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The battle with bullshit

January 6, 2015

The battle with bullshit

No Future For You, edited by John Summers, Chris Lehmann and Thomas Frank. MIT Press, 2014.

One of my pleasures over the holiday period has been readingThe Baffler‘s third book-length collection of articles, No Future For You. (I read the first one, Commodify Your Dissent in the early 2000s, but missed the second one.) For those new to The Baffler: it is a radical American magazine, published three times a year, that has mostly been going since 1988. The list of authors in this latest collection is impressive, from Baffler founder Thomas Frank to Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Graeber. The collection of subjects ranges wide across the sociopathies of our late Potemkin-capitalism, from gentrification to LinkedIn, toVice, NewsCorp and the Washington Post, to Sheryl Sandberg and the Waltons, to Fifty Shades of Grey andPrometheus to all of the President’s biographers. I bought the book to have a print copy of David Graeber’s magisterial essay “Of Flying Cars And The Declining Rate of Profit” on the failure of innovation in the digital age.

Hucksters

If there is a theme that binds these different authors and their disparate subjects, it is that The Baffler has a sharp eye for hucksters and hucksterism. And more: that in our present era of late capitalism, with its “morbid symptoms” manifested by a failed order desperately trying to keep itself and its privileges afloat, hucksterism is the latest, or last, symptom of therentier economy.

Some examples.

 

 

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