Von Ralf Keuper
Wer bisher angenommen hat, Apple Pay sei “nur” eine Applikation zur Durchführung mobiler Bezahlvorgänge und ansonsten ohne weitere Konsequenzen für die Gesellschaft, könnte nach der Lektüre des Artikels Apple Pay And How Computers Became The Cocaine Of The 21st Century ins Grübeln kommen.
Schon die Tatsache an sich, bei Forbes einen Beitrag mit kulturpessimistischem Unterton zu lesen, ist bemerkenswert. Der Autor Michael Thomsen fasst seine recht steile These in die Worte:
Digital systems have evolved as disruptive saviors of the social and economic dysfunction that precede them, a theoretical fabric of exchange better than money. Shifting from a medium of industrial exchange overseen by political organizations, digitization promised to return essential power structures to the realm of algorithmic efficiency and objective equality. Like cocaine in the late 19th Century, computers have become the storehouse of generational optimism about our ascent from the swamp of natural history. Computers swept across the end of the 20th century as both the product of epochal corruption and the most plausible solution to the socio-economic barbarism that had made it possible.
Das Argument, der Informationskapitalismus streue den Anwendern Sand in die Augen, indem er vorgibt, ihr Leben zu er…