Financial Psychedelia and the Commons

Using the metaphor of the Grateful Dead's music and community spirit, this book analyses the processes of political transformation in the USA from Fordist capitalism to today's platform capitalism.

This book pays homage to a rock band that has most influenced alternative culture, the Grateful Dead. It critically discussing the evolution of the libertarian spirit in the USA, which was born and developed in the 1960s and merged in the last three decades into a libertarian ideology, based on individual freedom, antistatalism and the primacy of the spirit of the self-made man. Examining how this transition was functional, on the one hand, to high-tech digital innovation and, on the other, to the spirit of new platform capitalism. Andrea Fumagalli suggests that the process of capturing the libertarian spirit for capitalist purposes, which represents one of the clearest examples of "life subsumption", the acknowledgment that the life of individuals at the very moment that it triggers processes of social cooperation is a potential source of subversive behaviour, and how this can turn into a powerful tool for today's capitalist valorisation.