Hostile Takeover
Sneakers instigate revolutions, condos promote freedom, and the “sharing economy” has become a means of revolt. Whereas shifting the fulfillment of every desire onto the market is no new phenomenon, perhaps the shrinking of the collective political imaginary into ever-more circumscribed, individuated, and personalized units may be. For Hostile Takeover, Sarah Lookofsky asked a range of prominent thinkers, political actors, and cultural producers to consider the analytical implications, political consequences, and artistic reverberations of corporate culture’s nimble appropriation of leftist, oppositional, and utopian ideas.
Trends and their Discontents
Natasha Stagg traces micro-trends to their sensational ends. A micro-trend micro-trend doesn’t last the time it generally takes to be recognized as a proper trend. It burns out because it flares too brightly, too quickly. But micro-trends are often what later inspire larger trends. Something that was too blatant or obvious to become fashionable at its inception but is later recontextualized as a relic and can ultimately become a signifier of its era. It’s something that overwhelms the industry of trend forecasting, fashion, and art and yet is a trend itself. Trends are trending. Isn’t it boring?
Geopolitics of Hibernation
How might we conceive a world where climate changes fast, and history moves slow? Perhaps fantasies of hibernation persist. As temperatures rise, we will live in our air-conditioned bunkers with our cell phones and lattes. Of course the other option is not without its complications. A transition to a post-carbon mode of production would not be all sweetness and light. It might lead to the geopolitical decline of the fossil fuel states. McKenzie Wark reflects on the climate wars that are upon us.
When Harry met Sally
In the so-called “age of access,” domains once circumscribed as personal are now gray zones of public/private profit-making. Referencing a study on the Berlin Wall as architecture from the 1970s by Rem Koolhaas and the contemporary transformations of Berlin’s housing practices and policies, this conversation between the collective åyr, Rem Koolhaas, and Hans Ulrich Obrist reflects on the power of the dematerialized walls of the digital age by looking at their sustained ambiguity as devices of division and exclusion—which also condition habitation and communication.