There was an interesting twitter exchange between Nicolas Villarreal, Vole, and myself yesterday on the question of the New Class. Villarreal opened with a comment that I think is the hinge-point of the entire debate: Seems that the debate over whether the "new class" is actually a class hinges on whether human capital/intellectual labor is […]
Read More New Class questionsThe plot of the third season of HBO’s Westworld takes an unexpected leap: in moving from the titular park to the external world, what is found is not the anarchic capitalism of the cyberpunk genre that so influenced it, but an earth held under the sway of an invisible regime of near-total planning and administration. Not […]
Read More The Haze of PosthistoryI recently had a conversation that led me to revisit Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs, and in particular, its final chapter, where Fisher undertakes a reading of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness to illustrate the ‘strange loops’ that characterize contemporary ‘cybernetic capitalism’—and, by extension, illuminate the ways in which capitalism is inducing a “schizophrenization of culture”. It’s […]
Read More Paranoid Style, Take 2
Reciprocal Contradiction 