Throwaways

Book excerpt: "Unlike public education, however, consumer culture deploys the resources of what the author calls technoideological coding, in which survival no longer designates "the fittest" but rather obsolete relics from the past, those left behind by innovations. These relics are throwaways, isolated groups of the population who litter the social landscape and require the moral attention of cleanup crews, the containing apparatus of police and prisons, the financial drain of "safety nets," and the immense bureaucracies of the state. In this coding, narratives of social change are class-as-lifestyle narratives, which locate race and gender as surviving relics of a rapidly disappearing past."--BOOK JACKET.