin, “Seeing Like a City: How Tech Became Urban,” Theory and Society 49, 2020, p. 948. 16 Ibid., p. 942. 9. Toward a Better Transport Future 1 Ursula K. Le Guin, “A War Without End,” Verso Books (blog), January 24, 2018 [2004], Versobooks.com. 2 Ursula K.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Tocqueville and Mill dealt with it by trying to cultivate an aristocratic strain within democracies. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America; and John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). e p i l o g u e : l o s i n g b a r e d e m o c r acy 1. See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso, 2013); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Noam Chomksy, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories, 2011); William Connolly, The Fragility of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Bonnie Honig, “The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization,” No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice 10 (2013); and Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 2.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

The market may be bottom-up, but it is populated by chronically top-heavy agents. Decentralized production and development have done wonders for the world of Open Source software, where certain fundamental rights of ownership have been disavowed, but it remains a real question whether the more proprietary wing of late capitalism can model its internal organization after ant farms or neural nets. For one, the unpredictability of emergent systems makes them an ideal platform for book recommending or gameplaying, but no one wants a business that might spontaneously fire a phalanx of middle managers for no discernible reason.

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

In a parallel fashion, we can say that “junk” capitalism is the empty expenditure of huge amounts of energy for things like permanent war, commodities that undermine human and environmental health, labour processes that damage and exploit workers, security that increases insecurity, or in other words, an expenditure of energy that is relatively empty when it comes to advancing human flourishing. 6 L E T T H E M E AT J U N K Thus the criticisms that I shall make of a food regime that so prominently produces, circulates and markets junk food, will in many respects epitomize the irrationalities of late capitalism as a whole. Our increasingly globalized capitalist economy is using more and more energy to run faster and faster, while actually losing ground when it comes to advancing human well-being. In this book, I shall argue that the principal reason for this is that the short-term profit orientation that is central to capitalism cannot deal effectively with the world historic problems that we face.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Automation has gotten so extreme that work, as the Rutgers University historian James Livingston writes in his smart and rude book No More Work, is “no longer socially necessary, which means it doesn’t pay. The labor market is broken, and it can’t be fixed. Or it’s been perfected at this outer edge of late capitalism.” It is getting easier and easier to use capital to replace human labor—to substitute machines for “real, live human beings” to the point where capital and labor start to seem equal to each other. Livingston is against work, or at least the traditional work that he considers close to wage slavery.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

It is, however, just one of a suite of potential ways to make sense of data and no doubt over time scholars will produce a set of diverse conceptual lenses through which to understand data, and the diversity of views will create productive counterpoints for new ideas, as well as conceptual vantage points to direct empirical research. These might include theorising data through a more structural lens that focuses on their role in the operation of late capitalism, or draws on Deleuzian poststructural notions concerning rhizomic modes governance, or on feminist or postcolonial critiques of the gendered and politicised production and employment of data. Regardless of the lens, what is required is deep, careful and critical reflection and putting theory to work through empirical case studies.

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

This page intentionally left blank Notes Introduction 1.╯Zama Femi, “Gang Wars Take Heavy Toll on Cape Matrics,” Cape Argus, December 29, 2006. 2.╯Matt Medved, “Cops to Fight Gangsterism in Primary Schools,” Cape Argus, May 29, 2007. 3.╯A’eysah Kassiem, “Crime Wave Engulfing Schools,” Cape Times, May 18, 2007. 4.╯Aziz Hartley, “Rasool Unveils Plan to Fight Gangs and Drugs,” Cape Times, May 23, 2007; Candes Keating, “High-Risk Schools to Get Top Security Measures,” Cape Argus, February 8, 2007. 5.╯Rafaella delle Donne, “City’s Heart Is Hardening, Say Homeless,” Cape Argus, July 15, 2007. 6.╯Tony Roshan Samara, “Development, Social Justice and Global Governance: Challenges to Implementing Restorative and Criminal Justice Reform in South Africa,” Acta Juridica (2007): 113–33. 7.╯David McDonald, World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town (London: Routledge Press, 2007). 8.╯James DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital (New York: Routledge, 2003); David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler B. 71 (1989): 3–17. 9.╯Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996); Gordon MacLeod, “From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a ‘Revanchist City’? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 602–24 . 10.╯Throughout the book I will use the basic racial categories employed by the Census: black African, coloured, Asian, and white.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Before The Apprentice, however, there was at least the pretext that it was about something else: how to survive in the wilderness, how to catch a husband, how to be a housemate. With Donald Trump’s arrival, the veneer was gone. The Apprentice was explicitly about the race to survive in the cutthroat “jungle” of late capitalism. The first episode began with a shot of a homeless person sleeping rough on the street—a loser, in other words. Then the camera cut to Trump in his limo, living the dream—the ultimate winner. The message was unmistakable: you can be the homeless guy, or you can be Trump. That was the whole sadistic drama of the show—play your cards right and be the one lucky winner, or suffer the abject humiliation of being berated and then fired by the boss.

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

References p 242 ———. 1951. The Bias of Communication. Revised edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jenkins, Henry, and David Thorburn, eds. 2003. Democracy and New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jeter, Lynne W. 2003. Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at Worldcom. New York: Wiley. Joseph, John E. 2002. From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of rapid innovation—and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely related squeeze—obscures the fact that these companies’ biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s rightful responsibility and risk. Airbnb didn’t tell its New York City users that they were breaking the law by renting their apartments.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

‘80’ still means something, but what it means transmutes without announcement. This chapter aims to answer these questions through the lens of control. Digital theorist Seb Franklin describes control as “a set of technical principles having to do with self-regulation, distribution, and statistical forecasting . . . [that] also describes the episteme grounding late capitalism, a worldview that persists beyond any specific device or set of practices.”7 This episteme, then, serves as “a wholesale reconceptualization of the human and of social interaction under the assumption . . . that information storage, processing, and transmission (as well as associated concepts such as ‘steering’ and ‘programming’) not only constitute the fundamental processes of biological and social life but can be instrumentalized to both model and direct the functional entirety of such forms of life.”8 These terms of control regulate, as well as epistemologically establish, the standards by which we, reconceptualized as measurable types, are positioned as subjects through data.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

The arrival of the nuclear age, the onset of the Cold War, the grip of the consumer cultures that Goodman and others abhorred and the appearance of communitarian counter-cultural movements in the 1960s, together with a wave of urban guerrilla groups in the 1970s, are some of the factors behind this. The arms race advertised the nature of the monopoly of nuclear violence concentrated in the superpowers’ hands and provided a fillip to non-violent antimilitarist activism. At the same time what Herbert Marcuse called the one-dimensionality of late capitalism raised questions about the effects of domination – repression, alienation, isolation, obedience and restraint – and the quality of personal relationships fostered by hierarchy and exploitation. Armed struggle seemed irrelevant in this analysis. The emergence of urban guerrilla movements prompted a new debate about political violence.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

‘I’m an ENTJ’ the name badge says, meaning I am an extroverted, intuitive, thinking, judging individual. That is my fate, all I will ever be – I may as well forget about developing whatever other qualities I might have. Small wonder that, after her immersion in the history of Myers–Briggs, Merve Emre concluded that personality typing was ‘among the silliest, shallowest cultural products of late capitalism’.9 That there are powerful commercial motives for profiling people is obvious: worth some two billion dollars annually, the marketplace for personality assessment is swollen with contenders. After making its name with forecasting polls, the Gallup organisation moved into profiling with its CliftonStrengths report.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Gender Equality and Urban Planning A ReGender Briefing Paper, Oxfam, London Gummer, J (1994) More Quality in Town and Country, Department of the Environment News Release 713, DoE, London H Haas, T (2008), New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future, Rizzoli International, New York Habermas, J (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society (translated by McCarthy, T) Beacon Press, Boston Habermas, J (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (translated by Burger, T & Lawrence, F), MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass Habraken, NJ (2000) (edited by Teicher, J) The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Hague, R & Harrop, M (2004) Comparative Government and Politics: An introduction (sixth edition) Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Hajer, M & Reijndorp, A (2001) In Search of New Public Domain, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam Hall, D (1991) Altogether misguided and dangerous – A review of Newman & Kenworthy (1989), Town & Country Planning, 60(11/12), 350–351 Hall, P (1998) Cities in Civilisations: Culture, Innovation and Urban Order, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London Hall P (1995) Planning and urban design in the 1990s Urban Design Quarterly, 56, 14–21 Hall, P & Imrie, R (1999) Architectural practices and disabling design in the built environment’, Environment & Planning B: Planning & Design, 26, 409–425 Hall, P (1973) Great Planning Disasters, Weidenfeld, London Hall, T (2008) Turning a Town Around: A Proactive Approach to Urban Design, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford Hall, T (1998) Urban Geography, Routledge, London Hancock, T & Duhl, L (1988) Promoting Health in the Urban Context, WHO Healthy Cities Papers No 1, Copenhagen, FADL Hannigan, J (1998) Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the postmodern Metropolis, Routledge, London Harcourt, B E (2001) Illusion of Order: The false Promise of Broken Windows Policing, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass Hardy D (2005) Poundbury, the Town that Charles Built, Town & Country Planning Association, London Hargroves, K C & Smith, MH (2005) The Natural Advantage of Nations, Earthscan Publications, London Hart, S I & Spivak, A L (1993) The Elephant in the Bedroom: Automobile Dependence and Denial: Impacts on the Economy and Environment, New Paradigm Books, Pasadena Harvey, D (2005) A Brief History of Neo-liberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford Harvey, D (1997) The New Urbanism and the communitarian trap, Harvard Design Magazine (Winter/Spring) 68–69 Harvey, D (1989a) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography, 71(1), 3–17 Harvey, D (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Basil Blackwell, Oxford Harvey, D (1989b) The Urban Experience, Blackwell, Oxford Hass-Klau, C (1990) The Pedestrian and City Traffic, Belhaven Press, London Hass-Klau, C; Crampton, G; Dowland, C; & Nold, I (1999) Streets as Living Space: Helping public Spaces Play Their Proper Role, Landor, London Hatherway, T (2000) Planning local movement systems’ in Barton H (2000) (editor) Sustainable Communities – The Potential for Eco-Neighbourhoods, Earthscan, London, 216-229 Hawkes, D (2003) Civic dimensions: Public places, urban spaces: The dimensions of urban design – Book Review’, Architectural Review, August Haworth, G (2009) Coin street housing: The architecture of engagement, in Ritchie & Thomas (Editors)Sustainable Urban Design – An Environmental Approach, second edition, Taylor & Francis, London, 116–131 Haughton, G & Hunter, C (1994) Sustainable Cities, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London Hayden, D (2004) A Field Guide to Sprawl, WW Norton & Company, London Hayden, D (1995) The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass Hayden, D (1980) What would a non-sexist city be like?

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Oxford University Press, Oxford Jackson, L (2003) The relationship of urban design to human health and condition, Landscape & Urban Planning, 64, 191–200 Jackson, R (2003) The impact of the built environment on health: An emerging field, American Journal of Public Health, 93(9), 1382–1383 Jacobs, A (1995) Great Streets, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass Jacobs, A; Macdonald, E & Rofé, Y (2002) The Boulevard Book, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass Jacobs, J (2000) The Nature of Economies, Random House, New York Jacobs, J (1969) The Economy of Cities, Random House, New York Jacobs, A B (1993) Great Streets, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass Jacobs, A & Appleyard, D (1987) Towards an urban design manifesto: A prologue Journal of the American Planning Association, 53(1), 112–120 Jacobs, J (1961, (1984 edition) The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Modern Town Planning, Peregrine Books, London Jabareen, YR (2006) Sustainable urban forms: Their typologies, models and concepts’, Journal of Planning Education & Research 26(1), 38–52 Jackson, M (2004) Malt Whisky Companion (fifth edition), Dorling Kindersley, London Jameson, F (1984) postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review,146, 53–92 Jarvis, R (1994) Townscape revisited’, Urban Design Quarterly, No 52, October, 15–30 Jarvis, R (1980) Urban environments as visual art or social setting, Town Planning Review, 51(1), 50–66 Jencks, C (2005) The Iconic Building: The Power of Enigma, Frances Lincoln, London Jenkins, E J (2008) To Scale: One Hundred Urban Plans, Routledge, New York Jencks, C (1990) The New Moderns: From Late to Neo-modernism, Academy Editions, London Jencks, C (1986) What is postmodernism?

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Usery Lecture in Labor Policy, University of Atlanta, GA, 2005 2. T. Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard, 2014) 3. http://newleftreview.org/II/21/fredric-jameson-future-city: ‘It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’ 4. http://shanghaiist.com/2010/05/26/translated_foxconns_employee_non-su.php 5. See P. Mason, ‘WTF is Eleni Haifa?’, 20 December 2014, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1801-wtf-is-eleni-haifa-a-new-essay-by-paul-mason 6. D. A. Galbi, ‘Economic Change and Sex Discrimination in the Early English Cotton Factories’, 1994, http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

Japanese managers criticized American managers for settling for spiritless, externally-imposed smiles, Raz notes, and themselves appeal to the workers' underlying "chi" (spirit). But the Japanese entice this "chi" by evoking guilt or shame. In the Tokyo Dome Corporation, managers placed video cameras behind the cash registers of unfriendly sales clerks and later shamed them by showing the telltale videos to fellow workers. It isn't just late capitalism that's at work here, 202 Afterword he suggests, but the use capitalism makes of a national culture. Yet another group of studies have focused on the consequences - burn out, stress, physical collapse - and the recognition and financial compensation given to those who do emotional labor and risk these effects.

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

Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie — as, indeed, it is.40 One need not accept Graeber’s (largely unsupported) claim that up to half of all jobs fall under this category. But the parallels he notes between corporate bureaucracy and mismanagement in late capitalism and those of late communism should surprise nobody who believes this is the natural outcome of environments that are run as despotic, quasi-feudalistic hierarchies. And where companies are run under the mantra of brutal efficiency above all other considerations, the result is an environment that more closely approximates a hi-tech sweatshop as one of the many personal accounts of Amazon’s infamous warehouses reveals (and note the enduring legacy of Jack Welch’s “rank and yank” system of employee turnover): Data is absolutely central to this efficiency.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

By 2008 Friends of Hudson River Park, a private conservancy that supports a state park on the West Side of Manhattan, was preparing a proposal to create the first residential BID, arguing that the park increased property values by such a substantial amount that developers, landlords, and residents should be glad to pay the additional tax a BID requires. Anne Schwartz, “A Property Tax for Parks?,” www.gothamgazette.com, October 2008. For a general critique of the public sector’s entrepreneurial approach, see David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” in Spaces of Capital (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 345–68. 28. See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), pp. 409–24; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); David M.

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

It is one of the small ironies of history that Isabel died before she could see the extent to which mass culture hollowed out her creation, a sad irony or a merciful one, depending on one’s perspective. There was always a danger that this was where type would end up, among the silliest, shallowest cultural products of late capitalism. After all, the logical extension of typological thinking was that type itself would stiffen and standardize in its bid for universality. The more rapidly type circulated through knockoff tests and advice columns, the more its descriptions of people’s personalities would reduce to one-word caricatures.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

The buyer, seeking a real estate investment with prospects for excellent returns, was not a real estate baron but a nonprofit, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The same impulse that had led it and other foundations to diversify their portfolios into what was called “alternative investing,” like venture capital funds, also led to diversification in real estate. A Marxist critique of “late capitalism” would have difficulty disentangling the interests of the for-profits from those of the nonprofits. Not only was Benchmark working, in part, “for” the nonprofits that supplied its capital, but its landlord also happened to be a nonprofit, too. A visitor entering the Benchmark office foyer would notice foremost the two walls of plaques, each commemorating the initial public offering or sale of companies that the individual partners had overseen in their relatively short venture capital careers.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 30, no. 1 (2010): 9–13; John Patrick Leary, “Keywords for the Age of Austerity 19: Resilience,” Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (blog), June 23, 2015, https://keywordsforcapitalism.com/2015/06/23/keywords-for-the-age-of-austerity-19-resilience/. 61. Jonathan Crary, 24 / 7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 62. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), 166. 63. Sean Dorrance Kelly, “A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can’t Be an Artist: Creativity Is, and Always Will Be, a Human Endeavor,” MIT Technology Review, February 21, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612913/a-philosopher-argues-that-an-ai-can-never-be-an-artist/. 64.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

“On the Nature and Origins of Marx’s Concept of Labor.” Political Theory 7, no. 1 (1979): 35–56. Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty, 118–73. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969. Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. London: Harper Collins, 1999. Bewes, Timothy. Reification. Or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London, Verso, 2002. Bhambra, Gurminder. Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Bhola, H. S. Literacy, Knowledge, Power, and Development. Springfield, VA: Dyneders, 1992. Bilbao-Osorio, Beñat, Soumitra Dutta, and Bruno Lanvin. The Global Information Technology Report 2014: Rewards and Risks of Big Data.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Mahmood Mamdani, for example, argues the liberal placing of Muslims within “culture talk”—removed from politicized discussions of Cold War imperial expansionism into Muslim-majority states—animates Islamophobia.4 Liberal multiculturalism also assumes a false solidarity between the racialized working class and racialized elite, who are directly implicated in oppression as bosses, landlords, and agents of the state, and contains radical demands in favor of promoting tokenistic diversity within the status quo. Elizabeth Povinelli argues that liberal multiculturalism is an adaptation of late capitalism to naturalize capitalist accumulation through categories of social difference and imaginaries of national cohesion. She maintains that multiculturalism calls on people to “perform an authentic difference in exchange for the good feelings of the nation.”5 Liberalism and far-right populism are, therefore, not completely contrasting ideologies when it comes to antiracism.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

What almost never seems to be addressed in these forums and meetups, though, are questions about what this self-knowledge is being mobilized for, and just where the criteria against which adherents feel they need to optimize their performance come from in the first place. While there are some fascinating questions being explored in the Quantified Self community, a brutal regime of efficiency operates in the background. Against the backdrop of late capitalism, the rise of wearable biometric monitoring can only be understood as a disciplinary power traversing the body itself and all its flows. This is a power that Frederick Taylor never dreamed of, and Foucault would have been laughed out of town for daring to propose. It’s clear that the appeal of this is overwhelmingly to young workers in the technology industry itself, the control they harvest from the act of quantification intended to render them psychophysically suitable for performance in a work environment characterized by implacable release schedules and a high operational tempo.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Financial crashes are a good example of this type of dynamic nonlinear process. So are sneezes, and orgasms. How best to think about shared mycorrhizal networks then? Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery schools for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism, with fungi jostling on the trading floor of a forest stock exchange? Or maybe it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal overlords presiding over the lives of their plant laborers for their own ultimate benefit. All are problematic. The questions raised by wood wide webs range further than these limited casts of characters allow.

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

London: Macmillan, 1990. Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Hybel, Alex Roberto. Power over Rationality: The Bush Administration and the Gulf Crisis. Albany: State University of New York, 1993. Jameson, Frederick. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Packaging the Presidency, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jencks, Charles. What Is Postmodernism? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster. The Century. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

Yet at the same time as the future integrity of the natural environment felt ever more at risk, society felt ever harder to change, especially if you were on the left. The idea that the political world and its economic underpinnings might be open to radical revolutionary change, a threat or promise central to European thought from 1789 onwards, went into retreat after 1945. There are a number of features of late capitalism which might be called on to account for this, most notably the shift from identities built on work to identities built on consumption, but there is a role for nuclear fear, too, both as a political fact – a world of superpower conflict was one in which revolution and war might be synonymous – and as the driver of a deeper change in the imagination.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

When evaluating a strategy, people sometimes consider its maximum drawdown (MDD) over some past time period: Figure 2.1 shows an example of a hedge fund strategy and its HWM, drawdown, and MDD. Figure 2.1. A hedge fund strategy’s high water mark (HWM) and drawdown (DD). 2.7. ADJUSTING PERFORMANCE MEASURES FOR ILLIQUIDITY AND STALE PRICES Some hedge funds may not be as hedged as they first appear. To see why, let us consider the following example. Suppose that Late Capital Management (LCM) invests 100% in the stock market but always marks to market one month late. For instance, if the stock market goes up by 3% in January, LCM will report a 3% return in February. In that case, what is LCM’s stock market beta? Well, βLCM will appear to be near zero, since it depends on the covariance with the market and the returns are misaligned in time: In other words, since LCM’s return is last month’s market return, and market returns are (close to) independent over time, LCM will appear to have a zero beta in a standard regression: The estimated values of α will be the average stock market return, which is positive (over the long term).

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Total world advertising revenues are estimated to be anywhere from $150 billion to $250, nearly one half of which are American.2 The largest firm, Britain’s Saatchi & Saatchi, operates in over eighty countries and, according to media expert Ben Bagdikian, buys 20 percent of all commercial time in world television; its Pepsi-Cola account developed an advertisement to be placed in forty different national markets that could be seen by one-fifth of the human race.3 Coca-Cola’s new subsidiaries include China and, in a manner of speaking, Rutgers University. In China it must share its market with PepsiCo and other companies but at Rutgers University it has outbid the competition and, for $10 million, has secured a market monopoly for its products along with the right to advertise its association with the school. Late capitalism is no longer about either products or competition. Image is everything and the “it” that Coke is, is now education—as image rather than substance. Such recent victories, including its sponsorship of recent Olympic games, are perhaps fruits of the link Coke forged a few years earlier with Creative Artists Agency, the powerful talent agency and image spinner run by Michael Ovitz, to “help mold its marketing and media strategies around the world.”

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

Nor are the doctors who today diagnose with Hoarding Disorder people who fill their homes with newspapers and empty pickle jars, but leave undiagnosed those who amass billions of dollars while other people starve, merely toadying to the wealthy. They don’t mean to turn the suffering inflicted by our own peculiar institutions, the depression and anxiety spawned by the displacements of late capitalism and postmodernity, into markets for a criminally avaricious pharmaceutical industry. The prejudices and fallacies behind psychiatric diagnoses, and even the interests they serve, are as invisible to all of us, doctors and patients alike, as they were to Dr. Cartwright’s New Orleanian colleagues or to all those doctors who “treated” homosexuals.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

Indeed, based on his philosophical writings, it is hard to imagine that he would not, for instance, have supported the Sherman Act, which was passed unanimously by the US Congress in 1890, a century after Smith’s death, with the aim of breaking up the railway and oil monopolies that by then were slowly but surely throttling the life out of American industry. But ironically, the social role of selfishness and jealousy in foraging societies suggests that, even if Smith’s hidden hand does not apply particularly well to late capitalism, his belief that the sum of individual self-interests can ensure the fairest distribution of the ‘necessaries of life’ was right, albeit only in small-scale band societies. For in societies like the Ju/’hoansi’s, envy-fuelled demand sharing ensured a far more an equitable ‘distribution of the necessaries of life’ than is the case in any market economy.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

Hammett, Jerrilou, and Kingsley Hammett. The Suburbanization of New York. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989). ———. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso Books, 2013. Jackson, Kenneth. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Jacobs, Jane.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

David Harvey also described this process, especially as regards cities, in a famous 1989 article in which he described a shift from ‘managerial’ governance of cities and localities, which focused on providing services and benefits to urban populations, towards ‘entrepreneurial’ governance systems, focused on attracting and building local businesses. See David Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography Vol. 71, No. 1, The Roots of Geographical Change: 1973 to the Present, 1989, pp. 3–17. 18. William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, Sage, 2014, p.110. 19. For an example of John Major’s use of ‘competitiveness’ see ‘Mr Major’s Press Conference on the Competitiveness White Paper’, May 1994, www.johnmajor.co.uk.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

Despite an alliance that has lasted since 1778 and despite the gift of the Statue of Liberty, France has a claim to be the home of facile anti-Americanism. On the political Right, Gaullism is saturated with anti-American claims of French superiority. The political Left, and this was true not just in France, found in alleged American materialism an example of the decadence it detected under late capitalism. A loathing of the West, rooted equally in hatred of America and hatred of capitalism, is a constant temptation, especially on the political Left. There are plenty of people in rich, democratic societies who believe that all the evils in the world are merely the process by which the consequences swirl back on the real perpetrator, the United States of America.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar