Andreas Broeckmann on Mon, 3 Mar 2014 15:05:28 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world


I don't think that Enzensberger's text is to be taken seriously - the tone is so light-hearted that it might well be that it isn't even intended to be. His suggestions are so far off the social reality of technical systems and media usage, that it is hard to take them as anything but the flippant and ironic Biergarten-remarks from an old man in the elite-quarter of München-Schwabing.

What is worrysome about this is that in a country where the government leader thinks that "the Internet is uncharted land for all of us" (Merkel, 2013), people who read a supposedly informed intellectual (Enzensberger) writing in a respected conservative newspaper (FAZ), might actually be mislead to think that the proposed privatistic "head-in-the-sand" strategy is a meaningful response to systems that affect human lives, economic and political processes on a far broader scale. Throwing away, as Enzensberger suggests, your mobile phone, not using online banking, or writing letters only by snale mail, would probably be as revolutionary as not reading the FAZ any more.

Welcome to "Neuland".

-ab


Am 03.03.14 12:24, schrieb Geert Lovink:

Thanks Cornelia, and Florian for making the translation. I don't mind
the piece but what misses here is a bit of self-reflection of a writer
who has been inside the media realm his entire life, and who is unable
to put his own 'offline romanticism' in the larger picture of the
(German) history of ideas. Apart from this, it is also sad that he is
simply badly informed about the current state of the postal system in
the age of global surveillance. One link will do:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html
(U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement). Geert


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