The iPhone and America

Traditional marxist thought codes production as masculine and consumption as feminine. But we've come a long was from mid-20th century in this regard and gender somehow doesn't seem to be the defining force that divides this dichotomy today. Today production and consumption is more familiarly coded along national lines. The USA consumes; Taiwan produces. This seems further fed by the general acceptance that there is a powerful connection between how people become consumers and how people become citizens. Our administration knows this all too well: the best way to help america is to distribute a stimulus check to revitalize the economy. We'll buy our way back into the world economy. We'll spend our money on technology to help us multi-task our way out of a recession. Our cutting edge will aim at micromanaging our social networks onto pocket-size black touch screens rather than developing ways to end hunger. But let's not think about that right now.

What's needed is a politics of consumption that neither blindly celebrates technological invention nor stringently valorizes our own inevitable obsolescence. Repair, compromise, rearrangement--in love as much as in politics--are maneuvers that require in order to properly function neither a winner nor a loser, but rather a vital understanding that itself is necessarily a radical invention. This is what i want. Fuck the iphone.

Hat tip to emily carruthers for dearly reminding me of this last point.