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“Beef 2”: Perpetrators and Victims of Big Tech’s Digital Domination

Logotype of Beef (TV series)

Beef has a double meaning. On the one hand it is meat, and on the other a feud.

The latter definition holds sway in “Beef 2,” an eight-episode series streaming on Netflix now. The series creator, Lee Sung Jin, gained notoriety with his Emmy-award winning “Beef,” a 2023 series that follows a road rage incident between two adults, Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, that descends into violent retribution.

In both series, Jin captures aspects of the class structure in capitalist America: income and wealth inequality driving personal instability, fueling divisions of class, ethnicity and gender.

In “Beef 2,” Oscar Issac and Carey Mulligan portray an upwardly mobile couple in their 40s who are treading water. They are hot and cold with each other, physically and verbally.

He works as a general manager of a country club with a $300,000 initiation fee. She is an interior decorator there until the billionaire owner sacks her. The boss doesn’t have to be right. S/he just has to be the boss in the largely union-free U.S. workforce after a near half-century of anti-labor policies. Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny are the Gen-Z couple in “Beef 2.” They aspire to settle down and rear a family.

Such aspirations are out of reach given the young couple’s paltry wage-income at the tony country club.  Some 40 percent of the American population have no savings, income and wealth shifted from them upward to the ruling class.

The “Beef 2” narrative grows from the Gen-Z female videotaping a violent clash between the Millennial couple.

This leads to blackmail. The ransom demand is for a pay raise and employer health care insurance.

There’s a catch, though. Think health-care insurance deductible. That $5,000 deductible compounds.

Meanwhile the male Millennial also experiences debt woes, leading him to criminal behavior. Money, or the lack of it, is central to the Gen-Z and Millennial characters’ desperation.

Chairwoman Park, Youn Yuh-jung, is the South Korean ice queen billionaire owner of the club. Her slight stature belies her lethal power over everybody else. She and Dr. Kim, Song Kang-ho, her plastic surgeon husband, take the corruption of capital accumulation by any means necessary to a higher level. Smartphones and social media play a prominent role in “Beef 2.” Suffice it to say that digital communication creates personal and social situations that worsen relations of inequality percolating throughout “Beef 2.”

The characters in “Beef 2” are perpetrators and victims of Big Tech’s digital domination. AI and algorithms strengthen that oppressive situation. “Beef 2” unpacks the dynamics of domination and subordination that govern late capitalism, where a predatory ruling class exploits everybody else. Such social relations are ripped from today’s headlines of normalized greed and theft.

This social class reality of late capitalism goes a long way to explaining the popularity of Lin’s work. Viewers see aspects of themselves in the characters’ lives.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com

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