On the radio and in the internet it doesn’t matter if you’re human or a cat. At least they said so in the good old times when there were still no digital bots. Even before, school table doodles were kind of our internet, and in between, according to German ZEIT magazine at least, the Interrail pass, a flatrate train ticket facilitating travelling and making internation contacts as a youth. There, too, many encounters remained just as fleeting and distant as pen-pal relationships and internet forums. But at least they were real. The dangers of spontaneous contacts with mysterious strangers are rightly adressed by many crime stories and thrillers. Maybe we were cautious enough or just lucky.
When my teacher read our table while I was giving a presentation in front of the class, that was less intrusive than it felt back then. Tabletop doodles are more of an open letter than a private diary. Yet I had been writing for weeks with a person who remained personally unknown, mostly about him, his lessons and his rambling and digressive lectures. Music lover, record collector, Plattensammler, self-taught in English, mainsplainer, everyday philosopher and commited social democrat: a controversial figure who inspired me, and whose voice often came to mind later when I listened to the radio DJ Klaus Fiehe.
Small Audience, Big Impact
Visible variations of low profile scribble messages are blackboards with collapsible sections practically attracting hidden messages. Just like in the book and film “(On the Shorter End of) Sonnenallee” only 1 additional letter jokingly changes the slogan “The party is the vanguard of the working class” to it being its foreskin. In a dictatorship, such subversive word play can cost your carreer. As West German with relatives in the East we lived history in the making. But I only knew Spreewald pen pal via a classified ad in a magazine. After only a handful of letters and one phonecall between our parents allowing me, still a teenager, to board the eastbound train to visit her shortly after the German Wall had come down. Not the only time in my life that I wrote and trusted people before having met them in real life.
When the Person you are Talking to is No Longer Human
Claude, Mistral and Chatty (GPT) still seem more like the unsettling psycho thriller phenomena to me, like Chucky, Ghost in the Shell or The Hearing Ear in John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider. Scary science-fiction ambivalent between dystopia and hope for companionship and connection. The hope of a bored lonely child feeling stranded on the wrong island or planet like E.T. The Extraterrestrian.
Algorithms and AI have become our uncanny ghostwriters: Even when you speak and write with an actual human being, how much are their words and thoughts written or controlled by a machine?
Crimes, pranks and impersonation were possible before the internet. But all actors were still human. Digital bots just didn’t exist at all back then. Personas did, however. When you talked to your dog, teddy bear or rubber duck, the dialog was all in your mind. Snoopy, Calvin and Hobbes, Winnie the Pooh, Paddington, and probably Night Rider as well, were popular prototypes of imaginary friendship.
Talking to a rubber duck has actually become a popular debugging technique for solving technical problems, and “rubber duck debugging” is still a productive alternative to overusing AI.
Fan Art and Fandom beyond Imaginary Friendship
Fandom is not the same as imaginary friendship, but both have something in common.
Beyond the emotional and intellectual connection to a songwriter, an author or their literary creations, fandom can connect strangers and inspire creativity. I remember naive fan art, closer to child’s drawings than artistic plagiarisms, drawn on envelopes or postcards, and I started doing it again, thanks to Postcrossing. Postcrossing brings back some additional moments of surprise and serendipity. And it’s possible nearly everywhere, for the price of a stamp and a postcard.
A Paradox of Reality
Because real life enounters, like attending workshops, meetups and festivals, mostly only work when living in an interesting diverse place; otherwise it might be hard to impossible to meet many inspiring people and role models in real life in the place and time you are. Hearing Aretha Franklin singing “Love the One You’re With” might inspire to discover underrated people next door (anew), like in the romantic comedy films of Lubitsch (The Shop Around the Corner) and Nora Ephron (You’ve got Mail). But it might also lead to becoming attached to the very situation that confines you, while you could and should rebel and leave to discover better.
What Makes People Move to big Cities
That’s why I moved to Berlin. Haha, look at me, what a rebel I am!
But, seriously, I only ask myself what a difference it makes that I’m here and not where I came from, unless I go back. We tend to take things for granted too quickly. Although I mock the nostalgia of young hipsters growing a moustache and sitting in bars, smoking, you should have seen me when I found that special edition of Urmel out of the Ice, a peculiar children’s book about talking animals that only became famous thanks to its performance as a marionette theater that thrilled audiences, serving as a highlight in the otherwise dull television programming of the time.
In the picture, I’m standing close to a charity book swap cabinet, right in front of a second-hand clothing shop and a record store selling actual vinyl records and inviting real musicians for music and signing sessions. Live music bars are just a round the corner.
You could say we should focus our time and energy on making the world a better place.
But I think that’s what we’re trying to do, in a way. I used to work in a hospital for little money, long time ago, instead of doing military service. I got up very early, cared for the elderly and did a lot of of dirty work. Not being a trained nurse also meant, I had more time to listen and talk and spend time with them. It mattered to them. It mattered to me. Even if there’s still war somewhere.
I’m doing a slightly creative, intellectual job for a living now, making and optimizing websites. I’m still some kind of a storyteller and communicator, and I’m still doing dirty work in a figurative sense.
And I’m not spending or wasting too much time writing blog posts like this one or hanging out at hipster places.
Is Authenticity Overrated?
What’s the point of this article, after all? I honestly just started scribbling spontaneously, inspired by remembering my old teacher, the notes on the classroom table, and the trip to my teenage pen pal. I also remembered how my dad used to be quite skeptical about my creative and social ambitions, having chosen a carreer despite his dreams of becoming an engineer building bridges in South America or Africa, inspired by a biopic about Albert Schweitzer.
What can our experience with analog communication teach us in today’s times of abundant AI slop, “alternative facts” and a generation growing up without a second of boredom?
Boredom is underrated. And so is serendipity. But what about authenticity?
Authenticity is great. Authentic real-life experience is often full of diverse details, reaching many senses all at once, leaving a stronger impression on us. Also leaving more room for interpretation. What we perceive as reality is, after all, merely a reflection of the real ontological reality. What constructivist science, philosophy, and buddhism teach is, simply said, mind over matter: essence precedes existence. While materialism says, we need food to survive. Both are right. Creatives need a physical world to live in. We all need a physical world to live in.
Coincidentally, there is one elevator that leads both to my gym and to my local library. Here I am again in my big city neighborhood, posing in front of an ad for Helene Nathan Library, Neukölln, featuring a supposedly unlikely male model with grey hair wearing a black leather jacket. Not unlikely at all neither in my gym nor in my library.
Is Berlin Overrated?
As someone having come to Berlin only recently, I missed the “good old days” that many people regret, especially the “cheap and sexy” and creative times of chaos and vacant buildings right after the fall of the Wall, when gentrification had all but started. The narrative of lost good old times isn’t exclusive to Berlin, for sure. I’ve heard that about Kashmir, the North Cape, and basically any place on this world that got famous for anything. Berlin isn’t cheap anymore, but still dirty, and still cheaper than most other comparable major cities.
Openness, tolerance, and diversity are not a necessary consequence of a sufficiently large crowd of people, however. Munich is just one counterexample, but some Berliner seem to try hard to make Berlin its own counterexample as well.
Homeless people regularly frequent the square in front of the book exchange cabinet, next to two cafés and hipster bars. Some read those books, others chat and beg for money to so they can afford a cheap beer from the supermarket. The drinks in the bar are out of the question. Ragged beggars, kinky queers, and veiled Arabic mothers share the same space and obviously tolerate each other. When music journalists in their Munich offices write that “Berlin is so over,” they’ll “achieve about as much as a dog peeing on trees,” to quote a classic German punk song by Die Toten Hosen from Düsseldorf, my former home town.
There are books, posters, and graffiti. People talk to each other and others can overhear what they’re saying.
The world doesn’t need Berlin, but the worlds needs places like our neighborhood where people and their ideas come together and inspire each other.
P.S. Image Sources and Original Notes
P.S. The AI image with the ghostly hand moving the quill was suggested to me as an example by ChatGPT. I photographed it, just to be on the safe side, and added the new EU-AI-logo to mark it as AI-generated. I found the image fitting in an unintended way, fitting an aspect that wasn’t my main thought initially. There are hardly any authentic photos from back, and that, too, is what nostalgia is about, letting unphotographed moments fade and und that they give way to romantified memory.
As an addtional proof of authenticity, let me show a photo of my original notes instead, scribbled with pencil on paper, and a first draft of this article after retyping into the computer. Not all of my blog posts start like that, some start in my head or while typing into my keyboard, sometimes in German, sometimes in English, and often mixed, like this one.
