Departments

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capitalism

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    5/17/2023

    Museum Celebrates Sweet Smell of... Failure

    The Museum of Failure is a global traveling exhibition that celebrates the signal marketplace flops of capitalism, from the infamous Edsel and New Coke to the obscure, highlighting the vagaries of consumer taste and historical contingency. 

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    5/4/2023

    Can Capitalism Exist Without Excess?

    by Trevor Jackson

    The pandemic supply chain disruptions have focused attention on shortages, but the problem of gluts—of food being destroyed when it can't be profitably sold–reflects a deeper problem with global capitalism. 

  • SOURCE: Harper's
    4/15/2023

    Beyond Quiet Quitting: The Real Crisis of Work

    by Erik Baker

    Impressionistic accounts of worker withdrawal and labor militancy both fail to capture a deeper issue: Work is failing to deliver on the promises the state has made as an avenue of meaning and fulfillment. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    3/12/2023

    O'Mara: Politics and Commercial Pressure, not ChatGPT, are the Threats

    Historian of technology and Silicon Valley Margaret O'Mara says that the peril of artificial intelligence chatbots and artificial intellience will lie in how it is marketed; the rush to be first to the market creates conditions for sloppy tech and abusive applications. 

  • SOURCE: Yes!
    1/26/2023

    Why We Need Pirates

    by Paul Buhle, Marcus Rediker and David Lester

    Though vilified in popular culture, the history of piracy shows that many crews were egalitarian bands of maritime workers escaping their exploitation at the hands of merchant companies and navies. A new graphic adaptation of a recent history of piracy tells the story. 

  • SOURCE: Vox
    12/20/2022

    2022's Lesson? Billionaires Bad, Actually

    Tech historian Margaret O'Mara says Musk, like other tech moguls, has long been supported by a myth of the individual genius that is only now being overturned by his erratic decisionmaking, boosting of right-wing conspiracy theories, and incredibly thin-skinned reaction to criticism. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    12/16/2022

    Dickens Would Have Had Bankman-Fried's Number

    The novelist targeted the absurdities and self-congratulation of utilitarian philosophers, the forerunners of the tech industry's "effective altruism," in his 1854 "Hard Times." 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    11/22/2022

    Is Environmental Damage Really Sabotage by Capital?

    by R.H. Lossin

     The term "capitalist sabotage" describes intentional destructive activity in service of profit, and is a more accurate label than "accident" or "unintended consquence" for the environmental change that will cause a million unnecessary deaths a year over the coming decades. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    11/10/2022

    Lunchtime in Italy: Work, Time and Civil Society

    by Jonathan Levy

    The Italian lunchtime insists that time be organized around communal rituals and sustenance, not work. Does the utter foreignness of this attitude in America help explain the current national derangement? 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/27/2022

    The Robber Barons Had Nothing on Musk

    by David Nasaw

    Like the Gilded Age robber barons, Elon Musk's self-made mythos hides the government subsidies supporting his businesses. Unlike them, he has the werewhithal to move financial markets to his advantage through Twitter. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    4/27/2022

    Palm Oil is Colonialism's Continuing Nightmare

    by Max Haiven

    The extraction and trade in palm oil in west Africa has been at the center of two centuries of exploitation and violence, which stands to get worse as the Ukraine war threatens the world supply of competing sunflower oil. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    4/4/2022

    Your House Makes More Money than You Do

    Rising real estate values are bringing more wealth to Americans than wages and salaries are. This is a big problem for economic equality.