Today everyone knows what we want. Because advertising is being personalized more and more. If you move through the internet, it will be evaluated. You can tell that when you are looking for something, banners and other advertisements suddenly pop up everywhere promoting the product you are looking for. Anyone who has purchased a new bicycle and posts it as a photo on Facebook or Instagram will be overwhelmed with offers for bicycles. This alone makes it easy to see that artificial intelligence is not as intelligent as everyone always thinks. Because I have already bought this product. A really good algorithm would now offer bicycle helmets, child seats, insurance or locks. But he’s not quite that far yet. The disadvantage of all this personalized advertising, however, is quite another. For the most part, you only get what people think you want.
It all started back then with a monopoly mail order company that had grown into a huge data octopus. In any case, there they showed me from the start what other people who had also bought what I ordered had otherwise acquired. For years I had considered ordering completely absurd things at the same time, i.e. a horror film and bleach, pickaxe, spade and sturdy foil. That might scare people or give them ideas. Of course I never did anything like that. And sometimes I came across really interesting things through other people’s shopping habits. But it was always something that I would have come across sooner or later anyway. I was never really surprised.
This poverty of surprise is the result of a homogeneous bubble of people who have interests similar to mine. On social media, we mostly make friends with people we know very well or whose interests we share. So we only encounter what we know and like here. But there is no opportunity to really get to know new things. It’s like you can’t get out of your village or small town. The global network produces global provinciality. And that in turn has an impact. On the one hand, we are strengthened in our actions and thinking because other opinions are being ignored more and more often. On the other hand, we begin to limit our worldview. Everything seems to be consistent with me and, above all, to be a consensus of all. We only perceive other opinions as a weak echo and marginal phenomenon. Unless we take care not to ignore the other, the unpleasant, the surprising. But you have to be able to endure that and that requires real tolerance and, above all, an interest in foreigners. But that is becoming increasingly difficult.
The problem can be identified very well in streaming services, for example. If we subscribe to them, it is because we are interested in the program. And the audience numbers can be used to determine fairly precisely what people are actually interested in. The audience or, in this case, demand rate ultimately determines the program design. It is hardly possible more democratically. And so the companies spend billions to produce and provide what the majority of the people want. The customer is king in the truest sense of the word and the artists are just fools who do everything to entertain their majesties. Because the films and series shown correspond to the viewing habits of the majority. So everyone is happy. But actually not either.
I remember I must have been ten or eleven and my most urgent wish was a car racing track, precisely a Carrera track. Actually we didn’t have that much money, but Christmas and birthday together gave us the opportunity and there it was, my racetrack. I was the happiest kid in the world. And then we raced and raced, lap after lap, it was perfect. A couple of days anyway, then I took it apart and rebuilt it again. And again it was fun. And then I took it down and eventually rebuilt it. The intervals between dismantling and rebuilding became longer and longer. At some point, like before, I played with the wooden train and the Lego bricks and the imagination again. The Autobahn was so concrete, so perfect, and without space for my fantasies, that it bored me. Because she was just as good without me as she was with me. She didn’t need me to be.
And it is exactly the same with the film productions, which correspond so perfectly to what we expect. “The Fast and the Furious” now has nine parts, all of which work perfectly, but never come as a surprise. We know what we get in the cinema. It’s like Marvel, Star Wars and “Bibi and Tina”, everything is as we want it and that’s exactly why it is boring and conservative. Somehow it tastes good, but always the same or similar. Art was always good when it surprised. Van Gogh didn’t sell anything during his lifetime because he disturbed people, but shortly afterwards his works were part of the art canon. “Citizen Kane” was not a success with critics and audiences and is now an undisputed masterpiece. But one that came about anyway, even though no one had ordered it at first. And so it is with everything. It is only really fascinating if we do not expect it and know what is coming. We just want to be unexpectedly surprised. With something we don’t know about. It doesn’t have to be Corona or the Taliban. But also not Baerbock or Laschet, Bibi or Bond, banana yeast or potato chips that should taste like currywurst. Nobody can really want that. | Lars Johansen
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