Products & Events
Unf*cking Capitalism
-
2024
-
Hardcover book
-
Walker Thisted
-
The systems that govern our world are constantly evolving. Some gradually lose dominance and fade into distant memory while others have significant staying power and captivate the imagination of one generation after another. They not only come to inform collective identity, but also structure many aspects of our habits and habitat. Even the most dominant systems guided by leaders who exert tremendous power, at some point, are no longer able or suited to serve an evolved world. As this occurs, there are often innovations that emerge from within the system that gain attention, serve an under addressed need, draw a community together, and build wealth. In unique situations, these innovations become a key means of defining and grounding a new system of value that drives society, the economy, and politics. This book explores whether a digitally powered connection between the virtual and our physical world is just such an innovation and, if so, how it might structure a system that evolves from late capitalism.
In order to explore the role that a connection between the virtual and physical might play, I define these terms and the significant impact that digital innovation has had on the world in which we live. This is accompanied by a brief history of the relationship between the virtual and physical and how digital technology has impacted this connection. These initial reflections help to define a conceptual framework for the relationship between the virtual and physical that guides our investigation of a series of examples across scales, locales, and flows of things, capital, people, and ideas. This begins with the home and is followed by commerce, industry, agriculture, neighborhoods, cities, regions, and countries. In each instance, I explore the specific virtual/physical technologies that have been deployed as well as the positive and negative consequences of the deployment of the virtual/physical connection for a range of stakeholders as well as broader structures of power and the future of late capitalism. As I move between examples and across progressively larger scales, I call attention to the ways in which late capitalism is not addressing current challenges facing our society, government, and environment. In the context of and as a response to this failure, I argue that the digital ideology that has emerged from recent digital innovation will evolve to become a virtual/digital ideology that can guide the evolution of late capitalism and support an ability to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our society and world.
A key component of such an ideology is the value created in the exchange between the virtual and physical. Through identifying how this value is created and tracked, it becomes possible to explore ways of optimizing this value and using this value to support community, new routes of investment, new means of representation of individuals and collectives, and greater equity and ownership of the systems that govern our world. In the end, the way in which we measure and cultivate this value forms a means of elucidating a cohesive system that relates to and maybe even replaces earlier systems that structured our economy and politics.
-
2021
-
Hardcover book
-
Walker Thisted
-
The polarized state of America is driven by how those responsible for national narratives – and the networks distributing those narratives – use beliefs and cultural preferences to divide people and win votes. In the process, diverse cultures from across the country are flattened on screens. This captivation of culture by power ultimately holds America captive through the tremendous cost of maintaining the captivation and the diminished capacity for cultural production and exchange that occurs as a result of attention being drawn to the narrative of captivation and the factionalization that causes people to be disinclined to collaborate with fellow Americans they perceive as different.
Ending this captivation by de-flattening the media representation of culture can play a significant role in reducing the polarization of the country. The first step is to reframe culture through drawing attention to where it is produced and consumed. This involves exploring the common underlying motivations of culture rather than focusing on the differences that result from these common desires. The second step is to understand how captivation is occurring through various tactics. It then becomes possible to ask what various interest groups would like their individual culture to be seen as and how it might form a broader dialogue through a new form of direct exchange within an expanded cultural field.
The book ends by speculating as to how this exchange might occur via a new user-owned platform supporting a cultural network and economy. Such a space would not only end the captivation of culture to drive polarization but would become a common creative space for everyone to share – and particularly those with more time due to ongoing automatization of jobs and changing nature of employment. It would be a space to care for ourselves, each other, and planet while also being a place to dream that in turn might lead to innovation that enhances the health and sustainability of the entire country.