"Schneider's glasses"

Hotly cooked

The North Korean nuclear bomb has also been feared before.(Bild: EPA/KCNA)

"Nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked" - "Krone" columnist Robert Schneider can also take a lot from this sentence. After all, his experience has taught him that hype quickly fades.

There is often very little left of all the hype. A few years ago, I started randomly archiving articles that dealt with topics that were supposedly on everyone's lips and caused tempers to flare.

I started in 2018 with North Korea's ruler Kim Jong-un, who began threatening to mass-produce nuclear bombs. It was a real media hype at the time and a friend of mine was worried about his job and the world as a whole shortly afterwards. I recently reminded him of his worries from back then. He ducked his head a little and moved on to another topic of conversation. I'm leaving out the #MeToo debate here, as well as corona and the war in Ukraine. The latter topic is still in the news, but the air has actually gone out of it.

How can you tell when the air has gone out of a topic? It's simple: you can now talk about this topic however you like. They are no longer immediately placed on either the right or left fringes of society. The climate debate is a wonderful example: the ranks of the doomsayers have also thinned considerably. They can once again enjoy sunny days without being labeled a backwoodsman or even a climate denier. Yes, you can talk about the weather as much as you like again. That wasn't the case last year.

How ChatGPT has disturbed people! Said friend, who works in the photography industry, now justifiably fears for his job. If he survived Kim, he will also survive AI, I think to myself. All the bots that are making us redundant have actually gone quiet.

I'm already looking forward to the next hot topic!