To prepare for the New Inquiry's upcoming screening of 1968 teen exploitation film Wild in the Streets, I have been reading The Greening of America, a 1970 book by Yale law professor Charles Reich that sought to explain the righteous ways of teenagers to the rest of society. Reich actually mentions the film in a chapter about how the "Corporate State itself is generating rebellion," calling Wild in the Streets "truly subversive." In Wild in the Streets, teenagers secure the right to vote, vote themselves into power, and have all adults imprisoned in camps where they are kept high on LSD until they die. In The Greening of America, Reich explains how most Americans are trapped in Consciousness II —  his jargon for the organization-man mentality, for the technocatic meritocratic Corporate system that made everyone into uptight, status-seeking drones with no "real"… Read More...

In this week's Economist, the Schumpeter column — which deals with management issues — considers how elastic work time becomes with the advent of the smartphone. What was alleged to be a tool to empower individuals and cater to their convenience has ended up making them feel more harried and hassled than ever. The servant has become the master. Not long ago only doctors were on call all the time. Now everybody is. Bosses think nothing of invading their employees’ free time. Work invades the home far more than domestic chores invade the office. Otherwise-sane people check their smartphones obsessively, even during pre-dinner drinks, and send e-mails first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Funny how that worked out. Convenience not really convenient, but a veiled speed-up? How strange. But it's interesting who the management columnist wants to blame rhetorically… Read More...

I signed up for Pinterest without really knowing what it was, out of a general sense that it is important to reserve a user name on any service that's garnering attention. When I found that it was an image aggregator, I didn't understand what the fuss was about. Why would I want to serve as a volunteer photo researcher? How is Pinterest any different from those Tumblrs set up to display a mosaic of images? Is it supposed to be a Twitter of images or something? I couldn't imagine what I would use it for, so I sort of forgot about it. But recently Pinterest has entered the mainstream, as a para-retailing apparatus presumed to appeal mainly to women. The site's supposed femaleness has occasioned a lot of theorizing, some of which Nathan Jurgenson details in this post, as has… Read More...

  Though published last, Northanger Abbey was probably among the first novels Jane Austen wrote, sometime around 1799. While it's not regarded as straight-up juvenilia, it's sometimes dismissed as a slight and occasionally awkward mix of parody with the  "free indirect speech" approach she later perfected, a satire of Gothic novels that can seem obvious and unnecessary. Austen has some fun lovingly mocking the books of Ann Radcliffe and her ilk, while issuing a gentle warning not to mistake the intensity of Gothic novels' narrative suspense for truth. Readers must not go Quixote with them and start interpreting everyday life in their terms. But there is more going on Northanger Abbey than that. It's not merely a novel about reading novels and the dangers such reading can present to an "innocent" girl like Catherine Morland, the book's main character. That… Read More...

Charles Duhigg's article in the New York Times Magazine and this excerpt from Joseph Turow's book at the Atlantic make for good companion reading. Both are about the rise of data mining for marketing purposes — the efforts to assign consumers a profile that will then determine their status in various retail spheres and what sort of deals they will be offered and ads they will see and what sort of service they will be offered and so on. Both give a sense of how our ingrained commitment to the values of consumerism then opens us to being further programmed in our habitual choices: consumerism is the maze in which retailers can hide the chocolate in the form of various goods. And scientists and statisticians are only too happy to treat us like lab rats we've become. Duhigg's article focuses mainly… Read More...

The word precarity is becoming increasingly fashionable as a way of describing the effects of neoliberal policy. The concept expresses the sense that the state has broken its ideological promise (what Polanyi posited in The Great Transformation) to ameliorate the misery capitalism necessarily generates. The state tries to offload as much of the responsibility for maintaining a minimum standard of well-being for its citizens, while corporations simultaneously shift as much of the economic risk to their workers, offering little in the way of benefits, pensions, and security. Individuals are expected to bear the burdens imposed by recession and fend for themselves as much as possible in the economy, even as the destructured work sphere that results from post-Fordist reforms demands an intensified cooperation among workers. The stress of having to constantly cooperate and compete with co-workers at the same time is just… Read More...

I've been reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which, as far as I can tell, is mainly about the varieties of servitude that early 19th century life had to offer women in England. That is to say it's about property, which is maybe why it's named after an estate and not a person. But it's also about rituals of attention, and the implications of servitude contained within them. The main character, Fanny Price, is a poor relation more or less purchased by her rich relatives, the Bertrams. Brought to the Bertrams' mansion as a child, she is then subject to serial humiliations meant to remind her of her social place while she is made over into an uncompensated servant who performs endless amounts of emotional labor (as well as running around and fetching things for her indolent aunt) without having the… Read More...

Art historian Michael Fried's 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality is about how French painters in the late 18th century started to paint people who are totally absorbed in the moment -- engrossed in what they are doing and oblivious to the possibility that they could be observed (by, say, the person looking at the painting). Fried tries to figure out why viewers of the time had such a taste for this. What made the experience of looking at someone who appeared oblivious to their presence so compelling? And was it any different from simple voyeurism? What, if anything, did it have to do with, say, the spread of literacy and of private solitary reading as a familiar and pleasurable experience? Since we are currently acclimating ourselves to a new culture-sweeping technology for self-absorbed pleasure, these struck me as interesting questions. As Nathan… Read More...

I'm reading through the summary of findings of this Pew survey of Facebook users. (It is based on phone polling, so caveat emptor.) The point they are foregrounding in their report is that Facebook has "power users," which means that the division of labor on Facebook's social factory is uneven -- some active users work harder at building the network and feeding its flows, which makes using the site more engaging for passive users. Thanks to the Facebook freaks (and it seems that everyone is linked to a few of these), the less involved users have something new to see or do when they log in. Niemann Journalism Lab interprets this as good news for the old media business: If Facebook activity disproportionately relies on a subset of power users with busy hands, that’s an opening for news outlets or… Read More...

1. Identity is fundamentally multiple, incomplete, provisional, cyborg, contextually contingent, etc. Deleuze et al. are right about that. (See Turkle's "Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community at the End of the Freudian Century" for grudging admission of this.) But consciousness or subjectivity is unitary (we only think we inhabit any one given identity at a time), which can confuse things. We can end up thinking our self is as unified as seamless and consistent as our conscious subjectivity seems to us to be. This tendency to conflate the two can be exploited for ideological ends, as was the case in the consumer capitalist era, in which the idea that we are all unique individuals who have complete control over our identity (which is discovered and revealed rather than constructed) suited consumerist ideas about power and expression through choice in the marketplace.… Read More...