"The Odyssey Years"

a work in progress.. thought I'd post it anyways.... a review and critique of a New York Times editorial

The Odyssey Years

It always feels like a slap in the face when the older generations take a hard look at us, like David Brooks does in this New York Times editorial. They like to generalize us as value-less, spirit-less, deluded brats because we're reluctant to take the same brainwashing they took, reluctant to accept corporate wage-slavery, and reluctant to have the same soap shoved in our mouths they did after the failure of their "cultural revolution." We are seen as apathetic and lazy in the eyes of the aging workforce, but perhaps that is because we feel like we actually can defeat the conformity that they fell into after Reagan convinced them that greed was good again.

What these articles critiquing the Millennium Generation have most in common is that they always relate everything (they almost center around) our position in the workforce, as a reluctant source of labor. Sure, girls are getting more college degrees than boys these days and nobody's shoveling shit now that computers allow us more intelligent pursuits, but we're still treated as something of a passive proletariat. Now that everyone has a college degree, the market is flooded with qualified applicants, and as Brooks points out in his article, there is in fact increasing competition for an ever-decreasing market of good opportunities. In direct correlation with the widening rich-poor gap in this country, job opportunities too are following this trend, with the few cushy opportunities out there going to the few well-connected shining stars out there, while the rest of us are relegated to entry-level temp jobs in the "information" industry--which in reality is more of a data-entry industry (as anyone familiar with Excel knows).

Consumption

"When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of this tendency, has calculated that the complex process of production, distribution and consumption of knowledge already gets 29% of the yearly national product in the United States; and he predicts that in the second half of this century culture will be the driving force in the development of the economy, a role played by the automobile in the first half of this century, and by railroads in the second half of the previous century."
-Guy Debord "Society of the Spectacle" # 193 (1967)

Just as the growth of the commodity-culture of last century directly correlated with the growth of a proletariat of commodity-producers, today we can see a relationship between the veritable tsunami of information that exploded in the last decade and the increase of mundane, repetitive information-industry jobs that provide, at once, the producers and consumers of useless streams of information. Because every book in the Library of Congress is now online and every event that happens on the surface of the earth is recorded and posted on You-Tube, there is a huge industry in place that attempts to manage that information. The management of this information--and the subsequent editorializing, promoting, and publishing of this information--is the new assembly-line culture of the American workforce. We are freed from the strains of hard manual labor and instead placed at the foot of an enormous cascade of information.

The incredible boom in commodity production of the 20th century is continuing in the 21st as consumable information. Whereas before the model was a five-day work-week producing commodities and a two-day weekend of consuming them as entertainment (buying an Airstream, taking a weekend trip to the car-show, and gulping Big-Macs), now we have entire industries popping up that produce fresh digital content 24 hours a day, and are consumed during the times when workers are not producing them.

For example, a you-tube video of a horribe bike-accident is posted online, copied onto a blog, where it is discovered by "culture monitors" for a major ad-sponsored website who editorializes it, increasing it's popularity to the point where it is further editorialized by numerous ad-sponsored publications, picked up as a spot on VH1's "Best Week Ever," lampooned in sketches on comedy programs, adapted as a screenplay, and turned into a star-studded feature comedy. An entire economy based around an intangible digital object--employing thousands who produce quick, meaningless "entertainment"--all hoping to profit from the temporary relevance of their content. All of it thrown away days later to make way for new meaningless content in the name of generating the cultural capital advertisers are willing to pay for.

Whereas the paradigm of the 20th century was of an ever-increasing materialism, what Marx predicted as Commodity Fetishism--in which the growth of capital depended on the idea that people needed to consume more and more commodities in order to "survive" in modern society--the 21st century paradigm will be one of an ever-increasing consumption of abstract ideas, a "Cultural"* Fetishism, if you will, in which people will need to consume more and more cultural texts (tv shows, websites, new books, etc) in order to survive in the new economy--to stay relevant in modern society. We can already see this in the exploding DVD collections of any of our friends: the accumulation of cultural texts gives their owner an increased cultural capital (a knowledge of what's current, cool, and relevant). Thus: whereas previous generations succumbed to the fetishism of the commodity--allowing their possessions to define their identity--contemporary society is allowing a fetishism of "culture" to permeate our perceptions of who people are, depending less on their material possessions and more on what forms of culture they consume.

This is not to say that the age of American materialism is over. The commodity culture that began with the assembly lines of the last century is still as powerful as ever, if not more powerful (as evidenced by massive consumer-goods outlet stores and the explosion of the Amazons and Ebays), but the actual production of these goods is no longer an element of American life. The production of commodities--for Americans at least--has been automated or sent to the proletariats of third-world societies, leaving an entire American workforce to fend in the world of information--thus consuming more of it to validate their position.

Because of the distinct lack of production jobs available to the masses (one look at the dying city of Detroit illustrates this phenomenon), an entire population of people is now forced into a much more competitive world of information jobs that require a college education and a fairly advanced knowledge of technology--thereby reducing the undergraduate diploma to a status once reserved for a high-school diploma, and making post-graduate education an absolute necessity for anyone who wishes to advance beyond the mindless pseudo-creativity of the entry and mid-level information jobs.

One factor that does remain, despite the paradigm shift from material commodities to info-modities, is the fact that ratio of the amounts of commodities produced and consumed by the vast majority of workers, favors not the actual producers of commodities, but the gatekeepers of media. For example, I spend five days a week producing recyclable ad-copy for my corporate media company (who makes a profit off of my "creativity" and pays me the lowest possible competitive wage) and only have two days a week to consume such recyclable information myself. The time and effort I contributed to the information economy is not fully returned by my consumption. Thus I have been exploited. Given this deficit of effort and reward, I as a worker am left to validate my existence (as a member of the new proletariat creative class) by consuming more temporal creative goods. I am forced to stay current by consuming news and culture publications. It is a cycle that keeps me from pursuing more fulfilling directions...

This deficit--the need to validate existence through consumption of culture--is the illusion that we are leading fulfilling, productive existences. This illusion is easily discovered when you look at how genuinely unsatisfying the work, and the products are--how nothing stands up to the test of time, how humor is now so intrinsically tied to current events (rather than the human condition) that we can barely understand the referents of many jokes, how blockbuster movies once praised are viewed as dated and corny just months after their release.

Of course, the information we create is not owned by us, just as the commodities of the past were not owned by their producers. The commodities we produce fall into the hands of the media gatekeepers that control and manipulate the "free" flow of information.

Career managers and conservative political theorists seem confounded by the fact that few of us want to dig-in for years of working our way up to cozy positions--instead favoring instant gratification or no gratification at all...


okay, so that's just the start of something that will eventually become clear in my head. please PLEASE comment on this article because i need all the dialog i can get!!!!!