Summer 2021 issue of Dissent

 

The Summer 2021 issue of Dissent is coming out with an introduction that reads in part:

"The American political infotainment machine has turned the ethics of conviction into a source of profits. It’s Patreon politics, a trick that allows you to pretend that signaling membership in a group counts as real political work. The question is whether you think a system of commodified tribalization leaves us better off—and if not, what you can do to push against it." 

That's the right question to ask, but Dissent should have posed it at least three decades ago.

But perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. After all, as Kierkegaard sagely observed, life is lived forwards and only understood backwards.

So: Shall we continue to live forward in a system of commodified tribalization or shall we opt out in favor of other possibilities? And if the latter, what possibilities present themselves to us now? 

Think about it.