The Loot Loop: Politics of Psychology in Consumer Society

Description

How are we to understand the technological integration that has taken place for younger generations; and what are its social, psychological and political implications not only in terms of forming relationships and imagining the future, but as routine activities maintaining and reproducing the way they see themselves? What does it mean to be plugged into a gaming console, sometimes while simultaneously binging a tv-show, perusing social media, eating and even getting high? When not at school or working, today's youth can engage in a flurry of self-stimulating activity to pass the time between compulsory subjectification. Within the circuits of self-satisfaction Selimovic uncovers something much more tantamount than a phenomenology of boredom. He argues that to be an adolescent growing up in the consumer society is to be a part of an emergent labor force tasked primarily with reproducing themselves as consumer subjects. Under the guise of false consciousness the consumer society is producing a self-stimulating machine that will absolutely nullify the existentially-upset consumer citizen. Through a treatment of gaming, the book offers a political reading of the habituation of the device-self relationship and its already observable transformative effect on the subject in the process of self-relating, and developing a consciousness and a sense of the world. Loot Loop brings together theories about what is happening in the psychic realm in advanced consumer society. Aiming to reframe our view of the emerging self-stimulating console's harmlessness, Selimovic wants to expose a reality where the ways we gather ourselves are privatized and sold back to us in an endless loop. This book exposes an urgent imperative for us to deepen our political critique of technology, before we are all looted. Adnan Selimovic is an independent theorist, a Yugoslavian émigré. He has worked in the gaming industry, and has a PhD in interdisciplinary critical theory from Social and Political Thought at York University. He has taught at City University of New York, New York University, and Ithaca College. His writing has appeared in the Journal of International Education, and New Directions in Critical Youth Studies (ed. vol.). Contact: [email protected] Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The Metropolitan Adolescent The Libidinal Economy of Gaming Towards a Politics of Subjectivity 1: Socialization as Technology in the Reproductive Economy Socialization as Technology The Entanglement of Subjectivity and Specie-ality The Real and the Imagined, the Ideal and the Fantasized Towards the Role of Gaming in the Consumer Libidinal Economy 2: Ideology as Technology in Political Economy Psychological Function of Ideology Reconsidering the Demands of Being a Consumer Subject Psycho-Politics of Consumer Technology The Player-Avatar-Subject as a Consumer Videogame High School 3: Industrial Application of Psycho-technology The Necessity of Fetishizing Small Differences in Loot Games The Reproducible Allure of the New The Anatomy of the Avatar-Subject Relationality The Nature of Commodified Identification The Principles of Psycho-Politics The Dawn of the Auto-Stimulating Machine On the Question of Addiction to Avatar-Subjectivity 4: Adolescent Gaming at the Advent of Psychic Labor Confronting the Ideological Definition of Play The Metropolitan Consumer Class New Forms of Adolescent Labor The Extraction of Value The Question of Materiality Valorization as the Site of Exploitation 5: From Reified to Commodified Performances of Self The Self-Conception of a Gamer as an Adolescent White Man The Attraction of the Open-World Games Life in the Loot Loop Gender as Psycho-Technology A Routine Fantasy of Exploitation The Selective Operationalization of Gender Performativity in Loot Games Gender as a Domain in the Auto-Stimulating Machine 6: The Psycho-Political Construct Maladies of Consumer Subjectivity A Genealogy of the Transgenerational Sacrifice Into the Economy of the Spill-over Affective Terms of Gaming Surplus-Extraction The Disney Child Exploitation of Psychic Surplus Boredom and Psychic Surplus Interlude: the Emancipatory Principle Theories of Adolescence Politics of Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination Adolescence as Class in the Age of Ouroboric Capitalism Psycho-politics and Responsibility Self-Consciousness as the Development of Private Language The Predicament of Consumer Adolescents Bibliography About the Author