Unscene Berlin

I'm playing infinite-scroll roulette on my Twitter feed. I swipe, and watch the posts flip past at warp speed, blurring like the stars outside the windows of the SS Enterprise. Where will it come to a stop? * An ad for a food show * Coronavirus politics * Clever German psychobabble * People openly advocating drug use * Earth Day * Pets wearing clothes? It occurs to me that everything's changed but many people don't even realise it, because nothing's changed on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc.  All of the mass media templates are holding patterns for a mentality that's optimised for panic. Outrage. Fear. They hang on to those emotions rabidly, regardless of what actually happens in the real world. Caging our adaptability. "Nonapocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to [disaster capitalism's] ambitions,” writes Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. Our disaster-fuelled me...

The reality of life in Berlin is much better than the [online] perception. April 3, 2020 Outside, sun-burnished, friendly people smile their way past me to thank me for leaving them enough space. In parks, balls and discs fly back and forth, in a sort of long distance conversation between players...  Everyone seems to be coming back together across the divide, unpaving their way back to a less fragmented state. Or out here they do, anyway. Of all the hesitant wildlife forms returning to the cities, the most instrumental one is probably us. Humans don't normally linger this long in their own habitats, which are too disrupted by "human" activities: traffic, pollution, sirens, stress. Industrialisation stops us from settling in, in our own cities, in our own name. But today, finding a new niche in this static, airy landscape is an irresistible urge. One that encourages me to find complexity and value in staying in one place, instead of carrying m...

Note: This is a postscript to my recent diary entry. You'll find it here ! In this new video interview with  Noam Chomsky  by DiEM25 TV , the American philosopher, linguist, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist talks about neoliberalism's role in creating the coronavirus pandemic. I thought I'd give my readers a partial transcript of the interview, too, so they can think for themselves. The audio was pretty poor due to Chomsky's weak voice.... I don't even want to think about how old he is, now... and how little has changed for the better since he first started speaking. In this section, he touches on neoliberalism's ineptitude in a crisis. Any crisis, really, but especially this one. Time stamp 17:11: "It was known for a long time that pandemics were very likely, and it was understood, very well understood, that they were likely to be a coronavirus -- modification to the SARS epidemic of 15 years ago. ...

March 29, 2020 Via  Reddit Colder weather today has me housebound, so I let my fingers do the walking. They moseyed on over to a conspiracy forum that I sometimes look at when I'm short of whack new ideas. I was thinking someone there might be bouncing around some totally overblown theory that the coronavirus is actually a DARPA-engineered, organic malware that we caught from using Instagram or something, I dunno... bizarre, you know what I mean? Something to make the whole pandemic thing seem so OTT as to be ridiculous again. To my surprise, everyone on the site seemed to have a more pragmatic take on The Plague than the mainstream of the Internet does, right now. Like, wow. How often does that happen? Consensus there seemed to be that the virus was being blown out of proportion and we should be more (or even just equally) concerned about the government's intervention in our lives. So for once, the conspiracy theorists were not on board with a wave of pa...