{"id":7097,"date":"2015-12-10T13:49:04","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T20:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7097"},"modified":"2016-01-09T13:56:07","modified_gmt":"2016-01-09T20:56:07","slug":"cult-easton-ellis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/12\/10\/cult-easton-ellis\/","title":{"rendered":"Cult Easton Ellis"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Bret Easton Ellis on Living in the Cult of Likability<\/h1>\n

By\u00a0BRET EASTON ELLIS<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"BRET EASTON ELLIS by Jeff Burton<\/em><\/p>\n

This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.<\/em><\/p>\n

Turning Point:<\/strong> Uber becomes one of the world\u2019s most valuable start-ups.<\/em><\/p>\n

On a recent episode of the television series \u201cSouth Park,\u201d the character Cartman and other townspeople who are enthralled with Yelp, the app that lets customers rate and review restaurants, remind ma\u00eetre d\u2019s and waiters that they will be posting reviews of their meals. These \u201cYelpers\u201d threaten to give the eateries only one star out of five if they don\u2019t please them and do exactly as they say. The restaurants feel that they have no choice but to comply with the Yelpers, who take advantage of their power by asking for free dishes and making suggestions on improving the lighting. The restaurant employees tolerate all this with increasing frustration and anger \u2014 at one point Yelp reviewers are even compared to the Islamic State group \u2014 before both parties finally arrive at a truce. Yet unknown to the Yelpers, the restaurants decide to get their revenge by contaminating the Yelpers\u2019 plates with every bodily fluid imaginable.<\/p>\n

The point of the episode is that today everyone thinks that they\u2019re a professional critic (\u201cEveryone relies on my Yelp reviews!\u201d), even if they have no idea what they\u2019re talking about. But it\u2019s also a bleak commentary on what has become known as the \u201creputation economy.\u201d In depicting the restaurants\u2019 getting their revenge on the Yelpers, the episode touches on the fact that services today are also rating us, which raises a question: How will we deal with the way we present ourselves online and in social media, and how do individuals brand themselves in what is a widening corporate culture?<\/p>\n

The idea that everybody thinks they\u2019re specialists with voices that deserve to be heard has actually made everyone\u2019s voice less meaningful. All we\u2019re doing is setting ourselves up to be sold to \u2014 to be branded, targeted and data-mined. But this is the logical endgame of the democratization of culture and the dreaded cult of inclusivity, which insists that all of us must exist under the same umbrella of corporate regulation \u2014 a mandate that dictates how we should express ourselves and behave.<\/p>\n

Most people of a certain age probably noticed this when they joined their first corporation, Facebook, which has its own rules regarding expressions of opinion and sexuality. Facebook encouraged users to \u201clike\u201d things, and because it was a platform where many people branded themselves on the social Web for the first time, the impulse was to follow the Facebook dictum and present an idealized portrait of their lives \u2014 a nicer, friendlier, duller self. And it was this burgeoning of the likability cult and the dreaded notion of \u201crelatability\u201d that ultimately reduced everyone to a kind of neutered clockwork orange, enslaved to the corporate status quo. To be accepted we have to follow an upbeat morality code where everything must be liked and everybody\u2019s voice respected, and any person who has a negative opinion \u2014 a dislike \u2014 will be shut out of the conversation. Anyone who resists such groupthink is ruthlessly shamed. Absurd doses of invective are hurled at the supposed troll to the point that the original \u201coffense\u201d often seems negligible by comparison.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The New York Times<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Bret Easton Ellis on Living in the Cult of Likability By\u00a0BRET EASTON ELLIS BRET EASTON ELLIS by Jeff Burton This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. Turning Point: Uber becomes one of the world\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}