{"id":4151,"date":"2015-01-06T12:24:25","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T17:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4151"},"modified":"2015-01-06T12:24:25","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T17:24:25","slug":"the-battle-with-bullshit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4151","title":{"rendered":"The battle with bullshit"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 id=\"post-4294\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com\/2015\/01\/04\/the-battle-with-bullshit\/\" target=\"_blank\">The battle with\u00a0bullshit<\/a><\/h2>\n<p><strong>No Future For You, edited by John Summers, Chris Lehmann and Thomas Frank. MIT Press, 2014.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of my pleasures over the holiday period has been reading<em>The Baffler<\/em>\u2018s third book-length collection of articles,\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebaffler.com\/books\/no-future-for-you-salvos-from-the-baffler\/\" target=\"_blank\">No Future For You<\/a><\/em>. (I read the first one,\u00a0<em>Commodify Your Dissent<\/em>\u00a0in the early 2000s, but missed the second one.) For those new to\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebaffler.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Baffler<\/a><\/em>: 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\u00a0<em>Baffler<\/em>\u00a0founder 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, to<em>Vice<\/em>, NewsCorp and the\u00a0<em>Washington Post<\/em>, to Sheryl Sandberg and the Waltons, to\u00a0<em>Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em>\u00a0and<em>Prometheus<\/em>\u00a0to all of the President\u2019s biographers. I bought the book to have a print copy of David Graeber\u2019s magisterial essay \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebaffler.com\/salvos\/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit\" target=\"_blank\">Of Flying Cars And The Declining Rate of Profit<\/a>\u201d on the failure of innovation in the digital age.<\/p>\n<h3>Hucksters<\/h3>\n<p>If there is a theme that binds these different authors and their disparate subjects, it is that\u00a0<em>The Baffler<\/em>\u00a0has a sharp eye for hucksters and hucksterism. And more: that in our present era of late capitalism, with its \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/alexwhite.org\/2012\/04\/the-75th-anniversary-of-antonio-gramscis-death\/\" target=\"_blank\">morbid symptoms<\/a>\u201d manifested by a failed order desperately trying to keep itself and its privileges afloat, hucksterism is the latest, or last, symptom of the<em>rentier<\/em>\u00a0economy.<\/p>\n<p>Some examples.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The battle with\u00a0bullshit 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\u2018s third book-length collection of articles,\u00a0No Future For You. (I read the first one,\u00a0Commodify Your Dissent\u00a0in the early 2000s, but missed the second one.) For [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[2452,111,244,2450,2451],"class_list":["post-4151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-bullshit","tag-capitalism","tag-economics-2","tag-hucksterism","tag-hucksters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4152,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions\/4152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}