Nonprofit Worlds - A Comparison

Some of my nonprofit colleagues on both sides of the fence have asked me about my impressions of the German and European nonprofit sector, and how it compares to the US.  So this post is for you, my colleagues of the Third Sector. It is entirely subjective and non-scientific.

If you are interested in a more data-grounded analysis, there are a few, somewhat dated scholarly comparisons of the nonprofit sectors in a variety of countries, among them the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.

In short: some of the structures and the regulatory environment here are different, as are the sector relationships, overall infrastructure and the governance of nonprofits. And then some things are strikingly similar, above all the constant quest for money and resources in a similar culture of scarcity and self-exploitation.

Shapes and Laws and Regulations

Starting with the differences: The regulatory and legal environment that nonprofits operate in is a little different here. While there is a similar concept of nonprofit-ness, based on a charitable purpose and tax exemption, the details are different. For example, the equivalent regulatory entity to the IRS (das Finanzamt), does not have a central, federal exempt organizations department, and charitable status is granted by whatever general tax clerk happens to get your application at the local tax office.

There is some interesting variety in corporate forms:  there are, of course, foundations (more about them below), small community based nonprofits called Vereine, they include neighborhood and community organizations, little groups supporting schools, and the infamous rabbit breeders. Rabbit breeding is a serious charitable purpose in Germany.

Kaninchenzüchterverein W 103 Burgsteinfurt. Foto: Theresa Gerks

Then there are these gigantic corporate service provider kingdoms. Finally there are a good number of limited liability corporations with tax-exempt status. The whole hybrid LC3 is-it-good-or-bad discussion that we had in the US over the last few years? Does not happen here. Hybrids are a reality. People don’t really care about what flavor your organization is. A term of reference here is the “social economy” which encompasses all the stakeholders involved.

Giants

Those really large nonprofits I mentioned are called Wohlfahrtsverbände, and they are something like umbrella associations of smaller providers. These have most of the health and social services government fee-for-service market cinched up.  Out of the six large ones, four are faith-based. Generally, you’d have to be part of that denomination to work for one of the providers (I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in the US). The Christian Verbände employ 1.5 Million people. 90 % of their income comes from public sources, including social security.  Their members, many of them large conglomerates themselves, run day care centers, assisted living and nursing facilities, women’s shelters, hospitals, developmentally disabled programs, drug rehabs, mental health facilities, reentry programs – they provide really any health or social services you can think of.

In the US, these services are provided by individual organizations, serving specific groups of populations, and competing for funding and policy -maker attention. Just imagine the power and efficiency of the Verbände that comes from joint effort around maintaining funding, influencing policy and through supporting their member organizations with almost everything: evaluation, personnel management, professional development, resource development, compliance, accounting, QI, and data – all those things that seem to slowly kill social service providers serving our US communities.

Foundations

Philanthropy features a few strange birds, too: First, there are party-related “foundations”, which requires some explanation to my colleagues in the US, where foundations are prohibited from any political activity. Each major party has an affiliated foundation (corporate-form-wise, most of them are actually regular nonprofits, not foundations), and their mandate is political education. They serve as think tanks, places of research, dialogue and public education. Many also have stipends for Masters and Doctorate candidates working in their areas of interest.  

There is a quickly growing field of mid-sized family foundations, as well as small foundations supporting specific nonprofits. Last year, around 600 new foundations were started in Germany, for a total of over 20,000. This is of course a reflection of the incredible wealth in this country, and of the German baby boomer generation trying to figure out how to socially invest their surplus. The 300 community foundations in Germany seem to be very small and rather undercapitalized, and very grass-roots.

Then there are large family and corporate foundations, just like in the US. Except here they seem to openly operate for the combined purpose of sheltering revenue from taxes and influencing politics, both of these purposes at a level of mutual reinforcement which would lose any US foundation their EO status in minutes.  The Bertelsmann Foundation is the most well-known and aggressive version of this business model.

There are, to my surprise, very few accountability mechanisms for foundations, or for that matter, any nonprofit organization. Once you have the status, you have to file tax returns, just like in the US, but the returns are not public documents. Boards are not viewed as the accountability mechanisms that they are supposed to be in in the US. Rubberstamp boards, board members getting paid, boards completely removed from the organization’s constituency, all these are the norm, and are not discussed much. The exceptions, at least nominally,  are the 515 nonprofits that pledged to abide by voluntary transparency measures, an initiative of Transparency International.

Looking across the Pond

People in the nonprofit sector here are very interested in US  sector developments and trends. This does not seem to extend to policy, but more to trends in organizational consulting, fundraising and philanthropy.  A few nonprofits here have discovered social innovation and collective impact, for example. A consultant told me that FSG had considered to open an office in Germany a few years ago, trying to protect their “trademark”. I am not sure what happened. Fortunately, there is a healthy critical questioning of everything US, and especially of copying any new trend, maybe FSG felt that.

Some of the newer US-bred concepts and fads, especially those from the corporate world, such as the whole “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” business, are very popular here. Bertelsmann Foundation spun off a whole organization that does very involved, very expensive impact assessments for organizations, and upon passing, the client gets a stamp that says: Impact! It makes you shudder.

I went to a presentation on their method, and the speaker was enthusiastically talking about logic models like they were this great new tool that will save the sector. I walked out after the Bertelsmann representative in the room cut off the interesting discussion that had emerged from critical questions of the audience.

Some of the older schools of thought, for example Peter Senge, are still represented on most consultant shelves, and seem to stick longer than in the US, where new, sexy tools, theories and schools of thought seem to crop up on a weekly basis. Here they still happily use SWOT analyses and read “The Fifth Discipline.”  The EU Commission requires grant applicants for a number of programs to submit a logframe matrix with their proposal, a tool developed in the late 60ies in the US and then further fine-tuned by many development agencies.

Troubles

In the US I have always worked with and for small or mid-sized, often rural organizations. So I want to say a few words about that part of the sector here: It totally feels like home to me. Small organizations here have the same structural and capacity issues as small and rural groups in the US. The real or perceived impending doom that will come from shrinking public funds have caused them to turn their attention to fundraising from private sources and earned income strategies. Lobbying may come more naturally to some of these groups, than to their colleagues in the US, as they advocate for maintaining their public dollars.

The main capacity issue, mentioned over and over again in any conversation I have had with small organizations and with consultants, is termed here as “projectitis”: The tendency of funders, both public and private, to fund only projects. If your organization wants to provide services on a sustainable basis, you still have to chop your work and your thinking up into projects. The administrative burden increases with every new funding source, and soon enough people are busy with admin work, rather than with achieving their mission.  Sound familiar? Except that in the US, there is now a pretty broad awareness of this problem, and at least some foundations have started to implement more sensible funding strategies.

New ideas have a hard time cropping up in an environment where even the basic work is threatened by funding cuts. If at all, innovation may happen within those large associations (Verbände), which have extra revenue from church tax  (yes, everyone pays church tax here!) and earned income, and also strong organizational capacity. But these may not be the grassroots innovations most appropriate to today’s social challenges.

Consultants

In the consulting field, there are some differences as well. In the US, if you run or found a small organization, you can do most of the work yourself, with the occasional help from a tax person, more rarely will you need a lawyer.  The system has been designed to not be that complicated. Many nonprofit consultants acquire some tax and legal skills, often because the real lawyers and tax accountants have failed to acquire nonprofit specific skills. In Germany, when you found a new nonprofit, you just give it to the lawyer, and you don’t even mess with that stuff.  They will write your mission statement and your tax-exempt application for you. It’s a little scary to me. 

Later, if you have conflict, or plan a change process in your organization,  or need money, then you hire the nonprofit consultant. Many of these consultants have not as much technical knowledge, and instead have backgrounds in psychology, organizational development, or conflict mediation. The sort of generalist service that we provided to rural organizations in NM is not really available here, with a few sort of underground exceptions. These little guerilla-consulting shops keep quiet about the tax and legal advice they might slip occasionally, so they don’t get in trouble with the law.

The F word

And then there is, of course, “Fundraising”.  This has been a quickly growing priority, field, and profession over the last decade or two. Based on the premise (or the fundamental misunderstanding) that public funds will go to shit and Germany will move towards a model of more private funding for charity. Like in the US, right?

Except that private contributions in the US still make up only a 13.3 %  of nonprofit revenue – we just think  of philanthropy as bigger, because it is so loudly self-important.  Same here. The term fundraising, by the way, has been officially accepted in the German language and here it encompasses everything: grant writing, earned income, as well as working with foundations, individual donors and events. We’d call all of this (resource) development. (Oh well. Did you know Germans call their mobile phones “handy”?)

So there are fundraising workshops, certificate courses, master degrees etc., etc.  There is lots of noise and lots of interest, and, based on my very subjective impression, very few funds are raised. The exception seem to be European Union grants and contracts, a significant source of public funds that some organizations have tapped into successfully for a long time, and others are just finding out about.

Another larger source of resources for nonprofit and for-profit employers alike over the last decade has been coming through the so-called 2nd labor market. Since welfare benefits were merged with unemployment benefits, similar to what happened in the US under Clinton, the German government pumps a lot of resources into subsidizing and fostering employment. So small organizations have been able to hire people who are lingering on the 2^nd labor market (they have been unemployed long enough to lose their first-level unemployment benefits), and receive very substantial subsidies, often up to 100% of the labor cost. My subjective impression is, that this policy has created a 2^nd class of employees, and that they do not necessarily move back up into the first labor market. The effect on organizations seems to be similar to what happens in the US, when nonprofits rely too much on AmeriCorps members, VISTAs and volunteers to run their programs: high turnover, lots of time spent on training, questionable quality of services.  While the well-meaning intention of the German policies was to move people out of the “Prekariat”, the class of precariously employed people, it seems to just have grown that class.

The Umbrella Infrastructure

Given the diversity of the nonprofit sector here, the nonprofit support infrastructure is much less developed than in the US. The European Foundation Centre is an international membership association of foundations and corporate funders. They have a whooping 231 members. There is an association of German foundations, which also runs a searchable foundation database.  This tool is unfortunately much inferior to the great Foundation Directory Online provided by the Foundation Center in the US.  Nor is there any data source even comparable to GuideStar. This is probably due to the fact that tax returns are not public documents, and thus also not a source of data for researchers, grant seekers and funders.  

While the German Verbände serve as policy advocates for their members, there is no overall association of nonprofits in Germany, any of its states or, for that matter, Europe. There are lots of networks, of course, with varying functions such as capacity building, volunteer matching and collaboration.  Most of them are organized around larger policy themes, such as youth, peace, or development aid. An important one in the Germany is the BBE, the network for civic engagement. There is also a professional association of fundraisers, much like the AFP, and a newer one for EU fundraisers.

Volunteerism is promoted widely, and supported by government programs, a new 2007 law to foster civic engagement, networks and online platforms. I have shared my unpopular opinion about volunteerism in this prior post.

Finally, in regards to education, there are a few well-designed master programs for nonprofit management in Germany, the most prominent at the Center for Social Investment at the University of Heidelberg and the MA program  for Nonprofit-Management and Governance in Münster. Both shops also engage their students in hands-on projects and consulting. Both take two years and run about 10,000 Euros. If I didn’t have to make an income, I’d be a student again…..

To wrap up this rather lengthy post:  the German nonprofit sector shows a huge diversity in terms of corporate forms and structures, with organizations ranging from service provider firms, semi-public agencies, large conglomerates to small political groups and neighborhood initiatives with no legal status.  The European dimension adds more diversity and confusion, as well as new exciting opportunities for transnational collaboration and exchange  - accompanied by a glut of EU funding.

Service organizations are largely funded by government, providing most basic and all specific human and health services. This is based on the collaborative partnerships that emerged within the social democratic welfare state model in Germany. The power and wealth of the large Verbände assures continuity, resources and quality in services, although the system is by no means foolproof  or perfect. The lack of community-based boards assuring accountability is a real risk in my view. In the US, on the other hand, we have a lot of smaller, locally rooted organizations, operating fairly independent from each other, with associations, foundations and collaboratives constantly trying to offset the impact of this fragmentation. And everyone is constantly hunting for funding, which often is damaging to collaborative efforts.

Certainly the much discussed blurring of the lines between the three sectors has occurred a long time ago in Germany, at the cost of accountability and with the advantage of more effective systems.

So… I hear someone asking, then which model is better? I will stay on the fence, and not answer this question.  The civic sector models are a reflection of the type of welfare system, the history and the political culture of each country.  As with all the topics on this blog, we can learn some stuff from the other side of the fence, and some stuff will just not apply.

Five tricks to make sure you get what you want from a Berlin bureaucrat

One of the more anxiety producing aspects of moving here were the many visits to public offices I had to make: registering us at our new house, applying for an ID and a drivers’ license (two separate documents here), applying for passports for the kids (still unaccomplished, because the officials here insist on the completely nonsensical step of sending an inquiry to the embassy in Houston, which has never heard of my kids, and the inquiry is probably sitting on the “I don’t know what the fuck to do with this” - pile on someone’s desk ), updating the civic records (I am still working on this nightmare, and according to the German system I am still married to Rory’s dad), getting health insurance, applying for benefits (Kindergeld!), dealing with the property management company (on getting a “pet permit”, among other things, in which you have to describe the cat, its age, breed, sexual status, and whether it will roam the yard or not. Then they send you the permit, which you have to sign and send back. Wow.)

Some lessons I learned:


1. Don't take No for an answer

In Berlin, when you ask a bureaucrat for something, the first answer will always be a standard gruff “No.” or if you are lucky, a “Well, that’s not as easy as you think.” No reason to lose hope. No does NOT mean no. It means, really, you are going to bother me with this shit? Just keep asking, explaining, politely insisting. The more you talk to them, the more the human connection develops, difficulties will eventually unravel, barriers melt away.


2. Let them go through their process

I applied for an “education coupon” at the Department of Labor to fund the EU Grant Writer Certificate course I am taking. It was a five step/five person/five appointment process, filling out forms, getting registered as unemployed (but not receiving benefits), entering all my information into their database and finally pitching my case for the coupon. I patiently went through all of it (in particular, painfully watching my caseworker slowly enter my work history while completely lacking the ability to type or spell).

I didn’t even mention the coupon idea until my caseworker had done her whole thing and had gotten to know me. We talked about her cats, too (Maine Coons). Then it was a breeze – she approved the 6,000 Euro plus a public transportation pass for 6 months, right away. Ka-ching!


3. Respect their work

The first thing we had to do was register ourselves at our new place of residence. In the process, working with the clerk, the ugly truth came out: I had failed to unregister from my dad’s place, where I was registered in the late 90ies so I could vote (and, I admit, receive Kindergeld for Rory). My dad has not lived there for several years…..The clerk was not happy: “How long ago did you leave there?” I said, at least 12 years ago, and then I made the mistake: I chuckled at my careless oversight of proper process. She stopped, turned from her computer and gave me the stern look. Then she said: "It’s not funny. (pause) We are trying to run a citizen registry here. "

Oops. After I apologized, she came back around, and was really helpful.


4. Don't write someone off as an asshole

I gotta tell the bus driver story here. Benny and I are on the way to the Halloween store, late October weekday, rush hour. Berlin double decker bus, stuffed with people (and another empty bus of course right behind it). Bus drivers are sort of a type of bureaucrat, public employees, selling and checking tickets, and calmly negotiating insane Berlin traffic while trying to obey the rules… which becomes hard when there is too many people on the bus. Passengers start conglomerating in the walkways, on the stairs, and what’s worse, in front of the exits, which makes the doors open and close madly. At this point, our driver loses it, publicly, on the PA, for everyone to witness: “OK, FINE. WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE UNTIL YOU IDIOTS STEP AWAY FROM THE DOOR!” Then he rants on about how he is going to lose his license if anyone gets hurt while hanging out in the walkways. He is yelling at the top of his lungs in Berlin dialect, using cusswords. People are leaving the bus, because they feel offended by this, not without first engaging in a shouting match with the driver on the way out – there’s lots of time now because a new wave of people-sheep is idiotically blocking the doors. Benny and I squeeze out at our stop, stunned by all the urban aggression we were just exposed to.


We buy black contact lenses and a cape at Deko-Behrend. On the way back, we get on the bus and this time we have to buy tickets (it was before I got the pass from Department of Labor), which is usually a harrowing experience. As we get on, Benny says under his breath, look, it’s the same asshole driver. I manage: “One regular and one discount ticket”. He looks at me and sighs, and then bombards me with a series of questions, kind of like when you try to order breakfast at an American restaurant: which tariff zone, short route or long route, etc etc. I try to respond, unsure whether our planned trip still qualifies as short route (less than 6 stops). He takes a breath and says, very patiently and nicely: "So, where are you going?"  I respond “Rathaus Steglitz”, and he considers this for a second. Then, he smilingly sells us short route tickets, even though it is actually more stops. We walk upstairs, stunned by how nice the asshole can be, even bending the rules and saving us a few bucks. Go figure. 

5. Humor the humor

Banking works really differently here. No checks, just transfers. Most of these you can do online, but sometimes I have to go and fill out the transfer form, and hand it to the teller. She is the only teller at the bank, handling all the customer traffic, standing on her feet all day behind a counter. I can’t believe they don’t give her a bar stool at least. There are always at least 6 people in line. There are about 10 other employees at this branch, they all have desks and cushy chairs, sit there and shuffle papers, and I have no idea what the fuck they do all day.

Anyway, this poor lady takes my filled out transfer form. 

I go: Can you check that I did everything right? This is the dilemma of the repatriated: I look German, am German by name, speak German without an accent, and I come across like a complete idiot because I don’t know how banking works. Like someone locked me in a basement for 20 years and I turned into a savage. The teller knows though, because I had explained to her previously: I have lived abroad, and I need to re-learn the German stuff.

So she smiles benevolently, looking at my form, and then turns it over. On the back there is a kind of legend that shows idiots like me how to write numbers - so the computer can read them. You have to cross your sevens. And your ones have to have the little extra roof line, that makes it look like an American 7. I feel like an idiot. Then she turns the form back over and says, in an attempt at bureaucrat humor: ‘Damit wir hier aktiv werden, muessen Sie das noch unterschreiben.” Sort of: “For us to do anything with this, you are going to have to sign it, too.” Duh. I am a little offended, but then I realize, this is not mean. It’s just Berlin humor. It’s coarse, it’s in dialect, and it always comes across “belehrend”, arrogantly instructive. But it’s usually good hearted. It’s called “Berliner Schnauze” and it gets them through the day.


P.S. Of course, just because Berliners are generally rude, it doesn’t mean there are no assholes here. There are plenty of them, too.

On Introverts

We have been in Berlin for exactly 5 months. While we have a home, schools, work and lots of family time, our social lives are somewhat limited still. Two of us are basically content, despite that fact. For the other two, the absence of their strong Silver City lifelong friendships has left a big gaping social hole. Wondering about how differently people respond to challenges such as this made me think about introvert and extrovert personality types. I wrote most of the content of this post first, and then surfed around the internet, only to realize that other people have been talking and writing about this recently too.

This past summer, a recovering corporate lawyer named Susan Cain published a whole book about the extrovert culture bias and how introverts are undervalued: “QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”. She describes convincingly how schools and the workplace reflect that bias. Many additional smart things have since been written and said in response to her interesting argument. (I won’t litter links all over this, just google it.) So I probably don’t have all that much to add…. But since this is a cultural issue, it is also an “On the Fence” topic.

We all know that today, society rewards extroverts. And we have all bought into this to some degree. We tend to think positively of the people who are “out there”, who are visible, verbal, performing. We admire them as leaders, team players and trailblazers, perceive them as people who get things done, have a lot of friends, and operate within human networks effectively.

Introverts, on the other hand, are viewed as reclusive weirdos who stay to themselves. You never quite know what they’re doing, you just know it doesn’t relate to you or to other people - and that makes their activities suspicious, and sometimes makes the extroverts angry. Introverts are annoyingly content without the company of others. They don’t play by the rules. They probably don’t feel the need to spread their private lives out publicly all over social media networks.

They are forced to switch camps, though, sometimes….: The TED talk of Susan Cain, now the official spokesperson of the introvert tribe, has been watched almost 5 1/2 million times, and ironically she has received the Golden Gavel Award for Communication and Leadership, by a group that, one could argue, tries to turn people into extroverts - the International Toastmasters.

Of course the introvert and the extrovert personality types are two extreme poles. We need both of them. Most people are somewhere in between, and, if they have managed to develop a somewhat balanced personality, they unite the healthier aspects of both types. But the world loves extroverts. If you are parent or a partner of an introvert, you are constantly under pressure to explain or fix their behavior. I am not sure how and how many times my poor husband had to explain my absence at the political fundraisers he attends. Hopefully people just stopped asking at some point.

Introverts are under constant pressure to become more outgoing. But I think extroverts are actually more vulnerable. They depend more on the constant recognition and gratification of others. So maybe extroverts are just people who act out, or have found other ways to overcome their shyness? Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro were in Berlin recently to introduce their new movie, and when interviewed both said they were really shy people. It made me snort first, but then they said being on stage or on camera is an act of overcoming shyness every time. The introvert doesn’t need to do this, because he is not shy. He is just an introvert. So leave him or her alone.

The full-blown extrovert needs company all the time, or at least people around him. When I first moved to the desert 20 years ago, it was in part because I loved the utter emptiness, vastness and quiet of the landscape, and how it threw me back onto myself. I could hear myself think, and just be… without constant human input. I remember some people telling me that they hated the desert. It was too scary how the desert forced them to be with themselves.

The extrovert personality is often associated with leadership (another value-free concept that merits disassembling… but that’ll be a separate post one day). Extroverts lead us, but where to? Leadership is a very scary term in Germany, for obvious historical reasons.

The introvert, on the other hand, is often a thinker, a creator. Introverts have given us great works of literature, music and visual art. Makes me think of John Belushi’s impersonation of Beethoven. Cain points out that Steve Wozniak invented the Apple computer, not Steve Jobs. I am a grant writer, not a fundraiser. I don’t enjoy taking people to lunch and convincing them to write a check. I like holing up with a challenging writing or research project and fine tune my work until it is perfect.

Having moved back to Germany, I feel to a degree I have escaped the noisy US extrovert culture, the glorification of leadership and the exhibitionist aspects of social media. Even though I am in a big city again, the noise around me has quieted down.

However, many facets of that culture have been adopted here in Europe as well. Especially if you are trying to reinvent yourself professionally, you sort of have to locate yourself on the intro-extro spectrum and act accordingly. The competitive job market favors the extrovert, just as in the US. So, how many extrovert “qualities” does one have to demonstrate to land a job? How much do I gush and shine and brag in the job interview?

I decided I am too old for this bullshit. The bullshit of buying into the extrovert culture and playing someone I am not. So I went to a few job interviews, and was just myself. The grant writer, not the fundraiser. The thinker, not the leader. Eventually, it paid off. I got a gig where I can be me.

Uneasiness

P.S. to the last post on dysfunctional governments: The Italian government didn’t dissolve, apparently reason prevailed and Berlusconi’s former allies are starting to defect from his agenda. Also, this week Italians were dealing with the aftermath of the terrible drowning deaths of hundreds of African immigrants near the Sicilian coast.

The Germans are still negotiating (the terms of the coalition for their new government). Everyone is sort of bored with the whole thing by now.

The US government is of course still shut down, and now threatening to plunge the world economy into another financial crisis by defaulting on its debts. Contrary to the smug observations that the world isn’t ending without the government, innocent little children are affected. So now US billionaire oil philanthropists are being lauded for stepping in by throwing 10 million to emergency-fund Head Start. One step closer to plutocracy.

Meanwhile some people are questioning the overall functionality of the US political system, and wondering if a European style parliamentary system with less separation of powers might not be more efficient. I think the question is moot. What ails American democracy is not the separation of powers. Sure, this system is what makes the political process vulnerable to gridlock. But the gridlock occurs because those elected to office are now guided by those who pay their campaigns, and no longer by the electorate. As a result, they have forgotten their oath to uphold the laws (including the Affordable Care Act) of the United States. And instead they work to undermine them, make them unworkable, to then argue, correctly, that government doesn’t work. It reminds me of the strange logic of the virus that kills its host, and then perishes itself.

I do have to say that in a parliamentary democracy, in light of prolonged dysfunctional government such as currently in the US, someone would by now have issued a vote of no confidence, dissolved the existing government and initiated early elections to start over. If the elected people don’t have their shit together, lets’ fire them and start with new ones. It doesn’t always work, but it sure puts on a little pressure.

This P.S. ended up being much longer than planned. This post was supposed to be about something else: Discomfort and preoccupation with where the internet is going, increasingly evident in conversations on- and offline. As I observe this, I am grouping these collective feelings and thoughts into two larger groups:

The first is discomfort with social media and what techno-consumerism does to people. This video in a somewhat oversimplified, pseudo-scientific art school end of the year project kind of way describes how being “connected” makes people lonely, allegedly.

The second has to do with the invasiveness of internet tech companies, and the whole lack of privacy thing that just snuck up on us. We always knew that e-commerce companies were surveilling our consumer behavior, and sending us ads based on what we search for and what we like on facebook and what we read on twitter. Now we also know that the US government is surveilling every single communication we are having online.

The two discomfort groups are related: the interconnectedness of your social media platforms with each other, and with your email, with GPS and with e-commerce sites has already created a world in which nothing is private anymore, not what you eat, what you read, who you love, who you communicate with and what you say to them, what you purchase, and where you are and have been at any moment in time. Google will now show your name and profile in an ad next to an item that someone might purchase, if you have shared or +1’d that item. It sounds like a small thing, but is just an example of how you do one little thing online and it has reverberations in 17 different other virtual places. No conspiracy theorist or science fiction author could have thought of a more sinister system of observation.

The discomfort is shared by people from all arenas: 

Journalists - Roger Cohen, in one of the last issues of the International Herald Tribune (and btw, what is up with that - The International New York Times, really?)  last week wrote about his fear to lose touch with the “real” things and felt experience. "Echt" in German means real.

We have an "echt" deficiency these days. Everything seems filtered, monitored, marshaled, amelioreated, graded and app-ready - made into a kind of branded facsimile of experience for easier absorption. 

Funny. I read this in the "real" IHT, purchased at a newspaper stand in Certaldo, Italy. Now I can't link to it, because the newspaper doesn't exist anymore online. 

Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the FAZ also has written extensively about "das digitale Ich” - this other person out there, that is sort of you, but you are not really in control of it anymore. And its identity is relentlessly exploited commercially and for secret intelligence.

Politicians - the German president (and no, it’s not Angela Merkel, remember, parliamentary democracy… our president is the head of the state with no political power but a figure with high moral integrity and authority), Joachim Gauck, spoke about this new age in his much-quoted speech on October 3rd (the German National Holiday aka Day of National Unity). Gauck praised the innovation, progress and possibility of the internet. But he also warns we have not thought about the consequences enough. Then he makes the link to German history:

Ausgeliefertsein und Selbstauslieferung sind kaum voneinander zu trennen. Es schwindet jene Privatsphäre, die unsere Vorfahren doch einst gegen den Staat erkämpften und die wir in totalitären Systemen gegen Gleichschaltung und Gesinnungsschnüffelei so hartnäckig zu verteidigen suchten. Öffentlichkeit erscheint heute vielen nicht mehr als Bedrohung, sondern als Verheißung, die Wahrnehmung und Anerkennung verspricht.

Roughly translated: There is no line any longer between involuntarily exposure and self-exposure. Citizens’ privacy from the state, which our ancestors have fought for to combat totalitarian spy systems, vanishes. Public exposure is no longer viewed as a threat, but as a promise for being noticed and recognized.

Gauck goes on to say that your digital “twin” makes you transparent, calculable, exploitable and manipulable ( I know, that’s probably not a word).

Writers - Another,  manifestation of unease includes Dave Eggers recently released book “The Circle”, and many of the reviews and the reactions to it. Guess what, one person even quit all social media for an entire week after reading the book. 

And finally, another great American author, Jonathan Franzen, just published a new annotated translation of the works of Karl Kraus, influential early 20^th century satirist from Vienna. Franzen discovers that Kraus’ disdain with modernity back then mirrors his own angry rejection of techno-consumerism now. And does he go on about it in this essay published by the Guardian. And then he got a lot of pushback from online commenters.  

The historical perspective illustrates that this debate has been going on forever, is probably as old as humanity: on one side people worried that the manifestation of progress, modernity and the related new forms of communication specific to their time and age are the end of everything, or the end of whatever they hold dear - literature, silent films, letter writing, conversations over coffee, music that the composer is paid for, etc., etc. (These folks are often called Luddites, which is stupid, because they are not destroying anything.) And on the other side the people who engage in new forms of communication, profit from it, enjoy it and are part of, or born into the new culture. In 1964 Umberto Eco described the actors of this cultural division as the apocalyptics versus the integrated.

But then there are those of us who feel in between the two. Those on the fence. So Google “thinks” it is the best thing since sliced toast, that my email, google+, where I am located, and my blog are all connected. I think it is sort of convenient, when it works, but it’s also creepy.  Technology has moved forward, as many times before in history, but our ethical and moral thinking and subsequent rule-making has not caught up.

Being on the fence, I don’t have answers, only questions:

Does technology serve to reinforce what is already evil in our society and economic system? Or has it become an evil force in itself? Can technology, progress, innovation ever be neutral? (answer: no)

Is this time and age really as revolutionary as we think? Or are we freaked out/enthusiastic (take your pick) victims of "Gegenwartseitelkeit"? Who's not exited to live in sea-changing times. But how much of this great new world will still be significant 100 years from now? 

Or are we simply using new tools for the same ends?  Tom Standage  just published a whole book about the parallels between modern and historical social media. 

More pragmatically: Are the big shots of the internet – Google and the social media companies - going to address the privacy concerns of their consumers? Or are they going to barrel on, just losing the concerned folks on the way as they choose to drop out of the whole thing?  Or in other words, will there be a space in between, where you can take advantage of the internet as information source, communication and business tool, and still maintain privacy and control? Is the US government going to change its surveillance practices?

And on the other side, are people, the “users” going to self-teach a sensible practice of social media? Michele Filgate, the woman who quit facebook (which, I think, might just be slowly slipping through the bullshit filter of history, dropping down there with MySpace) and twitter for a week is back on, but she created some new rules for herself – to preserve her non-digital self, and her relationships.

I’ll quote the German president again:

Wie noch bei jeder Innovation gilt es auch jetzt, die Ängste nicht übermächtig werden zu lassen, sondern als aufgeklärte und ermächtigte Bürger zu handeln.

As with every innovation yet, we have to not let fear take over, but we have to act as enlightened and empowered citizens.