How to, or not how to

...that’s still not the question

I have to keep my anger in check. Moderate my tone and watch out that I don’t scream at you through these lines. Because only a few minutes are enough to stumble in the Internot over some kind of instruction texts in which somesmartasses sell their “how to...” and “10 ways to...” wisdoms. Apart from the fact that these texts mostly offer recipes that can’t be implemented or only with moderate success, and that these texts are not necessarily based on their own experiences, it really makes me angry that there are still people who read this crap. Especially when they never have the intention to implement even a single suggestion, and during implementation would notice that it is total bullshit.

Which unfortunately brings me to the point where I am again and again shocked at how indescribably superficial and banal the Internot has become. In the past there were trash magazines that achieved high circulations with rumors about superstars. And other magazines that already back then offered useless recipes. You knew what these magazines were called, you could recognize them by their look or at the latest by the headlines, and make a wide detour around them.

The Internot, with its always same basic structure, makes these distinctions impossible. You only know what you’re getting once you have opened Pandora’s box. What nobody would have to do, though, would be to like this mental waste and push it into an undeserved foreground with attention. There are so many people out there who have at least something to say and to share, instead of satisfying the comfortable consumer attitude of modern bipeds. That is not promoted by the algorithm. Only what is already known and successful is promoted. Follow the usual structures, be nicely superficial, repeat what has already been repeated often, and “success” is guaranteed to you. Which makes you wonder what this so-called “success” is even worth anymore.

If the unimaginably dumb algorithm only offers more of what has already been offered a thousand times anyway, it ensures that more and more of the same is pressed into people’s heads. The logical consequence is that sooner or later even the simplest mind will realize: “I already know that. Where is something different?” Good question. Where is this “different”? I know it exists. It’s just getting harder and harder to find. Theoretically I would have to scroll through thousands of trivialities before I would find something that would really give me inspiration. Which I don’t do, because my time and my eyes are too precious for that.

When I think about it a little longer, I notice that this phenomenon is not a matter of the algorithm and Internot alone. Wasn’t it always like that, that I first had to dig through mountains of trash to find a single pearl? And this pearl was almost never what someone was trying to sell me as a pearl. In the field of music for example, I preferred small, almost unknown underground bands and musicians. Music that was rarely, if ever, played on the radio. The books I read were in the rarest cases on any bestseller lists, on the contrary: books that appeared on bestseller lists were suspicious to me. If a bestseller did come before my eyes, I often asked myself: “Seriously?” These bestsellers were then eventually filmed, and even if so-called superstars took the leading roles, the substance did not increase because of that. Films in particular over the last 20 years were increasingly characterized by becoming flatter, hollower and emptier the more money was pumped into them. And that has also become the general context in which films are talked about today in the Internot: how much money did it cost, what did it bring in, was it successful? Nothing could interest me less! I still insist that a film should inspire me. That it may give me courage. And that happens more and more rarely. It does still happen, at least. Amid the general flattening, there is again and again now and then something that touches me. Only: finding it, or the luck of stumbling over it by chance, is no longer worth the effort. If it were only that alone, all of this could still be irrelevant to me. Only I had already noticed many years ago that my main reason for sticking to the Internot, so that customers could find my art, had become increasingly more nonsensical. At the latest the Covid experiment had put an end to my life as an artist. That is a few years ago now, and I go on painting, go on writing, and now and then still make sound collages, but the reactions to what I do have arrived at nearly zero.