Atopia

NYC

Tashkent

The Chambers Street subway station really seems to encapsulate everything I feel about New York right now: this city has the courage neither of utopia nor dystopia.

Send Me New Words And Old Books

Probably, there is already a term for the junk at the edge of my mind somewhere in something I read a while back... rentier-() but I don't know. Maybe we need a new term. 

For what?

Still hard to say.

Lately, maybe just because I am more careful about tracking my finances, but I feel like I've noticed something, something that, maybe, has been true for a while, but now with added intensity, perhaps due to the collapse of credit as the means of expanding middle-class prosperity that occurred in 2008. Partially it's, of course, due to de-industralization and the rise of the service economy. 

Nevertheless, it sometimes feels to me as if we are in a "new" phase of capitalism. I can't quite put my finger on it how to describe it, what to call it, and really, to those of you still checking this site, I invite you to point me to any words, articles, books, etc. that may tell me what I am trying to grasp at.

Basically, it has started to feel to me that whereas labor was the "resource" harvested to create wealth, with individual income merely a byproduct, a private property that individuals could choose to put back into the system of exchange, now the resource is that income itself. The work that people do doesn't seem to figure into the reproduction of capitalism; the system somehow needs my money more than my labor. The purpose of labor is now to produce money. Something feels backwards. Or maybe not backwards. Just more abstract.

I guess I could just be describing consumer capitalism, but does it feel like 1958 to you? Or 1968, 1978, 1988?

Industrial capitalism - material byproduct is the improvement of the public sphere (transportation, electricity, construction of cities, sewers, etc.)

Consumer capitalism - material byproduct is the improvement of the private sphere (home ownership, cars, laundry machines, etc.)

(something) capitalism - no material byproduct - money seems to turn into money without ever being capital in a classical sense.

Post-material? But "post-" seems lame.

I feel like I'm on the edge of understanding something without being able to do so. 

The best analogy I can think of is horrible. It requires reference to the film The Matrix. Help me!

Interest rates on savings accounts are really shitty, aren't they? By design, too, I'm guessing. "They" don't want anyone to save, do they?

Anyways, hi.

EDIT:
Yeah, I guess the article below pretty much sums it up, and yet I feel that nagging at the back of my head.... there's more to this, isn' there? Can we call something and experience something as new? It can't be that I already understand, can it? No.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/in-the-age-of-hyper-disparity-the-ultimate-loss-is-a-livable-earth/