“At the height of the uprising, people marched in Bonn, Rome, London, Tokyo, New York and dozens of other cities around the world; students in universities revolted…”
Peak oil, mass extinction, catastrophic climate change. With every passing day, the signs are becoming more and more difficult to deny. But we deny them anyway. We swear we’ll curb emissions. We pledge to actively pursue an alternative energy policy. We don’t believe we have a problem. We can stop anytime we want. Just not today.
What if Japan, the face of the future, is showing us who we are becoming – as a kind of proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine,’ a Cassandra of our trans-cultural futures.
When the life Sontag loved fell away and the death she feared took over, relaxation set into her body for the first time, a smile appeared on her lips and her brow unfurled.
A new capitalism – brutal and conquering – is moving in. It’s the capitalism of a new category of vulture funds: private equity funds with the appetite of an ogre that command colossal amounts of capital.
We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. (Cover story of Adbusters Issue #79, hitting the newsstands now.)