Category: Deutsch

Fragment Piratensender Powerplay E131: Lina, Law & Order

Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.

https://piratensenderpowerplay.podigee.io/155-neue-episode

Putting this receipt here about life in the DDR and its eventual downfall:

Anekdote 3: im November 89 kam eine neue Schülerin in unsere Klasse. Aus der DDR. Wie ich später erfuhr, war ihr Vater in einer verantwortlichen Position in einem VEB. Er hat seine Familie in Sicherheit gebracht, weil er Angst hatte, was passiert, „wenn alles rauskommt.

https://twitter.com/waldorf_charles/status/1673584970902675456

It’s anecdata but it’s plausible and pretty damning and there’s a bunch more where that came from. Don’t listen to people glorifying how nice and functional things were under the GDR.

It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).

What we need with the Bürgeramt though is not 10% more appointments but the automation of at least half of the processes there to no longer need human intervention. We needed that 10 years ago.

Das Bürgeramt der Zukunft – Teil 2

Hey Datenschutz, leave those kids alone

The next bit of insanity has to do with the German Datenschutz nutters. This is a small but virulent group of people who have blown up privacy issues to the point where most of Germany is still afraid to use the internet.

It started with this:

A bunch of schools in Karlsruhe were attacked by ransomware and their servers had to be taken offline.

Now the first question that comes to mind is of course: Why does a school have servers? Don’t all schools run in the cloud these days?

Well, in Germany they don’t. There are lots of agencies and levels of decision makers all of whom are too busy covering their own ass and none of them will say: “Schools can use cloud solutions.” People and organizations being as risk averse as they are in Germany, nobody will use cloud solutions without such a declaration.

So what do they do instead? They have to get servers and people to install and maintain barely useable non-cloud collaborative software tools. Nobody in their right mind would use these tools and kids in private schools of course don’t either, but this dysfunctional ideology is foisted upon kids who have no other choice.

These tools are not usable in any way, barely work even in the best of circumstances, are tremendously costly in maintenance and then break like in the news above. If you ever get to see from the inside how a normal organization manages their IT (i.e. poorly), from that point on you will beg, plead and scream to have everything put in the cloud.

That’s where somebody like the poster above from KRITIS comes in. That’s an organization representing people who get off on pushing around physical servers and whose founding member sells an alternative private collaboration suite, exactly like the ones that they recommend people use.

I agree with their core point that critical infrastructure should be protected better and in just doing that they’ll generate more than enough work for all the security consultants in their network. Just stop scaring normal people because you benefit from the widespread climate of fear and hands off the kids.

Important prototyping work to show how German government forms can be much better and much friendlier than what’s out there right now.

Getting anything like this to production will be very very difficult without a lot of systemic changes and groundwork done first.

Nutzerzentrierte, digitale Verwaltung: Bessere Online-Anträge durch Co-Kreation mit Bürger:innen
Ungleichheit und Systemtheorie – Die blinden Flecken in Luhmanns Theorie der Gesellschaft

Here’s one of many possible takedowns of Luhmann’s work that should give you a good taste of how useless it is without having to read any of the works themselves. Imagine living in a society where they got this instead of ANT.

The block quoted below for instance is exactly the same vibe as Rudolf Steiner’s nonsense.

Durch diese Beschreibung ziehen sich auch die Funktionssysteme, also Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft, Politik usw. über die gesamte Welt. Ihm fällt dabei allerdings schon auf, dass es gewisse Bereiche gibt, die scheinbar mehr Einfluss auf das Weltgeschehen ausüben als andere. Vielleicht, um eine zu vertikale Formulierung zu umgehen, die er nur für die Feudalgesellschaften vorsieht, nutzt er für dieses Ungleichgewicht die Unterscheidung nach Zentrum und Peripherie (Luhmann 2005: 249). Dabei sind wir, die aufgeklärten und fortschrittlichen Länder des Westens, natürlich im Zentrum.