Babel

The net is a babylonic confusion of tongues. The disorderly amalgam of commerce, gambling, porn, news and weather forecasts, trivial confessions and holiday pictures. The perpetual recycling of what has been. Never arriving at a conclusion, let alone a solution. Customer service is anonymized, even Big Brother is outsourced. Google and Yahoo have come to the aid of China. Rem Koolhaas writes in 'Junkspace': "The subject is stripped of privacy in return for a credit nirvana. You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are. […] Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities […] out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests. Each man, woman, and child is individually targeted, tracked, split from the rest… [...] Globalization turns language into Junkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrrhic: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. […] Through the retrofitting of language, there are too few plausible words left; our most creative hypotheses will never be formulated, discoveries will remain unmade, concepts unlaunched, philosophies muffled, nuances miscarried…"

Above painting is 'The tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the elder.