Ben also served as the Director of the Center for Theory, and founding editor of this journal, Fast Capitalism.Both of these projects are also based in the Sociology Program in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas-Arlington

Two decades after the close of the Cold War, 2011 is an opportune time for reflections about the present and recent past.Twenty years ago as the Soviet Union was crumbling, Christopher Lasch asserted in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), "it ought to be clear by now that neither fascism nor socialism represents the wave of the future. . . .None of this means that the future will be safe for democracy, only that the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within" (Lasch, 1991: 24).At the same time, Lasch fretted about the growing "revolt of the elites" in which he saw a powerful, prestigious, and a privileged new class of wealthy professionaltechnical experts--emerging all across the U.S.A. and other developed Western economies--increasingly were making themselves and their embedded institutional networks at the top 5, 10 or even 20 percent of society independent of public services, decaying cities, and civic activities in their nation states.By 1995, Lasch argued with regard to the new class that "in effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. . .Many of them have ceased to see themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse" (Lasch, 1995: 45).On the one hand, with the growth of "the borderless global economy, money has lost its links to nationality," and, on the other hand, the mobile, cosmopolitan, and self-centered new class increasingly had "little inclination to make sacrifices or to accept responsibility" as their denationalized businesses, professions, and skills followed their money into the liquid modernity of globalism in which "the cosmopolitanism of the favored few, because it is uninformed by the practice of citizenship turns out to be a higher form of parochialism" (Lasch, 1995: 46, 47).Being proponents of more material progress in 1991, the new class did not seem at all enamored with "a return to a more frugal existence: such views fell outside the progressive consensus" (Lasch, 1991: 529).Things have changed, however, during the past two decades.The worried open acknowledgement of global climate change, excessive state borrowing, overextended public services, and rapid economic globalization have become secure articles of faith for many among this new class.Indeed, for their most successful factions among "the super-rich" (Brenner, 2002;Hacker and Pierson, 2010;and, Taibbi, 2010), there is a willing acceptance of frugality, impoverishment or dispossession, as long as these deprivations are endured by the many rather than them, while they affirm a renewed faith in the central importance of growing prosperity for the elite few (Kapur, Macleod, and Singh, 2005).These rhetorical concessions, then, are foundational principles among "the new global elite" (Freeland, 2011), which has become more evident in Lasch's "revolt" of talented and wealthy elites in richer and poor countries alike.This brief study of the U.S.A. in the twenty-first century examines aspects of the "more frugal existence" for the many, now known as "the 99 Percent" after the Occupy Wall Street occupation of Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, created by continuous economic upheaval.It also probes the consolidation of greater wealth among the privileged and/or talented elites, who are now identified as "the One Percent" at the top of today's twirling economic booms and busts.From 1968 to 2009, income inequality between the richest Americans versus those at the poverty level almost doubled, this income inequality was the largest of all Western industrial economies, Blow Out, Blow Back, Blow Up, Blow Off: The Plutonomic Politics of Economic Crisis since 2001

Thirty-five years ago, Bill McKibben published his best-selling popular depiction of climate change, The End of Nature. Nearly a decade ago, Naomi Klein's global best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate presented her detailed brief: “thought leaders” must resist and reverse the degradation of Earth's climate in the face of denials that this policy change was impossible. As popular activists, McKibben and Klein both believe “more information leads to good and great change.” This gambit presumes when presented disturbing facts on how and why rising fossil fuel use is degrading the climate, like-minded readers will wisely rise, readily organize and rationally stop such destruction. Both authors have thriving careers as “thought leaders,” but the gamble that informative writing would inspire game-changing decisive actions has backfired. In fact, the intensity of their climate decrying for millions of “action laggards” is twisted into disinformation to justify climate denying. Nature has not ended, and climate change has not changed everything. Costly climate disasters are increasing; but habits of embedded symbolic action tied to moralistic decrying suggest McKibben and Klein now play new roles as artful traders in the networks of disinformation. In today’s ESG-guided climate politics, major energy companies nod appreciatively to climate decriers, pledging future perfection at carbon reduction in contrite denialist exchange for sustaining the continued present degradation of their carbon emissions. This is a puzzle. Are answers to the puzzle to be found in Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which explores to what degree everyday life now is not engaged with the natural world? Instead, denial and disinformation seem to ensnare it in “trips into the Mirror World” where sustainable degradation produces “digital doubles” of fulfilled future pledges of true sustainability in the 24x7 attention economy underpinned by the falsehoods of current concentrated carbon intensity.

In the contemporary capitalist global economy, as many of the authors in this issue of Fast Capitalism assert, markets have been remade by neoliberal leaders and organizations to favor greater global finance, manufacturing, and trade over preserving the prosperity of entire national economies.Under the blows of the austerity that such policies bring, democratic political hopes and cultural traditions are suffering new crises and shocks.From the Brexit vote in Great Britain, a hard-line party crackdown in China, and low intensity warfare with Russia in Ukraine to a failed coup in Turkey, a severe presidential crisis in Brazil, and the on-going fragmentation Syria in its brutal civil war, the struggles between ruling elites and restive mass publics are becoming more bitter and severe.In this respect, the United States plainly is no longer an exceptional country.Indeed, as the 2016 presidential primaries for the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States of America have unfolded both at home and around the world, the crass culture of "reality TV" with its heated celebrations of extraordinary individual wealth, cruel competitive gamesmanship, and vicious spectacles of personal debasement simply to gain a bigger audience and dominate daily discussion incredibly has colonized the presidential elections in the USA.The centerpiece of this development is the bizarrely successful bid by Donald J. Trump to win the Republican Party nomination, which he captured during July 2016 despite widespread dissatisfaction in the party with this outcome.Trump's unique rhetorical mix of individual put-downs, suspiciously sweeping negative generalizations, anti-establishment insults, and xenophobic calls to greatness quickly have, in turn, become his campaign's most distinctive feature.While his bombast has started to stall going into the general campaign in August 2016, if only because of Trump's resolve to run as a Washington outsider and champion of "America First" policies, his over-the-line approach to electioneering continues to excite many alienated voters.Many political pundits are arguing that Trump also is driving away most moderate voters, and he is flagging in almost all of the swing states.Nonetheless, it is still over two weeks before Labor Day, and many electoral campaigns find new focus and energy as Election Day draws near.Even so, one must return the decades before World War II to find equally extreme politicking in a major political party's campaign messaging and policy positioning.By praising Vladimir Putin's strong leadership, harping on President Obama's African heritage, ridiculing disabled reporters for their special needs, insulting female newscasters with sexist comments, doubting the geopolitical purposes of NATO, suggesting nuclear weapons would be used in the Middle East to defeat fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, hinting gun owners in defense of the Second Amendment "might do something" about Hilary Clinton to prevent her packing the Supreme Court with anti-gun justices, and claiming President Obama founded ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), Trump has pressed harder on his strangely twisted appeal to the darkest fears of the GOP party faithful by taking his gloomy vision into the national campaign.He unfortunately won too many primary elections by appearing seriously to regard myths as facts, facts

Many developments, like greater domestic turmoil, economic dislocation, social immobility, and political gridlock, suggest "the public" and "the private" are different domains with the US than they were decades ago in 1969 when President Nixon entered office. The constitutional state, as a theory and set of practices in the USA in the Nixon era was put under tremendous strains, and it seems clear that those pressures fractured it. After Vietnam, stagflation, Watergate, and the transitional Ford Administration, has it ever been the same? The Reagan-Bush assault on the New Deal and Great Society as well as the essentially permanent mobilization for war in the Middle East since 1991 all should force us to conduct a radical check-up of the body politic, and ask if The Constitution is, in fact, the nation's benchmark for foundational law. This paper argues that major political and cultural shifts within the USA, as it has faced these new challenges since the 1970s that have been both domestic and global in nature, suggest that its 1787 Constitution no longer organically underpins the nation's dominant modes of the governance, principles of sovereignty, or notions of political legitimacy, as they have been expressed since 1969 or 2001 in the larger New World Order organized in Washington, D.C.

This preliminary analysis connects the dilemmas of eco-pessimism and eco-optimism and links them to a number of core and peripheral thinkers in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have sought an escape, or “an out,” from the deepening deterioration of both Nature and Society making many feel pessimistic about the environment. As New York City choked through eerie days cloaked by nearly impenetrable clouds of wood smoke in June 2023, the sky turned a Martian orange in the sunlight from dawn to dusk. At the same time, coastal homeowners along Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific beaches received notices that their property insurance costs would be greatly increased, or their policies canceled permanently, due to the increasing frequency and destruction of severe coastal erosion and weather events. Meanwhile, the American Southwest was being smothered in prolonged intense heat waves punctuated by massive hailstorms, intense rainfall, and tornados. Due to so many coincident catastrophes like these, the experience of eco-pessimism today is growing in its breadth and depth as climate change simply becomes more problematic, personal, and pervasive.

Since 2005, Fast Capitalism has worked to serve as an academic journal with a political intent.For now thirteen years, fifteen numbers, and nineteen issues (with a 1.2 issue in 2005, a 2.2 issue in 2006, a 5.2 issue in 2009, and an 8.2 issue in 2011), we have been publishing reviewed scholarship and critical essays about the impact of rapidly changing information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century.As we announced from the outset, we do not pretend an absolute objectivity, given that the work we publish is written from many perspectives with a viewpoint.Our authors examine how heretofore distinct social institutions, such as work and family, education and entertainment, have blurred to the point of near identity in an accelerated, post-Fordist stage of capitalism.And, we launched this project before there were the nearly 2 billion smart phones and over a billion smart tablets operating everyday around the world in 2018.The scale, scope, and sweep of these means of communication in the existing mode of information makes it difficult for people to shield themselves from subordination and surveillance.The working day continues to expand; there is increasingly less to actually no "down time" anymore.People can "office" anywhere, using laptops, tablets, and other personal mobile devices to stay constantly in touch.But these invasive technologies that tether us to capital and control can also help us resist these tendencies, as we noted during the Great Recession, the "Color Revolutions," the Occupy movements, and Arab Spring uprisings.People use the Internet as a public sphere in which they can express and enlighten themselves as well as organize others; women, especially, manage their families and nurture children from the job site and on the road, perhaps even "familizing" traditionally patriarchal and bureaucratic work relations; information technologies afford connection, mitigate isolation, and have made way for many new social movements from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to #MeToo and March for Our Lives.We are convinced that the best way to study an accelerated media culture and its various political economies and existential meanings is dialectically, with nuance, avoiding sheer condemnation and ebullient celebration.We seek to shape these new technologies and social structures in democratic ways.We invite contributions on these and related issues.Some papers will stick close to the ground of daily life and politics; others will ascend the heights of theory in order to get the big picture.The work we publish is both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, bridging the social sciences and humanities.Culture and capital are keywords.As we always have been from the beginning, we are also are intensely interested in cities, the built environment and nature, and we encourage people who theorize space and place to submit their work.With 15.1, we continue this project with an eclectic mix of essays, beginning with Jacobo Bernardini addressing in his "Nomophobia and Digital Natives" the dark sides of smartphone psychological dependence in contemporary Italy, especially the strong correlations between youth apathy and the massive use of new digital technologies.The second piece by Daniel Broudy, "Flags, Anthems, and Free Speech: A Trump White House," addresses the emergent national populist regime and nationalist movement being constructed in the United States around perhaps the world's first full-blown "reality TV" inspired style of daily administration in President Donald Trump's White House.The third article by Sascha Engel poses the challenge of how to go about "Writing Circuit Histories" by delving deeply into software coding practices to contest the predominant linear narrative devices to which semi-human, semimachinic assemblages for high technology work are subject: the narrative of "progress."The next essay by Yasmin Ibrahim deals with the complexities of "The East as a Theatre House of Suffering: 'Suffering' Scholarship and the Orientalist Bind" in contemporary media studies.For her, "suffering" is a sustained human predicament, but it has been largely consigned to the East/Global South as a collective human role.In turn,

This preliminary critical analysis explores the decisive shift in U.S. environmental policy from the Biden Administration, which still honored the mythic might of FDR’s 1930s New Deal, to the rapid implementation of a President Trump's MAGA ("Make America Great Again") approaches to environmental conservation and protection policy. The Biden Administration’s and the Democratic Party also entertained “Green New Deal” measures despite their often misunderstood connections to statist class compromises and corporatist legitimation dynamics that alienated many conservatives and the GOP, as exemplified by the Project 2025 program from the Heritage Foundation behind the Second Trump administration. As a mix of nuclear ecomodernism, fossil fuel resurrection, industrial deregulation and rapid climate denialism, MAGA environmentalism also appears to be a program for anti-woke culture war, deglobalizing industrial supply chains, creating new strategic mineral reserves and privatizing public lands reverses over a century of Democratic and Republican policies to protect Nature.

A brief 2021 news item provides a curious, but important, point of departure to examine the accelerating pace of environmental degradation associated with rapid climate change. After decades of destructive hurricane landfalls from the 1821 Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane, the 1893 New York, or “Midnight Storm” Hurricane, the 1903 New Jersey, or “Vagabond,” Hurricane, 1938 New England, or “Long Island Express” Hurricane, and then Hurricanes Donna (1960), Floyd (1999), Irene (2011) plus Superstorm Sandy (2012), environmental conditions have changed across New York. In turn, hard new realities hit home for Manhattanites during September 2021 with Hurricane Ida’s damage.

dawned coldly in Blacksburg, Virginia.This reflection about that terrible day for Virginia Tech is difficult to write, but something must be written.Universities work best when they are free, open, and untrammeled sites for intellectual growth, constant learning, and scholarly inquiry.This has been true at this university, and it remains the case in many places around the world.Because of April 16, there will be repeated, strong and understandable calls to abridge, if not, constrain these conditions, through expanded policing and constant surveillance.To admit they are understandable, however, is not to agree that they are acceptable.Indeed, they could lead to overcompensating police measures that no outstanding university should tolerate as well as create a far more restrictive academic setting for teaching and learning that I would not wish to experience.Careful consideration of the violent events of that day, therefore, must defend, fully and forthrightly, the place of every university to serve as a free and open site for scholarship and study.Here is my effort to meet that task.While I have had many people at the university read through this account, my observations about April 16, and this analysis of what occurred here on that day, as well as many of the days since that event, represent only my personal perspective on many of the contradictory issues involved rather than an official statement of any sort.Many official statements already have been issued from the President of the United States to the Governor of the Commonwealth to the President, Board of Visitors, and various faculty, staff, and student organizations here at the university.More official findings and statements will be forthcoming in the months to come; so this is just one study of the April 16 events and their aftermath during the last sixty days. I. The April 16 EventsAfter a night of intense blustery winds, the weather outlook from Roanoke TV stations promised light snow and more gusts of high wind in Blacksburg.As usual, I drove into the office before 6:30 A.M., crossing Washington Street (about a quarter mile east of where the West Ambler Johnston Residence Hall sits) on my way to campus.Once there, I parked on Drillfield Drive 120 yards or so down from Norris Hall.I had several sessions with

ions typically labeled as science, technology, culture, society or markets—as kinedramatic modernity. Hybrids are the fabric of our lives, those good things corporations bring to life, or where science and technology get down to business, while they deny the very existence of these hybridized actualities in conventional Enlightenment fables of live human subjects dominating dead non-human objects through science and technology. “The essential point of this modern Constitution,” as Latour maintains, “is that it renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable” (1993:34). Modernization, as Latour frames it, requires two sets of practices: translation, which mixes entirely new types of beings, or hybrids of nature and culture; and purification, which disputes these mixtures as it “creates two entirely different ones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (1993:10-11). As long as everything and everyone treats these practices as separate and distinct, then one can think and be “modern.” Translation builds conventionalized constructs in the networks of quasi-subjects/quasi-objects betwixt “a natural world that has always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society” (Latour 1993:11). Any effective analysis of modernity, then, must confront the “quasification” processes in hybridity, because clearly “objects are not the shapeless recreatables of social categories—neither the ‘hard’ ones nor the ‘soft’ ones....Society is neither that strong nor that weak; objects are neither that weak nor that fabricated, much more collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society” (Latour 1993:55). Environments—artificial or natural—cannot be understood fully without seeing how these quasifications constantly either pull back into purifications of discourse or fail to disclose translations in action. As they do, speed matters most. Nature’s supercession creates a second nature, a processed world or a postmodern condition—mixing together quasi-objects and quasi-subjects—in which those who own and control the material and mental means of enforcing order amidst these asymmetries concretize new inequalities on a global scale in many landscapes, places, and spaces— urban, rural, suburban, and exurban—which are neither metropolitan nor peripheral. Without saying so, Latour here essentially walks into Beck’s subpolitical domain. Indeed, where we are going derives from the quasi-objective and quasi-subjective characteristics of people and things caught up within routine governmentality. Who gains and who loses are conditions that fuse hybridized objects and subjects within techno-scientific quasification in all of its amorphic (con)fusions. Here one finds the quasipolitical order in which speed is matter, and in which kineformations must matter—which are global and local, industrial and agricultural, commercial and nonprofit, urban and rural, built

It has barely just past, but 2011 already is petrified solidly in print by Time magazine as “The Year of the Protester.” In keeping with its active policing of symbolic and social order by “putting a face” on “the force of the year” who typically is a known person, the magazine’s cover image of “the Protester” is at the same time ambiguous and distinctive. An androgynous, hooded, veiled, long-necked visage with arched brows and piercing eyes, Time’s depiction of “the Protester” recounts how he and/or she roamed from “the Arab Spring to Athens from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow.” Resurrecting this street-fighting historical agent of social change from the deep sleep induced by Time’s own eager embrace of Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis during the Clinton years, the magazine’s editors spin up here their own just-in-time sociology. That is, the years from 1991 to 2011 are now another now closed chapter in time: “credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like emotional sideshows--obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war . . .. massive and effective street protest; was a global oxymoron until--suddenly, shockingly--starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history” (Time, December 14, 2011). Most importantly, however, Time asserts the revolutions of 2011 were marked distinctively by “their use of the Internet and social media . . . In the Middle East and North Africa, in Spain and Greece and New York, social media and smart phones did not replace face-to-face bonds and organization but helped to enable and turbocharge them . . . New Media and blogger are now quasi synonyms for protest and protester” (Time, December 14, 2011). In other words, an “occupation” of many cyberspaces out on the Net’s systems of digital communication by “the Protester” preceded, and made possible, the protesters’ occupations of 2011 – from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. Such instant sociological analysis, however, with its easy celebration, or lazy dread, of liberatory ebullience in the streets, freedom-seeking through Facebook or crowd-sourced instant reportage of brutal state repression with mobile phone videos, misses the meaning of these movements, even as the mass media struggle to document their size, scope, and significance. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to battles for Benghazi, Libya, from summer riots in London to occupying Wall Street in New York City, from anarchy in Athens to angry voters in Moscow’s Red Square, Time’s need to find a 1789, an 1848, a 1917, or a 1968 amid 2011, in fact, ends up ultimately trashing the protesters’ aspirations for liberation. Due to the protesters’ alleged lack of clear demands, decisive agenda or heroic role-models (arguably one could find a plethora of each for every uprising), Time frets when will the protesters effectively focus their energies? The “Year of the Protester” proves to instead be – under Time’s benevolent but bored tolerance – simply a journalist’s hook for documenting many big protests of the year, which then tries to quilt together innumerable revolutions that do not even have the colors, fabrics or ideologies – touted in many other uprisings since Informatic Spatiality, Electronic Agency, Cybernetic Structure, and the New People Power: Occupy Movements at Play in Network Systems

Science should never fully rest upon settled consensus, even though intense conflicts at key conjunctures in many scientific research programs often trigger such demands.Proponents of the Anthropocene thesis in various disciplines and different countries are lobbying hard now to force a consensus about its actuality, believing that the dire changes associated with this new epoch will alarm inventors and industrialists enough to slow rapid economic development and destructive climate change.Other geoscientists, however, doubt they should declare this moment in time as the close of Holocene epoch, which demarcates the last 11,000 to 12,000 years of the current Quaternary period in geological time.Furthermore, they are reluctant to rule that the planet now is so fatally ensnared by rapid anthropogenic climate change that this new geological epoch of humanity's making, namely, "the Anthropocene" definitely exists.Such forced settlements do not adequately conform to the methodical practices of prevailing geoscience research; and, even if they did, few believe the declaration would make much difference in the workings of human life on Earth.At the same time, the suggestive powers of the Anthropocene concept for many other intellectuals, scientists, and writers beyond the sciences have become almost irresistible (Lidskog and Waterton, 2018: 25-46).Its rapid proliferation in many cultural and scientific networks through their everyday spoken and written communication is a rolling daily plebiscite that leans toward ignoring the old rules.Professor Jedediah Purdy at Duke University's law school, for example, opines that human beings do, in fact, now inhabit "a new nature" since "the Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural," which transforms, in turn, the management of this "new nature" into "a political question because the Anthropocene future is, unavoidably, a collective human project" (Purdy, 2018).Soaking in the heated froth spraying from such rhetorical whirlpools, other thinkers also find an expansive remit to speculate more concretely about the current moment "as if " the Anthropocene epoch has become a reality during "the Great Acceleration" of economic and technological change since 1945 (McNeill and Engelke, 2014: 1-5).There are groups of museum professionals, who are also have decided to sail on this rhetorical tide by steering their institutions into the largely uncharted waters of these controversies (Newell, Robin, and Wehner, 2016;and, Möllers, 2013).The catastrophic effects of rapid climate change are significant, and they do impact more than the taxonomic conventions of stratigraphers, geologists, or botanists about deep time.This study suggests nothing better exemplifies such add-on effects from these scientific debates than a few efforts by museums and other cultural institutions, first, to map new channels being cut by the currents churning up in debates about the Great Acceleration, and, second, to explore various rocks and ripples rising out of these discursive currents.Along the banks, one already finds some highly politicized collaborative conservation efforts at seed banks, zoos, biotic conservatories, aquaria, botanical gardens, and museums, as their curators struggle to sponsor the survival of Holocene life forms and cultural inventions as well as operate institutionally as arks for the activism needed to slow the accelerants of the Have a Heart for the Holocene: The Politics of Ark Activism, Collaborative Conservation, and Sponsored Survival at Museums