Global Obscenities

Book excerpt: The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble. New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation. Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.