Human behavior

I don’t remember how I found this tweet or when – but I kept it in my notes because I found it noteworthy:

To the producer who texted at 3.51 am asking for a live interview at 4am re #xxxx please create a database of insomniacs and leave me off

Ever since technology has made it possible there are bosses/ customers/ media producers who think their employees/ contractors/ public figures should be available at all times and, what is worse, employees/ contractors/ public figures who agree.

I do not think, however, that technology is the cause here – technology only reinforces what is already latent in human nature. It is pretty normal for people to act on the assumption that their fellow human beings are just like them – as described in the tweet cited above. Here is someone who feels under pressure to get an interview about a hot topic, and the adrenalin in their veins makes them oblivious about the time.

And the recipient is so irate about receiving this at such an ungodly hour that he fails to take into consideration that he received a text, not a phone call – a text is silent and it is up to the receiver whether he takes notice or not. If he has set his mobile phone to ring when receiving text messages he deserves no better than to be woken up by a text message sent by an insomniac.

Technology has enabled us to leave a lot of limitations behind – but there is one limitation no technology in the world will help us leave behind, and that is the limitation of our own thinking, and more importantly, our emotions. The internet has given us easy access to the thinking of others, but we will always interpret what we see, hear and read according to our own coordinates, and these coordinates are not determined by our intellect.

Our behavior remains determined by the parts of our brain that we do not have any control over. So regardless of whether we interact with people who are physically around us or whether we use an electronic device to send messages, we remain human beings – Twitter is a good place to study this.

NPD-Verbot Ja oder Nein

Die Frage ist so alt wie das Nachdenken über die Freiheit selbst: Wie viel Freiheit soll man den Feinden der Freiheit zugestehen? Ich sags gleich: ich weiß es nicht. Ich habe da keine Meinung; ich kann mich zu keiner Meinung durchringen, weil Alle, Alle Recht haben.

Dummheit könne man nicht verbieten, sagt die FDP zur Begründung ihres Standpunktes, dass ein Verbot nichts bringt. Das ist wohl wahr, aber was, wenn diese Dummheit plötzlich in Serienmorde umschlägt?

Gerade dieser Kommentar aus der FDP erinnert mich an eine Episode in der Autobiografie von Klaus Mann, ”Der Wendepunkt“. Klaus Mann war der älteste Sohn von Thomas Mann, und natürlich war er hoch gebildet und belesen. Gegen Ende des Buches beschreibt er eine Szene, die sich 1932 in einem distinguierten ”Tea Room“ in der Münchner Innenstadt abgespielt hat. Man muss sich diese Örtlichkeit etwa so vorstellen wie die Lounge eines 5-Sterne Hotels im Stil von Downton Abbey – üppig gepolsterte Sofas und Sessel, dicke Teppiche, schwere, pompös geraffte Vorhänge. Das sorgt für eine gedämpfte Akustik, aber natürlich sind Alle dort sowieso viel zu fein, um ihre Stimme über Gebühr zu erheben. Klaus Mann, der Großbürgersohn, ging dort wie selbstverständlich ein und aus.

Eines Tages musste er feststellen, dass sich die Attraktivität des Etablissements auch bei den niederen Ständen herumgesprochen hatte: In einer Ecke saß Hitler mit seinen engsten Vertrauten. Er stand kurz vor dem großen Durchbruch, und sein Aufstieg wurde von den Einen mit Sorge, von den Anderen mit Begeisterung zur Kenntnis genommen. Klaus Mann beschreibt nun – aus der Retrospektive seines Exils – wie er selbst dort in dem ”Tea Room“  saß und Zeuge wurde, wie der spätere GröFaZ Erdbeertörtchen mampfte und sich mit seinen Spießgesellen über die Schauspielerin Therese Giese unterhielt, die er hoch schätzte, denn er wusste nicht, dass sie jüdischer Abstammung war.

Klaus Mann hörte eine Weile zu und beobachtete mit einer Mischung aus Faszination und Abscheu die Gier, mit der der spätere Reichskanzler seine Erdbeertörtchen in sich hinein schlang:

 …[er] erschien vielmehr von höchst unedler Substanz und Beschaffenheit, ein bösartiger Spießer mit hysterisch getrübtem Blick in der bleich gedunsenen Visage. Nichts, was auf Größe oder auch nur auf Begabung schließen lassen konnte!

[...] Die Vulgarität seiner Züge beruhigte mich, tat mir wohl. Ich sah ihn an und dachte: Du wirst nicht siegen, Schicklgruber, und wenn du dir die Seele aus dem Leibe brüllst.

Und mit diesen Gedanken zahlte Klaus Mann und ging, beruhigt, dass die Welt sich vor diesem Nichts von einem Menschen nicht zu fürchten brauchte.

Natürlich leben wir heute in einer anderen Zeit, aber man sollte auch heute potenzielle Mörder nicht verharmlosen. Ob ein Verbot der NPD der richtige Schritt ist, weiß ich immer noch nicht. Ein starkes Argument dafür ist jedenfalls die Überlegung, dass im Falle eines Verbots unsere Sicherheitsbehörden vielleicht einmal von ihrer Fixierung auf das linke Milieu herunter kommen und etwas effektivere Strategien gegen Rechts verfolgen als das, was wir derzeit durch den NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss zur Kenntnis nehmen müssen.

Work in the digital age

ˮWork is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter, second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

No, this is not another cynical remark Oscar Wilde has made Lord Henry say in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Bertrand Russell wrote this (in 1932), and cynicism aside it is an apt description of work as we knew it throughout most of human history. We put seeds into the ground and harvested what grew out of them, and we made the tools that helped us do that. Trees were felled to create clearings for more agriculture and we made vessels in which to store our crops.  We also made dishes to eat from, not to forget the knives and forks and spoons we use for eating. We made yarns from fibers, weaved them into fabrics and made clothes from these fabrics. From the trees we made furniture in which to store our fabrics and clothes, to sleep in and to sit down on and eat dinner. We made weapons for hunters and warriors and we erected buildings from wood, clay, bricks, and finally from stones. To get around in our world we made all kinds of vehicles …

Over the centuries the things we made became more sophisticated and our world became more complex, but still our wealth depended on things we made or the things we had others make for us. Then we made machines, and “altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface …” became a very powerful activity indeed.

Then came digitization and now everything is supposedly different. We order everything online, and the things we need in our daily lives just materialize on our doorstep, handed over by a delivery person.  This delivery person is the only real person we need to come into contact with when we shop. 

Shortly after Amazon had started its operations in Germany, there where billboards all over the place saying ˮAmazon: ordering machine – Post Office: delivery machine”. I thought it was quite a good campaign at the time, but now, more than a decade later, it has a foreboding in it which I was not aware of then.

Thinking about service companies as “machines” made us all forget about the people who packed the things we bought and who drove the trucks and vans that brought them to us – to say nothing of the people who made them in sweatshops all over the world. 

In those years we have seen enormous change in how we think about work – or should I say how the digital avant-garde wants us to think about work. Technology has changed our workplaces and has given us plenty of opportunities we never had before. I have benefitted immensely from all this myself, so I am the last person to bore anyone with a Luddite rant. But I do have my moments when I can’t help wondering where all this is heading.

Recently my thoughts were triggered by the report about amazon.de and its temp workers, which made quite a stir in the German media. It was also picked up in the English-language press, e.g:  http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-19/amazon-under-fire-over-alleged-worker-abuse-in-germany

In all our digital euphoria, we don’t seem to think in terms of material things any longer. We’re post-materialistic, sharing is the latest trend; nobody owns anything any longer. But we still live by things, and there will always be people who have to take care of the physical side of it all, mine the raw materials, assemble the devices, pack them, ship and deliver them. Last but not least we need people to work in the power industry in order to generate the energy for it all – not just for making and moving things, but also to keep that virtual world going where we all prefer to spend our time, while we are physically moving about the world, using up even more energy, and being catered to by another army of underpaid workers.

So there is still a division between different kinds of work in the world: but it is no longer between those who alternate the position of matter and those who tell them to do so. In the digital world the division is between those who live in the virtual world and make money altering the position of bites relatively to other such bites, and those who are stuck in the material world and enable the physical lives of the lucky cyberworkers.