The Loot Loop: Politics of Psychology in Consumer Society

Product 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.


About the Author


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]