Stanford Humanities Center
Eli Cook is an associate professor at the University of Haifa where he specializes in the history of American capitalism and economic thought. His first book, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life, won the Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s Best Book Award as well as the Morris D. Forkosch Best Book Prize from the Journal of the History of the Ideas.
SHC Project
Choose-Your-Own-Captivity: Choice Architects and the Analog Origins of Digital Capitalism
By tracing the choice-centric emergence of Choose-Your-Own Adventure books, fantasy sports, teen magazine quizzes, school stock market simulations, Ritalin-fueled standardized tests, Nickelodeon market research and much more, this pre-internet cultural history of American neoliberalism examines how childhood was restructured by an endless array of interactive, multiple-choice “menus.” While such novel formats led children to genuinely feel as if they were wholly individual subjects entirely free (and thus also responsible) to choose their own fate, this project traces the origins of our current era of platform capitalism and rising inequality by uncovering the powerful “choice architects” and social conditions that structured the choices made available to them.
