Wendler's Alucalypse - Übermedien übermedien ornament--vertical ornament--middle ornament search paywall email übermedien-kompakt twitter facebook rss instagram whatsapp

I still remember that television interview. Michael Wendler sat full-screen on a cream-white sofa with a golden border. Tanned and sewn into a shiny suit, he reports how intensely he loves himself. Above him hung a diamond-framed picture of him naked in a bath full of coins. His look: hard and bold.

At the time, I believe, he spoke very proudly of buying a golden mirror, presumably so that from then on he could look at himself in an aristocratic atmosphere during autoerotic acts. He also plans to turn to more serious musical genres. A little less Ballermann. That's all well and good, a journalist interrupted him, but Wendler doesn't think that -

Of course, Wendler didn't see it that way. Wendler, Wendler continued defiantly, felt totally misrepresented in public. With "Big Brother" he, the Wendler, will show the real Wendler, the Wendler explained. That was the Wendler 2014.

A lot has happened in the meantime. Wendler was in the “jungle camp”, in the “summer house”, he is on Instagram, entered into a relationship with a girlfriend who was underage, had lots of advertising deals and other formats, lost a fight against Oliver Pocher, and a penis picture was circulating. Then a pandemic broke out - and everything happened very quickly. Suddenly there was a never-before-seen, a new, different Wendler.

As depressing as it is sad

The personal and media avalanche that Wendler started rolling with a small video was as impressive as it was sad: within a few hours, this previously unknown new Wendler made it, whose entire USP was enthroned on a thick base of hard-to-tolerate trashiness, supported by one unshakable confidence in his own abilities, apparently fully conscious and willing to pull the rug out from under his own feet and cancel all his existing public commitments.

The Alukalypse began with a blurred Insta video. Wendler looks worriedly into the camera, occasionally looking at a well-prepared text. "Almost all television stations, including RTL, are complicit, are brought into line, are politically controlled," he says, and accuses the federal government "of gross and serious violations of the constitution with regard to the alleged corona pandemic and the resulting measures".

For a moment there was an uncertain reality in which everything was possible at the same time. What happened? Was it some confusing media stunt? a prank? A weird promo stunt? A social experiment? Or actually: about a man who has radicalized himself into a complete corona denier, far from common sense, far from the production circumstances of a casting show, far from his own manager.

He finally sat with tears in an RTL special broadcast by Oliver Pocher and his wife Amira and reported what he doesn't really know himself. Wendler's advertising partner Kaufland immediately pulled the ripcord and removed a spot with Wendler published on the same day from all of its channels - it was deleted faster than the Wendler penis picture circulating on the Internet. And RTL announced that it would put further projects with Wendler on hold.

At the same time, Wendler's wife Laura posted Insta stories of her Halloween purchases with the calm of a partner who hangs up her laundry during a hurricane. As a trash version of a Memento Mori skull, the plastic skeleton was perhaps exactly the right symbol for Wendler's career, which had just died.

Radicalized into a new Wendler

Three months ago he was still joking about conspiracy theories and seemed to think the measures were understandable, he canceled his own wedding several times for security reasons. Wendler is not the first to publicly strangle himself with his aluminum hat. We also lost the former DSDS juror Xavier Naidoo to the dark side of the moon. Do all those blurs make your mind go crazy too? But then, on the other hand, Dieter Bohlen would have had his own Pizzagate for a long time.

The Column

Samira El Ouassil is a newspaper scholar but earns her living through acting and political ghostwriting. She also travels as a lecturer and, together with Friedemann Karig, makes the podcast "Piratensender Powerplay". She has been writing about media, politics and communication at Übermedien every week since 2018.

The conspiracy chef Attila Hildmann told the "Spiegel" on Friday that he knew Wendler from "Let's Dance", the dance show in which both appeared. However, the two had not had any contact since 2016, then Wendler contacted the chef on Wednesday night to tell him that he wanted to end his collaboration with RTL. "He knows that Germany is no longer governed democratically," Hildmann told Der Spiegel. "He followed closely what Xavier and I did in the last six months of our political investigation."

Then it happened in front of our eyes in public: With the help of the prepperganda of a phone call, a Wendler radicalized himself into a new Wendler, had himself sewn into a less shiny aluminum suit. No incel without a girlfriend, no one left behind without an income, not even someone who would have made massive losses as a result of the corona crisis, because the shows and advertising deals continued despite the pandemic.

Without wanting to pathologize him remotely, as was the case with Xavier Naidoo, I wondered how someone who seemed so connected to the social network could ultimately decide to want to fall through it voluntarily. How do you decide on such a celebrity death?

In order to be able to understand this, I would like to present two mechanisms that could have had an impact on Wendler's media reception and are intended to be examples of the radicalization that friends, colleagues and relatives go through.

The rabbit hole

In late 2019, there was a very notable study from the University of Berkley: Examining YouTube's Rabbit Hole of Radicalization. In it, Mark Ledwich and Anna Zaitsevsin investigate how users radicalize themselves, especially on YouTube; not consciously, but rather incidentally and systematically due to the Youtube algorithm.

The entrance to the rabbit hole is a thematic interest. Let's say you have a cold and are looking for a DIY recipe for a ginger infusion. So you watch a few videos until you have the perfect ratio between ginger, honey and lemon explained to you by a New York star chef or a grandmother in Toronto. The algorithm learns and from now on shows home remedy recipes on the start page, but of course those that have a particularly wide range or have been commented on, liked or disliked a lot.

If you look a little further, there are videos with thematic cross-connections: homeopathy self-experiments, videos about antibiotic resistance, angry speeches about the pharmaceutical lobby. The next time you call it up, videos will be suggested about Bill Gates and his connection to the WHO, in between two videos of men in gaming chairs saying “Think for yourselves! We're just delivering the facts here!" shout, then a nurse filming empty intensive care beds with the comment "Where are all the sick people?" - and suddenly there's a Ken Jebsen video that you might have seen because of the silly make -ups clicks or because it has four million views. From there you are quickly deep down the digital rabbit hole. Until you end up questioning the entire pandemic or lizard people like Barack Obama or the Pope.

And it all started with a cold and ginger tea.

While, out of boredom, curiosity or a search for meaning, you receive an algorithmically extreme flow of information that steers you further and further down this rabbit hole, you experience a kind of informational blunting at the same time, because every video that is suggested is even more radical , is more extreme or far removed from reality than the previous one.

That means you don't have to agree with the end point of the tunnel, you might be amused or frightened beforehand, but you have the small moments of conviction with the - compared to completely delirious "Pizzagate" videos - harmless content thought through and approved at least once.

This can also be transferred to our reception behavior in other social networks. The mechanism is the same wherever algorithmic suggestions are made to us based on our self-chosen media menu. The research network Correctiv showed this week in the course of extensive research which acquisition rights operate on Instagram. The principle is the same here too. Habituation effects and algorithms used to their advantage. Influencers who put a pretty face on fascism stand at the entrance to the rabbit hole, you click on their pictures and you get more and more of their subtly packaged right-wing content flushed onto your home page.

Lisa H., formerly known as Lisa Licentia, explained to Correctiv how she learned to guide followers to the right: “As a woman, I would never think of putting Kaiser march music under my pictures. But if I see it 20 times, I think it's funny and then I do it," she says. "You have an enemy image, and you try to gradually instill this enemy image in people."

Digital Incubators

These network dynamic effects naturally run parallel to the pandemic. They are reinforced by the longing for classification, clarity and the desire to overcome one's own information impotence. And in supposedly closed and unmoderated spaces of communicative self-help such as Telegram, Whatsapp and Facebook groups. Especially the way Facebook has changed the algorithm towards user content encourages these homemade echo chambers.

The platform tried several times to divert the focus in the timelines from external sources, especially news providers, to personal content: To do this, the Facebook groups were promoted, comment behavior was emphasized and content created on Facebook was made more visible. Facebook also wanted to get away from the image of the news aggregator, because social networks never wanted to be media agencies or news agencies.

The hermetic groups have naturally become incubators for every form of conspiracy theory, because they naturally elude moderation and corrective action. Facebook groups have been instrumental in the rise of the QAnon cult. From a shitpost on a cat girl hentai exchange called 4Chan, it seeped into the mainstream network and suddenly became something that people took seriously. Now we have thousands of Facebook groups that deal with QAnon and other conspiracy theories in all seriousness. Ironically, people who step into this spiritual dark room feel like they're the ones who finally understand what's really going on in the world out there.

Of course, this can also be transferred to Whatsapp, as we can see with the right-wing extremist chat groups that have recently been uncovered: It starts with jokes and memes until you find misanthropy quite normal. So you can also cultivate a hostility to science and susceptibility to conspiracy theories, the rabbithole principle on a small scale. It is also no coincidence that hoax chain letters are so successful, especially via Whatsapp, and your relatives may have forwarded you a total nonsense video about Covid-19. Which brings us to the whole operating principle of Telegram, which is open but simulates a closed space of (alleged) truth. Which brings us back to Wendler.

Now he's drowning in fool's gold

At the end of his announcement, he no longer advertises his Facebook or YouTube channel because they are "censored", but instead his new channel on Telegram. RTL itself had to realize that these groups cannot and do not want to meet any quality standards when Pocher's Wendler program was quoted from a Wendler group of all things, which was not the real Wendler Telegram channel at all, but a fake. Which is the most consequent twist of this whole story, which is based on a permanently staged human falling for a fabricated narrative, which is why he accuses the government of spreading false facts.

In 2014, Wendler bathed in a tub full of gold coins, now he's drowning in fool's gold. We can see from him how quickly it happens, almost immediately: a bit of a rabbit hole, a few conversations with Attila Hildmann, a little geographical distance from Germany and perhaps a mind that is very inexperienced and gullible. Suddenly a successful trash singer, who lived in more or less stable structures, became a man who ended up on the dark side of the moon with an aluminum hat.