late capitalism

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

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
Published 7 Mar 2017

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
Published 29 Nov 2018

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
Published 11 Mar 2014

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
Published 14 Jun 2015

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
Published 1 Jan 2013

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.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

To explore this dynamic, he focused on the linchpin of capitalism, consumerism, and how modern consumption had distorted our values and behaviour in ways that served late capitalism but compromised us in the process. For Fromm, the materialistic way of life upon which late capitalism depended had undermined more authentic ways of living and being, and this was having adverse psychological effects. To illustrate the psychological harms of materialism, Fromm spoke eloquently of what he called ‘the having mode of living’ – something that had always been part of human experience, but which had become unnaturally exaggerated under late capitalism. Under the pressures of modern life, we had all variously succumbed to the over-valuation of buying and consuming things.

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Indeed, as Giles Fraser put it to me: ‘Capitalism doesn’t want your inner life to be completely fixed – it is happy for you to be a functional depressive or a functional alcoholic, because in both instances you are still a functional consumer and that’s what really matters.’ In this sense, the preferred emotional state for late capitalism is a state of perpetual ‘functional dissatisfaction’: functional to the extent that you will continue to work, and dissatisfied to the extent that you will continue to spend.1 Late capitalism does not generate just the conditions of distress, but the materialist, apolitical and profitable interventions deemed to remedy it – interventions that, as we will now see, chime with the materialist zeitgeist of our times.

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Given that these links have literally littered the profession over the last thirty years, it is little wonder that the over-medicalisation and medicating of emotional distress has similarly proliferated.22 But this book is not about the unholy alliance between drug companies and establishment psychiatry, which I covered more extensively in my previous book, Cracked. It is about how the wider social and economic climate of late capitalism has allowed this highly medicalised, marketised and depoliticised way of managing our emotional distress to flourish unimpeded, despite its clear failings on a whole host of the most important outcome metrics. According to the NHS’s own Independent Mental Health Taskforce, mental health outcomes have actually worsened in recent years, as have rates of suicide.23 In fact, since 2006, there has been an 11 per cent increase in suicides in people who use mental health services,24 and, despite widening access to services,25 no reduction at all in the prevalence of mental disorders since the 1980s.26 Additionally, while as a society we have made some extraordinary gains in life expectancy over the last fifty years (largely due to biomedical advances in general medicine), for people diagnosed with severe mental health problems, the gap between their life expectancy and everyone else’s has doubled since the 1980s.27 In fact, in the UK, the mortality of those suffering from severe and sustained emotional distress is now 3.6 times higher than in the general population, with people so diagnosed dying approximately twenty years earlier than the average person.28 There are many reasons given for these dire statistics.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

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
Published 15 Jan 2001

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
Published 8 Nov 2016

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
Published 1 Apr 2004

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
Published 8 Jan 1997

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.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

Communicative Traces This book considers a core contradiction between the immediate utilitarian purposes of personal data and the lasting affective significance of aggregated data. Profiles designed and used for amusement and advertising purposes have the capacity to become sacred spaces for collective mourning and individual legacies. The political theorist Jodi Dean uses the term “communicative capitalism” to describe how late capitalism extracts value by mining communication, just as Fordist capitalism exploited workers in factories and other workplaces.51 I use the term “communicative traces” as a play on Dean’s concept by bridging critiques of digital labor and platform capitalism with theories of materiality, memory, and mourning.

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It is part of a broader repertoire of invoking the slain to vivify collective action.”22 Hashtags like #SayHerName became calls for Black women, especially Black trans women, to be counted among the dead and memorialized alongside murdered Black men.23 Online memorials are now intimately connected to hashtag activism, in addition to providing the scaffolding for individual remembrance.24 Grassroots efforts around memorialization can be a form of resistance—such as when hashtags and viral videos increase the visibility of the victims of police shootings—even if memorialization is simultaneously reinscribed by late capitalism’s demands for constant connectivity. In the face of mass death and viral depictions of violence, hashtag-driven celebrations of Black life and joy are also a form of resistance.25 But platforms are not always equipped to handle such practices. Platform temporality points to the discomfort that arises when a platform built for immediate social networking becomes a place to honor the dead for years or even decades.

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As a means of preserving collaboratively produced data across multiple platforms, interfaces, and devices, digital estate planning promises to turn mundane assets into potential heirlooms. The very definition of digital estates as “assets,” however, points to the growing significance of affective and communicative labor under late capitalism. Digital estate planning is thus politically oriented, or at least holds out a utopian promise that users will be able to reclaim their mundane digital possessions as part of their estates, designating them as worthy of preservation. The practices associated with digital estate planning may in fact compose a form of resistance against the compulsory forms of connection fomented by user-generated media and the dangers associated with digital surveillance.

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

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
Published 14 Sep 2006

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
Published 29 Nov 2015

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 and Antonio Negri
Published 9 Mar 2000

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.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

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?

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

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

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
by Kathi Weeks
Published 8 Sep 2011

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
Published 8 Apr 2019

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
Published 10 Mar 2015

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
Published 31 Jul 2016

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
Published 3 Feb 2015

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
Published 20 Aug 2019

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
Published 26 Jan 2021

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 and Daniel Lang/levitsky
Published 11 Jun 2012

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.

…

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.

…

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
Published 16 Sep 2013

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

…

“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.

…

“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.”

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

Their art resists the simplistic Black–white binary of race relations. Although America’s history remains entangled in the legacy of slavery, narratives that ignore the experiences of people of Indigenous, Asian, Latino, and mixed descent fail to reflect the world we live in. Yet far too often critiques of late-stage capitalism don’t address how people of color get pitted against each other. Alexandra Chang’s novel, Days of Distraction (Ecco, 2020), skillfully portrays the mental calculations, the considerations of race and power that her narrator makes in something so mundane as an editorial meeting at a tech magazine.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 15 Jan 2012

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.

…

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.

…

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.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 19 Aug 2012

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.

…

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.

…

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
Published 20 Nov 2016

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.

…

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
Published 28 Sep 2020

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.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

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.

Explore Everything
by Bradley Garrett
Published 7 Oct 2013

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.

…

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
Published 8 Nov 2016

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!’

…

Hall, ‘Designing Non-space: The Evolution of the Elevator Interior’, in Goetz, ed., Up, Down, Across, pp. 59–78. 18Sally Wilk, ‘Elevator Safety: What to Do if Someone Is Trapped’, Elevator World, September 2006, pp. 129–32. 19Simmen, ‘Elevation: A Cultural History’, p. 28. 20Paumgarten, ‘Up and Then Down’. 21Susan Garfinkel, ‘Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility’, in Goetz, ed., 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.

…

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.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

Marxist theorist Ernest Mandel writes: “What makes planning possible is the actual control that the capitalist has over the means of production and the labourers in his enterprise, and over the capital which in the event may be accumulated outside the enterprise.” Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999). 76. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1982). 77. Hudson and Oncu, Absentee Ownership and Its Discontents. 78. Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities. CHAPTER 2: THE UNITED STATES OF FORDLâNDIA 1. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 2.

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Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (New York: Trade Paper Press, 2009); Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019); David Dayen, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (New York: The New Press, 2020). 18. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999); Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (London: Verso, 2019). 19. Isabelle Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 20.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

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.

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——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).

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

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.

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To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools. 3G mobile phone network, 88 Abedi, Salman, 212, 213 abortion, 99, 102 AfD (Alternative for Germany), 5 Africa, 8, 110–11, 192, 193 capital flight, 208 HIV sufferers in, 120–21 need for modern firms, 37 and World Bank/IMF, 118† youth’s hope of escape to Europe, 121 African Americans, 13 Akerlof, George, 18, 34, 35, 50–51 Amazon, 87, 91, 146, 147 anger management programmes, 160 Apple, 148 asymmetric information, 88, 90, 185 auction theory, 146–7, 148 Bank of England, 39 Bear Stearns, 71, 75, 86 belief systems and belonging, 34, 40–41, 42, 53–6, 165, 211–15 CEO compensation committees, 77–8 Clark’s ‘family culture’, 107–8 the ethical family, 97–8, 99–105, 108, 109, 210 formation through narratives, 34, 40–41, 42, 53–6, 165, 211–15 GM-Toyota comparisons, 72–4 and ISIS, 42 Johnson & Johnson’s Credo, 39–40, 40*, 41, 72, 74*, 79 and leadership, 41–2, 43, 95 of personal fulfilment, 28, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 108–9, 213 polarization within polities, 38, 63, 202–5 and schools, 165 Theory of Signalling, 41, 43, 53, 63, 95 and trust, 27, 29*, 48, 53–4, 55–6, 59, 63, 73–4, 79, 94–5, 210 see also belonging, narrative of; reciprocity value-based echo-chambers, 38, 61–2, 64–5, 212, 215 see also nationalism belonging, narrative of absent from Utilitarian discourse, 16, 59, 66–7, 210–11 avoided by politicians, 66–7, 68, 211, 215 as a basic drive, 27, 31, 42–3, 65, 66 and belief systems, 34, 40–41, 42, 53–6, 211–15 in Bhutan, 37† civil society networks/groups, 180–81 and ‘common knowledge’, 32–3, 34, 54, 55, 66, 212 families as natural units for, 32, 97–8, 104 heyday of the ethical state, 49, 68, 114 and home ownership, 68, 181–2, 184 and ISIS, 42, 212, 213 and language, 32, 33, 54, 57 and mutual regard/reciprocity, 25, 40–41, 49, 53–6, 67, 68, 98, 181, 182, 210–11, 212–13 place-based identity, 51–6, 65–8, 211–14, 215 and purposive action, 68, 98, 114, 211, 212, 213 and salient identity, 51–6 Bennett, Alan, The History Boys, 7* Bentham, Jeremy, 9–10, 12, 13 Berlusconi, Silvio, 14 Besley, Tim, 18–19, 35 Betts, Alex, 27 BHS, 80, 172 Bhutan, 37†, 63 Biafra, 58 Bitcoin, 37–8, 193 Blackpool, 4 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison, 108 The Bottom Billion (Collier), 27 Brazil, 58 Brexit vote (June 2016), 5, 125, 131, 196, 215 British Academy, 7 British Motor Corporation, 74 Brooks, David, The Road to Character, 108 Buiter, Willem, 186 Bush, George W., 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.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

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.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

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.

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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.

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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 and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

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.

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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
Published 14 Jan 2021

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.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2020

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.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

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?

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

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.

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Rockefeller (Nevins), 156 Josephson, Matthew, 139 JPMorgan Chase, 182 market dominance, 127 Juvenal, 87 K Kalecki, Michał, 6 Katz, Lawrence, 74 Keillor, Garrison, 17, 206 Keynes, John Maynard, 16–17, 154 Khan, Lina, 39, 103–104, 225 Kidney dialysis, duopolies, 124 Kill zone, 109 King Kong, monopolies (comparison), 35 King, Mervyn, 18 Knepper, Lisa, 83 Knoer, Scott, 170 Kodak, digital photography, 55 Kosnett, Michael, 169 Koss Corp., 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.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

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.

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023

But Esther saw the image of her, in her sleeping bag, on the floor of a conference room, as a badge of honor. When she had launched her first start-up in her early twenties, fresh out of a cult and barely getting by on welfare, she had worked round the clock, forgoing meals and sleep for days on end. This wasn’t late-stage capitalism at its worst, or Elon enslaving employees for his own bank account—this was Esther, leading by example, trying to elevate her new team to achieve something for the greater good. Angry, laid-off Tweeps could call it hustle culture, but Esther was just out there shooting her shot; she’d survived the first round of layoffs because she’d made herself indispensable, and now she was one of the few Tweeps left working face-to-face with Elon, building Twitter 2.0.

Meantime: The Brilliant 'Unputdownable Crime Novel' From Frankie Boyle
by Frankie Boyle
Published 20 Jul 2022

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.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary
Published 3 Jun 2013

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 and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

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
Published 1 Jan 1993

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
Published 23 Aug 2021

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
Published 15 Jul 2019

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
Published 19 Dec 2002

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
Published 5 Mar 2020

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
Published 2 Aug 2005

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.

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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
Published 6 Nov 2018

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.

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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.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

more than forty square miles: “Walmart Inc. 2020 Annual Report,” Walmart Inc., 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.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
Published 14 Apr 2020

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.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

Zeke Faux writes about this world with such clarity, humor, and perspective that the portrait captures something even larger: a moment in time that we can’t afford not to understand.” —Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Ambition “Business journalists are not usually lauded for their bravery, but it takes guts to gaze into the abyss of late-stage capitalism—never mind parachute directly into it—and Zeke Faux’s descent into the blatantly nonsensical, blistering immoral world of cryptocurrency is a kind of hero’s journey. It’s a riveting, character-driven narrative in which Faux, a longtime writer for Businessweek and a crypto skeptic, guides readers through a vividly rendered hellscape populated by corporate lawyers, drug lords, terrorists and former child actors—among others—while nimbly telling the story of how a ‘hobby for nerds,’ became, in the words of its more infamous villains, ‘the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.’ ” —Jessica Pressler, special correspondent, Vanity Fair; producer, Hustlers and Inventing Anna “This book is riveting, scary, funny, unbelievable, depressing, insane, and many other adjectives, but I’ll stop here and just say: If you want a front-row seat to one of the greatest business stories of all time, you should read Number Go Up now.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

"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.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

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.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
by Catie Marron
Published 11 Apr 2016

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?”

In the Flow
by Boris Groys
Published 16 Feb 2016

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 and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

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
Published 17 Jun 2019

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
Published 22 May 2012

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
Published 27 Dec 2008

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
Published 1 Jan 2002

(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.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

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.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

“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.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

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.”

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

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.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

Late September, my master’s program began, but the dry lectures already seemed dull compared to everything I was discovering outside academia. One weekend, I took the train to Brighton for a multi-day festival about left politics, where I listened to panels featuring speakers whose books I had devoured.6 They shared stories of struggles that were going on now — efforts to resist the worst excesses of late capitalism — and for the first time in a while I felt hopeful. It was strange to suddenly meet so many people outside the tech bubble. I was embarrassed to explain my startup melodrama to people who were working multiple jobs yet still drowning in student debt that they suspected would follow them to the grave — my acquisition woes sounded even more frivolous in comparison.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the true writer has nothing to say”: “Alain Robbe-Grillet,” AuthorsCalendar.info, authorscalendar.info/​grillet.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT arguments made by the influential Marxist critic: Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” web.education.wisc.edu/​halverson/​wp-content/​uploads/​sites/​33/​2012/​12/​jameson.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “So what we could do”: Tommy Orange, There There (New York: Knopf, 2018), 57. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the poorest, most marginal”: Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 17.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

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
Published 1 Mar 2016

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
Published 18 Jun 2018

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
Published 10 Sep 2012

“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
Published 4 Jul 2022

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.

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity
by Robert Albritton
Published 31 Mar 2009

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.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
by Rob Kitchin
Published 25 Aug 2014

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.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

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

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.

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City
by Tony Roshan Samara
Published 12 Jun 2011

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.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
Published 25 Jun 2018

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.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

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.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

‘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.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

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.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

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.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

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.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

‘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.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

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
Published 29 Jul 2015

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
Published 1 Nov 1983

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
Published 10 Mar 2020

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.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

Ralph, ‘World Bank Group Helps Plug Infrastructure Investment Gap’, Financial Times, 14 March 2018. 79 B. Harris, ‘Brazil’s Economic Outlook Buoyed by Big-Ticket Investments’, Financial Times, 4 January 2022. 80 T. Carroll and D. Jarvis, ‘Introduction: Financialisation and Development in Asia Under Late Capitalism’, in T. Carroll and D. Jarvis, eds, Financialisation and Development in Asia (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 6. 81 S. Kennedy, ‘Indonesia’s Energy Transition and Its Contradictions: Emerging Geographies of Energy and Finance’, Energy Research & Social Science 41 (2018), p. 232. 82 ‘Brookfield Asset Management to Acquire Hydroelectric Facility in Brazil’, ENP Newswire, 21 December 2007. 83 ‘Brookfield to Acquire TerraForm Global’, 7 March 2017 – at globe newswire.com. 84 ‘Two PV Plants Bring Clean Energy to Senegal’, Renewable Energy Magazine, 2 June 2021. 85 ‘Brookfield Case Study’, 22 June 2020, Brazil–Canada New Energy Investment Forum 2020, p. 4 – at clientesinterativa.com.br. 86 ‘Ontario Teachers’ to Invest $175m in KKR’s Road Platform in India’, 20 April 2022 – at realassets.ipe.com. 87 ‘Brookfield Case Study’. 88 Westchester, ‘2020 Farmland Report’, p. 4 – at faculty-senate.uiowa.edu. 3.

What’s Your Type?
by Merve Emre
Published 16 Aug 2018

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
Published 30 Oct 2008

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.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
by Sharon Zukin
Published 1 Dec 2009

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.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

,” 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.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

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.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

“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.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

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
Published 11 May 2020

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
Published 15 Mar 2006

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 Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
by Gary Greenberg
Published 1 May 2013

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.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined
by Lasse Heje Pedersen
Published 12 Apr 2015

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).

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

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.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

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 Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

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.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

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.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

This, of course, is a major challenge, given that critical Middle Eastern studies have been systematically repressed in the United States since 2001. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Robby Herbst, ‘Hinting at Ways to Work in Current Contexts; an Interview with Brian Holmes’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 1: 4, 2007. 23 Herbst, ‘Hinting at Ways to Work in Current Contexts’. 24 Gregory, ‘Geographies, Publics and Politics’. 25 Elin O’Hara Slavick, Protesting Cartography or Places the United States has Bombed, art exhibition, see www.unc.edu/~eoslavic. 26 Ibid. 27 This term invokes Fredric Jameson’s classic argument that ‘postmodern’ urban life requires new ‘cognitive maps’ to make sense of the landscapes of globalization. See Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 1: 146, 1984, 53–92. 28 See An Atlas of Radical Cartography, available at www.an-atlas.com. 29 Brian Holmes, ‘Maps for the Outside: Bureau d’Études, or the Revenge of the Concept’, message board post, InterActivist Info Exchange, available at info.interactivist.net/node/2398. 30 Ibid. 31 See clockshop.org. 32 See Mike Davis, ‘Reading (PA.) by Bomb Light’, Tom Dispatch. 33 Louise Amoore, ‘Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror’, Security Dialogue 38: 2, 2007. 34 See www.opensorcery.net/OUT. 35 See youarenothere.org. 36 Ibid. 37 Paula Levine, ‘Shadows from Another Place: Transposed Space’, review paper, San Francisco: San Francisco State University. 38 Herbst, ‘Hinting at Ways to Work in Current Contexts’. 39 Peter Baker, in Under Fire.2, 57–8.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

The solutions to these challenges are familiar but no more easier to implement: regulate data brokers and pass legislation guarding against data-based discrimination; audit Internet giants’ data collecting practices and hand down heavy fines, meaningful ones, for unlawful data collection; give users more information about where their data goes and how it’s used to inform advertising; don’t give municipal tax breaks (Twitter) or special privileges at local airfields (Google) to major corporations that can afford to pay their share of taxes and fees to the cities that have provided the infrastructure that ensures their success. Encrypt everything. Consumers need to educate themselves about these industries and think about how their data might be used to their disadvantage. But the onus shouldn’t lie there. We should be savvy enough, in this stage of late capitalism, to be skeptical of any corporate power that claims to be our friend or acting in our best interests. At the same time, the rhetoric and utility of today’s personal technology is seductive. One doesn’t want to think that a smartphone is also a surveillance device, monitoring our every movement and communication.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 1 Jan 2004

According to this new counterinsurgency strategy, sovereign power—faced, on one hand, with the impossibility of establishing a stable relationship with the existing population and, on the other, given the means of such full-spectrum dominance—simply produces the obedient social subjects it needs. Such a notion of the production of the subject by power, the complete alienation of the citizen and the worker, and the total colonization of the lifeworld has been hypothesized since the 1960s by many authors as the defining characteristic of “late capitalism.” The Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and various critics of technology and communication have focused on the fact that power in capitalist societies is becoming totalitarian through the production of docile subjects.72 To a certain extent the nightmares of such authors correspond to the dreams of the strategists of full-spectrum dominance.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

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.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

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.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

Contestants are shown a purchasable item – impasse that say a juicer, a kettle or a pair of sunglasses – and are asked to guess the retail price. The contestant whose guess is closest, but without going over the correct retail price, wins. And that, essentially, is that. It is common to see the show as a metaphor of sorts for late capitalism. More than anything else, it comes across as a veritable orgy of consumerism, and has been interpreted as such by any number of cultural theorists. The contestants guess the price of certain consumer products. And the prizes taken home by winning contestants are also consumer products, mostly donated by consumer products companies in return for the ‘free’ advertising that placement on the show represents.

The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 1 Mar 2001

Occasionally he would stop reading and try to write; but he never got far. Once he wrote several pages on the economy of the war. The organization of agriculture and business, especially in Germany under Rathenau and England under Lloyd George, reminded him very strongly of the postmodern economy now running things. One could trace the roots of late capitalism to Great War innovations found in Rathenau’s Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (the “War Raw Stuff Department”), or in his Zentral Einkaufs-Gesellschaft. All business had been organized to fight the enemy; but when the war was over and the enemy vanquished, the organization remained. People continued to sacrifice the fruits of their work, but now they did it for the corporations that had taken the wartime governments’ positions in the system.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

Towards the end of the nineteenth century hunters armed with punt guns, which could fire nearly a pound of birdshot at once, managed to do in the passenger pigeon, a North American bird that once numbered in the billions. Around the same time, hunters shooting from trains managed to nearly wipe out the American bison, a species once so plentiful its herds were described as ‘thicker than . . . stars in the firmament’. Our most dangerous weapon would prove to be modernity and its trusty sidekick, late capitalism. In the twentieth century human impacts began to increase not just linearly but exponentially. The decades following the Second World War were a time of unprecedented growth in population on the one hand and consumption on the other. Between 1945 and 2000 the number of people in the world tripled.

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
by Rachel Hewitt
Published 6 Jul 2011

Ireland, William Henry, Henry the Second, London: Barker, 1799. Irwin, Robert, The Art of Paul Sandby, New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1985. Jameson, Frederic, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, pp. 347–60 in Nelson and Grossberg (eds), 1988. Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London and New York: Verso, 1991. Jarvis, Robin, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Johnson, Samuel (ed.), The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, 21 vols, London: Johnson, 1810.

Antarctica
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 6 Jul 1987

But here they were living in a stripped-down microcosm, "Little America" as one precursor base had been named; and X saw that it was the global class system in miniature, everything clearly laid out, and shockingly similar to accounts he had read of Tsarist Russia, not to mention pharaonic Egypt: a ruling caste and an underclass, aristocrats and serfs, with a few middlemen thrown in. The red parkas and tan Carhartts only color-coded it, as if ASL and NSF knew all about it and knew also that they could shove it in people's faces and no one would protest, not in this the globally downsized postrevolutionary massively fortified stage of very late capitalism. The in-your-face effrontery of it made X even angrier, and as he continued to pluck up nuts and washers from the concrete and drop them in their proper bins, he fantasized images of slave revolts, Spartacus, general strikes-in short, revolution. Guillotines on Beeker Street! Except with a little more thought-and sitting on that cold concrete, he had a lot of time for thought-the image of the guillotine made it clear how impossible these fantasies were.

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi
Published 15 Mar 2010

Itoh, Makoto, 771e W/orla’ Economic Crisis andfapanese Capitalism, New York: St Martin’s Press 1990. Jackson, Robert, Quasi—States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the 77Jird W/orld, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990. 396 THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY Jameson, Fredric, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Lefi‘ Review, 146, 1984, pp. 53-92. Jenkins, Brian, New Modes of Conflict, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1983. Jenks, Leland H., 77Je Migration of Britis/7 Capital to 1875, New York and London: Knopf 1938. Jeremy, David J., “Damming the Flood: British Government Efforts to Check the Outflow of Technicians and Machinery, 1780-1843,” Business History Review, 51, 1, 1977, pp. 1-34.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract. The forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves become thinner and thinner.”4 Marx was also certain that his dystopian vision of late capitalism would not be the end state of human history. For this bleak capitalist system was to be overthrown by one that nationalized and socialized the means of production. The rule of the business class, after creating a truly prosperous society, would “produce… above all… its own gravediggers.” What would society be like after the revolution?

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

To theorize this hybrid, Hardt and Negri reach back to Polybius’s Histories, particularly his characterization of imperial Rome in terms of the relationship among three “good powers”: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Polybius argued that each of these powers was a check on the other, thereby preventing monarchy’s fall into tyranny, aristocracy’s into oligarchy, and democracy’s into ochlocracy or anarchy (Hardt and Negri 2001: 314). Empire in late capitalism is analogous to this structure. In Polybius’s schema, the monarchy anchors power, giving it both unity and continuity. In the Empire as conceived by Hardt and Negri, the monarchy consists of bodies (such as the G8, NATO, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization [WTO]) that are designed to ensure the maintenance of “efficient” markets for goods, technologies, and labor power.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw
Published 29 Aug 2018

These included the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser (an increasingly strange and mentally disturbed figure and opponent of attempts to relate Marxism to humanism) and Michel Foucault, whose work emphasized the repressive power and controlling discipline of social institutions and agencies. Among the most prominent influences on student radicals was Herbert Marcuse, the German-born American critic of ‘late capitalism’, who saw contemporary society as dehumanizing, advocating revolution and the total rejection of the false gods of a Western consumerist culture. Marxist ideas in different guises served to fire the imagination of the generational rebellion of a relatively well-educated and articulate social group, driven by an urge to create a better world, to produce a fairer, more egalitarian society.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

One from his first year in New Orleans, titled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” lamented the disorienting effects wrought by the torrent of commercial images on the internet and TV, a trend that in 1996 was in its mere adolescence. Much later the topic was fodder for myriad books and studies about how the web was shortening people’s attention span. “The increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities,” he wrote. “The viewing subject, ‘glued’ to the screen, mistakes himself or herself for an ideologically laden ‘image-repertoire’ ” in which “the images must have some content to create the possibility for a mirror stage identification.”