The good column – hashtag #daslebenlebennicht

I’m not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, experienced and older people like me shouldn’t become more socially involved. Anyway, I decided to become an influencer. It is a job that seems comparatively lucrative to me and that I can do from the comfort of my own home.

But I’ll probably have to shave first. We’ll see. At least I would look a little younger than I actually am. And a little more well-groomed. I suspect that in our ultra-conservative society, clean and neat-looking people who don’t have leftover egg yolk from breakfast in their beard are generally better received, even by the young mass audience.

The gap in the market that I intend to fill is “Ideology-Critical Influencing” (“II”), which I have just invented and for which I will immediately apply for trademark protection: Hashtag “#dasganzeistdasunwahre”. The guiding principle of my influencer activity should be: “To even think of hope is to violate it and work against it” (Adorno, “Negative Dialectics”, p. 394).

On my YouTube, my Tiktok and my Instagram channels, I will not hold consumer products up to the camera or encourage my followers to buy them with a shrill voice and exalted jingoism, but will give long and strenuous lectures that are mainly about the managed world , the damaged life and the elimination of the non-identical and in which I strongly advise against buying products of any kind with a furrowed brow and a slurring voice: »Consumer products are nothing more than civilizational garbage with a price tag, and the irrational act of purchasing them is basically – no different than amusement – the extension of work under late capitalism. So influencer marketing is completely different!

The lectures are introduced musically with a cacophony of free jazz passages from Peter Brötzmann’s early work, selected twelve-tone music and nasty feedback noises. The opening credits will show blurry and unflattering selfies of me taken in total darkness, with virtually nothing visible.

I’m sure no one has an approach like this yet, which will give me a so-called unique selling point in the influencer scene, which in turn will greatly boost my popularity.

Since it has proven in the past to be essential for successful influencing that followers are involved in the entire process and kept on track, my channels also regularly organize viewer votes, polls and quizzes on exciting questions: » Life in late capitalism: continued vegetation or suicide?” for example. Or: »What type of depression is currently the most popular? a) the endogenous, b) the neurotic or c) the reactive?” There is nothing to be gained. You can only lose. Just like in real life.

There will of course also be a video podcast lasting several hours, produced twice a day, in which I, standing motionless in a bare, desolate room lit by a shabby, flickering neon tube on the ceiling, persistently complain and explain the current state of the world with a gravely bitter expression. why in the future everything will become very bitter and ugly and even the tiniest remaining remnant of enlightened consciousness will die out. Or I simply read for hours from the novel “The Giant Dwarves” by Gisela Elsner while the screen remains black. Even when it is proven that no one is listening anymore, because that increases the level of pointlessness.

At the beginning and end of each episode of the podcast, a so-called jingle (a short sequence of sounds or an acoustic signal with recognition value) is played: an agonizingly long, difficult to bear rear-end collision noise.

For my followers and fans, I will then be an integral part of their lives. Like a daily soap you don’t want to miss: What new insights about the miserable state of the world does he share with us this afternoon? What meal did he not like today? How many days do we have until we conformist individuals with our standardized opinions are fully integrated into the late capitalist-prefascist system? Will we still be here tomorrow or will we have already been destroyed by the apocalypse?

It is not impossible that the young people will find my approach fresh. And if everything goes as planned, my crazy lifestyle (curving up in the corner, complaining, reading depressing books) will become a new trend. “#youonlyliveonce” is out, “#thatlifelivesnot” is in. One thing is certain: I will be very close to the kids in the future.