Tag Archives: Economics

theory

300 Memos To Myself

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  1. People like it when you take the time to learn their first name and use it when speaking to them.
  2. If the artist was popular at the time of an album’s release, the first pressing is probably the most common one.
  3. Only deal with what you know, but also try to know more every day.
  4. The easiest way to save money is to listen to what other people aren’t listening to. Per Robert Frost: “The good things are hidden so the wrong ones can’t find them.”
  5. If you’re selling online and the buyer has an issue with an item, never give partial refunds, always ask for returns.
  6. If all other sellers you meet think an entire genre is categorically not valuable, that is the genre you should research.
  7. The most costly part of haggling is emotional stress.
  8. The more expensive the restaurant is, the less food they serve you. This is because most of their clientele does not do physical labor during the day.
  9. Something being rare doesn’t inherently mean something is valuable.
  10. Something being valuable doesn’t inherently mean something is rare.
  11. Don’t ask “is this valuable?”, ask “(why) would someone want this?”
  12. Usually the people who argue the most vehemently over a few dollars are the ones who can most afford to spend those few dollars.
  13. A speculator’s market is ultimately only propped up by people who actually want to own the item. Pure speculation always ends in a market collapse.
  14. All sealed items are prints.
  15. The market logic of most media collectibles overlaps with that of prints.
  16. In my line of work, every original is also a copy.
  17. Prices people ask online are just things that haven’t sold yet. Sales records are the only things that matter in appraisal.
  18. Reselling is one of the few jobs where you are genuinely paid to learn new things every day.
  19. If you’re having a problem with a piece of electronics, somebody else has probably had the same problem and complained about it on the internet.
  20. Collecting things yourself is the only way to actually understand the intricacies of resale.
  21. There are always more objects.
  22. Looking for one thing and only one thing, particularly if it’s rare, is a recipe for disappointment. The joy of this discipline is the endless novelty.
  23. Most highly collectible objects were considered garbage at some point.
  24. Brick and mortar is about the sense of community. The internet cannot replicate that.
  25. The best way to always get your money’s worth with a book is to read it and enjoy it.
  26. Every signed object is a rabbit’s foot.
  27. This is the study of peoples’ relationships to objects as much or more than it is the study of the objects themselves.
  28. Your family will have to deal with anything you’ve hoarded when you die. 
  29. Beware of cultural necrophilia. Believing that people aren’t making good art anymore just betrays that you aren’t looking very hard. More importantly, it makes you sound old.
  30. All broken electronics have many useful components that can be reused in other repairs.
  31. The desire for recordings of human culture is a pursuit laced with superstitions. It is very easy to be possessed by the dead.
  32. The contents of a book or record are usually easily available. The container they came in gives their cultural context.
  33. Being picky is not inherently the same as being discerning.
  34. If you think a thing looks cool, somebody else probably also thinks it looks cool.
  35. Much of the desire for cultural objects comes from a sense of rootlessness; a desire for a tangible sense of history in ones surroundings.
  36. Any book you aren’t reading, any record you aren’t listening to, any game you aren’t playing, is decor.
  37. The best book ever written on retail is In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Every object is someone’s madeliene cookie. Touch and smell trigger memory.
  38. A desire for the past should not be a solution for a perceived poverty of the present. 
  39. The search for a pristine copy of an object disregards why one should seek a physical object in the first place; don’t become the sort of vampire who can only suck the blood of virgins.
  40. Taking care of objects is important, but so is taking care of ones’ body -regardless, someday we’re all going to die.
  41. Nostalgia is only one reason to engage the past. 
  42. The culture of endless disposability and the culture of hoarding are two sides of the same coin.
  43. All right answers are situational. The desire for absolutes is the desire to stop thinking.
  44. In a capitalist system, people value objects by what other people have paid for them. I sold things on consignment once for a real estate broker; when I explained the most valuable book in his dead father’s house was an academic text on 16th century Italian peasants, he took it with him to read on a plane. He got nothing from it.
  45. Any great work of art is a moving target.
  46. Most of the world’s greatest works have been reproduced to the point of having little monetary value. This is a good thing.
  47. The best way to appreciate what is good in a field one doesn’t understand is to consume something in that field that is bad.
  48. If God created the universe, all media objects are graven images.
  49. Every retail store is also a museum. A grocery store is a museum of the present.
  50. There is no better negotiating tool than genuine enthusiasm. 
  51. Most people coming in to sell things fall into three broad categories: somebody died, somebody got married, somebody really loves going to yard sales.
  52. A compulsive behavior is only a bad thing if approached thoughtlessly.
  53. The object only changes when you do.
  54. I am a benign conspiracist-I believe it is all connected.
  55. CRT televisions are hazardous waste unless used. Give them a home.
  56. Love is a relationship to a thing in motion; anything else is taxidermy.
  57. The artist’s intent is only as important as the intent of the audience.
  58. Be gentle with those looking to learn, be ruthless with those looking to speculate.
  59. Something old isn’t something valuable if the people who wanted it are all dead.
  60. Peel slowly and see.
  61. Save some for later.
  62. You will only find what you are looking for. Anything else will find you.
  63. Everything happens for a reason, but not every reason is a good reason.
  64. The way a person tells a story tells you how they assess their surroundings.
  65. Most broken video game consoles can be fixed by cleaning the cartridge slot with isopropyl alcohol and a toothbrush.
  66. All the dead people who wrote books and recorded music were once living people with problems.
  67. Once you get the message, hang up.
  68. Are you more afraid of death or madness?
  69. The voices in your head telling you to do things aren’t you.
  70. The most difficult part of repairing something most of the time is putting it back together afterwards.
  71. Many things very popular in their time are nearly forgotten now. The canons we receive are what the generation after thought was important.
  72. Talk back to the television.
  73. Anything truly original will arrive without an audience to comprehend it.
  74. Meaning is only one use of language.
  75. There are more rare things than common things. There are just more copies of the common things.
  76. The most important archaeology is that of the present.
  77. Realism is just another aesthetic.
  78. The most dangerous propaganda tries to present itself as having no politics.
  79. Distinctions between high and low culture are primarily distinctions between the economic classes of their consumers.
  80. Most audio cassettes can be repaired by gluing the felt pad back in carefully.
  81. Art is not a discrete category.
  82. You are the only person living your life. Use that.
  83. Streaming is a nightmare for archivists.
  84. Are you building a collection or a youtube set?
  85. Use what’s there.
  86. Do the thing and stop whining.
  87. All small time crooks think they’re master criminals. Getting away with something gives them what they actually want: validation. That’s why they’ll tell you all about it.
  88. The amount of water you get from the river is dependent on the size of the bowl you bring.
  89. “The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.”-Russian proverb
  90. Second hand retail is very dependent on weather.
  91. Know what day of the week it is.
  92. A person’s collection is a record of their life and interests.
  93. Self-help books are rarely helpful.
  94. It’s a thin line that separates the dump and the antique store.
  95. A hipster is someone who isn’t actually enjoying this stuff.
  96. College is mostly useful as a way of delaying employment.
  97. The most valuable thing you can steal is time.
  98. When I worked in a bookstore, the owner was about to go on a vacation. I asked him if he was excited about it. He looked at his shoulder and said “If I had actually achieved zen in my own life, I wouldn’t need vacations.”
  99. Reselling is as much about supply and demand as anything else. Don’t overemphasize the importance of the supply.
  100. If the buyer doesn’t know why they want to buy the item, you need to know why they want to buy the item.
  101. Don’t just research prices.
  102. Fidelity isn’t the only measure of a playback device.
  103. The most useful tools in repairing electronics are a 72 in 1 hobbyist screwdriver set, isopropyl alcohol, and a used toothbrush.
  104. Most keyboards can be cleaned by prying off the keys with a flat head screwdriver and soaking them in soapy water.
  105. Read the manual.
  106. An NES will take nearly any barrel plug power supply 9 volts or over.
  107. “If your guidance counselor was so great at picking jobs, why did they become a guidance counselor?”-Matt Groening, School Is Hell
  108. In a comic book one can’t just show or tell, one must show and tell. What’s being told however doesn’t have to be the same as what is being shown.
  109. Art is about evoking feelings in a controlled setting so those feelings can be taken apart and put back together again.
  110. Haggling is something people only do to small businesses. Be careful not to punch down.
  111. Don’t ask me “What’s the best you can do on this?” I come in every day and do my best. That’s why I look so tired.
  112. One must eventually put their trust in strangers; this is what’s referred to as community.
  113. Know when to stop negotiating.
  114. You pay for everything eventually; be careful what you pay for it with.
  115. Your confidantes are as often as not determined by your sleep patterns.
  116. Your time is worth something, if only because you are going to die someday.
  117. There are many more certainties in life than death and taxes.
  118. Life is inherently repetitive, your readings of these repetitions determine everything.
  119. “I’m practicing how to say it right the first time”-Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives
  120. Meet your heroes in order to realize they are also just people who show up every day.
  121. We are all beholden to idols and graven images; their quantity is the only natural check and balance.
  122. Rough edges are what distinguish an accomplishment from an exercise.
  123. Consider the quantity and pace of production as much as other elements in evaluating a piece.
  124. Industrial society has produced far too many objects. Don’t buy new ones.
  125. If your true love is money, kill yourself.
  126. Don’t be too stupid. Don’t be too smart.
  127. What a practical joke pokes fun at is the idea that we perceive reality directly.
  128. Old ways of thinking fade away when the old people thinking them die.
  129. The value of your excitement in a moment is in that moment.
  130. Don’t talk like you’re being interviewed by The History Channel unless you’re being interviewed by The History Channel.
  131. I’m not the reason your adult children don’t return your phone calls.
  132. Be careful when challenging the state monopoly on violence. A collapsed monopoly of violence is a free market of violence.
  133. Not all aspirations are legitimate.
  134. Have you ever met a black libertarian?
  135. Power and money naturally tend towards accumulation.
  136. The difference between the Kanye West who thought George Bush hated black people and the Kanye West who wants to go deth con 3 on the jews is roughly $500 million dollars.
  137. Racists want to be racist until it substantially disadvantages them. Their comfort and safety is our peril.
  138. No death cult has ever called itself a death cult.
  139. Don’t produce industrial objects without a clear idea where to put them.
  140. If you build it they will come. But who are they?
  141. Any system of psychological analysis that doesn’t confront the death urge is worthless or worse.
  142. Appeasement begins at home.
  143. Fantasies in US culture revolve around three primary themes- committing extralegal violence, owning people by conforming them to the dimensions of fantasy objects, and unambiguously becoming an adult.
  144. Money is translated into unlike objects, unlike objects are then translated back into money or waste.
  145. If you find crackly sounds physically painful why are you collecting records?
  146. Curate your complaints.
  147. Libertarianism is mostly a movement about defending the right to not pay people fair prices for labor.
  148. Being transgressive isn’t enough.
  149. Loving the things you loved as a child isn’t inherently a good thing.
  150. Victim status implies a certain social capital; choose your poor wisely.
  151. If the existence of god can’t be determined either way, both the theists and the atheists are making empty assertions.
  152. Don’t put much stock in individual incidents.
  153. Are you making a conclusion based on an experience because it’s a logical conclusion to make or because you were looking for an excuse to make that conclusion?
  154. Are you grasping your experiences tightly or loosely?
  155. Are you practicing religion or tribalism?
  156. The most valuable part of Marx’s ideas is his rejection of nature, not as a concept but as an inherent good.
  157. It is very often a good thing that people don’t achieve their goals.
  158. Don’t confuse a person talking to themselves with a person talking to you.
  159. The difficult part isn’t killing the king but installing a better successor.
  160. All experiences are ephemeral, time only goes forwards.
  161. Don’t privilege your childhood in your memories if you can help it.
  162. There are far worse qualities a person can embody than insignificance.
  163. Think in terms of actions.
  164. Act thoughtfully.
  165. Free will is a thing you earn, not a thing you’re given.
  166. The nicest car in the world without brakes or steering is just a more expensive way to crash into a tree.
  167. I once asked a therapist why so many intelligent and successful people were miserable. He responded “The crazy is like a goldfish; it grows to the size of the container it’s in.”
  168. A moment doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be specific.
  169. A story that doesn’t go anywhere, or a story that doesn’t need to go anywhere?
  170. Home is a set of repetitions.
  171. Nothing has to be this way.
  172. A sense of history is a sense of impermanence.
  173. Life is repetitive; appreciate small variations.
  174. Folklore lasts longer than whatever happened.
  175. Most folksy phrases about adulthood revolve around themes of disappointment.
  176. Try to seem more wise than old.
  177. Many of life’s most important decisions can only be resolved by gambling.
  178. How far back do you stand in order to see what is important?
  179. Have a holy book.
  180. Knowledge is like clothing; try knowing things until you find the ones that fit.
  181. Don’t fetishize minimalism, don’t fetishize efficiency.
  182. A beginning, middle and end may as well be chosen by way of magical chairs.
  183. Don’t strive to be original, strive to be better.
  184. Don’t commodify banality.
  185. The syntax and phrasing and spelling are the message.
  186. Be polytheistic in your influences.
  187. Don’t read this in order.
  188. “The purpose of art is to plow the soul, to harrow it, to make it possible it might turn to good.”-Andrei Tarkovsky
  189. Relating to a piece of art isn’t an inherent good.
  190. The value of philosophy is not the soundness of points but the shape of thoughts.
  191. Your front sign is a billboard telling people who need to get rid of things quickly what you’re looking for.
  192. Shorthand is a means of highlighting the most important bits.
  193. A friend with weed is a friend indeed.
  194. 420 is the most largely embraced act of collective civil disobedience.
  195. All Holocaust films are either Purim stories or Passover stories. In the story of Purim an outsider is lobbied to save the Jews from mass extermination. In the story of Passover God intervenes to not only save the Jews from enslavement. 
  196. Use index cards to take notes for books you find challenging.
  197. Every event and object has a historical context.
  198. Talk back to the television.
  199. Greatest hits compilations are usually worth less than original albums.
  200. A good idea had under the influence should still seem like a good idea when no longer under the influence.
  201. The more specific the subject of a book, the more likely it is to be worth something.
  202. Items with many varying versions-think any Beatles album etc.-take longer to research.
  203. Pitch a big tent.
  204. Know the history of the area.
  205. Pick and choose the holidays that mean something to you.
  206. Das Kapital has important lessons in how economics work useful to adherents of any school of economics.
  207. Have a broader frame of reference than nostalgia.
  208. The way to have a lot of successful friends is to help your friends be successful.
  209. Consider multiple readings, not just the one the author intended.
  210. Criticism is the act of creatively describing objects.
  211. This is all mandatory.
  212. In good circumstances, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, within limits.
  213. Read books about the history of books.
  214. If you put the creamer in before the coffee you don’t need to stir the coffee and it’s easier to eye the amount.
  215. According to William James, extreme versions of things give a magnified view of a tendency in the normal version of the thing.
  216. Stop selling once you’ve sold it.
  217. Take breaks.
  218. The most widely read material before the internet was usually placed next to toilets or inside doctors’ offices.
  219. Mistakes and distortions are the colorings that create the character of an illustration.
  220. Act like you’re supposed to be here.
  221. Does anyone care?
  222. Fortune favors the bold is something I saw on a Flaming Carrot comic book once.
  223. What makes something iconic? What objects best channel that iconography?
  224. Older markets are more predictable markets in terms of reselling. This is a major advantage of working with books.
  225. How long has a subject held public retail attention? When do major trends settle down?
  226. If an item is very expensive online, put in what you’re willing to pay in every current auction for a while. If it’s a mass produced object, you will probably win one of them. An initial high bid also scares off other bidders.
  227. Don’t just curate, diversify.
  228. If you stack two pairs of identical box speakers with the top one upside down, they’ll sound much better than they will as a normal pair.
  229. Buying large collections is the easiest way to grow inventory value, not just because of the bulk pricing but because a large record collection means the owner didn’t have time to use everything to the point it’s worn.
  230. Signatures don’t always add a substantial amount of value to an object.
  231. The strangeness of wear can add to the appeal of an item.
  232. The world is very big. It may even be bigger than our problems.
  233. Be wary of any ideology that is enslaved to axioms.
  234. Per Richard Feynman, you don’t truly understand a subject until you can explain it to a stranger in under 5 minutes.
  235. If you can see the road, don’t turn on your brights. You will blind the driver in the opposite lane.
  236. Find what you love but don’t let it kill you until you’re ready to go.
  237. When assessing a hobby or activity as a potential career, put equal weight on your enjoyment of it and your ability to do it for many consecutive hours.
  238. The heavy trade of “graded” comic books and video games in impenetrable plastic slabs is one of the ultimate affirmations that Marx was correct in his narrative of capitalism as the gradual transformation of a society concerned with the use-value of objects into a society entranced by the exchange values of objects to the exclusion of any other considerations. Money buys objects as a means to reproducing itself.
  239. A man is given a small book that contains the place and time he is going to die. He sends it out to get it graded and slabbed. It only gets an 8.5.
  240. Tell people what you’re looking for. They might know where it is.
  241. If you’re good at one thing and not another, get somebody who’s good at the other thing to do the other thing.
  242. Every new project also serves as advertising for all your old projects.
  243. Resale is akin to an ongoing game of poker. Be the house.
  244. God is an answering machine.
  245. Whatever it takes.
  246. When making plans, remember the initial goal.
  247. Get it done, put it out there.
  248. Invest in yourself but also monitor your investment.
  249. The artist reaches maturity when their influences start to look human to them.
  250. “I’ll talk to strangers if I want to because I’m a stranger too.”
  251. Your early work will probably suck. If it doesn’t, you may not have long to live.
  252. A market of pure speculation is a market that will collapse sooner than later.
  253. Trust your taste over the amount of money someone else paid for a thing.
  254. If someone is arguing with you in bad faith, be ruthless.
  255. Image Comics has offered every creator who has worked for them the same rights deal the founders got and they’re doing just fine.
  256. “If the audience knew what they wanted, they wouldn’t be the audience.”
  257. Try to recognize magic when you see it.
  258. Faking it is part of figuring out how to make it.
  259. Beautiful things are often sad.
  260. It’s easiest to say things when you mean them.
  261. Have a posse.
  262. Choose the things you put up in your home based on the things you want to think about while looking at them.
  263. Be yourself but don’t just be one of them.
  264.  Love is giving someone the power to hurt you because you are convinced they won’t
  265. Caring about things is frequently scary.
  266. Love is like a pair of glasses. It’s always right in front of your eyes.
  267. Love is a fine tuned and unique dynamic.
  268. Do you feel, deep down, like this is where you are supposed to be?
  269. If you want people to show up somewhere, make it somewhere where they’d want to show up.
  270. The deepest connections are founded in a dynamic. Those are the people you can not see for a long time and then pick up where you left off.
  271. If you wanted to do it badly enough, you’d be doing it.
  272. If the revolution isn’t compelling, we lose.
  273. The distance of memory is not linear.
  274. For W., who taught me how to write like this without knowing it.
  275. Sadness is when you have emotions that can’t reach a point of action.
  276. “Knowledge before you wisdom or understanding is fucked.” – AZ
  277. I did a gig with Professor Irwin Corey when he was 96. I asked him if he had any advice for living. He replied “Any money you owe when you die is profit,” and then fell asleep. 
  278. You might not ever get over something but you still have to keep moving.
  279. “I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death.”
  280. Figure out what you’re good at and do that.
  281. “It took eternity to get to my destination.”*
  282. The thing that actually anticipated memes was the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.
  283. Are you prepared for when the moment happens?
  284. Did you change over time or did you adjust?
  285. Is it enough? It has to be enough.
  286. Consider the mobility of your employment.
  287. A person’s voice is the part of their presentation they have the most control over.
  288. Blow up but don’t go pop.
  289. Speech doesn’t need to be anything other than sound.
  290. Sometimes love doesn’t have to be fully reciprocated.
  291. What is aging?
  292. What is an adult?
  293. What is love?
  294. Baby don’t hurt me.
  295. Why not get excited about things?
  296. What makes you accept the authority of another person?
  297. Which thing is the treasure map?
  298. Where am I supposed to be?
  299. Where did I put my keys?
  300. Stick a fork in it.
economy, theory

You God Damn Millennials are Killing All of America’s Shittiest Businesses

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fabsofNot pictured in foreground: Anything that actually does anything even remotely beneficial for your laundry.

Earlier this evening, Comrade Levine helped ease the pain by sharing this article to his Facebook wall, an otherwise routine piece of hysteria about Those Damn Millennials and all of the ways in which we are unacceptably changing society. Strangely, most of these articles seem to limit the purview of their juvenoia purely to the consumer realm, and this Business Insider shit show is no exception; it surpasses other articles waxing idiotic about The Kids These Days only in its wide assemblage of consumer examples.

Here are the industries this article says are failing because of disinterest from millennials, along with a brief overview of why I think these industries suck, for I have no job, no current classes, and nothing better to do with my time than try to waste that of others. My hypothesis: Maybe we’d stop murdering all of their beloved businesses if all of their beloved businesses weren’t total garbage.

Casual dining chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee’s: The food at these places is worse for you than fast food and is every bit as factory-cooked-and-frozen halfway across the country and microwaved in the “restaurant” as fast food. (I’ll have the #WordSalad as an appetizer, thank you.) Instead of getting your food at a dystopian counter in what feels like a mess hall, you are served at a sticky table in poorly-lit, beer-reeking, butt rock-blasting shithole with decor furnished by the nearest bottom-shelf antiques shop.

Beer: Tastes like dirty laundry smells, doesn’t get you drunk if you can hold your liquor. Pass.

Napkins: A napkin is cloth and you launder it. These are shitty little pieces of miserably flimsy paper that no sensible person should use in a world where paper towels are just as readily available.

“Breastaurant” chains like Hooters: When your business is failing, whatever you do, do not look into the politics of your youngest target demographic. That would not be rational in the least.

Cereal: I mean, I never cared for the stuff much, probably haven’t had a bowl in over a year. Not having it because you have to clean things afterward is asinine, though. Heartless Industry 1, Millennials 9,682.

Golf: Ah, yes, I’ll just have my driver take me and my caddy over to the cart rental in the Rolls Royce and we’ll cease our murder of this industry forthwith!

Motorcycles: Loud, obnoxious, dangerous, famously associated with violent criminals, horribly bigoted ones in particular. SEE: “Breastaurant” entry.

Homeownership: Hahahahahahahahaha are you fucking kidding me?

Yogurt: Anyone’s guess is as good as mine on this one.

Bars of soap: And I quote, “Almost half (48%) of all US consumers believe bar soaps are covered in germs after use, a feeling that is particularly strong among consumers aged 18-24 (60%), as opposed to just 31% of older consumers aged 65-plus.” Who are we, Howard fucking Hughes? Heartless Industry 2, Millennials 9,685. At least they didn’t try to spin this one to imply that we’re unwashed.

Diamonds: SEE: “Breastaurant” entry again. Literally involves the dismembering of small children and vicious wars.

Fabric softener: “According to Downy maker Procter & Gamble’s head of global fabric care, millennials ‘don’t even know what the product is for.'” Stupid millennials, not knowing what a pointless product is for. There’s an incredibly apt metaphor in here somewhere, but I’m too busy looking at my smartphone to notice.

Banks: I mean, I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard about millennials stuffing their cash in the mattress en masse, but perhaps this includes business lost to people who are joining credit unions that won’t gamble with their deposited money and nickel-and-dime them with fees and charges. Pah! Credit unions! Why would anybody ever join such a foolish thing?

Department stores like Macy’s and Sears: “Who could possibly want to order goods directly to their door?” ponders industry giants who made themselves into what they are by aggressively circulating mail-order catalogs. Why would I rifle through wrinkled clothes and struggle with store employees who are paid so little that it would come off as offensively desperate if they were helpful?

Designer handbags: Forget it, it’s Chinatown! If you need a magnifying glass to tell that a mainly-cosmetic item is counterfeit, then it is, for all intents and purposes, not counterfeit.

Home-improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s: SEE: “Department stores.”

Football: I won’t go into it at length here, but having read a shit-ton in the last year about the state of football’s popularity, I can say with confidence that this entry is entirely bullshit. Surely they could lament something more specific about football and of which there is more evidence of the uselessness of millennials, like not buying jerseys that cost over a hundred dollars or something.

Oil: SEE: “Breastaruants,” yet again. Also smells bad. Is hard to clean off of plants, wildlife, and out of earth and water. Continued combustion will literally make the Earth uninhabitable for humans. Procurement is ecologically harmful as well. Should be conserved as it is otherwise needed for plastics, of which advancing technology and growing populations will presumably only increase demand for.

I find it curious that all of the articles like this use an active word like “killing” to describe a trend which is defined by a lack of the relevant parties doing anything at all, in this case, engaging with these various businesses. Why, oh why, won’t the best-educated generation in human history, which is also simultaneously the worst-paid generation in the last century or so of American history, exchange money they don’t have for goods and services that make them sick, exploit others, and/or are mainly pompous, ostentatious displays of consumerism?

How can anybody seriously wring their hands in confusion at what is happening here? Businesses that don’t sell things people want aren’t logically supposed to exist in the free market, right? Well, then.

Fuck ’em all.

History and Politics

On the Sharing Economy

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The rise of what has been called, inaccurately, “the sharing economy” presents a number of problems for how we conceive of eventual worker liberation and the establishment of a more sane and equitable society. It requires the nationalization of platforms more than industries.

The psychological model of “platform” based work relies on the schizophrenic split between the identities of consumer and worker; a master/slave dialect that exists within each individual that exists within this economy. The person as consumer feels all powerful and pampered so long as they have money, and in some respects even without money provided they have an internet connection. I can get most of my needs besides food and a place to sleep extremely cheaply or free if I live close enough to an urban area and know how to navigate the system of thrift stores and things like Freecycle. When I do buy things, the standards of customer service have been automated to points where I can, in certain cities, order almost anything on the internet and have same day to within the hour delivery. I’m not sure there’s ever been a better point in human history to be a person with money buying things or living on the fringes of people buying things than the present.

However, as a worker, the environment is chaotic and assaultive. Attempts to dismantle what protections workers have gained over the past hundred years come from all directions; there’s a large portion of the working class in the United States that seems convinced that the primary problem of class tensions is that they haven’t given the bosses enough. Economically the US is in decline and facing tough competition from China and others.

This creates theoretical problems for the engaged Marxist. While a crisis of overproduction is a classic problem that Marxist theory is extremely well-equipped to tackle and the consumer identity side of things makes a lot of sense, the sharing economy is predicated on the bizarre notion of charging the worker for the privilege of…their owning the means of production. An Uber driver owns their own car, etc etc. It could be said that the thing actually being produced isn’t rides but work; that the actual customer of Uber is the driver and that therefore the largest growing market is the market for employment (that, for added absurdist sci-fi flavor, refuses to call itself employment and will fight over that in court.)

In terms of the present, this being the growth market makes some sense. The end point of technological sophistication, one of them anyhow, was always going to be the replacement of human labor by said technology. This was supposed to happen, this was the dream that you see in so many science fiction stories and popular TV shows dealing with the future-flying cars, and, more importantly, robotic servants, always viewed passively as set decoration. The other side of the sci-fi coin were anxiety dreams the robots would enslave the humans. This template isn’t especially far removed from the passive mammy/frightening minority threat coming to destroy “our values/homestead/etc” dichotomy that’s been a hallmark of the movies since Birth of a Nation. The comforting aspect of these films to the technologist or the racist is that they all still presume a strongly bonded community and an other, a stable world where the privilege stemming either from being human or white is a divine right. It avoids the question of whether the problems that would arise from technology wouldn’t stem from the inertia or weakening of man in the face of machines but from where most problems of the past 250 years and many from before then have stemmed-the banal and crushing inertia of the accumulation of wealth to a small minority of the population.

Technology’s advance has not led to a more fair or equitable society. Conveniences have multiplied, yes, but these have been trojan horses. The creation of massive quantities of so-called redundancy in the workforce, the speed-up that expedited the process of accumulation, and the powers of control and surveillance that have been handed over to massive tech giants while no one was paying attention all speak to this.

If I was accumulated capital personified, in the long term, what would I want? I would want to replace the specific functions of the federal government that collect money, while leaving the husk of said government to deal with the externalities that cost money. I’d want a couple private towns I had complete sovereignty over that could be designed to use soft-behaviorist techniques to control the activities of especially skilled employees. I would want to collect my employees’ taxes instead of the government. I wouldn’t want my employees to be considered employees so they couldn’t have collective bargaining rights. I wouldn’t want my employees to think of themselves as employees so they wouldn’t think about collectively bargaining. I would want access to massive zero percent interest loans backed by the government.

The above paragraph is not a new analysis. Much has already been said about the point of accumulation where the interests of concentrated capital are in the position to discipline state governments and not vice versa. This situation in some aspects is already happening. The rise of independent contractor “platforms” like Amazon used selling, Uber, etc. are ways for private interests to collect a second layer of sales tax, not land rent.

The platforms need to be seized for the workers.

The automated economy is an assault on the petit bourgeois in the same manner that industrialization was an assault on the artisan class at the advent of the industrial revolution.

 

History and Politics, theory

America is in a trade war with China. It’s losing.

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This past week news media outlets around America have been silently editing out the ‘unimportant parts’ of the presidential primaries, particularly those surrounding Presidential Candidate Donald Trump’s comments on Mexico and China. They instead are highlighting the ‘more important’ parts of ‘controversial statements’ (i.e.: the parts where he’s obviously vying for both press coverage and to appeal to the very far right).

We don’t beat China in trade. We don’t beat Japan, with their millions and millions of cars coming into this country, in trade. We can’t beat Mexico, at the border or in trade.

– Donald Trump

A spat of articles were quickly written to challenge the idea that America could be losing to Mexico in trade; these articles all pretty much admitting “yes but not by nearly as much as we have historically”, though you wouldn’t get it from their headlines (e.g. Is Donald Trump right that Mexico is ‘killing us’ on trade?).

But curiously missing were headlines asking “Is Donald Trump right that China is ‘killing us’ on trade?”

Why? Because everyone knows the answer: yes. China is killing us on trade. China has overtaken the United States GDP, though the US media has so far declined to cover this. (1)

Not only is China’s economy larger than the United States, it’s growing remarkably faster. The US media hurrahs every time the growth projections for China are around 7% and even champion 7.5% growth as a significant and important slow down from its historic “10%”. The United States struggles to achieve 2% growth.

It’s not fair to compare numbers out of context like this: China is an emerging economy and about to hit the knee of the curve into a modern import-consumer economy. The growth numbers above are both easier for China to achieve as it continues to industrialize and modernize. These are specific policy targets the Chinese national banks are targeting for reasons we will get to in a minute.

China is the central economic spoke of an Asia-Pacific region of the world. This region is about to crest into financial and economic plenty. In one or two short decades the Asia-Pacific region (comprising nearly half of the entire world population) will transition from second to first world nations. Every prediction from every multinational bank positions the Asia-Pacific region and China especially as the center of the global economy for at least the next half century. These same banks predict that the region will grow to host nearly 3/4 of all global shipping – this causing the United States to double down in investments to the Panama Canal.

China is set to lead the helm of a huge financial windfall. However, they haven’t been merely waiting for natural causes to provide this. Frustrated by inaccessibility to leadership positions denied to them in highly guarded multilateral banks and lending institutions (the World Bank and the IMF), China has developed a series of its own international organizations, forming an alphabet soup including the new BRICS Bank (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa international bank), the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), the ADB (Asian Development Bank), and several others.

The AIIB in particular has garnered a lot of US press because the United States tried at the time of its formation to project the image that China would not be a responsible leader of the initiative and encouraged its allies and defense partners not to join in membership. Alas, the majority of allied parties including the majority of Europe did join the AIIB. This was somehow unanticipated by US statesmen and it took the States by surprise.

The AIIB is one of the tools that will be used by China in its upcoming plan to create a ‘new silk road’ or ‘one road, one belt’. The AIIB will be used to grant internationally sourced investments to building infrastructure in countries that will benefit its lenders geostrategically – similar to how the IMF funds the majority of war costs on the Kiev side of the civil war in Ukraine because it benefits the NATO member countries that contribute to it.

China will be using the AIIB to build oil pipelines, highways and other infrastructure through Eurasia, and ports in countries with access to the Pacific Ocean. With this ‘one belt, one road’ initiative China seeks to develop a large economic zone in its neighborhood and in tandem with the rise of the associated economies. China will profit from the trade, the capital flows, the economic power, the regional leverage and the debt that must be repaid by the borrower countries.

Additionally, much like how the Colonies stole intellectual property from Britain to sponsor their industrial revolution, industrial cyber espionage by China is asymmetrically beneficial (versus the US’s industrial cyber espionage of China) to that China. China has simply more to gain in the cyber espionage war than the United States does on the side of intellectual property. This is even more complicated for the US because there is no international intellectual property law nor any international cyber law it can enforce.

Recently China depegged the Renminbi (Chinese currency) from the dollar, a move that was immediately criticized in US media and caused US officials to go haywire. The dominant narrative in the media was that lowing the currency was manipulation and was done to offset Chinese export losses (around 8%) in the previous quarter. This is partially true but so far from complete as to be dishonest. Missing from the broad media coverage was the fact that a depeg of the Chinese currency was a long standing demand of the US government and was advised by the IMF.

The US wanted China to depeg its currency when it would led to the Chinese economy becoming in the more immediate term a consumer economy on level of the size of the US economy. The strategic depeg this week was criticized because the float of the currency drove its value down, rather than up (as the US wanted). This puts an upward pressure on the US dollar and will encourage US debt to continue to drive the global economy through consumer debt. It will also probably exacerbate the US export problem so much that the Federal Reserve may back out of plans to raise the US bond rates in the upcoming financial quarter.

China did what the US asked them to, but what they did is going to allow China to continue to grow its economy relative to the United States in the short term. It also encourages other countries to take debt from US trade deficits and means that China can be continue to grow larger than the United States before it decides to “balance” and level out. A very good explanation of these details can be found in Patrick Chovanec’s Let the Global Race to the Bottom Begin. Phil Levy does a good Q&A in Let Slip the Dogs of Currency War, similarly noting that nothing specifically implicates China for bad behavior because it did exactly what the US has been asking it to, but in a way that harms the future of the US economy in predictable terms.

Folks in high finance have been warning that the trade war may turn into a currency war. At the Financial Times, headlines read: China devaluation raises spectre of currency wars, rhyming with prior coverage wherein Brazil accused the United States of doing the same to them.

This paves the way for the accusations of alleged US backed coordinated naked short selling that set off the most recent market turmoil in the Chinese stock markets. Intelligence interference of the sort has been seen before in the Libor rate scandals, Iranian financial hacking operations, and others – given the national security stakes, do we think the United States is above this sort of covert action?

The Xi Jinpeng administration wants China to grow into a superpower that can compete with the United States. Already a permanent member of the UN security counsel and holder of atomic weapons, China has officially stated its intention to become a great global nation. So far it’s tried to do this by consolidating financial might, soft power, and increasing regional responsibility. China now spends the second most of any nation of military budget. This is where the United States has a fundamental issue. The United State Grand Defense Strategy, codified in the leaked Wolfowitz Doctrine, is to prevent any other nation from rising in order to preserve its uniqueness as a hegemonic superpower.

Knowing this themselves, China has sought to eject the United States from the Asia Pacific region. It has gone on the record internationally claiming that the US is not a legitimate Pacific power and need not patrol these areas with aircraft carriers when other regional powers can provide the services the US claims to provide. Crucial to this effort, China has been developing exclusive trade deals with ASEAN (regional powers) and has excluded the participation of the United States despite great enthusiasm on its part.

So it makes sense that the Secretary of Defense has said “passing TPP is as important to me as another aircraft carrier“. Or that Thomas Friedman has publicly called the Trans Pacific Partnership a national security imperative on multiple occasions. Or that the historic address by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the US Congress on mutual security (re: extending NATO into Asia) saw him answering questions about the TPP almost exclusively in relation to the national security benefits it would foster in the face of a rising China. It explains why Obama, during his last State of the Union Address, urged the US to pass TPP as a means of “writing the rules” in Asia, rather than China.

The TPP is a protectionist trade deal that enshrines benefits and provisions meant to exclude China. It would create a trade bloc through the Asia-Pacific region composing 40% of the world’s GDP. The draft chapters leaked through Wikileaks reveal a slew of international laws that work against China. If China were to want to be allowed into the TPP’s trade bloc, it would need to adopt a slew of castrating laws the United States has long sought to establish over China. It would benefit regional adversaries and neighbors of China in a way that might keep them from being entirely under China’s economic shadow. It codifies partnerships and mutual benefits between nations that might otherwise be divided and conquered by soft or financial power. If the TPP passes, China will be faced with a choice to be excluded from huge capital flows or to agree to international law that will end many of the tactics it currently employs in its bid for global prominence.

The United States media has mostly been worried that a cabal of rich neoliberal capital monopolists and international corporations would be armed by TPP to further control and to accrue wealth, ideas, labor and productive capacities: that the economic benefits will go primarily to the few while the many are left hoping some of this wealth will make it into their 401k – or that somehow they will marry a daughter of one of these moguls and launch themselves into riches. This is a tangential issue to the one covered in this article but I’ll cover it briefly:

The United States does not have state owned enterprises (though much of its enterprise happens to be owned privately by the same elite circle who hold positions as defense and public officials). When a country in a trade war creates a weaponized trade deal for its industry and security, the few private individuals that own these enterprises will have their power and wealth magnified by that trade deal. The question is: which country’s elites will reap the benefits?

  1. It depends on how you measure and diehards will stick to obscure measures but most estimates agree that the US has been overtaken in price-parity adjusted gross domestic product..
Guest Posts, theory

Of the Force of Economic Identities

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Economics texts are stories. A work initially written to describe the world exactly as it is will, because of the seeming exactness of its resemblance, paradoxically reshape the world in its distorted spectral echoes. Karl Marx wrote Capital while buying potatoes on margin and pretty much living in the London public library. Within 80 years of its initial publication, nearly half the world had reshaped itself attempting to live up to a thing supposedly describing itself. Truth is chased and chases ominously in return; felt as much in its implications of the present’s lacking as its seeming descriptive powers.

As Montaigne wrote in “Of the Force of Imagination”:

Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time: I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old fellow’s house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with the patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be pleased with his company, that I might come often to see him, by which means, and by fixing his eyes upon the freshness of my complexion, and his imagination upon the sprightliness and vigour that glowed in my youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I then was, his habit of body might, peradventure, be amended; but he forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse. Gallus Vibius so much bent his mind to find out the essence and motions of madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a degree, that he could never after recover his judgment, and might brag that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the scaffold, by the stroke of imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale, and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed, feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes to expiring. And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires…

The US at present is fascinated at the moment with things that, like the great books, don’t seem to be either dead or alive but possessed with supernatural powers for being neither-werewolves, vampires, ghosts, Frankenstein’s monsters…

And at a house party in Seattle where attendees dressed as zombies a shooter came, and for a time the partygoers were unsure what was happening, unsure who was dead and who was exceptionally good with a makeup kit. In the Treblinka death camp the first woman to escape and return to warn the others of their intended fate was only able to do so by pretending to be dead and then sneaking out by cover of night, and when she told them they didn’t believe she was who she was or that what she was saying was true.

The most contentious issue and decisive initial choice made in any economics text is how to gerrymander and prioritize the various archetypal performative roles one sees in an economy. None of these roles are historically a given, a thing that always-already existed on clean lines. So the most convenient starting point for deconstructing any work of political economy usually begins with an analysis of this decision. It’s the single fuse that can be cut to turn off all the lights in the house or modified to make them switch on and off interchangeably in brilliant displays…

So we see the shift in cultural adoption of Smith toward Marx towards Keynes towards the Chicago School and beyond as what they are; a shifting series of parts to be played with varying degrees of revisionism or shrinking senses of disappointment, imaginary men conjured in a seance whose image we’re taught to squirm under in our failure to embody or avenge…

The primary shift from the classical economists toward the neoliberal ideologues of the present was the shift from the self-conception of the…let’s call them the eternal 99%, from the identification as the worker toward the identification as the consumer. The neoliberal text always frames liberation in terms of the drop in price of goods and their continued increase toward providing the imagined perfect consumer with the peak of convenience. They state these imagined narratives mostly in the most simple, calm fashion the new “folksy”-the literature of pats on the back, the literature of free cookies-can provide.

We should be immediately suspicious of any person too eager for us to understand them; underneath the clean simplicity of a prose can lurk the demanding neediness and need for control that it seems to cover up. Emerson gives a helpfully unspecified warning:

Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness.

And so the new definition of man as consumer wriggles and squirms in and out of various incarnations and social formations within and around these constraints, as have others. It is said “You can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house”. But isn’t the lesson of the dialectic that the master’s tools will dismantle the house of their own accord? So the man of prolific consumption becomes the learned master and vice versa; the roles melt into each other around a violent and awkward dance toward validation or revenge for having not been validated.

We find the imagined self of many people most easily in what it is they take offense at. I recently was embroiled in an argument on Twitter regarding my essay on superheroes. The person tweeting back at me claimed that Alison Bechdel was “redefining the superhero” and spoke of seeing the Broadway production of Fun Home. I claimed that, for what wonderful things Bechdel is doing, they don’t have much of anything to do with superheroes besides a shared form in the comic book. She grew angry and inquisition-like demanded to know if I’d read any of Bechdel’s work. I’ve read most of it; this is why I feel confident in my assertion as such. We go into conversations wanting something. She wanted her self as a consumer validated. I’m not especially sure what I wanted out of the exchange. But then, it’s easier to observe a thing from the outside.

This need for validation as consumer defines much of the internet discourse surrounding media, most of which is a flimsy runaround for the act of gatekeeping by means of shaming or validating the person for their exploring whatever regions of the world of words and pictures are considered off-limits. The consumer can never be satisfied lest they stop consuming, and if they are disturbed in their dream of this self this may well happen. Think of the “DVD extra”, which usually just consists of more “legitimate” persons than the viewer patting the viewer on the back for having viewed. The advertisement for a thing the person already bought; an advertisement for the continued legitimacy of the self as consumer. On the internet, people seek out something resembling the DVD extra and exhort the producers of discourse to provide this and scream bloody murder when they don’t. The invisible fence words build around themselves to keep other words out as though they were the Cliven Bundy of things we tell ourselves.

Guest post by Daniel Levine. Check out his first book here. His comedy album wants you to listen to it; he could honestly care less at this point. Anyway, whatever, it’s here.