The following issue features a collection of submitted work relating to the effects of late capitalism and the growing need for possible alternatives.
Click and scroll around!
Frequently isolated, deprived of healthcare and support, and obsessed with productive immortality, online diagnostic tools, listicles, and comments sections have become our fast doctors, therapists, life coaches, and confidants, however ineffective. Alien WebMD attempts to critique this alienating process and the many unsavory results of unfettered capitalism today. The zine’s purpose is to act as a creative, community building, and strategic outlet for people living in a system in dire need of restructuring.
In addition to the alienation we experience through systematic isolation and mediating technologies, the the zine ironically references one of the only strategies capitalists have imagined for resolving the ongoing crisis of the degrading planet: to save themselves by colonizing other planets. WebMD, a health media corporation that includes web-based diagnostic applications, is a quintessential example of late capitalist medicalization, serving as a substitute for community and structural resources while churning out worst-case scenarios. The zine’s title therefore merges these references as a place to showcase and express one’s late capitalist “symptoms” and ways to manage or overcome them.
Animations by Sasha F.
Late Capitalism Diagnostics
Daria Taback
The doctor is in! Take this quiz to find out what’s plaguing you in late capitalism.
The Late Capitalist Media Paradox (Elucidated by @Dril)
Chase Kamp
This essay highlights the contradictions and challenges faced by the mainstream media through tweets by Twitter's most notorious online loser, @Dril. Hyper-literate in the online sphere, acutely aware of chinks in the armor of discourse, and a massively arrogant dumbass, @Dril is the perfect lens through which to examine the conditions of both mainstream and social media, as well as their subjects and consumers.
ATM Friend
Daria Taback
Cryptocurrency Ok
Sasha F.
The Fetishism of Commodities, Animated
Daria Taback
A breakdown of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.
Are You a Robot? CAPTCHA Test
Daria Taback
Prove you’re not a robot! Shout out to comrade [g]Rad / George Slavik for this idea.
Monopoly Capitalism
E. J. G. Hon
Jelly Roll Pen & Colored Pencil
Purchase / Consume / Discard
George Slavik
(Yeah—I don’t really need a link—seems awfully capitalist if I do—like my submission needs to be productive and garner me more followers)
Ziggy takes a stand against slumlords
Daria Taback
A cake to celebrate an ending that is not an ending.
Marisa A. Coyne
I don't make birthday cakes anymore. Instead, I make cakes for less festive occasions. These days college attendees in the US owe nearly $1.5 trillion dollars in student loans. This staggering debt, or the prospect of such debt, shapes the realities, imaginations, and futures, of people, young and old, seeking personal enrichment, survival, or a spot in the ever-shrinking middle-class. Under late capitalism, we don't need cakes for birthdays. We need cakes for death days -- the days our student loans succumb to the blow of final payment.
This classic funfetti cake marks the day that Alexander Ersfeld Keilty paid down one of the three student loans he secured to attend a small college in his home state of Minnesota. Alexander currently works as a high school science teacher. He estimates, at 33, that he will be in his 40s when he completes his final final student loan payment. In this piece funfetti, arguably the most jovial of cake varieties, contrasts nicely with the pallor of debt in America.
Google Search is My Doctor and Therapist
Daria Taback
Your search questions: add to the anonymous database!
Prepper's Plant Sale Extravaganza
Erica Schapiro-Sakashita
My submission is an homage to the tropes of graphic design used to advertise discounted goods. I used it as a fake advertisement for my real artwork, a sculpture project I started in part because of the guilt and anxiety I feel about generating post consumer waste. This zine felt like the perfect time to address these feelings, as well as the ongoing cycle of self doubt and insecurity about my productivity as an artist in late capitalism.
Harmonize (TM)
Daria Taback
This parody infomercial takes place in an imagined future when sex robots have replaced women as companions. In this world (not a far stretch from our own), the “leftover” women are given the opportunity to become roboticized — replacing their autonomy, personality, and preserving them at a young age, while leaving their reproductive organs in tact. This video comments on the persistence of the commodification of women under capitalism. While “you can’t harm a robot,” the promotion of non-consensual sex and companionship with someone over whom you have complete control is an old idea recycled in new forms. Less than 5% of RealDoll customers are women.
Rebecca Solnit articulately argues that “incels” (or “involuntary celibates”) are not just a strange, fringe group of violent misogynistic men, rather they promote “extreme versions of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with” — transactional and one-sided. The idea that women are commodities, toys, and status trophies to which men are entitled has long been a mainstream idea in our culture.
Footage taken from The New York Times.
Mansplain Generator
Daria Taback
Mansplaining is a concept that speaks to a commonly felt experience: male arrogance over women about knowledge.
Office Christmas Party Present
Sasha F.
A San Francisco Portrait
Jared Silbert
Evening Walk
Sasha F.
A collection of haikus about my back pain.
5 from Myth of the Garbage Patch
Maya Weeks
Myth of the Garbage Patch is a multimedia project about late capitalism, gendered violence, oceans, bodies, and logistics. It examines cultural imaginaries of trash in the ocean, this trash as capital accumulation, and its violently gendered effects.
Respecting Women & Femmes 101
Jemma Bean
As the the #MeToo movement started gaining momentum, I created this quiz in response to the fact that the basic respect and treatment of women as human beings was and is still not a given in our world.
Hourglass Figure
Hannah Trumbull
This poem is about seeing a past lover for the first time in a long time. Capitalism divides us from our sense of self, other, and beauty so that time is all we have to give and take. Giving time to someone makes you vulnerable, which is scary, which might be love. We work an absurd amount and in the rest of the time we break each other's hearts.
Everyone I Know Lives in a Converted Storage Unit
Dave Bay
A series of of drawings of places that I have lived that were converted storage units. I realized at some point that I and just about every friend I could think of had at some point and more often than not repeatedly lived in an apartment that was really some sort of converted storage. Traditional living is well out of the reach of most young people and increasingly everyone else, too.
How to Be a Woman at 30
Daria Taback
This piece addresses patriarchal and commodifying dynamics in relationships and in the workplace. Women are condemned for having expectations while bearing the brunt of emotional laboring and care for others. They are also blamed for not getting ahead in their careers, for lack of “leaning in” — often without examining the structural forces that prevent women from being able to “lean.” These examples highlight the lack of consideration for the patriarchal and capitalist conditions that cause women to feel powerless, objectified, exchangeable, and lacking in value, particularly after 30, when they start to lose their most effective form of cultural capital: their appeal to men. In response, I embrace the life of the “crazy dog lady.”
Footage and imagery taken from Sex and the City, 60 Minutes, Bridget Jones’ Diary, WikiHow, and stock image repositories.
You’re Invited! Family Dinner
Alicia Decker, George Slavik, and Daria Taback
You’re Invited! to a community dining experience. You'll never have to eat alone again!
This project consists of an 8’ tall dining pod in which participants can eat instant meal Jelly Beans and choose one of three simulated social meal experiences that play on video: Family Dinner, Cool Friends Party, and Romantic Picnic.
The makers of You’re Invited! ask guests to examine the value of eating real food with real people. The project comments on the dining rituals of our fast-paced, production-oriented society that values time-free, instant meals like Soylent that enable and encourage workers to not take breaks at the expense of their psychological well being. See more at youreinvited.me.
Virtual Psychic
Daria Taback
Explore the page with clicks and hovers, and scroll down for a meme tarot clarity spread on your situation in late capitalism.
Lukewarm War
Daniel Friedman & Sasha Mikhailova
Living under tension from the 3 directions of right/left/center politics in late/after capitalism.
Internet Archeology
Sasha F. and Daria Taback
A small sampling of our screenshot exchanges as we’ve purveyed the Internet.
