Mercedes Bunz

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.