Subservient Chicken

[ajoe]

http://www.subservientchicken.com

[emily655321]

umm...is that real? Like, do they just stand in front of the cam all day long in a chicken costume?? I was like...oh no, I don't want to give directions to a chicken guy! :eek: I left really quick. :p

What on earth is that about???

[ajoe]

It's really fun. :banana: He'll do push-ups if you tell him to.

[ajoe]

lol, the dancing banana is making my sentences fly. :banana:

[emily655321]

It's really fun. :banana: He'll do push-ups if you tell him to.

For some reason that seems really scary. I don't like being the one to tell people what to do. :( I think I'd enjoy watching someone else play with Chicken Slave Man, but I'm not gonna visit him again. :p

[ajoe]

lol, just so you know it's not really one poor man hired to do what online people tell him to do. I don't know how exactly it works, but all the stuff he'd do he HAS done and now that's just some replaying of action depending on the keywords you type. If you know what I mean.

[emily655321]

I thought it was more like one pervo guy who liked obeying commands in a chicken suit. :p As long as he isn't really there, I guess it doesn't bother me so much.

I still hate viewing cams. I feel like the people can see me. :p

[emily655321]

Dude, I swear he's gotta be really there. He was sitting on the couch, then got up and stood... What keywords could he be responding to here?...

ME: hi there. ur scary looking
CHICKEN: *draws back and gasps, then pretends to cry*
ME: this is kinda creepy. do you make any money?
CHICKEN: *histerical laughter*
ME: lol. ok, buhbye chicken dude :)
CHICKEN: *large bow*

I'm officially very freaked out.

[ajoe]

ROTFLMAO

Like I said, I have no idea how this thing works, but he can't really be there because there are several other people commanding him to do different things, so... *shrugs*

[Sycron]

It must have taken forever to program that site. Honestly, to film over 300 different actions and then to program the input system would have taken such an enormous amount of time.

[simon]

nice avatar sycron

[simon]

Fast Food Nation

[emily655321]

I'm so relieved it's not a real guy. But it still creeps me out. :p

Has anyone seen the movie "Super Sized" yet? I really want to. Documentary of this one guy's experiment of eating nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. (Apparently he was in "superb" condition before he began, a veg who excercised daily, and at the end of one month he'd gained 25 pounds and some kind of liver disorder. It took him over a year to get healthy again.) McDonald's denies the movie influenced the decision to do away with "super sizing" and begin serving mildly healthier stuff, but all signs point to that being the case. :)

[emily655321]

Correction: the title is "Super Size Me."

[verybaddmom]

Simon, have you actually read that book? what an eye opener eh?
i also read "the mcdonaldization of society" by Ritzer for a sociology class. brings a new perspective to things like shopping malls and suburbs...ick

[simon]

Yes I read the book and it was an eye opener, I think it should be required reading in all high schools, in health classes. For anyone interested in it just don't read the part about slaughterhouses while eating a hamburger, it just isn't prudent.

[The Unnamable]

From Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society?

The Holocaust: The End-Product Was Death

Weber wrote about rationalization and bureaucratization in the early 1900s. It can be argued that his worst fears about these processes were realized in the Nazi Holocaust that began within a few decades of his death in 1920.

Zygmunt Bauman contends that "the Holocaust may serve as a paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationality." Like the bureaucracy, the Holocaust was a distinctive product of Western civilization. Further, Bauman argues that the Holocaust was not an aberration, but "in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world." That is, the Holocaust required the rationality of the modern world. It could not have occurred in premodern, less rationalized societies. In fact, the pogroms that occurred in such societies were too primitive, too inefficient to murder systematically the millions of people killed in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust can be seen as an example of modern social engineering in which the goal was the production of a perfectly rational society. To the Nazis, this perfect society was free of Jews (as well as gypsies, gays, lesbians, and the disabled). Bauman sees an analogy here to gardening. Just as a perfect garden is free of weeds, so a perfect Nazi society was one that was Judenfrei. Using a medical analogy, Hitler also defined the Jews as a "virus," a disease that had to be eliminated from Nazi society.

The Holocaust had all of the basic characteristics of rationalization (and McDonaldization). First, it was an efficient mechanism for the destruction of massive numbers of human beings. For example, early experiments showed that bullets were inefficient; the Nazis eventually settled on gas as the most efficient means of destroying people. The Nazis also found it efficient to use members of the Jewish community to perform a variety of tasks (for example, choosing the next group of victims) that they otherwise would have had to perform themselves. Many Jews cooperated because it seemed like the "rational" thing to do (they might be able to save others, or themselves) in such a rationalized system.

Second, the Holocaust emphasized calculability, for instance, how many people could be killed in the shortest period of time. Bauman offers the following further examples:

For railway managers, the only meaningful articulation of their object is in terms of tonnes per kilometre. They do not deal with humans, sheep, or barbed wire;.they only deal with cargo, and this means an entity consisting entirely of measurements and devoid of quality. For most bureaucrats, even such a category as cargo would mean too strict a quality-bound restriction. They deal only with the financial effects of their actions. Their object is money.

There was certainly little attention paid to the quality of the life, or even of the death, of the Jews as they marched inexorably to the gas chambers.
In another quantitative sense, the Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being seen as the most extreme of mass exterminations:

Like everything else done in the modern-rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated-way, the Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its alleged pre-modern equivalents, exposing them as primitive, wasteful and ineffective by comparison. Like everything else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior.... It towers high above the past genocidal episodes."

Third, there was an effort to make mass murder predictable. Thus, the whole process had an assembly-line quality about it. Trains snaked their way toward the concentration camps, victims lined up and followed a set series of steps. Once the process was complete, camp workers produced stacks of dead bodies for systematic disposal.

Finally, the victims were controlled by a huge nonhuman technology including the camps, the train system, the crematoria, and the bureaucracy that managed the entire process. Here is how Feingold describes some elements of this nonhuman technology:

[Auschwitz] was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager's production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh. The brilliantly organized railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo.... Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency.... What we witnessed was nothing less than a massive scheme of social engineering.

Needless to say, the Holocaust represented the ultimate in the irrationality of rationality—more specifically, the ultimate in dehumanization. After all, what could be more dehumanizing than murdering millions of people in such a mechanical way? Further, for the murders to have occurred in the first place, the victims had to be dehumanized, that is, "reduced to a set of quantitative measures.” Bauman concludes, "German bureaucratic machinery was put in the service of a goal incomprehensible in its irrationality."


Discussing the Holocaust in the context of precursors of McDonaldization may seem extreme to some readers. Clearly, the fast-food restaurant cannot be discussed in the same breath as the Holocaust. There has been no more heinous crime in the history of humankind. Yet, there are strong reasons to discuss the Holocaust in this context. First, the Holocaust was based on the principles of formal rationality, relying extensively on the paradigm of that type of rationality—the bureaucracy. Second, the Holocaust was also linked, as we have seen, to the factory system, discussed in the next two sections. Finally, the spread of formal rationality today in McDonaldization supports Bauman's view that something like the Holocaust could happen again.

[Stanislaw]

The hicken dude is actually an old flash-style trick, using a combination of programming code and video clips...if you notice every now and then there is a static frame or two and a frame jump...also there have been others that do something...almost anyone can replicate this all they have to do is have tons o money for bandwidth, a perverted sense of humor, access to a web/digital camera, and about 5-10 hours on a saturday afternoon. :D

But seriously what is our society coming to??? :confused:

ps. Hello VBM!

[Koa]

ps. Hello VBM!

Sorry to disappoint you, that was an old post...

[Xamonas Chegwe]

In Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens", Famine (of 4 horsemen fame) decimates the human race by the introduction of burger meals that have a negative nutritional content whilst being incredibly filling and satisfying.

I wish I could write a best-seller by stating the obvious so plainly.

Compared with BK's 'food' output, I would say that the chicken man contains far more valuable content, is a lot less bland, and almost certainly has more vitamins.