Tag
Capitalism
-
Resistance or Complicity? The Engineered Paradox of Digital Activism
As genocide unfolds in Gaza, we turn to platforms that profit from our witness. Are we fueling the very systems we seek to resist?
-
The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
-
My Job Is to Fulfill Your Infantile Desire
“The outrageous expectations placed on Chinese e-commerce couriers may surprise western readers. … Such interactions document consumers’ obliviousness to labor along the supply chain.”
-
You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Supply Chains!
“Logistics,” warns Susan Zieger, “reveals how the illicit economy is the legitimate economy: the nature of free trade prevents the two from ever being separated.”
-
The Pain Is the Point: On the Violent Realities of Capitalist Sport
In 2022, critical sports scholar Chen Chen uncovered a staggering statistic: The three leading academic journals in sports management (Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, and European Sport Management Quarterly), with over 74 years of combined history between them, had published a grand total of 14 articles that mentioned the word “capitalism” more than…
-
Lineages of the Engineering State: On China, the United States, and the Future
“Perhaps, when we claim that China has exhausted the conceptual resources of the West, what we really mean is that China has exhausted the conceptual resources of American journalists and defense intellectuals in the Washington, DC area.”
-
Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?
“There is a movement undermining, constraining, and eradicating those who document, understand, and name the experiences of systematically marginalized communities in US history.”
-
Diaspora, Indebted: On “Industry”
“Gambling with big bets against challenging odds, regarded warily by moneylenders, questioned about your ability to balance your books, needing to take on more debt to pay back older debt. Whom exactly are we talking about here: Rishi or Britain?”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 100 Years of Murdering Migrant Workers
“The KKK’s terror campaign took a bloody toll. Between 1917 and 1920, 170 IWW union organizers were lynched or murdered in extra-judicial killings.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: A US Infrastructure Decades in the Making
“Immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today, because it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
-
B-Sides: Albert O. Hirschman’s “The Passions and the Interests”
“The Passions and the Interests” charms the reader as it persuades. Much of that charm is about its content as well as its style.
-
“Suddenly, the New Story Was There”
“I had seen a lot of bitumen in the devastated landscapes of the bitumen mines. But seeing it here, in such a mundane and tranquil setting, surprised me. That was when I first understood that this material is natural.”
-
Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
-
“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of…
-
Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
-
It’s Not Optimal
Four books about a new age of AI tell stories of sluggish processes, ambiguous outcomes, emotionally charged issues, and generous margins for error.
-
-
America’s Pernicious Rural Myth: An Interview with Steven Conn
“Narratives about rural crisis seem to trap American discourse in a cycle of crisis and myth.”
-
-
Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture
Art continues to get made—that’s what human beings do—but capital devours it.
-
Bad Beef
Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.
