Kids

Where are all the kids?
Where do they play?
With what do they play?

Where are their sticks to fight?
Where are their stones to throw?
Where are their trees to climb?

Where are their colours to paint?
Where are their carts to drive?
Where are their matches to burn?

Where are their arrows to shoot?
Where are their tins to cook?
Where are their balls to kick?

Where are their books to read?
Where are their knifes to cut?
Where are their shovels to dig?

Where are their bikes to ride?
Where are their berries to eat?
Where are their ropes to build?

Where are their binoculars to spy?
Where are their torches?

Where are their maps?

Where are their headlamps?
Where are their sleeping bags?
Where are their boots?

Where are their fishing rods?
Where are their slingshots?
Where are their tents?

Where are their carabiners?
Where are their backpacks?
Where are their axes?

Where is our compass?

The volume of Information

The sheer volume of everything which has been written and it’s acessability is something quite remarkable. But it also poses questions. See if you were interested in studying anything for that matter, 500 years ago you had to either live with a king or a priest, in short you had to be extremely lucky.

Then you had to read through hand written books, travel if you wanted to talk to other people who were similarly interested or write letters.

I would argue that these constraints made actual thinking possible. Of course you want to know if someone has thought something before you, probably that is true anyway. But there is no way, to sif through every accessible information there is today.

First you need to know your interest. Then you need to ask a question. And then you need a filter. From big to fine. And on every level you need to make a value judgment about the information.

This is difficult. Just knowing more does not help. You need wisdom to do that. There is no way around it. And how do you get wise?

You fear the lord. And you pray for wisdom.

That’s how you get wise. Which then allows you to filter through everything there is. Then you start to see a connection in every written Information. Like a golden thread in a hay stack. You grab it and start to pull. Then you continue to weave on this marvellous cloth of human thought.

But first there is fear and prayer.

Züge und “large men”

Das Trolley Problem, Szenario “Fussgängerbrücke” führt in die düstere Welt der Moral und sieht folgendermassen aus:

Sie befinden sich auf einer Fussgängerbrücke und betrachten ein Gleis an dem fünf Arbeiter beschäftigt sind. Ein TGV fährt auf die ahnungslose Gruppe zu. Plötzlich verdunkelt ein “large man” ihnen die Aussicht auf das drohende Spektakel. Jetzt kommen sie auf den Gedanken, den “large man” bei seinem Gürtel zu packen, ihn mit aller Kraft über das Geländer zu hieven und ihn vor den fahrenden Zug zu werfen. Dadurch würde, so ihre messerscharfe Kalkulation, der Zug gebremst und die fünf Arbeiter am Leben bleiben.

Folgende Dinge sind bemerkenswert:

Schön waren die Zeiten wo “large men” noch so selten waren, dass sie als Beispiele für Philosophische Gedankenexperimente herhalten konnten. Heute könnte man sagen: ein Fussgänger begegnet ihnen. Da circa die Hälfte der Gesellschaft übergewichtig ist, wäre die Chance nicht schlecht, dass irgendein Passant auch “large” wäre.

Züge trugen zu dieser Entwicklung bei.

Einen erwachsenen Menschen hochheben ist nicht so einfach.

Auch ein XX-large man wäre wirkungslos.

Statt am Gürtel wäre es wirkungsvoller, die Knie des “large man” mit beiden Armen zu umfassen, ihn mit dem Gewicht des eigenen Oberkörpers aus der Balance zu bringen, so dass er mit seinen Hüften gegen das Geländer kippt. Dann könnte man in die Knie gehen, den Rücken gerade halten und mit einer Bewegung aus der Hocke aufstehend, den “large man” über den Drehpunkt am Geländer, relativ leicht von der Brücke befördern.

Er würde in der Luft rotieren.

Wehrt sich der “large man” haben Sie keine Chance. Ausser sie üben Kreuzheben.

Hat der “large man” einen Hund an der Leine, dann bietet es sich an, den Hund zuerst von der Brücke zu werfen. Der “large man” würde perplex und von infantilen Automatismen gesteuert, sich sofort mit Kopf und Oberkörper in Richtung des fallenden Hundes richten. So über das Geländer gebeugt könnten sie dann von hinten den “large man” viel einfacher darüber lupfen.

Sind sie selber ein “large man” –

Sollten sie je in ein solches Szenario geraten, schauen sie dem “large man” auf die Schuhe, murmeln sie etwas von deontologischer Moral, aber gehen Sie in Gottes Namen weiter.

home office

We changed the home into an office…

We sit in office chairs

at kitchen tables.

We talk business

in dinig rooms.

We eat convenient meals

with porcelain.

… and the office into a home

We work on couches

in office buildings.

We talk private

in public cafeterias.

We eat homemade meals

from plastic containers.

We fucked up both.

Offensive categories

Different problems need different solutions.

Problem one: You have a five year old daughter and you don’t want her to run into an incoming Porsche.

Problem two: You have a five year old Porsche and its transmission is broken. Same Porsche, different problems.

Of course you are going to use a different description of the car for your daughter than for the mechanic working on the broken transmission of exactly the same car.

The simple and obvious reason for this is that even though the Porsche might be the same, the problems are completely different. This explains the different representations of the same car.

I imagine categories as levels of abstraction. A simple low resolution abstraction category is enough for your five year old daughter. It needs to represent some sort of a sound, have four wheels and be a big box, which is faster than let’s say anything else in her usual environment. The specifics of the transmission are useless for this problem.

On the other hand, on a very concrete level, a high resolution category of the Porsche allows the mechanic to repair certain specific parts of the transmission. The low resolution description of the Porsche would be useless to the mechanic.

So which category is useful? The answer is, it depends on the problem. Both can be useless and both can be useful. The reason why I stress the use is because I want to emphasize the problem solving aspect of different categories.

Different categories serve as different solutions for different problems. Of course the category in the father daughter problem 1 is a simple, low resolution one of a Porsche 911. It doesn’t say anything about the details and complexities of a so called 8-speed Porsche Doppelkupplungs transmission. But that doesn’t mean that the category itself is not useful, or god forbid wrong. It is also by no means a value judgment. The father actually doesn’t care if his simple low resolution categorical abstraction of a Porsche 911 also contains a VW Polo, or worse, a Fiat Multipla – on the contrary, he actually hopes for it, because a five year old can be killed by both.

Even a hardcore Porsche fan would never find this chain of argumentation offensive. And even if he would, to deal with an offended Porsche mechanic is hardly never a good problem to solve. Leave him and solve the important problem. Use an apt category. As simple as it needs to be.

The WhatsApp subscription plan

Communication was once bound by time and space. Try to listen to someone who is a little more than at arms length away from you. Tell me what you hear. Tell me.

If you want to hear you need to get close. Your face needs to be so close that if you say something really stupid, you can be punched in the face. For a long time communication was backed by the risk of a real human interaction. Gutenberg (or someone in asia) changed that. It caused a bloody mess during the religious wars in the 17th century. Turned out to be good, but that’s hindsight. The guys at CERN changed everything again.

So here we are. Trying to communicate with WhatsApp, this constant stresser of “communication” across time and space, stored up, on hold, as if the real communication would actually profit from such a degeneration. Complete utter nonsens. Humans intermediated trying to reach other humans also intermediated. Time and Space were once forces to be reckoned with. Forces which were impossible to overcome. We twisted it as good as we could. But to get to the center of the attention, if you wanted to talk and to be heard, you needed to eat and train like an animal, be 6 feet 6 and carry a net and a trident.

And you took the risk of getting slayed by another humungous animal and wetting the sand with your blood, writing a warning, to all the spectators present, for what it actually meant to be in the center of the attention.

Imagine a WhatsApp subscription plan. There would be a reaction button. If you’d get a message, you could press the button and it would trigger an electric shock in the device of the one who sent the message. If you upgrade your plan, you could let the device of the sender explode.

Piece of cake for an algorithm and some witty hacker in north korea.

So everytime I send a message, god forbid a voice memo or a cat image, I knowingly would take the risk, that the reciever blows my hand of.

So if one would get a message, some complete nonsense, not real communication, one could wait. One could not react for a week, two weeks, until the sender is completely oblivious to the fact, that he communicated with a risk.

Then the sender is on the toilet, naked in the morning, taking a dump, no pants, checking his insta, and then his phone would blow up, in the perfect center of attention, 30 cm away from his brain, his genitals, his organs and his thighs. His two thumbs would be launched like mini missiles through his eyes. He would collapse like a dying star, crouched over his phone, the center of his worship, this strange being which was once upright looking at stars, and leaving a real message: A last reminder of his biological boundness to time and space.

Skateboarding

To skate is to play. It is playing with the world. A world of concrete steel and glass. A dystopian world. To skate is to crack the polished surface of the world itself. To skate is to grind down the symbols of eternal growth and human striving.

To skate is to mimik surfing. To take a holy interaction with nature, with water, forces greater than man, and applying it in an artificial concret world. To play the last game, to actually look at the map. Not to flee but to rebelliously play with the map itself – noisily altering, making cracks and marking the ground.

Skaters scorn modernity. Cynically they scratch the idea of the polished glittering surface of the optimized self-striving healthy human. Playfully they throw it down stairs.

Every mark they leave is backed up by a scar on their body. For they are credible, these jokers of the city, (not that they would know) as long as they skate.

The laws of attraction

As if I could crack the code. To see behind the stage which produces wonder and awe. To see the mechanics, the tows and pullies, the waterpipes, the gears, the lights, the fire and fans.

What makes the bush burn? What lures me in and asks for my attention? What is it? Whose orchestra is playing? Who is the conductor? Who did train him? How does he protect his authority?

And why are we all watching? Focused gazing into this mirracle mirror displaying an image of ourselves. We are strikingly captured and towed by this representation of life itself.

Completely absorbed, some moments last and the long ones – oh lucky if you experience the long ones. If you get to observe it, if youre allowed to swim with the current, because you realize you don’t need to breath, that by opening and letting water in, turning in, by diving down, you get rushed along and you fly over landscapes of trickeling pebbles whispering to you. And the longer you are allowed in this long river of attraction, the more you realize how fleeting it is.

Why even bother?

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht,
Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht;
- Mephistoteles

I don’t believe Mephistoteles. I don’t believe the ultimate proposal that not existing is better than existing. I don’t believe it.

But I don’t know why.

I do have to justify my believe. Not for myself, but for each and everyone who get’s to feel the premises for Mephistoteles argument, which is suffering and pain. The children beg for answers. The children with absent parents. The children with abusing parents. As if answers would help them. The answer is for me.

I mean you could argue that if you would follow Mephistoteles argument you would make everything worse, like a self fullfilling prophecy. The more you judge life itself, and bring judgment into existence, the greater the suffering and the greater the need for it to persih.

But how to deal with the already existing pain and suffering of life itself? Without adding to it? See this question implies that I do believe that no pain is better than pain. That the absence of suffering is better than suffering.

To make it worse, often the greatest highs are won by suffering and pain. But let’s say for the sake of the argument, even though the process might be full of suffering and pain, and it might serve a greater purpose, and even though the purpose is only great because of the suffering and pain, still the process is directed towards a place where there is no suffering and pain. A place where it all makes sense, where there is a relief. So yes I do say, this state of beeing is better than the state of suffering.

But I don’t really know why.

And let’s say to help is to suffer for someone else. So you fight suffering by suffering. Of course you have no obligation to help, to really help, to make yourself dirty, mouth to mouth, literal bloody first aid. Stand there and watch the suffering, mouth-bleeding addict die. I mean there is a social obligation to make a phone call – but to help? To really fight the suffering by suffering? To infect yourself with the suffering of the addict? For what?

A nasty zero sum game, an evil eternal joke.

The one holy enough who suffered and sacrificed his life for someone else fought the suffering with all he had. But he still inflicted more suffering on himself and on to his relatives. He had to ask his brother to comfort his mother. Yes there is resurection on earth. But only for the holy one. For us it might be in heaven. If we believe.

And I don’t know why.

Some days are just chaos…

It started this morning. I felt it as soon as I got up. I could not focus. I do have to write. I am always a little confused, people do so much “normal” stuff. And then I look at them and I ask myself: What are these guys doing? Somedays the glasses clicking and the clutter clacking, the conversations just seem louder?! too loud.

Then I get angry. A practical tip, if you want someone to be your friend, don’t fuck him (common sense?). Motivation is key. There is no need in arguing about the startup vibe of a bank if the motivation is cash. You can have formal attire and a good motivation. But startup vibe with a shitty motivation is even worse.

Now I get cynical. I feel contempt and disgusted annoyance rising. I do not know why but I can feel it. Should I give in? I don’t know. Cause why on earth should I give in? Or should I not? I hate my fuzzy language. It’s not clean. I can’t really …

I am disgusted by people who shimmy themselfs from appointment to appointment. It’s like they jump from one floating log to the other, over an eternal swamp of insecurity, constantly balancing and tumbling for stability. The worst thing is that they use other people for their sad dance. The chosen appointed one barely floats so he gets pulled down and they both start to drown, until they separate and hop on to the next log. A disgusting misery of sludge, an absolute shit show.

See yesterday I wanted to hug the whole of humanity, say YES to human existence itself, with a smile which was “knowingly tormented by all the misery there is” - but a smile full of hope, joy and love, but not naive! More like “intellectually informed” (arrogant). This kind of smile.

And on days like today I want to punch my yesterday self in the face. It’s 11:30 AM and I am already exhausted.