Community 5.8: A Successful Parody!

As an alternative to the broad-stroke humor of Idiocracy, I would like to examine last week’s episode of Community, “App Development and Condiments,” which explores the nature of corporate-influenced political citizenship. The episode depicts the entire student body of Greendale Community College serving as the beta test for an app called MeowMeowBeans. This app allows the users to rate one another as people, thus creating a reified, objective social hierarchy. The students feel as if they are in charge, but in fact, it is the app that is running the school, and the company that created it.

Soon, a rigidly organized system of citizenship has sprung from the app, with students assigned to different areas of the school based on their rating, and being assigned clothing from worker’s uniforms to white togas based again on rating. What’s more, the official governmental structure (in this case, the college’s bureaucracy) happily bends to the will of the app. The highest-rated users are allowed to control the air conditioning; the school’s dean serves as the stage manager for the app’s official functions. And in spite of the obvious problems this app might cause, the school-wide beta test was pre-approved by one of the school’s advisory committees. 

A "four" serving a "five".

The madness only comes to an end when the students realized that they have been used by the company. The data from the beta test has been processed and incorporated into the final app, which now costs $0.99 to download. In addition, the app has sold the users’ data to other companies, leading to a deluge of unwanted email advertisements. At this point, the student body decides to stop consuming, and collectively deletes the app. Without a corporate struture to uphold it, the system of citizenship the app engendered (which began as a monarchy and was later toppled by a worker’s revolution) dismantles almost immediately.

This is not only a great example of the confluence of consumerism and citizenship, but of the fan cultures Liesbet van Zoonen discusses. The app users act both upon their affective relationships as fans of one another, and cognitive processes, in manipulating the system to advance their own status and degrade that of others (47). The app-users organize ritualized functions in which they can officially rate one another, with great aplomb or opprobrium for success or failure (47).  

In this respect, Community is provoking the ‘affective intelligence’ van Zoonen sees as essential to effective political processes (39).