I'm reposting this comment I made on 
It seems to me that after 2008 with the Lehman Brothers crash and subsequent bail out that Wall Street/Goldman-Sachs have decoupled from reality in the sense that they have rigged the game to a degree that they dont need consumers to make money. Wall Street is booming, or was :) the DOW up to 25,000 on what? These guys have figured out how to make money out of air and their machine is perfected. Only when it falters and breaks down will we see a renewed interest in "democracy" .. for now the monied elite are moving in the direction of China and Russia ie oligarchy and plutocracy.
Amazon is another issue that makes me insane. This centralizing and monopolizing under one firm that has huge economic clout seems really dangerous to me. The consumer class is drying up, expendable income is drying up so Amazon is putting its tentacles into the food market. The corporations are more important than people and as long as they have this kind of power, democracy is dying.
I understand the focus on identity politics as it seems to have a major hold on the public discourse, but ultimately don't brands and "nihilist cool" mostly exist on a superficial plane of appearances? I agree we have gone down the rabbit hole of atomized class relations aligned over various image or signifiers .. I think the internet effect is the greater issue. We all live in bubbles, little echo chambers, and Millennials and younger people have a hard time knowing which signifiers to align with because the world is increasingly dragged into the equalizing space of the internet ... increasingly no one knows what to believe in, and with rulers like Trump signalling a sort of spiritually-void nihilist materialism, with our education (our meaning USA, but perhaps also in the EU) being gutted by data-driven policy, etc etc .. people do not know what to believe anymore. We are in a crisis of meaning. I know I sound conservative here, but I think community/society requires common signifiers and that is falling apart.
With Wall Street lurching along and recent falls and tremors, maybe we will see a market correction. IMHO we desperately need a reality-based global economy that responds to the human needs of the global citizenry .. what we have is a well-crafted trap that enriches a tiny oligarchy .. they will not relinquish that power willingly.
spell check doesnt recognize the word "signifier"?? That's ridiculous ...