Project Mayhem Syndrome
Some jerk bombed a New York Starbucks. He saw it as an attack on "corporate America" and was imitating what he'd seen in Fight Club.
1) Did he interpret the film correctly? I'm not, of course, claiming this would even slightly justify what he did, but Fight Club got to a lot of people. Some of them started fight clubs, which is bad enough. The last thing we need is a real life Project Mayhem. (Actually, we've had other Project Mayhems well before Fight Club was released--look at the exploits of The Weathermen, for example. There's a long history, in fact, of civil disobedience in our country--the big question is over crossing the line into violence.)
As I've argued before, the explicit message of FC is Project Mayhem demonstrates when things cross the line and go way too far. But the implicit message is this is where things will naturally go, and isn't it cool.
2) It's weird how certain companies get stuck with being hated symbols of corporate America--Microsoft, Wal-Mart (both companies that barely existed not that long ago), McDonald's and Starbucks. Meanwhile, other leviathans are treated as positive symbols, like Honda or Google or Apple.
I'm not sure why Starbucks has such an evil rep. I don't drink much coffee or tea, so I rarely go there, but presumably they offered something the public wanted, or they couldn't have grown so fast. Yet, from the way some people talk, you'd think Starbucks is a conspiracy being foisted upon an unwilling public.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:17 AM
1 Comments:
Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" contains some very insightful sociological analysis mixed in with its discussion of software history.
His explanation of why Microsoft is despised is the best I have ever seen:
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity -- it is, in a word, bourgeois -- and so it attracts all of the same gripes.
As far as I can tell, the same applies to Starbucks-haters. I hear people complain that it is everywhere and rich, and others (coffee connoisseurs or those who consider themselves such) who despise it for less than gourmet coffee.
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