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We have heard a lot about post-fact politics in the past few years. Now we have to talk about prefactional politics. The term comes from the famous Viennese philosopher Isolde Charim. She describes politics that is detached from reality and that creates facts on this basis. I consider the copyright reform decided by the European Parliament to be a prime example of prefactural politics.

"The system is hard to see through, the result is backward-looking ... That's not reality anymore." This writes the young CDU politician Jenna Behrends in her book about a necessary restart of politics. It's about family politics. But it is no coincidence that these sentences can also be applied to other areas, such as digital politics. In both areas, the prefactional ignoring of new realities is at stake. In reality-blind zeal, politics tries to restore old states. It does not even have to mean that these states ever existed; the human brain is a verifier. That prepositional politics have taken over is based on a deep yearning for a world that used to be easier to control. For example, before digital networking.

Copyright reform is an attempt to impose the rules of the analogue twentieth century on the digital 21st century, and it must necessarily fail. Because of course Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are not unchangeable forces of nature. Digital networking, however, is a force of nature, strange or presumptuous that may sound in analogously socialized ears.

But it is true: We have to speak of digital networking as a mathematical force of nature . It is created by the often lossless reproducible digital copy and by the decentralized flow of information in the network, which can spread exponentially. This should not explicitly mean that everything does not matter, on the contrary. It should explicitly mean that we absolutely need laws, regulations, guidelines, but they must be effective for this mathematical force of nature and not for a nostalgic wishful reality.

If you do not take that into account - and copyright reform does not - then regulation will fail. The crucial question is where the mathematical force of nature begins and where the explicitly unfair, efficiency-radical, monopolistic behavior of the digital corporations begins. This is not as easy to explain as the pro-factional advocates would like.

The prefactural aspect is not listening to science

As a result of the Enlightenment, they had actually agreed to negotiate social progress based on science. That is why I am worried by a phrase from MEP Julia Reda, which is why she is withdrawing from politics: "I find it alarming how little scientific advice is in politics."

As early as April 2018, some 200 copyright experts from 25 leading European universities and institutes declared that and why the reform will be both potentially harmful and ineffective. Until just a few minutes before the vote, globally recognized and mostly independent groups of scientists opposed this reform, from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford to the Max Planck Institute. Really true. Prefactual policy is not to give such votes weight.

Which opens the room to other political forces, such as MEP Elmar Brok. The journalist Peter Mühlbauer had since 2001 repeatedly pointed to its conflict of interest. According to his own statement, Brok got between € 5,000 and € 10,000 per month by 2014 from Bertelsmann *, one of the largest, most influential creative companies in the world. He was involved in the political design of copyright, what party lawyer Hans-Herbert von Arnim called "legal corruption". Just this "legally corrupted" Brok complained before the vote completely realistic a "massive and algorithmically controlled campaign of the major Internet companies". Yes, the bots have even been seen on the streets.

Reform in the impasse

And now? The Pyrrhic victory will have to be renamed Voss-Sieg, after Axel Voss (CDU), the main actor behind the reform. Because it will hardly benefit anyone substantially, but bring collateral damage with it. Proponents are characterized by magical thinking typical of prefactoral politics. They hope that everything will be fine in a completely unclear way. That's for nothing. That's the warning of science.

The European ancillary copyright law becomes a debacle, as the German before, because the media landscape argued away from any reality. Google News will probably just shut down, then cry and scream.

Upload filters will open a Google-controlled market on the - absurd turn! - Media groups are likely to buy Google technology themselves if they ever set up or participate in their own platforms. What they are likely to do, also because the world's advertising funds are massively flowing in this direction. And the policy states that a company must demonstrate that it has "made every effort to ensure that certain works ... are not available", in line with high industry standard professional care standards.

The "industry standard" for upload filters is none other than Google. The development of YouTube's content ID "Content ID" has cost more than 100 million euros. Including Google's knowledge advantage, the creative industry could not reach this standard, even with 500 million euros, and instead resort to new or already existing but certainly not better technology.

The price for this nonsense is a dismaying loss of confidence of a digitally-driven generation in the effectiveness of their commitment, in democratic politics and in the EU. Because these people see through the lies, insults and absurdities that have been expected them. From how many uninformed, insulting lies to the digital world you no longer believe in politics that it decides democratically efficient in all other areas?

This is the result of prepositional politics and lobbyist lobbyism that can not and do not want to distinguish what digital groups can influence and what digital reality is. We need more than ever before a functioning, private media landscape, in addition to the public-law. We need more than ever the protection of authors in a digital, platform-dominated world. We also need economically flourishing recyclers, ie capital-rich creative companies that can pre-finance the work of authors.

But copyright reform will not do that because it is not based on reality, but on a prefactional worldview from the days before global digital connectivity. Proponents of this reform believe they have won the race. You will find that they have run into a dead end, into a very, very lonely dead end.

* Note: The SPIEGEL publishing house belongs to 25.5% of the Bertelsmann subsidiary Gruner & Jahr, my first book was published by a Bertelsmann subsidiary, and I now and then work with the Bertelsmann lecture placement agency.

The podcast question:
How can we avoid pre-emption policies and solve the generation problem?