Data battle disk

 
Column Today, the linked citizen has the opportunity to become a data gourmet. The offer is there. All you have to do is reduce it. 
The promise of the IT revolution was - typical technology, typical revolution - that it would liberate and enrich us. Liberated from propaganda, TV garbage, the drumbeat of advertising; enriched by relieving us of boring tasks and leaving us more time for important things. And we read and write more today than we used to. The opening up of the means of publication (blogs) has given us many wonderful tools for expressing our opinions. News has become more accessible and transparent. The Internet is an electroshock weapon against the bastards who try to chop, polish and whitewash information to their own advantage. Today, we can really X-ray politicians before we vote for them. And the best thing about it: it's all free! But?
We have more data garbage and less free time: today we have more tasks (in the inbox) and less leisure time to solve them. We are bombarded with even more stupid advertising (spam), write (text) and read (beep-beep-beep) even more data fast food (and free newspapers). The big companies are even more savvy (with viral campaigns, blog cheerleaders and "social media consultants"). We outdo each other in blogging, tweeting, tweeting and Facebooking. We happily link our circle of friends with the dubeli sites, where peeping Toms and spammers, envious and neurotic people, old annoyances that have finally been got rid of, come at us again. We have become data fast food junkies. How did it get this far?
Revolutions are vicious circles: the slack King Luis XVI was followed by Robespierre and then by Napoleon Bonaparte I, the tyrant-in-chief. And on the Internet?
Ironically, there is still talk of "people's rule of the web", and it is even said that "the mob" is now in power. The fact is that the World Wide Web is in the hands of a few autocrats - Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft - who have long since divided up the most beautiful Internet properties among themselves. It is much more difficult to run a web service profitably outside of the three Internet emperors' areas of jurisdiction than it is to set up a "real" store. If you look at the success stories of successful start-ups such as YouTube, you can see that the dream of a fun website that finds users and makes money with a good range of information alone is a mirage - you need relationships and massive amounts of money, otherwise nothing will work. Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer now wants to get his hands on Yahoo! and reduce the Internet titans to two. And then, in a digital Russian campaign, the emperor Google is to be crushed ...
Be that as it may, the revolution is over. The people have nothing more to say about Napoleon's battle plans. - The question remains: What has the revolution brought us?
It is said that the birth of world-famous French cuisine can be traced back to the fact that after the beheading of the king, the kitchen staff of the Palace Royale, numbering several thousand, became unemployed and then opened countless gourmet restaurants for the citizen in the city of Paris. - In fact, the linked citizen now has the opportunity to become a data gourmet. The offer is there. All you have to do is reduce it: Pare down email accounts to just one. Chop off Facebook notifications. Peel off your Xing account. Burn Twitter and freeze your cell phone.
> Oliver Reichenstein is a communications architect and lives in Tokyo