Unscene Berlin

It's March and I'm too tired to stay up all night, aren't you? That's what makes winter & spring such a great time to explore Berlin's afterhour scenes... Same Bitches @ OHM DJ Handmade plays regularly at Same Bitches @ OHM Each time the door cracks open it admits some light, along with a few bodies from the huddle by the cash desk outside. Their shadows quickly dissolve into the dark sound chamber, wading into the music like ducks into water. Tiled walls and low ceilings gleam with damp in the retired bathhouse, making each watery analogy I dream up seem even more appropriate: people don't come here just to listen to the music, they come here to swim in it. The rhythm of the waves is being controlled by DJ Handmade who's playing sublime banging mix of techno, tribal house, hard house, acid techno, acid house... Far from sounding like a mishmash, though, these tunes are lined up with an intuition that makes them all seem part of a single...

Hard to remember that fact in February though, isn't it? Winter in Berlin means grey skies, grey streets and a grey-black mood. But at least we have our cameras and videos to remember the summer by, eh?  Just imagine this: up until colour photography started being widely used, even the memories that people used to keep of this city on film were grey .  That meant they weren't even able to escape into a vision of the summer that had been (and hopefully would be again) like we can. So we should probably all take a second to be thankful for our smartphones, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube - and for Blogger of course! Technology's transformed the camera since the black n' white days, and made it loads more accommodating to the mind reels of memories that all Berliners collect, to bursting point, each summer. There's never enough time to process all these memories at the time, so why not use the winter lull to try and catch up and make sen...

Globally, the right wing troll community is made up of people who have plenty of money, power and privilege... or a combination of all three. (Photo via DailyStormer.com) 
 Master of Sock Puppets The Alt-Right might be in the spotlight now, but its efforts to manipulate public opinion are likely overshadowed by the efforts of another group of trolls, whose mission it is to promote a slightly less offensive - but still conservative - worldview: those who work for the military and government. Many people will by now be familiar with JTRIG , China's 50-cent party , or the Kremlin’s “troll factories”. These monikers all refer to shadowy government intelligence units that are presumed to be spreading pro-establishment propaganda across Internet forums, worldwide. A number of leaked top-secret documents and budget statements over the years have alluded to the existence and purpose of such units: Reporters who have gone undercover in Moscow's troll fa...

Daily Stormer discussion circa 2016 Rotten to the Grassroots Twenty-sixteen was probably the worst year for online hate speech to date: a year when a loose network of neo-fascist trolls known as the Alt Right finally managed to overwhelm many online discussion platforms in the West, after years of trying. Posing as members of an outraged, but otherwise ordinary public, these trolls flooded Facebook, Twitter, and many major news websites with hateful posts like the ones above. It seemed clear that they were striving to mould a new popular consensus of contempt for minorities everywhere... and by extension, a consensus of contempt for any social justice movement that stood in their way.  And, to a degree, they succeeded in altering the public's perceptions about everything from the new Star Wars movie, to the Brexit, to Hilary Clinton’s state of health, not to mention the election campaign of President Trump.  Maybe it would be more correct to call their...

Throw together a building without owner, opening times without curfew, people without limits, music without definition, and you have a squat party. That pair of words conjures up more images than any two in the English language.  Crowded night buses.  Roads to nowhere. Lorries. Dogs. Queueing and smoking.  Haggling. Drinking.  Snorting.  All just a preamble to the main feature: the dancefloor, and all the subplots that spin out of control on it. A stage of pallets and speakers, set for a chemical cabaret.  The fantastical, the fanatical, the enlightened, the dejected - a lineup of gems in the rough - all take their turns and bow out.  Next up: the Old Bill. Their stony-faced dispatch enters stage right: cue first intermission break.  Floodlights glare on flattened beer cans and electrified, blinking stares.  Rolly smoke pirouettes in the air. Eventually they retreat, freeing the party. Regular scheduling resumes: heavin...