Hans van der Kamp

Recently I saw a documentary called ‘Smiling in a War Zone’. In this video we follow the Danish visual artist Simone Aaberg on her trip to Afghanistan. From the money she has saved from selling her art, she has bought an old Piper Cup and in a newspaper she has read about an Afghan girl who wants to become a pilot and of course she wants to help.

So we are looking at her trip in the little Piper Cup through airspace in a warzone. I would say take a regular 747 or a boat, but this woman is an idealist and is drawn towards danger for the better cause. A psychologist would probably diagnose this as the typical behavior of a person coming from a family with overprotective parents, but hey, I have done some really stupid things in my life with parents who have done a great job convincing me that they did not care if I would live or die, so who am I to sneer at this?

Sitting on my couch it is clear to me from the start where this documentary will lead up to. We are about to see how Afghan women, or Islamic women in general, are not allowed to make their own decisions, and although we have seen a lot of that in the last decade, I am not the kind of man who easily zaps away from a serious documentary done by a fellow visual artist.

So the first part of the documentary has this cosy feeling of an old Jacques Cousteau documentary. (..and now we ahre entering zee most dangerussh zhone, and so on. You will get my drift. Nice TV if you are sitting on your behind eating potato chips.)

The longer this Odyssey takes, the more I start to like Aaberg with her light blue shawl draped in Islamic fashion. Whatever they say about Islamic dress codes, those shawls do a hell of a lot more for wrinkly faces than plastic surgery has ever done for Western women. Aaberg really looks good to me in her Piper Cup.

Finally she arrives safely in Afghanistan against all odds. Faryal, the Afghan girl looks 16 to me and is very enthusiastic about becoming a pilot. My first thought is: if my 16 year old daughter would want to become a pilot in one of the most dangerous air zones of the world, I would certainly forbid that, just like I told my son at age 16 that I would accept any decision he would make regarding his future; with the exception of a career in the army.

The parents of Faryal think differently. They just sit there and nod as Aaberg starts a third degree on the poor girl. ‘I have to be really sure that you can make your own decisions, before we go up in the air!’ Yes, says the girl and again the mother nods. Are we going to look at something unexpected for a change, I was asking myself.

No, we weren’t. Just when I returned from the bathroom, Aaberg was sitting in Faryals room - for the first time without the Islamic shawl - and with a grim face she is putting a sickening guilt trip on the little girl. ‘We were all there at the airport, 55 of us, and you did *not* show up?’ The anger on the face of Aaberg almost looks like the anger of a deceived lover.

What happened? Well, Faryas uncle got sick and she had to take care of him. That answer is not good enough for Aaberg. Another third degree follows and yes, finally, the girl admits that her uncle is opposed to her wishes to become a pilot.

Good thinking of that uncle. My conclusion: there are some civilized beings left on this planet after all.

When the Internet first became popular in the Netherlands during the mid 1990s, publishers were very arrogant about this new ‘hype’.

Soon after that a little nervousness started to kick in. How about copyrights? Can ‘they’ just steal all our valuable publications? Arrogance turned into anger. (As it always does, sooner or later.) Journalists gathered in smoke filled cafés to protest the fact that they were not being paid for digital publishing rights, etc. etc.

Today journalists seem to have left news investigation completely to the Internet. They set their Google alerts to the keywords that match the subject they write about most, check their inboxes in the morning and start typing.

A good example is an article in the Washington Post about the design of a robot assembling Ikea furniture. That was two weeks ago. I quoted the article in the news section of TheInsaneRobot.com earlier this week and 48 hours later it became a news topic for a Dutch newspaper: De Telegraaf. (Just a day after the item was also posted on other Dutch websites.)

Freelance journalists do not get paid very well these days, so why should they properly investigate something before they write about it? They have families to feed. There are thousands of examples where Internet hoaxes were blindly copied to more established media. Nobody on the Internet gets paid when journalists of printed media steal their texts, but ‘paper’ journalists do get paid for copying contributions of Internet publicists.

Lately my attention is drawn to a new generation of Internet video-journalists, who - much to my surprise - take research very seriously. Journalists who are in the beginning of their twenties and seem to have little or no material goals in life but owning a pc, a video camera and as much illegal software as they can possibly lay their hands on.

The idea seems simple. You go out interviewing people with a low budget video camera, you edit the material on your Mac or PC, and you publish the results on the web.
Of course 9/11 is still one of their favorite subjects. There must be around 60 full documentaries circulating the web with all sorts of conspiracy theories. I am not saying that all these conspiracy theories make sense, but once in a while there is one that really impresses me. Lately I downloaded Loose Change, 2nd edition. I will restrain from giving a detailed opinion. The maker offers this documentary for free distribution through the web and I am asking you to make up your own mind by viewing it.

You can download this video here as a Zip file. Unzip it to your hard drive. The encoding is DivX Avi and it will play in almost every viewer installed on your Mac (OsX) or PC.

Loose_Change.zip

Please note that it is almost a full Gigabyte download, so you may have to exercise some patience. Depending on your connection it may take up to a few hours to download, but take my word for it, it is well worth the wait - even if you have to conclude it is a hoax, after viewing it.

Once the search engines will start to list it, I will have to remove the Zip again, because other sites will start deeplinking to it and my server cannot handle that kind of load. (No server can.. I have experienced that when I once webcasted 9/11 for two days.)

Credit: Loose Change is a documentary written and directed by Dylan Avery and distributed through his company ‘Louder Than Words’.

Since George W. Bush has been signing about 800 ‘work-arounds’ on existing American Legislation - 200 more than all American presidents combined before him - it is safe to state that The American Constitution is crumbling. There is also little doubt that Americans have elected this president in a democratic fashion and it is even more obvious that they are enthusiastically exporting that same kind of ‘democracy’ to the rest of the world, and by doing so cause a genocide that is turning the stomach of any civilized being.

As you know I run a site called AmeaNet.org, mostly visited by Americans. The last two years they seem to be almost obsessively focused on ‘Freedom of Speech’. I do not see a lot of freedom of speech taking place in the US lately, but this may very well explain why they are all logging on to a Dutch server instead of an American one.

A few weeks ago I deleted a distasteful set of photographs on the forum. On one photograph Brazilian women were showing off their breast implants and on the other Turkish women, properly dressed to represent their Islamic belief, were waving flags. This was all in the context of the World Cup soccer, of course, and the poster called for a comparison. ‘Who would you rather have as your supporters?’ I thought it was degrading. I would have left the pictures up, because I hate it when they call me a censor, if not for the fact that currently so many Muslims are being killed for no reason at all. I am not advocating terrorism (Israeli or Arab) here, but there are too many civilian casualties for this war - or these wars - to be called other than a genocide.

In my view the gentleman who posted these pictures acts, thinks and talks like a true American with all the patriotism baloney that comes with it, but he is in fact of British descent. I knew he would try to start a row over my moderation of his post on the discussion board. He had already tried that two months ago in defending our beloved xenophobic Danes with their lack of respect for Muslim traditions. I was tired of that. So, I kicked him out and one of his friends with him, because from experience I know that if you leave one of a pair sitting there, the other one will continue the same crusade you kicked the first one out for. They were both none paying members, so I did not care too much. In fact Americans make up for 75% data traffic of my sites and only 5% of my income, so at times I would rather see them leave.

Boy, did I miscalculate that move! Everybody was upset. Nobody had any idea why I thought the pictures were distasteful. Usually the forum members stay on the forum. They rarely spread out to other AmeaNet sites, but now I had them coming to the old chat. For many days in a row I was cursed at and insulted as though they were being paid to do so. It reached a peak two days ago when somebody compared me to Adolf Hitler, Stalin and Osama Bin Laden, all in one go.

One would think that there would be some support coming from the French, but no, the only French woman (about 55 I guess) in the chat had a background on the barricades. She enjoyed a solid Communist upbringing and apparently later converted her radicalism into feminist ideology. We all know that feminists have their own reasons to hate Muslims. True feminists insist on ‘liberating’ Muslim women, even if that means: against their free will. From that perspective they are no better than the paternalists of the 1900s who also thought they were chosen by a higher authority to decide what was best for women.

Although she had not seen the pictures the British American had posted, she aired strong opinions, of course. After the British American had replied to that with ‘Vive La France’ you can imagine there was no stopping her either. In the end I had to close down the ‘old chat’ which has been there for almost ten years.

Nobody is waiting for an opinion coming from a webmaster of an adult site, but what I see happening between all these nationalities on my sites is that this almost full-blown ideological war is not about terrorism, it is not about oil, it is not about Bush, it is about one of the steepest hills we ever had to take in history.

With a world becoming smaller every day we are forced to lose our nationalism to become World Citizens and although that would be best for most of us, we keep clinging to our local superiority feelings. Suddenly the Swedes are explaining why herrings are best eaten with whipped cream, Americans try to convince us that everybody wearing a beard is a terrorist and the French will always stay the French. They will try to gain political power through ideological onion soup, whatever the conflict is and they will keep looking for new opportunities to restore their antique agricultural society to its former glory.

Onion soup makes me fart.

(As you can clearly see, I am not making a lot of progress becoming a decent World Citizen either.)

Eleven years ago when I started building websites I was laughed at by most of my friends. Born in 1955 - most people of my age saw the computer as an enemy to be feared. I did not mind their laughs too much. What bothered me more was the fact that I had become an outcast overnight.

I have worked as a photographer, a writer, and an editor in chief for several magazines, so my friends came from those same groups of professionals. Suddenly the pleasant discussions we used to have in neighbourhood restaurants were over. They were working on paper and I was working on hard drives, doing almost the same what they were doing at the time, but whenever I tried to join in on discussions, one of them would address me with the following one liner:

‘Stop talking Chinese!’

So I slowly started to withdraw from that scene. There was nothing there for me. After the economical crash in 2002 my job got tougher. I remember a lot of 12/14-hour working days. The few people who did in fact believe in the Internet withdrew their money, support, etc. I kept working on, knowing that if I would quit at least five years of hard work would have been for nothing.

All sites that I considered to be competition for my main project AmeaNet.org started to evaporate, while I moved on in solitude with some occasional help of people who were only half motivated and caused more problems than they solved.

Almost two years ago I finally saw some income being generated by my sites; a year ago it doubled, and even now in summer the number of subscriptions and sales keep growing at an unexpected rate.

One by one my old colleagues try to get in touch with me again, complaining that there is so little money to be made in printed media. Do I care? Yes, I do. Once they were my friends. Do I lose one night of sleep over their misery? No, not at all. Strangely enough, when I listen to their complaints, I have to suppress the urge to stand up and yell:

‘Stop talking Chinese!’

Meanwhile my work gets to be more fun.
I felt immensely satisfied, when I finished my latest project yesterday evening at 11:35 CET.

http://www.theinsanerobot.com/

The title for that site was not randomly chosen. It describes exactly how I felt over the last ten years: an insane robot.

PS: For the few visitors here who speak Dutch, the logo at theinsanerobot.com was designed by my son and it was inspired by a remark of a barkeeper here in Amsterdam who once said: ‘Je bent een aardige man, maar je hebt een bek als een scheermes.’