Mercedes Bunz

If I may quote Andre here: “London, you late capitalist bitch”

For the first time in our relationship I am mad at London. It’s been over a year now, and we’ve been really happy with each other. But one thing keeps on coming up: It doesn’t like me hanging around with my friends. so it makes them move away.

Very early in our relationship I decided to confront that problem rather radical, and denied to become friends with new Germans. I preferred British people. I was told this is racist, of course, and ‘you can’t do this’, so I made a few exceptions. It was in vain anyhow. Lately, London has send C to Graz, S to Pasadena, A to Hamburg, and is even threatening to send my best friend A, British, to Africa. By now I stop finding it funny, or losing people an interesting challenge to coup with. I simply pout.

Everyone who has been longer in London knows that here “flexible capitalism” can still be observed in its natural surrounding, and more directly than in every other European city. It comes as no surprise that Marx wrote the Manifest of the Communist Party in London, in which he was taken away by the crassness of capitalism. Also Darwin developed parts of his evolutionary theory on the survival of the fittest after being back to London from the Beagle; less known, he also wrote about the survival of the prettiest, for which I am convinced he travelled secretly into the year 2010 to study the Hackney hipsters on Broadway Market. (This part of the book is also known as the bible of Shoreditch.)

Finally, after London already killed lots of productive debates that can only badly be replaced by a glass of vine on Skype, and drove the test objects of my wild assumptions into exil, this late capitalist bitch of a city, as my friend Andre likes to say, decided to steal one of my flatmates. I am not amused.

In Germany, you only live with flatmates when you are a student and can’t afford a flat on your own. In London, the housing situation is different. Everyone is quite focused on work all the time, plus transport is so slow that they ask you to top up your patience if you buy a ticket, and friends live far away as the city is huge. Here, flatmates are a wonderful social condition of their own. Necessary, good, comforting, a bit like having brothers and sisters living with you, being in a certain way very close, albeit independent beings with different interests.

They are not friends – I wouldn’t like to live with my best friend, I rather keep him as a best friend – but in a certain way you feel as close as you share the bathroom, meet late at night in the kitchen and know each other with swollen morning eyes. They are an important part of your life. Good flatmates are a gift. Mazen, we miss you.

- Hackney Hipster Hate
- Winfried Menninghaus: The promise of beauty

24/08/10

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The downturn of a publishing society: Does producing become the new consuming?

Every single day 210 billion emails get written, 50 million tweets are published on Twitter, 900 million objects get posted on Facebook, 3 million photos are uploaded on Flickr, 900,000 blogposts get published, and 35,000 hours of video are uploaded on youtube – and this is increasing.

This society is changing. In a certain way we can say that producing has become the new consuming. For sure the new access for all is clearly to be welcomed; I also don’t mind that surveillance got democratised. There is, however, a hidden downturn lying in ambush.

This morning I debated with one of my inspiring flatmates straight through the old school house we live in on the good thing about having lived in different countries: you can choose among national attitudes towards humans, culture or capitalism.

Turn off the market in your head
As different as the UK, Germany and France, for example, handle cultural production, they have one thing in common. By now you don’t produce because it can be done, and explore. While producing you think about the moment of publishing already, and what will be/can be said about it.

Cultural production is constantly marketing itself. The moment we call art, wherever it happens, needs a certain amount of autism. Insisting on a difference between cultural production and cultural creation as my friend CT does, with whom I recently spend hours debating in his Grazer kitchen, might be a necessary move.

Today, the public is part of the human condition; and a side of this new public shows a certain logic of repression. For sure, thinking of it is not always good for getting somewhere.

Here is the good thing: We don’t have to. You can get up and decide, today I am going to be really unproductive. Laughing. Yes, I do like logic.

22/08/10

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So Google allowed the Germans to have an unrecognisable house while in the UK people were concerned to get an unrecognisable face. I am not sure what conclusions are to be made of that.

19/08/10

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Dear Google, please be evil

In Germany, home builders protest agitatedly against Google Street View. The strong outrage might seem to be a bit weird as people often they make a plea against Google in the news being photographed in front of their house, but the moment they protest against is comprehensible. They are worried about Google controlling public space, and rightly so.

In the US, Google’s and Verizon’s proposal to turn away from net neutrality when it comes to wireless broadband has promptly evoked a storm protests in the whole world. More than ever, the digital access of information is political, and the ideal of equality is set aside.

Much like a work of art was never just another commodity, information isn’t just another product. Information is political, it conditions our society. Democracy is built on information. And not a public institution, but Google is managing that information. It isn’t just another brand. 75% internet users use Google. Much like Facebook or Apple it became an online nation.

When Sergej Brin and Larry Page founded the company, they wanted to make all the information on the internet accessible. Some years ago, however, we users decided to use search differently. When we use Google these days, we don’t search anymore the internet. When we don’t know something, we ask the internet. The internet became the index of the world. This is why we should be alert.

You confuse me! Or when private behaves like public

It is not that we have to throw our hands up in horror because the access of information is controlled privately. After all, newspapers have been private for good reasons. The problem is 1 that newspapers, television, institutions that are out there to control Google are about to become digital themselves, and are 2 therefore depending on the quasi-monopoly Google, a 3 quasi-monopoly that is in fact serving the public giving not a lot of reasons to oppose it.

Look, for example, here as flood disaster in Pakistan is entering a new dimension with more than 20 million people affected. Google is not only launching a crisis page that somehow steps in the role of news organisations who have been in command of writing contemporary history so far, adding new digital tools they developed like a resource finder for NGOs and person finder. Google is also trying to use their satellite capacity to help with pictures, something that the cloud coverage has prevented so far.

It is true that companies have responded to disasters before, and offered help. Most of the time these were disasters they felt somewhat connected to, or thought that a social gesture was good for their image. They didn’t actually establish an own permanent crisis response team that develops tools and uses Google technology to help, eh, society. Is Google a public service?

It is often behaving like one, but it isn’t. Much like newspapers and their separation of content and advertising Google is in fact already living up to stronger ethical standards than normal companies, but is that enough?

Who controls our frienemy?

As a company, Google can easily change its mind, like they did with tracking users.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published parts of an internal Google “vision statement” debating possibilities how to track users. As some of you might know, Google resisted for years using any method to track people online without their knowledge at the fierce insistence of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as Jessica E. Vascellaro puts it in her interesting article.

Instead of tracking the user, Google used search terms and focused on contextual advertising only. The WSJ piece looks behind the Google scene reporting the debates going on between the founders, and the final decision to buy DoubleClick Inc.

The important thing isn’t really to see Google making up its mind to move from contextual advertising to target advertising introducing the cookie in March 2009, but to get evidence that the company is struggling with its role, and decided to move into cookie business. This is the problem.

As the internet became the index to our world, and Google is managing that index, who controls Google? This question is clearly not enough on our minds.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking: Dear Google, please be a bit more evil.

WSJ: What they know
WSJ: Interview with Eric Schmidt

17/08/10

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Beautiful

It’s pop, but devolving into complex modern music about being alone but staging it together, and feeling hurt but distancing yourself from it by enacting. Always liked the special way These New Puritans use musical structures and cultural fragments; this is especially beautiful.

10/08/10

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Untitled (After Adalbert Stifter)

When we see mankind in history approaching a great, eternal goal like a calm, silvery stream, then we sense the sublime, the especially epic quality. But as powerfully and capaciously as the tragic and the epic may affect us, excellent as they may be as levers in art, nevertheless it is mainly the ordinary, everyday, countlessly recurring actions of people in which this law most securely lies as a center of gravity, because these actions are the most enduring, constitutive ones as it were, the millions of rootlets of the tree of life.

[You are right, the living room of the beautiful museal house where I spend my Indian Summer of writing was crying out for a a bit of Adalbert Stifter, here from the Preface to Many-Coloured Stones.]

27/07/10

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Why Christopher Nolan tells you, my dear philosophers, you have work to do #inception

Definitely worth your attention: Inception. Your mind will come back fully stretched and blissful. Yes, there is intelligent action, and much like Total Recall it would only sound silly if you would recount it. I hereby congratulate Christopher Nolan not only for a good movie, but also for freeing us from what I would call ‘the one sentence business philosophy’. Good god, was that ever necessary.

You know what I mean: These days it doesn’t matter if you start up a business, apply for a PhD grant, or want to make a movie, your project must be decribed in one sentence. Meaning: If a project can’t be understood by a very dumb person, you’ll fail, no matter that there are 87% not very dumb persons left out there who would love it.

Next time someone asks you to follow that rule, you simply say: And the success of Inception? The plot of this movie is way to complex to fit in one, two, or even three sentences – and utterly successful. Each trailer sends you in wrong directions, trust me, Nolan is clearly revolting against this attitude. Lovely.

While some criticize the movie as being not emotionally involved enough (and I see what Mendelson means), I must admit that I might be spoiled simply because the movie evolves around a concept that gets me excited: the thesis that once you have an idea in your head, the world will never be what it was before. Whomever has experienced that, and I did a couple of times, knows the force I am talking about. It is as beautiful as shocking, a truly revolutionary experience (you might get hurt by your own conclusions).

The movie manages to put enough details around that concept to keep you busy, and they fit most of the time. From using dreams to forming a gang of crime to visually fold up Paris to Leonardo di Caprio’s furrow to Blade Runner unicorn like symbols and open endings, even if the James Bond everywhere around the globe setting isn’t even necessary; the concept of playing a game/dreaming a dream on different levels is so familiar by now.

Interesting, though, if it comes to the driving vision of the movie itself, we get lost in the maze of dreams.

While Total Recall was about starting a revolution on Mars to help the poor and the weak for a better living, the inception is needed because of private business interests, only slightly driven by the fact that the world needs to be saved from a new superpower this business organisation is going to be. In the end, all of this is rather irrelevant.

As movies are the subconscious of society, this tells us something about our dreams: Lost in complexity. Gone.

The driving force of Cobb/diCabrio is the love to his children. But is that enough for society? I don’t think so, and agree with PH, with whom I recently had an email debate on this. Having his head deeply in political philosophy, he expressed amazement about all those parents who think so long as they do it ‘for the children’ then anything goes, the most barbarous self-interest, the most naked class struggle is suddenly justified. So no, not enough.

See what I mean by intelligent action movie, as this is what the movie tells us: Can someone start planting an idea in our head again, please?

21/07/10

. 8 Comments

After the paywall: On the state of online journalism today

When I opened my obligatory RSS reader yesterday morning, I found several articles focussing on the state of online journalism today. Well, that’s what you expect, isn’t it? The interesting thing: They all focussed on different aspects.

At the media blog Beehivecity former Times media correspondent Dan Sabbagh reported a rather low number of 15,000 paying after paywall subscribers. The iPad customers that bought the Times separate app, on the contrary, is rather impressive with 12.500 customers. This is causing Sabbagh to ask an interesting question: Will the future of newspapers like the future of the music industry: an Apple dominated digital paid-for business and an internet-free-for-all in which nobody pays?

If you look at the tremendous success of the Daily Mail you see quite a different picture. Last year still head to head with its competitors the Guardian and the Telegraph, it has a commanding lead by now. With 16 million unique browsers in the UK, 26.3 million in the rest of the world it begins to hint at a different league, reports Peter Preston for the Guardian, calculating roughly that advertising can bring in a round £20m to turn Mail red ink into deep black.

Interesting that the Mail not only runs newsroom operations totally separately, but also is a “different beast” not playing print’s little brother:

“The online market, like the print market, is beginning to set different rules for itself, to insist that quality and redtop and celeb can define different pitches (and appeals to advertisers) just as they do in the land of dead forests.”

Meanwhile, the NYTimes takes the working conditions of online journalists into account asking if online-journalism became the new assembly line. Instead of scoops these journalists are hunting down to enter the charts of the most-viewed articles with Bloomberg News andGawker Media paying writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles, editors checking upon how many articles journalists are writing a day.

Online journalism is a genre that is still making its way by walking it. Each brand has to re-invent itself anew in a digital environment. This is confusing, as well as challenging and exciting. One thing is certain, it is our future.

By now we know that producing online first was just the beginning as publishers also have to take a journalism into account that focusses on the long tail. Here, new forms have to be found quickly at least if we don’t want to give our traditional definatory power over contemporary history away to the likes of Demand Media.

Furthermore, the recent success of the iPad also showed that we have to understand our readership not anymore only in terms of target group, but also alongside reading situations.

Confusing, challenging and exciting, indeed. But well. We didn’t became journalists to sit back and relax.

20/07/10

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“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea.”

Inception by Christopher Nolan

19/07/10

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See the digital at work (better than Berkeley)

Press play into the summer and see the digital at work staring Akzidenz-Grotesk & Brooklyn.

Oh, and don’t forget to have a look behind the screen of Greg Solenström to learn all about the pixel magic. Crack the city streets with your mouse, brush some motorcycles out of the way and learn that sometimes beauty is just a few pixels away.

18/07/10

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England vs. Facebook

Live from from the top of a power shift, see now the leader of the old nation meeting the leader of new nation on video. Could someone please start a discourse analysis here, apart from the fact that it looks a lot like ChatRoulette?

- TV camera angle vs. webcam
- “really excited about it” vs. 6 x “you guys”
- sending to vs. gratefully receiving
- make-up vs. “what the hell do I care how I look like”-authenticity

What else?

14/07/10

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Thx

It is important to dance on top of the world from time to time, and we planned on going that night. Now in London this is not so easy. Like for example Fabric might be a club with an amazing soundsystem, but lacks the creative roughness of a Berlin club. Yes, I know I am spoiled from living there fore too long. But Fabric is a professional entertainment stage there to produce your clinical entertainment event, and events don’t like to be staged, the less in a clinical environment. Events like to catch you off guard to take action, connect with a crowd, and deny to follow a plan. Here goes the Saturday night, good bye top of the world, was what I was thinking.

Moderat – Rusty Nails (Shackleton Remix) by Nialler9

Suddenly the sound became thick, dense, and dark making its way across the whole range of the soundsystem. Soon its complexity, the one that made us dance, curated the crowd, sorted it out until only those who know moved across the dancefloor to the straight dubstep, here and there broken by a soundwall that gave way to new fragments of the musical structure, cut by a sharp twisted snare or accompanied by poetry.

This music tried to break the conventional structure of electronic music, the loop. A bit like the tracks of James Blake, it seemed to be composed in a new style, its fragments diffunding, playing with each other, interacting, behaving more like a tag cloud. The elements of the live set were not shifting in the foreground and background like usually in electronic music. It was engineered in a different way. New. We were standing in the music, dancing, making way, moving through an annoying, complex, beautiful, aggressive and pure sound. The soundtrack of the 21st century.

Sometimes In Autumn (Shackleton Remix) by ishmo kayor

When Shackleton finished playing his two hour live set, the crowd applauded very long, then left immidiatly. On our way home through the morning light, I finally understood what had happened, when A. said the words to describe what was going on: “I am shocked.”, she said. We were, and still exchanging comments full of joy on the next day. Oh, music.