Mercedes Bunz

Recently there has been a lot of international attention to the Middlesex University which is abruptly closing its widely known philosophy department. It is home to magazines like Radical Philosophy and a high-quality bunch of vital left thinkers like Peter Osborne and Peter Hallward, and therefore acknowledged and recently defended by the likes of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, or Judith Butler. And now the university plans to shut it down – more about the ongoing protests here.

However, this is not only going on at Middlesex.

There is something strange happening at the moment, there is something haunting cultural institutions, bringing them to shut down departments that are of high quality with a certain orientation. Listening to several people yesterday at the Middlesex protest event at London’s ICA, I recognized this is not only happening at universities in different countries, but it is something that is going on at cultural institutions in general.

The BBC also announced cuts nobody had asked for so far with its director general Mark Thompson saying “The BBC can’t do everything. It needs to concentrate its investment (sic!) on services, and the program that makes the most differences to audiences.” Basically that means, it plans to become more streamline.

Here is the thing: Without force, cultural institutions close departments like BBC’s 6Music or Middlesex’ continental philosophy, departments that make a difference. On the ICA event yesterday Alexander Garcia Düttmann spoke of a general transformation of universities into businesses, and the term “investment” used by BBC’s Mark Thomson seems to confirm that transformation pushing it to a much more general level.

Why behave cultural institutions as if they are haunted by business these days? Why do they make voluntary cuts?

Peter Osborne explained the shutting down of the Middlesex philosophy department as follows: philosophy is the place of capitalistic angst as it withdraws itself from any measurability and accountability, so it resists the McKinsey approach to the world.

That philosophy does that (and that we love it for it) is certainly right, but I think the picture is a lot bigger.
There is a huge shift within the landscape of knowledge going on. Let me put it this way: In the past, knowledge was something that was produced by research institutions, today it becomes more and more something that gets managed by algorithms and technology companies.

While universities or the BBC shut down their edgy parts to concentrate their investment with a McKinsey argumentation (but is it really for business/budget reasons?), business does not follow this simplistic McKinsey interpretation of budgeting as a management tool.

Why do cultural institutions follow McKinsey, and business does not?

In fact, technology companies turn McKinsey upside down. Measurement? Accountability? Stay within the budget? Well, maybe later, maybe not at all. Start up companies are supposed to fail by the bucketful, that’s okay. Twitter has no business model, but gets its tweets archived in the Library of Congress, and we all know it took Google years to find one.

While universities are shutting down their humanity departments once aiming for a higher ideal, the leaders of technology companies take that ideal over. From Google to Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, you name it, the executives believe that their companies change the world for the good, and therefore technology conferences like TED or SXSW don’t focus on technology anymore, instead a bunch of do-gooders tell you how to, sorry, how they make a difference.

This world has turned upside down.

What happens here fascinates me, maybe because I live in both worlds. While most people know me as a journalist, my background is philosophy which I studied at the Free University Berlin, finishing it with a PhD at Weimar. At the same time, I co-founded a small company which still publishes a monthly magazine focusing on electronic music and digital culture, DEBUG.

Meanwhile I have been the technology reporter of the Guardian among other journalistic jobs all related to the internet, and now I am writing a book on how algorithms affect the landscape of knowledge. And yes, there is a massive shift, and it is not only coming from algorithms and the internet.

Not only that the managing of knowledge is handed over to technology companies, the internet became an index for the world to which we turn, whenever we need to know something: Let me Google this for you.

Here, sending a search query is quite different from the muycelium spread knowledge that up till now we needed to read or ask our way through in order to get informed. Thanks to the internet, knowledge got democratised and freed from exclusive experts – and that is not only good, it has an immense political potential; on the way, however, it became a different knowledge. Aligned. Adjusted. Straightened. Losing its philosophical moment as search streamlines knowledge.

Do cultural institution now think, they have to lose it, too? Resist!

How to? Alex stressed how important it is that you affirm philosophy, and not defend it. He pledged for a strategy of rupture. Because if you defend it, he said, it’s over, you will always running behind, saying yes to more cuts. BBC will be a good example, I bet, you’ll see.

In his talk, Alex described philosophy as an unbiased effort focusing on the argument itself. Philosophy, he said, wherever it happens, goes for the sake of the argument. Falling in love with a disturbing and difficult complexity, being devoted to pureness, to an ideal, how deconstructed it may be. Make something with great effort and the love of your heart, that is not supposed to deliver.

Create an outside.

A world ruled by friendly coloured quasi-monopolies like Google, by hung parliaments, and transparently oil spilling oil companies, a world that obviously said goodbye to dialectics, can be very happy about that.

Derrida once said, that “One cannot say: ‘here are our monsters’, without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” Well, now you can, because the pets stay monsters. So how to resist in a post-dialectical world? Try to monster back! But that is another story, and it might even make too much sense, and as I just wrote, delivering is not a thing that monsters should do.

To be continued…

Quite a while ago, Facebook gave users more control about what you want to share with whom. Now, a month later, media reports that users find the privacy settings too complicated.

Let me translate this for you: There is no media story at the moment, so let’s express some concern about Facebook and privacy as that works always. Besides, and just as important: journalists think of themselves as trendsetters, and Facebook is mainstream by now. Ever seen a hipster doing non-biased reporting? See.

So here we go: Yesterday, NPR found Facebook pricacy a growing concern for users. Oh, really? Wow. The everlasting trend, now new! And today, the New York Times has Facebook also on the down. Nick Bilton had to write about Facebook’s privacy settings, and he did the best that he could: he is funny.

In a second article, Joshua Brutstein features a social media consultant that left Facebook recently, and also mentions a couple of high profile computer engineers. He concludes that it becomes a trend showing up in the conscious of the algorithms of Google.

However, how to leave Facebook does, no, not show up as the fifth result in the assisted Google search as mentioned in the article, but far more down on the list – fifth is “How to leave a Facebook group”. And the guys that were reported to leave Facebook left it for Twitter and were Googlers, who were concerned about the instant personalisation that Facebook plans to introduce with Open Graph – as if Google did a better job with Buzz.

Privacy on the internet is a serious concern, but this is not about privacy issues. This is about hipness.

Yes, Facebook became mainstream, so a lot of hipsters feel it hurts their hipness. As reporter David Montgomery recently wrote on Twitter, “Complaining about Facebook privacy has joined fixed-gear bikes and ironic facial hair as a hipster trademark.” Exactly. But do we have to turn this into journalism?

Be careful, you might find this art video offending. No, offending is not so much the dead body, but how most of the people are responding to the hanging man. Even Eva Mattes of the artist duo 0100101110101101.org says, she was shocked by some of the reactions.

Still, this is a genre picture of a media society hanging helplessness in front of the screen watching a man that hang himself, a hanging man that was in fact Brooklyn based artist Franco Mattes, and the whole scene a set up.

No Fun – Eva and Franco Mattes from Franco Mattes on Vimeo.

No, it is not the Internet that is to blame for the dramatic exhaustion of social interaction at a distance, as New York University researcher Marco Deseriis remarks so rightly on The Art of Prank. After all, social interaction is often lacking when not at distance, too.

Don’t hide with a corus of outrage on the side of a good conscience. How would you have reacted? Like seriously? Confronted with a scene like this, you might as well not believe what you see in the beginning. That is normal. But then..

Here, the artists Eva and Franco Mattes make a point, as they often do in their work. 0100101110101101.org has been know in the net art scene as a succeeding radical approach for quite a while. They have kidnapped a Nike logo for a public installation in Vienna, or filmed weird and a bit hilarious sex performances on Second Life. Now, they let society look in the mirror with the help of chat roulette.

Google rolled out its new design yesterday as most of you will have noticed. In general, the new Google theme looks very much “My First Search Engine” (quote of Guardian SEO Chris Moran). Yes dear, now it’s Fisher Play for all of us! But there is something else to it. Google is zooming out of 3D, while everyone else wallows in it. Look, the first one is the old logo, and the second, more 2D like one is now new.

Multicoloured, but flat!

Why are digital companies so in love with 3D-design, anyhow? Apple’s iPad for example: OMG. The never really cool jeans of Steve Jobs (look at them here) might have given a hint that Apple isn’t everywhere a design driven company. However, the open flipped book animation together with the fake leather binding of the iPad Address Book makes you wanna shield your eyes. To be fair, Microsoft Word’s fake wood background in its publishing mode isn’t any better, I nearly dropped my good old black MacBook recently when I accidentally activated it.

The horrible 3D trend just makes me wanna throw my “Understanding Media” Marshall McLuhan book at them. He already warned us that the programs in a new medium are always revivals of an old one. So we already know we are tempted, but we humans, we can grade up, too, can’t we?

Dear designers out there, please notice that the digital has grown up. It is not imitating reality anymore. Digital v reality is: over. The trend we see in film might not be good to apply to all other digital media. It doesn’t add to the story, so please, don’t avatar my interface. Yes, there is a certain beauty in 2D. While I think that Google is really past its oh-no-not-another-again-doodles, moving back to 2D made my day. Thx.

And everything else you want to know about the recent design decision of Google you’ll find in Helen Walters informative Businessweek article on How Google got its new look.

Writing a book about digitalisation and news organisations at the moment I am naturally interested in, yes, revenue models. I believe that there is a transformation of business models in a digitalised world, therefore I am collecting material for the thesis that today companies need to change their business models from a revenue stream to a revenue delta. Apple – bitten into by a software engineer who lost the new iPhone over celebrating his birthday with German lager – is a good example.

Announcing its spectacular profits yesterday, it reported to a surprised Wallstreet that its revenue was up 48% to $13.5bn. Well done. However, it is interesting to have a look which are the best selling units of the company as we still have the image of Apple Inc. as a company who makes its money with computers. Computers? It sold nearly 11m iPod music players, nearly 9m iPhones and only 3m computers – not to speak of the 15% revenue share Apple gets from the iTunes store.

It would be interesting to learn more details about the Apple revenue cake, if anyone knows where to find more business details, or another good example, please let me know.

Obviously one big player doesn’t fit my thesis: Google. 97% of its revenue stream is advertising. However, it is interesting that Google is eagerly busy developing a potential revenue delta as there are several new approaches besides search, like developing its own phone, inventing a new browser and OS, or taking pictures of the world for Google map. Google functions according to the old rules, but it read the sign of the times, we might say.

Why was everybody talking about a gadget that basically does the same things as your computer, some of them maybe with a little twist?

Yes, that is the most interesting thing about the iPad, the fact that the whole world was getting crazy about it, even before it was shipped. Is it magic, as Steve Jobs suggested? No. Let us have a guess: The iPad reflects a change that happened in the last decade.

Before we digitalised information, now we need to digitise situations. Here, the iPad is just the beginning. There is more to come.

Therefore the iPad doesn’t change a thing, it just reflects precisely what already has changed. Who wants to sit at a desk to watch some YouTube videos or read the papers? The iPad is about a situation. It is lovely, and hangs out with you. Sounds perfect to me.

This is obviously the change that Apple understood: It is not anymore just communication that is affected by digitalisation, but situations. And we don’t want to go to our desk to initiate them. Digitalisation disseminated from the PC to the laptop to become even more mobile – a companion in whatever we do.

Now, there is a pad for it.

It looks like a success. Sold out, and the critics love it, too. From Gizmodo & Mark Wilson to the New York Times & David Carr to WSJ & Walter Mossberg everybody is positive about it. Well, nearly everybody. Cory Doctorow wrote about Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t either):

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps.

Well, you can program one, too, but he has a point here. As Jeff Jarvis says, the iPad has a tendency to turn us back into an audience again. Apple has to live up to its new role as a content gatekeeper. Yes, Apple became a publisher in a certain way. The trending job of the future? It will be good bye web designer, hello app designer. Don’t you think?