2028 – Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (essay documentary 2015)

A Film by Isabella Gresser

An Essay Documentary Film narrated by and featuring Korean-German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han talks about the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘Burnout Society’. He raises the question of how we want to live today, and uncovers the underlying themes of an achievement-oriented digital society.

Read more by Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Verso Books) available on libgen.is (YT)

interview with Byung-Chul Han

interview by art review with Byung-Chul Han

review in LARB of Burnout Society

Without reading none of his celebrated books, I still have a big reluctance of what I regard a well-qualified but still blatantly anti-technological stance that Byung-Chul Han professes. To me, that smells too much of Martin Heidegger and too little of Marshall MacLuhan. There is also the feeling that there is too much convergence with the current (fully digitized) mindfulness. In a sense ‘smart’ technologies themselves offer nowadays an improved default mindfulness setting, as if in agreement with what Zizek once called a ‘decaffeinated’ version, a new sort of Decaf Reality. Mindfulness apps abound. Remains to be seen if these are just adjustments on the go – another sign that there is more and more need for what is perceived as “growing disillusionment” with future prospects and what feels more and more like a ‘labor camp’ type Googlag working environment. Tang ping is another term that is being coined completely independent from Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of post-Fordist malaise, but has a lot in common with his ideas about the current threadmill.

I also think that Byung-Chul Han’s emphasis on Panopticon is still much too imprecise and tributary to Foucault’s own predilection for early modern examples, so it risks (in my mind) missing out on the current shift of digital governance from Foucalt’s older ‘panopticon’ to the (particularly in China but also Gaza Strip/Israel) new model of ‘panspectron’ (as highlighted by Gabriele de Seta and Rogier Creemers.

By posting this documentary essay that I quite like, it is important on Byung-Chul Han – a star philosopher of recent years. Yes, I consider his ideas timely, zeitgeisty and appreciate very much his slide from studying metallurgy to philosophy and art theory. I also think that anything that might help slow down or throw some light on the nature of time (of Money) transformations under financial capitalism, or on the ideology of work, on the workings of ‘hustle culture’ and the gig economy, on ‘death by overwork’ (過労死, Karōshi), for qualifying the so-called Asian economic miracle as capitalist mode of hyper-production, and on paradoxical modes of incomplete, non-utilitarian, Taoist (emptiness philosophy inflected) non-productivist, non-optimized living speaks to this very moment of tiredness and widening depression. His own wanderings trough both East/West and his necrosophic musings within cemetery grounds and poetry (as seen in this documentary) brings him very close to my own orientation and others that I have been collaborating with over the years. He also makes a very cool reference to the Momo novel by Michael Ende that turns out to be one of the most precious and timely books on accelerationism or today’s burnout society.

Special thanks to Felix P for sharing the books of Byung-Chul Han and especially this documentary.

INFLUENCER CULT?!… Weird Truth About Breakaway Movement (YT video 2021)

“The Breakaway Movement is a bizarre Instagram Influencer “cult” seemingly designed to rope people into a pyramid scheme unknowingly. You start off in the breakaway movement thinking you’re going to learn things about business and how to be an influencer, but slowly the truth is revealed, that to join this elusive club you have to pay $5,000 for a kangen water filter, and sell for Enagic, which is an mlm for over priced water filters… So in this video I examine how the break away movement gets away with this scheme and stays under the radar while continuing to draw in young aspiring influencers into their mlm.” (YT channel description)

MLM schemes are some of the most pervasive expressions of neoliberalism and privatization transitional times in Eastern Europe (Romania and Albania both being rocked by such pyramid ponzi schemes immediately after 1989). There is very little chance that they will ever disappear, in fact, like this video demonstrates, they are mutating and taking on the hues of the particular times we are living in. If “abundance” is now the new mantra for both prosperity theology gospels as well as for the innumerable mantra and so called “abundance frequency” online videos, there are always new avatars and historically specific expressions of mlm. Roughly said this is a view into current ideological materials and also things in a moment of water wars. The fact that clean water is increasingly harder to get, and poor communities are forced to use lead-poisoned water such as the Flint water crisis is one aspect of it. The Breakaway – is not bizarre cult. It is just a scam adjusted to current anxieties and desires, such as the desire to work remotely (in Bali preferably), and working remotely or a nomad digital lifestyle is becoming one of the most polluting ways to exist. There is of course a lot of online BS regarding the environmental impact of becoming a digital nomad after COVID and cities being ranked according to their suitability for online remote working.

Same time this is a total takedown of celebrity – of online celebrity. Of course there is a lot of cultishness around such celebs and also the important thing to take home is that this is not an exception. It might seem exceptionally vacuous, and increasingly hard to pin down, but Breakaway does not stray far from the usual influencer ecosystem or entrepreneurship that is built on faking it on social platforms until you make it. It is a very good classroom example of current platform capitalism. What is interesting is also how all pretense at something slightly spiritual – or new agey, is gone, there is only some very thin layer of just vacation photos of happy white people (not that including black, brown or others into the picture might make it better) that promise you something completely shallow and hollow.