Computerwelt: Kraftwerk Recorded The First Anti-Surveillance Song 40 Years Ago

We live in a computer world, so we made a song about it.

Ralf Hütter

In 1981, Edward Snowden‘s revelations on how Imperial America mass-surveilled its own citizens and the citizens of the world were still 32 years away. Yet, the seeds for today’s surveillance capitalism and globalization as 21^st century version of colonialization were planted, and the technological ideas and devices for the contruction of crypto-fascism were being developed. And while large portions of protest culture remained a variety of the vague and narcotic “The times they are a-changin’ ” parole or smoldered in the energetic anger and fury of punk, Kraftwerk came straight to the point with Computerwelt (1981) and picked up the most striking and relevant dystopia of our present: crypto-fascism and mass-surveillance.

Interpol and Deutsche Bank
FBI and Scotland Yard
Flensburg and the BKA
they all have our data

Berlin, 1980: Under great pressure the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) admits that it accesses the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Germans. They justify this large-scale surveillance as “dragnet investigation“ to chase the RAF. The RAF (Red Army Fraction), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, was an anti-imperialist militant organization which had valid issues with the Vietnam War, the failed “de-nazification” of Germany under the American occupation forces, and the continued Colonialism of Europe and the Empire, now with Cold War narratives which led to the outlawing of the Communist Party of Germany in 1956. It is a common fairy tale that the Nazism of White Christian Supremacy has lost WW2, since confirmed and supposed Nazis continued to hold high positions in all branches of German society including government and economy- or they were just straight away flown into the USA to be granted respected careers there. In response, the several branches of the RAF committed multiple acts of terrorism including the placing of three pipe bombs at a United States headquaters in Frankfurt, the bombing of the right-wing populist Springer publishing house, the killing of high-ranking bankers, and the kidnapping and killing of Hanns Martin Schleyer, a member of the SS who was elevated to being the president of both, the Confederation of German Employers Associations and the Federation of German Industries after WW2 and until his murder in 1977. The RAF claimed responsibility in a letter: “After 43 days we have ended Hanns-Martin Schleyer’s pitiful and corrupt existence… His death is meaningless to our pain and our rage… The struggle has only begun. Freedom through armed, anti-imperialist struggle.”

The RAF looked into the Palestinian cause and resistance for inspiration and some of its members went to Jordan and were trained with guerillas from the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The anti-imperial German and Palestinian resistance were deeply entwined: the PFLP on 13 October 1977 hijacked a Lufthansa Flight 181 to demand the release of imprisoned RAF leaders. To understand the Colonial European and Imperial American post-WW2 reality, there is no way of passing the RAF in this examination. That is the case now, and that was the case in 1981 when Kraftwerk recorded Computerwelt after living through the formative events which were gathered under the rather pointless and romantic term ‘German Autumn’. Although Kraftwerk were never explicitly political, but consistent in their trans-human elusiveness, it is a band that was always attached to the past during its pioneering and progressive history. Computerwelt is a product of the resistance and the German government’s law & order reaction to it, as is most Krautrock in general. Also keep in mind the geographical proximity of the German Autumn to the epicenters of the Krautrock scene that are Düsseldorf and Cologne: many of leading RAF members like Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were imprisoned in Cologne-Stammheim where they collectively committed suicide in the scandalous “Stammheim Death Night”.
But back to the digital world.

Numbers, Trade, People / Numbers, Trade, People / Computerworld / Because time is money

Kraftwerk do something interesting in their original German lyrics by naming the ruling corporations’ and governments’ main motivations for digitalization and surveillance (trade and profit), and contrasting it with a curation of promises and incentives which seduced the people into buying into capitalist slavery and colonial ideology; promises and incentives which are still highly accurate today:

Machines and video games / Guide the future now / Computers for small businesses / Computers in the home/ Travel, Time / Medicine, Entertainment / Travel, Time / Medicine, Entertainment

The full-length album contains other tracks with astonishingly visionary outlooks on a future that is now our present. “Taschenrechner” is regarded as fun little gem, while it is worth spending further thought on why Kraftwerk penned a song about a pocket calculator in the first place. With Texas Instruments developing the first pocket calculator already in 1967, it was hardly a device of the future in 1981. But two qualities make the pocket calculator stand out: the handy design which already points towards the iPhone (2007) that made smartphones and surveillance a product for the masses. And indeed Apple- the company that fused capitalism and the digital and introduced personalized consumerism with the iPod (2001)- took many of its inspirations from Dieter Rams’ designs for Braun, including the German company’s ET44 pocket calculator.

The other feature that makes pocket calculators interesting in the futuristic timeline is that they, without any ostensible distracting functions such as calls or text messages, embody numbers, arithmetic, and algorithms – nowadays also referred to as “weapons of math destruction“. Algorithms today are synonymous with oppressive and discriminatory tools which are building architectures of inequality, market monopolies, and corporate control. Kraftwerk have incorporated this control aspect into the reduced lyrics of “Taschenrechner“:

I’m the operator with my pocket calculator
I am adding and subtracting
I’m controlling and composing

Social media, the latest act of digital colonialism and surveillance capitalism, was yet to be globally installed a full 23 years later and is the only element that’s missing in Kraftwerk’s Computer World. Or is it? On the full-length album, the roboter-blues “Computerliebe” (“Computer Love”) foresees the loneliness of the hyper-individualized capitalist age’s citizens and deals with the conditions of virtual love and life in pre-internet times. But that Kraftwerkian prophecy would make for an article of its own…

I am alone, once again so alone
Staring at the screen, Starring at the screen…
I dial the number, I dial the number
Call up screen text, Call up screen text
I have nothing to do tonight, nothing to do tonight,
I need a date, I need a date.

Prophecy is no miracle, but the ability to have a critical look into what’s already existing and why it’s existing historically, and to then see into which condition it could develop. Kraftwerk mastered this ability like no other, whilst simultaneously pioneering a sound of the future and thus placing themselves in the historical and futuristic timeline. It is a band that is still on top of the artistic hierarchy.

by Saliha Enzenauer