Monat: April 2014

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Australian anthems: Nick Cave – Into My Arms | Music | theguardian.com.

A plangent piano ballad played at the funeral of Michael Hutchence, this ode to loss and sorrow has comforted generations of listeners

Nick Cave writing lyrics.
Nick Cave writing lyrics: ‚the offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births‘.

Nick Cave understands the love song. His can be hopeful or angry, loud or raucous, but they press down on your chest, pick you up briefly, and then dump you right back down again. They explore – as Cave says himself – the darkest regions of the soul.

Sorrow has always formed a part of Cave’s songwriting. In his lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song, he traces the genesis of his own artistic expression and identifies the one event that catalysed the process – the death of his father when he was 19. „I see that my artistic life is centred around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss that laid claim to my life,“ he says.

The songs became his emissaries, drawn from that desire to explore the sorrow, the pain and the anger that he says „have whistled through my bones and hummed in my blood“.

Into My Arms, which opens the album The Boatman’s Call, is Cave’s most haunting love song. A quiet piano ballad, its plangent melody mournfully hymns the end of two relationships. Full of beautifully limpid songs, the 1997 album was a world away from Cave’s more confronting earlier work with the Birthday Party and the Boys Next Door. In the process, it opened up his music to a new audience.

Cave has became revered in Australia, although some have found this strange. While he grew up in Melbourne, he spent many years wandering, living in Berlin, London andSão Paulo. His songs don’t yearn for his home country. But his voice has a coarseness that is unmistakably Australian, and he is a standard-bearer for a darker side of the country’s artists who are boldly unafraid to explore and experiment.

Cave counts Into My Arms among his most treasured creations. In The Secret Life of the Love Song he says: „Mostly, they were the offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births. Most are rooted in direct personal experience and were conceived for a variety of reasons, but this rag-tag group of love songs are, at the death, all the same thing – lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man.“

The song at its heart is about loss and the sorrow that flows from it, whether it’s the end of a relationship or the death of a friend or family member – Cave sang the ballad at the funeral of Michael Hutchence. Evocative, emotional and stirring, Into My Arms reminds us that even at the darkest times we’re not alone, truly conjuring of the elusive spirit of duende.

Should it be called an Australian anthem? It was written by an Australian and has captured the souls of many Australians. But it goes beyond that. The love song speaks to people in a way that is universal, and that is surely one of Cave’s most enduring qualities.

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The 100 best novels: No 32 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) | Books | The Observer.

The 100 best novels: No 32 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth

Robert McCrum introduces the series

 

Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, inspired by Heart of D

Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, inspired by Heart of Darkness. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

 

So far, on this list, with the possible exception of Alice in Wonderland (No 18 in this series), Heart of Darkness is probably the title that has aroused, and continues to arouse, most literary critical debate, not to say polemic. This is partly because the story it tells has the visceral simplicity of great myth, and also because the book takes its narrator (Charles Marlow), and the reader, on a journey into the heart of Africa.

 

Our encounter with Marlow’s life-changing journey begins on the Thames in London, the great imperial capital, with his recollection of „the uttermost ends of the Earth“. With brilliant economy, Conrad transports him to Congo on a quest that the writer himself undertook as a young man. There, working for the shadowy, but all-powerful „Company“, Marlow hears of Mr Kurtz, who is described as a first-class Company servant. Once in the dark continent, Marlow is sent upriver to make contact with Kurtz, who is said to be very ill, and also to safeguard the security of the Inner Station. What he finds, after a gruelling journey to the interior, is a fellow European, who may or may not have gone mad, and who is worshipped as a god by the natives of the primitive interior. Kurtz, however, has paid a terrible price for his mastery. When Marlow finds him on his deathbed, he utters the famous and enigmatic last words: „The horror! The horror!“

This line is often said to refer to the atrocities Conrad himself witnessed in Congo as it suffered under the colonial administration of the Belgians. He himself is said to have remarked that his story was based on „experience, pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case“. The metaphorical force of the story and the indifferent contempt of the African who announces „Mistah Kurtz – He dead“ (brilliantly expropriated by TS Eliot) gives Heart of Darkness the most modern air of all the books that make up the movement called Modernism. Welcome to the 20th century, possibly English and American fiction’s golden age.

A note on the text

Conrad’s first and second languages were Polish and French, with his third language, English, not acquired until he was 20. English, however, was the medium he adopted to explore his youthful experience as a riverboat captain in Belgian Congo. Part of the work’s strange hallucinatory atmosphere comes from the writer’s struggle with a language that was not his mother tongue. He sometimes said he would have preferred to be a French novelist, and that English was a language without „clean edges“. He once complained that „all English words are instruments for exciting blurred emotions“. This, paradoxically, is perhaps what gives the book its famously enigmatic, and ambiguous, atmosphere.

Conrad finished writing Heart of Darkness on 9 February 1899. It was originally published as a three-part serialisation in Blackwood’s Magazine from February to April 1899 (a commission for the 1,000th issue of the magazine), where it was promoted as a nautical tale by a writer whose work was at first (mistakenly) associated with the sea.

Heart of Darkness comes down to us in three other primary texts: a manuscript, a typescript and the final, revised version published in 1902. Not exactly a long story, and certainly not a novella, at barely 38,000 words long, it first appeared in volume form as part of a collection of stories that included Youth: A Narrative and The End of the Tether. It has become Conrad’s most famous, controversial and influential work. The English and American writers who fell under its spell include TS Eliot (The Waste Land), Graham Greene (A Burnt-out Case), George Orwell (Nineteen-Eighty-Four) and William Golding (The Inheritors). It also inspired the Francis Ford Coppola 1979 film Apocalypse Now, a work of homage that continues to renew the contemporary fascination with the text.

None of Conrad’s other books have inspired such veneration, especially in America, though some (including me) might want to place Nostromo (1904) higher up the pantheon. Critics have endlessly debated it. Chinua Achebe denounced it, in a famous 1975 lecture, as the work of „a bloody racist“. Among the novels in this series, few novels occupy such an unassailable place on the list. It is a haunting, hypnotic masterpiece by a great writer who towers over the literature of the 20th century.

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Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate writer, dies aged 87 | Books | The Guardian.

Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate writer, dies aged 87

 

Gabriel García Márquez in Monterrey in 2007 Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez in Monterrey in 2007. Photograph: Tomas Bravo/Reuters

 

The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who unleashed the worldwide boom in Spanish language literature and magical realism with his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, died at the age of 87. He had been admitted to hospital in Mexico City on 3 April with pneumonia.

Matching commercial success with critical acclaim, García Márquez became a standard-bearer for Latin American letters, establishing a route for negotiations between guerillas and the Colombian government, building a friendship with Fidel Castro and maintaining a feud with fellow literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa that lasted more than 30 years.

Barack Obama said the world had lost „one of its greatest visionary writers“, adding that he cherished an inscribed copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, presented to him by the author on a visit to Mexico. „I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo’s work will live on for generations to come.“

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said yesterday via Twitter: „A thousand years of solitude and sadness at the death of the greatest Colombian of all time. Solidarity and condolences to his wife and family … Such giants never die.“

Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate writer, dies aged 87 García Márquez in Mexico City in March. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters Journalists gathered outside García Márquez’s house in Mexico City in the hope that one of the family members who was reportedly at his side would emerge.

Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto expressed sadness at the death of „one of the greatest writers of our time,“ in the name of Mexico, the novelist’s adopted home. Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda was quoted by the Mexican newspaper Reforma as saying that he was „the most important writer in Spanish of the 20th century“, central to the Latin American literary boom that „revolutionised everything: the imagination, the way of telling a story, and the literary universe“.

The Colombian singer Shakira wrote: „We will remember your life, dear Gabo, like a unique and unrepeatable gift, and the most original of stories.“

Born in a small town near the northern coast ofColombia on 6 March 1927, García Márquez was raised by his grandparents for the first nine years of his life and began working as a journalist while studying law in Bogotá.

A series of articles relating the ordeal of a Colombian sailor sparked controversy and saw him travel to Europe as a foreign correspondent in 1955, the year in which he published his first work of fiction, the short novel Leaf Storm. Short stories and novellas with the realism of Hemingway as their inspiration followed, but after the publication of The Evil Hour in 1962 García Márquez found himself at an impasse.

Speaking to the Paris Review in 1981 he explained how he decided his writings about his childhood were „more political“ than the „journalistic literature“ he had been engaged with. He wanted to return to his childhood and the imaginary village of Macondo he had created in Leaf Storm, but there was „always something missing“. After five years he hit upon the „right tone“, a style „based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories“.

„She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness,“ García Márquez said. „When I finally discovered the tone I had to use, I sat down for 18 months and worked every day.“

Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a copy of his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1975 García Márquez with a copy of his book One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1975. Isabel Steva Hernandez (Colita)/Corbis Right from the elliptical opening sentence – which finds Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering the „distant afternoon“ many years before when „his father took him to discover ice“ – One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves together the misfortunes of a family over seven generations. García Márquez tells the story of a doomed city of mirrors founded in the depths of the Colombian jungle with the „brick face“ his grandmother used to tell ghost stories, folk tales and supernatural legends.

The novel was an instant bestseller, with the first edition of 8,000 copies selling out within a week of its publication in 1967. Hailed by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as „perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes“, One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to win literary prizes in Italy, France, Venezuela and beyond, appearing in more than 30 languages and selling more than 30m copies around the world. García Márquez forged friendships with writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar and Vargas Llosa – a friendship that ended in the 1970s after Vargas Llosa floored the Colombian with a punch outside a Mexico City cinema.

The Autumn of the Patriarch, which the author called a „poem on the solitude of power“, followed in 1975. García Márquez assembled this story of the tyrannical leader of an unnamed Caribbean nation from a collage of dictators such as Franco, Perón, and Pinilla, and continued to draw inspiration from Latin America’s history of conflict with a novella inspired by the murder of a wealthy Colombian, The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, published in 1981.

A year later he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy hailing fiction „in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts“. Speaking at the ceremony in Stockholm, he painted a picture of a continent filled with „immeasurable violence and pain“ that „nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty“.

„Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination,“ he said, „for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.“

Undated photo of Gabriel García Márquez An undated photo of García Márquez. Photograph: AP The lives García Márquez next made „believable“ were those of his parents, whose extended courtship was rendered into Love in the Time of Cholera, first published in 1985. The novel tells how a secret relationship between Florentino Arizo and Fermina Daza is thwarted by Fermina’s marriage to a doctor trying to eradicate cholera, only to be rekindled more than 60 years later.

A 1989 account of Simón Bolívar’s final months, The General in his Labyrinth, blended fact and fiction, but García Márquez never left journalism behind, arguing that it kept him „in contact with the real world“. Clandestine in Chile, published in 1986, was an account of the Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littín, who returned to his homeland in secret to make a documentary about life under General Augusto Pinochet. News of a Kidnapping explored how prominent figures in Colombian society were snatched and imprisoned by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel.

He continued to write, publishing a memoir of his early life in 2002 and a novella that chronicles an old man’s passion for an adolescent girl in 2004, but never regained the heights of his earlier masterpieces. His brother Jaime García Márquez revealed in 2012 that the writer was suffering from dementia after undergoing chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer first diagnosed in 1999.

Asked in 1981 about his ambitions as a writer he suggested that it would be a „catastrophe“ to be awarded the Nobel prize, arguing that writers struggle with fame, which „invades your private life“ and „tends to isolate you from the real world“.

„I don’t really like to say this because it never sounds sincere,“ he continued, „but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn’t have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer.“

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Heraclitus

Panta rhei, „everything flows“

Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) „everything flows“ either was not spoken by Heraclitus or did not survive as a quotation of his. This famous aphorism used to characterize Heraclitus‘ thought comes from Simplicius,[32] a neoplatonist, and from Plato’s Cratylus. The word rhei (cf. rheology) is the Greek word for „to stream“, and to the etymology of Rhea according to Plato’s Cratylus.[33]

Heraclitus by Hendrick ter Brugghen

The philosophy of Heraclitus is summed up in his cryptic utterance:[34]

ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.
Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei
„Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers.“

The quote from Heraclitus appears in Plato’s Cratylus twice; in 401d as:[35]

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
Ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden
„All entities move and nothing remains still“

and in 402,a[36]

„πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει“ καὶ „δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης“
Panta chōrei kai ouden menei kai dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaies
„Everything changes and nothing remains still … and … you cannot step twice into the same stream“[37]

Instead of „flow“ Plato uses chōrei, to change chōros.

The assertions of flow are coupled in many fragments with the enigmatic river image:[38]

Ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
„We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.“

Compare with the Latin adages Omnia mutantur and Tempora mutantur (8 CE) and the Japanese tale Hōjōki, (1200 CE) which contains the same image of the changing river, and the central Buddhist doctrine of impermanence.

 

Also in Ovid’s ‚Metamorphoses‘:

Bk XV:176-198 Pythagoras’s Teachings:The Eternal Flux

 

‘Since I have embarked on the wide ocean, and given full sails to the wind, I say there is nothing in the whole universe that persists. Everything flows, and is formed as a fleeting image. Time itself, also, glides, in its continual motion, no differently than a river. For neither the river, nor the swift hour can stop: but as wave impels wave, and as the prior wave is chased by the coming wave, and chases the one before, so time flees equally, and, equally, follows, and is always new. For what was before is left behind: and what was not comes to be: and each moment is renewed.‘

 

And from Ovid to Shakespeare:

We have to look no further than Shakespeare (who read Ovid in Golding’s translation) to confirm this point. Shakespeare, quite literally, plundered Ovid for stories and moved them directly into his plays – in Titus Andronicus or A Midsummer Night’s Dream for example – and, like so many of his contemporaries used Ovid as a sort of handbook for classical allusions and similes (as sad as Niobe, as crafty as Ulysses, as vain as Narcissus, as impetuous as Phaethon, as foolish as Icarus, and so on). Shakespeare lifts whole speeches from Ovid and adapts them to his purposes (so, for example, Prospero’s famous invocation of the spirits in the Tempest is adapted directly from Medea’s similar speech in Metamorphoses (a speech Shakespeare had used before, in Macbeth). In Shakespeare’s early work, something like three quarters of the classical imagery is derived directly from Ovid’s poem. And if we want to see modern poets doing the same thing, we have only to look at, say, Eliot’s Waste Land, in which images and references to Ovid are just as frequent. In fact, if one wants to have any sort of historical appreciation for the development of English poetry, understanding the influence of and the reference to Ovid is essential.

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Self-censorship in the digital age: We won’t be able to recognize ourselves – Feuilleton – FAZ.

 

Self-censorship in the digital age We won’t be able to recognize ourselves

07.04.2014  ·  More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud showed how we censor ourselves. In the age of digital mass surveillance we are facing self-censorship of a different dimension. We are more cautious, warier. Our behavior is changing drastically .

Von Peter Galison

 

Straßenlaterne

© dpa Vergrößern Will streetlamps soon be equipped not only with LED’s but also with facial recognition technology?

 

On February 24, 1998, back when Edward Snowden was but fifteen, the National Security Agency finished one of the most remarkable documents in the history and theory of communications media. The Internet itself had just recently shifted into a commercial mode and was hosting an ever-growing fraction of all two-way communication.  Electronic intelligence officers took notice, in concert with its “partners.”

 

The document said: „In the past, NSA operated in a mostly analog world of point-to-point communications carried along discrete, dedicated voice channels.  [M]ost of these communications were in the air and could be accessed using conventional means….Now, communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia.  They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less. … To perform both its offensive and defensive missions, NSA must live on the network.“

 

Lurking in the shadows of the shadows

The NSA and its allies have indeed, learned to “live on the network,” hovering over tweets and texts, emails and videocalls, social networks, games, images, searches, and phones.   They are not the only ones with eyes on the digital prize.   The British GCHQ has been fiercely aggressive in pursuing electronic intelligence, the French DGSE have happily joined in with their own version of massive electronic surveillance, and the Germans, alongside the Americans and British, grown very familiar with the NSA “crown jewels,” like the digital vacuum cleaner XKeyscore (capable of searching emails, chats, and browsing histories), using the program to capture hundreds of millions of German data sets.   In one NSA document reported on by Der Spiegel, the NSA applauded „the German government [for] modif[ying] its interpretation of the G-10 privacy law … to afford the BND more flexibility in sharing protected information with foreign partners.“

 

Of course, prying eyes on the Internet come too from countries beyond Europe and North America.  If anyone doesn’t know that the Chinese and Russians have invested heavily in cyber-espionage they reside in some other solar system.  Multi-national corporations plead “shock” and “outrage” that their servers and data pipes were so well hoovered– they doth protest too much.  Meanwhile, those same companies are themselves cross-correlating data on all of us at a staggering rate.  Lurking in the shadows of shadows are the cybercriminals, profitably snatching government and corporate data.

 

Reshaping the self

In fact, the most shocking thing I’ve read over the last year has not been that electronic espionage agencies spy electronically.  Instead, it was a small salmon-colored text balloon lodged on the lower right of an NSA PowerPoint PRISM slide: “PRISM cost: ~ $20M per year.”

 

Twenty million dollars per year?  An absolutely insignificant drop in the NSA’s budget. Of course that low price depended on getting the data but by pressure, law or stealth from the corporate data world.   The very ease of this kind of monitoring suggested by this low seven-figure bill means that this debate is effectively over.  Sure this or that program will be curtailed.  But no one, no institution, no treaty, law, or country is going to stop this world-wide harvesting of data.

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Selbstzensur durch Massenüberwachung: Wir werden uns nicht mehr wiedererkennen – Feuilleton – FAZ.

Selbstzensur durch Massenüberwachung Wir werden uns nicht mehr wiedererkennen

07.04.2014  ·  Vor mehr als hundert Jahren hat Freud nachgewiesen, dass der Mensch sich selbst zensiert. Im Zeitalter digitaler Massenüberwachung droht uns Selbstzensur in ganz anderem Ausmaß: Unser Verhalten ändert sich grundlegend.

Von Peter Galison

Artikel Bilder (3) Lesermeinungen (53)
Straßenlaterne

© dpa Vergrößern Will streetlamps soon be equipped not only with LED’s but also with facial recognition technology?

Am 24.Februar 1998 – Edward Snowden war gerade einmal fünfzehn – stellte die NSA eines der bemerkenswertesten Dokumente in der Geschichte und Theorie der Kommunikationsmedien fertig. Das Internet stand seit wenigen Jahren für die kommerzielle Nutzung zur Verfügung und bestimmte in zunehmendem Maß die Zwei-Wege-Kommunikation, was den Nachrichtendiensten natürlich nicht verborgen blieb.

English Version: We won’t be able to recognize ourselves

In dem Papier heißt es: „In der Vergangenheit operierte die NSA in einer überwiegend analogen Welt von Punkt-zu-Punkt-Verbindungen, die über diskrete, feste Sprechkanäle liefen. Der Zugang zu diesen Verbindungen konnte meistens auf konventionellem Weg hergestellt werden. Inzwischen findet Kommunikation überwiegend digital statt, mit Milliarden von Bits, über Sprache, Daten und Multimedia. Sie wird dynamisch weitergeleitet, ist global vernetzt und stützt sich immer weniger auf traditionelle Kommunikationswege wie Mikrowelle oder Satelliten. Um ihren offensiven und defensiven Auftrag erfüllen zu können, muss die NSA ‚im Netz leben‘.“

Im Schatten der Schatten

Die NSA und ihre Partner haben in der Tat dazugelernt. Sie „leben im Netz“, überwachen Tweets und SMSe, Mails und Videoanrufe, soziale Netzwerke, Spiele, Fotos, Suchanfragen und Telefone. Sie sind nicht die Einzigen, die ein gigantisches digitales Schleppnetz ausgeworfen haben. Die Briten betreiben eine aggressive elektronische Überwachung, die Franzosen haben ihre eigenen Schnüffelinstrumente, und die Deutschen sind bestens vertraut mit den „Kronjuwelen“ der NSA, etwa dem digitalen Staubsauger XKeyscore, einem Programm, mit dem sie Mails, Chats und Browserverläufe durchsuchen und Abermillionen Datensätze abgreifen können. Laut einem Bericht des „Spiegel“ lobte die NSA die deutsche Regierung dafür, „ihre Auslegung des G-10-Gesetzes geändert zu haben, um dem BND mehr Flexibilität bei der Weitergabe geschützter Daten an ausländische Partner zu ermöglichen“.

Internetüberwachung findet natürlich nicht nur in Europa und in Nordamerika statt. Wer nicht weiß, dass die Chinesen und Russen massiv in Cyberspionage investieren, lebt in einem anderen Sonnensystem. Multinationale Unternehmen geben sich „schockiert“ und „empört“ darüber, dass ihre Server und Datenleitungen angezapft werden – ihr Protest fällt etwas zu laut aus. Gleichzeitig sammeln und nutzen diese Unternehmen Daten über uns in beispiellosem Umfang. Und im Schatten der Schatten bewegen sich Cyberkriminelle, die Daten von Staaten und Unternehmen stehlen.

Leerstellen im Bewusstsein

Das Schockierendste, was ich im letzten Jahr gelesen habe, war nicht, dass Geheimdienste elektronische Spionage betreiben, sondern ein kleines lachsfarbenes Textfeld in der rechten unteren Ecke einer Powerpoint-Präsentation der NSA zu Prism: „Kosten für Prism: ~ 20M pro Jahr.“ Zwanzig Millionen Dollar jährlich? Für die NSA ein lächerlicher Betrag, der auch deswegen so gering ist, weil man durch Druck, durch gesetzliche Vorgaben oder heimlich an die Daten der Unternehmen kam. Die Mühelosigkeit dieser Überwachung, auf die diese geringe Summe hinweist, bedeutet, dass diese Debatte faktisch beendet ist. Sicherlich wird das eine oder andere Programm eingeschränkt werden. Aber niemand, keine Institution, kein Vertrag, kein Gesetz, kein Land, wird die weltweite Datensammelei einstellen.

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Peter Galison, Jahrgang 1955, gehört zu den bedeutendsten Wissenschaftshistorikern; er ist Professor für Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Physik an der Harvard University. Gemeinsam mit Robb Moss drehte er den Dokumentarfilm „Secrecy“ (2008) über Strategien staatlicher Geheimhaltung. Siehe auch Peter Galisons Kunstprojekt „Sensity“.

In unserer Reihe über die Auswirkungen der digitalen Revolution auf die Geisteswissenschaften schrieben bisher Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Claus Pias und Philip Mirowski.