One of the great delights of this decade is @Scarfolk, @richard_littler's long-running art-project about a English horror-town trapped in an endless, looping Thatcherite decade, whose artifacts are pitch-perfect comments on our own daily lives.
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The period Littler focuses on - the dawn of neoliberalism - is a turning point in our collective timeline, the ascendant moment of selfishness, the elevation of sociopathy to a virtue, the moment in which corporate personhood was elevated at the expense of human personhood.
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As such, the parallels he is able to draw are incredible, savage and brilliant, augmented by his biting prose and his superb draftsmanship and outstanding design.
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Littler's work was born digital, but it transitions VERY well to print. Last year's SCARFOLK ANNUAL was one of 2019's best art-books.
This year's addition to the print Scarfolk canon is "Scarfolk & Environs: Road & Leisure Map for Uninvited Tourists," endorsed by the likes of @billybragg and @Beathhigh.
For those of us who grew up poring over the endpaper maps in Lord of the Rings or the giant hex-paper Greyhawk maps in our D&D modules, this is a weirdly comforting and profoundly discomfiting artefact.
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It retails for £12.00; Britons can buy it from Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells or the Book Depository. There's also a web-exclusive run of 1,000 with Herb Lester that comes with "a Scarfolk bookmark made of genuine imitation leather."
The Obama administration inherited a vast economic crisis. They responded with Quantitative Easing, pumping trillions into the finance sector to rescue the banks that had knowingly gambled on bad mortgages, losing so much they were about to go under.
At the time, deficit hawks predicted inflation, which is a commonsense prediction: inflation is what happens when the amount of money chasing goods and services goes up faster than the supply of those goods and services, creating bidding wars.
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They were right...and wrong. What we got was asset bubbles, especially in housing markets, driving up the price of putting a roof over your head rewarding speculators and landlords, especially Wall Street landlords.
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HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.
Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.
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The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers' interests ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.
After all, when your profits depend on charging more for ink than vintage Veuve-Clicquot, you need to get up to some serious shenanigans to get your customers to drain their bank accounts to fill their printers.
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