Radical Critique of Free Culture
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Yes, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ged Lovink. I'm based in Amsterdam, where I'm heading the Institute of Network Cultures. This project was originally made in Germany. It's a bit different than I expected.
00:24
It's a bit different in German, but the organization has more to say. I'm sorry, Libra. Of English, but that's all. I'm not sure, I'm in the shade, but OK.
00:42
Hey, guys. So we did this talk in English, because approximately 25% of the current visitors are non-German speakers. So OK, I would like to welcome everyone here.
01:03
I'm going to lead you through some of the recent projects of our Institute of Network Cultures before I come to today's topic. And I moved from Australia to the Netherlands,
01:21
back to the Netherlands in 2004, where I had this unique opportunity to head my own little research institute. It looks bigger than it really is. We only have two permanent staff, and that includes me.
01:43
But nonetheless, coming from the squatters movement in the 80s, the do-it-yourself culture, I knew exactly that I can do a lot with a little bit of money. If you don't have any money, it's really hard to do little. But if you have little money, you
02:01
can do an awful lot with it. So this has been our recipe. And I work within, let's say, the European tradition of critique, as you can see. With Pittschult in 1995, here in Berlin,
02:21
we started the Nettime Initiative, which still is dedicated to the further development of what we call internet criticism. Some have noticed that internet criticism has gone mainstream lately, at least in this country. That's certainly not the case worldwide.
02:44
But we are developing a methodology that entails the developments, the, let's say, the,
03:00
how can I say, our institute wants to spur early research into emerging topics. It means that we bring together researchers, artists, and activists around these issues with the idea that the projects that we do kind of
03:25
create a small critical mass of people that work in the same field. They get to know each other. They start to collaborate, and so on, and the rest we know. So what we are doing is, with the little financial means
03:40
that we have, is be on certain topics very early. And our specific methodology, as I said, is European, in that we believe that radical criticism is one of the major forces in innovation. Of course, in the American Silicon Valley model,
04:04
innovation has to be positive, new age. You have to bring a good message, a feel-good message. We think that the unique European quality would be radical critique. This is our background, our intellectual background.
04:21
Mine is, let's say, of German media theory, but it's something else. And it is through that spirit that we believe that we can develop critical concepts that later on can also be developed in a variety of practices.
04:43
Okay. This is the website. You can see a few of the projects, and one of the most successful ones recently has been the Video Vortex Project, which deals with artist responses to YouTube.
05:05
We've had already five big events. A reader, we're now producing a second publication. This is a very, very active, mostly European network, and we hope to bring it to Berlin as well at some point.
05:25
This is something recent that we've started. As I said, I'm not going to give you an overview of all the things we do, but this one kicked off in November, but it goes back to events in Maastricht,
05:43
organized by Florian Kramer, and in Vienna, organized by Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker. This is kind of a loose European network of people that try to deal with the search engine and search from, let's say, an arts and humanities perspective.
06:03
So it's not purely technical. Of course, it is a technical topic, but what we start to do is bring together people who work in this field from a critical perspective.
06:22
That's quite important because, if you know, it's quite difficult to critique Google. It's very easy to praise it, and it's very hard to critique it, let's say, from a sophisticated, intellectual, and political point of view.
06:40
If you don't want to end up in some kind of resentment or cultural pessimism or warning kids not to use the computer, and so on and so on. If you don't want to go there, then what? If you don't want to preach the Bildungsberger and help them in their painful process of change,
07:05
and if you see that there are more bigger political projects, then you'll have to come up with something. It's one thing to propose a nationalization of Google or a straight out ban, but I think this is better.
07:22
This is something that we could better deal with within a European perspective and do that in Brussels. We think that it's also very interesting to look at alternatives for Google, to discuss them, to promote them, and also to see where this could probably go.
07:43
These are some of the questions that this project, this network, which is now a network of events, is posing. We are looking at alternative browsers. We are looking at next generation search engines. We think that, for instance, from a technical point of view,
08:02
too long, especially by journalists, we've been focused on, let's say, the algorithm, kind of the fetishism of the Google algorithm. By now, we know that this algorithm was indeed important at the very beginning, 10, 12 years ago, but Google, for instance, now is a huge international enterprise.
08:26
And the role, in particular, of the algorithm, for instance, might be a little bit overstated these days. There are a lot of different ways to search, and Google lists, I think, about 200 ways to do that.
08:44
And, yeah, so this project looks into the history, and this is the book that kind of came out, which our colleagues in Vienna produced.
09:00
So this is the first comprehensive publication coming from Europe with a critical perspective. It is in English and in German, so it's two separate books, if you're interested. This is probably the most sophisticated publication about this topic at the moment.
09:23
If you read it, you can also say, well, it's early days here. And this is the problem that we have in all these fields. If you start to do critical work, you really have the idea, OK, a lot is happening, but it's still early days.
09:41
We are still very much behind, and this feeling that critique is kind of running behind the facts is a very structural problem that we have to face. On the one hand, you could say, OK, if we're behind, we have to speed up, or we have to slow down even further, that's what some say.
10:01
Or we have to question the very paradigms that we are confronted with. So these projects really ask these questions. And the next event is in Vienna. So if you're interested, we are continuing together
10:25
and to see how we can deal with critical interventions in that large field of search and Google, I have to say.
10:42
It's about Google, and it's not. That's also about this one. This is the project that we're doing this year. It's called Critical Point of View, and it's a Wikipedia research initiative. We have started this one together with the Center for Internet and Society.
11:07
Nishan Shah is speaking in another room here. I haven't seen him yet, but he's around to speak about the other project that his center in Bangalore is doing, and the Digital Natives Research Initiative.
11:25
This is something that we're very proud of to have pulled off. It's a real Indian collaboration, also with people from the University of Siegen here in Germany, with also members in Melbourne, Australia.
11:43
And the next meeting is now planned for this in Leipzig. So there will be a German meeting of this initiative, probably on the 22nd and 23rd of September.
12:01
There will be a meeting in German focusing on the research, the Wikipedia research that is happening within this, let's say, cultural context. And the next one, a big one, is planned for Taipei in January. So we're really putting a lot of efforts
12:21
into pulling off this independent Wikipedia research. Why independent? I think, yeah, I don't know if you know Wikipedians. You quite soon get into a fight with them about their project. So it was our idea that it's not forbidden for them to participate,
12:43
but this is not a collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. And we are quite explicit about it. We want to have a free space to talk about all the different aspects of the Wikipedia project in order to critically support it, I have to say.
13:01
This really comes from people, more than half of them are, in fact, of course, Wikipedians. That's no surprise because you need to know something about it if you want to do research about it. Here you can see a little bit the topics that we are trying to deal with this network that's
13:24
still emerging as we speak. We emphasize a lot on the interface design. Wikipedia itself is working on that. We've got a more academic section on the history of encyclopedias in the place of Wikipedia and its relation to arts because Wikipedia
13:43
is going multimedia. And that's a very interesting development in relation to Creative Commons, online video, and so on. There's a bit hardcore statistics as well because it's the seventh biggest website in the world. It generates an enormous amount of data and different data
14:02
sets that researchers can use. And again, of course, the most central debate there is designing debate. It's about the whole issue of moderation and so on. We all know about that. Also, the German case there is very interesting, this debate that recently took place about possible forking.
14:25
And because it is, let's say, a global initiative and Wikipedia itself has emphasized this lately more and more because most of the contributors we know that are somehow white, male, middle age, somehow grumpy guys.
14:47
This is known. The statistics about that are available. And I can show them to you if you like. But all right, the challenge for Wikipedia is, of course, to move to the non-Western world
15:01
to really work on Spanish, Arab, and a lot of other languages. All these Wikipedia editions are available. They have started, but it's now really about bringing them up to a critical mass that, for instance, the German Wikipedia really has achieved.
15:23
And the German Wikipedia in that sense is a very, very good example how to do that. Because Spanish and English, they're somehow world languages. Things get a little bit blurred there. So the post-colonial critique of Wikipedia is a very, very important starting point.
15:46
Now I come to the topic myself, as I already said. When I ask myself, what is Web 2.0, this is usually my answer. This is what has happened since the dot-com crash, since the second incarnation of internet culture, if you like.
16:03
And that is the significant move of internet use and internet cultures away from the West. You've heard China becoming bigger than the US in terms of its uses last year. Well, OK, we can go into all these statistics.
16:24
This one is maybe also quite significant. English still is the number one language. But between one and two years, that will be no longer the case. Overall, English will somehow stabilize around a comfortable minority position of 20%, 25%
16:43
of the content. And it's particularly Arab, Spanish, Portuguese that will grow significantly over the next few years. I don't think German can grow, Japanese can't really grow,
17:02
Korean can't really grow. But others have a really interesting growth spur ahead of them. This is what I have been emphasizing a lot in my own blog research.
17:21
Maybe you know that while I was here in Berlin a couple of years ago, I wrote the essay, Blogging Danilo's Impulse. And that is, in fact, based on this very, very diverse picture that you get when we talk about what do people blog when they blog about.
17:41
What are the topics? And usually, the emphasis is usually around on this. So when we're talking about bloggers, and that's particularly the case in Germany, and I think that's very unfortunate, it is always about how do bloggers relate to so-called old media, Holzmedien, Unsebeiter.
18:05
And I think that is, just purely from the perspective of the statistics, this is a slightly irrelevant question. Because if you look at the overall blog landscape, people blog about anything, about anything. And there's so much going on.
18:22
And the question whether some want to become journalists or not is, I mean, for me, it's completely overrated. And I think it's really also a pity, because what we do not get to see is the rich variety in blog culture.
18:44
If we only emphasize on the small group of wannabe journalists or not wannabe journalists, then the whole thing is going in circles. And what happens when it's going in circles? You are a hype, and then you're out, and you've forgotten, and so on. We know all these cycles, and I
19:01
think we can learn from that. Yeah, all right. What has happened over the last few years is this kind of obsession almost with the quantities. There is this whole feeling that we are overwhelmed.
19:24
And in the academic, let's say, circles, we would call this the quantitative turn. The internet has gone from, let's say, a pioneering culture, a subculture, cyber culture, towards a mainstream. A mainstream that is maybe not so different from society,
19:45
but is maybe quite different from the media landscape that we have known over the past few decades. So what we are particularly dealing with
20:00
is this issue of so much. OK, well, here you can see other statistics. It just doesn't stop. I have 5 million tweets a day, how many?
20:21
900,000 new articles that bloggers post, and so on. Yeah? And here, again, there are more issues. And what this has led to, in particularly for the leaders,
20:42
in what in Germany is called Feitung, in the opinionated press, is this lamination, this kind of cry for guidance and this fear of information
21:01
overload. People can't manage anymore. They have stopped reading their emails. They have to somehow deal with Twitter, but they can't. They don't know how to fit it into their busy, everyday life, and so on, and so on.
21:20
And we have been dealing with this issue already for a while in our institute. And in 2006, we started this initiative. It's called My Creativity. And it deals with the issue that here, especially here in Berlin, of course, has been discussed widely. And that's the whole issue of how do you manage it all?
21:43
How do you make a living? How do you divide your time? All these questions that you might consider as private or personal, but we know very well that they are completely defined by the rules in society.
22:01
For many professions, to deal with the internet is becoming inevitable. Lately, I've noticed, for instance in the Netherlands, that because of the rise in unemployment, all the architecture firms have now suddenly woken up.
22:20
So all the architects, they've fired about 20% of their workforce. And they've discovered that they now have to deal with web 2.0. Of course, in the building boom, they couldn't care less. They had clients anyway. It didn't really matter what they thought or what they did with internet.
22:41
They were doing very well anyway. But just very recently. So it goes in waves. And every profession has to deal with it. This is a research that recently we commissioned
23:00
to do by Russell and Jill, who worked at the London School of Economics. And it asked the question, what are the working circumstances? What are the working conditions in our industry, in our branch? And this is really important to us because we know, for instance, in the case of web design,
23:21
that prices have been falling. Still, a lot of people entered the field. And she had a very interesting outcome, saying that people accept lower incomes because they gain in freedom. They don't have to work for a boss.
23:40
And so their lack of income is compensated in that lifestyle choice, which is interesting because it doesn't really, of course, fit to the pure, let's say, Marxist kind of analysis and so on.
24:01
This is kind of a similar sign. This is Sanprecario. He's our saint of the precarious workers. This is really an Italian invention. And what I like about it is that it kind of tries to emphasize this double aspect of the situation, namely
24:24
that we can be proud of the freedoms that we have gained. But of course, we are very concerned about labor conditions and income. So I think this is kind of the strategy
24:41
that we should follow. And I find this a very interesting kind of follow-up German example of that, which is about interns and the way, in particular, the cultural sector
25:01
is using interns. This is, of course, also the case with a lot of new media and design companies who employ a lot of these so-called practicatin. And I think just from a perspective of organizing people
25:21
and raising social issues, this is really an interesting strategy. OK. Now I come to the topic of my title. And that is the free culture. And what we have lately seen is quite an interesting kind
25:43
of clash of cultures. But it's also a very interesting and inspiring debate. This is the ox cars. I think they were held for the second time in Barcelona in October. And it's a huge event, especially
26:02
in the Spanish-speaking world, in the Spanish context. Maybe it's a little bit comparison even to this event here. And we had, for the first time in the preparation with a large number of people, a big debate with the organizers about why they emphasized free culture.
26:22
Free culture is clearly a right-wing concept of US think tanks that kind of wants to go head-on with the intellectual property rights regimes. It's related to Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig.
26:41
It's a very, very kind of liberal approach. And from, let's say, a political perspective, it has to be said that the celebration of free culture is not really in the interest of, let's say, the creative workers. Of course, we cannot go back to the old regime
27:03
of intellectual property rights. But at least we have to put it on the agenda, how to make a living. This is the time of economic crisis. And it hits us very hard, in particular, young people. And we cannot walk away from this and just celebrate free culture and say,
27:20
everybody has to give its work away for free and be happy with Creative Commons and so on. And so there was a really lively debate there about this. And it is this kind of coalition that I think is kind of pointing at the future, where
27:40
we try to maintain some of the values of free software, open source, of free culture, Creative Commons, and at the same time focus on how we can give creative workers, intellectual workers,
28:01
public intellectuals, and so on and so on a living. This is the charter that was produced at the event in Barcelona. It's a very interesting document because you can see that the people who have made this
28:23
are clearly starting to have doubts internally and have a lot of debates about this issue, how to reconcile these two different, let's say, demands. And of course, Econukes, in the German context,
28:41
has worked on this for a long time. And their emphasis on peer-to-peer production. So that is somehow a threat that we should also kind of insert in this debate. But this is kind of, in my opinion,
29:00
where we are at the moment. Yes, we need to defend free culture, but we also need to put the economic demands on the agenda. This is, of course, Pirate Bay. As you can see, you can download for free here
29:21
the book Free by Chris Anderson. He's a very Hippocratic person. He is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. He has always refused to put his book online for free. Many people have done it for him.
29:43
But this kind of points at the internal hypocrisy of the Silicon Valley agenda. Free is always free of others. It's other people's content that needs to be free, not my content. And yeah, so I thought this was funny.
30:02
The book is now, I think it's two years old. But still, I think it kind of incorporates the dominant, let's say, internet ideology. Yeah, audiobook, I know.
30:22
But I'm talking about the book itself. And I know that he made it available. But then also, it disappeared again. So yeah, now I want to go through, let's say, four internet critics that I'm kind of looking at
30:45
or that I want to relate to or think that are interesting. This is really certainly the most prominent one for me, at least, Nicholas Carr. Used to be editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review
31:01
in the 90s and then became an independent writer. And his latest book, which is going to be out in a few months, is called What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, the Shallows. This is his blog. And he's probably the most fierce critic of the free, of Wikipedia, of the economic model that
31:26
underpins Google. And yeah, I can highly recommend you to kind of look at his work and follow it. He became, let's say, particularly famous in July 2008, when the Atlantic Monthly
31:42
published this article. It's Google making us stupid. And the piece asked the question whether searching is kind of creating a new culture of what I call modern nervosity.
32:06
That's the term, of course, Freud used 100 years ago. But this is kind of, I think, what he is describing here. This nervousness, this relentless looking, going back to different windows, different sites,
32:25
updating, we all know. I mean, this conference I read on the website is dedicated to the real-time internet. And I think that is a sign of the time. Internet is, in its very structure and culture,
32:42
moving away from the archive approach and moving slowly, bit by bit, to the flow, to the real-time internet. This conference is a good example. We have a live stream. It's not archived.
33:02
And this is kind of what people expect these days and also what is kind of cool and what you need to do. Of course, streaming has been around for the last 10 years or so, but finally, it's working. And also, the computers at the very end of the line,
33:23
at the end of the users, are now ready to receive a lot of data. So this real-time internet is kind of ready to take off. And Nicholas Carr, in this essay,
33:43
asked what the long-term implications are of this culture. And of course, there's the big debate amongst teachers in the buildings sector also about this. Should we stop teaching children?
34:03
Can they just look it up and find? Well, that's, in fact, what children are already doing. So maybe we have another philosophy in the school, in the classroom, but the children themselves are already just doing this way of learning.
34:25
Now, whether it's a form of learning or not is exactly the debate. And this article maybe looks more into what I call the neurological term in net criticism, which means that there's
34:43
a growing amount of opinion leaders and researchers that look into the long-term effects on the human brain of this nervousness, of this constant searching and switching, multitasking, and so on, being available.
35:05
Clay Shirky is one of the players in that field. And I find his approach quite interesting. He is, on the one hand, he's an intellectual, but he's also kind of a very pragmatic, almost
35:20
entrepreneurial-like researcher. And so he kind of shies away a little bit from all these big cultural debates. And so for him, the problem is quite simple. It's filter failure, not information overload. And I think that's interesting.
35:40
And this problem, this proposition that he makes will be with us for quite some time. And of course, here, with filter, he doesn't mean, of course, the filters that are now under debate everywhere that will filter internet content for censorship. But here, you have to think of filters probably more
36:02
in the sense of the so-called dashboards that people install on their desktops, where you decide which information arrives to you, where you are, again, in control, because you have defined
36:22
the terms of the filter. Now, this is, I don't need, maybe here, I need to say much about this guy and his book, Playback. It's been widely discussed mainly here in the German-speaking world. The book has not been translated yet.
36:43
He's certainly part of that, let's say, scene, what I call the neurological term. In his book, he is paying a lot of attention to this question of information overload, how to deal with it, and the question of the brain.
37:04
Yeah, the book was, I think, quite hastily written. It needs a bit of a rewrite, I think, for a second edition. I hope he's going to do that. But yeah, overall, I mean, coming from the very pragmatic cultures, it's quite astonishing,
37:22
at least for me, that a guy who's in charge of a major newspaper is able to write such a book in the Netherlands that would be completely inconceivable, because they just don't have the intellectual capacity to do that. They are just businessmen, and they're in the game
37:44
of just selling quick and dirty news. So in that sense, I think it's really nice that there still is intellectual culture in this country, at least. You can't say that of many other countries where anti-intellectualism is very, very strong.
38:04
Now, this is, of course, the one that I read with the most pleasure, and it's a very, very problematic book. I hope it will come out in German soon. He writes really from the inside of the,
38:23
from the inside the belly of the beast, so to say. He's a really Silicon Valley guy. Maybe you've heard of him. He's the kind of the VR hippie that is very much also into playing alternative instruments and into the music industry.
38:41
He has a very rich and diverse life. He's operating in a lot of different fields. And this book is a really, is a radical critique of free culture, of the mediocre culture of Wikipedia,
39:03
and it's a very strong plea to go back to some kind of humanistic, radical individualism. This is what he thinks will ultimately save the internet, not the crowdsourcing, not, you know, not the kind of the collaborative projects,
39:24
but the unique individual voices that, this is kind of, this sums up his argument in this book. You follow the money,
39:41
and if the money is going to advertisers, read, yeah, he cannot say Google, of course, because he's a Silicon Valley insider. He's not allowed to critique Google, so he cannot write Google there. But of course, being good Silicon Valley readers, like Kremlin readers, we can read their Google,
40:02
instead of musicians, then society's more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. It's kind of, yeah, it's a bit naive, we could say, but he's the first real insider in that culture that stands up and says, we should stop this.
40:21
We should stop celebrating the so-called user-generated content. The do-it-yourself culture is leading nowhere. It's dumbing us down. It's not bringing us further, and it goes against the very nature of the internet itself,
40:41
which, in his view, should enable and emancipate the individual. In my own work, maybe you have followed it a little bit,
41:01
I'm now primarily focusing on these trends. The colonization of real time, I think, is a really interesting one that is gonna stay with us.
41:22
Maybe you think of Twitter or Google Wave, but also, of course, the fact that people carry the internet with them everywhere they go on their Blackberrys, iPhones, and so on.
41:40
That is all creating this, what I call, colonization of real time. A summary of this, you can read on the website called Eurozine, where I've recently posted an essay on these issues, and I'm currently writing a book
42:03
about these issues, and I hope to finish it later on this year. Particularly, I'm focused on comment culture. Well, it's a bit ironic, because my last book was called Zero Comments. Of course, that was referring to the long tail.
42:22
And now, I'm not focusing so much on the long tail, but looking at the really popular websites where each posting would have like 200 responses. There's the big websites in the Netherlands. One of them is, for instance, is called marocco.nl,
42:41
where the youth hangs out and fights over all the issues of Islam. It's a hobby horse of my country at the moment. This website is tremendously popular amongst really young people, teenagers, let's say. And they are dealing with 50,000 comments every day.
43:05
50,000. And because they are operating in this very delicate field of critique of Islam, of Islamic fundamentalists that are trying to raise support there,
43:23
this site is heavily policed, and there's a lot of concern about this site. However, the question really is there, and this is a question of more and more websites, how do you deal with 50,000 comments? You can't read them all. You can outsource them a little bit to bots.
43:43
We've seen that in Wikipedia increasingly. The editing and the control of new entries in Wikipedia is done by bots. So the involvement of bots is growing, and we can also see that in kind of the management
44:01
of this comment culture. And the rise of extreme opinions, of course, that's related because there are a lot of people that are very frustrated. This is the times of economic crisis, of right-wing populism. It's growing. Just see what happened in Hungary on Sunday.
44:25
And this is really, this is now going hand in hand. With internet being the mainstream voice, and the wooden press no longer really catching up, this is kind of the new cultural battleground.
44:42
And it's related to what I call the emergence of national webs. Because more and more what we see is that there's a decline, overall decline, of the so-called global internet and its ideology towards nationally confined spaces.
45:02
And it's very ironic here that China is leading the way here with its great Chinese firewall. And they are now exporting that technology to a lot of different countries. Of course, with the help of a lot of Western companies
45:20
that install this filtering software and that are actively involved in censoring the internet. So this is a real debate. And of course, in other presentations, I know there's a lot more that is said about this trend. I would like to close here with saying
45:43
that we, with the coalition of people in Amsterdam, are putting together a big event on the economy of open content. It's a follow-up of an earlier event that the Bali organized in April 2008,
46:03
which was called Economies of the Commons. And we will, at this event particularly, look at the question, again, what I've raised here, the critique of the free, but also the question of how can artists make a living in this space?
46:26
How are we going to deal with cultural heritage and a lot of issues that border, let's say, the political issues, culture,
46:41
legal issues, and the economy? And we think that it's really time that we come together and have a lot of kind of brainstorms and open sessions how we can proceed with this. Okay, thank you very much.
47:07
Yeah, there's time for questions. So if you have, if you want to talk about it, then we'll know more. Yep, oh.
47:25
Are some questions here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, please. I just have some kind of intellectual disconnect. A while ago you said the do-it-yourself culture is dumbing us down. Mm-hmm, no, but that's what Jaron said, yeah.
47:42
I'm just, is he talking like MakerBot, Arduino Instructables do-it-yourself culture, or? No, his main example is Wikipedia, but the other example that he is using in his book
48:05
is not so much related to the internet but to the spreading of digital technologies in the music industries. And what he's saying is that he sees a direct connection between the rise of, let's say, music editing software,
48:21
digital production, digital distribution, and the decline of what he calls pop music, that there are, he, according to him, I don't agree with him, but there has not been any new kind of style, you know, creative new style,
48:42
coming out of the music branch for the last 20 years, and he blames that to this spreading of the digital technologies. And he says that these technologies are dumbing people down, they're pointing people only at mashups,
49:03
and they are not stimulating people to create new, original music and music styles. Thank you. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, okay.
49:26
Excuse me. You mentioned the theory as a critical theory, and this is our main focus in Europe to go ahead with this tradition, and what did Adorno, Habermas,
49:42
what Habermas said about free culture? Okay, yeah, yeah, that's a good question, because finally, for instance, Habermas said something about it in his Dresden speech in 2006, and also in relation to that in a speech that he gave in Vienna, in which he describes internet as a secondary culture,
50:04
as kind of as a comment culture. That also, I think it is also a normative statement that he makes there that should stay secondary, because the other one, the primary culture, which is the print media and the broadcasting media,
50:23
have to remain their dominant position in the creation of culture and the kind of filtering and production of, let's say, collective opinions. He doesn't believe that the internet, which is fragmenting the whole landscape,
50:42
is able to really synthesize public opinion, and so, yeah, that's where we are at, talking about the Frankfurt School, and yeah, it's quite unfortunate that there isn't very much happening.
51:03
The only person that I find really inspiring is an Israeli woman, Eva Elus. Her book has been recently translated into German. She's been heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School, and she writes about emotional capitalism.
51:21
She also did a case study about speeding websites, and she's really up to the topics, so if you are interested in that, I can highly recommend her work. Emotional, emotional, that's the title of one of her books.
51:43
Eva Elus, I-L-L-O-U-Z, okay, yep. I would like to share a question. You said Google is making us stupid. I don't think that Web 2.0 is making us stupid,
52:02
but I think something else. We are very active on Web 2.0 and social media, and we think we are busy doing things, but I think we see everything very behind pink glasses, so everything is fine, we are doing, we are active. What is your opinion about that?
52:22
Well, I think it's Google making us stupid is really looking at it from a perspective of mainstream culture, of elite culture, of academia, and of, let's say, the prime sides, western sides of knowledge production. And we could say that, yes, indeed,
52:40
I think these tools work against the very, for instance, the very principle of reflection. If there is, this is the Paul Verilio argument, if there is no interval, if there is no time to think, and if we have to think real time, well, you can't think real time, that's not possible. Thinking requires time, yeah?
53:03
For instance, these are kind of the cultural critiques happening, if you look at it from a perspective, and I'm gonna talk about that tomorrow in the Kalkstein at 10.30, I'll give a second talk, I'm looking at this from an activist perspective,
53:22
where these things are more like, or tools, or where Web 2.0 can become a tool, if we master the tool, I don't think we have yet mastered these tools very well. At the moment, these are very dumb, in my view, mostly US American kind of corporate platforms
53:44
or environments, they have yet to be developed in tools, and once they will become tools, we can get more of a grip on them, speaking from the perspective of artists, activists, and so on. But that's, now I'm summarizing tomorrow's talk,
54:02
but, okay, please come if you wanna hear more about that. One more question, because we've got, certainly. We have one more. I think we have to leave it there. Okay, thank you very much,
54:20
and hopefully I'll see you tomorrow at 10.30. Thank you.
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