Go Home, Occupy Movement!!
Go Home, Occupy Movement!!
(The McFB - Was Ist Das?)
Ever since, years ago, I coined the expression "McFB way of life" and particularly since my intriguing FB articles (Is there life after Facebook I and II) have been published, I was confronted with numerous requests to clarify the meaning. My usual answer was a contra-question: If humans hardly ever question fetishisation or oppose the (self-) trivialization, why then is the subsequent brutalization a surprise to them?
Not pretending to reveal a coherent theory, the following lines are my instructive findings, most of all on the issue why it is time to go home and search for a silence.
Largely drawing on the works of the grand philosophers of the German Classicism and Dialectic Materialism, it was sociologist Max Weber who was the first - among modern age thinkers - to note that the industrialized world is undergoing a rapid process of rationalization of its state (and other vital societal) institutions. This process - Weber points out - is charac-terized by an increased efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control over any 'threat' of uncertainty. Hereby, the uncertainty should be understood in relation to the historically unstable precognitive and cognitive human, individual and group, dynamics. A disheartened, cold and calculative over-rationalization might lead to obscurity of irrationality, Weber warns. His famous metaphor of the iron cage or irrationality of rationality refers to his concern that extremely rationalized (public) institution inevitably alienates itself and turns dehumanized to both those who staff them and those they serve, with a tiny upper caste of controllers steadily losing touch of reality.
Revisiting, rethinking and rejuvenating Weber's theory (but also those of Sartre, Heidegger, Lukács, Lefebvre, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Bloch), it was the US sociologist George Ritzer who postulated that the late 20th century institutions are rationalized to a degree that the entire state becomes 'McDonaldized', since the principles of the fast food industry have gradually pervaded other segments of society and very aspects of life (The McDonaldization of Society, a controversial and highly inspiring book of popular language, written in 1993).
Thus paraphrased, Ritzer states that (i) McEfficiency is achieved by the systematic elimination of unnecessary time or effort in pursuing an objective. As the economy has to be just-in-time competitively productive, society has to be efficient as well. Corresponding to this mantra, only a society governed by business models and sociability run on marketing principles is a successfully optimized polity. Premium efficiency in the workplace (and over broader aspects of sociableness) is attainable by introducing F.W. Taylor's and H. Ford's assembly line into human resources and their intellectual activity (sort of intellectual assembly line)[1]. Even the average daily exposure to the so-called news and headlines rather serves an instructive and directional than informational purpose. Hence, McEfficiency solidifies the system, protecting its karma and dharma from any spontaneity, digression, unnecessary questioning and experimenting or surprise.
(ii) McCalculability is an attempt to measure quality in terms of quantity, whereby quality becomes secondary, if at all a concern. The IT sector, along with the search engines and cyber -social clubs, has considerably contributed to the growing emphasis on calculability. Not only the fast food chains (1 billion meals, everybody-served-in-a-minute), Google, Facebook, TV Reality Shows, and the like, as well as the universities, hospitals and travel agencies, all operate on a nearly fetishised and worshiped 'most voted', 'frequently visited','most popular', a big is beautiful, matrix. It is a calculability which mystically assures us that the BigMac is always the best meal - given its quantity; that the best reader is always a bestseller book; and that the best song is a tune with the most clicks on YouTube. One of the most wanted air carriers, AirAsia, has a slogan: Everyone can fly now[2]. Amount, size, frequency, length and volume is all what matters. Thus, a number, a pure digit becomes the (Burger) king. Long Yahoo, the king! Many of my students admit to me that Google for them is more than a search engine; that actually googalization is a well-established method which considerably and frequently replaces the cognitive selection when preparing their assignments and exams. Ergo, instead of complimenting, this k(l)icky-Wiki-picky method increasingly substitutes the process of human reasoning.
(iii) McPredictability is the key factor of the rationalized McDonalds process. On the broader scale, a rational (rationally optimized) society is one in which people know well beforehand what (and when) to expect. Hence, fast food is always mediocre - it never tastes very bad or very good. The parameter of McFood is therefore a surprise-less world in which equally both disappointment and delight are considerably absent. McMeals will always blend uniform preparation and contents as well as the
