C: And I think that most of the time, we also prefer it this way. It makes life very easy when there's this interface that, based on your data, can sort of figure out what you like — and be so spot-on!
F: But the danger is that we wouldn't even know if we would like the 'other thing', the unknown, more.
C: I just recently watched the Propaganda Game, about North Korea. While I was watching this documentary, I started to think: how interesting that communism seems to be something very fruitful, a very successful system, but, for it to be able to work, the people in this community have to behave strictly average. You have to live an average life, with normal needs, with average ambitions... If everyone is just average, then this communist system is something which, apparently, can be very... attractive. But imagine, as soon as you would break out of the norm or the standard, it would totally disrupt the harmony of the system. The stable average would waver. So in North Korea, unfortunately, anything out of the ordinary is punished very harshly.
Having North Korea in the back of my mind and then seeing the trailer of HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis, I've been thinking about this idea of everything becoming sort of homogeneous, average, normal, and somehow that really connects to this Google bandwidth situation. We're not stepping into the library anymore, going through books and suddenly taking something off the shelf just because it stood out, leading us to new worlds and discoveries just by chance. No! Chance is becoming something... rare. For me, that's one of the main motives for Chives, even though the act of archiving is perhaps quite predictable and monotonous as well. But then that brings us back to the network of unpredictable stories, facts, information you never thought you were looking for.
F: Exactly, those stories are the real treasures. But you know, people are becoming more aware of the influence of data, I think. You see it in how hyped HyperNormalisation has become. It's funny, before watching it, I tried to read into the different reviews that it had received, and overall there were a lot of positive reviews, while on the other hand many of the comments from the readers were very negative. In that sense, it's almost a product of its own topic: it's non-critically hyper-normalised.
C: Preaching to the choir, you mean?
F: That said (and not to talk much more about Adam Curtis), when he chooses to make a 3 hour long documentary, where — although he simplifies a lot of things — his main purpose is to put out questions which in the end are not really being answered, but left to the viewer to reflect upon, and still he manages to produce something which is accessible to a broad public — which is in that sense good — but in doing so, it does result in simplifying certain things.
And it's funny that you bring up North Korea, because this whole idea of communism or dictatorships or main structures to adjust your life to, is something which I also think has quite a focus at the moment. I've for instance been seeing more and more references to Marx.
C: Do you mean in a critical sense?
F: No, no, not in a critical sense. It's actually bringing us back to the topic of the sharing economy, which is maybe also getting us back on track towards Chives. Looking at how capitalism has somehow structured the way we live and how the digital development has been very affected by capitalistic values. I'm thinking of the moment that online shopping was introduced. Internet was getting way more accessible and user-friendly, so this was a natural interest for companies. But this was never the purpose of the internet, of course. Anyway, now we're seeing how the internet also introduces a sharing economy and values which are not based on money but on sharing knowledge, which in a vague sense is something which I think we can also relate back to Chives.
C: Yeah! Although I think that this has always been amongst people who are collecting, it is sort of inherent to the subject?
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