late stage capitalism

there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world

The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who dares not pursue it. Because this much I know is true: it’s not because they’re soft.

But the real root of the problem is something much deeper than cost-cutting exercises, maximizing shareholder value, and a general loss of craft and bold originality. Somewhere along the way, we lost respect for each other. We’ve broken our social contract, forgotten our manners, ignored the golden rule. The producers have lost respect for the... See more

And in America, no matter how much you’ve got, someone next to you has more. This is what Chris Hayes once described to me as “fractal inequality.” America’s top 10 percent are far, far better off than the other 90 percent, but the top 1 percent is far, far better off than the 10 percent, and the 0.01 percent is far, far better off than the 1... See more

Late-stage capitalism, dying in and of itself, has medicalized and privatized this universal and primal process. It’s created industry from every possible morsel of Life, including birth and death, and every breath of air between. With industrialization came separation, with separation came unknowns, with the unknowns came fear. A shirking of our... See more

Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the "solution" is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.

The Great Diminishment has several causes. (The internet, social media, apathy, etc., all play a role. I’ve written more about how “everyone is numbing out.”) But a big cause is what I’ll call the “venture capitalization” of culture, where as much cost is squeezed out of every nook and cranny as possible, while prices remain the same or higher. You... See more