Manufacturing crisis under globalisation: middle-class precarity in Dave Eggers’s <i>A Hologram for the King</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large swaths of homo economicus americanus today confront chronic unemployment or under-employment in a period of tremendous offshoring of the production of goods and services, high consumer debt, static or declining disposable incomes, and shrinking governmental supports, even as large income gains and increasing wealth concentration are enjoyed by the rich and hyper-rich. In recent years, Dave Eggers has authored a number of post-postmodern novels that address the divergent trajectories of various contemporary American economic actors. This essay investigates one of these works, A Hologram for the King (2012), which details the long decline of the American manufacturing sector since the late seventies through globalisation, and the angst and material suffering of downward economic mobility that this has occasioned. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, this essay examines Hologram’s depiction of middle-class precarity and its repudiation of American exceptionalism, as well as its anticipation of the Trump Administration’s global trade wars. Finally, in its conclusion, the essay takes up philosophical and political issues related to economic globalisation in contemporary American and global society.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it