DIVERSUS: The mysterious kaleidoscope!
The history of DIVERSUS begins concretely with the so-called “subprime crisis” in 2008, which still accompanies us today in its new guises, the public finance crisis and Euroscepticism. At the G7 summit in Heiligendamm in 2007, Chancellor Merkel put climate change on the agenda and I asked myself what I was actually doing with my life when the CDU chairperson provided more critical and innovative impulses than I did, when I saw myself as progressive. I was art director for all kinds of advertising jobs, at the time mostly events for industrial companies. That means you struggle for your life, to earn the necessary pennies somewhere, to get your family through. You burn up as an advertiser while you pour oil into the fire of environmental destruction. At that time I had the unusual honour to write the article “Die Scham der Gestalter” for the ZFWU, a trade journal for business ethics. At the time, this was a relatively critical statement for an advertiser.
Prof. Hennecke on dematerialisation – even more topical today than in the past
At the same time I used part of the budget for a show for a German car manufacturer to travel through Germany and to shoot interviews with the brilliant cameraman Johannes Straub with experts and economists about the phenomena of climate change and peak oil. We summarized this under the working title “Peak All”. 10 days every day several interviews. I transcribed most of the interviews over hundreds of pages and became aware of a phenomenon that was difficult to grasp. Almost all statements fit together somehow. Like in a kaleidoscope, meaningful connections could be recognized in almost all combinations.
If you look in the youTube Channel to the videos listed here, in the text descriptions, you will find there transcripts of what has been said. While typing these fundamental statements, I realized that I didn’t want to be a director for this material as I had originally planned. Every word was too valuable for me to simply cut it out and put it into a linear context dominated (manipulated) by me. For too long I had been working on a media ethic in which I had clearly pointed out the power of omission, exaggeration and montage. The thought that I was depriving people of this valuable material by shortening it to TV-compatible lengths became more and more unpleasant for me as I went on writing.
There would still be one or two things to tell about the course of this story. It ultimately led me to move my life from Munich, to Hamburg, to Malaga and then to Berlin and talk to people everywhere about it; the question of this mysterious kaleidoscope drove me. I knew that there had to be a technical infrastructure that would enable all thoughts to be dialectically related to one another. That’s why the project ran for several years under the working title “dialectical engine”.
I don’t want to overstrain this short article and rather let the people speak who inspired me so much with their statements at that time. There were many more interviews, but the chaos in the restructuring of my way of life from an advertiser to what I am today (what?) has unfortunately swept them away. I had already published the interviews on my website back then and now do it again – a pleasant feeling to do the same thing again after 10 years and to see that the concept has developed in the meantime. I hope the youTube translater will be able to translate the german statements into any language soon.
Hermann Ott on the Unconditional Basic Income
Prof. Radermacher on the countervailing power of the Internet
Prof. Radermacher on media, language manipulation and awareness raising
Hermann Ott on climate, democracy and elites
Hermann Ott on kima change and agriculture
Technical innovation as a solution?
Prof. Hennecke on material costs versus labor costs
Reiner Priggen with one of the most important statements about material taxes
Prof. Hennecke with climate protection as an economic gain
Hermann Ott on climate change and lifestyles
Climate change, another world?
On the silence and speech of architecture
The direct hit that nobody notices
So, anyone who has looked through this far will perhaps be able to comprehend the intuition that drove me back then, for example when Hennecke talks about the urgently needed dematerialisation and Priggen pulls a brilliant tax concept out of his pocket for it, without the two talking directly to each other. I mentioned the example of the materials tax for environmental protection dozens of times later, nobody has ever known it. The idea is impressively simple: toxic materials are increasingly taxed with a long-term, rising plan – thus providing producers with planning security. The tax revenues from the material tax are offset by a reduction in wage tax, and the bottom line is that it is revenue-neutral. Human cognitive performance will thus become more cost-effective and “statistical security” will make companies strategically invest in material substitution in order to compensate for the rising tax burden. An ecological and economic direct hit.
Unfortunately, this direct hit is not noticed by anyone, because the media are busy with what Pierre Bourdieu calls “omnibus reports”, things that interest everyone somehow, but which have no meaning whatsoever and therefore displace important things from the democratic attention economy.
DIVERSUS is a Trojan horse that awakens the user’s desire for dialectical differentiation with fun (gamification). It further dissolves the linearity of media consumption, which was so toxic in the 20th century, and brings back to man the possibilities for which his brain is actually structured: for the dialectical recording of reality.
My hope would be that a global dialectical machine would make it easier for Reiner Priggen’s idea to make it into the “Green New Deal” currently under discussion in America. I think this tax will do everything they talk about without increasing the overall tax burden. That would probably even be cool for Trump 🙂
You can read Florian Arnolds essay how he describes the Dialectical Roots of DIVERSUS. One of the deepest descriptions of the inner mechanics of the project you can find in Collective Cognition.