Carl Guderian on 12 Jul 2000 08:59:45 -0000


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[Nettime-bold] <nettime> Edge 71: Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech - FrankSchirrmacher


I thought Kai Krause's comments were the most cogent, but the discussion
neglected to mention a couple of aspects of the dot.economy that leave
people over here cold:

1) New Economy apostles insist that government subsidies for
infrastructure, rent-controlled apartments, and a large safety net are
"obstacles" to that great and shiny future Americans are presumably living
in right now. "Come on! Slash taxes on business, and maybe drop the
personal income tax a point or two, but make those lazy bastards work or
starve. It'll be great! You can't have our fiscal perpetual motion machine
without a frictionless economy! Get with the Clinton/Blair/Schroeder
program!" Thanks, really, but we'll just take a closer look at the U.S.
dot.economy before making irreversible changes. Maybe Europeans would
rather have some of those IPO goodies without ridiculous rents and
netslavery. We'll certainly try. Those way-cool ICE trains, GSM phones, and
rich cultural scene of Cologne exist BECAUSE the government, speaking more
or less for the people as well as business, took an active role in industry.

2) Media blowjobs for dot.com billionaires and their paid intellectuals get
old fast. "Wow! Steve Case and Jeff Bezos invited me backstage after COMDEX
because I'm their favorite groupie! There's fancy beer and sushi, and who
knows?...<wink>" If rock stars-cum-philosophers like these Dockers-clad,
Hootie-&-the-Blowfish-playing whitebreads are the public face of the Way
New Economy, then I'll throw my Vaio out the window and dust off the old
Smith-Corona. It's not that the European cyber-entrpreneur scene is free of
celebrity culture, but at least there's more critical thinking. Thank "Bob"
for the Nina Brink/World Online damn-near-close-to-insider-trading debacle
here in the Netherlands. She'll get away with it, but the episode puts
things in perspective for us over here.

As I recall, Jaron Lanier was outfoxed by those wily French. He wanted that
VPL Power Glove to become reality so badly that he signed over controlling
interest to a French consortium that, in the end, tossed him aside. Old age
and treachery beat youth and energy every time.

Carl,

Holding out for 4th, 5th, and Nth cultures?

>From: John Brockman <brockman@edge.org>
>To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
>Subject: <nettime> Edge 71: Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech - Frank Schirrmacher
>Date: Mon, Jul 10, 2000, 09:41 AM
>Sender: owner-nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
>Precedence: bulk
>
>
>     [orig To: 3culture@edge.org (Third Culture Mail List)]
>
>
>"Nobody knows, you can't find out, and you don't have to ask permission."
>
>July 10, 2000
>
>Edge 71
>at
>http://www.edge.org
>
>(9,642 words)
>
>--------------------
>THE THIRD CULTURE
>--------------------
>Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech
>By Frank Schirrmacher
>
>The European intelligentsia is entering the 21st century in silence,
>stubbornly or clumsily avoiding the issue. It is easy to imagine one
>of these intellectuals, fumbling over a new word-processing package:
>the infuriation at this "not coping", the alleged lack of "technical
>know-how," the antipathy (often justified) which sets in at the
>slightest whiff of leads and sockets. All this also characterizes
>prevailing attitudes to the revolutionary paradigm shift itself. The
>new age didn't come to us Europeans in a flash of inspiration, it
>came as a "retraining program": from typewriter to computer, from
>computer to Internet.
>
>--------------------
>THE REALITY CLUB
>--------------------
>Clifford Pickover, Geroge Dyson, Stewart Brand, Dave Myers, Sebastian
>Schnitzenbaumer, Kai Krause, Jason McCabe Calacanis respond to Frank
>Schirrmacher's"Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech"
>
>--------------------
>THE THIRD CULTURE
>--------------------
>
>Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech
>By Frank Schirrmacher
>
>Inroduction by John Brockman
>
>On May 23rd, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
>published Frank Schirrmacher's manifesto "Wake-Up Call for Europe
>Tech", in which he calls for Europe to adopt the ideas of the third
>culture. "Europe," he writes, "should be more than just a source for
>the software of ego crisis, loss of identity, despair, and Western
>melancholy. We should be helping write the code for tomorrow."
>
>Schirrmacher is a publisher of the newspaper, and his manifesto, a
>call to arms, is the beginning of a effort by FAZ to publish articles
>by and about third culture thinkers and their work. His goal: to
>change the culture of the newspaper and to begin a process of change
>in Germany and Europe.
>
>Schirrmacher's program, a departure for FAZ, has been covered in the
>German press and has caused a stir in German intellectual circles.
>FAZ has played an important role in shaping German culture, and that
>has meant, until now, culture with a capital "C".
>
>In a few short weeks since publication of his manifesto, Schirrmacher
>has brought the ideas of Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil, V.S. Ramachandran,
>Patrick Bateson, James Watson, Craig Venter, among other notable
>thinkers to the forefront of public discussion in Germany, while also
>initiating a collaboration between FAZ and Edge, the first product of
>which was the recent simultaneous publication in English and German
>of David Gelernter's manifesto, "The Second Coming."
>
>- JB
>
>FRANK SCHIRRMACHER was born in Wiesbaden in 1959. He studied German
>and English literature in Heidelberg, Philosophy and German at Clare
>College in Cambridge (UK) and obtained a PhD.
>
>In 1989 he became head of the arts and science department of the
>Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the most influential German
>newspapers. He has been one of the publishers of FAZ since 1994.
>
>Among others: Member of the Goethe-Instituts, member of the cultural
>advisory board of the Expo 2000 and of the Herbert Quandt-Stiftung,
>Bad Homburg. Newsweek has named him one of the leading Germans in the
>21st Century .
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech
>By Frank Schirrmacher
>
>NEW YORK. Blink and you will miss something. More so than any
>previous generation, we are taken by surprise virtually every week by
>technological and scientific innovations, and Europe has nothing to
>say about it. J. Craig Venter decodes the human genome and the public
>treats it as nothing more than a case for the Patent Office. Our
>growing dependence on data networks is only discussed when systems
>are brought to a standstill for a day by the love bug.
>
>With the blessings of the U.S. public, the American theoretician and
>computer expert Ray Kurzweil prophesies that within our lifetime,
>computers will exceed human brain power. In Germany, hardly anyone
>knows his name. This may be partly because his bestseller The Age of
>Spiritual Machines appeared in German last year under what could pass
>for the parody of an outdated title: "Homo S@piens."
>
>The European intelligentsia is entering the 21st century in silence,
>stubbornly or clumsily avoiding the issue. It is easy to imagine one
>of these intellectuals, fumbling over a new word-processing package:
>the infuriation at this "not coping", the alleged lack of "technical
>know-how," the antipathy (often justified) which sets in at the
>slightest whiff of leads and sockets. All this also characterizes
>prevailing attitudes to the revolutionary paradigm shift itself. The
>new age didn't come to us Europeans in a flash of inspiration, it
>came as a "retraining program": from typewriter to computer, from
>computer to Internet.
>
>This may be why many European intellectuals equate current
>developments with previous technological adaptations made after the
>invention of the automobile or the refrigerator. In this they are
>certainly mistaken. Ray Kurzweil may be wrong when he predicts that
>over the next 20 years, bio-, nano- and computer technology will
>bring greater changes to the way we live than the entire 20th
>century. But it is definitely worth talking about, especially in
>these times of tech-conscious, "green" government. But we just keep
>on fumbling with our leads and plugs and sockets, while people
>elsewhere are busy programming our future.
>
>"Europe has stopped thinking," proclaims Jaron Lanier, "but it has
>supplied the software." In his view, it will not be long before all
>the questions Western philosophers asked themselves, all the
>questions of being, illusion and consciousness, begin to be asked by
>computers. "And when they do, they can use the software written by
>Kant and Heidegger."
>
>Jaron Lanier is one of America's cyber-gurus, a player in the new
>intellectual scene which Europe has still barely discovered. Yet this
>discovery will be essential if Europe is to wake up to the new
>century. Years ago, Lanier invented the term "virtual reality" and
>built a reputation on spectacular software programs. Now, he is
>reconstructing ancient Egyptian music. "We will make something
>audible as it was once heard by the Pharaohs - a classical case of
>reverse engineering."
>
>Lanier is convinced that technical evolution is in the process of
>creating artificial intelligence. But such an intelligence will never
>stop despairing over programming errors. Immanuel Kant, Arthur
>Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche are no more than bug-infested
>versions of human consciousness. "Philosophers," he says, "have
>subjected humankind to constant beta-testing of their software."
>
>It is amazing to what extent the new century's technological elite
>reaches back into the distant past. Bill Gates collects Leonardo da
>Vinci and copyrighted art, telling us something about how he sees
>himself. J. Craig Venter, who cracked the genome, imitates
>Christopher Columbus' voyage of discovery in a one-man yacht. Ray
>Kurzweil, the technological revolution's influential commentator (and
>owner of countless patents) lets his computer invent new Shakespeare
>poems for him. Daniel Hillis, who created the super computers, is
>constructing a mechanical watch designed to run for 10,000 years,
>which he refers to as "my own little Stonehenge." And finally, there
>is Nathan Myhrvold, "the brain of Gates," who coordinates
>comprehensive expeditions on the life of the dinosaurs.
>
>"Since 1970," Myhrvold explains, "computers have increased their
>performance by a factor of one million," a development he expects to
>continue at the same speed for another 20 years. To make that quite
>clear: a factor of one million means the difference between a year
>and 30 seconds. In other words, today's new computer requires 30
>seconds for a task which would have taken a year with an older model.
>In the year 2010, computers will require 30 seconds for a task which
>would take a 1970s computer one million years. Maybe this explains
>his journeys to the land of the dinosaurs. According to Myhrvold:
>"We're going through a second evolution." He believes future
>generations will have as little understanding for our concepts of
>time and space as we have for those of the Middle Ages. As an
>assistant to Stephen Hawking, Myhrvold witnessed the birth of A Brief
>History of Time and a new cosmology. "In the past," he says,
>"astronomers built tools, and now the bio-computer experts are at
>last building their new tools."
>
>In Myhrvold's view, the combination of genetic engineering and
>computer science will trigger a tremendous revolution. Based on the
>AOL/Time-Warner model, he predicts that small biotech companies will
>buy out huge pharmaceuticals groups. "Their dimensions will certainly
>go beyond what I am capable of imagining." At this point, it's worth
>reminding ourselves of Myhrvold's dimensions: the former assistant to
>Stephen Hawking became a billionaire as Microsoft's key research
>strategist.
>
>In the 1950s, many who traveled to Paris did so to see Jean-Paul
>Sartre holding court in a cafe or arguing with Albert Camus. Anyone
>entering the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria on May 19 would have seen
>only a 40-year-old and a 30-year-old. "Does it know what it is?" asks
>the 40-year-old. "It's still a baby;" the younger man replies.
>
>The 30-year-old is Ben Goertzel, who has attracted talented people
>his own age from around the globe to his company to create artificial
>intelligence for the Internet. The 40-year-old is Nathan Myhrvold,
>and he gives Goertzel exactly 15 minutes to shape his destiny: "When
>we raise our baby, we won't talk to it about trees and flowers and
>teeth, as these are things it will never know. We will talk to it
>about files and MIDI sequences and shapes, as these are things in
>which we ourselves and the baby have gathered experience."
>
>This encounter is like the meeting between two artists, the elder
>celebrity and the rambunctious youngster. The finishing touch would
>be if Myhrvold were to ask Goertzel what he was working on, as Goethe
>once asked Heinrich Heine, and Goertzel were to reply: "a version of
>Faust."
>
>According to Myrvhold, genetic engineering and the development of
>artificial intelligence are the two main obsessions of America's
>scientific elite. In a text available on the Internet, he illustrates
>the limits to this project. One example he gives is the number of
>permutations possible with 59 objects - only slightly more than a
>deck of cards. Calculating the complete set of permutations for 59
>objects would require 10 to the power of 20 permutations, roughly
>equivalent to the entire number of protons and neutrons in the
>universe.
>
>"Europe has stopped thinking," says Lanier without a trace of malice.
>Later he adds: "Maybe we'll all go mad over here."
>
>These are young men reciting the development of artificial
>intelligence to young billionaires like a poem. Scientists such as
>Daniel Hillis, who first built the world's most powerful computer and
>now a mechanical watch which might still be ticking away in a world
>without humans. Hillis, whom Marvin Minsky lists among the most
>important scientists of our time, built parallel computers which
>simulate evolution. His machines were so powerful that the U.S.
>government banned the sale of his company Thinking Machines to a
>Japanese group in the interests of national security. And where did
>the theoretician of "artificial life" end up? "Until recently I was
>at Disney, but I resigned," he says. "It was a great experience. But
>it was just a transitional phase on the way to creating artificial
>life."
>
>Ray Kurzweil speaks of an age of "spiritual machines." And indeed, at
>technology's cutting edge, a movement has grown up that is as
>spiritual as it is materialistic. Like every movement, it has its
>profane sides. Asked how this profanity manifests itself, all the
>representatives of the movement without exception name Bill Gates. As
>if he was an ideological traitor, the Stalin of the computer age. But
>these are minor battles. "We are all part of it when Microsoft is
>broken up," says Lanier: "Broken up into its component parts."
>
>The way he says this, it sounds like: "Reduced to its skin and
>bones." The new reality just over the horizon will have as much in
>common with Windows as a monitor does with a windowpane. What then?
>"To grasp the scale of this revolution, think of the everyday
>things," recommends Hillis. Unlike Myhrvold, he is not yet a
>billionaire and is founding a new company: "Think of visits to
>administrative offices, schools, universities, libraries or doctors.
>In a few decades, all these things will no longer be as we now know
>them."
>
>Over the next few months, to ensure we are informed slightly in
>advance, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will be running a series
>of articles by the theoreticians of what John Brockman has dubbed the
>"third culture." Europe should be more than just a source for the
>software of ego crisis, loss of identity, despair, and Western
>melancholy. We should be helping write the code for tomorrow.
>
>May 23 © Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2000 All rights reserved.
>Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited.
>
>--------------------
>THE REALITY CLUB
>
>George Dyson, Stewart Brand, Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, Dave Myers,
>Clifford Pickover, Kai Krause, Jason McCabe Calacanis respond to
>"Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech" by Frank Schirrmacher.
>
>--------------------
>
>From: George Dyson
>Date: July 6, 2000
>
>Don't forget that we upstart Americans owe this whole digital
>business to G. W. Leibniz, hardware and software alike. In 1679,
>while exploring the powers of binary arithmetic, he imagined a
>digital computer in which binary numbers were represented by
>spherical pellets, governed by a rudimentary form of punched card
>control. "This [binary] calculus could be implemented by a machine
>(without wheels)," he wrote, "in the following manner, easily to be
>sure and without effort. A container shall be provided with holes in
>such a way that they can be opened and closed. They are to be open at
>those places that correspond to a 1 and remain closed at those that
>correspond to a 0. Through the opened gates small cubes or marbles
>are to fall into tracks, through the others nothing. It [the gate
>array] is to be shifted from column to column as required." In the
>shift registers at the heart of all electronic computers, from
>mainframes to microprocessors, voltage gradients and pulses of
>electrons have taken the place of gravity and marbles, but otherwise
>things are still running exactly as Leibniz envisioned (in Germany)
>in 1679.
>
>What better way to place ourselves between the digital past and
>future than to build a working model - 321 years later - of Leibniz's
>machine, on tennis-ball scale? It would take millions of tennis
>balls, and hours to perform the simplest of calculations, but a few
>miles of clear plastic shift registers, accumulators, and some
>gravity-fed input-output would make visible the invisible workings
>that govern so much of our existence today.
>
>[Leibniz, De Progressione Dyadica, Pars I," (MS, 15 March 1679),
>published in facsimile (with German translation) in Erich Hochstetter
>and Hermann-Josef Greve, eds., Herrn von Leibniz' Rechnung mit Null
>und Einz (Berlin: Siemens Aktiengesellschaft, 1966), pp. 46-47.
>English translation by Verena Huber Dyson, 1995.]
>
>GEORGE B. DYSON is a leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut
>kayaks Ďthe subject of his book Baidarka, numerous articles, and a
>segment of the PBS television show Scientific American Frontiers. His
>early life and work was portrayed in 1978 by Kenneth Brower in his
>classic dual biography, The Starship And The Canoe. Now ranging more
>widely as a historian of technology, Dyson's most recent book is
>Darwin Among The Machines.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Stewart Brand
>Date: July 6, 2000
>
>That's an endearingly almost random sample of ideas and thinkers. As
>good a way to dive in as any.
>
>Germany does seem more alert than most to some of these questions.
>They've translated my Clock of the Long Now, and two German video
>teams are filming the development of Danny Hillis's Clock and the
>ideas around it.
>
>STEWART BRAND is founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The
>Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, cofounder and president
>of The Long Now Foundation. He is the original editor of The Whole
>Earth Catalog, Author Of The Media Lab: Inventing The Future At Mit,
>How Buildings Learn, and The Clock Of The Long Now: Time And
>Responsibility (MasterMinds Series).
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer
>Date: July 6, 2000
>
>Schirrmacher's article is interesting, although a bit biased, since
>it fails to include the new economic spirit in Germany and the people
>who are driving it. As you know, the 1968 Generation is currently the
>biggest problem. As youngsters these people were in revolt against
>the post-Nazi regime in Germany, and they definitely did a great job
>of moving us away from the past. Today these people are in power, but
>because they were always against power, they make the worst CEOs,
>managers, etc.
>
>These people are against the concept of optimism for the future and
>believe that any form of pride, patriotism or team spirit is a
>manifestation of the devil himself. Today they're a royal pain the
>ass: inflexible, negative, blind.
>
>A very good example is the bureaucracy in Germany. Considering
>themselves to be the "last line of defense" against the Nazi Regime
>in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, the 1968 Generation felt that they had
>no alternative but to fight the old order. A lot of them became
>bureaucrats
>themselves, "infiltrating" the system and changing it from the
>inside. Others became terrorists.
>
>The reality is, though, that after securing power by making the long
>and tiresome walk through the institutions, the 1968 Generation
>really didn't change things a lot, except in making things even less
>efficient because of their lack of management talent. And since it
>took them so long to get there, they're all really "burned-out" and
>frustrated.
>
>Members of the 1968 Generation are blind because they fail to see
>what's really going on with the younger European generation, which is
>very different. Today's younger generation combines the best of both
>worlds: the idea that not every technological innovation is
>necessarily for the best, as well as the ability to become movers and
>shakers, to become entrepreneurs, to make things happen together.
>
>The next generation, which I represent, is solving the same problem
>that the 1968 Generation faced from a very different angle. My
>company, Mozquito Technologies, has just signed a deal with the
>Bavarian government to put all government forms online. And all I did
>was found a company with friends, raise money, and develop a
>technology together in a team. This whole process took us just two
>years.
>
>This technology will now make it possible to interact with the
>Bavarian bureaucracy without physically having to go to a government
>office, wait for hours in ugly rooms, fill out silly forms by hand,
>talk to those frustrated 1968 Generation guys. We're not making them
>obsolete, but at least we're providing an alternative path. These
>government officials will soon find themselves to be in competition
>with online forms, their digital counterpart. They're losing their
>status of being omnipotent and irreplaceable.
>
>In order to achieve this, did we have to fight? No. Did we have to
>throw away our lives and infiltrate the system from the inside? No.
>We've prevailed with a smile, silently, without much talking. And we
>had a great time doing it.
>
>SEBASTIAN SCHNITZENBAUMER is CEO of the Munich-based Stack Overflow
>AG which specializes in innovative client-server solutions for the
>Web. Their flagship product - the Mozquito Factory - is the world's
>first XML-based XHTML authoring tool, enabling developers to use
>tomorrow's Web technologies today.
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Dave Myers
>Date: July 6, 2000
>
>One aspect of the technological revolution that Americans are now
>researching and debating - and that Frank Schirrmacher and FAZ may
>wish to engage as well - is its social consequences. For example,
>does the Internet, while connecting people with kindred interests,
>also facilitate social isolation and risk of depression?
>
>Robert Putnam engages this issue in his new Bowling Alone , and I
>track various social trends during the technological age in my own
>The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty.
>
>DAVID G. MYERS is the John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology at
>Hope College and author of The Pusuit of Happiness, and most
>recently. The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Clifford Pickover
>Date: July 6, 2000
>
>The Frank Schirrmacher article "Wake-up Call for Europe Tech" is an
>interesting one. I believe he is suggesting that European
>technologists are not pursing the fractal edge of the known and
>unknown as much as American technologists are. In short, he appears
>to suggest that European technologists are less creative than their
>American counterparts and are not speculating as much about the
>philosophical implications of future technology. If this is
>Schirrmacher's point, and if this is true, it would be fascinating to
>determine various correlations between such technological creativity
>(TC) and other societal factors. Aside from more obvious economic and
>political indicators, are there other correlators of TC? For example,
>does the percentage of science-fiction books sold in a country
>correlate with TC? Does the number of people who bought Frank
>Tipler's The Physics of Immortality correlate with TC? (I mention
>this book in particular because I heard it sold quite well in
>Germany.)
>
>Can we directly infer TC by counting the percentages of "Edge.org"
>readers in each country? I hope to track country of origin for
>readers of the "Pickover Report" at www.pickover.com to infer TC.
>
>Here's a question to ask of the Edge readers: "What are viable
>correlators of technological creativity in a society?" Who knows -
>maybe we will find a direct correlation of TC with readership of
>mind-numbing SF authors such as Greg Egan, Robert Sawyer, Neal
>Stephenson, or Stephen Baxter? Or maybe there is a correlation with
>the religious makeup or age demographics of a country, or the
>percentage of people speaking English, or some other odd factor.
>
>When I asked colleagues why Europe might have less TC than America,
>they made three controversial points:
>
>1) "Europeans deliberately poke around the edges of current
>technology because they lack the lash of being eaten alive (laid off)
>if some other company beats the company they work for."
>
>2 "The measure of success in America is the height of the pile of
>dollars accumulated. This is less true for Europeans."
>
>3. "The European response to American innovation is frequently an
>attempt to apply brakes: 'No gene-engineered frankenfoods.' 'No
>information unless you pass oppressive privacy rules.' 'The Internet
>is an American imperialist plot to infect all countries with the
>English language.' 'Let's only send snail mail instead of e-mail,
>which gives a competitive advantage to American companies.' Perhaps
>Americans are more willing to beg, borrow, or steal ideas that work
>than Europeans are."
>
>I don't know I agree with all of these points, or if they are
>relevant, but they seem to be on peoples' minds.
>
>CLIFFORD PICKOVER is a research staff member at IBM's T. J. Watson
>Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is the holder of
>more than a dozen patents dealing with computer interfaces, and he
>has written some twenty books on a broad range of topics, including
>Time : A Traveler's Guide, Surfing Through Hyperspace : Understanding
>Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons, Black Holes : A Traveler's
>Guide, Future Health : Computers and Medicine in the 21st Century,
>Keys to Infinity, and The Science of Aliens.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Kai Krause
>Date: July 6, 2000
>
>Euro Muse and Ponder
>
>What Schirrmacher is describing is important and timely. I have lived
>between the continents somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic for 25
>years. Born and raised in Germany I left at age 19 and have been
>intertwined with computers and Silicon valley since the inception of
>personal computers. When in Europe, I found myself on stages and TV
>shows wildly gesturing to the audiences about the coming revolutions,
>the PC, and later the Web. The West- East lag time in the 80s would
>easily be measured in years, even as late as the mid 90s hardware and
>software prices would typicallys be tripled by the time they reached
>end users. Now in "the Zeroes" the visible delays have been
>minimized. Sure, it always will take a couple extra months before The
>Matrix hits DVD in German, but no more so than it takes half a year
>for the Playstation II to migrate from Japan to the US. That doesnĄt
>seem to ruffle the feathers of the American consciousness or make
>them feel inadequate. A stroll down Akihabara will teach any American
>that there are such quirky last vestiges of cultural imperialism
>expressing itself in a communal smirk.
>
>And while I completely agree with SchirrmacherĄs general poke at old
>encrusted layers, I canĄt quite subscribe to the notion that the
>American version is all that its cracked up to be. There is a huge
>gap between the cutting edge digerati and the common man. Cutting
>from Danny Hillis to Billy Bob Hillbilly can bring you to the edge of
>insanity. A cross country trip and a random stop at any random gas
>station in anytown can easily let you lose all faith in mankind.
>
>There have been plenty of times where I was certain itĄs time to
>reboot this planet and hope for Earth 2.0 to be better. It has never
>been this great and it has never been this bad.... The landscapes are
>cut up beyond all repair, kind of a molecular entropy getting more
>chaotic by the week. The frequencies are globbed with more and more
>and more of nothing. This is not the space to whine about the ever
>obvious dot coma we are in and anyway you are the choir and beyond
>being preached to.
>
>The point in question was that Europe with all its encrustedness has
>also endless amounts of beautiful crust on its bread, for starters.
>As a bicontinental drifter and now living in a space that is in parts
>1000 years old I do have many thoughts on the question.
>
>Surely there is kind of a Germanic-depression lingering. The school I
>went to was older than the entire US. The generation of the teachers
>had gone through one or several wars. EveryoneĄs parents and uncles
>were still talking about the post-war time of extreme restrictions.
>America has never even had a war invade on its soil. Or rebuild all
>of Chicago after it was bombed out entirely. The first generation of
>Germans that is no longer completely pummeled by the communal guilt
>and depression of that era is just now emerging.
>
>The weather isnĄt as everblue, there is a 24bit high resolution gray
>that sets in. But suddenly now I find it kind of soothing. Its light
>out until a quarter to 11pm. I muse and ponder...
>
>There has always been a focus on completeness, depth and details
>which I am very glad to have inherited and refer to as my "Mercedes
>Benz genes". What may be described in a superficial manner as an Urge
>for Cleanliness is to me just an expression to get things right and
>follow through to final details. This may have its side effects but
>is in principle a very laudable trait. Much that I see in Germany is
>an absolutely beautiful attention to the small minor aspects.
>
>The building I am in high above the Rhein river has hundreds of such
>details that would make modern architects shrivel up...that could not
>possibly be done in this age. Free hanging staircases out of bevelled
>wood, stone steps leaving a central free column for a bellrope, a
>chapel built underneath a meeting room and over an archway...and all
>that as Beethoven was turning deaf, Chopin wrote some piano concertos
>and Brahms was busy not being born yet. In California, sneezing the
>wrong way will dent the neighbors sliding glass doors from Sears.
>
>The waiter at the local restaurant has learned "waitering" in a three
>year apprenticeship, waiting to become a Meister at his craft. In
>L.A. I have yet to meet a waiter that wasn't more focused on a script
>than the fishfork, or one that could even identify one.
>
>And such are the intellectuals on the scene here. They are not as
>loud and colorful. There arenĄt as many billionaires to buy
>Leonardos. But they do go to the local "Kneipe" which is not the same
>as a "pub" since they don't just drink beer, real beer at that by the
>way, but they discuss and debate and argue and engage. The local
>village here by the Rhein river has barely a couple thousand souls
>and yet there are places that serve food after midnight and dancing
>till 5 am, when just in time the local bakeries open for breakfast.
>Did I mention the bread?
>
>The Cultural Scene in a town like Cologne easily matches anything in
>the US anywhere. There are more museums, interactive art shows,
>theaters, plays, children and senior citizen events, classical
>concerts, ballet and multimedia events than you are likely to find in
>a city 15 times its size like LA. Aside from that, going to a
>midnight Vernissage in LA would let you take your life into your
>hands...I brought a dozen US designers and programmers with me and it
>was amazing to see their reactions and wonder. As I used to say it in
>various debates and keynotes in the US: "in this damn puritan fake
>society you canĄt even show a nipple, unless someone is cutting it
>off with a razor blade at the time, then itĄs ok..." And that was
>before I saw a wrestling event.
>
>This place here has had 16:9 widescreens for a decade. Driving an
>S-class at 270 km/h on the Autobahn will make 55 mph on the way to
>Vegas feel like a very sad joke. I have had navigators in every
>rental Beamer and Merc since 98. My cellphone was half the size of
>the model "back home". I take a train, it comes every 12 minutes and
>it is on time. The fast ones go 220 km/h. I took my kids on an Amtrak
>to up the coast. LA-SB is 4 hours, three times the time by car.
>
>Germany has comics that are ever bit as wild and witty as a Robin
>Williams, if not more so. There is machine gun speed and wit like
>"Otto" but also deep political satire like "H¸sch" and hundreds of
>shades between. Never heard of them...? Well its no wonder. The
>reason is simple: this stuff simply doesn't translate. Its like
>watching a Woody Allen movie in Irian Yaya or east Shanghai: without
>the voice and the New York context, it just loses everything. There
>are plenty of people that are, seriously, "World Famous" in Germany.
>Every bit as entrenched in the local culture alas, they cannot be
>exported. What strikes me as sad though is that this simple insight
>itself is not exported and the lack of English speaking German
>Standup Comics leads to this implied notion that the entire
>population is somehow stern and tough and worse yet "humorless". This
>is, to use a technical sociopsychpathological term, complete bullshit!
>
>The point of non translation, both in language and therefore in
>awareness, is made with the implied statement that there are plenty
>of extremely creative people here, amazing artists, literate thinkers
>and innovative spirit at every level and in every shade of meaning.
>Its just that you may have never heard of them and maybe in some
>cases never will.
>
>Its not all roses of course. IPO fever has hit the Neue Markt and
>there are now plenty of rambling etailers with b2b speeches about
>sticky eyeball solutions. The American LHF disease ("low hanging
>fruit") has rampaged through the ranks.
>
>The "Old Money" also has "Old Knowledge". They are endangered
>species. Count von Suchandsuch canĄt count on anyone to drag him onto
>the web. The schools are in dire need of new generations of teachers
>with new methods, tools and guidelines
>
>The creative young spirits don't have the structures that built
>Silicon Valley.... in Silicologne Valley they are only beginning to
>talk about Angel investors and penny options for all early team
>members. Starting a corporation will set you back 50,000 Euro
>immediately: three students in Prague and 2 professors in Tyrolia may
>already fumble. But as I sit with the Chancellor discussing these
>stumbling blocks I sense that they are keenly aware that everything
>is about to change. They WANT to embrace that change. They KNOW that
>they don't know...
>
>As I arrive here, in love with the notion of an ancient castle with
>monstrous walls and inside all plasma screens, digital monks
>meandering about, I cannot help but feel more at home than I do in my
>actual home of Santa Barbara.
>
>There is something in the air, I used to explain to the Germans about
>California, and I didn't mean the smog. It is that "anything is
>possible", that you are reduced to the essence of what you bring to
>the party and if its good, you will succeed.
>
>That as the American Dream appealed to me in my twenties. The twists
>of that and the shades of the American Nightmare appall me in my
>Forties. Still I am an Optimist, but I am lost between these worlds.
>I don't feel either German or American. Albert spent a considerable
>amount of time in the end thinking about a world government. Having
>felt a Citizen of the World all my life, I believe that the future
>incarnations of the Ultroid Web will get us there faster than any
>political structural changes. I do see a chance for a completely new
>kind of "digital democracy" so to speak, where all the ants in the
>ant hill suddenly have direct access to every aspect of their culture
>as well as each other.
>
>The differences should not be between the US and Europe. They are
>between individuals that want to bring about change for the better
>and the ones that don't, both here and there. We have more in common
>than in difference.
>
>DonĄt label several hundred million people with that much history in
>their jeans as "they stopped thinking". Maybe they should start
>talking a bit more about the fact that they are thinking. IĄll
>mention it to them.
>
>Schirrmacher did too, and I am grateful for it.
>
>KAI KRAUSE, born 1957 in Germany, has a doctorate in philosophy, a
>masters in image processing, a patent for interface concepts, a Clio
>for the first StarTrek movie and a Davis Medal by the Royal British
>Photographical Society. Time magazine selected him as one of the 50
>most influential thinkers of the next decade. His software was used
>for the Oscars and the Mars Mission, Issey Myake clothing and Playboy
>logos, an Absolut Kai ad and a few others. He wrote some filters for
>Photoshop, stuff for kids and programs to play with landscapes and
>human figures and then took the whole thing to Nasdaq in 95 for a few
>hundred million.
>
>He is currently building a research lab in a castle on the Rhein
>river dubbed the Byteburg for applied innovation in all fields, as
>well as an Incubator for startups with the German government in a
>second castle near Cologne. He loves "Go and G–del, Bach and
>Billiards, Escher and eclectic food. Tea and Tivo, new gadgets and
>old books, museums and symphonies"
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Jason McCabe Calacanis
>Date: July 7, 2000
>
>The United States, Legos, and Innovation
>
>Frank Schirrmacher's dispatch on the state of thinking and execution
>in Germany doesn't surprise me. While I'm not an expert on science,
>it does seem from my pedestrian perspective that the United States is
>clearly pushing the dialogue, as well as the envelope, on important
>topics of our time like nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,
>robotics and the human genome. Topics which are, and will continue
>to, converge in our to time.
>
>As for my personal focus (the Internet), I get the sense that
>Germany, along with all of Europe, is suffering from a general mental
>block, or perhaps sympathy pains, with regard to Internet
>development. When I speak with Internet entrepreneurs outside of the
>United States, the distinct feeling I'm struck with is that they
>believe that what has happened in the last five years in the United
>States is the gospel in regard to the dot-com world. As such, the
>prevailing thinking is to build knock offs of businesses that have
>worked in the United States Internet market (think: EBAY for Germany,
>EBAY for Spain, etc.), as well as financial models (i.e. angel
>investors, incubators, stock market roll-ups, etc.).
>
>What non-U.S. markets have to realize is that the U.S. dot-com market
>is like some warped house of mirrors inhabited by a freak show.
>Figuring out why theglobe.com was worth billions and is now worth $50
>million, or why the market rewards B2C one day and B2B the next, is
>like trying to figure out who's who when you've stumbled into the
>house of mirrors and you're looking at the reflections of the bearded
>lady and the world's smallest man after drinking three martinis.
>
>Boo.com, Europe's biggest and shortest-lived dot-com play to date, is
>a result of buzz-word copycat thinkers mirroring the worst of U.S.
>dot-com models: raise lots of money, spend tons of it on advertising,
>and sell products at a loss in hopes of making it back in volume.
>
>Sure Europeans need to study the United States market, but most
>importantly, they need to look at the core values of the Internet and
>evaluate them for themselves in relation to their market and culture.
>Every child in the United States plays with Legos at some point in
>their childhood. They are one of the longest and best-selling toys
>ever, and hail from a tiny, yet innovative country (Denmark), with a
>population that is a fraction of the size of the United States. That
>is how European dot commers need to think - Ian Clarke's advances
>with Freenet could be the first example.
>
>JASON MCCABE CALACANIS is Editor and Publisher of Silicon Alley
>Daily; The Digital Coast Weekly, Silicon Alley Reporter and Chairman
>CEO, Rising Tide Studios.
>
>-------------------------------------------------
>-------------------------------------------------
>EDGE
>
>John Brockman, Publisher & Editor
>
>Published by Edge Foundation, Inc.,
>5 East 59th Street,
>New York, NY 10022
>
>Copyright©2000 by Edge Foundation, Inc.
>
>[If at any time you want your name to be taken off this mail list, or
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>-------------------------------------------------
>-------------------------------------------------
>
>~~
>John Brockman
>Edge Foudation, Inc.
>5 East 59th Street
>New York, NY 10022
>tel: 212.935.8900 x11
>fax: 212.935.5535
>brockman@edge.org
>
>Visit EDGE at: http://www.edge.org
>
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