AW: <nettime> Michael Malone : Regulating Destruction

["Heiko Hansen" <heiko@hehe.org>]

>Morlock Elloi [morlockelloi@yahoo.com]
>I mean, why isn't there a new automaking startup today to do the IPO?
>Sounds silly? The computer industry is coming to the same maturity.

This makes me think of my last visit as a German in Germany this summer -
"the summer that changed Germany" (World Championship)

Stuttgart, Germany, 2006 the world championship is lost. Never the less, the
game for third place gives reason to a storming Volksfest in town. The
Germans having a Fete, a party, announced nonstop on all channels. Outside
Stuttgart, a small town, called Schorndorf, 170 years ago Gottlieb Daimler
was born here - his house is a landmark. Everything is about cars in
Stuttgart, Mercedes Benz or Porsche or Volkswagen, and anyway Porsche partly
bought up Volkswagen. The car industry is making everybody work. The new
Mercedes Benz museum has recently opened, a monstrous modern blob (not blog)
built by dutch architecture studio UN Studio - for cars. A Surprise: here in
Schorndorf suburbs a local artist inaugurates a sculpture on a sort of
round-about. It is a wooden man holding a car. The mayor says that art is
often about provocation, but that the artist chose to be ironical instead.
He laughs and notes that everybody came by car today and that "we love
cars". The football stadium in which Germany is playing (their "own final")
is called Gottlieb Daimler stadium. The stadium was built 1933 as
"Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn" and was later rennovated, partly financed by:
Daimler Benz. Another violent abbreviation of modern architecture smashed
into Stuttgarts fragile post war city center: The CUBE, the new art museum.
It really is a cube with glass facade and automatic doors inside and all the
rest of it. The glass facade is shielding of the noise of the crowd outside:
a sea of Black, Red and Gold colors, which Germany had never seen before.
Because of the defeat of the German "Kliensmannschaft" (after the coach
Juergen Klinsmann - real "Californian Ideology") in the semi finals, the
museum decided to give free entrance to people. Nobody goes. Due to the
official motto Germans are supposed to make friends with all the other
nations. For the Portuguese, who are in town, this must be a difficult task,
as "fans" in the market square are starting to sing how they are going to
beat the shit out of them. It had rained now and the air smells of beer,
cigarette, pee and sweat. A Volkswagen Golf, special edition "Bon Jovi",
with flags hanging out of the windows, passes by. Over a massive, meaty
dinner in a local restaurant, a Daimler employee speaks out loud "This
(Daimler Benz) industry is going to last for another 50 years".

h


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