<i>carpe diem</i> credit-card capitalism

I've put up another depressing culturemonkey post that functions as a kind of follow-up to last week's, thinking about the way 1973 can be seen as the high-water mark for production-oriented capitalism. That year exposed the physical limits to production that our society will someday confront, perhaps best symbolized by the closing of the frontier with the last manned mission to the moon in Dec. 1972. The growth and technological magic of the last thirty years has been fueled by debt as much as by innovation, with the evacuation of futurity and long-term planning replaced by the endless now of the credit card. This is what consumer society is—and like anything else, it can't last forever.