Comedié regrettée, Racine, Comedia (Haunter Records)
“Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” —Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie.
Casio Manufacturing Corporation, the US-based subsidiary of Japanese consumer electronics company Casio Computer, announced the construction of its first North American factory complex in Tijuana, Mexico, in December 1988.
Casio set up operations on a sprawling 14-acre property, nestled next to its new neighbours, Sony, Sanyo, and Maxell, constructing a 162,000 square-foot plant in the Mesa de Otay section of Tijuana, right next to the Otay Mesa US border crossing.
The facility would be responsible for making the Casiotone line of electronic musical instruments, cheap and portable synthesizers intended to compete with products from other companies like Yamaha and Roland.
Casio chose Tijuana because of its proximity to Southern California, the world’s largest electronics market at the time, and the location of the National Association of Music Merchants, North America’s trade association representing the entire musical instrument industry.
Of course, being able to pay its staff of 200 workers $1.25 per hour, a full $4 less than the concurrent minimum wage in California, likely factored into Casio’s decision.
Nümonia with DJ CPR Annie, Le Cheval Blanc, 5 April 2025
America’s desire for cheap consumer goods fuelled a more than 20-year exodus of manufacturing from the United States, and from the west more broadly, beginning in earnest during the 1980s and reaching its peak around the turn of the 2000s.
General Motors laid off tens of thousands of factory workers in Flint, Michigan, leading to the economic devastation of the once vibrant auto manufacturing town about 100 kilometers west of the Canadian border, an era chronicled in the filmmaker Michael Moore’s 1989 debut documentary, Roger and Me.
GM was just one of hundreds of companies to move manufacturing facilities to countries with no minimum wage, lax labour laws, zero tolerance for union organization, lower corporate tax rates, nonexistent tariffs, and other financial incentives for business.
It became cheaper to ship products to America across long distances than to pay workers the salaries they began to demand — in order to afford the consumer goods that came to characterize modern middle-class Western life.
The Mivos Quartet presents Steve Reich’s complete string quartets, Bourgie Hall, 1 April 2025
Did prices follow wages, or vice versa? Did demand stimulate supply, or was demand artificially produced to justify excess?
Certainly, in the case of electronic musical instruments, there was no existential necessity for synthesizers and samplers, drum machines or computer sequencers. Musicians had made melodies just fine for thousands of years using acoustic instruments that were crafted by artisans and luthiers rather than mass-produced in low-wage factories.
Electronic music became fashionable in part because of the media that consumer electronics — namely radio, recordings, and television — facilitated. “I want my MTV” was the rallying cry of a new generation. This equation is represented by a simple formula: media + technology = desire ♾️.
The problem is that earthly production cannot increase infinitely. Eventually, we run out of things.
Greetings, Mary Garden, Espace Maurice, 29 March 2025
“A base-level futurism is simply unavoidable. Radical scepticism — irrespective of its intellectual merits — does not offer a practical alternative.” —Nick Land, “Eternal Return, and After.”
Naomi Klein’s 2000 book No Logo was a manifesto that became the new millennium’s anti-globalist scripture. Suddenly, it was fashionable to reject fast fashion, disdaining name brands like The Gap and Old Navy whilst quoting low salary figures from regions like Southeast Asia and India, where many of their products were made.
Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, and Esprit were among the companies reportedly paying workers as low as 13 US cents per hour in China, where a living wage was only around 10 dollars a day. By contrast, garment factory workers in Germany in the late 1990s were earning an average of $18.50 an hour, according to Klein.
In the west, capitalism’s malaise manifested as melancholy exemplified by Radiohead’s weeping minotaur avatar, lost in a labyrinth that its own insatiable desires designed for and by itself. Buying or not buying Nike trainers produced equivalent but opposing measures of dissatisfaction. The libidinal pleasure derived from having dissolved because consuming assumed that others couldn’t.
However, instead of bowing to domestic pressure, multinational corporations simply doubled down on exploitative labour practices sensing that, like every trend, rejection of capitalism’s darkest impulses would melt away. And it did.
LEYA with Kee Avil and Deli Girls, Cabaret Foufounes Electriques, 9 April 2025
A recent New York Times op-ed written by the author Patrick McGee estimates that an American-made iPhone could cost upwards of $3,500. Nonetheless, a worse problem presents itself in the dearth of highly skilled technical labour in America that would be necessary to manufacture something as complex as an iPhone. To coin a phrase, the Rust Belt is a little rusty.
It took at least two or three decades to offshore manufacturing to unscrupulous and hungry nations. So, it may take decades more for America to starve itself back to the bottom. Globalization, once vilified on the political left, neoliberals now view as necessary to an integrated and interdependent economic ecosystem, in spite of its exploitative tendencies.
The hard right has filled the vacuum that Michael Moore once occupied. Although there is more than a rhetorical difference between cultivating local markets and punishing foreign ones. Is it possible that cutthroat exploitation is better than actually having your throat cut?
lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran, 13 March — 3 May 2025
On 17 January 2025, the rapper Snoop Dogg DJed the first-ever Crypto Ball planned as a simultaneous inauguration party at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, just a few blocks away from the White House. The President-elect was notably absent, concurrently taking to his own social network to announce the $Trump coin’s launch, a cryptocurrency that would net the new president $350 million in fees.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump, not a musician, detunes markets.◼︎
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Cover image: Gallery view, lie down with holograms, David Armstrong Six, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photographed for NicheMTL.
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