/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14369660]

So how do we get the term 'burgerpunk' into mainstream academia?

[Anonymous No.14369669]

"Globalization" (or Americanization for people who find it's easier to just blame America for why there're only 4 newspapers left in their country)

[Anonymous No.14369686]

>>14369660
Which city is this?

[Anonymous No.14369706]

>>14369660
>>14369686
This is Breezewood, PA, isn't it?

[Anonymous No.14369710]

could you explain "burgerpunk"

[Anonymous No.14369713]

>>14369710
it's a "you had to be there" sort of thing desu

[Anonymous No.14369717]

the minimalist movement in the '80s and, if you like, DFW are basically what people seem to mean by burgerpunk and they are widely studied in the academy

[Anonymous No.14369725]

>>14369710
It's kinda a meme term rn so it has yet to really get a concrete definition, but i'd consider it the
general aesthetic of consumerist american-culture with anti-capitalist undertones.

[Anonymous No.14369734]

>>14369660
These places exist as stopovers for truckers and people on roadtrips. America is a very large country and has a lot of sparsely populated land. I don't know why Europeans and other third worlders find this so confusing.

[Anonymous No.14369738]

>>14369734
america is the ulcer of the world and god's justice will destroy it sooner or later.

[Anonymous No.14369840]

>>14369710
Somebody post the burgerpunk reading list. And yeah, it's basically what >>14369725 said: growing discontent and/or malaise with the late capitalist lifestyle in Americans. American Psycho does a good job of it.

[Anonymous No.14369851]

>>14369669
Globalization is Americanization, for now. The US acts as the vehicle through which Capital circulates, encroaches and ultimately flattens the globe.

[Anonymous No.14369856]

>>14369660
why

[Anonymous No.14369858]

>>14369840
you think American Psycho is a good example? I would have thought "burgerpunk" lit would be looking mainly at the American underclass

[Anonymous No.14369861]

>>14369840
There's the blindpill chart which is kinda related to this feel

[Anonymous No.14369948]

>>14369686
It doesn't matter. I've traveled America on long road trips since I was a small child, there are enclaves like this all over the country and most small towns that are close to a major highway have one.
This is something that doesn't have a specific word denoting it, unfortunately, but could be called an "Entertainment District" or a "Hospitality Zone" or a "Tourist Trap." The locals almost never come out to these places except to work or satisfy a specific fast food craving that isn't duplicated in the town proper-maybe it's the only Pizza Hut in town, by way of example.
In the really big metropolises, places like Denver and Phoenix and Houston, they have similar places, but they're sort of glamoured up and made ritzy, if not respectable, by an excess of potted plants and fountains and fashionable things to do. It's all the same. The real meat and potatoes of everyday life doesn't happen within earshot of a respectable hotel. The churches, schools, museums, libraries and grocery stores are all well away from any of that. Who has time for that after driving for ten hours?
TL,DR: OP's image looks like a miserable place to live because nobody really lives there. Everybody is either visiting or at work, and the latter live in quiet, normal-looking towns a mile or so away from all that rubbish.

[Anonymous No.14369956]

>>14369948
The metropolitan/"downtown" equivalent is strip malls, which people do live near/among. Not quite as repulsive as OP's pic but not really different, either

[Anonymous No.14369965]

>>14369710
cyberpunk but distinctly american. high tech dystopia but highly infantalized. Minecraft in AR; Marvel movies on Google Glasses

[Anonymous No.14369967]

>>14369948
The creation of nodes like in OP's pic is but a facet of burgerpunk. Having a throwdown at a Denny's parking lot at midnight is cyberpunk. Attending a school shooting is cyberpunk.

[Anonymous No.14369970]

>>14369967
if you could buy tickets to attend a school shooting, that actually would be cyberpunk

[Anonymous No.14369973]

>>14369970
Just you wait.

[Anonymous No.14369989]

>>14369970
but if that school shooting is sponsored by Baskin Robins and your ticket stub is redeemable for a free waffle cone upgrade with your next purchase, it lapses back into burgerpunk

[Anonymous No.14370011]

>>14369956
Well, I grant that Phoenix has a couple of Suburbs near Westgate, but for the most part there's a definite otherness to these districts, though it's much less pronounced in the big cities than in the small towns.
>>14369967
Now I know you're spouting foreign stereotypes. You'd be stumbling over yourself to make fun of me if I started talking some nonsense about how every englishman is either a poofter or a chav, or if I claimed that everywhere in France is like Paris on a bad day.
It is really quite remarkable how many people have never visited America, or if they have, did not leave the city limits of New York, and yet think they can get the measure of American life from watching our television and eating the lowest forms of our food. What is still more remarkable is how many Americans think that they themselves are very cosmopolitan and worldly people because they live in a large and unpleasant city, when in fact it would never occur to them to move more than a hundred miles from the place of their birth.

[Anonymous No.14370017]

>>14369710
it's losing your virginity at a comfort inn

[Anonymous No.14370020]

>>14370011
Newsflash, you fucking idiot: any aesthetic idea is a generalization from observable phenomenons. Cyberpunk was about the rise of grimy cities, ad explosion and corporate corruption. Romanticism was about the dullness of the dark, satanic mills. Burgerpunk is just about the stupid shit that happens in your country. Stop being a whiny burger and fulfill your role as a consoomer.

>yet think they can get the measure of American life from watching our television and eating the lowest forms of our food

This IS America. There is no real America, only America as a hyperreality. None of these stereotypes were created by foreigners: they are precisely what you sell to every single human being in the globe who has access to a bank account. Your industry produces such staggering amounts of video footage, audio files and printed word that the world is bursting with this shell of Americanism. You're pretty delusional. You should leave your country in order to see it better.

[Anonymous No.14370027]

>>14369710
the thought of explaining what the word "burgerpunk" means has literally never even occurred to me
i just saw it and instantly knew, it spoke to me from the bottom of my soul

[Anonymous No.14370033]

Is it burgerpunk?

[Anonymous No.14370048]

>>14370011
>Well, I grant that Phoenix has a couple of Suburbs near Westgate, but for the most part there's a definite otherness to these districts, though it's much less pronounced in the big cities than in the small towns.
with actual major cities (and I count Phoenix as a major city), there are definitely well-defined districts, an urban core, etc., but if you go somewhere like Lexington, KY or Scranton there's a lot less distinction between ex- or suburb and urban core, and you will find a lot of apartment buildings set back from a four- or six-lane "strip" composed of modular storefronts with Subways and Supercuts, etc., near what is supposed to be "downtown." I've been to the UK but haven't seen much outside central London. I went to one town in Cornwall and its high street had a lot of chicken shops, Ladbroke's, etc., but the city itself was so old (not designed for cars), that it didn't closely resemble the American towns I've seen and lived in, although I'm sure there are probably towns in the UK that do

[Anonymous No.14370053]

>>14370011
>>14370048
>>14370048
Shit, for some reason I thought you were English. You should already know what I'm talking about, then

[Anonymous No.14370082]

>>14370020
Stuff and nonsense. What you're talking about isn't America, it's American news and entertainment. Do you also think that japan is populated entirely by shy girl magnets and big titty onee-sans, or that normal Australians wrestle crocodiles? After all, that is what those countries produce and sell to the rest of the world.
But then, I suppose I am wasting my time by talking to someone who thinks that what he sees in american commercials is a deeper reality than the everyday lives of real, breathing Americans.
Continue to seethe, europoor.

[Anonymous No.14370089]

>>14370033
Vaporwave is just postmodernism. A lot of those albums, ironically floated from Burger Records, were just ways of winning big without putting in the effort, for the fans lucky enough to win social influence and the producers/con-artists themselves (no, like, I mean a literal warehouse full of fake OG Mac+s.)

To me, burger punk seems to be that awareness you're in the center of a world created inexplicably for wealth, for high-level fantasies and delusions, pleasure centers and new-worlds for immigrants/first-time westerners. It kind of seems like something similar to gonzo or noir only in the sense that it takes that first perspective of being some third thing, unessential to the foundation of the setting, but traps that inside a fundamental purposelessness outside of that original imposing structure. So burgerpunk is when you go to a poverty/ghetto BK just to feed your dying impulse to relieve those childhood dopamine receptors, because to you that's richer than anything under the sun, but you are not some fatass or someone plainly comfortable in low SES. You've been battered by the imagery of the unusable landscape around you, and there's never been a scene greater than "laying on the beds at bed bath and beyond" or "getting a blowjob in the starbucks bathroom".

That's the impression I get anyway.

[Anonymous No.14370198]

>>14369660
Fuck acedemia. It needs to be in the mainstream American lexicon. Just need to meme it. Make top 10 lists. Blogs. Videos. Make a subreddit. Etc. Eventually Ellen will do a 10 minute segment on her favorite burgerpunk museums.

[Anonymous No.14370224]

>>14369851
You're absolutely correct but Americanization is still a misleading term since it gives the impression that the problem starts and ends with US hegemony, and implies the problem is America rather than capital.

[Anonymous No.14370238]

>>14369710
>could you explain "burgerpunk"
It was a meme forced by the sort of losers who post on /lit/, /fa/, and /mu/. It never really caught on. Basically;
>wat if mcdonalds petrol station bad

[Anonymous No.14370241]

>>14370238
>petrol
who could be behind this post?

[Anonymous No.14370246]

>>14370238
you don't get it and are so stupid that the possibility of it being a thing that could be gotten cannot even fit into the tiny brain that sits inside your thick skull
i'd tell you to kill yourself but you're probably too stupid to do that either

[Anonymous No.14370253]

>>14369660
Am I the only one who actually likes the aesthetic of that picture? I've been living abroad for years now and that picture just makes me think of home.

[Anonymous No.14370254]

>>14370224
Yes, it is not America's "fault". However the essence of burgerpunk is inseparable from Americanism, just like the Neo Tokyo aesthetic is indivisible from Japan's interpretation of urban planning under Capital. Americanization and globalization are stupid words for this, though.

[Anonymous No.14370257]

>>14370246
kek looks like I hit a nerve. Tell me more about late capital or globalisation. Love that shit. Deep af.
You should read the book /lit/ was writing about burgerpunk. It was juvenile garbage.

[Anonymous No.14370260]

>>14370253
The beauty of a rhizomatic mess.

[Anonymous No.14370309]

>>14370082
Burgerpunk as a literary idea is obviously going to be a generalization. And while people don't live in those tourist trap-just off the highway shitholes people do live right next to strip malls or they work in the midst of endless office parks and they go from office to the couch where they watch American news and entertainment and then back to the office.

I love America, I love living in America, but if you can't see that Burgerpunk is a lived experience for millions of Americans then you're deluded. Sure it's mostly the suburban poor, and mostly a Southern and Midwestern phenomenon, but it has a real impact on the American psyche.

[Anonymous No.14370328]

>>14369970
>>14369989

> CyBurgerpunk

[Anonymous No.14370336]

America is incredibly vast and varied, almost impossible to peg anything as a "look" for the entirety of the nation. Here in northern New England, the "burgerpunk" aesthetic is so foreign, it feels like a separate country.

[JN !!vXXhA/qzhjm No.14371039]

>>14369660
>mainstream academia
>sending your concept to be suffocated to death by a bunch of sexually frustrated hacks
Wow, reach for the stars OP

[Anonymous No.14371065]

>>14369660
It's already the case since the 50's in fact.

[Anonymous No.14371069]

/lit/ leftist's obsession with being noticed or patted on the head by academia is pathetic tbqh

[Anonymous No.14371161]

>>14369710
Rural cyberpunk

[Anonymous No.14371336]

>>14371069
As opposed to the right which gave up after their millionth paper titled “I’m not a fash but it’s pretty cool” was rejected.

[Anonymous No.14371351]

>>14371336
You woudn't be implying there was some sort of...takeover of academia in the past century would you? Of course not. Queer African Studies is rigorous theory but anything right wing is simply not fit for academia. It's not bias, it's just that the right are dumber than the left, after all look at the IQ scor- well maybe don't look too closely at IQ scores.

[Anonymous No.14371368]

>>14371351
I could be because that’s what I believe to have happened, but I’m not as I’m just a shitposting commie.

[Anonymous No.14371633]

The US since they told King George to suck a fat dick, have always needed something to strive for, whether it be Manifest Destiny, the American Empire or the Cold War, the American identity needs to be united for something significant... whenever it doesn't, it falls into decay. That's what's happening now, after the fall of the USSR... the US is a wandering warrior with no more foes. They tried to make terrorism a thing, but that was like a filler arc in a Chinese cartoon.

[Anonymous No.14371646]

>>14371069
W-what?

[Anonymous No.14371659]

>>14369710
The aesthetic that is deep-fried, supersized, and with extra cheese.

[Anonymous No.14371811]

>>14369710
You have to drive around the interstate, then get off at an exit to gas up and you'll know.

[Gaskun !!LKQ0Koj4uFz No.14371980]

For Burgerpunk to even appear as a blip on the radar of meme culture you’re going to need a stand alone piece or body of work to substantiate its place in “punk” level subdivisions of fantasy or science fiction you’re imagining. There needs to be one solid example of the work that properly displays and defines the aesthetics everyone in this board seems to beat around the Bush about but never cite. I’d write it myself but I’m too busy with jetpack space operas, desu

[Anonymous No.14372003]

>>14369710
Burgerpunk has been described as the aesthetic reconciliation of the post-modernist 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 escape.

[Anonymous No.14372012]

>>14370253
no, and that's a key part of burgerpunk. It is your normal.

[Anonymous No.14372015]

>>14370336
That HDR is disgusting

[Anonymous No.14372091]

>>14370336
Clearly you’ve never been to Nashua NH, Lebanon NH, Everett MA, Malden MA, half of Connecticut, or about a billion other places. Don’t act like we’re separate.

t. resident of the commercial shithole known as Fitchburg MA

[Anonymous No.14372142]

>>14369660
We don't. Haven't you noticed how any okay joke instantly rots when presented to masses? How chan memes go from mildly funny to brain cancer inducing the moment r*ddit hears about them? For normies know no limits, they'd abuse the joke til there's nothing left to beat, and will wipe their feet on its pitiful remains.
If we don't want to lose burgepunk, keep it there.

[Anonymous No.14372178]

>>14369660
>>14372142
The irony or course being that the origin of burgerpunk itself and the coding/deciding of traditional messages that drive how Americans consume product behaves in the same way. The restaurants, establishments, plastic, waste products, and aesthetic pollution which make up the elements of burgerpunk are all derived from parody of something “simpler” and “wholesome.” Imagery of farms, small towns, and other rural idylls are twisted and corrupted, made systematic and efficient for the sake of producing capital and nothing else.

American business and culture co-opts the concepts of individuality, hard work, small communities and authenticity for the sake of raking in money from across the vast geographic expanses that make up our nation. Truly, we are lost.

>>14369710
Fundamentally, Burgerpunk is the exploitative romanticization of agrarian life and individual hard work and it’s associated aesthetics for the sake of easy profit.

[Anonymous No.14372205]

>>14371351
>look at the IQ scor- well maybe don't look too closely at IQ scores.
IQ scores aren't very useful because it was designed as an aptitude test for children, and these are known, along with basically all other sociological tests, to suffer from a huge number of confounding variables. Most places wouldn't really approve of raising a bunch of feral children in a lab for instance.
That said, right wing beliefs are strongly correlated with lower IQ lmao

[Anonymous No.14372223]

>>14370253
i wouldn't say i "like" the aesthetic but i don't dislike it, either. i think that it's important to point out a fundamental part of the american experience, which is that despite living in this cheap shitty plastic universe constructed by big corporations and brand names, there is at least the sense that there are others like you who also inhabit this world. it really does look so ugly to see EXXON MCDONALDS SUNOCO SUBWAY TACO BELL DINER WAL MART plastered over the entirety of your vision but inside of all of those places too are dorky teenagers working their first job, 40 year old frumpy waitresses, college kids working their summer away, old guys without pensions who have to keep working to pay the bills, people who all have to watch the same shitty advertisements and eat the same prepackaged food as you do. this is not necessarily good and might not even be excusable, but like it or not those are the people who your subjective reality is shared with. what the OP picture reminds me of after the initial aesthetic assault is the humanity that inhabits that grimy scaffolding, and that's what makes me think of home - the people i share this sprawling spiritual wasteland with

[Anonymous No.14372226]

>>14372205
the data for political positions and IQ tends to look like this:
>In support of this, Rinderman et al. cite findings from Great Britain and Brazil showing that people who expressed support for centrist parties (including centre-right and centre-left) had higher average IQs compared to those who supported more clearly left or right parties. An interesting finding from the study in Brazil was that people who had a political orientation at all tended to have a higher IQ than those who said they had no political orientation. This suggests that people who are more intelligent tend to be more interested in and informed about politics generally. It is worth noting that the average IQs cited for the various political orientations in Rinderman et al.’s study were all well within the normal range (an IQ ranging between 90 – 110 is considered “average”). For example, those who supported centre-right parties had an IQ around 105 whereas those who supported clearly left or right parties had IQs around 94.

The highest scoring demographic is usually libertarians iirc and it's still not a very big difference. The point is that the Left should not ever bring up IQ disparities for very obvious reasons

[Anonymous No.14372257]

>>14372205
You know nothing about this topic, clearly.

[Anonymous No.14372271]

>>14372205
I think his implication that blacks and mestizos are most likely to consistently vote Democrat... and they have consistently lower IQ. The average pure Sub-Saharan African is considered mentally retarded. Although there's a false assumption that STEM (which tend to be center right) is smarter than the arts (which tend to be center left) however the irony is that caucasians being the most creative of racial groups are more statistically more likely to be in the arts than STEM which throws a wrench in their worldview.

[Anonymous No.14372827]

>>14369660
How are you supposed to walk from any arbitrary point A to different arbitrary point B in this picture. Fuck burgers for letting car companies undermine public transport and decent pedestrian infrastructure.

[Anonymous No.14372842]

>>14372827
>assmad carlet
>weeb
checks out

[Anonymous No.14372946]

>>14369710

this >>14372003

[Anonymous No.14372976]

>>14372827
You're not, it's literally a highway overchange that was made into a "town" for tax purposes. Nobody lives there, it's a place you stop at to piss, gas up, grab a bite, and then get back on the road or rent a room for the night before heading out.

I mean that literally btw, the population is zero, reverse yandex image search it and you can find its name.

[Anonymous No.14373164]

>>14369706
it's funny because
>oversaturated capitalist hellscape america
is actually a waystation town, and for a hundred miles in any direction you'll find wilderness

[Anonymous No.14373263]

[Anonymous No.14373300]

I'm about sixty pages into a novel with themes that coincide strongly with a lot of the stuff this board describes as burgerpunk. The two protagonists are deracinated college kids that initially do nothing but take psychs and trespass in hotels and conference centers.
One of them gets kidnapped by a group of neo-Bonapartists because he's the long-lost descendant of Napoleon and the other goes on a long journey to rescue him, unknowingly joining up with a group of Prussian nationalists trying to assassinate him.
It sounds silly on the surface but I do want the whole experience and the characters they meet along the way to lead them both to lose faith in the nihilistic burgerpunk suburbia they've always been so immersed in and grow somehow into having genuine beliefs and aspirations, probably involving a lot of weird Christian mysticism.

[Anonymous No.14373393]

>>14369660
there's already an acedemic term for it, it's called "K-Mart Realism"

[Anonymous No.14373995]

>>14370017
if I lost my virginity at the mariott does that count?

[Anonymous No.14374245]

>>14369965
this is the most succinct formulation of it ive seen to this date

[Anonymous No.14374340]

>>14370082
Yeah, but the romantic notions of america you profess aren't all that. Every day more small towns bleed out, more people settle on a handful of frozen meals from wal-mart instead of proper groceries. Even the nice little places locals enjoy are relegated to the corners of a strip mall just out of view of OP's image, a mile from that I-XX interchange on Monroe, Washington, or Anywhere ave.

[Anonymous No.14374366]

>>14369965
burgerpunk isn't that high tech, just whatever modern consumerist products fit

[Anonymous No.14374371]

>mainstream academia

[Anonymous No.14374410]

>>14374366
high tech in the burger sense

[Anonymous No.14375205]

>>14374371
burgerpunk has to enter mainstream academia so it can be commodified to the fullest extent

[Anonymous No.14375213]

>>14375205
/lit/ could be a vanguard counter-academy if it tried. so much wasted potential here. sad.

[Anonymous No.14375882]

>>14371811
it's honestly kinda comfy ngl