Read an Excerpt

The writing collected here spans the period between the summer of 2011 and the fall of 2019, between the birth of the Occupy movement and the midterm survival of the Trump regime. In the first piece (in terms of when it was written), on the rhetoric of the 2011 Ikea catalog, I quote Thomas L. Friedman, who summed up the feelings of that moment: “Things will slowly get better, unless they slowly get worse. We should know soon, unless we don’t.” Wall Street put a gun to the nation’s head in 2008 and threatened to shoot. The government paid up and bailed out the capitalists. It was clear something historical had happened, but not what or why. Plus, historical things weren’t supposed to happen anymore.

While the established pundits struggled to make sense of the world, a new cohort of activists and writers emerged with a scavenged explanation: class conflict. The reason no one could figure out if America was in a crisis or out of one is because its effects were uneven, and by design. This was heresy in a twenty-first-century America, where socialism had been disproven. We were taught to locate ourselves near the end of history’s long arc toward justice, a “You are here” dot sliding along the asymptote between the way things are and the best we could hope for them to be. And yet, things kept happening.

Instead of providing a higher standard of living to everyone for less work, we saw technology and the market generating unimaginable profits for a tiny ruling class, while everyone else struggled a bit harder every year. Americans lost their houses while rents went up and speculator landlords left beds empty. The crowning achievement of the Obama administration was a compromised health care bill that secured the existence of a rage-inducing private system. Higher education, that great equalizer, drove young people and their families into tens of thousands of dollars of average debt and didn’t supply the promised good jobs. It became difficult to shake the feeling that most of us were on a trajectory other than “slowly better.”

* * *

Being in New York at the end of 2011 was the right place to be geographically at the wrong time historically. After I graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010, I moved back home to California and got a job off Craigslist at a new site focused on the “sharing economy.” (I had applied for a full-time gig with health insurance, but in a twist that would become familiar, wound up with a part-time remote contract that paid a few hundred bucks a week.) For some months I spent my spare time reading, watching Netflix DVDs, writing on my blog, and thinking about what to do with myself. When I had told an advisor at Maryland that I hoped to write about ideas professionally but outside academia, he laughed and asked, “Are you independently wealthy or do you plan to live off women?” I resigned myself to grad school.

Not wanting to get too comfortable back at home (and knowing I wouldn’t be able to afford to live in the Bay Area), I planned a trip to the East Coast to try and find a place to live. The low level of commitment between remote worker and remote boss excused a move without warning, I figured, as long as I maintained Internet access. At the same time, I had earned my first real publication. I stumbled on a new online magazine that seemed like it would be a good fit for my writing, and I sent the Ikea piece to their submissions email. On the other end of the address was the small crew that made up The New Inquiry, principally publisher Rachel Rosenfelt and editor Rob Horning. They liked my piece and more of the material on the blog. When I visited New York, Rachel made me an offer: move to Brooklyn, help edit The New Inquiry, and stay in her closet-sized extra bedroom for $400 a month until I found a permanent place. As anyone who’s lived in New York in the twenty-first century knows, that’s the kind of deal you can’t turn down.

I kept my other job, spent most of my time working on TNI, and started to get to know the New York writing world. I got my medium-sized break in the spring of 2011 when the magazine n+1 published an essay I’d written about the explosion of student debt called “Bad Education.” Based on research I’d done in college for a presentation I helped develop for a left-wing student group about the financial crisis and its connection to the university, that piece gave me something to point to when I was pitching book reviews or justifying my presence at magazine parties. Though it didn’t turn into a bunch of highly paid reporting assignments, the strong reception of “Bad Education” (along with Rachel’s insistence) convinced me that I wouldn’t have to get another degree to be taken seriously. Plus none of the grad schools to which I had applied chose to admit me, which made it hard to attend any of them.

* * *

The first Occupy Wall Street general assembly was August 2, 2011. Occupation was the preferred tactic of the ultraleft student movement, which I had been a part of at Maryland. I had childhood friends who joined building occupations as part of the fight against tuition hikes at the Universities of California and I watched videos online of them being beaten and pepper sprayed by police. Students at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico took over their school for real, leading the fight against austerity on the island. Some of us wanted more, bigger occupations, outside the schools and into the public squares. “Occupy everything” was the slogan, and the plan was to never give it back. We didn’t quite get to world revolution, but we got a lot further than almost anyone expected. Sometimes I fear that the most important thing I’ll ever do with my life is fake a rock concert or lose a court case about my Twitter account—more on that soon.

My Occupy case lasted longer than the occupation, but it didn’t stop me from working. At the beginning of 2012, The New Inquiry launched as a two-dollar-a-month subscription (digital) magazine, and I left my job to edit full-time. Well, I didn’t leave so much as I informed my boss that he had neglected to renew my contract and therefore I didn’t work for him anymore and was going to do something else. The first issue of TNI was, fittingly, based on the topic of precarity—the weak connections that increasingly characterize the employment relationship. TNI’s readers paid my rent for three years, and it was an immense privilege (as well as a ton of work). I got to edit an incredible set of writers, and I’m proud of the material we put out, including especially prescient issues on drones, cops, weather, weed, consent, and borders.

When it came to my own writing, TNI was a great place to grow, and a lot of the pieces collected here are from that period. I had the freedom to pick my own topics, and a top-rate editor in Rob who was always willing to be patient and open-minded with me. Plus, publishers had started to send us review copies of forthcoming books. When I could, I sold reviews and essays to other magazines and sites, and I started to build the relationships that could sustain me as a freelancer. My first dependable writing gig came in 2013 when an editor I’d worked with at Boston Review, David Johnson, got a job at the newly launched Al Jazeera America and found a place for me there. For the first time since college I had a regular column, which allowed me to respond to current events quickly and write the occasional low-stakes piece about redheads or sex robots.

Over the course of 2014, I wrote the first draft of the manuscript for what would become my book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, which expanded on the research behind “Bad Education” into a broader analysis of my generational cohort. (Though it wouldn’t be published until November of 2017.) At the same time I kept doing columns for Al Jazeera and freelancing where I could. That was going well enough that in 2015 I could step back from paid work at TNI and focus exclusively on my own writing. In the spring of 2016, I found out at the same time as everyone else that Al Jazeera America was folding. I was living check-to-check when, with no warning, my job disappeared. I panicked. The line between making it and not felt incredibly thin, and suddenly I was on the wrong side. I reached out to other editors and planned to leave New York City, which was getting more expensive faster than my wages were increasing—a process I had contributed to by moving there in the first place and paying those ever escalating rents for as long as I could. Luckily Ted Scheinman at Pacific Standard came through with some steady work, but I still moved to Philadelphia in the summer of 2016.

Selling my book and moving to a cheaper city gave me the breathing room to work on longer, more substantial pieces, which are the ones that pay better anyway (provided you can afford to work for a month or two before getting a check). I got to report some stories, and I placed my first real feature with the New York Times Magazine. It was about furniture startups that targeted millennial buyers, and it was published on November 10, 2016. I’m not even sure I read it. At least I don’t have to blame myself: I may be a communist, but I still voted for Clinton.

* * *

The situation has gotten much worse since a guy called Mickey Smith brought a sign that said SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT to Zuccotti Park and the whole world knew what he meant. Like everyone who cares at all, I’ve struggled with the question of what the hell I’m supposed to be doing if I can’t stand the few continuing to ratchet up their exploitation of the many. It has been amazing as a leftist in America over the past decade to see so many people shift in that direction, and at the same time we have to know it’s in large part because things have gotten harder for more of them. By any metric you want to use, the exploiters are tightening their grip on the exploited at an astonishing rate. How much is there left to squeeze? For how long?

After Occupy, I didn’t stop doing political work, but I did separate it from my writing. I joined politically oriented volunteer childcare collectives, first in Brooklyn, then in Philly. There’s a whole network of them it turns out, and there’s very little ego or debate involved in the work, which was a relief. But here I’m less interested in what it means for us to do our part than where we are, how we got here, and what it is that needs to be done. This collection pulls together my best attempts to process and understand the events of this period as they occurred. I want to put this writing in its proper context—personal, historical, political—but there’s never just one. Perhaps the most important thing I can say is that I wrote most of the pieces for money, most of which I spent on rent.

I’m starting the collection with an essay about what I see as an acute emergency situation for caring people in America, a breaking point. Then I jump back to 2011, the beginning of the Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit era, when it started to become clear to more Americans that the twentieth-century narrative of progress unto the end of history was, itself, more history. If the title of this book speaks to a phenomenon you already recognize intuitively, then I hope the contents help clarify how and why, and maybe even point to a way for things to be otherwise.

And if the title doesn’t make sense to you yet? It will.