Fast Capitalism

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Editors — 2023-10-20

Editorial Board

Editors — 2023-10-20

About the Authors

Editors — 2023-10-20

TikTok Containment meets "The threat of a good example": Inversion gets more than 15 seconds of fame

Marcus Breen — 2023-10-20

When President Donald Trump proposed to ban the Chinese social media platform TikTok on national security grounds on August 6, 2020, it marked a pivotal moment in the interaction between many contending layers of political life. Cojoined in a register of nationalist rhetoric, US national policies cross-referenced geopolitics, and the history of international competition and cooperation in global trade flows with and against China. As such, the proposed ban gave credit to the ancient popular Chinese saying: “Things that oppose each other also complement each other” (Ban Gu nd: 84). More precisely, when seen through the lens of digital networking, Trump’s announcement marked an inversion of the un-assailed US domination of all things digital. In so doing, it marked a challenge to the overdetermination of technology by the United States against the emergence of a new, more complex set of forces operating through the digital or virtual sphere as well as every other level of human activity, given that so much of life has become defined by communication technologies. The Chinese model had arrived via the internet. This model, drawing on state planning for a managed economy that addresses the entirety of the Chinese population in a program of socialist development– provoked the ban on TikTok and, as such, operates as an example of the narrow US commitment to dominate the world with its communication technology. The resulting landscape is one in which communication is revealed as central to the continuing dialectic of human history through the collision between China as TikTok and the US as a national security state. Donald Trump’s announced bans on TikTok exposed this contradiction, illustrating how the inversion of the global power structure was constituted by the complementary energy of digital interaction.

Fediverse’s evolution from the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory

José Manuel Meza-Cano — 2023-10-20

This paper begins by mentioning some problems we found in social networks belonging to corporations such as Facebook and Twitter, emphasizing the inclusion of algorithmic timelines, the verticality of decisions that respond to market logic, and the privacy of users’ data. This research gives rise to presenting open-source social networks as a democratic and safer alternative for their users. These social networks shape the Fediverse, the result of the union of the words Federation- Universe, and whose history and evolution we describe. We expose the main postulates of the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) for using this theory to conduct the Fediverse analysis, characterizing it as an Activity System, and thus, investigating the foremost tensions, reasons for change, and results. Among the findings of this analysis are: the preference of users for specific interfaces, the shift in the choice of social networks by users, the suggestions and opinions of the user community, and their influence on the programming development of social networks, promotion, or abandonment of projects by developers and change in the protocols used to connect the networks. We conclude this work by emphasizing that the CHAT allows this type of systemic analysis to be carried out from the critical moments and historical milestones of a system in constant change, such as the Fediverse. Furthermore, the proposal is made that universities are those institutions with prestige and infrastructure that can promote research, criticism, and reflection on the use of social networks for the benefit of users of the social Internet. Keywords: activity system; psychology; social networks; technological mediation.

Beyond Verticality and Horizontality: Arcological Thinking and the Neoliberal Subject

François Debrix — 2023-10-20

Over the past two decades, several critiques of neoliberalism have relied on a binary understanding of space to depict neoliberalism’s operations and objectives as well as to offer modes of mobilization and contestation against neoliberal politics and economics. For quite a few scholars, the challenge of neoliberal capitalism and the need to resist it can be summed up as an opposition between verticality and horizontality. In particular, this challenge, we are told, is what the contemporary subject of neoliberal politics (or what commonly has been referred to as the “neoliberal subject”) is faced with. While neoliberalism’s vertical structures, institutions, aspirations, and metaphors (building higher, accumulating wealth, raising one’s socio-economic profile, reaching for the top, elevating one’s competitive capacities, increasing one’s portfolio, etc.) confront the neoliberal subject with what often looks like an insurmountable neoliberal capitalist monolith, horizontality is presented as a somewhat new and often welcome, even if dispersed, spread out, and sometimes unrooted, “on the ground” mode of political organization, mobilization, and emancipation from contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalist growth.

Cyberculture’s Abstract Utopia: Silicon Valley and Cleaner, Greener, Leaner Rules for a “New Economy”*

Timothy W. Luke — 2023-10-20

This preliminary analysis connects the dilemmas of eco-pessimism and eco-optimism and links them to a number of core and peripheral thinkers in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have sought an escape, or “an out,” from the deepening deterioration of both Nature and Society making many feel pessimistic about the environment. As New York City choked through eerie days cloaked by nearly impenetrable clouds of wood smoke in June 2023, the sky turned a Martian orange in the sunlight from dawn to dusk. At the same time, coastal homeowners along Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific beaches received notices that their property insurance costs would be greatly increased, or their policies canceled permanently, due to the increasing frequency and destruction of severe coastal erosion and weather events. Meanwhile, the American Southwest was being smothered in prolonged intense heat waves punctuated by massive hailstorms, intense rainfall, and tornados. Due to so many coincident catastrophes like these, the experience of eco-pessimism today is growing in its breadth and depth as climate change simply becomes more problematic, personal, and pervasive.

The Right-Wing’s Dirty War Against History and Education: Beyond the Politics of Disappearance

Henry A. Giroux — 2023-10-20

The past haunts the present moment because it increasingly offers terrifying narratives and images of what Walter Benjamin once called “a catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin.”¹ The catastrophe to which Benjamin refers is the ghost of fascism and its irrepressible ability to reappear in different forms at certain moments in history. At the present time, memory and catastrophe have merged as past images that flash before us, signaling danger and suggesting that the current era is a “state of emergency” that is no longer “the exception but the rule.”²

The claustropolitan society: A critical perspective on the impact of digital technologies and the lockdown imaginary

Tara Brabazon — 2023-10-20

The imperative of this article is to develop the trope of the ‘lockdown imaginary.’ To enact this project, a diverse array of theories and theorist are summoned, including the tropes and trajectories from Jean Baudrillard, Benedict Anderson, and Steve Redhead. This – seemingly – odd intellectual combination is both timely and appropriate. It is necessary – as with the Matryoshka Dolls – to commence with a theorization of hyperreality, then we crack open the concept to reveal theories of the imagined and imagining, concluding with the smallest and most brutalizing theoretical Dolls: claustropolitanism and foreclosure. From here, a (post) pandemic lockdown is configured, an imagining that transcends the restrictive public health imperatives of COVID-19 and global lockdowns. This article captures the perpetuity of the pandemic. It will never be post. Instead, we argue that the lockdown imaginary will continue to foreclose thought, behavior, political choices, and life decisions. Through the claustropolitan sociological approach, we chart not only the lockdown imaginary but a way through ‘the end of the world’ by naming its destructive tendencies. Keywords: Claustropolitanism, COVID-19 Studies, (Post)pandemic, lockdown imaginary, Digitalization

Of the Enemy: Scalping as Culture and Commodity on the North American Frontier

James Sandy — 2023-10-20

In a February 1711 letter home, John Barnwell recounted his campaign’s recent victories in the raging Tuscarora War. Fighting in the western reaches of colonial North Carolina, Barnwell and a group of South Carolina militiamen marched from one Tuscarora village to the next in search of Native American warriors to kill and civilians to harass, enslave, or otherwise brutalize. John “Tuscarora” Barnwell was thorough in his recollection of their campaign, going to great lengths to describe their “valient” task. Barnwell, like many other frontiersmen and militia commanders of his generation, added a flair for the dramatic to his retelling of the colonists’ near mechanical destruction of each Tuscarora site they came across. In one such punchy section, he claimed that he and his men were “Terror to our own heathen friend to behold” and that their war “was Revenge, which we made good by the Execution we made of the Enemy.”(Barnwell 1897) The colonial destruction of the Tuscarora was devastating in both style and scale. Barnwell and his men dehumanized their adversaries, which is obvious in the way his letter quantitatively recounted the outcome of their battles. While specific and descriptive about his own losses, carefully counting and naming those lost and wounded from each company, Barnwell lists the number of people enslaved and the quantity of enemy scalps each company produced, with an aptly titled section: “Of the Enemy.”

C. Wright Mills: A New Left for a New Day

Charles Lemert — 2023-10-20

Thomas Paine, during a crucial moment in the American war against its colonizers, said famously: “These are times that try men’s souls.” Many think, I among them, that these too are times that try men’s souls. At such a time, one must look back for clues as to what to think and do. One from not that long ago who lends us wisdom of a sort is C. Wright Mills, who in the 1950s, tried to make sense of America’s changing culture. However, a bad heart killed him in 1962, just after he wrote of the possibility of a New Left. He deserves another look.