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In Defense of Anonymity
Photo by Tony Pierce. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s odd declaration that “there are no second acts in American lives” is, as has been said, among the most inaccurate statements ever made about the country....
View ArticleThe Future of Music
Recently The Atlantic published a piece about how “a generation of file-sharers is ruining the future of entertainment“. The piece is pretty silly, since it conflates “the future of entertainment” with...
View ArticleThe Internet is not a Place (any more)
Easily the most tiresome conversation that has resulted from the Arab revolutions of 2011 is the argument about whether these uprisings are “Twitter revolutions” or “Facebook revoutions” or whatever....
View ArticleDe-commodification in Everyday Life
In his influential treatise on the modern welfare state, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Gøsta Esping-Andersen proposed that one of the major axes along which different national welfare regimes...
View ArticleIn Defense of Soviet Waiters
There’s been a bit of a discussion about affective labor going around. Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books describes the elaborate code with which the Pret a Manger chain enforces an ersatz...
View ArticleGentrification and Racial Arbitrage
This post spins out something that occurred to me in the course of writing about consumerist politics and its limitations. One of the sections concerns gentrification, and the political dead end of...
View ArticlePut the Money in the Bag and 86 the Tricks
Mixed in with the usual litany of concessions to billionaires and businesses, the Trump administration delights in a petty and banal sadism that at times seems to serve no significant purpose, if we...
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On the Politics of Basic Income
In the course of preparing some brief comments on the Universal Basic Income for another site, I decided to write up my attempt to clarify some of the politics behind the current debates about UBI as a...
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Keep Socialism Weird
"our power isn't in being less different or strange…it's in making strange things seem possible". The above statement, though today often attributed to antifa mascot Gritty, was actually made by Kate...
View ArticleBreaking the Norm
I was pleasantly surprised with the response to my last post (thanks Red Wedge and Commune and the Art and Labor podcast). But there was one specific misinterpretation that I want to try to clarify. It...
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