Do you ever just look around and get the feeling that everything is just… worse?

This week, we’re joined by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, and Lauren Boyle, co-founder of the long-running NYC art collective DIS, to discuss how the story of the 21st century became one where consumer experiences are always getting crappier, jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, and workers are constantly being asked to do more more with less.

Putting on our finance hats, we zero in on something called the leveraged buyout, a shadowy business maneuver from the world of private equity that happens to be the subject of Syzygy, Jacob’s excellent new documentary for DIS’ streaming platform DIS.ART. Mild spoiler: The film was inspired by a supremely strange Meta commercial that aired at the 2022 Super Bowl, and takes us on a surprising and thought-provoking journey involving gaming pioneer Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and private equity giant Apollo Global Management, which acquired the kitschy pizza party chain in 2014 using this very practice.

We explore how leveraged buyouts funnel resources away from companies and ordinary Americans and into the coffers of the corporate overclass, DIS’s evolving role as a patron of video work that makes theory accessible to the people, and what it means to successfully adapt to an internet that is always changing for the worse.

To watch Syzygy and check out more from the episode, head to theculturejournalist.substack.com.

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