Heute aus der Reihe Kulturpessimismus für Fortgeschrittene: Peter Sundes Eröffnungsrede (neudeutsch: key note) der Transmediale 2015. Eine vollständige Zusammenfassung gibt es auf golem.
„The internet will keep getting destroyed. It will keep becoming more and more centralized. You can’t do anything anymore. We tried, we sucked at it. The few people that really did anything are now old, some are even dead. The young ones believe in the system and try to change it from within. It’s like trying to beat capitalism by trying to capture all of the money. Every now and then we win the fight against one of their pressive new measures. Like we did with ACTA and SOPA and PIPA. We congratulate ourselves and feel important. In essence we just lost ten other battles that we even didn’t know about.
We have our own celebrities, we had WikiLeaks, we had Snowden, we had Manning, we had Aaron Swartz. Some are dead, some are in jail. Some are in hiding, scared for their actual lives.
What people reveal, what people fight for are major causes. Freedom of information, liberty, democracy, government of transparency and [unverständlich] process. Things we take for granted that are the basis for a modern safe society. We talk about it a lot, we are upset, we cry, we scream, sometimes we protest. We have T-shirts, we have our symbols, we have our masks, our conferences, our „Transmediale“, our debates, we even get the attention. People in general like us. Our opponents are all fat bastard-whore-corporate-sellouts. They´re mostly rich men from the United States of America. They are super corrupt, it´s easy to hate them, it’s like any good Hollywood movie.
But we’ve all been fooled. We lost. There’s no need in fighting anymore. We lost long time ago by cornering ourselves. There’s no use to struggle. There’s no point in being positive in. The only positive thing about it all is that we no longer have to worry. It’s all predetermined. It’s all a waste. There’s no more any „we“ or „us“. We’re becoming drones. Mind it or not, it doesn´t matter. We built the system, we trusted it because we trusted ourselves. We’re all drones, maybe we have always been that.“