Andreas Wacker

Five years ago Mark Z could be heard speaking Chinese. Officially it was since he wanted to connect to his inlaws. Since his spouse was a Bostonian which parents had arrived with the ‘boat people’ after the US loss of the Vietnam war people accepted this as an explaination.

There is just one problem: Mark had wrapped his head around Mandarin. While his wife spoke Cantonese to her parents. Who had been in the country since 40 years and probably picked up a bit of English along the way. Both Mandarin and Cantonese are being spoken in China. But they are very different.

The real reason why Mark tried to learn Mandarin was since he tried to get his product into China. More than in 6 people on this planet lives in China. Marks raw material is people. He harvests their attention and sells it. Him not trying to get into China is like Exxon ignoring Saudi Arabian oil.

He failed.

China understood what he had made is very simple to build. Actually it could be made much better: WeChat has many many more features (hooks into people) than Marks Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp combined.

This (and the title) might suggest that I dislike Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t. I would not care about the person. It is just that he has the wrong position and job. Sure he made this thing and nudged it towards success and market dominance. He is really good at that part. And showed great instincts for the matter at along the way. Matter at hand is the construction of a ‘social network’. It is NOT what people would benefit from. What would bring the world further along. His lip service to those aspects are ridiculous claims. In any language he speaks. He does not build communities. His job is it to keep people using his product. He is much like the Tobacco industry in the 50-70s in that respect. Getting more users and getting them hooked more is the goal. Who cares if people die of lung cancer later or countries are internally at each others since they feel so divided.

Our current troubles are entirely related in human nature. The bad aspects of it that get willingly or unwittingly amplified by Facebook.

WeChat users started wearing masks real quick. People getting their information by the censored and controlled Chinese outlets behaved much better for the greater good than Marks billions. Something he could have controlled and changed with great ease. It is not that his believe in democracy would be the reason for him not doing this. Nobody at Facebook understands or cares. Trump took 2016 away without them noticing that he do so on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica behaved like the fox in the henhouse. And nobody at Facebook noticed. I doubt somebody could pull of the same stunts in China.

Image by Bob Bicknell-Knight “Mark’s First”, 2019

I don’t think she’ll be back anytime soon.

Netflix. Oh Netflix. Imagine they would not exist, imagine steaming would have happened, and we would have gotten just the usual junk. We didn’t. In the end it is all HBOs fault. Would they not have elevated the medium of TV 20 years ago those bits streaming onto our screens might be mush and junk. It is not. Occasionally there are real gems. Like Episode7 in Season 2 of “The Crown”. It has amazing moments of camera work. Yes, it over does it with the BlowUp meets blue-lit-silhoute porn schema. But only by a couple of takes. The concept is still brilliant. And it is not the only moment / picture that is noteworthy. The 3 red pearl strings is a stroke of genius. Vanessa Kirby gets to wear stunning things, her make up is wonderful. Her performance holds it all together. IMDB does not list a DP, which is a shame. Music choice is awesome as well. It has been a while since I hear Henryk Górecki. Max Richters Vivaldi work I had never heard before. If you are in the same boat change it. It is great. Can’t wait to go through the full piece. “Dies Irea” by Zbigniew Preisner I had not heard either. It is well placed in the show, and I enjoyed listening to it.

A 30+ year old device that still works. Kind a nice. Kind a trouble. It sits in stark contrast to the tech that is around today. In the end I will be driving things via HPGL. In looking for documentation I found this wonderful document. The https certificate is expired since 5 days. But peak HP was decades ago. So, yes, this is not surprising. Back then HP made things. And cared for them. Cared for making them well. Which includes documentation and explanation. Today everything is encrypted, and everywhere revenue angle seems to be lurking. Subscriptions are need to run things. Big and old tech companies are rather horrible to deal with. New tech companies mostly too. It is a shame, since technology is amazing. It is of great benefit to people. Back in 1977 the corporate wrapper that HP put around it was reflected in the premium price that was asked for the products. And then bad companies just did not have the service, care or product to live up to the promises. While good companies (like HP) did.

Make Tech Great Again.

Of course that is nonsense. There never is a way back. An egg can not get unscrambled. But still worth looking a the different states of eggs that exist.

10 more minutes not more. They never showed up in time. Not the only thing she disliked.

It gave her time to wonder how all this had started. Yes, the money was good. Too good. The only reason she didn’t stop. Or was it?

The first time it wasn’t really something she set out to do. There was an opportunity. It had cried and just to calm it down she lifted it out of the stroller. The noises stopped. Somehow she started walking. Five short exciting seconds later she was around the corner.

It took a while before she realized what just happened. There was no plan. Her car was not far. She put some pieces of laundry in the foot room of the passenger row and placed it, now crying again, gently there.

She remembered the messages she had seen when she bought party drugs for her cousin Luiza. Luckily nobody would notice something strange about her when she carried an oversized armful of clothes into her house.

Was that them? A dust cloud on the horizon announced the arrival of a 4×4. She hoped.

Occasionally she had doubts about what she was doing. The money was amazing. It also was exciting and interesting to look for opportunities. She had quit her job in the nail salon. She no longer needed the money and it took her time to drive to different
towns, look for opportunities. She told herself that she just filled the gaps that the bureaucracies of the adoption system would leave.

What would happen once she had made the trade was never something she thought about much. She rather thought about what she would do with the money.

Yes. It was them. In 10 minutes ti would all be over and she could do what she wanted again. She didn’t have any more diapers either, and they get so annoying when they their own feces give them discomfort. One of these aspects of her job that convinced her further never
to have kids herself. Besides, you never know if not somebody would steal it.

Charles Courtney Curran painted this in 1912. Probably somewhere around The Gunks. He seems to have split his time between the small Cragsmoor and the not so small New York City.

The world of 1912 was naive and unknowingly standing at the end of an epoch of progress and change. The time between 1914 and 1945 would smash it into ‘modern times’ – if it wanted it or not.

Today we have no knowledge on how large the changes are that started to unfold. Covid is part of it, but the bigger ones are AI, the phonication of peoples minds and the unstoppable ascent of China.

Between 2014 and 2018 I was telling myself: Well it is better than 100 years ago. This holds true. But if you ask people about it many might claim that they’d rather be back on those 20s that they called roaring. A world with mud roads, cobble stones and before antibiotics.

Unrelated: Worpswede in the Teufelsmoor seems strangely similar to Cragsmoor on the Shawangunk Ridge. I am sure there were lots of other artist colonies during that time. Their styles differ and are also similar. Funny how that happened. Without an Internet or easy faithful color reproduction methods.