We have made ourselves the object of total control.

In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, in 2008 Lehman Brothers collapsed, and in Berlin there were still empty apartments. Jens Balzer wrote a book about the noughties, which is the fourth of his decades of history. A conversation about a decade in which much began, which one only understood later. His book makes it strikingly clear how memory works, namely that one eventually no longer knows when something started, or that it started at some point and was not always there. You were there, but you did not grasp the drama in the moment. I think I had a second-generation iPhone. That was practical, nothing more. That this device and the App Store with the Facebook app would change our communication and ultimately politics – no one guessed that in 2007. It was the beginning of the social networks' winning streak. When Steve Jobs said then that the iPhone would change everything, people thought: marketing rhetoric. But it was the truth. I was never on Facebook, by the way, but I refused back then. One was old enough to think: I am not giving away my privacy. In retrospect, what happened is completely clear: people were online around the clock at some point. There is no longer a sphere in which this virtual world plays no role. There were already people who suspected this back then. Peter Glaser wrote in the Berliner Zeitung about what it means when screens are stroked and blurred instead of being tapped. That was visionary. Travel highlights Travel highlights exclusively for you MORE ABOUT THE PERSON From the Census to the Glass Container The willingness to give away one's privacy may have started with the "Big Brother" show. The title is derived from George Orwell's "1984," a novel about a totalitarian surveillance state – and suddenly that is the name of a television show. That's crazy, isn't it? And no two decades earlier there were protests against the census in the Federal Republic. I was fourteen in 1983. Alongside nuclear power, the census was the topic. If you look back today at what was asked then – how far the commute is, such things – and everyone acted as if Big Brother was now coming. And 15 years later, people did everything to completely expose themselves on the internet. This was just the beginning of them giving away their data completely to technology corporations. How did this happen? The important thing is the private television of the nineties. These daily talks, in which real or invented characters displayed their wrinkles and tattoos – fifteen minutes of fame to somehow stand out, to become a character. "Big Brother" was just the next level. But that people voluntarily enclosed themselves in a glass container and let themselves be filmed around the clock – that would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier. "A laptop connected to a giant bone" You find that in the noughties a new type of person emerges, the digital nomad. What characterizes him? I was not clear from the research how old the term digital nomad is. I think it was coined in 1998 for the first time. And that was before universal accessibility. There was no smartphone. But mobile phones. There were mobile phones, there were laptops too. When I started as a freelance writer for the Berliner Zeitung in 1998, I was a reporter at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. There was a laptop connected to a giant bone. Mobile internet did not exist. You could write and transmit texts, but not go online. The idea of being constantly mobile is mainly related to the change in working conditions. You could take the work with you – and the new start-ups demanded that too. You were no longer an employee but someone who develops projects, constantly switches between tasks, and invents himself. It sounded wonderful at first: working in a café, without fixed times. But it has its dark side, doesn't it? You are never really free. Burnout rates have correspondingly increased. When I started on Alexanderplatz in 2000, there were scooter shops all around Hackescher Markt. That was the big thing. A sign for people who wanted to be mobile and change themselves. Today, everyone hangs anxiously at their workplace because they believe they will find no new one. They stay in their relationships because they fear not finding their own apartment. We have a completely exhausted society in which everything seems to stand still. You can no longer travel by train because you don't arrive. Back then, you had the feeling that you were entering a world whose infrastructure is designed for you to stay in motion. That is the dramatic difference to 2026. Today you encounter obstacles as soon as you move. It is almost dangerous to be in motion, isn't it? You remain stuck somewhere constantly. The train is just a symbol. It is best to stay with what you have because it won't get any better anyway. This spirit was completely different at the turn of the millennium, especially here in Berlin. In my house there were empty apartments back then. Unthinkable today. When I looked for an apartment in 1999, I had three offers at the same time. I could choose. Young people can't even imagine that anymore. "The attack was religiously motivated, this is not seen" The noughties are also marked by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and there was then an argument that is still relevant today: Some explained the attacks – partly justified – with US politics, with their imperialism and colonialism, or? Many German intellectuals blamed the USA and not the attackers. I noticed this again when rereading it. The same happens now with regard to Gaza and October 7th. One does not simply say: this was a massacre. But: it was not without cause; there are explanations for that. We are at the same point regarding the inversion of perpetrator-victim. However, I also noticed again how little people understood back then: that this attack was religiously motivated. This does not fit into the schema of Western intellectuals to this day. That religious fundamentalists attacked a symbol of modernity falls out of sight. We just had the anniversary, and the taz published a whole issue about September 11, in which it was almost exclusively about how Muslims were discriminated against in the USA afterward. The attack itself actually played no role, and the fact that the perpetrators were Muslims who undertook a holy war was even less so. This is related to a fundamental error in postcolonial studies: the history of the last decades only appears as one in which the so-called West acts as the perpetrator and the global south resists it. Everything is subsumed under that. A central thread of my book is therefore the return of religion – as a motivation for political terrorism, but also for authoritarian political thought in general. The Fight Against the Decadent West This is also the focus of your essay "Redemption," which has just been published. In Russia you can observe this return of religion and also in the USA. But in Western Europe? Indeed. In France, Jordan Bardella has a strong alliance with conservative Catholic circles. In my essay "Redemption," I try to demonstrate how religiously motivated Russian imperialism is. This can be read in the writings of Alexander Dugin. It is about Russia as the Third Rome that must defend the true Christian civilization against the decadent West – including Catholicism with the West. Dugin justifies the invasion of Ukraine with this, but at the same time seeks an alliance with fundamentalist Islam to unite Russia and Iran against the West. And this is also found in the leading figures of the AfD. To what extent? Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, for example, is a great admirer of Dugin. And Tino Chrupallas, the basic reference for Dimitrios Kisoudis, provides the ideological foundation; with him, Dugin plays a central role, for example in the book "Order State." It is about an authoritarian organized society where religion serves so that everyone stays in their place – and at the same time about grand ideas. Dugin speaks of Eurasianism: the entire space from Lisbon to Vladivostok belongs to the curation of Russian Orthodoxy. The world-historical mission he derives for Putin from this is that he governs this space as God's representative on Earth. Not all AfD politicians would sign this. But it is interesting that such thinkers present something like this there. The fight against the decadent West is oriented towards these religiously based Russian ideas. And even if religion does not seep into Western Europe, the authoritarian ideas remain. One can understand this well with Dugin and the fascination he has with intellectuals in the AfD circle. They place the foundation for the rise of right-wing populist parties in 2008 – as Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy announces and it becomes clear that the neoliberal economic system has withdrawn from democratic control. But they also write about Merkel, who will become Chancellor in 2005 and brings issues into the CDU that were previously with the Greens. Doesn't that make room for a party to the right of her? This is how you can see it today. Back then, people thought differently. Merkel, I think, had the feeling that the whole society was liberalizing and the CDU had to follow. I believe she did not see herself as an actor at all, but as someone who picks up social trends. On the other hand, the NPD already had considerable election victories in the new lands back then. In the noughties, there were also doubts about the idea that the end of history had come, that democracy with its capitalist economic system had triumphed over dictatorship. In truth, it was in retreat. Those who came from the GDR, for them the victory of capitalism was not just a blessing – many were unemployed at first. And in Russia, the right of the stronger was already prevailing in the nineties, under the kleptocracy of the oligarchs. There was no reason to equate democracy and capitalism. Then Putin came in 2000. For a time, he acted as if he was guided by Western values, but he had already pursued an imperialist policy in the noughties. Jens Balzer © Henk Hogerzeil/Berliner Zeitung What Peter Thiel saw in Facebook The noughties are also the time when Peter Thiel becomes noticeable. On the one hand, he invests in Facebook and on the other hand, he founds Palantir, a company that can analyze large amounts of data, for example to use these analyses in the war against terror. Thiel refers to the anthropologist René Girard and his theory of mimetic rivalry: We want what others have – not because we need it, but because we want to be exactly like them and then better than them. And Girard derives this from biblical texts. Thiel sees this very principle at work in Facebook: mimetic rivalry brings people to constantly optimize themselves in their profiles so that they cannot break free from the competition. Everything they do is registered by the network: they become completely transparent people. Two years earlier, Thiel had founded the company Palantir, which made large amounts of data so compatible that patterns can be recognized: basis for military and other intelligence work, initially with George W. Bush's "War on Terror." Interestingly, Thiel saw in his talks from the noughties that September 11 was a religiously motivated attack. He was clearer about it than many back then. In a society that can no longer imagine a religious war, a religious war was declared – and the answer to that is military instruments, including such software. Thiel is a student of Leo Strauss. And with Strauss, the lesson from the fall of the Weimar Republic was that in times of crisis, democracy must be suspended and the elites must take power. Not particularly sympathetic position. But this entire technology is based on that. And I always find it uplifting when now everyone is shouting that we should not have Palantir in Germany – and those are the same people who have been dumping their data into Facebook for twenty years. We have turned ourselves into an object of total digital control. There is no need to complain about intelligence services anymore. They write that Thiel is looking for a place to flee. What does he promise himself? No compromises, no slowness – and above all no taxes. The whole idea of social redistribution is contrary to him. Everyone should be the smith of their own fortune, everyone should compete as an entrepreneur against each other, and from that arises supposed general happiness. That is the old Hayek idea. But he also knows that this can lead to social chaos. That is why he became interested in remote valleys in New Zealand. In the meantime, he has decided on Buenos Aires and is on good footing with Milei. The idea of the end of history has perhaps arrived, just differently than thought, hasn't it? The victory of capitalism over communism seems final. What has prevailed is a certain form of individualism. This is a trend in Western societies since the seventies, since 1968, and popular culture has depicted it. Individualism has prevailed in the sense that every individual turns themselves into an object of total surveillance because one only has one place in the world. We are no longer imaginable without our digital double. And this only happens at the cost of exposing ourselves to these corporations. Your last sentence in the book about the noughties is: "What is emerging on the horizon is the end of democracy as we know it." What do you mean by that? The developments of the last twenty, thirty years have led to such a loss of trust in democratic institutions that people – as in the election in Saxony-Anhalt – only go to vote when they want to bring a clearly anti-democratic party to power. The system of parliamentary democracy and the rule-based international order also enjoy little trust in other Western European societies. And because the coupling of democracy and capitalism has become fragile, capitalism is what still connects the world. From this perspective, perhaps the end of history has really arrived – only democracy has not won, but capitalism. Authoritarian leaders can agree on this, as can figures like Trump. So the noughties were the decade when everything began, but it was not perceived? Or we could at least hide it well here in Berlin. Jens Balzer in the interview about the 1990s: "The myth of great Berlin was bought" "High Energy" by Jens Balzer: Between Upheaval and Fear Your opinion is important to us. 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