Viral Media: How Coronavirus Has Exposed the Failures of the Ad-Based Business Model

The news can no longer survive by playing subservient to ad-revenue. COVID-19 has shown us that much.

When Florian Schneider, founder of the legendary German electronic outfit Kraftwerk, passed away (of COVID-unrelated causes) in late April 2020, a number of eulogising pundits could be heard commonly remarking upon a particular feature of that seminal band’s work. The feature in question was not their enduring ubiquity, nor the astonishingly catholic reach of their influence.

Kraftwerk were at all times taken, conceptually and practically, with ideas of a fully computerised future that, at their point of formation in 1970, seemed as remote as the same idea seems intimate (if not invasive, even violatory) now. However, what pervaded among Kraftwerk’s forecast of man’s transition into a new teleology as ‘showroom dummies’, computer love and the Trans-Europe Express, was that in their eyes the future seemed fantastic. It was this facet of Kraftwerk’s work that the aforementioned pundits had been talking about, one of those rare composite insights about the work of someone notable that only comes into full focus after they’ve died. To the boys from Dusseldorf, the future, however ersatzly formalised and strange it…