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Last Saturday I witnessed an animated group of German twenty-somethings talk about privatkrankenversicherung, a conversation that deeply amused and frustrated me. Years ago I met a Indian journalist who said he would be opposed to be insured, because he saw that as a violation of his body's natural right to be sick and removing the element of drama from having a sickness. It was a radical approach towards possessing an insurance, one that can be termed reckless or even stupid. But in India it is not mandatory to be insured and considering the low healthcare costs such a gamble with healthcare can be flirted with.

The case is different in Germany where everyone is supposed to be insured with a choice between public and private insurers. Private insurance is more expensive and out of reach of the average German and public insurance is good until economic sophistication invokes its presence. Economic sophistication (or creep) is a problem we all face with when our spending hits a particular threshold and the boredom associated with those choices becomes apparent. A person spending 85€ on a monthly train ticket would prefer to budget for a car EMI, because that signals sophistication to whichever class he's a member of. Insurance seems like that unchanging monthly expense but to make it more sexy, one has to add more frills and more expense which a private insurance does very well.

The interesting thing in the group dynamic in these twenty-somethings is that they are all being weaned off the parental support, the Kindergeld, which is a monthly allowance until the age of 25 including the expenses of the insurance. The 25th birthday is emblematic of this dependence, the age where the child finally becomes the adult and the relative opulence of the early twenties give way to economic realism.

This economic realism is what I would say is the gateway to the middle-class they wish to embody. Dreams become enshrouded in jobs and the paycheck becomes the final master. The desire for stability in a society geared around stability means that everyone gets a degree and then they work where the degree permits them to be. In comes the conversation about privatkrankenversicherung, whether it should be allowed the by the State or not and if so, where can the free market insurance firms can operate?

The amusing part is that none of the people at that gathering would've been eligible for having private health insurance, considering that no-one was self-employed or making over 62,550€. The whole conversation itself was about coming-of-age, where one finally has the adult conversations that could not have been had before. I find this equating with the idea of powerlessness we embody, but the conversation becomes about the numbers and signaling. This is sad to witness because the apparent power that the people around me were programmed to possess was being impeded by the highly structured society they lived in. Coupled with the necessity to belong, they would soon be induced into the pleasures of rearing a family and keeping up with appearances. This talk about privatkrankenversicherung will not be their last, the more mundane aspects of middle-age will take over, talking about kindergartens and kitchen tops.

During this conversation, the raw power of the Indian journalist along with the freedom he had became more apparent. He would not fit into any mold in the regular society and when he's sick, the disease will not discriminate him at all. He would find a way to live or die but his rejection of insurance was also his rejection of this middle-class stability to life. The cookie cutter nature to existing, the drab monotony of work and living, the search for a meaning between the monthly payments of insurance and phone bills. I wonder how boring it would get over in time at these parties. An entire generation replacing the one before without having anything new to offer. Maybe this is a limitation of existence itself, to succumb to little packets of life and not think of anything grander.

#germany #society #youth #power

Two hundred years from now the great American history rewriting machine will have erased memories of the proxy fights with Russians in the sovereign nation of Afghanistan. What will be remembered is the horror across the world after the World Trade Center was brought down in an act of sheer terror. The word terror will be emphasized and the perpetrators names will be lost in generalizations. The wars that followed which destabilized an entire region will be an after thought. America won that war at an ideological level, convincing the world of the same. America propagated Islamophobia is internalized across the globe, equating the idea of a terrorist to a Muslim.

A Muslim pogrom will happen somewhere in this century (the Rohingyas? the Uighurs? the Kashmiris?) there will be excuses that the community asked for it. In this whole scenario, America always has and will be the victim. In broad strokes of history, the 3000 people who died in the buildings will be forgotten but the savagery of the actions that brought them down will play in memory.

The perpetrators were brought to justice through military occupation and with shiny, invisible drones that breathed hellfire. The Architect-in-Chief was killed in a clandestine military operation in another sovereign nation. This is all forgiven because we are all America and what is against this Great Nation is against all of us. Hunter S. Thompson was right in saying, “It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.”

There exists a memorial for the dead at the site of the fallen towers – but who will cry and remember the 31,000 Afghan and the 650,000 Iraqi civilians? The greater instability induced in the regions and the mass migration that followed has induced a death grip on European politics as well, but as far as we are concerned, America is absolved of all guilt. America is our only savior against the twin evils of China and Russia, in this respect we are all American, overwhelmed by the country more than the places we live in.

The real memorial for the thousands of dead, the millions displaced and the future millions that will be killed and displaced is the falling of the Twin Towers itself. It showed a moment of belligerence and exposed the deep arrogance of the American state. That a crude organization could overwhelm the greatest superstate in the history of nations with a handful of planes and some symbolism is a fact that cannot be translated into history.

$ 2 trillion (and counting) of American money went into wars after this event, even as a majority of its citizens crumble without a public safety net. The true victors in this war have been the handful of people who plunged the planes into the buildings on that Tuesday morning. They exposed what we know of America's diabolical power all along, its corruption and violent hunger. They teased America off of its money in a war that will never go anywhere. But I cannot say that, as talking against the politics of this Great Nation, is talking against the interests of the world itself.

11th September 2001 is a memory of the millions that perished because of American political greed. With this being said, God bless America.

#America #politics #power

The people on the streets and on public transport appear more as people than blurs, there's a distinct sense of belonging without adherence to a particular cause or reason. I do not have the urge to debate over global topics, which I am removed from anyway because of powerlessness I embody. When I look around this powerlessness is more visible but the cacophony of the media narratives makes us believe that we are more important than we are. – A break from the news

Most of our everyday life we are propelled through with a feeling of power. We are told that our actions have consequences and they hold us in the middle of things: pay your taxes, wear your masks, vote for change, buy local.. for most part we do believe in them and do our best to participate. Societies that do not operate on these levels of consciousness wither into a painful existence while we soldier on, believing that we have the power to change anything and everything in our lives.

But, can we really? While the news amuses us with how much wealth Jeff Bezos has hoarded this year or with some political brouhaha from across the world, we assume in part the bodies of the people we read and think about. The politics of the country we live in is far from us and the globalized American dream has us wondering what step we take in the future can make us the capitalists we love and hate at the same time. The plebeian existence we inhabit is hidden behind the millions of customizations we are granted in the internet age, a power trip that was hitherto unknown to previous generations.

The music we listen to, the books we read and the restaurants we go to are all hidden in the black boxes we possess each moment, hidden from the everyday audience. Behind the scenes they are the access to central servers that pile up money with the very information we hold secret with the people next to us. In these moments we feel powerful that we have access to all the information and products in the world but what we cannot control is the faces and the powers behind the screen. Power now has become abstracted, it is no longer the politician who controls what we want and how we want them but a Silicon Valley billionaire who in his nonchalance is putting a hyper-libertarian world view into action without your permission (you clicked on “I agree” of course).

In a pre-internet era there was a singular flow of information and a chain of command that was local. There was not a constant monitoring of oneself (unless someone lived in East Germany under the aegis of the Stasi) and the villains of ones life could be found in the nearest Capital city. Now that is not the case. If one wants to decry job losses and protest against Uber, where does one go to? And if Uber were to be shut down, what about the market forces that Uber has helped unleash? Sitting on contracted work with no benefits in an economy that promises more “freedom and flexibility” for both consumers and producers alike, what's the political upheaval one is really aiming for?

I am not saying that societal problems did not have a global relation in the earlier generations but with the advent of the internet, our problems have been collectivized into an effective global package. Google is just identifiable as the crucifix around the world. To google is to exist in the 21st century, this is a reality that no-one of us is going to escape anytime soon. The buzzwords of disruption and digitization, are warning signs that the security of being middle-class, is being slowly taken away by a class of extremely rich people who we have learnt to revere. How does one fight for their rights against someone situated in another country altogether?

What has been really disrupted is our lives: one part of it is being drained into the dossiers of mega-corporations and the other we are trying to figure out how to make our presence in the economies we live in. We do not talk about these things because we are all engaged in the same game of capital worship. If we were as honest to each other as we are to layers and layers of internet surveillance, we would see how powerless we are in the global scheme of things. A part of the rebellion against the current iteration of how things are organized would come from this shared powerlessness.

This powerlessness should make us question why power should be concentrated and if that power should be concentrated between a few companies and investors on the planet. Governments do not have the gall [1] or the creativity to fight the new operators of power. If the lowest common denominator in a democracy, the voter, finds their place of helplessness then it is easier for the government to see their relative position. This helplessness will be a bargaining position for the world of the future. As the power becomes powerless, it starts to fight back.

The first step in the process is to come out of the induced stupor of artificial self-worth that our current state of living provides. Communicating our fragility in the market ecosystem instead of trading ego boosts on Instagram would pave the way for a greater social conversation about current state of our power. This can be translated into political will and speak – it is irrelevant if someone is Indian or Tunisian in the current iteration of the market. It's US, China or a handful of developed countries everyone is dependent on and this dependence is only getting stronger by the day. When the political apparatus of countries start to wake up to this stark divide – (hoping that most countries have the interests of its common people at heart) – change can be expected. The hegemonic nature of countries are always in flux, to steer it away from the current establishment requires unity of the powerless and resolve.

[1] As we speak, the Indian government has banned a fresh lot of 118 Chinese apps citing surveillance as a reason. None of the American or other internet companies that operate on the same revenue models find no mention for the same practices. If the government was really so concerned about the well-being of its citizens, it would shut down the internet. This is a sign of the helplessness once the Indian government wakes up from its Doublethink.

#capitalism #democracy #power #internet