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

[Andreas Broeckmann <broeckmann@leuphana.de>]

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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