Soundtrack: Evan P. Donohue – Irene

Alright. We survived Irene. Well, as a matter of fact, surviving isn’t exactly the correct term. It practically blew over. The media (media in general, of course, there’s definitely nothing better than trying to generalise something so abundantly diverse as the mainstream media business) proved their necessity once again by covering the storm excessively, but as far as I am concerned last Sunday was a lost day.
In fact I was as skittish as an old women wondering were her beloved pet might be after not hearing it yelp for more then ten minutes. The motel felt like a giant mausoleum for unimaginative post-menopausal women dragging their duckling daughters behind them just to let them rot in their room after 8pm. Built in the late 70s it was one of those architectural abominations that feature huge windows which will never open and a slowly meandering vent trying to move the damp and air-conditionally frozen air from one end of the room to the the other.
I have never understood the ida of having a pool inside. Water, I my opinion, is something that belongs to the outside world. I love it as long it stays in the confinement of my shower tub and the general area of the bathroom (I’m not overly concerned with the cleanliness of my daily morning routine), however, everything exceeding one litre makes me slightly uncomfortable. This pool was not only several cubic metres larger, it also started to loose the inherent qualities of water: transparency, odorlessness and fluidity. Generations of children, unwashed underwear and the frequent use of chemicals to counter the inevitable results had given the water a texture close to cold vodka.
The atrium enclosing this horribly failed experiment of sanitized fun didn’t make in any better – it may have just been me, but the percentage of chlorine which mixed with the water may have matched that in the surrounding air.

In spite of all this, there was still life. Similar to the volcanic swamps covering this planet in the beginning of time which for all the sulfur and heat didn’t stop the first cellular structures from merrily zipping around this pool virtually seemed to breed mothers and children.
Since I don’t mind children I was happily letting the more voyeuristic side of my character take over (always carefully staying behind a closed glass veranda to avoid contact with the possibly irritating substances in the pool) while reading a seemingly never ending fantasy novel.
While I’m at it: let me tell you that having a long novel with you does not distract you from a rainy day that you’re spending in a impossibly ugly motel, as long as you’re trying to use it as a matter of distraction. It’s Murphy’s Law of Boring Hotel Rooms – the longer the time a person has to spend in a ridiculously confined space the longer the time stretches. Thus a long story becomes an endless story and consequently time stops. Ingenious, isn’t it?

I have to admit this logic might be a bit flawed but then again: logic never has been one of my strong suits.

It took us nearly four hours to leave the flat.

Ellis Island, though only seen from afar was quite nice. So was the ride on the amazingly free ferry to Staten Island, which, however proved to be a ride to, guess what, Staten Island, which in turn made us taking the ferry back to Manhattan more or less immediately. Fortunately I had really nice view on my way back. Manhattan bridge is quite long and marvellous, but there were two legs with the same attributes which easily outshone her. Since they were attached to a quite intelligent looking and classically beautiful top (and head) I didn’t mind the detour.

However, MOMA was what really made my day. Don’t get me wrong, me luvs me pair of legs, but even those don’t stand a chance against 10 square metres of water lilies. At first, I tried to rightfully uphold my long lasting principle of not caring about hyped originals. But Monet’s lilies gave the final push to my over-confndent self-conciousness. I’m not good at describing art. The two elder ladies who asked my about my grinning face when I faced a version of Braque’s violin probably are the only thing I could reiterate in a coherent manner. They might have been a bit  surprised about the fact that I suddenly started rambling about Braque’s way of seeing things and the general idea of cubism, but I think they quite enjoyed the talk.
The one thing that really put me off where the visitors. First there were shit-loads of them, which isn’t that problematic in it self, there’s always a way to shuh people from the piece you just want to enjoy for yourself. Still, who in for Christ’s fuckin’ sake shoots a photo of a piece of art instead of just quietly marveling it? At the end I was seriously grumpy and considered setting them on fire for their obvious idiocy.
I might just have been craving a fag though.

After that I was fairly exhausted. But somehow I had to do something. News York has a certain pull to it. Sitting on the ledge of my the window and watching the passers-by is all nice and fine, but I wanted to mingle. So I packed my stuff and set off for a jazz bar I read about.
To be honest: it was a bit underwhelming. The live music wasn’t that bad and considering the free entry I had a really nice evening but: to be listed as a jazz bar I’d expect a little bit more than just some easy listening jazz which is barely audible over the chatter of a room full of wanna-be intellectuals. Still, I enjoyed the food and the waitress, which made up for the presumptuous who fancied himself the owner of the establishment. Rarely have I had the unpleasant occasion to meet such an excellent embodiment of the stereotypical French waiter. With a front all nice and easy and a back revealing more than just a long stick up his ass.

If you wanna experience it for your self: www.julesbistro.com

Went for a small walk to the times square. Too many people for my taste. The radiant aura (auras? aurae?) of the neon signs, dipping the texture of everything around them in shades ranging from deep purple to ice-cold blue. It felt like a huge swirling festival of consumerism. It felt alive, however, like the fast pulse of an animal half asleep.

Walked down back to 8th avenue. As far as I can tell this is rather the slower veins of the city. Reminds me a lot of Edinburgh. Shop after shop nested into four story buildings with a huge front ant not a lot behind. And man, these girls. Honestly, this city doesn’t have enough lamp posts to run against. I digress. The view is positively extravagant and my bourgeois self is pleased with wriggling its toes in the lukewarm summer air while high heels do their click clack on the street below the my suspiciously small bottle of beer assimilates to the general atmosphere.

Apart from that I actually enjoy my lukewarm beer, though I probably should have shared it in a pub instead of sitting here on my own. I’ll try that tomorrow then.

When Martin Luther started the first world-wide (euro-centric view, yes I know) public press-war with the pope, publications really read a lot like tweets from today. Luther himself used a language that was everything but a language fit to discuss problems objectively. He provoked using in his sermons the public language everyone would use but in an official context, which is one of the reasons he was so popular at his time.

Let’s make a leap forward in time. 400 years later, publishing works using a printing press as well your own mother tongue has been institutionalised. There are newspapers, a rich amount of literature in several European languages as well as translations to choose from, and of course, there is a slight amount of censorship in most of the young European states, which haven’t switched to the new political system to come: democracy.

Surprisingly though, democracy developed its own form of censorship: it’s called public opinion. It isn’t something that was invented and put into use by a central government utilising force, it gradually emerged out of a mayhem of publications. The press and with it its role as the “fourth pillar of democracy” had emerged.

Fast forward 150 years. We should have arrived roughly after WW II and shortly before the wild 1968 flower-power eruption. The Watergate-Scandal is still to come and the public press is at it’s all-time high of acceptance: the only way to actually get access to any kind of information goes through the almighty hands of publishers and editors, and the only way to get it voiced is the same. That’s the time publishers like Murdoch’s News Corperation want to go back to.

Why? Because it meant power, an extraordinary amount of power, yes. But I believe there might be more to it: The 1960s and the following ten to twenty years were the time, when publishing was for a short time not completely constricted by public opinion and – even worse – monetary power.
If an editor wants to publish a newspaper today or a publisher has to choose a manuscript to publish, in today’s world he has to follow two laws: will it be accepted and can it be sold. It’s obvious the the latter may depend on the first, but that aside, it still has one outcome: if it is not scandalous enough to be sold anyways it’s public opinion that will decide about the fate of it’s revenue.

This is a hard thing to swallow for most of the quite intelligent middle management in publishing. They consider themselves an intellectual elite of their society, but they are pulled down by the dumb masses which they vowed to surpass.

Why is this important for Twitter? Or Wikileaks? Or me? Because, as sixtus put it quite neatly over there Twitter, Blogs and Wikis, in short: publishing electronically on what is known as the world wide web, will change our society eventually.

The only thing I’m not so sure of, is: will it change for the better. Publishing in general brought out a huge amount of creativity, political change and millions of ideas which could be discussed in an open forum. But it didn’t really change the way man or woman works. We still have the underlying problem of a society that is ruled by few and change is a slow and anguishing process.

Public press didn’t solve the problem of transparency, it just masked it very well. And I highly doubt that, what ever modes of government may follow, it will change our first-hand experience of society in a relevant way.

Further reading and inspiration:

• Martin Sixtus: Who’s afraid of Wikileaks via zeitreisen
• Sascha Lobo: Kuschelkapitalismus aus dem Netz via SPON
• Jeff Jarvis: The Progression of the Public via Buzzmachine
• Miriam Merkel: Journalisten an der Crowdsourcing-Front via Focus (Who would have thought, I know, but this one is actually good)

Men are no computer's and they never will be

Jaron Lanier may be known to those who used a 56K modem to explore the barren wilderness of the new internet before the bubble burst. But for those of you whose first contact with the web was using Wikipedia to compile a last-minute presentation here’s just a short overview: Lanier may be one of those people who like to see them selves as universal geniuses. Not saying of course, that the guy isn’t incredibly talented – hell, apart from the fact, that he really knows what he’s talking about concerning everything from AI to general internet history, he’s able to use some of the world’s most obscure instruments and even poses as a visual artist.

Apart from that, the stuff Larnier is well-known for are his ‘manifestos’. The first one was on the possibility of ‘technological totalism’ and basically made the point that mankind is a) a long way from creating an AI, even if the computing power of processors doubles every year and b) computers just don’t work like human conscience which is why it is humbug to compare both.

The second now, is called ‘You are not a gadget’ and makes basically two points:

1. the internet is getting worse each day
2. it does so because we use applications which undermine the importance of the author, hence the individual

Which is basically not completely wrong, I guess. Still, the question should be rather why it is that important that the individuality exists. As for most people who value their own thinking and creativity, for Lanier, this must be a deeply disturbing idea. First, that somebody can actually just use parts of your stuff without even understanding the complexity of the whole and after cannibalising your ideas make these, your brain’s children, his own in reinterpreting them. However, this your thoughts becoming part of a new and sometimes even more complex intellectual concept is the way science works most of the time.

Still, I’m far from saying “this is good” or “this is evil”, or that it has to be that way because it just is. But if we look at the history of science we have to accept, that there is no genius. Even somebody like Lanier feeds on the ideas of others. And he just has to do so because he is not only a child of his time, but also because complex thoughts like ‘computers are not going to overtake the world’ imply a incredibly intricate network of assumptions, definitions, theories, values, fears and predictions.

Another thought closely tied to his idea of collective intellectual evolution is his criticism of mash-ups and their influence on the accesibity of information. In short: The question is, if when combining stuff I read to a new text, do I still use my own words and if I don’t: does that make them less comprehensible? Fair question, yes, but again – why so? Is a text compiled of different scraps of information less original than one written from scrap? It’s a question on how our mind works: do we produce ‘better’ implying more refined and progressive concepts, when we don’t rely on outside information? I highly doubt that.

Lanier’s third accusation goes against the fact, that you – say, you subscribe to my RSS-Feed – can basically see right now, what I’m typing. Which isn’t actually true, I can save this stuff as a draft and wait another five years before publishing it (by then it will be outdated, and probably not my personal opinion anymore, but hey, just for the sake of doing it ;). But this will give you no time to think about it, because the next minute somebody else will produce some senseless shit on the other side of the world and you’re going to read that as well. No time to think about what I wrote… and that makes you less of an individual because, according to Larnier, it’s thought that constitutes your consciousness. Adding to this, the constant flow of information that constitutes the internet anonomyses each bit of info and we cannot process it.
This is a line of argument so sophisticated, it’s hard to tackle at once. So let’s look at every assumption individually:

• assuming you read everything – nobody will ever do that without applying his unique filtering system acquired since childhood.
• assuming you don’t think about stuff you read – this is virtually impossible: you cannot turn of thinking, since while reading you generally already constitute your special interpretation of what the author tries to say
• assuming you read a lot – and I mean, really tons of stuff – at the internet, the very nature of hyperlinks generally leads you to the source more or less directly. The notion of anonymous information is something that I’d rather relate to 19th century authors: where the idea to quote sources was generally seen as something you’d only use underline your credibility and not to inform the reader about where you got your ideas.

So, all in all: this is an incredible train of thought – based on very doubtful assumptions. I really love this guy.

I love him especially for writing stuff, that is so absurdly anti-mainstream. Nevertheless, this time he really hit my Oh-My-Conservative-Approaching-Button.

So: Apologies for this rant ;)

Sources: FAZ Netzkultur: Der digitale Maoismus ist zu Ende, Wikipedia: Jaron Larnier, Wired Magazine Jaron (1993), Jaron’s Homepage, NYC Interface: Interview with Jaron Larnier (1994), The Guardian Profile: Jaron Larnier (2001)

Thanks to blimpa for the pic.