Wal-Mart
Article
Wal-Mart is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 04, 2021 and November 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “If this really happened then Wal-Mart would be put out of business”; “Wal-Mart would be put out of business”; “the obese white Boomer who shops at Wal-Mart”. It most often appears alongside America, “How do you do, fellow kids?”, NotAllMen.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: May 04, 2021
- Last seen: November 08, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- “How do you do, fellow kids?” (1 shared issues)
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- NotAllMen (1 shared issues)
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- TheResistance (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s - 1990s (1 shared issues)
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- 2000s (1 shared issues)
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- 2008 (1 shared issues)
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- 2010s (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- 11 (1 shared issues)
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- 11 attacks (1 shared issues)
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- A Brief History Of Neoliberalism (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The imbalances seem not to trouble the Bush administration, judging by cavalier statements to the effect that the current account deficit, if it is a problem, can easily be dealt with by people buying US-made goods (as if such goods are readily available and cheap enough and as if nominally US-made goods do not have a high foreign-input component). If this really happened then Wal-Mart would be put out of business. The budget deficit, Bush says, can easily be dealt with without raising taxes by curbing domestic programmes (as if there are any large discretionary programmes left to dismantle). Vice-President Cheney’s remark that ‘Reagan taught us that budget deficits do not matter’ is alarming, because what Reagan also taught is that running up deficits is a way to force retrenchment in public expenditures and that attacking the standard of living of the mass of the population while feathering the nests of the rich can best be accomplished in the midst of financial turmoil and crisis. If, furthermore, we ask the general question, ‘Who has actually benefited from the numerous financial crises that have cascaded from one country to another in wave after wave of catastrophic deflations, inflations, capital flights and structural adjustments since the late 1970s?’, the weak commitment of the current US administration to fending off a fiscal crisis in spite of all the warning signs becomes more readily understandable. In the wake of a financial crash, the ruling elite may hope to emerge even more empowered than before.
In 2014, armed with this model, I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. For the previous few years, the social justice movement had been the dominant intellectual paradigm in online spaces (and increasingly offline too). The movement had started with the same people who start all trends - starving bohemian artists, poor people on the fringes of society, hip college kids. Beginning around 2008 it spread like wildfire among all the most popular and clued-in people I knew - all my favorite slightly contrarian bloggers, all the most interesting people at my college. But by 2014, it was starting to get embarrassing. We'd already seen the beginnings of "woke capitalism", where Wal-Mart or Amazon or whoever would put their corporate logos in rainbow colors for gay pride day and then everyone would praise them and talk about how they were striking a bold blow against the entrenched forces of the kyriarchy. Hillary Clinton, 25-year-contender for America's least cool person, was giving speeches about male privilege and rape culture. The Instagram pages of the hippest, most counterculture people in the country sounded exactly the same as the lectures corporate consultants gave at mandatory educational workshops. According to Bell's theory there was no way this was a stable situation.
And so I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. Nobody would confuse them with the maximally-uncool people, the obese white Boomer who shops at Wal-Mart and plasters their car with anti-Obama bumper stickers. And it would distinguish them from the corporate consulants and Hillary Clintons of the world. A few hip young people seem to have tried this - I think this was a little bit of what gave the alt-right its original appeal, especially after Clinton's speech.
Marc Lore founded diapers.com and various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city in the deserts of the American West, with a new vision of socially responsible democracy.