Politics

I’m swapping out Lage der Nation whose popularity has led them to lose focus and believe in their own hype for FAZ Einspruch.

A well written defense by Markthalle IX in Berlin that sounds good but still paints a much more rosy picture of reality than is justified. Let’s be totally clear: removing the ALDI will advance the area’s socio-economic cleansing.

As soon as AOC got the nomination I already had a strong hunch that she was the real deal. Turns out I had no idea how much of a deal she was going to be.

I’ve seen tons of people whose lives were made significantly easier because of parental credit lines which is good for them, but to be fair:

A very necessary housing revolution is underway in Berlin that has the potential to halt market forces that are running amok. After Barcelona, now Berlin. Who’s next?

Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can.

When democracy ends, we are likely to be surprised by the form it takes. We may not even notice that it is happening because we are looking in the wrong places.

I want to coin a German translation for the dirtbag left neologism failson. I propose Scheitersohn which I think has a nice ring to it.

Events of the past months have sharply brought into focus the need for passable borders. I’m not coming out for fully open borders. That still seems somewhat extreme and too dismissive of borders (which contrary to some people’s opinions definitely are not arbitrary). I just think that keeping borders hermetically closed will exact a moral cost from us that nobody should be willing to pay.

His design ‘was to write for a tyrant those things that are pleasing to tyrants, bringing about in this way, if he could, the tyrant’s self-willed and swift downfall’.

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.

Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people.

One cannot chart a course of social action without understanding the world in which one lives, works, and struggles.

It mattered little to which class or race they belonged; the subordinate peoples of the world keenly absorbed the deeper implications — moral and psychological — of Japan’s triumph.

Ik heb me de afgelopen weken geërgerd aan en gegeneerd voor de domme venijnige kritieken die het boek ‘Hallo Witte Mensen’ van Anousha Nzume kreeg. Zoals de uitgever van het boek Ebissé Rouw zegt: Nederland is een intellectual wasteland. We zijn nu eenmaal een klein taalgebied waar iedereen zich heel slim en onschuldig kan voelen door het Engelstalige debat over een onderwerp compleet te missen en zelf wat bij elkaar te verzinnen.

Naar aanleiding van de Zomergasten met Leon de Winter had ik al wat aantekeningen gemaakt. Deze zaterdag las ik in de Volkskrant Femke Halsema’s veroordeling van de Winter en zijn debat-techniek. Ik heb mijn aantekeningen van toen er maar weer bij gepakt.

I don’t think you can draw a lot of conclusions from this bit of selectorate theory but it’s interesting to get a feel for the numbers.

The USA example of resistance against Trump in the form of Tech Solidarity quickly gained a following in the Netherlands with TechSolidarity.nl and here in Berlin with some Tech-Solidarity-Berlin. I’ve had a small role in both of those groups’ creation but I’m currently not an active participant.

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Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV —the far right Dutch Freedom Party— had his campaign start today for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Spijkenisse, one of his traditional strongholds.

Just another day in the Dutch election campaign.

Somewhere between language proficiency levels C1 and C2 lies a plateau that I’m finding difficult to cross in German. Living in Berlin I’m simply not exposed to enough of the language on a day to day basis. The usual advice would be to join a Verein and hang out with Germans. That sounds fun but I’m not in the market for a new hobby.

I was tremendously hyped for Deutschland ‘83 after hearing about it and watching the first episode. Now that it is finally airing in Germany it turns out that it is not doing that well. Viewership started out low and has been declining over the first four episodes.

This is an expanded transcription of a tweetstorm (based partially on conversations with Peter) that starts at this Tweet about the Volkswagen emissions scandal but actually as we go along it will be clear that it is about ethics in software engineering. First the news that started it all.

Last week there was some debate spurred by some of the larger insurers of the Netherlands who want to use tracking data to personalize insurance coverage. A piece in the Reformatorisch Dagblad of all places and Rob Wijnberg talking about it at DWDD.

A couple of weeks ago already, James Bridle opened his first solo show The Glomar Response at NOME gallery here in Berlin. The opening was attended by more or less everybody I got to know when I first got to Berlin, a reunion of sorts.

With some trepidation did I read Evgeny Morozov’s latest piece “The Taming of Tech Criticism” but thankfully the firebrand has matured and this piece is both readable and relevant.

I read “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” on assignment and I am glad I did because it is a well written, easy to read and profoundly insightful book. It illuminates what capital is and what effects it has in the world to an extent that hasn’t been done before. The book contains lots of insights and it takes down many financial myths that are imposed on us every day.

I read this paper by Acemoglu and Robinson right after I read the book by Piketty thinking that there would be some interesting economic debate. Unfortunately I was proved wrong and this seems to be exemplary for the stagnation of the economic field.

There is a shack on Tempelhofer Feld that explains the senate’s plans with the park and the construction they plan to do there:

I have been long flummoxed by how terrible the CDU/CSU complex in Germany is. I could not understand how people could be that stupid and that conservative to the detriment of everybody including themselves. The number of examples is near infinite, but this post was prompted by yesterday’s action by the young Union Berlin 1.

I have followed the Turkish elections on the night from Sunday to Monday which turned into a gripping account of prime minister Erdogan trying to steal the elections while most of the people were sleeping. Orchestrated blackouts had drawn out the count. The twitter block didn’t prevent activism from spreading but did reduce the reach of its effects. Those that knew and cared about it were at the counting locations trying to safeguard the ballots and the tallies.

Funny to come across three pieces today wherein a bunch of fashionable faux-intellectuals are taken apart.

I tried to register to vote for the buyback of the Berlin energy grid and then I got this letter back informing me that I cannot vote.

I will be gone during the peak of the horrible German election campaigns (in fact I’m just back and voting is this Sunday). The only thing that is keeping things somewhat bearable are the low-budget fake news broadcasts by Tagesschaum. I pay taxes in this damned country but I am not eligible to vote. That’s why I penned this election advice before I left for those that are. I didn’t have time to polish it then but here it is, better late than never.

Right now in Berlin we are being bombarded with the election campaign but I do not know anybody who looks forward to voting come September. I cannot vote but if I were allowed I would also face a tough choice. None of the options are appealing and what we will get seems so certain and terrible that potential alternatives pale. Germany being as it is the election focuses on the heartland and there isn’t that much being discussed that people living in a city can relate to.

This was the week that Kars returned from his honeymoon on Bali. And all for the better as well, because I had worked through most of our stack —we didn’t have any running projects at the time— and I was getting so annoyed by Dopplr’s performance that I was about to write a clean implementation of its trip model to store my upcoming travels in.

So today I went to the meeting of Autofreies Kreuzberg about the traffic calming of the Manteuffelstraße between Skalitzer and Naunynstraße.

There’s an absurd amount of construction being done in my neighborhood and I presumed that as a resident somewhere you would be entitled to see the changes that are being planned in the area. Not to mention to be able to know the traffic blockades that result from this construction (which almost exclusively seem to black the foot/bike paths.

I had penned some notes about bitcoin before the entire thing exploded last week. So it seems that everybody is blogging pretty much everything about bitcoin there is to blog. So trying to see if I have some points that are still worth publishing.

In Conversation: Jaron Lanier and James Bridle On Who Owns the Future? from The School of Life on Vimeo.

There are some interesting similarities between a recent proposal commissioned by the French government and the book out by Jaron Lanier just now “Who Owns The Future?”

My small project during Swhack was to create a django version of a delegated voting system partially inspired by Liquid Feedback and the manyfold problems that system has 1. In particular that it is written on such an esoteric stack 2 that it is near impossible to get running without root on a Linux machine and let’s not even discuss the maintenance. What is even worse is that it makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to join the project and contribute to it significantly.

So this Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I are having a small hackathon here in Berlin in remembrance of Aaron Swartz and to in one small way continue doing the work that needs to be done on the internet, in government and especially where those two meet.

I followed the last CCC from a distance reading the Twitter fallout and keeping track of the live streams while getting work done in an empty Berlin. Besides the various controversies playing out, there were some good talks. What I found to be the best of the event was “Long live the protocoletariat” by Eleanor Saitta (@dymaxion) and Smári McCarthy (@smarimc) about a topic that is very near to the things I am thinking about: institutions and networks and all of the opportunities and problems associated with them. The presentation in the first thirty minutes of this video is well worth watching. Pull quotes below are paraphrases.

A couple of weeks ago I and judging from Twitter almost everybody I knew read Quinn Norton’s Eulogy for #Occupy. Her coverage for Wired and her twitter stream had already broadcast an almost minute to minute beat of events in the movement. That account finally culminated in this retelling of the camps and the evictions crowned with a tally of the movements hopes and achievements. It is one of the journalistic highlights of 2012.

I just pulled out this stuff from my weeknote into a separate post because I think it merited it.

A rather interesting capitalist reflection on Facebook by Rob Horning at The New Inquiry and why online activism never changes anything.

A couple of days ago I got an answer on behalf of Ms. Neelie Kroes with regards to my inquiry about computational literacy (which I asked during her visit to Berlin during re:publica):