Monthly Archive for August, 2010

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
. 2 Comments

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
. 0 Comments

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
. 3 Comments

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
. 3 Comments

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
. 7 Comments