Hypercapitalism

Perhaps Americans will finally choose to stop living in an economic Wild West and at last reject the boom-and-bust cycle of turbocharged hypercapitalism in favor of a more humane, livable society.

CCRU members disavowed the leftist pieties of their peers and fused cybernetics, metallurgy, bacteriology, chaos theory, science-fiction and the occult to explore, often in deliriously opaque language, what it meant to be alive in an age of hypercapitalism.

Under hypercapitalism, the most beautiful things are the surest signs of impending crisis. The nap seems like a luxury, or even a sign of weakness, a regression into infantlike torpor.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism at the beginning of the 1990s was very good news, but it had the unfortunate effect of making almost any left critique of America’s new hypercapitalism seem not just quixotic but also kind of corny and quaint.

However, the politics are much different. Silicon Valley’s libertarian, technocratic ideals – themselves a curious mutation of the California counterculture – could extend the darker aspects of hyper-capitalism.