Connect with us

Business

Germany’s ‘oldest and biggest’ gay nightclub declares bankruptcy | Germany

Published

on


Germany’s “oldest and biggest” gay dance club has declared itself bankrupt after nearly half a century in business, falling victim to inflation and an evolving party culture threatening Berlin’s nightlife.

Management troubles and dating apps were among the factors putting SchwuZ on the ropes last year and in May the club shortened its opening hours, laid off staff and asked regulars for help to plug a growing shortfall, to little avail.

On Thursday, the management team posted on Instagram: “SchwuZ has filed for insolvency. But: we don’t want to give up!”

The post noted SchwuZ’s integral role in Berlin’s LGBTQ+ scene since it was founded in Kreuzberg in 1977, helping two years later to launch the Christopher Street Day parade and the queer magazine Siegessäule.

“For nearly 50 years, SchwuZ has been more than just a club. It’s a second living room. A place for queer art, community, family, resistance,” it said. “Many of us have found what we were looking for here: a home, our chosen family, and freedom.”

SchwuZ, which is short for SchwulenZentrum or gay centre, moved to a much larger space with capacity for 1,000 revellers in fashionable Neukölln in 2013, which may have been the beginning of the end.

This year the club has had a deficit each month of €30,000-€60,000 (£26,000-£52,000), with income on a downward slide, the public broadcaster RBB reported.

SchwuZ’s managing director, Katja Jäger, said an ailing economy, an ageing core clientele and the creeping crisis in the Berlin club scene had all taken their toll.

Surging rents and electricity prices have threatened to put many beloved Berlin hotspots out of business after a shortlived post-Covid revival, in a gloomy phenomenon known as Clubsterben (the death of clubs).

In May, SchwuZ had to let go of 33 employees – about a third of its staff, many of them long-serving – and cut back on professional drag shows. A crowdfunding campaign collected only €3,000 of a €150,000 goal.

The club has now staged a last-ditch bid for supporters to rally behind it “for future queer generations who need a place that uplifts, empowers and makes them visible”.

skip past newsletter promotion

The social media post drew an outpouring of solidarity, with the drag star and political activist Gloria Viagra vowing: “We can do it together …!!!!” Other commentators, however, complained about an outdated music playlist and steep prices at the door.

SchwuZ hopes to stay open until October when the insolvency hearings will begin, RBB reported.

The dying nightclub scene in Berlin has become increasingly pronounced in the last year. Busche Club, a historic gay and lesbian dance spot, closed last weekend after four decades, blaming rising operation costs. Busche was founded in 1988 in communist East Berlin and developed an image as the “anti-Berghain” – a party hotspot catering for an international crowd.

On New Year’s Eve, Watergate, an upmarket riverside institution and part of the electronic music scene, closed after 22 years, citing a range of challenges including inflation, a growing preference for outdoor music events, high DJ wages and a drop in budget flights to Berlin.

The techno club Wilde Renate, which offers open-air and indoor dancing, has announced plans to shut at the end of the year after a protracted struggle with a property magnate over its lease.

The planned extension of the A100 motorway poses a further threat to several popular clubs around Ostkreuz railway station, prompting protests for Berlin’s centre-right government to abandon construction.

Emiko Gejic, a spokesperson for the Club Commission lobby group, said: “Clubs are an important part of the city’s DNA … but also an economic factor.”





Source link

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Business

CEO of Amazon-Backed AI Company Predicts “End of Human Creativity” in a Dystopian Future to Rival Any Movie

Published

on


The death of human creativity is coming, and it is coming from the ever-present threat of AI. At least, that seems to be the opinion of the CEO of Amazon-backed AI company Fable, who are behind the restoration of missing footage from the 1942 Orson Welles movie, The Magnificent Ambersons.

Edward Saatchi made an appearance on Squawk Box on CNBC last week, an interview that helped promote his company’s involvement in completing an 80-year-old movie that has been missing a large section of its story for many years. While this is a wonderful thing, and in many ways simply the next stage in the evolution of movie restoration, Saatchi seems happy to believe that AI will go well beyond just helping to revive lost and damaged movies of the past and will instead become as much of a creative force as humans. He said:

“What’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and that we will enjoy entertainment created by AIs. So, we wanted to train our AI on the greatest storyteller of the past 200 years, Orson Welles.”

Saatchi went on to envision a world where “a movie would come out on a Friday, with [an AI model] alongside it, day-and-date.” This, he enthused, would allow fans to generate additional content based on the movie, and by the end of opening weekend “there are millions of new scenes.” Yes, because that sounds like exactly what the world needs.

According to the CEO, who is not exactly likely to dumb down the purpose of his company, the idea of making “enormous amounts of money” from AI is something that studios and stakeholders are “starting to come around to” after rejecting it as little as a year ago. In his excitement for all of this money-making, potentially at the expense of actual human interaction with the creative process, Saatchi declared that the whole belief in computers being capable of generating original work would be “something Warhol would have found very exciting, DaVinci. The idea that AI can be creative and that you can create a work of art that creates more works of art is really exciting.”

AI Is Back at the Hearts of Several Lawsuits

Although Fable CEO Edward Saatchi is ready to revolutionize the world with AI, seemingly whatever the cost, the idea of anyone being able to create additional scenes for a movie is filled with so many potential pitfalls that it is impossible to comprehend the issues that could come about with such a thing becoming reality. Currently, AI is already caught up in several lawsuits linked to copyright infringement.

Anthropic AI, a company that specializes in generative AI, recently agreed to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit with a group of authors to the tune of $1.5 billion. In the last few days, Warner Bros. has joined Disney and Universal in filing a case against Midjourney, claiming the company has recently eliminated “guardrails” that previously prevented the platform from generating videos and images that use trademarked and copyrighted characters including Superman, Tom & Jerry, and several Looney Tunes characters. Today, Apple has found itself caught in the same web, with the tech giant being accused of using pirated versions of copyrighted novels and books to train its LLM, OpenELM.

Despite all these lawsuits, along with the scrutiny on AI content use in Hollywood from unions, it seems that those heading up AI companies only have their eyes on one thing, and it isn’t how their technology will impact the people currently making a living in the creative side of filmmaking and writing. For regular people, sitting in their bedrooms with no money and without the talent to render their ideas themselves, AI can hand them the world, but for studios, it can only hand them a way of cutting costs and increasing profits.



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Shadow AI enters workforce, employees embrace AI adoption: IBM

Published

on


Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have made their way into corporate environments as employees report using tools for work without formal approval from IT departments.

IBM says the growing reliance on personal AI tools in the workplace introduces serious risks to Canadian businesses, from potential data leaks and compliance issues to losing control of sensitive business information. Shadow AI, the use of software without oversight, costs nearly $308,000 per data breach, according to the company.

“It’s only growing until we actually are able to lock down the use of shadow AI, enable our employees and enable our organizations, but through sanctioned, governed, secured AI,” Daina Proctor, Canadian security services leader for IBM Canada, told BNNBloomberg.ca in a Friday interview.

A shadow AI survey from IBM found that while 79 per cent of full-time office workers said they use AI at work, 25 per cent rely on enterprise grade AI tools. The rest rely on a mix of personal and employer tools (33 per cent) or entirely on personal apps (21 per cent).

IBM said while AI tools offer organizations the opportunity to significantly improve productivity, the technology presents new challenges such as security threats. Despite the risk, the survey found AI adoption in the workplace is being led by employees.

“AI adoption in the workplace is no longer theoretical, it’s happening, and it’s being led by employees,” said Deb Pimentel, president of IBM Canada, in a news release. “To securely and efficiently harness the value of AI for smarter business operations, leaders should prioritize secure solutions, align AI with tangible business objectives, and foster a data-driven culture.”

Canadian workers overwhelmingly reported viewing AI as a tool that makes them better at their jobs as 97 per cent said they agree AI improves their productivity at work, 86 per cent felt confident using AI, and nearly 80 per cent said AI allows them to spend more time on the strategic or creative aspects of their roles.

“As humans, we’re going to find things to help ourselves to evolve ourselves to get more efficient, to get more creative to get more productive,” said Proctor. “As the saying goes, ‘water will flow downhill.’”

Surveyors found Canadian workers believe AI allows them to save time. More than half (55 per cent) said AI saves them between one and three hours per weeks and 26 per cent reported saving up to six hours. About 61 per cent of employees surveyed said AI allows them to complete a task faster, 43 per cent said AI enables more efficient workload management, 40 per cent said AI allows improved accuracy and 39 per cent said AI enables increased creativity.

While employees report using AI, highlighting benefits, only a small handful of surveyed employees (29 per cent) believe their employer is using AI to its full potential. Nearly half of workers (46 per cent) said they would leave their current job for one that uses AI more effectively.

Proctor said she wants companies to invest in AI so that employees don’t have to use personal devices.

“Organizations need to provide secured enterprise grade AI tools, or else we as individuals, we as employees, are going to find the AI tools that maybe our organizations don’t really want us to, so we need to close that gap,” said Proctor.

She said businesses are openly leaning into AI in a proactive, collaborative approach tailoring programs to ensure that their confidentiality, regulatory and conduct requirements are met to bridge the gap of what they need and what employees expect.

Methodology

The research was conducted by Censuswide, among a sample of 4,000 full-time office workers who are not sole proprietors and are familiar with AI tools in the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. The data was collected between May 23 to May 30, 2025.



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Funding extension for school holiday club programme in Cornwall

Published

on


A programme providing school holiday clubs for thousands of children in Cornwall has been extended.

The Time2Move holiday programme supports families with activities and healthy food for children aged between five and 16, and is fully funded for those eligible for benefits-related free school meals, the government has confirmed.

The government announced a three-year extension for the scheme, as part of a £600m investment nationally.

The programme is run by Active Cornwall, which brings together providers across the county, and said £8m had been invested in it since 2021.

Tim Marrion, partnership manager at Active Cornwall said: “We know that school holidays can bring particular challenges for families on lower incomes and children can face triple inequalities of social isolation, poor diet and low levels of physical activity over the holiday periods.

“Through our Time2Move programme we make a real difference for over 12,000 children and their families each year, so this funding extension is very welcome news”.

The programme is fully-funded by the Department for Education and is known nationally as the Holiday Activities and Food Programme.



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending