I
EI'm sorry: but, which I didn't know until recently, I'm already dead. Died on July 15, 2021 in Frankfurt am Main. Nothing is known about the cause of death, but the obituary sounds friendly, quote: “Kurt Drawert was a German writer, poet and essayist. He became known for his diverse literary work, which dealt with themes such as identity, history and social changes. His works are known for their profound reflections on German history and culture.” This was preceded by the shocking news that I had to prove on an online site that I was not a robot. To do this, I was presented with a grid photo of a tree with the task of placing a tick wherever a detail of this tree could be seen. I failed this test. I must have missed a branch or a leaf somewhere and the process ended. So that's how I tracked down my death. After all, I still owed it to myself to provide proof of being physically present, a human being among human beings. And then there was also the more unconsciously felt obligation to justify my presence in and of itself, which is part of my work as a writer – to constantly ask what hardly anyone asks themselves in this urgency: Who am I, why and why?
It was in this chain of events that the misfortune began. Since half the world is talking about ChatGPT quite excitedly, I took the liberty of doing the same and looked it up there – the result was known. Now, of course, I could proceed empirically and, to establish proof of my existence, touch myself and say that the AI machine is wrong. But if the information constantly remains the same – and I have asked about myself at least three times, becoming more and more hysterical as time goes on; and three is the number of a verified guess – then we are in the digital modernity of today and are watching our own demise. Or how do you combat information that is burned into the virtual cosmos and that the sparrows are already whistling from their electronic rooftops? With a classic: “I think, therefore I am, therefore I exist”? The subject can think whatever he wants: if he doesn't make correlations to an algorithm of probability, what he thought becomes irrelevant and buried by data sets until he can no longer find himself.
#Kurt #Drawert39s #acceptance #speech #Italo #Svevo #Prize