In the “Süddeutsche” of August, 28th and 29th, 2010, I read the following article by Norbert Bolz in the section “ESSAY” on page V2/3:
Man clicks his own destiny!
Why we give up our civil freedom along with our privacy in the internet society.
If course, this is the kind of article I always read with great interest. The playful arrangement of the words: “click your own destiny” sounds attractive.
And afterwards, I am horror-stricken. All I found was intellectual nonsense. After having read the article, I know less than before about privacy (incidentally, you cannot find the term in Wikipedia, either – although you can access it indirectly through private (privat).
In the article, however, I find deductions such as about the loss of privacy threatening the civil freedom or an attack against the state of secrecy being driven home which is essential for the civil private sphere. Or that bureaucracy is turned into software which controls our behaviour.
Neither does the author forget to write about the often-heard, critical neuro-marketing as practiced by Amazon.
The entire article is nothing but a list of nebulous speculations and incomprehensible platitudes. Taken together, they warn against a danger in a very confused way. Said danger is not specified in the article at all.
It is a wild mixture of technological details (Cookies!), citations, terms like culture of all-pervasive computation in the age of digital utilitarianism, super connectors that link the digital world, the problem of equally minded in the digital echo and grandiose sentences such as: Thus, the civic individual changes into a constantly and infinitesimally controlled one.
Now doesn’t that sound nice: Infinitesimally controlled. You have to come up with these kinds of ideas in order to believe them! The entire text is formulated in a very eloquent manner, so as to sound really important. It is also supported by nice graphics meant to catch the eye. The gist of said graphics (if there is any), however, is even more confusing than the article (if that is possible).
On the whole, it is an article composed after the pattern:
Oppose something the people are scared of. Use many terms and metaphors that sound nice. Use citations all over the place. And, above all, warn against possible dangers you cannot substantiate…
And if you think you know anything about the internet and are still capable of thinking straight, why don’t you read the article? But be careful – it hurts! It really takes some endurance to accept so much nonsense. I could not find the article on the internet, otherwise I would, of course, have put a link right here. But perhaps some of you have the weekend edition of the SZ at home and access to a scanner.
Perhaps I simply failed to understand. However, I will not start getting more and more thoughtful about my privacy. Instead, I will publish something about my privacy during the next weeks.
RMD
P.S.
Incidentally, Norbert Bolz is teaching media and communications theory at TU Berlin …
P.S.1
Here is another critical comment on the article I found in the internet: Link.
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