Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Economism These Days: On Kids These Days


I started reading Malcolm Harris' Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of  Millennials in probably the ideal location and context. I was visiting my mother at a retirement community in Florida for Christmas. I was reading it by the pool when I actually overheard someone go on about "kids today" and their phones and video games. The general worry about the current generation was all around me. 

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Small Concept: On Downsizing



Matt Damon has the odd distinction of staring in two science fiction dystopias, one bleak action movie the other farce, that are absolutely confused on the role of work and capitalism. The first was Elysium and the most recent is Downsizing. The confusion is not just a product of the director or screenwriter's particular confusion, but is in some sense symptomatic of a more general ideological elision in which capitalism is lived but never named, or, more to the point, never named because it is lived--just like the proverbial fish in water.