As always, Hal Faber’s newsreel (spoiler: Detlef Borchers is behind it) wants to sharpen the view for the details: Sunday’s newsreel was commentary, outlook and analysis. It was backward and forward at the same time.
*** This is my 1227th newsreel and the last. No, ChatGPT is not to blame for this. Even if it is now the speeches of politicians writes, it is not enough for a newsreel. The first appeared 23 years ago, on February 6, 2000. You can read the WWWW with the first bits of information here. At the time, I was asked by Jürgen Kuri to come up with a column format that would fill the IT void in an entertaining way on Sundays with little news. We both liked the concept developed in January and that’s how the column could appear. There was just one tiny problem: I was writing two more columns at the time. One was called “Online” and appeared as a follow-up to my very first column “Bulkware” (named after our Bulkhof farm) in ZEIT. The other was called “Bytegeist” and was published by Ziff-Davis Germany, the competition at the time. A pseudonym was needed, as was common in the industry in the past when you weren’t actually allowed to work for Heise-Verlag (c’t) AND Franzis-Verlag (mc). At the time, the editors of both publishers solved this by assigning the names of known murderers.
Another fish: home-made Hommingberger cheetah trout (by Marita Wagner)
*** In the case of WWWW, however, it was not intended to disturb the Sunday rest. That’s how Hal Faber was born. The first name Hal came from the computer HAL 9000 from the film “2001 – A Space Odyssey”, the surname of the engineer Walter Faber came from the novel “Homo Faber” by Max Frisch. In the novel, Walter Faber is a thoroughly rational person who meets the young Sabeth on a ship crossing the Atlantic, not realizing that she is his daughter. “Sabeth knew nothing about cybernetics, and as always when you talk to laypeople about it, you had to refute all sorts of childish ideas about robots, the human resentment against machines that annoys me because it’s narrow-minded, their hackneyed argument: The Man is not a machine I explained what contemporary cybernetics calls information: our actions as responses to so-called information, or impulses, and they are automatic responses, largely beyond our will, reflexes that a machine can do just as well as a Man, if not better. Sabeth wrinkled her brows (as she always does with jokes she actually dislikes) and laughed.” Mister Faber falls in love with Sabeth and has to experience how his accurate world view falls apart. The simple reflex machine starts to stutter.
*** The pseudonym was also considered so that all other Heise workers and the freelancers could deliver their bits of information, but nothing came of it. I realized early on that I had to become a subbotnik, albeit a line-paying one. The first real test of the comment format came after September 11, 2001, when I couldn’t just rant. The horror was great. Silence what is dog. No sound. Five years after the start, there was a first pause, with a big thank you to the Heise Forists from back then, some of whom I know to this day. Immediately afterwards, the small newsreel from the North German Plain was still on the cliff in front of the abyss, because I had linked to a photo in a WWWW that Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth in warrior uniform at a paintball shootout. The picture of the self-confessed gun fanatic was an invasion of his privacy, the court found. The process was lost and caused resentment, but Heise paid.
*** The Heise-Verlag also paid the line fee for the 500th issue of the newsreel, but the money went to Reporters Without Borders, because the complete anniversary edition, with the exception of the introduction and the end with Heinrich Heine, was written by friendly journalists and forists, as announced. That was a nice gift that Jürgen Kuri and Peter Glaser had come up with.
*** Among the nuggets of information for the current week is the news that the Justice farce about Ola Bini came to an end and he was acquitted. Even his arrest in Ecuador, just a day after Assange’s arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy, was for dubious reasons. It was said at the time that he was supposed to be part of “Assange’s team”, which was apparently considered a crime. The later added reason of computer espionage could not be substantiated. Who is still in jail in a UK jail awaiting a court decision is Julian Assange, who is searching for a new report physically and mentally damaged. The case is unique and yet not: Just a few weeks after the 500th WWWW, I wrote about the great harshness with which US President Barack Obama acted against whistleblowers. That’s when it caught Thomas A Drake, the critic of the NSA program Trailblazer. He had taken home papers from this project that were classified as top secret and was therefore already considered a spy, a charge of great simplicity that one could now level with Biden or Pence.
*** One of the stories that keep recurring like a marmot and function as a permanent template is the news that the Federal Constitutional Court has declared the eavesdropping without cause and the surveillance of living space in the Meckpomm police law to be unconstitutional. Things could continue in this style, because there are still more lawsuits pending against the tightening of state police laws. In all, police rights are extended on the way to the surveillance state, an issue that is more than 23 years old. In addition, there is the Ministry of the Interior with a minister, Nancy Faeser, who is also the top candidate for the Hessian state elections. How do you profile yourself there? With a hard Nancy catalog (modeled on party colleague Otto Schily) that has washed up. Incidentally, the last person to dare the feat of going into a state election as acting minister was Norbert Röttgen, whom Angela Merkel met after the defeat kicked out of the cabinet.
*** Yes, the topics and messages are repeated and fatigue spreads. Age also plays a role. When you’re almost 70, it’s hard to write a column that reaches young readers, spurs them on and goads them. Should others before the AfD supporters in the Federal Intelligence Service warn those who are fed up with this republic and are therefore supplying Putin’s regime with information or in Russian talk shows appear. In a pinch, it is enough if this space is filled with Cicero’s writing “On the Greatest Good and the Greatest Evil”, better known as Lorem Ipsum: “Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.” (“Furthermore, there is no one who loves, pursues, and wants to attain pain itself, because it is pain, but because sometimes such circumstances arise that some great pleasure is attained through toil and pain.”)
what will.
The newsreel began with Sabeth’s “Mister Faber” and will end with HAL 9000. When Arthur C. Clarke wrote the first draft of this wondrous Space Odyssey in 1966, Hal 9000 was still called “Socrates” and was designed as a robot walking around the ship heating and serving meals. It was director Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant idea to turn the entire spaceship into a computer and let Roach HAL 9000 speak with the soft voice of Canadian actor Douglas Rain. You should think about this scene, which was later deleted from the script:
That’s it, and thanks for the fish – presented by Hal Faber in the forums’ age-old tradition.
“Bruno”, asked the robot, “what is life?”
dr Bruno Forster, director of the Mobile Adaptive Machines department, deliberately took his whistle out of his mouth in the interests of better communication. Socrates still misunderstood about two percent of the spoken word; with the whistle it became five.
“Subprogram three three zero,” he said with emphasis. “What’s the point of the universe? Don’t rack your brains over such problems. Late three three zero.”
One day, he was certain, there would be robots that would ask such questions – spontaneously, without provocation. And a little later you would have robots that could answer them too.
(from Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, German: 2001 – departure to lost worlds
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