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> Bay area but the guess "small negative experience" - the idea of we are going around experiencing things and our life is a product of these experiences we consume and interpersonal politics - that's very california "the personal is the political" or that it's some how a consumption experience we "have" and who we "are" is coloured by these "experiences" etc (a fish in the water "what is water?")

you might be giving them another small negative experience. you've certainly given me one.

Not sure anyone responsible for how you feel, but I accept you feel that way, and that is regretable! Please forgive (if something I said affected negatively), and perhaps (well ... certainly) I could be better expressing. I just typed it out in haste

> the idea of we are going around experiencing things and our life is a product of these experiences we consume and interpersonal politics - that's very california "the personal is the political"

That's a very superficial reduction of the meaning of that phrase. It's worth reading the original 1969 essay with that title:

https://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html

This quote might help understand the context:

> The bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional). Women as oppressed people act out of necessity (act dumb in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women have developed great shuffling techniques for their own survival (look pretty and giggle to get or keep a job or man) which should be used when necessary until such time as the power of unity can take its place. Women are smart not to struggle alone (as are blacks and workers). It is no worse to be in the home than in the rat race of the job world. They are both bad. Women, like blacks, workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our “failures.”

The author was dealing with and responding to very real oppression, and pointing out in part that day-to-day interactions were consequences of, and contributors to, that oppression. That's one sense in which "the personal is political."

The introduction also points out where the overall insight came from:

> However, many on the SCEF [Southern Conference Educational Fund] staff, both men and women, ended up joining the criticism of women getting together in consciousness-raising groups to discuss their own oppression as “[navel]-gazing” and “personal therapy”—and certainly “not political.”

> They could sometimes admit that women were oppressed (but only by “the system”) and said that we should have equal pay for equal work, and some other “rights.” But they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called “personal problems” into the public arena—especially “all those body issues” like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our demands that men share the housework and childcare were likewise deemed a personal problem between a woman and her individual man.

In that context, the personal was political in a very concrete, direct sense.

> They could sometimes admit that women were oppressed (but only by “the system”)

As the saying goes, when you're privileged equality feels like oppression.

Yup.

Somewhat amazingly, John Stuart Mill addressed this as long ago as 1869 - a full hundred years before The Personal Is Political, in his essay The Subjection of Women:

> “But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? ... Those who enjoy the benefit of an institution or a social arrangement, have a strong interest in believing that it is just; and they are rarely slow in finding arguments to convince themselves of what they wish to believe."

> taboo on taking photo

Do Germans complain/rage every time they see a security camera?

Wasn't Germany the original country that forced google maps to censor all houses unless they opt-IN? And faces, and driving plates.

I think they are quite privacy conscious, as a country.

And quite averse/backwater (choose your version) on using debit/credit cards. Which is mindblowing from my Easter European perspective. I didn't use cash in a decade.

Unfortunately that's much less the case since COVID. Not looking forward to have more and more placed that only take panopticon-payments.

That has pretty much changed now. I rarely use cash in Berlin. About 2-3 years already...

Berlin is very different from the rest of Germany.

But not how you think, in this instance. I think Berlin has more places of questionable legality which require cash for presumably tax avoidance reasons.

That reminds me when I was in Schleswig (lovely town) on my way to Denmark. And I wanted to pay for 1 day stay, lady that had (a really nice) apartment said that unfortunately her terminal doesn't accept international debit/credit cards (wild! and probably not true) and I had to hunt for an ATM machine to get some cash. It was 13 years ago, I remember I was so surprised that the west is so far back behind us.

germany had bank transfers as the norm when the US still fiddled around with paper cheques.

Google Streetview isn't opt-in, it's opt-out. But it was used so much that Google simply gave up for a while.

Blurring faces (and I assume license plates) was a thing before they started serving imagery for Germany

See how StreetView looks like there (or looked), they have trouble being photographed.

They don't see security cameras because there are very, very few in Germany and the few that exist are in train stations, or private areas like INSIDE a business, or INSIDE a private estate, pointing inwards since they're seldom allowed to film outwards

And there is a big warning if there is a security camera around. And they get destroyed pretty often.

Source: living in Berlin.

Yes. Datapoint: the underground garage of the complex where I used to live experienced a large number of thefts (including my motorbike), and in 6 years we never managed to install security cameras because you need unanimity for this, and there's always someone who is concerned about their privacy.

Security cameras are illegal by default in Germany. Having one is a crime punishable by jail time, if you aren't careful to follow the rules.

If people feel obligated to be spazzy around cameras why would they go near an event on photography...

the ccc isn't about photography?

> At one camp, where there even was an event on photography, someone I met almost went into a rage every time he saw a camera.

There was an presentation on photography at a conference with 4-5 days and 6-8 tracks, in some many years of going?

So nobody should be allowed to talk about taking photos, if you aren't allowed to take photos in the surrounding week of the talk?

Another Australian checking in, living in a DACH country with life experience in most of them .. Germans are averse to social culpability in ways that Australians (and Americans) are not .. whereas in the US you’ll get a neighborhood watch person on your case for not cutting the grass in the right direction, in Germany you’ll get a grumpy unwashed totalitarian who literally thinks you’re gestapo because you took photos in the public park. Actually, come to think of it, you’ll get a grumpy German complaining about the grass cutting too, never mind that analogy.

Basically, westerners need to realize that the war shock is still reverberating through DACH cultures - remember, German’s were perfectly okay with having their neighborhoods ‘cleansed’ of those their state considered inferior - and then had to suffer decades of persecution for it - whereas Americans see themselves as victors in the freedom game, which is quite pathetic because the freedoms enjoyed in German streets on the regular would have half the American nation birth kittens in conniptions.

I’ll never forget how relieved I felt when I first cracked open a beer on the street in Germany. I don’t do it often, it’s not a thing I really see myself doing a lot. But just the idea of being able to take a couple beers to the park on a picnic with my new German girlfriend, and take a few naughty pictures of her (at her request and with full consent), washed away all the pretense I had, having (at the time) recently relocated from California, where I literally witnessed kids getting their heads bashed in by police for complaining about getting a ticket for having an unopened six pack in the back seat…. I don’t fear German cops, I find them completely amusing. I do everything I can to avoid American cops.

But you know .. Australians too, have their quirks in this regards. I’ve never met a more uncouth nation, frankly. The vitriol and invective I encountered, visiting my homeland again, just for speaking a bit of German on the train with my kids, was overwhelming… from little old ladies who should know better than to challenge a well-traveled cosmopolitan sandgroper on the subject of language. Oh, how their faces vacuumed into themselves once I explained that I was, in fact, Australian, and that I consider anyone who only speaks a single language vastly inferior to those who speak many - just as the original caretakers of the stolen land did!

All in, I prefer living in a DACH nation than either Australia or USA, unwashed totalitarian personalities notwithstanding. It’s just a more relaxed culture, all things considered. The war shock reverberates, but in the corners of it all you will find a lot more free thought than most of the western world.

And that’s another great reason to go to CCC and see for yourself: the freedoms of thought on display.