You can’t stop rubbing your eyes at all. After Sweden, the Italians have also fallen into the abyss. Ironically Italy! Perhaps the most beautiful country in the world is (again) ruled by right-wing nationalists. It creeps up from all sides: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, England, Sweden, now Italy, maybe tomorrow France. Russia anyway – and China, Brazil, India and probably the USA the day after tomorrow. The entire planet seems infected, the world’s population confused, disoriented, lost. Through which? What made this rush of autocrats possible? There is a relatively clear answer:
the social networks!
What ostensibly was created to unite us and bring us closer (real friends turned virtual “friends”), to make it easier for us to meet and hit on, quickly turned out to be the perfect channel into every household and straight into people’s brains the citizen out.
And since access to unfiltered content that is not subject to journalistic due diligence (at least in Germany) was and is easy, since there is no educational mandate and no inhibitions on the Internet, the door is open to brutalization and the base instincts. The web, seen by many users as a place of free choice of information sources, is in fact well camouflaged and carefully mined territory. All the voices that would previously have been exposed relatively quickly as dubious are up to mischief here eloquently.
It’s about money and it’s about the controllability of souls, ultimately about political power. Back in the 1980s, we never dreamed that we would one day voluntarily put the tools of surveillance we were warned about in Orwell’s 1984 in our pockets and on our dressers.
Recently, with my old friend Manuel Tessloff, I tried to recreate Facebook, to create an alternative to Zuckerberg’s data streams, to create a platform that is non-commercial and not infested with lobbies, that offers and creates a space of equality, friendliness, creativity and solidarity and who is still fun. It didn’t take Manuel long to program the basic framework, but while we were in trial mode we realized how difficult it would be to get (art-loving) users onto our platform. Because you actually need the money and women’s power above all to make people aware of this alternative and make them palatable.
At that point we gave up, we simply didn’t have the means or the strength.
But at this point I would like to call again for collective thinking about alternatives to the Kraken of the metaverse. I call on Claudia Roth to give us (the artists) the federal funds to create a community free network and thus an alternative for all people who do not want to be dependent on the drip of the US media giants. Because we know exactly what we need and want. (For example, I claim the right to be forgotten.)
As long as this does not become reality, we have few options to react to the political upheavals in the world. One of them is boycott. Don’t go to Italy any more while that country votes for the far right. If everyone who reads this column implements this, then there will definitely be 16 fewer holidaymakers coming to Italy, and then the Mussolini freaks will begin to ponder. Ha!
Some films that shed light on the nature of networks, you can watch them on ARTE or on Netflix:
- In the shadow of the net world – the Cleaners
- The social media dilemma
- Fake America great again
- Instagram – the toxic network
Author photo by Kerstin Behrendt