“Whoever uses a spoon is accepting the cold soup of state failure.” — advertising campaign, 2114
How a newspaper nickname became a social taboo, and why the elite of the ESTEMPs drink their soup through a straw.
How the nickname was born
FictionThe media mocked it, the resistance adopted it, society made it taboo.
The resistance is called the AntiFaCa, short for Anti-Fasci-Capitalists (in Portuguese, faca means knife). The corporate media saw a ready-made joke: if they are against the knife, they are spoons. Harmless, childish, useless next to the corporations' sharp knives.
1. The mockery. Cartoons, commercials and comedy shows started calling the rebels "spoons". 2. The adoption. The resistance embraced the word. A spoon is easy to own, easy to show and easy to recognise in any kitchen in the world. Codes appeared: "asking for soup" means asking whether someone is in the resistance. 3. The campaign. The press offices doubled down. In commercials, street holo-videos and internal networks, the spoon came to mean weakness, mental stagnation and subversion. 4. The taboo. People who are not in the war began avoiding spoons so as not to look sympathetic to the resistance. Nobody banned them by law; people gave up the spoon of their own free will.
"Soup-eater" became an insult among executives and the corporate middle class, aimed at any employee with low output or reformist ideas.
The Cutlery Revolution
FictionSoup bars, cream in sachets and cutlery with a laser-etched logo.
To prove their loyalty to the Capi-Fascists and avoid being investigated for sympathy with the resistance, the upper middle class created a new etiquette with no utensil that looks like a spoon.
The food industry reformulated everything that called for a spoon. Soups and broths became solid bars; creamy desserts became quick-suction sachets or chewable capsules. In the upper ranks, soup is drunk through a straw.
Precision knives and forks, modular, with the company logo laser-etched on them, became compulsory fashion accessories. Each ESTEMP's "patented multifunction cutlery" avoids any concave surface.
Business dinners became loyalty rituals. Guests compete over who has the most expensive, sharpest and most high-tech cutlery, showing off their "love of the corporate cut". The adventure has one such dinner: Knife Dinner.
The moral panic
FictionNobody was banned. Everybody was convinced.
The most frightening thing about the spoonless culture is not a ban, because there is no ban. It is that people were convinced to give up the spoon, and are proud of it.
People look at any concave object with fear and disgust. If someone finds an old spoon forgotten at the back of a drawer in a corporate residential zone, the reflex is not to keep it but to report it to company security for "advocating subversive terrorism".
The law says nothing about spoons. But each company's security can file the holder under "conduct incompatible with corporate culture", and that is enough for an investigation, a relocation or a dismissal. It is a grey zone, and the grey zone is the tool.
Citizens highly educated to produce profit and completely infantilised, unable to see that they changed their eating habits and their own dignity over a meme invented by a press office. They turned a kitchen utensil into an ideological battlefield and feel proud of their own submission.
The Capi-Fascists
FictionThe upper middle class that swapped nationalism for love of the brand.
The Capi-Fascists are the corporate upper middle class that developed a blind, fervent love for the company that pays them. They swapped nationalist fascism for brand corporatism: the logo in place of the flag, the jingle in place of the anthem.
They are the ones who report spoons, who cry at annual conventions and who tattoo their staff number. They are not comic-book villains: they are neighbours, bosses and relatives. Many player characters will have a Capi-Fascist in the family.