👍🍔 - Critical burgerPunk Theory

Part 1: An Overview

Part 2: A Critique

Part 3: burgerPunk Schools of Thought

Part 3.5: A Criticism

Part 4: Neo-burgerPunk

Part 5: Was burgerpunk Dead Before it Started?

Part 6: Yes, But That Never Stopped Anyone Before

Part 7: Post-Neo-burgerPunk

Part 1: An Overview

burgerpunk has been described as the aesthetic reconciliation of the postmodernist individual recognizing the cognitive dissonance between the vast nature of corporate service-based globalization and the individualist nature of consumption forced upon them by the very nature and propaganda of their capitalist benefactors. The genre's backdrop explores the conflict between traditional american sensibilities inflated to a caricature by exaggerated use of freeway systems, suburban growth, and franchise based food products against the cynical nature of the average american blooming into a genuine need for individualized and personalized culture after slowly exchanging their ancestor's cultural heritage for their own force-fed culture of ease of access and frugality. Issues of hopelessness, automation, and complacency contrast the information provided through constant access to media and propagandized geopolitical news. The genre itself, becoming a meta commentary on other fantasy or science fiction based genres by using the actual occurring landscape as the basis for literary escape.

As a metastatic reorientation of burgerpunk, post-neo-burgerpunk emerged under the umbrella of commodification for the burgerpunk sensibility in mid-2019. Post-burgerpunk asks questions of the object-orientation of the burgerpunk School of thought, such as: does object fetishism exist without the physical object? How will the streamlining of service-oriented positions affect consumer gestalt? Is there life after burgerpunk?

In post-burgerpunk, the burgertheorist substitutes the low-quality consumer goods, with all its accompanying sense-experience and immediate physical health hazards, with the post-industrial information commodity. Where there were pimpled minimum-wage fry cooks, there are now rows of sleek touch-interfaced kiosks. Where there were gas fumes now hums the Tesla roadster. Purely ethereal forms take the place of physical sense-referents. The freeways remain, but the thrill of driving is minimized. Consumption is retained in intensity, but replaced in its formulation.

The question comes to be: did the object ever matter? And in this sense the informational commodity supersedes the consumer good. The subscription secures the means of consumption, but the commodity is ever-present for consumption. All modes exterior to the subject-object, consumer-commodity relation can then be safely expunged.

It should not be surprising then that the model of continued purchase and return should be replaced by automated subscriptions, in order to remove the choice from each forking path in consumption. The consumer need no longer to even decide yes or no, but only to remain inert within the system of automation. It might be said in the future: the mobility scooter had to roll, so that the Amazon™ drone could fly.
There remains then a contention among the burgertheorists, either in the traditional burgerpunk School, or in the more reactionary German Freipünken , of the role of Freeways in the post-burgerpunk world. The Freipünk’s Autobahn connection must not be dismissed: the origin of German consumerism rests on the cement of their superhighways. The Freeway, as a propulsive force for delivery and transaction of consumer goods, does not find easy parallel in the burgertheory of tomorrow. And those burgertheorists who have tried to handwave its replacement by the Internet, as the “Information Superhighway of Tomorrow” have been met with more than incidental scorn for their literalisms.

By this time, there were those who scarcely bothered to read the theory, either through hypnosis through the social aspects of Post-burgerpunk, engendered by a kind of creeping, mass-stimulated orgy of consumption, or through loss of the necessary faculties to understand the text.

But this brings us to the dimetrical split between the broad strokes of burger theory, that of the european school and the american.