Eintritt in ein Lebewesen/ Journey into a Living Being Von der Sozialen Skulptur zum Plattform-Kapitalismus/ From Social Sculpture to Plattform Capitalism

by Tilman Baumgartel

In 1977, Joseph Beuys presented his installation "Honey Machine at the Workplace" at documenta 6, in which tubes ran into the exhibition rooms, through which honey was pumped. The work symbolized Beuys' idea of the expanded concept of art and of social sculpture. “Everyone is an artist” is his famous motto –not because everyone can paint, dance or make music, but because we all contribute through our productivity to a collective creativity that can be weighed as real capital and societal potential, to which Beuys ascribed the formula “art = capital.” Honey as the “spiritual nutrition of the cosmos” (Beuys) is the embodiment of this collective creativity.

These days, we deliver our creative “honey” voluntarily to internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or Amazon. Computers and smartphones, online speakers and fitness wristbands upload a large portion of our data to these companies’ servers. Even rental bikes and e-scooters collect our location data. Our every click, every Like, every photo posted and every online comment is fuel for the companies of “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff). They use our data to sell advertising, predict our behavior, optimize their algorithms and AI, and to keep competing companies out of the market as much as possible.

112 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020