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Reality T.V. and the Flexible Future
art by Rebecca Rojer After every long day at the office I go home to face my addiction: watching other people work. Whether I’m gritting my teeth as elderly miners crawl through a tunnel to chip out...
View ArticleArt Without Humans
DJ Screw has been dead for over a decade, but the art form he pioneered—slowed-down hip-hop mixes, with jarring repetitions created by cutting between two copies of the same record, slightly out of...
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The Rise of the Machines
Automation isn’t freeing us from work — it’s keeping us under capitalist control. Illustration by Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch One summer during my undergraduate years, I was having trouble scrounging up a...
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Sympathy for Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman’s late to the party again, but I guess it’s good of him to show up. Today, he takes up the banner of the Luddites, the workers who revolted against the mechanization process that was...
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Just Flip the Switch
The trailers for Elysium promised a class-struggle masterpiece, but for all its triumphs the film’s politics don’t quite measure up. Trailers for Elysium were like catnip for the left-leaning viewer: a...
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Silent Majority Music
To put it most unkindly, trap music is adult contemporary for the prosumer age. Illustration by Ben Sanders Back in April, one of my favorite minor internet celebrities, Hennessy Youngman, announced...
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Revenge of the Nerds
No act of consumption is completely passive, but even the most active types of consumption form a shaky ground for serious left politics. A debate has broken out over geek culture at Jacobin. Ian...
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Chicken Littles of the Right
If the Right wants to cry about class warfare, we should give them something to cry about. The crybabies at the American Spectator have put out their new cover, a heaping load of hysteria that equates...
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Liberalism and Gentrification
Gentrification isn’t a cultural phenomenon — it’s a class offensive by powerful capitalists. 1866 Mitchell Map of Washington, DC When I want to examine the limits of liberal ideology, I look for class...
View ArticleAnother Jurassic World is Possible
Summer is the time of the year that the culture industries dust off their old properties and take them for a spin to see if they still handle like they used to. Typically they don’t: sequels rarely...
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