re:publica 2024 | Stage 1 – Day 1 | EN

Alle #rp24 Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAR_6-tD7IZWUKTU4nkDoKmzGTSocVAAx

The livestream of stage 1 on 27th May 2024 at #rp24 (English).

Programme:
https://re-publica.com/en/schedule?day=2024-05-27&search=&stage%5B5643%5D=5643

For German:

re:publica 24 – „Who cares?“
re-publica.com

let’s let’s not be distracted. Let’s look at what EU is doing. Let’s look at what politics are doing. I’m almost done now, but we’re funding this for 17 years. This is a really long time and only my relationship with Tania is older. We’ve been doing this for 17 years and for 17 years. We stressed that Republica is not a place for sexism, race ism, which of course includes anti-Muslim racism. So it’s really important for me to say Republica is also not a space for anti-Semitism. Thank you for being here. Thank you for making this place a safe space. Here is Markus Beckedahl. >> Hello. Good morning. Nice that you’re all here. We had the pre publica day with all the long lines so we can make them a little shorter. But most of you have been here yesterday already . The program team in the last weeks did a lot of work playing Tetris. We have many, many stages. That’s wonderful to be back because we have more space and we counted everything together. How many we had, or rather the way was a little longer to get there. We asked you what you want to provide for our program, and we had over 1000, entries. And that’s a record. But even if we have 28 stage situations, you can do the math yourself. We couldn’t take everything into the program. It was a big progress and we had a few track teams. We were able to take in 300 contributions, but we couldn’t take any more, so we had to decide and say, sorry, you couldn’t make it. Don’t don’t let yourself take taken down. Just try it next time. There’s over 800 sessions in these three days that we curated . That’s that are in our program on our website. That’s one of the biggest republicas when it comes to program that we ever had. And additionally, there’s 200 sessions at the partner stores that we discovered in the last days over thousands of pieces of program in the three days, with 1800 speakers in our system. Thanks for taking part in this. And well, we know the problem. We have to choose. You were able to choose one thing at a time, but we can only look at it on video afterwards. The stages are recorded as well as the lightning box. So for your background. So where do we want to go? If you have different things you want to see, believe us, we would see everything ourselves, otherwise we wouldn’t have taken it into the program. Not everything works in the end. Kids are getting born earlier. Some are sick or have to take care of family members. Some speakers of the Global South didn’t get visa by by their embassies, even though they wanted to discuss with politicians from Germany. I hope this get this is getting better for next time. The weather is a little concerning. There’s a lot of rain clouds coming in our weather apps. We have three stages in the Technik Museum. Two of them are open air. All the rain clouds just just didn’t take the location that a little more northern or more south, we have nice stages outside, but in times of climate change, it can happen that it rains. There’s one question that came up to us in the last days. Where do we meet digitally during Republica since second time, we met on Twitter and now we’re lost in platforms and we kind of distributed what does this do with us as a community? Do we have to post everything five times so we can talk to each other? It’s a really interesting question where we don’t have a solution for. We have the we have the year after the platform regulation, other tools, efficient and sufficient. Do they work? We can find that out. But that’s also why we have a lot of debates on these topics. To have an engaged civil society , to give them a stage and a discourse, and to ask ourselves, how can we restrict this might and how can we control the way, how we communicate with each other that less big companies get, get the energy to do all this? And we have to find out how can we build alternate lives that work with our work, that work with our values as well? And one topic Republica, was really important for how can we force democracy and how can we well decide how many people went on the streets to show that this right wing move is maybe just a virtual one, but still real? We are standing in front of this situation, and this time the Nazis might make it might make it to, to local, to local parliaments. How can we make democracy more resilient? What is efficient? How can we make those people stronger? Who, who fight for our democracy, against those people who want to destroy the democracy? How can we make sure that the discussion gets stronger? And how how do we get all these analogue and digital tools for this, this and everything else will be discussed in the next three days, and we hope that you go home afterwards. And they are motivated for a better digital world and to step in for it. >> So und jetzt and now Andreas Geppert is still missing. >> A round of applause, please. Hi Good morning everyone. Nice that you’ve come home, that you’ve come back. It’s incredible to see you all here. It’s been five years since we’ve been here on this stage. And time is flying. So, I’ve heard from a lot of people who are feeling at home and are feeling well here. We have about about ten football fields in area, including a space from the Technical Museum, I and Art. We had a little pre-conference yesterday on that topic and that was an opportunity to relax. If it’s getting too crowded in here because we are also, making record visitor numbers, my role as a CEO is to bring everything together in the background, but also to work with the partner team and ensure that this party is being financed. I will speak for you all the individual numbers. You can see them on the website. So visit go visit the website, look at partners. Thanks to all of our partners who are making this event possible. So please give them the biggest applause possible as diverse as our audience is, the partners as well, there’s partners from the public sphere. There’s NGOs, foundations and companies, and this variety and diversity is necessary to in in the times of crisis for event organisers, these prices are very high. It’s not that, it’s not a given that we’ve managed to organise this via a variety of partners. I want to give a big thanks to our teams, most of them are here, so a big thank you to all of the EU, Republica team members. It’s not a given. That everything is working so smoothly. Also from the facility management perspective, frame conditions have changed. A lot has happened in five years so that we can bring back this show like that again. Is really great and a big thank you to all. Press representatives. And Marcus didn’t manage, didn’t mention how many politicians we have here. This is also due to the fact that we have EU elections. So I’ll stress it again. Go vote. It’s only two weeks. Because this is the least you can do to bring our democracy forward. You will see me in bigger and smaller groups at this event tomorrow. We have a reception for embassy members, different embassies have representatives registered to represent ant, other countries and provide access to Republica. We have got the Swiss window for the first time with speakers from Switzerland and with the focus. What’s on, what’s going on in Switzerland. We have a lot of international audience. And if you work in an international organisation and are willing to work together with us, please approach, approach us because we would like to be more international in the future, because digital society is not just diverse, it’s also a global. So we have to see that we don’t miss the connection here in Germany to this development. That’s taking place worldwide. And with our ageing society, we sometimes have trouble and we’re not, in the first row anymore. So thank you to Johnny and Tanya. Johnny mentioned it that they integrated the Tenkan for the first time. So at 830, this house was full, which is great. There’s the opportunity for students to come here for free. This is a great opportunity. I want to tell you a lot, but I’ll make it short. Have fun, be safe and enjoy. So so. It’s us again. Now This is done. Opening is done. You’ll do a photo. Should we take the photo? All right. Thanks. So a short confusion, but we’re here to bring light into the stage, let’s do a bit of housekeeping. Let’s explain our offer. What we can do. What we can make possible, and what we have so. So this rooms, we have stages 1 to 0 here within station. Stages ten, 11. And park stations are in the on the grounds of the technical Museum. There’s the community hub, the makerspace, the podcast stage where we’ll record a podcast. You’ve got the lightning boxes, one and two in front of the partner area, and the atrium, and there’s an exhibition about virtual things such as a portal. So, yeah, everyone’s leaving at the housekeeping, even though this is really fascinating info, our stage contents on stages one and two, there’s a, live interpretation into English and German, and there’s also a sign language interpreter team who are into editing and transcribing the content so that everyone can share and participate. So and we’re also recording here on stage. There’s also a, an interpretation of the content of stage one into simple language. And there’s the Live Voice app, which you would need to download, because on some stages you can only hear the you can only hear the speakers if you have headphones. But if you forgot to bring headphones as I did, you can collect some at the info point. And if you’re, if your battery is low, you can rent, you can borrow power banks from our partner charging regarding recharge if you notice. Oh my god, I’m dehydrated thing. I’m not feeling well. There’s water stations from the Berlin waterworks where you can refill your bottle with beautiful cold drinking water. You can see the, drop symbol on the map. That’s where they are located at. And you can also follow up on the program in the app, and you will be notified of changes. So download it quick. Like if you notice something is not going well, if you feel unwell, if you’re being harassed, if you see someone being harassed, there is an awareness team that is walking around that are approachable. If you can’t find them, if you find a situation, you can also write an email at awareness at Republica. Com or call the number which I’m just giving through and this is too difficult for me to translate. Sorry And we have awareness teams here. And when parents want to hang out, there’s a kids and baby zone where you can leave your children. I think you can leave your children there. At least I left my child there. You just have to remember to pick them up. Yeah, we’ll see about that. So So. Sustainability is important to us. We are completely vegetarian this year, so all the offers are completely vegetarian. Thank you to GLS Bank, who is helping Republicans for offering a good, reuse system since 2014. We have the makerspace here, which is a space for all make errors and hackers. You can build a solar power station. We have special toilets, so if you want to go and explore, do so. We have a tin can republica stage where everyone is invited. So that’s the program for 13 to 25 year olds from 930 to 1430. And you can also come if you’re over 25 and want to have a look and there’s also a mobile, on the courtyard where you can do some hands on stuff. So that means I have to keep, a look at the watch. Thank you, Anna, for helping me inaugurate the Republica. Big applause for Anna Schumann de Schumann, please. See you later. And I now have the opportunity to introduce our first speaker for the, the opening keynote. There’s a lot going on today. There are a lot of highlights, such as on this stage today on 415, we have a session on the secret plan to take over Germany. The corrective research and everything that followed up because that was a big political scandal in Germany this year about the AfD party. So make sure to be here at 415. Also at 715 last session today we have Johnny Hausler talking to Annalena Baerbock, our foreign minister, about foreign policy challenges. This will be very interesting. But this is not just a lot going on on this stage, but also in stage two at 1230, we have Michael Friedman talking to Dario Grinfeld and a lot more so that will also be very interesting for everyone who has the stamina to not want this evening to end at 20. We will have Nobunaga. I songwriter who is really worth a listen, and then a Republican classic karaoke and everyone who still wants to sing can. Show us their talent so that’s just a few hints for today. I will bring you more hints, in the course of the day, this is just an overview. Now it’s the time to start. It’s time for the opening keynote held by a woman that I’m very glad is here today. She’s one of the most fantastic journalists, authors, and podcasters in this country country. She writes short stories, novels, essays, has is, writes for the Zürcher Zeitung, and she also has a podcast. She’s a fantastic speaker and she brings fantastic guests such as Michael Friedman, Agnes Zimmermann, Sibylle Berg, even Jan Böhmermann, who usually doesn’t visit podcasts but he came to her podcast to discuss about the most important topic of the time freedom, so we that the podcast is called Freiheit Deluxe and today’s topic is soft radical Party. She will tell and explore on that. Please give a round of applause to Jagoda markovic. Hello? Oh yeah. >> Hi. >> Yeah, nice for you to be here. I’m very happy to be here, too. I’m happy that you are here. Hi. And I’m. I think it’s so great that you’ll be doing the opening keynote for us and giving the first keynote. So can you give us a bit of a can you give us a bit of a preview what we should expect? Well, don’t expect anything, please. So that I can so that I can surprise you. I’ve just come back from the six week travels through Europe for a documentary series about Europe. So I’m in a kind of jazz mode. I have lots of thoughts. I don’t know if I can get them sorted as much as I would like, but I’m sure I could give you a few points that might get you talking. Great. I’ll give you the stage and I’ll be coming back though, so please have fun with Jagoda. Thank you. Well, there’s quite a walk up here, but here we are. And I have to say, it’s fantastic. As has just been said, I like to do podcasts and that is a very lonely situation. And speaking in front of so many people, that’s something that I have done a lot a few years ago. And then I kind of said goodbye to that, and it’s kind of touching to see that we are coming together and that as a democracy, we have this kind of public sphere and I’m happy that Republica exists, that people are getting involved, that they care and I was looking at someone talking about I last year. I’m glad to be able to talk about human and emotional intelligence. That for me is the basic precondition for everything that we create or that we get done or don’t manage to get done. And I’m serious about this jazz thing. There are so many things that I wanted to get into this. This is the first actual, event that I accepted. And there are so many people that want to show what they do and want to connect with others. I am not afraid of people that say, this is the bubble separating themselves. I think it’s allowed to celebrate yourself if throughout the day and the year you are striving for things, you have a kind of right to self reassurance. Whatever is happening out there. And as an introduction, I brought a small image with me, which you all probably know, and that has been that is useful in so many situations and that is this very well known small, big image of David Foster Wallace. I’m going to read it out in English and then explain to you why. I think it’s a very, very apt image for today. >> Are these two young? >> There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. Who nudges them and says, morning, boys. How’s the water? And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, what the hell is water? With this motto, I had to think of this year’s Republica because who cares? That is what I’m asking exactly. Those who are staging this forum every year and with you and your ideas want to drive social change. And the question therefore today is what the hell is water? And who the hell cares? We care. You are in the middle of it. And it’s more even, even more all the more important to find out what actually we care about so much. All of us cares. Because the best answer to the question, who cares for me has always been I do to not point at others and say, this one is not doing enough and this one’s not doing enough. But do I do enough? Do enough? And that’s the spirit in which I would like to hold this keynote, which I’m very happy to be able to give. I want to move away from talking about conventional care work, which we will surely talk about a lot, but move on to the care work for society. We talk about care, work for relationships, yes, for nursing care or these things. But what we actually bring along, what we take from our interior world and present it to the outside. That has always been the big decision. If I ask, who cares? It’s always been, I care, and that makes you vulnerable. Every time the mere fact that I have been travelling for eight weeks and thinking I’m actually too tired to be standing in front of all these people, but I cannot risk my thoughts to be dissected. But the question is, who cares? And that is something that democracy, democracy has to be built upon, because democracy is the civil society. I’ve always tried to be working on two levels, not always. I started out as a writer, for myself and, in publications. And I thought the theory is the one thing you go to a ministry and give a talk, and you have people sitting there and quite often they think along the same lines as you do, or they there is a kind of consensus, maybe that is here to do. And then I thought, what is actually the value of these talking and these theories? If I don’t get them tested and try to put it into practice, what I’ve said to actually, try out the change that I think is possible and risk failing. So after a few years of speaking in ministries about integration, about diversity, about inclusion, I thought I’ll now go out. The city of Heidelberg was looking for someone to run an intercultural centre, and I thought, that’s where I’ll go and I’ll try. With all that I’ve done and find out, is that actually still possible? Can I work in the institutions? Can I offer this to a commune? There are people behind there who are dreaming of change. Can I do that? And how can I do that? And in these ten years of my life that I gave to this kind of work, the decision on to say I want to move away from just talking in circles where there is a certain consensus and into a commune where, of course there are manyfold opinions and where political decisions are taken and where actually have to get those onto my side that actually don’t care in any way about what I say and about the change I want to achieve. Can I create a majority? Because we tend to forget in these heated times as where everyone thinks they are right, that we actually have to fight for a majority? And these impulses, my jazz impulses. I’ve actually divided into three categories. The first is soft radicality, which is about the attitude that in these ten years I developed for myself to actually be able to do this work in the public sphere and shape change and not harden up as a person. And this wish to be somewhat softer for a society. Make that usable for a society to this dilemma of saying a hardened society could be opened up for diversity, for inclusion. But at the same time not become hardened yourselves because there are so many wars you run up against and not become the way that the people that let you run into these walls. So I’m going to talk about soft radicality then about the firewall, which is related to a column that I wrote, which caused a lot of reactions where I didn’t believe that it would actually be possible. It was a column I wrote after this secret meeting in quotes happened in Potsdam for of the right extremist AfD party and others. And I talked, with someone and said, I’m going to make this a big column and talk about the way what it means. As a person with a migration history to actually meet these people with someone plans to actually throw you out of this country. And early this year it was Potsdam. And just recently it was Sylt, where people were just, shouting, right, extremist, things, so getting in touch with these people that are not in top of the food chain economically. True. That was another issue. And my third point was self-care. I want to talk about what it means. If you ask, who cares? And the answer is I care. And that actually gets you into a huge, melt stream of people thoughts and movements, you shape democracy, I want to say, but democracy shapes you back. So the thing that we want to change, it’s a full circle. Every time you change society, society changes. You And it just makes this you up completely. And you meet so many people that you perhaps wouldn’t like to meet, hate speech is one issue here. So how do you deal with this? And what is it like for those that are here in public, perhaps because they want to care and you can realise you can notice how much of the things we talk about is coming from an Anglo-Saxon background, so that that’s why I’m using many English words. It works in the original and the last word I would like to give you is self-care. So how do you look after yourself? Because that, of course, is also a necessity. So the first thing is soft radicality that I learned about in the city of Heidelberg, trying to get a communal project going and looking back, I think that was kind of a crazy thing to try because I didn’t know what that would entail. So for 20 years, people, foreigners at the time were calling for a place that would be would be open for NGOs, for democratic exchange, for a society that doesn’t understand migration as a deficit. They wanted a space where they could talk about their resources, their richness. And I thought, that is something I want to do. It was kind of related to the fact that Heidelberg is a very atypical city. The migrant, society is a very academic, so I thought this might be a place where I could set an example for Germany, how it could work and how you could understand it, not as a deficit, but as a plus. If I don’t have to go to the town council and say, you migrants have these problems, we have to teach them these and those things. We have resources here. We have people that are more educated on average than you are more cosmopolitan. What could you learn from them? We could be a country of migration and actually see that in a positive way, and not fight that based on a rhetoric of 50, 40, 50 years ago, but actually dream of a future that we could shape together. And I thought this kind of city would have to be one where this is easy. Of course, it wasn’t easy. I started to talk about this with people. I wanted to stay for only 1 or 2 years. I learned about I got to know very many so-called foreigners. I use the term so-called because, well, they didn’t have a German passport, but we don’t talk about the fact that more people than ever do not have a German passport. In Germany, millions are not actually eligible to vote, and it’s important to not gloss over that fact and just talk about migrants. We have to talk about our citizenship legislation and that this legislation has grave implications for them. They cannot vote for the politicians or against them that do that, make the policies that determine their lives. So people that are have were growing up with this kind of concept went to me and told me, well, nothing’s ever been done for us. I have always been the problem. I’m afraid of German bureaucracy, bureaucracy and administration. And then someone came to me, someone I will never forget. He had Turkish roots and he said, I don’t know if I can believe you when you say that you are going to see us as a resource, because what I have learned in Germany has been that people will only help us. I’m going to say it as harshly as he did. What I have experienced is they want to hack our legs off and then give us crutches. So they’ve always been told that they have a deficit and if you don’t see that, we will find that deficit and then we’ll give you help to actually escape that deficit. And that touched me. And I then took then said to myself that every time I do this work, I will not let the right extremists push me into certain corner and talk about deficits. I’m going to look for these resources and I will provide a stage for them. I will provide the resources. And it wasn’t that easy because even German grants, policies require you to formulate a deficit if you want to be supported and you have to go and say what? What are the things that these people cannot do, and then you are getting the support that you need. So you have about these cultures that are not German, but what about the cultures that also exists on German soil? And if I, I have been told that after the when there was a certain normality, people told us, well, what’s the problem now we have these people, we have these projects that are running. So what’s missing? What should we why do you still need us? So the things that were good were not strengthened. And that was perhaps the most important message that I learned. We are a country that has to learn to think about the good things and strengthen those good things in whatever way. We Mrs. >> We really have to learn to trust in the good. Good to not make it invisible. 2015 was just one example. 9 million people all but nearly disappeared with electrically and instead the few who were angry were so overrepresented that 9 million merely disappeared and that taught me that even when I argue with people who are, putting down others, I’m actually putting a light on those people. So So I had to self-discipline. Over the last ten years, whenever the law allowed criers turned up and you wanted to defend yourself, to not forget about those who do good, I will not give my attention to the loud people so soft. Radicality Does not use radicality to support those who decry others. My learning was that you have to have rules in discussion, that you have to demand those rules, and those who do not keep with those rules. I’m not going to argue with them because they are not playing according to the rules. So So that doesn’t mean that you can’t swear or get angry. But I don’t just want to exclude those from this discussion from of about democracy, not exclude those who are invisible, those who are not talked about it, but who know exactly who are the people in power and what they’re doing. So the time has come to talk to everyone. So that also included social media. In Heidelberg. I did my work silently and within two years, two and a half years, I managed to make an idea that was 20 years old, become a reality, a parliament decision where the AfD, did not vote and did not want that. And in the beginning, reactions were negative. People said, you’re not the first one who’s trying to do something, and it’ll just end up in the drawer. And maybe the must most hurtful reaction was a bourgeois guy who said to me, no one needs a migrant scrapyard like the one you’re trying to build. I didn’t know it was possible to think that way. I’d never provoked it up until then, I’d been an author. And you kind of have the opportunity to hide yourself off. And I tried. When I tried to change society, I came to certain realisations. People who studied with me and said, well, you’re taking over. Who do you mean you? What do you mean, take over? Well, there’s this German Turkish person and you. So you’re taking leadership. You’re taking over, aren’t you? So our generation for whom it was normal that migrants are part of our lives, are still caught up in this binary way of thinking. And it’s my task. And all of our task to not get stuck in this binary thinking. And the migrant scrapyard. Man, I looked him in the eyes and I thought, well, I can either start a racism debate or I can lecture him. But I just looked into his eyes and I looked, visualised a timeline. And yes, at some point, you will be in this and you will say, yes , this was my form about of radicality the soft radicality. So at this point, I don’t want to pretend it’s not hurtful. It’s not degrading. As an overachiever in this country, because you’re the example that shows that migrants are not like that. You’re the example of a perfect migrant. We study, we’re ambitious, and suddenly it’s my task. Well, only because, I have certain talents and my background and I just want to say, if you don’t assimilate, if you keep your memories, your history, your home country, you will stay vulnerable. And this is also a good thing. After two and a half years, I had, the, permitted the permission to build this house. So the man who set migrant Scrapyard later spoke out in favour of this house. I knew that it was possible. It’s just one example of many of people who came here, who experienced things together and not through debates. Maybe this is one of the difficult points that I want to bring across today. We are used to a discussion of a culture of discussions. It’s in the sense of Habermas, an existential part of our democracy, which personally I love, but we tend to forget the moment to experience things together with others beyond discussions. So it’s not just about discussing, about being right, about arguing . It’s means building something. And it’s difficult with Placa tive truths that sound right on the internet when is someone at racist? When is someone this and that? It’s often not as simple. But these labels sometimes make it impossible for us to. It’s very improbable that many of us in the room have racist patterns of thinking, but only if we accept this fluidity. We can say to ourselves, okay, those are my shortcomings. This is what I want to learn and then I can approach other people and well see their patterns of thoughts. And if you try to fight against that, you’re just putting a mirror in front of yourself. So you have to take a different approach. And this is something we have forgotten how to do. We also go along with people who we don’t agree with in democracy. And this will decide on whether it will be successful or not. A presidential candidate who has lost the election, will he concede that? And this is what it all comes down to you. How liveable is our democracy? This House, interestingly, still costs me ten years. I thought it was two. So much for who cares if you decide to take over responsibility connections form. I knew that if I leave, everything will collapse behind me. And that gave me the feeling that I would have to stay. So I worked together with the migrant office. We enhanced the democratic processes. So it all comes from one small community in a backyard or something. An institution of the community. The community took this topic and it’s not yet perfect. It will never be perfect. It can always we can always take steps back. But the potential is there. And that was important to me. And I think after ten years, I knew I could leave it alone and come back to writing. This is what is beginning now, and writing is something well do people actually read anymore? Are they ready for more complex content than an Instagram style? When this Potsdam secret meeting was uncovered? And although I don’t like the term secret meeting since it was pretty much an open secret, all along. It was about Will I write a piece about this? I had actually stopped writing speeches, and when I was writing, I got the feeling, well, when people like that come into power, you will be the first one who will be expelled. So how do we care in a society where we know that at so many fringes, it’s getting dangerous for the individual? In my articles, I will not discuss right wing ideologies and ideas. I want to reinforce what I’m fighting for and what motives awaits me. Many people are sharing it on the social media. My Friedlander, who said this was how it began back then to remember that we don’t we can’t underestimate reality. We are always constructing the future of tomorrow. And if we have the feeling we have to raise our voices, we have to raise our voices. And everyone who lived through this dark period in history knows, knows that their powerlessness is created when people become deaf emotionally, when they don’t raise their voices. So I want to encourage you all to raise your voices. And why do we have to do that? Isn’t it pretentious in these times? Isn’t it virtue signalling, because you’re sharing on your social media, posting photos and so on. Isn’t that a bad thing in Europe, where rightwing extremism is taking up the streets, there’s a right wing extremist movement that wants to usurp democratic institutions. I want to build institutions that are there for an open society. We have to reinforce our democracy, we to build institutions. It sounds old fashioned, but the fight against rightwing extremism is also a march through the institutions. Because if Democrats don’t march through the institutions as right wing extremists will do it. So everyone is needed to find their paths to vitalise our democratic institutions, to bring them back, to not give up space to right wing extremists, democracy can be abolished by democratic means that is the Achilles heel of our society. This is why we need civil society. This is why we need every individual. This is why we need people standing up and saying, this isn’t okay. So I can’t give a guideline on how to deal with videos like the one from Sylt. But we’re tired of, patterns of speech coming back from the 70s and 80s that led to right wing extremist attacks in the 90s. We cannot accept this, and we do not have to accept this. Anti-democrats would abolish democracy by democratic means. So I’m not interested in whether someone has been elected democratically. I’m interested in whether they spread democratic content or anti democratic content. Content At the moment, it’s not about outrage moral. Many We are discussing about the outrage and the moralising. There are forms I would also criticise us. I will come back to that. But still this, this form of outrage, if we do not pervert it . This is what outrage means. It’s a form of care work like it’s a form of care work to keep social networks free from lies. It’s a care work against troll factories fighting against disinformation. Care work has many faces today. The societal care work is what this democracy needs. We need the end of a silence majority that thinks that if you remain. Silent, everything will come into place. History shows us the opposite. We have to actively put things into place. And this takes me to the last part of my presentation. Self care. It’s always kind of embarrassing to talk about yourself in times where our planet is threatened by climate change. So many wars. Can you talk about self care at a conference like this? I think you have to, because only if we stay sane inside, we can fight the fights that I just described and at this point with self care, I would like to appeal to everyone. Social media. When I worked in Heidelberg, I avoided them because I always had to like, explain my migrant background, why I have a right to, participate. Am I not to white to blonde? >> There was like, competing for who’s the most victimised? >> Isn’t racism against white people part of German racist history? We guest workers in Germany, should we allow back each others? Or should we use social media to bring topics into debate? Positive topics content, openness, softness, vulnerability, interest in each other? I stayed and I will stay in social media because I do still find them important. I’m shocked. As shocked as everyone else by how many right wing extremists lurk on TikTok to draw in young people and statistically, young people are falling for this. They find right wing extremists. World’s views attract of. Suddenly they are attracted by authoritarian models and it is our responsibility to show them why it matters to care, why it matters to be responsible care. Work for yourself at home. Let me just give you one sentence. It’s a bit of jazz. There’s a group of people in this country, people with migrant background. They still can’t vote. They are usually not integrated into voluntary work structures, but still they do a lot of informal care work on a neighbourhood level, I know. So many immigrants who should have a or a medal of the public Merit. They help their neighbours, they help them find an apartment, even if their German is broken. They do their best to integrate other immigrants. And my wish is for this care work of the invisible million people, for people with broken German who care for each other to be visible. So please give a round a round of applause for this thought. >> And I always say self care is a bit embarrassing as a term because, it’s always a question when do I actually have some time off? I am not a fan of this, looking at yourself in self inspection, too much of it. But I found some great literature that showed me, and I would like to share two pieces of literature for all those that might be working in this area. I’m not without reason. I haven’t selected to Women Without Reason because, the kind of care work that I’m now focusing on is, of course, that one of by Audre. Of course, I’m afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. So I’m going to repeat this in German, of course, I’m afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action so is an act of self-revelation and that is always fraught with danger. I have to need to say this here, because, well, I really thought that with my generation, this might end. But we’re talking about fantasies. How people can be expelled from this country. One of my first speeches in the country were political speeches that are held after the NSU terrorist, right wing terrorist group had murdered immigrants. I told people that now this is your land too. You can stay here. We are standing behind you. We are 25% in this country and no one has the right through permanent violence, to give you the feeling that this is not your home and not your security. You have no right to do that. And each and every one of you that has to leave is someone for whom I would like to stand up here. So, Audrey Lord said, it’s always an act of self-revelation. It’s always dangerous. There is no child without a migration history whose parents never told them. Is that something you need to do? Can’t the Germans do it because they were afraid of their children? And you have become so accustomed to this that this is something normal in your country. When there were surveys of young people with a migrant background, and after these slogans were shouted in while the answers were, I’m not shocked, I’m used to this. We talk about future, we talk about change. But when will it change? Or how are they going to take this change back before we can really put it into place? So we have to get active now. We have to get it done. Social movements are the firewall. Social movements are the people that get together, take to the streets and this kind of digital mass, I always say this. The people that put up the beer tents and in festivals, but also those that have the ability to kick off a digital, avalanche. The people that took to the streets immediately after Potsdam. You can’t ridicule this. You can’t have it ridiculed by those that are cynically lounging on their sofas. And you wonder where they are getting this from. When people see that around them. In Germany, authoritarian in other countries, authoritarian rulers are kicking off wars. You have to show that the authoritarian, authoritarian, authoritarian authority is not the strongest, I now quote Gloria Steinem as the last person. It’s a very banal sentence that she wrote, and I think I’ve lost it somewhere. Gloria Steinem, self-esteem isn’t everything. It’s just that there is no nothing without it. And I have brought this with me because there’s been a lot of time in the US, and people in Germany are often afraid, especially when they work together to believe in a strong ego, you often in these influencer times, you get into a feeling of this is too much self representation, but to love the ego, the self and then the others is the beginning of everything we can do to perhaps make this hate somewhat smaller. If we can actually get love out into the world, we’ll have to see. But that’s what I hope for, for all of us. And I’m thankful to all of you who are here and show that they care. And I hope that my jazz has kind of worked out. Maybe there are there were 2 or 3 thoughts that might stay with you that you would like to talk about, to strengthen yourself, maybe to reflect it, whatever. But vitality, what lives within us, I think is the most important firewall. Thank you. Yagoda. A deserved applause. Well first of all, thanks so much for this opening keynote. I think that was something we all needed to see clearly again. But I would like to know something very completely, very different, you said you have been travelling for six weeks. Where were you for this documentary? I was in ten European regions, six countries, Poland. Well, I hope I can get the list together. Poland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany. I forget, but I was there and there are films. Six films where I tried to go to these places where it hurts in society. Where are these breaking points in Europe? Where are people having ideas for the future? There are six films on art Europe. Nice to Meet You is the name of the series, and I would be happy if you like to look at them. Is Europe especially particularly vulnerable? Threatened at the moment? Well, I think we are. And I think that there’s a certain strength that you can draw from this journey to see that is about it is about all of us in Italy. You will talk to people that haven’t resigned, but that know that this kind of shift to the right has happened. How do I get it back? How do I get the country back? I was in Poland and it was giving me so much hope to see that people have actually managed to vote the old government out. Nothing has motivated me as much as Poland because people weren’t actually as proud of that election result. They do deserve an applause though. Because as they said, it’s actually not that important that we’ve won this election. It’s important that with the actions we had in advance, we actually reached many people. Many people voted the way they did because they were sick of corruption. But through these protests, many Polish people have started to think differently. So the PiS party that were able to, to kind of get into people’s heads suddenly wasn’t as threatening as an authoritarian government. And that was what people were proud of. And that was very impressive to me. Yes. And I always find it very strange. There is no single line you can say that. There’s this wave towards the right and then towards the left. We have this big shift to the right. But as you said, Poland, Spain, the election before last, there were these kind of wave breakers from the left that were kind of putting a stop. Can we find a certain system like, feature in this? Well it depends on the kind of measure, the kind of level that you look at. If we accept that we have people dying out there, is it a shift to the right if this is not being prevented? We have to do this. As humanitarians prevent this, these deaths. And I do believe that we have to be honest. In France we have marine Le Pen, who is very strong, who even believes that the German far right AfD is too far right, in her view, because she wants to portray herself as a serious partner and we cannot underestimate this. The structures that exist that are being built, the foundation lines that are being made, what is what has happened on the left side of the spectrum is happening on the right. It’s the rhetoric, even the kind of structures that they got used to that were supposed to further democracy. They are now taken over or rebuilt against democracy. If civil society becomes anti-democratic, that is the real danger, if people in India tell me that Hindu nationalism is terrible, the people in power are terrible, but it’s actually the mob in the country, in society that isn’t afraid of this and is supporting this. That is the most, most the important danger because it’s about making sure that in the breadth of society, whoever is in power, there’s always a centre in society that has this democratic power and it has to be a broad spectrum, not just the left, a really broad spectrum, a stable majority in the centre that is fighting for democracy. That is important. If we focus Germany now, it is actually quite a miracle or quite a mystery, how these resources are provided, because you have to fight back against all the nonsense that is being spread all the time. How can you work against that and say, no, this is actually nonsense. You are always busy to fight against something rather than constructively build up or point at positive things. How can you actually use resources in a more sensible way? Actually I’m quite happy that you are focusing this because I’ve said, well, people might say, we’re just talking, but I believe in the power of the argument and the power of facts. I think we are neglecting the power of experience and the power of working together in an emphatic way. And through that, you might actually, dislodge something that you cannot work against in another way. So by not making an offer where I say, we have to fight back against political advertising, how would say how do you want to change your city? How do you want to get people together and that was the healing experience in the city of Heidelberg, because just thinking, I noticed that I felt critical. The more critical, the more clever. I would think. But the fact that cleverness actually exists, consists of risking something that 10,000 others might criticise. But then they criticise, getting involved to actually get people involved in your dream, to work with others is that kind of togetherness is what’s missing. And when I was in Italy or Croatia, when people were singing with each other in the evening, I don’t know how many times in Germany people found it cool to be singing with each other without thinking, well, is this really good? So to forget how you think politically, to build in the streets, in the gardens, a sense of neighbourhood, a sense of togetherness where differences can perhaps be ignored for a while we are in a mood of always thinking where are you? What have you shared? Instagram. What have you said? If we make this the measure of everything before actually interacting, we actually dissolve the inter-human connections, the empathy that we need. Even if someone is alien to us, we need to be emphatic. Empathetic. Actually, that is a good call for the singing that we will have at Repubblica. And to actually get into action. That’s a very good thing to say. I live in Pankow, in Berlin, and there are a few streets there where just looking at the houses, you have bunting over the roads from one house to the next, which makes which makes the place so much more inviting. So people from that house have communicated with people from the other house to get this set up. So these little things are where it starts, right? If I see the other person, if I react, that actually is something that is possible in an everyday situation. And I don’t understand the grumpiness in an everyday situation that we have so often in Germany, in other countries, turning into Europe, I see this kind of understanding , oh, you are a person. It’s not easy for you either. Everywhere in the middle of society is fighting against decline. So a kind of empathy, a kind of forgiveness, a little detail. When in Spain I often daydream, and when in Spain I bump into someone, and quite often in Germany I would be told, oh, take care, where are you going? But in Spain I would be told, look after yourself. So the assumption was not that I want to hurt someone. They are caring for me and to have this kind of presence in an everyday situation, to see how is someone that is sitting there looking at me and a civil society that is so strongly organised in various associations and clubs, has the danger of not seeing the individual in their function, in their situation. What is someone’s worth? Is there if they’re not the head of some association or club? And if they are in danger of being sorted out? A mayor that is being retired, whatever. If you don’t have a title, you are no one. And that often is the way that we deal with someone. This kind of thinking in ranks, if we can break that open to some extent and not raise ourselves above someone else and get onto the same level with them, and that is a kind of dream, something small that is not a political program, but starts with something we can do and where we can actually learn from countries. But it is hard work in those countries too. I was in Spain and thought, everyone is so new age, just like the Americans. I’m not this kind of a fan of this kind of self-optimization, but, this working on yourself is so much related to how much presence awareness do I have of what is happening inside me to better shape what is around me? And that was what I was thought of, this Gloria Steinem quote, to be able to react to the outside, if these both factors are there, with all the differences in everyday life, it helps. And I would like to get out of this fighting spirit in Germany and learn the friendliness that is true. >> That reminds me, I’m from Cologne, and if you watch people in the pub, they often a dialogue. Someone’s coming in and they’re being asked be is it like how, how are things going? And, the answer is always, so how about you? They’re really nice. You really you talk to strangers and talking to strangers when you go to the swimming pool. And there’s the older generation and they’re always talking to other people at the pool. As a lack of alternative. They are talking about their doctors, their children, their little speaking machines. So they produce thoughts and share them. And of course, that has to do with the fact that we are experiencing the first generation and I’ve talked about the people who developed that. We have a generation of children who experience the extent of the digital world where we don’t even know, how responsibly we are doing this. And the repercussions are a thing we will have to see in the future. Well, you talked about German debate culture that discourse is very taking us, very important to you. And it’s very important to people. I sometimes get the feelings that Germans aren’t very good at debating thing, but there’s a very highly intellectual discourse course that doesn’t take many people along. It’s just, given or trickled down. I don’t think that Germans are as deliberative as maybe British people or Americans, where you have debating clubs in school, where you learn how to take a stance or take the other position. Is that a problem here for I? Well, I don’t want to get too into that, but I’ve lived abroad for a while and I missed it because I have friends from Argentina who had a big crisis that completely took over the country. It was unrecognised able and they said we actually we envy you for the small debates like about an increase in university fees of ■k710. I think that’s a quality that we have. And the question is how we structured in Italy. I talked to a chef who said Italians love to argue, especially if the other person has another opinion. But still, we don’t lose ourselves in each others and we don’t have to convince each other. And this is what we sometimes misunderstand, and we misunderstand and arguing because we think we have to convince the other party. But actually we just want to understand the other party better. Everyone can keep their opinion, but you’ve had an exchange and tomorrow you can say, well, my car is broken, can you help me out? And this is what a neighbour, what constructs a neighbourhood last week we fought. But this week my car has broken down and you can help me. And she lived in the US and she said she she left the US and she doesn’t want to live without that. We do not discuss to win a fight, but to understand and maybe to even change ourselves. And this is why arguing feels so frustrating, because you. It’s always about winning. That’s boring because we’re not even good at it. And to be so rhetorical invested that you want to listen to people, it’s still, kind of, kind of putting yourself above the other. I’ve seen many European countries, and I like to compare. And if you arguing, enjoying the debate, enjoying the art of discussing without wanting to win the other person over. Well, I love arguing. I love arguing about important things. And as soon as it becomes important that I get this feeling that I have to convince the other party, even if it’s about which is Nirvana’s best album, I can argue for three hours and I have fun doing that, and it’s difficult to bring that together. Well all you have to also learn to not argue, because that’s also a fear that we have. When you talk about important topics, when you argue about important topics in society. There’s this fear that the family will fall apart. For example, that we lose our connection to others. Making our world view two dimensional. It’s difficult to, support this duality of opinions. I believe that we can argue about important topics without losing the other. Well in Heidelberg I argued with people which I would have blocked if they weren’t Twitter. And then this person turns around and suddenly cares about another person. So we should keep this sense of community before people radicalise themselves. I am often talking to a an Indian person who is talking about mobs who are difficult to bring back into the middle of society. So yeah, you kind of also have to support it and endure, the positions of other people to draw them back into the middle of society. Unfortunately, many people who are taking a public stance are threatened physically . I hope that we will be able to close this Pandora’s box. What Italian people love to do is, having passeggiata in the evening and going, well, going out for a walk, meeting people, chatting. This would be a good solution, wouldn’t it? Shouldn’t we all just get into this habit? Yeah We want to see each other and passeggiata is also like carrying about the other Jagoda. This conference couldn’t have started better. Thank you so much for being here and bringing us these important words. Thank you. Now now at 1230, we’ll continue with Jenny Day and Jana Clarkson. See you soon. >> So. All right, all right. Sorry for the delay. We had some technical issues, but, now they seem to be fixed, the next session will be in English, so I have to host that in English. But we have our live translation on the monitor at the site. So you have kind of subtitles, if your English is not as good as mine, for example. So, the next session is called Beyond Repair. And it’s pretty interesting because it is about the philosophy of repairing things. Isn’t repairing kind of an anti-capitalist technique, because it helps to not buy everything new or whatever. We right now have a new law, I think, at the EU, which has, the guarantee for a repair in it. So that’s a pretty interesting and important tech topic these days. And, this keynote is held by Jenny Odell. She’s an artist and writer from Oakland in California. Her New York Times best sellers were How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, and she is an avid, bird watcher, so I’m pretty interested in which of these topics she lead us today, and she’s holding a keynote. And after that we have a talk with her and Banhart person. But then I come back to you. But now we are listening to her keynote and we are very happy and proud that she is here. Give a big hand for Jenny O’Dell. >> Hi. Thank you so much for being here. And thanks to Republica for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you, before I get into it, I just want to give a little bit of a caveat, in case you start to worry about halfway through that, I don’t know where I am. I’m aware that this is a conference about digital culture, and as you’ll see, this talk is about some pretty insistently physical stuff. It’s about physical repair, but I promise that I will come around at the end and talk about how digital culture plays into this. And I also invite you to kind of keep that in the back of your head as I’m going. How you think these ideas could play out in our digital lives. So I’m going to start off by introducing you to a friend of mine. This is Trav, I met Trav in 2015 when we were both living in San Francisco, and we had some nominal things in common. But there was one major thing we shared a love of trash. Not that we would have called it that. At the time, I was an artist in residence at Recology SF, a waste transfer station otherwise known as the Dump, where individuals and businesses could pay to unload u-hauls full of unwanted objects. And the other artists. And I referred to this daily bounty as the pile for my project, which I called the Bureau of Suspended Objects. I was pulling things out of the pile photograph them, and finding all the information I could about their manufacture and marketing, basically trying to explain their existence in the world. I found that almost everything in the dump contained some kind of surprise. Sometimes literally. So Trav stuff is mostly second-hand, and when he came to my studio at the dump, he saw the objects in a similar way. The trash was not trash, but objects full of potential deserving of attention. But he also possessed something I didn’t have the propensity to bring things back to life. One time I found in the pile separately, a Nintendo Entertainment System with a Super Mario Bros. Game cartridge still in it, and a seemingly broken 1992 Sony Trinitron monitor. I researched and catalogued them, but didn’t do anything else for me. They were objects of contemplation, not objects of use. But when Trav visited me at the dump, he got the NES working on the Trinitron and we got to play a glitchy, version of Super Mario Brothers. After I finished my residency, I moved into an art studio with Trav and some of other some of other people in a space appropriate to our shared interests a creaky old shipbuilding site, and a disused pier, a structure that even then was slated for destruction but for some reason still exists today. My desk, a board sitting across two file cabinets I found from a nearby seller of recycled building materials, fit right into the studio, which was full of second-hand furniture and things thrown out by other studios, including inspiring paintings like this. During these years, one of the things I got used to seeing was Trav’s hat, which you can actually see here in this video at the time, the hat was new. It’s foldable, meaning that it has a circular steel band that lets you pop it out somewhat like a tent, and then fold it up and stash it in a little bag. But when it arrived, the hat was already asking for a form of repair. Trav noticed that the cotton was very weak and didn’t completely block the sun, so he sewed another layer onto it using fabric he found in the dumpster of a textile factory and MacBook cleaning cloths, which he’d gathered while working in it. The sewing thread was dental floss. On his website. He later wrote. The result has a post-apocalyptic witch vibe, which is not my usual vibe, but I have adopted it. The crazy stitching also makes people ask if I made the hat, which the answer is no, but I did basically recreate itself on top of itself. So kind of. I should note that this process has been ongoing. When I asked Trav if I could include a photo of his hat in this talk, he asked if I meant an up to date photo. These are some up to date photos. Trabb’s hat, and the question about whether he made it may remind you of a famous ancient Greek thought experiment. The Ship of Theseus. The thought experiment goes like this if you replace the planks of a ship, not all at the same time, but as needed as each plank decays is it the same ship? And as Trav points out, this is also a way of asking have you repaired an old ship or have you built a new one? What I want to do in this talk is dwell in that grey area between repairing and making. Using a couple of my recent experiences learning how to fix an object or restore a landscape. But in addition to this grey area, I’ll also talk about what this practice can mean for us. For our relationships to objects and places in ways that might ultimately repair us. And then, as I said, I’ll touch on how digital practices and digital culture represent both an obstacle to this kind of relationship and a potential support for it. So to start off, let’s talk about the relationship between repair and making first in the realm of objects. Trav lives in Vermont now, but he visits the Bay area once in a while and on one visit he gave me a darning needle and showed me how to darn a hole in a sock using one of his own that was currently in progress. So I have another little caveat here. I have no idea how common sock darning is in Germany, but in the US most people I talk to not only don’t do it, they don’t know what it is. So I’ll just briefly explain, it involves stretching the hole out on something. There are wooden implements for this purpose, but Trav uses a jar lid and I use a bottom of a jar, and then sewing running stitches with long stitches over the hole and then after that, you turn 90 degrees and sew across, going over and under the stitches you just made. This part of the process is very hard to distinguish from weaving. You’re essentially making fabric within the hole. I swear I wasn’t stoned, but during the long half hour in which I darned my first sock, I realised that this is, after all, all that fabric is over, under, over under. After my first attempts, I half expected my work to come out in the wash. A combination of my lack of skill at sewing, the age and fragility of my socks, and the use of such small, insubstantial seeming thread. But the socks have survived many washes. At this point I started to realise that they weren’t just repaired, but in fact reinforced in exactly the places where they were the most likely to wear out. Surprised by this, I told a friend that I felt like I had made my socks go backwards in time, but in other ways they went forwards in time. Obviously it’s not the case that I made a sock, but neither is it the case that I exactly restored it to its original condition. The first pair of socks I darn. I still remember buying at a Clarks store in a mall many years ago, and I knew they were manufactured overseas, but now this wasn’t the full explanation for their existence because I too had had a hand in them. Repair restores something to a useful condition, but there are always decisions to be made in the case of visible visible repair, these can be design decisions or repair can be an opportunity to tailor something to fit your own particular body better. And even when something can no longer carry out its intended use, there’s the creative decision of what to make out of its material. In all of these cases, objects aren’t just something to be chosen among taken up, and discarded. Rather, they acquire a transparency. There appears to be a way of intervening in them, which in, however small a way, means intervening in the world, especially if you’re not used to this. It feels strikingly different from the freedom a consumer has to choose among prefabricated options. When I was first looking for a thread to darn my socks, you can see my socks in the corner here. I visited a fabric store about a half hour’s walk from where I live. The shop was owned by an amazing woman named Lan, who basically became my idol. In the space of one conversation, she showed me the holes she had darned in a cashmere sweater she had. I could barely see them at all. Then it turned out that Lan made all of her own clothes and she didn’t even use patterns. Sewing was such a part of her life that she sewed for an hour every morning, no matter what. Something that reminded me of what Trav calls his morning meditation. In one of the things Lan and I talked about was how in the past and even now, repair was associated with poverty, I mentioned that when my own mother was growing up in the Philippines, she regularly made and repaired clothes for everyone in the family. This is a dress my mom made for her sister in the 1970s. What I observed in both my mom and in lan was not only the quiet anti-consumerism that resulted from this upbringing, but also the easy continuum between their knowledge of how to construct a garment and the knowledge of how to repair one. Because on a basic level, in order to fix something, you have to know enough about how it’s made. In a recent sewing class, I took for Total Beginners, when we were asked what our ambitions were, several people said they didn’t necessarily want to make new clothes, but rather to alter and repair the clothes they already had. Over the course of the class, you could see everyone, myself included, have a series of moments about how things were made, rendering the entire world of sewn objects immediately more legible. And this made everything in our closets seem less like endpoints and more like starting points. Things we could have a hand in evolving, like the Ship of Theseus. So that’s just a little preliminary stuff about mending. I want to move on now to the realm of landscapes. So at the end of my book, How to Do Nothing, I use the phrase manifest dismantling, which is a counter reference to the American phrase manifest destiny. My example of such productive dismantling was the removal of a nearby dam, which not only required significant creativity in policy and engineering, but also basically meant the creation of trout habitat. The Bay area is full of inspiring habitat restoration projects, and I’ve remained interested in that practice ever since. But I’ve never had a hand in it until I started volunteering at something called Skyline Gardens. But in order to explain Skyline Gardens, I need to give you some context about where I live. Many hills in California are covered in invasive European grasses. Plants have, of course, moved around for millennia, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Believe me, as a biracial person, I find the idea of a place based purity frozen in time as undesirable as it is impossible all. So I want to be specific in ecology, the difference between what is simply a non-native plant and something that it’s considered invasive has to do with how it behaves in an ecosystem. One example of an invasive plant that I believe is also here in Germany is English ivy. Under the right conditions, ivy will choke out all other species in an area, even climbing up and killing trees and leading to what some have called an ivy desert. In contrast, we also have a widespread non-native plant called broad leaf planting that commonly grows as a weed. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, the Native American author Robin Wall Kimmerer says that we think of this plant as native simply because of how it behaves. It doesn’t colonise entire ecosystems and finds ways to fit itself in. Deserts of invasive plants have cascading effects on other plants, on insects, on animals, including humans. Where I live, they can also decrease the land’s natural resistance to wildfire. It gets to the point where we can say, in some sense, that the ecosystem is broken simply on the level of biodiversity and resilience. What remains of this biodiversity is something I’ve become much more familiar with over the last 5 or 6 years, as I’ve come to learn the names of things I’ve lived near all my life, a process that I describe in How to Do Nothing. But in all those years, I remained in the position of an observer, just like I’d observed the Nintendo and the Trinitron. I revelled in little pockets of healthy ecosystems is when I found them. But the relationship was one way characterised by admiration alone. At some point I found out about Skyline Gardens, a four year old volunteer project to restore a meadow in the hills east of where I live. I didn’t immediately go because I was somewhat intimidated. I’d never gardened before, having lived in apartments my entire adult life. When I did finally show up, I was given a warm welcome and a gardening tool I had no idea how to use. We trekked out to the restoration spot, which branched off from a trail I’d never been on. What I saw there was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Growing up in the Bay area, there was not only an absence of invasive grasses, but a profusion of native wildflowers. Some familiar, some not, and this native purple needlegrass, a single plant of which can live for 100 years and whose deep taproot makes it wildfire tolerant. How did this happen? I learned that the group’s work was informed by an Australian technique called the Bradley method, which you can think of as sock darning. In reverse. You find existing patches of native plants that have held on and work outward from there, proceeding only once those native plants have caught up and recolonised the area you’ve weeded. This is a before photo from the area I just showed you. In this case, there had been a few lupine bushes to begin with, although you can’t yet tell in this photo. This area is ecologically unique because it’s where the cool weather from the Pacific Ocean meets the hot winds coming from east of the hills, so it has a lot of potential for biodiversity. A man named Glenn Schneider, a landscaper who discovered the site and got a permit from the local parks department to work on it, knew that the seeds of invasive grasses only lasted in the ground for three years, so it was actually quite simple, he told me. As long as you were willing to come back and mow and weed twice a week for three years in the meantime, he had planted only the seeds of native plants from remnant prairies in the nearby hills, and the volunteer group had come back week after week, year after year . Glenn told me the way he knew it was successful was that the bugs had all come back. Indeed, there are more flies, bees, butterflies and other bugs up there than I ever see anywhere else. On my first day, after taking some time to admire the successfully restored meadow, we moved to an area on the periphery that was still in progress. On the edge of that circle, in the diagram I just showed you, I was invited to get right into the middle of these native flowering shrubs and try to pull the invasive grasses out from within and around them, learning the different kinds of invasive grass. We were looking for was like struggling to distinguish words in a new language. I can only now tell you there are four different kinds of weeds in these photos. Eventually I started to get it and I decided that I even liked weeding. This will be unsurprising to anyone here who gardens, but ripping plants out of the ground may feel counterintuitive if you see nature as something sacrosanct to be left completely untouched. The idea of human intervention seems to exist in tension with the idea of nature left alone, one could look at the hillside now and ask, is this restoration? Or is this gardening? Indeed? The name of the project is Skyline Gardens, but the idea of pure restoration without creativity or renegotiation relies on an often fictional or impossible idea of how something is supposed to be. The truth is that this particular ship of Theseus has, at its planks, replaced for a long time for thousands of years, the native Ohlone were the ones doing the opposing, simultaneously maintaining and shaping the land where the Spanish colonists saw wild nature. The Ohlone had long intervened in essentially gardened and farmed this same landscape to bring about a diversity that was beautiful and advantageous. And to give just a few examples, one of the most beautiful flowers in the meadow, Chia, was used for chia seeds, similar to the ones you’d buy at the store. Now wavy leafed soap plant was, as you might guess, used for soap, but also to make brushes for cleaning baskets and mortar stones, prairies and oak savanna in general were valued not only for all their useful grasses and flowers, but as hunting habitat for elk and deer . The point here is that in California, the idea of landscape immemorial means a landscape that has been immemorially, tended or neglected by humans. I came across a striking example of this when researching indigenous fire management for my second book, Saving Time. It was in a lecture by Margot Robbins, the director of a group that handles burning on native held land. Left alone, prairies will often start to be encroached upon by surrounding forests. When Robbins showed this photo, all I saw was a natural setting, but she explained that it, because it hadn’t been burned as it normally would have, things were out of the desired balance. The hazelnut was being encroached upon to the point where animals wouldn’t be able to eat from it, and it eventually stopped producing. She pointed to a young Douglas fir tree on the right. An ambassador of forest, and said, quote, this fir tree is starting to encroach on what is supposed to be an oak woodland savanna. When leaders like Robbins describe a practice like this one that destroys, creates and maintains all at the same time, they’re not describing something solely of the ancient past. Currently, Cal Fire, a state agency, is working with indigenous groups to reintroduce these methods to our forests and prairies because, ironically, lack of what we call good fire is partly responsible for the out of control wildfires we’ve been having. Indigenous groups have taught us that while overdeveloped is obviously harmful, stewardship means something very different than just leaving a place alone, like weeding fire is an intervention in favour of the way it’s supposed to be a biocultural standard. That has to do with what we ask of our landscapes as humans, and what they ask from us in return. So once again, we see how repair is inescapably creative to maintain is also to create. That’s one thing that these two brief examples I’ve given mending and restoration have in common. It’s hard, in either case, to separate the fixing from the making, because the very act of repair involves finding ways to tie elements of the past to our present desires for what we want to see in the world. But there’s something else important they have in common something that will initially appear to have more to do with the repairer than the repaired. If we return to the ship of Theseus, what’s missing from this image? It’s the person or the people maintaining the ship and their relationship to it. This is really important to me to give you a sense of why I need to talk a little bit about alienation, by which I mean a little bit about my experience of where I’m originally from. I grew up in a 50s era suburban tract in Cupertino, which some of you may know as the headquarters of Apple. I spent my teenage years haunting, near-identical non spaces like this one Cupertino crossroads, which ironically, is the site of a real crossroads and general store in the 1800s, which is considered very old for us in California. Cupertino’s actual geographic location next to the Santa Cruz Mountains, its actual ecological history, if it appeared at all, felt remote, similar to its vague invocation in the background of the architectural rendering of the Apple Spaceship campus. As an adult, I cackled in recognition when I watched Vivarium, a horror film in which an unsuspecting young, childless couple goes to an open house and gets trapped in an empty housing subdivision by anonymous sinister forces. The winding, identical roads confuse them, always bringing them back to the same house, which they eventually resigned themselves to. Living in the husband starts digging a hole in the front yard in a desperate attempt to reach something else. The couple live out their meaningless days in isolation and having mysterious packages of shrink wrapped food delivered to their door. Eventually, another mysterious package arrives with a baby inside, and the inscription raised the child and be released. This film would be a great watch for anyone wanting to think about social reproduction, but it is also an unsparing depiction of suburban alienation that over the top, as it is, rang true for me. I may not have grown up eating shrink wrapped food, but I am all too familiar with the fear of living an isolated life in a dead world, a world that never speaks back to you. How this not only makes your environment seem less real, but also makes you feel less real. So much of my thinking and my work has congealed in response to this early experience and longing. This is why in How to Do Nothing, I was so drawn to the philosopher Martin Buber’s distinction between an I it relationship and an I thou relationship. An example of an I it relationship would be the one between a consumer and a product. But I it describes really any way of seeing an element of the world as not having its own existence, where something can only be useful to you, a threat or completely irrelevant. In contrast, an I thou relationship is one in which the other is a thou has its own reality, and where the interaction includes both. In this case, I am no longer untouchable, but rather changed and affected by thou. One familiar example of I, thou is a conversation versus just being talked at. We know that in an actual conversation, each person is equally present and their thoughts and positions are changing based on the other’s in real time, which is why the course of a real conversation can’t be predicted. A conversation leaves both speakers changed as so beautifully illustrated in My Dinner with Andre, one of my favourite films. And sometimes it turns out that a single conversation can change your entire life. The distinction between I, it and I, thou gave me a way to understand what I longed for in my suburban youth, what I wanted without knowing it, was that conversation which would have required another people, not consumers. Things not products and places, not real estate. Without these, I was left with a feeling that neither I nor the elements of the world around me truly had anything to do with each other besides happening to be here at the same time, to return to the ship of Theseus. It’s as though I could see a ship, but not yet see how it had been repaired, much less imagine that I could ever respond to its need for repair. And so at this point, I want to basically turn around and go back the direction we came by, thinking about how the other the thou appears in both the examples I’ve shared and how repair makes that conversation possible. The idea of the other might seem obvious in the case of landscape restoration, since the West has its own long tradition of personifying nature. But I think there’s something a little different from that happening at Skyline Gardens. What I encounter there is not so much a universal mother Nature, but rather a place with its own character, capacities and desires. This only appeared over time as I visited the site in different conditions on days when different things were flowering or not. Flowering I noticed that the group has pet names for different parts of the site, which serve the practical purpose of identification, but are also clearly terms of endearment. To name anything is already to enter into a certain kind of relationship with it. Glenn, who runs the group and who you can see in this photo, uses specific language that reminds me a lot of Buber’s I-thou about the prairies we work on. He writes, quote, having won our hearts, they have called forth a huge effort on our part. Literally thousands of volunteer hours to assist them on a path to recovery. Likewise, when pointing out the abundance of bugs to me, he used similar language. It was the bugs who had accepted us who had judged the restoration sufficient to start moving back. I mentioned earlier that before this I had never gardened. I found that it was surprisingly intimate, getting so close to those plants and carefully disambiguating them from the weeds. I couldn’t help but notice how different this felt from the many hours in my life I’ve spent hiking and appreciating nature, even when I was looking at it very closely. After a certain number of weeks, individual shrubs I’d worked on started to seem like characters, ones I could see, but which were also seeing me after my first visit. Having learned how unrelentingly sunny it can get up there. I had bought a white parka from a thrift store and a pair of my own gardening gloves, which happened to be in almost latex blue. The incidental combination made me feel like a doctor. Two things were happening at the same time. The flowers were flourishing, but with their inescapable hold on me, they were also changing my self-conception turning me into a flower doctor. I think I was experiencing what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls resonance in his book by the same name, which was translated into English in 2019. Rosa maintains that quote our scarcely articulated yet in practice quite powerfully guilty conscience, about no longer heeding the voice of nature in our collective productivist and competition oriented behaviour, generates an unspoken collective desire for nature to become audible and speak to us again. Perhaps this explains not only my experience, but something I read in an article about the ailing forests of hearts National Park that in the 90s, park rangers had had to repeatedly solicit volunteers for help planting trees. But in 2019, the number of people showing up at times outnumbered the available seedlings. One ranger said we have a lot of inquiries from people who have a need to do something to help the forest, and there I would emphasise the word need. Now Now it might be harder to imagine this kind of relationship in the realm of objects. Can you really feel this way about a sock? My experience says yes, I call as my witness here Marie Kondo, author of the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I don’t know how popular this book is here, but in the US it’s so popular that many people, myself included, totally wrote it off without ever having read it. Kondo is sometimes associated with an austere minimalism and, somewhat ironically, with materialism. When I actually read the book, I was surprised to find that Kondo unabashedly personifies the objects she talks about, which makes sense given that, as she mentions at one point, she previously worked as a Shinto shrine maiden. Shinto is an indigenous Japanese religion that is polytheistic and animistic, one where a thing we would call an inanimate can very much have a life. For example, this is a photo of my friend recently took in Japan of a small shrine for the spirit that inhabits this thousand year old horse chestnut tree. You can find many such shrines in Japan. Kondo’s book, which is informed by Shinto but written for the mass market, is fascinating as a translation of these ideas into a culture that doesn’t typically afford experience to non-humans, much less to objects. So to me, Kondo’s book is about acknowledgement in the I thou sense, oh, sorry, the section on how to properly store your socks is titled treat your socks and Stockings with respect, she writes. Socks take a brutal beating in their daily work, trapped between your foot and your shoe, enduring pressure and friction to protect your precious feet. The time they spend in your drawer is their only chance to rest. She implores the reader to lay them flat and fold them in thirds, not just because balling them up wears out their elastic, but because it’s what they deserve. In Kondo’s book, we care for and lovingly arrange objects that speak back to us, that thank us for our care. My own experience suggests that each time you repair something, you take it further away from being a branded product and closer to a thing on its own terms that converses with you. These are some of the things that you come to consider 15 minutes into darning a sock that it’s made out of, cotton that grew out of soil in a field somewhere under this same sun in the sky, that it’s chemical dye was synthesised from metals that in some way, shape or form came from the ground, that the threads were woven. The pattern cut and sewed by machines operated by humans. Even the very shape of the sock of clothing in general, is a reminder of the human condition. How the world brings out in us the need and the capability to supplement our bare bodily existence with materials we gather from that same world. These are not just feelings. These are facts, the sustained contemplation of which can turn yes, even a sock into a thou Marie Kondo’s world of cared for objects contrasts in the extreme with the treatment that you see in the recent documentary on Brandy Melville, a cheap, ultra fast fashion brand headquartered in Italy but incredibly popular in the US among middle school and high school aged girls, this film makes a brutal cut between hall videos in which shoppers display the many items they’ve just bought from the store and images of textiles being washed into the sea. In Accra, the capital of Ghana, which houses an enormous second second-hand textile market, where sellers often repurpose used items but obviously can’t save or resell everything in the hall. Videos The clothes seem almost symbolic, passing only briefly through the lives of consumers, not made well enough to last long anyway. But at the coast in Ghana, the solid thingness of these castaways comes to the fore. They’re now meaningless brand names exposed to the same elements that, in some way or another, went into their physical material. I’m reminded of how I felt standing in front of the pile at the dump. This orphaned material cannot simply be wished away. Vaporise or sent into space. Its existence becomes insistent, calling on us for the acknowledgement that consumerism denies. Perhaps this is why I was unexpectedly moved almost to tears by the first page of Mending Life, a Handbook for repairing Clothes, and Hart’s quote consider every garment you’ve ever owned. Consider where it is now. Consider a garment you loved that you let go of along the way, deeming it irreparable. Now imagine hands open in front of you, offering you that garment, revived and ready to wrap around your body once again, ready to keep you warm or dry or cosy or beautiful. Once when I asked Lorne at the fabric store about sashiko mending a Japanese technique, she said that in Japan there had been a culture where you had one jacket that was your jacket, and if it had a tear in it, you not only needed to repair it immediately, but you needed to make the repair look good. The jacket served you and in turn you had a responsibility to it. You were the keeper of the jacket. It goes without saying that this investment of effort and attention into something, and the resulting enrichment of its meaning to you, is different from the so-called meaning that product advertising offers. The kind of pre-packaged meaning that somehow always magically disappears once you buy something and bring it home. I had a front row seat to this during the few years I worked at a clothing corporation where the advertising assets on my screen contrasted with the incoming boxes of what was referred to simply as product, as evidenced by our landfills and those mountains of discarded clothing, and by our uncared for landscapes. It’s obvious enough what the importance is of cultivating a culture of repair. But what I’ve tried to focus on here is not merely the practical and environmental stakes, but the stakes for ourselves and our stance towards the world. Heartmade Rosa, while noting differences across culture, finds a desire for resonance to be universal. He writes that, quote, a lack of resonance and a predominance of alienation represents an objectionable state. I take from this that we have a right to resonance. This is why we should be doubly angry about the old paradox with capitalism, that not only have we developed time and labour saving technology that has not made us free to care for ourselves in the world, we also have the technology to make things incredibly long lasting, worth repairing, and yet we’re just producing garbage faster and faster. There are also corporate obstacles to the right to repair, as well as planned obsolescence. And I think there’s a panel on that tomorrow , but when I say doubly angry, what I mean is that completely apart from the external costs and sheer irrationality, this this situation deprives us of the meaningful relationships that can also maintain us. Now, when you think about those hall videos and a world of unacknowledged objects passing through our lives, you might be reminded something of something else other than shopping, scrolling. Indeed, in his book Non Things, Byung-chul Han, another local figure, writes that quote, the constant, constant typing and swiping has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. Han is concerned that the real physical, insistent world of things, of the thou and the I thou relationship is slipping away from us with the smartphone , he writes, reality is deprived of its presence. We no longer perceive the material vibrations of reality. Perception is disembodied. The smartphone realises the world. End quote. Anyone who has used social media for any amount of time knows that the things that we encounter there do not have staying power. We are constantly scrolling through them, junking old images for new ones. In my second book, I write that Instagram should not be considered a social app, but a shopping app. It not only literally includes many shopping features and makes consumption more seamless than ever before, it also encourages the consumerist mindset towards places and landscapes, which appear marketable as potential backdrops to be added to the storefront of one’s life for a power user. Instagram provides a grab and go menu of entire lifestyles and ideologies. There are many ways in which, intuitively, you could argue that there’s something about the digital that inherently blocks resonance and makes everything feel slightly less real. I sometimes joke that buying things with one click shopping on Amazon feels like receiving an IRL JPEG, and yet, when I reflect on my own experience learning about repair, I think there is an important role for the digital to play here. And that role has to do with networks and wisdom. I think of how someone from a nearby restoration project recently visited Skyline Gardens to help out and gather tips and knowledge to apply to her own site. I think of Trav, who lives on the other side of the country, from me now, and how we’re always messaging about repair our inspirations, successes and failures. Little things we figured out. I think of the app iNaturalist, which uses computer vision to estimate IDs for plants and animals, but where human users provide corrections or contexts. INaturalist was huge for me in learning the names and shapes of things, but there’s also just the fact of being connected to others who I know are paying attention in similar ways. And I think of this land kerozene by a group working on what they call test plots in Southern California, giving loose tips based on their experiments, restoring small patches of land and suggesting the ways that a reader could adapt them. These examples bring to mind a term Metis, which I came across in the book, seeing like a state. Metis means practical knowledge that’s developed in a local context, as opposed to a one size fits all standards. As one of Scott’s example is the rule of thumb used by Native Americans in New England, in which you plant corn when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear. He contrasts this with the American Almanac, in which the author gave specific days on which to plant things, a rigid technique that couldn’t adapt to shifting locations or seasons because it’s collectively used and maintained, and because it naturally evolves over time to accommodate different circumstances. Scott compares Metis to the way language adapts and evolves. He notes, too, that the essence of Metis lies not in the content of the rules themselves, but in knowing how and when to apply them. Compared to officially sanctioned knowledge, Metis is embedded in everyday experience thinking about Metis made me look differently at an old and rather silly project that I did more than ten years ago called People Younger Than Me, explaining how to do things. At the time, I meant it as a jokey anthropological exploration into the how to video trope. But now I think I also see it as youthful forays into various forms of Metis and the naturalness of wanting to share and participate in collectively maintained practical wisdom. The very same platforms that encourage an I it consumerist relationship can be and are used to learn, remix and disseminate knowledge about how to have more of a hand in the things we care for. Unlike advertising or propaganda, the how to is not complete until the watcher leaves the screen and tries it for herself, perhaps discovering something new and useful in the process and sharing it with others. It was Trav who showed me how to darn a sock, but it was a woman on YouTube. I turned to when I forgot the specifics. Ideally, of course, these connections would happen on non-commercial platforms that don’t have financial incentives to keep us addicted to them. But there’s also another broader way in which I think the digital can be helpful here, simply in terms of directing our attention toward repair in general. Remember when I said, I feel like I’m making my socks go backward in time? I’m implicit in this statement is the idea that as time goes forward, everything inevitably falls apart. In a podcast called On Point about Fast fashion reuse, advocate Danielle Vermeer said that in her research on Shane, a low quality, super fast fashion brand whose clothes have been known to disintegrate in the wash, some of the comments she got from Gen Z shoppers were nihilist in tone. Quote the world is falling apart, so why can’t I have this $3 top and look cute? While I can understand where they’re coming from, to me this is a worldview unsustainable both ecologically and emotionally. When I think about how to combat this form of declinism, I think of something Glenn pointed out to me from the restoration on site, a similar sized meadow on a peak less than a mile south of us. Another group had just started restoring that site using techniques that Glenn had been using here they were on year one, i.e. not a lot of flowers yet. I looked around us at the orange of the poppies, the yellow of the tidy tips, the blue of the blue eyes and I said, it must be nice for them to look over here and see this while they’re working. Likewise in every domain, I think we need images of repair, not only to be reminded that our world takes work to maintain, but also to be reminded that while, yes, everything does eventually fall apart, a huge and meaningful part of the human project is in forestalling and sometimes even reversing that flow, holding together the set of relationships that makes The Ship of Theseus survive to another day. I think this is especially important for a generation that is traumatised and desensitised to the idea of improvement. To me, a repair stance makes sense as a response to declinism because it starts from brokenness, from the present. It is a wish for longevity that assumes ongoing failure. It does not magically make things go away as we do, either when we scroll or when we write off the future as a foregone conclusion. And it does not replace broken things wholesale. Both methods I described earlier, sock darning and the Bradley method, take as their starting point that which is still holding together. Just as importantly, repair as a stance doesn’t just assume that the world needs work, it also opens our eyes to all of the work that has made possible many of the things we take for granted. If repair ordinarily feels hidden, it’s not just due to the amnesia of consumerism, but also because currently those who maintain society are typically at the lower ends of gender, racial and class hierarchies. Something that I also touch on in my second book. At least within my own experience. I have found that even in the small amount of repair that I have done, the repairs of others past and present have become far more palpable. Recently, I looked more closely at a denim jacket I had bought Second-hand many years ago, and realised it had been mended so skilfully by its previous owner that I had never noticed. I noticed how many repair shops there were in my neighbourhood, tailors, shoe repair, watch repair, vacuum repair, iPhone repair inside a thrift store, its own window in need of repair. Having learned to weed, I noticed plots that have been weeded. How many people who live near my apartment had planted native plants, and I could even recognise the non-human maintenance work of the gardens? Pollinators? I wonder if there are ways that our shared knowledge and experience online could help us here too. Not just disseminating practical wisdom, but highlighting and drawing attention to the patches of our world. The beautiful repairs, the successful meadows amidst the ruin and all the things going backwards in time against the certainty of demise. Because for many of us, it is not just our things and our places that are in need of repair, but our entire relationship to the future and how to do nothing. I quote the ecologist Aldo Leopold, who writes that quote, one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds . Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. Now, I would add that much of the repair is also quite invisible to laymen in the world of wounds, whether in objects or landscapes, looks quite different. If you have some notion of how to fix them, even if it’s painstaking, even if it’s small, even if there’s not enough time to fix everything. So I started this talk by mentioning my friend Trav, and I’m going to close it by mentioning another friend. And it’s not the cat, if anyone here is familiar with how to do nothing, you know that it is largely inspired by municipal Rose garden. Five minutes from my apartment. I have either sat in or passed through this garden almost every other day. Since 2016. It has been indispensable to me as a person and as a writer, and I truly believe neither one of my books would have been written without it. As you can imagine, I’ve gotten to know some of the volunteer gardeners, one of whom is a man named Royal. Royal is retired and can be found in this garden pretty much every day. The garden as we know it, would not exist without him. But I’m also convinced that Royal as I know him, would not exist without the Rose garden. This place is full of evidence of Royal’s artistry, training roses to grow in certain directions, cutting, grafting, planting, supporting, much of which took me years to notice. One day while I was working on this talk, I ran into Royal and I told him about the plant restoration project. He congratulated me on discovering the joys of weeding, and it turned out that he knew Lon at the fabric store, because sometimes he had to buy thread to repair the leather gardening gloves in the garden’s toolbox. He showed me some of the gardening tools, saying the high quality ones were made by a Japanese company that used to make samurai swords. They seemed like they would last forever. I told Royal I was about to give a talk in Berlin. It turned out that he gave talks sometimes too , about the history of roses. Then he told me about something he always mentioned in that history talk a rose in our garden. That was a copy of A very old Rose, sometimes referred to as the Thousand Year Rose. The climbing rose plant from which ours was copied, he said, had been growing since the eight hundreds here in Germany at the Hildesheim Cathedral, the cathedral was bombed during World War Two, but the root system of the rose remained intact and it eventually resprouted. In fact, it still grows there today. New flowers, old root system, its own ship of Theseus. Whenever I look at our copy in the garden now, I think about the thousand year rose. It’s hard to imagine even the most cynical person standing in front of it and not finding it meaningful, not affording it some kind of experience in life. Time has weight, after all. The rose issues a call for us to assist it in its survival and to be changed and repaired in that assistance, to become keepers of the rose and turn being the keeper of anything is what ties us a little more firmly into this world and to its past, present and future. Lest knowing the danger of slipping away into heartbreak and alienation, it’s a little patch of I thou in a world of I it. That’s why it’s in situations like this which arrive every day in forms big and small, that I think you can truly ask who is repairing whom? Thank you. >> So me? Yeah. So So let me first. Thank you, Jenny, for your beautiful lecture. I think there was never an occasion at the Republica where somebody was talking with such intensity, compassion and care about socks. And I actually could feel the ripple effect of your talk because I was sitting next to Uncle Domscheit-berg here, representing the paté Die Linke, and she was knitting socks, and there was somebody else knitting a bag. So really there is some effect. But let me ask. Let me ask you a question which really haunted me during your lecture. On the one hand, we have this macro level of destruction, the climate crisis, species extinction, the rise of populism. You all know this. And it might be that a fascist clown will take over your country next year. And on the other hand, we have this micro level of existence which you described so beautifully with this idea of repair and how are these two levels related? How are these individual actions in our personal life related, so to speak, to the planetary scale? >> Yeah, I think, I think of these small kind of everyday interactions and actions as being kind of like a laboratory for, well, actually, before even that, it’s just sustenance, right? Like before you do anything, you need to be sustained, like emotionally and, just to be able to get to another day. So there’s that level. I mean, when I, when I talk to the other people in the restoration group, it’s very clear that it’s serving that function for everyone. Then, and then so then on top of that, I think it’s a sort of laboratory for learning ways of interacting or thinking about change that I think are much more useful, at least in my experience, than the sort of like doomscrolling like sense of a problem, I mean, I also think of like, you know, people who have been involved in like, union actions, like often are like learning new ways to like, build solidarity or just, you know, ways to interact with other people where it’s not like your co-worker or your friend. It’s like something else, you know? So I kind of think of it as like a base layer kind of where you start kind of growing sprouts of things that then can become useful in bigger ways or like join up with other sort of actions in a bigger way. >> And do you also see this problem like a cruel optimism, putting too much responsibility for the repair of the world, so to speak, on the individual? >> Yeah. I mean, that’s, as you know, I want to write about this more in the future. And that’s it’s been similarly haunting me, too. It’s like when, when is something, well, there’s that question, right? Like, when is it too much on the individual? But also when is something a Band-Aid? When really the whole thing should be rebuilt, like so. And I, I find those questions kind of like intimidating, but also it’s the type of intimidating question where you it’s actually quite exciting to think about, like, what is that line, and that’s like, you know, you can see that all throughout politics, right? Like small changes versus big changes and like when is one at the cost of the other? And how do you calculate that? >> Yeah, I was listening to you as someone being interested in media theory. And I was reminded of the famous phrase, the tenet of media theory by Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. And I if I think about your lecture, I think you proposed a different idea. The context is the message. The meaning is in the context. Can you relate to that idea? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. >> I, I don’t remember where I said this or when, but at some point I said that my medium was context as an artist because I was trying to explain why I do things like go to the dump and, and I don’t make paintings, and so I think I’ve, I’ve also for a long time been obsessed with this question of how impossible it is to separate things out from their context, like even a person. Right. Like I’m a different person here than I am at home, I mean, there are more extreme examples in ecology. It’s impossible to isolate any kind of organism from its environment, and so, like, that’s another kind of undecidable question that I am like constantly revolving around, but I do think that on the whole, it’s been sort of, sort of my part of my project has been to try to bring context back into things where I feel that it’s been stripped away. Oftentimes in order to, like, sell it better or have it sort of be consumed more quickly. >> And if we relate this to digital culture, I mean, Danah Boyd was here a couple of years ago at a Republican. She was talking about the collapse of context. And we clearly have if we look at digital culture, this is not cultural pessimism, but we clearly see a distortion of context, a destruction of context and the collapse of context. So how would you say within your communication theory where the good conversation is becoming, an ideal or a metaphor for a good life, so to speak? How would recontextualize Asian help in order to have a better form of debate or conversation, of talking to each other? I mean, I was just talking to someone about this the other day about, actually, how how, you know, like, I hate Facebook, but we were talking about Facebook groups and how, like a Facebook group, like, for example, they don’t use Facebook, but the everyone in that restoration group stays in contact online throughout the week. >> And that interaction is grounded in the fact that everyone is showing up every Sunday and is all thinking about the same physical place. And so in that sense, it just becomes like a tool, like it’s just purely useful, versus something that is completely divorced from any like time, place or situation where there’s nothing you have nothing in common except for just this platform, I see. >> Yeah, I see, I understand if I and I, it might be a very personal question. >> You were quoting the mystic Martin Buber and Martin Buber idea of a dialogue is clearly a representation of the eternal dialogue with God. So and then you were showing us all these objects and these socks, and at a certain moment, the socks were no longer socks, and the objects were no longer objects. In a sense, they were start to talk back. Yeah And are you getting close to a spiritual or animistic worldview with that form of describing a different approach to the world, probably, yeah. I kind of, I kind of stopped short of like, really talking about any of that, like, or like naming anything, you know, because I feel like that is that carries a lot of baggage . But I do think it’s kind of safe to say, at least from the conversations that I’ve had with people and also with readers, without necessarily like naming spirituality, I do think it is clear that a lot of people want something more like that. People are searching for meaning, purpose, something that does not quite fit into like a utilitarian framework of like success and accumulation, and I am definitely one of those people. So yeah, that’s what I would say. >> let me ask one last question, and it’s a question I referring to one of the early German internet philosophers, Peter Clauser, Peter Glaser, who was here a couple of times before, and Peter Glaser was once asked to give a speech to humanity. >> So to imagine this thought experiment that there would be the situation, he’s giving this huge speech to humanity and to condense the most important message in one sentence at the end. So probably we could imagine this situation in a playful manner, and you would have this one sentence to say to humanity, what would that be? As a final question to you, oh man, I hate those kinds of questions. >> pay attention to your socks. >> I don’t yeah, I think that’s a very wonderful pay attention to your socks. Thank you for paying attention to Jenny Odell. Thank you for coming over from Oakland. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. >> Wow. Yeah >> Thank you very much. Bernard Bergson and Jenny Odell for this keynote. So gleich jetzt hier weiter 1350 mit Markus Beckedahl und 1315 wird Jenny Odell noch ihr Bücker Bü Tisch at quarter past two, Jenny will sign her book at the Dussmann book table, if you’re interested in that, on on 1350 jetzt hier weiter. Also sitzen bleiben bis gleich. So Lieber Leute. Jetzt. Words. Mal wieder besonders. >> Okay, now it’s going to be very important. Well, it always is, isn’t it? It’s about things like the AI hype, which solidifies old power relationships, doesn’t it, it’s, things are happening in Europe against democracy, against openness. The very old ghost of data retention is going to be is going to be revived chat control. But there are acts. There are packages such as the Digital Services Act, the Act Digital Markets Act, that even at the European level, are supposed to regulate this whole thing in a good way. And and show that we don’t lose our digital digital freedoms, but can they actually manage to do that? Are they full powerful enough? Or are these toothless paper tigers and how can we remain optimistic? Now, the speaker that will be appearing soon to tell you all about this? Well, I don’t have to introduce him to most of you. It’s Markus Beckedahl, co-founder of Republika and also co-founder of Netzpolitik.org. And in 2015, in case you didn’t remember, he was Germany’s most wanted as a high treason suspect. And the federal public prosecutor then? Well coincidentally, had to retire after it had been turned and it had become clear what nonsense that was. Now he is here to make us optimistic, and his talk is called a better digital future is still possible. Give a huge applause to Markus Beckedahl. Hi. >> Right. >> You can hear me now. Great. I’m glad that you’ve all come. I have one hour. I have way too many slides. I had to throw some of them out. Way too many things to talk about. But only one hour of time. So, it’s not that I forgot about issues. I had to leave them out. Maybe I’ve forgotten about a few others too, but I have to focus on a few things now. I could talk half an hour or rant about the fact that we have a failed digital policy of this traffic light coalition. The red, green, yellow or Social Democrat green liberal coalition. So many announcements have just turned out to be empty bubbles. And they have popped. And the plan lawlessness that we have in the digital politics and the lack of coordination, means that aims targets are not being reached. But you can just refer back to my talk from last year about that. I said most of these things then, and sadly, things haven’t become much better. We have three digital ministers, but what’s missing are digitally competent people that actually show us the way digital issues are everywhere, but they always understaffed in each ministry, and there is no single person who’s really responsible in any of the ministries, so no one is. You just deal with other things. We need more cooperative governing. We need less siloed thinking, fewer trenches between the three parties in the government or in the ministries. And probably a well equipped digital ministry would make sense with a balancing budget of several billions, not just as an addendum to the traffic budget traffic ministry, but probably a digital ministry would have made much sense if what if there is no competence? Otherwise it’s just going to be a lot of PR. These have been our previous digital ministers, and we know as Germans who we are talking about now, if we see this as on the same scale as the finance crisis or the capital market crisis, then we see the power it has and it should be a task that is not just seen as something cutting across all issues, but a core issue. And maybe, maybe in five years we’ll see some progress. Not everything is going badly. In the last digital summit, the German government actually managed to invite civil society in time and involve them somehow. After the disaster of the digital summit before last, which happened, which took place in this space. But no one was there. Civil society hadn’t been invited. At least this was a tacit, new beginning. One example about the cooperation in the last few years, the liberals wanted to have a quick freeze instead of, data retention. The Social Democrats wanted a cap on apartment rents. This was announced, and it has been holding for a few months now. No idea what will, become of the cap on on rents, but data retention is again being called for. Also So when it comes to fibre to the home, if you read the small print at the bottom of this chart, these 28% in Germany, that’s the data of the federal network Agency. But the OECD estimate is at around 10% for Germany. So according to the OECD, we are at the third from the bottom, according to the Federal Network Agency, at 828, where somewhat better. So where does the difference come from? Well, I think they mean that there is some kind of fibre near the home, but not actually in the home. And this is how it looks. The telecom website tells me that sadly, in your location, the fibre, extension is not being planned. I cannot buy a fibre connecting tariff one house further on. It is possible , but not in my place. So I am part of the 28% in theory, but in practice I am outside those 10. Beautiful brave new world. There is the right to internet now or the right to broadband internet. You know, all this ten megabit per second download and another figure for upload. But there are way too many people that would be glad to have such kind of speed, but they can’t get it. So a suggested right to broadband, but they get well, something. And the German government is trying to just sneak out of this obligation somehow and say, well, Elon Musk will have to provide for it. There are a few problems there. This is about ■k7500 connection fee and, a large cost per month as well. And the rights to broadband actually was envisaged lower costs. And there is just a hope that Elon Musk will lower the prices there. We don’t know. It would be good if everyone was hoping for Elon Musk and internet by satellite sounds all nice and sensible, but look forward to the nights in the future. If by through all these satellites that Elon Musk and others Amazon have sent up there, you cannot watch the skies anymore, the sad news, someone died. The oh, the dog behind the Doge meme, has died. The actual dog. Sad news this week. Gamergate has been was ten years ago, and that debate showed us, even if many didn’t realise it, what was lying ahead for the right wing people? It was a fantastic playing ground to find, experiment and new tactics and collect new followers. And there are lines from Gamergate to the present through Trump and the right extremist AfD in Germany, that have to lead to strategies against the right. And this was also where a education for online communication was massively tried out, and the consequences have been felt in the on the island of Sylt, where right wing people were shouting slogans, at a party and in the name of freedom of speech, the freedom of speech of people with a different opinion is restricted. And that is a massive threat to our democracy. So it is a very important cause for us. To have those that have that do stand up on the stages and have to face all the hatred to support them and show them that we are behind them. That’s just two of, various talks about the issue here on the screen behind me. And that’s why things like hate hate are important. So these people are receiving support and not are not left out in the rain. And we need a better fundamental law to protect people from violence and online violence. And it has the issue has to be taken more seriously because words turn into deeds. We have seen this. The best known, conspiracy ideologue has sadly destroyed Twitter and the rules that we have. The Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act were necessary to regulate things that didn’t work in self-regulation, but that led to nice selfies. At least the digital services Act is finally being enforced, and that is a chance for civil society to get involved because our efforts, our capabilities for monitoring, for observing can be used and we can actually put our criticisms across. So that they are being heard in the implementation. But if our role as civil society is being talked about, we have to talk about money too, because enforcing the DSA through civil society is resource intensive. It has to be financed in a sustainable and independent way, and we need solutions for that. For example, a fund where the EU commissions at member states pay and which is then distributed. And the same goes for trusted flagging those that monitor disinformation and evaluate it have to be funded. And then there is the Digital Markets Act next to the Digital Services Act and the DMA is also slowly being enforced. And the thing is to break large companies apart that have formed monopolies, this must remain an option that is sometimes should be used as well . But what’s also interesting is that the EU is now searching whistleblowers from Big Tech and says that it wants them. So if you work in such a field, if you if you see something, this is where you can report there is more on this at 10:00, with a member of the EU Commission in the enforcement department, he will be talking with me about the implementation and enforcement of all this. And of course, in many other talks in the coming three days on the National level, the German government has finally managed to agree on an implementation. It took a bit longer, so we had a regulation holiday in between, but there are a few unanswered questions. How are the committees going to be staffed? Is there going to be financial support and things like that? The Federal Network Agency has won the race to be the authority in responsible for the implementation. But the question remains who is actually going to be affected? We, the blogs that we write with our comments, is it just about companies that are active somewhere? Is it just the larger commercial websites? We don’t know and we need more answers from the federal Network agency because there’s a lot of legal uncertainty still left. But also interesting. Bonn the previous federal capital is going to be the digital regulation capital, because several authorities that are going to be responsible are located there. So they can form their working groups somewhat more easily than in other areas. And the DSA also affects AI platforms, which when the AI act comes into force, will have to follow rules in addition to the DSA and so on. So in acceptable, risky, unacceptably risky applications might be banned in two years. There’s going to be a labelling obligation for AI. We know that the bad actors won’t oblige, but, there’s it’s going to be a raise of regulation and circumvention. But this is still important. We have these rules and the labelling obligation that will raise the responsibilities at the platform level, which is going to be better than self regulation. This is going to be going to apply also to calls from a call centre. If a generative AI is going to talk with us for hours on end until we realise that we are talking to an AI, but who has the competency and who is responsible for enforcing the AI act? This is still unsolved. And, a joke is that Zalando, Germany’s largest shopping platform, is going to be regulated by the ordinance administration in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. They, of course, don’t have the necessary staff, so it will be important to have a national competence centre for AI that exists at the EU level. So there is expertise that could be bundled there. It could be borrowed to other administrative or government departments at the national level. And the AI experts will then come and help. Instead of us hoping to quickly build a certain amount of competence everywhere, there is not enough people around to, take these positions. So to concentrate competency actually makes sense. In this instance, the AI act is gone, but it has to be implemented. And there are many other things that in the implementation and enforcement will have to be looked at. Algorithm watch has compiled a long list, but mostly the best regulation will only work if there are good laws. Whether we have those is not quite clear yet. If there is the will to enforce them, whether we have that we don’t know yet, whether there’s enough resources with qualified personnel. Well, sadly, still somewhat unclear. And the idea still is that liability questions are quite unclear too, at the moment, consumers have to prove that in an AI system is faulty. How should that work? It makes more sense to lay the burden of proof on the platforms. Google has this excuse this, the generative AI and Google sold someone to put some glue into a pizza. Now, this is a kind of mistake that, Google says is, according to very strange prompting and these examples, they said, would be used to improve their products. Well that we will have to see whether the progress will be made. No progress regarding face recognition, the German government has promised to limit this at the implementation, but we’ll see if this is just going to be an unkept promise or whether an actual ban on face recognition will be around. The bets are on. I’ll bet against it . I’d like to. I could talk a lot about deepfakes. It was overestimate rated in the current election campaigns, but this of course, is going to be used by everyone for their personal advantage, to improve their chances. What is more dangerous is deepfakes for women or that are made on women and the most influential woman on the planet. Even cannot fight back. And that is a problem that has to be solved urgently. >> The US wants to forbid TikTok, or maybe they did. Well, they would like to buy it, maybe quite cheaply. Otherwise they’ll prohibit it. There’s two lines of arguments, and both of them I can easily understand. One sort of connection data provides Chinese Chinese people, Chinese people, and especially the government. Very good info on who’s talking to whom. Well, now we know that if we use a US platform, then there’s American security services that are that have this data and might be using it against us. And the second reason is that it might be unclear if, we can use TikTok if China can use TikTok to, manipulate our information, our opinion. Now, in my opinion, the logical thing would be to regulate. But what we’re seeing is that the US big tech companies are really making sure that there isn’t any comprehensive regulation that would also affect them. So they’re trying to place the TikTok prohibition in its own context at the EU level. There’s also a couple of things to think of how we can ban TikTok, but obviously the EU parliament can’t just implement a new law to sort of ban TikTok, we have a couple of examples. In Germany, we have the Russia Today case that, where after Russia attacked Ukraine, we, decided to censor the content of Russia today, which is a propagandist Russian outlet, so we have this case. But what happens if, China attacks Taiwan and suddenly uses this kind of, uses TikTok to propagate its own, its own message? But so that’s one case. But what happens if the digital Services Act isn’t really, implemented? What happens if TikTok decides, well, I won’t be actually changing this if TikTok is unwilling to follow this this digital service act, then of course, the EU also has the option of prohibiting TikTok. But this will be a very long, lawful way currently. There’s also a lot of attention to this topic because the AfD, the far right German party, is really very active on TikTok and the most successful party on TikTok currently. I’m not sure if we are actually thinking this through. The, the party is actually part of all of the parliaments. It’s getting money from taxes, and it’s using this money. Not necessarily for parliamentarian work, but instead for networking on social networks. And because TikTok, because AfD doesn’t really care that much about, sort of what it’s achieving, it can it is actually able to make it work. So instead of thinking about how to do parliamentary work, where suddenly the AfD is suddenly using talks in Parliament to actually, take a video of them and put them on TikTok. Now, what we need to consider is what does that mean for us? For parliaments, we don’t necessarily debate with each other, but instead we’re debating for TikTok. This is a great new world of sort of parliaments. Now, what we’re seeing now is that AfD is actually losing followers. I’m assuming that it doesn’t. It’s not happening like this. But we know that TikTok actually has uses some strategies for information control. Now, some of these, some content is just sort of, banned or shadow banned oftentimes, for a couple of years ago, we knew that people who had some physical disabilities were not really, weren’t promoted the same way because they weren’t they didn’t fit this great sort of blinking world that TikTok wanted to promote. Now we can maybe assume that maybe AfD is also shadow banned to some degree because we want because the AfD wants to really show its willingness, excuse me? Because TikTok really wants to show its willingness to work together with the people that are sort of operating and that are enforcing a lot of these laws. Now, this should really give us pause because, we actually need democratic oversight over these things. So TikTok isn’t able to just change official change, this kind of public discourse without us even knowing about it. So far, far right, politicians really have a couple of advantages. Polarising content is really gets a lot of reactions, a lot of, content. So they are really, they really get a lot of algorithmic boosts because of that. But in addition to that, there’s also a lot of push from sort of people that are sharing everything. So especially if information, information like, so it doesn’t necessarily help with when, people like Maximilian Krah might be shadowbanned, but there’s still a lot of people who are just sharing and sharing everything that they can see. And all they care about is sort of getting reach. So looking only at the big accounts doesn’t really help. Now it is now. What we are seeing is that AfD is actually really motivated, but not necessary to do a lot of great. But not necessarily to do a lot of great work within Parliament, but instead to, to sort of copy the strategy of RFD. So what we should be thinking about is do we actually want other parties who are more interested in that to try to copy AfD strategy? Now, what we’re seeing with chat control is that that member states can’t really make a decision, what we want to know what chat control is about is should we actually, should encrypted content have to be shared? Should encrypted content be investigated, so that within these kind of videos, you can actually see maybe child pornography, but actually this is a lot of work. But so there’s actually a lot of other things you could do if you wanted to, if you wanted to sort of, fight against this kind of child porn or, teenage porn. Because it would be quite and building up this mechanism means that it is really easy to look for all sorts of different content. So suddenly we could also look for different democratic organisers. Lots of different content could be seen. So what some countries are planning on doing is instead of having a necessarily like a regulation is to maybe, hide it in their terms of service or, maybe we want some services to introduce this first, which sounds like a great idea. Now, this kind of total control, is really can really be, can really be built on a lot of this data from online advertising. And this data is really shared and, often sold to our security services who get a lot of better access to us and our online behaviour via buying this data without, then they could get through their own work. And in the US, this is actually more regulated than in Germany. In Europe, where security services definitely don’t want to talk about this. Now, if you just if you just click accept because you don’t want to check these kind of, cookie banners because you want to buy these, these tickets, then 600 partners could get data from, you could now know that you you want that you just bought this ticket. Now you can evade this, but this is really very inconvenient. It’s a lot of work. And this really shows that what we need is more regulation for advertisement. We need anti trust regulation against Google and meta which is Facebook’s owner who who are who really have both both sides of the transaction and built a moat around that. We need the kind of regulations, against these kind of big tech companies, against this ad tech companies that are using this data to really get money. And we need a privacy law that should have been sort of, should have come at the same time as the GDPR, the general Data Protection Regulation. But, the German implementation of the GDPR has been a couple of years old. This is where a lot of these cookie problems are actually coming from. We would need to replace this to renew this. And in addition to that, we would need an advertising act at the EU level, to sort of forbid these kind of addictive patterns, to explain what kind of business models are allowed and what which one aren’t. Now it would have almost landed in the Digital Services Act. The conservative majority actually, sort of managed to get it excluded. >> And what we need is the creation of a public digital infrastructure. Regarding identity management. It sounds a bit boring, but this is actually where a very important part of the operating system of the Digital Society is we’re going to be built. So let’s have a look at the architecture for at least at the national level, there is a competition of ideas. There’s this open source wallet, but but the important thing is how privacy friendly the result would be, because this, this kind of identity management with a wallet wallet is what we will use to identify against with everyone that wants to see our identity. As soon as this identity infrastructure is going to be in place, many people will want to use it, because at the moment, identification isn’t very secure and we are going to be nudged to leave this information everywhere. It sounds boring, but it will meet us everywhere. If it’s, advertising containing a doctor buying a public transport ticket , e-government. So all kinds of companies will want more of our data and all our identities and make even more money with our data. Data if they know who we are. So we should ask ourselves, what does this do with us as a society? If this kind of identity is with us and we can use it everywhere? Just think about this for a moment, talk with others and how can we manage to create a right for an analogue life if we all, everywhere, have to identify ourselves digitally? And this talk by Thomas Zuniga and Paul Keller on day three will deal with that. And this kind of identity management, might solve problems that many parents have when they try to, set screen times for their children. This works with all manufacturers these days, but it’s going to be complex. If people have more than one device from more than one maker. So if they have an old iPad and maybe a notebook, it becomes an unsolvable question. At least then. But maybe with the ID thing, it might be solved. And that leads us to the to use protection, there is an interstate treaty in Germany between the federal states that is going to be reformed, remember, it should have been reformed in 2010 that then failed, because of the censorship debate and because of ideas that were just in collision, in incompatible, incompatible with reality. And since then, we have rules that are not matched to reality, and it’s going to be reformed. And the core again is use protection in the media. It’s about labelling offerings, and if that’s going to be work to work, we don’t know yet, they want to prevent children to, reach obvious pornography offerings. But the thing is, we have no working systems without risks. And side effects. There are companies that are sell hope that that sell hope and that offer solutions that infringe on the rights of others by using biometric face data. And we don’t know if those data are going to be secured and what is going to be happen to happen with them. And that all collides with our basic right to anonymity. We companies will want to identify us and then market the records about our online behaviour. The problem we were talking about earlier. Then there was this, issue with the media minister from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, there is an online debate that you can take part in, you can get in an exchange about what works and what doesn’t work, because everyone wants working youth protections, but we don’t want these protections to unnecessarily limit other fundamental rights. And the rights of children and minors are supposed to be protected just as much. Of course. And at the Second Republic, as much as 16 years ago, we had someone from the public broadcasters and discussed about outsourcing open sourcing, more stuff, because if you would rethink public broadcasting these days, then public infrastructures such as communicative and open infrastructures would be at the top of the agenda, not just diversity of opinion. So we are quite happy that public broadcasters now at least understand their media archives as an ecosystem that they want to open up, and that is what we should have been done many years ago. And that is worth a bit of an applause, actually, that the public broadcasters finally have got to the right idea. In addition, the public broadcasters ZDF is running a prototype about a more constructive dialogue culture together with three other partners from Canada, Switzerland and Belgium and the New Public Institute by Eli Pariser and, at 4:15 on stage two, there’s going to be a panel on that where this is going to be presented. It’s going to be in English, says this interpreter, and that shouldn’t be enough. We shouldn’t be content with that. It’s just a start. And it should be thought bigger. How we have an infrastructure oriented on the common good and how we can finance that, not just small pilots in the year 2024 that are completely dependent of large commercial companies, or we have become dependent on these right now. So we need these larger alternatives. We need a broad financing of public, digital infrastructures oriented on a common good, including content moderation, because the infrastructure is not just the one thing who moderates them these days, who can steer constructive debate co-moderate them. That is going to be the question that is going to create the most cost. And we need new ways of financing that we need public digital, public digital commons, commons everywhere. So the public sector has to move to open source and open data with a time plan. We always say open source is important. It even is in the manifesto of the conservatives. But in practice, the money all goes to Microsoft and open source is, well, if someone likes it, go it coincidentally we will have it. Otherwise it’s going to be go to the usual suspects. So more public money, public code please. The digital civil society is growing and that is a good thing. Since the first Republica, when most of the activists could fit into one room, a lot has happened. There’s a new organisation, new structures that are becoming more professional. And that is massively important because the industrial level is massive and they have the funds. So the engagement at the civil society level cannot just be voluntarily fee based. And there’s a lot of debates that you have to observe . The digital rights perspective is becoming more and more important in all kinds of debates. But the most the biggest challenge is always money. These infrastructures have to be financed to be able to make their work to, to, to do their work. Fortunately, there are more donations than ever for digital engagement. But compared to other parts of civil society, it’s still a very small slice of the cake. But at least it’s a cake that is growing. Whereas in other areas it is shrinking, for example, European digital rights, they turned 20 last year and they are the umbrella or all the institutions were all the NGOs from the civil society come together and they are effective at the, Brussels level. Two what don’t what many people don’t know. Well, George Soros has become the object of hate. Without him, there will be a much smaller digital rights community because his institution was the only one where you could ask for funding for a long time now. This is now going to be torn down, sadly, because there is a generational change. Which wants to focus on democracy at the local level and not spend too much money on democracy elsewhere. So some NGOs are having a problem. Epicentre works from Austria, who do a great work, have a whole of ■k7200,000 in their financing because of that. But we have new actors such as the Mercato Foundation, that have come into the scene and they have their own programs supporting civil society, but that’s not enough by far, because too much money is still coming from a single source, and too much concentration is happening. And that’s not good for a sustainable development. On Wednesday, we will talk about a study by the MacArthur Foundation, about the challenges that civil society is facing. And it would be good if more foundations with more money, would be joining that. And support this important by so many more people. And one of the people in that panel is now continuing going to continue this interpretation on. >> Jaron Journalismus, we’ve been saying it for years. >> Journalism needs to be for non not not not for profit for public good. Otherwise there will be a lot of for profit media at Netzpolitik.org, for instance, we looked into what we can what we can write about. We decided to look into sort of protecting people, protecting users of things. Others, some local, some people, some people have a very local, sort of just have a very local reason. And the non-profit laws are actually quite strict. Some right wing actually have a really cancel strategy against these kinds of non-profit organisations. And let’s imagine a time where more and more of these financial authorities are actually taken over by IFD. And what kind of power they will have to sort of grant and especially take away the non-profit status of these kind of projects that are really for the public good. And there will be a talk in the next couple of days about this, and now let’s talk about Mastodon. Mastodon actually moved outside of Europe to get the non-profit status. This is a really bad sign that, it’s really important and that German bureaucracy doesn’t understand that we should actually make sure to get non-profit status easier. We have a similar problems with hacker spaces, because hacker spaces also aren’t part of this kind of non-profit. Law, the sea bass, which is a big German, hacker space in Berlin, has actually, seen the same problem where a couple of years ago, they lost their non-profit status because someone from the financial bureaucracy actually saw that they were playing go and playing go isn’t in line with their non-profit status. They decided now, in order to change this, all 16 lands really need to make a decision. And what we’re seeing is that this is really changing, that this is really a window that is closing, and we need to make it clear that you can actually be a non-profit while still doing political work, because we think that political work should really be part of a democracy and therefore should be able to be a non-profit. Of course, we need we need to make it clear that a non-profit can also be engaged for other parties, for instance, to support, other non-profit organisers stations, even if they might be outside of the original remit. So if I’m a an animal rights organisation, then I can support an organisation against the far right. We need these changes as fast as possible before individual lenders have actually a far right regulatory, government. Now that we need this, this is a every sort of government party actually knows that we need these kind of changes, but that’s not enough to provide this kind of security for people active in the non-profit space. There’s a petition that you can support if you want to. Now, currently, there’s actually currently it can be quite useful to actually do a strategic lawsuit against public participation. It’s called sometimes slap On. And now there is a new government funded initiative that is supposed to support people. And, media that is using that is doing journalism, and they’re trying to be silenced. This is a really good step to make sure that we still keep independent media. Now happy birthday, the German grundgesetz, the German Basic Law, it has improved a lot in the last couple of years. We have had that by introducing, an IT Basic Law in there. Those have been sort of granted to us. They’re not actually printed in there, but they have still been granted to us. Now, when I was a kid, I, I bought the old version . You can still buy it. It’s free and. Yeah, it’s also now possible the whole Basic Law on one on one poster. You can look at. It’s 23,000 words if you want to read it, you can print it. But it’s really about us. If we can make it to 100 years of the basic Law, until a couple of years ago, we really thought it wouldn’t be a problem. But one year in, we’re looking into a turn to the right and we’re looking at maybe it’s not possible. Maybe it’s not obvious that there will be another 25 years of actual, democracy and rule of law. Now, this is about, please go vote at both sort of local and EU elections. EU elections are obviously coming up, but every vote really weakens, sort of the Nazi rights and the Nazi elections. Now. Yes. If you’ve had a bad school experience going to vote in schools, which is usually the case in Germany, might be bad for you, but actually there is an easy way for you to mail in vote. So there’s only like a very simple form do that and very easily you will be able to, to vote by mail. Otherwise go go to a protest in the next, weeks, there will be the opportunity to really show that a lot of people want to stop the right, want to defend democracy and never give up. Vote for freedom, for democracy, for, evidence based policy and for a really, a society that is worth living. This year I, I have left netzpolitik.org I after 20 years. I want to have more program, more more space to do experiment. It’s, for instance, this year I did more on the program of Republica. This is obviously a lot of work, but what we’re actually need now is new partnership and new alliances. We need to build more bridges into the analogue society. We need to show what we’re about in a better way to reach more people. And this these are all the things that I’m looking into with the with a new institute that we call the Future Festival. We’re building a new, festival from my that is going to be happening in Bonn between October 3rd and October 5th, which is my hometown. In addition, I also blog and newsletter on digital politics, hopefully I’ll have more time to do that in the future. So let’s continue to have this kind of societal dialogue. Let’s make sure that internet is still possible. Let’s have fun and enjoy your Republica. So I’m done earlier than I expected. So So, I’ll be here in the next couple of days, I might look a little bit hurried because I might need to go from A to B quite quickly. Otherwise Guys, enjoy the sun. Be inspired. Goodbye See? Yeah Thank you very much. This was Markus Beckedahl, who, who told us that a digital future is still possible. I hope you could use our interpretation of it. >> Here. Den den geht’s unser aller Zukunft bis gleich. That’s good. That’s good. >> Coming up on stage one in a half an hour’s time. Tsukunft eine Anleitung, or translated future. An instruction manual by Florian. >> So jetzt gets weiter. >> All right, we continue on stage one. And we have a quote. Humans are an animal that are able to think about future in such a way that you’re able to create it. And that’s a quote by the woman who will join us on stage now, who just published a book about futures, and she’s going to tell us about the content of that book and tell us about her vision. It’s, Florence Gaub, PhD. She’s a political scientist, researcher of futures and of military defence. She works at the NATO College in Rome, she’s a counsellor for lots of different organisations. And she, she was also a guest at the Alice Gesagt, German newspaper Zeit podcast. So, very happy that she’s here today, please give it up a big hand for Florence. Go. All right. Hello, everyone. I flew in from Rome today just for you. And in Rome, the weather is a bit better. But that’s always the case. I guess. So why am I here today? I wanted to start with a quick survey in the room, please raise your hand if you agree to the following sentence. The future of Germany and the world, quite pessimistic about it. Almost everyone, and maybe the ones who didn’t didn’t understand the question. Right. All right. Please, please raise your hand if you agree to the statement that my own future. I’m quite optimistic about that. Almost everyone. Well, so we can already see maybe it’s a bit more complex thinking about futures. And the reason I wrote this book, you know, most of us think about, you know, futures. Something that just happens to us like a comet. You know, a what’s the word, meteorite, you know, it’s something that happens and we can’t influence it. We can’t prevent it. But it’s a fact that future is something, you know, we’re thinking about now. It’s here now. Future is what we think about today. And so you know, most people are like, oh, maybe, there’s a German minister here, this evening, the you know, the climate of the world and our own little future, you know, it’s disconnected from that. But really, it’s all, like, stacked within each other, like Russian dolls. And that’s why I wrote this book. Because you don’t need someone to tell you it’s not going to be as bad as you think it will be, but you need to understand that we all have this capacity in our brain to think about future today and so I thought about, you know, instruction manuals for a vacuum. And I’m going to write a book just in that style. I don’t know if you read instruction manuals, I don’t usually, but now I wrote one myself. It’s a bit absurd, but. Oh well. And so an instruction manual tells you how to handle something, right? And so at the end of this talk, I want to give you the ability to have a the feeling of being able to influence the future, to actually handle it. And to not just think about it as something that will happen to you. And so why do people, why do humans have the ability to imagine something that’s not here yet, that doesn’t exist yet, and maybe we’ll never exist? What is it made of? How do you how do you handle it, and what do you do if it’s broken and I think a lot of us feel like the future is broken. So what is the future ? Most people think, well, it’s, you know, always been the same. People think about stuff that might happen. But when we look at history, we see that the human imagination, about future has really changed and shifted quite a lot. So the old Romans and the old Greeks, they had a very different conception of that. So, you know, the oracle of Delphi, right. Where the sort of future, you know, they thought of the world as being influenced by gods and gods that were just the same as humans with emotions, emotions, irrationality, and it’s really nothing ordinary people can do to influence that. And maybe you can like, sort of understand what’s happening, but you cannot influence it at all. So for example, the story of Oedipus, he, he, you know, there’s this oracle saying, right, that he will marry his mother and kill his father. So they send him away, and then he returns as an adult. He doesn’t know who his father is. He kills him and he marries his mother because he doesn’t know she’s his mother. And so this is that’s sort of emblematic of this ancient idea of future. There’s you know, there’s no responsibility for the future. There’s you’re just like, you have to deal with what comes your way. And so, left and right, you can see, the final judgement. Right. In Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity. Some forms of Judaism. And almost every major religion that we know today, they institutionalise responsibility, the concept of responsibility, the what? My actions today I will be held responsible for them in the future. And that’s revolutionary in comparison to the ancient Greek and Roman idea . And so it’s something where you can do something about the future and where you ought to do something about the future, and that’s a crucial moment to the history of humanity, because we have this understanding of future as something we’re responsible for, which we can influence, where we understand. If I do A, then B might happen, and that only happened in the 17th and 18th century with the enlightenment and the scientific Revolution, the discovery of how pregnancy works, gravity and all of that really only started, in the 18th century. And so this concept of future that we have today, that we live with today, that’s not as old as you might think. And we have this, future cone. >> It’s a very, popular tool in our in our line of work. We’re here and ahead of us. There are lots and lots of possible futures, and that’s that’s the thing about future. There’s not one single future. There are lots and lots of possible futures. Like at any point in time, there are even a thousand futures present in this room. Not not only about, climate change. All of you can think of multitudes of possible futures where you’re going to go on holiday. What you’re going to have for dinner. All of these are future features. And only one of these futures is going to happen in the end. That’s one of the reasons why future is overwhelming, because there are so many futures and we don’t know which is actually going to apply. And of course, in the centre we have the projected future. The business as usual future. We like to say that it’s never been as bad as it is now. The future is uncertain. That’s not true. It’s not true because each and every one of us is born with what we call a life expectancy today. So the concept that I can be born and be expected to live until 80, I can look at my phone and find out what the weather is going to be like. If I’m involved in a legal in a in a legal proceeding, I know what the, the law is. What I’m trying to get at is our ancestors, as somebody who lived in Berlin 100, 150 years ago, had a lot less certainty than we have. But we have more, more knowledge, more certainty about what’s going to happen. We don’t live in a time of high uncertainty. I like to say that we live in a time of high certainty, and that makes us allergic to everything. We can’t predict. It’s overregulated, and we have an overreaction to everything we don’t understand. These are the outer borders of the future. Preposterous Very unlikely to happen. Possible. Plausible and so on. But the most important thing is that the futures are can be distinguished by distance. Am I going to make my flight? That’s that’s one very small future. But it’s a future probability and influence . And I’m the difference between the first and the second question is influence. Most people think that they can influence their own future. Not everything, of course, not all of it, but a lot of it. But you can you can influence your own future more than the future of Germanism Germany’s. And that’s that correlates with pessimism. It’s a historical fact. I’ve looked at studies from the 80s and 90s, early 2000, and people like to say everything used to be better, but that’s not true. Germans were afraid of different things, but they were afraid. I don’t want to talk down these problems, but it’s normal to be afraid of the things you can’t influence. And then we have the four categories of future, like Russian nesting dolls, the small future is called every day. Most of us don’t, don’t consider what they’re going to have for breakfast, a new every day. Then the projects of our lives, the project projects of humanity. These are. Well, this used to be dominated by religions. Today, due to climate change. It’s also part of a political debate. But why do we have this? We’re born with this increase. Our ability to imagine so many things, each and every one of us was, lying awake at night and thinking about these worst case scenarios. My sister isn’t coming home. Did she get run over by a car? Did I forget to turn off the coffee machine at work? And it never turned out as bad as we imagined. So why do we have these futures? There’s this interesting approach, that says that what we like to call ourselves Homo sapiens. But we’re probably we should be called homo prospectus. So the human who thinks about the future because that’s what we spend most of our time on, not necessarily the big futures. During the day, humans spent most of their time thinking about the future. And even when we think about the past, it’s mostly because we’re interested in its implications for the future. So we’re obsessed with the future because most of the things that make us human depend on that ability. Being human means making decisions. And thankfully, in the 21st century, we can we can make a lot of decisions. We can make decisions of so many kinds and but for that, we need this future ability. We should I marry this person, person or that person or no person at all. And only since , the age of brain scans, we know that our brain shows the same amount of activity when considering the future as it does when it’s when we think about something that we actually experienced. It’s like the holodeck holodeck in Star Trek, which is constantly running and is taking a lot of our mental bandwidth. So considering all the possible velocities, what do I want to study? Who do I want to be? Where do I want to live? All these things that the 21st century is giving us. We couldn’t. We couldn’t, profit from these if we didn’t have the this future ability. There’s also handling uncertainty, this is the fun part of my talk, there is a study that asked people. You can you can either wait ten minutes and there’s a 50% chance of getting an electric shock or do you want an electric shock right now? Who of you would like an electric shock right now? You’re not crazy. You’re humans because people hate uncertainty. People prefer a negative certainty to a possible negative uncertainty. And being able to reduce those negative uncertainties. That’s what the future ability is for. If I wouldn’t. Well. And being human means having visions, travelling somewhere, wanting to experience or learn something, not necessarily in this capitalist entertainment idea, but being in movement and one part of that is having a vision for where you want to be. Do I want to be a super surfer? For example? You need future ability for all these things. There are people who don’t have this. There are people with amnesia. There’s a patient who is lacking part of their brain. They don’t have short term memory, but they also can’t answer the question, what are you going to do this Saturday? So being here woman is defined by this ability to think about the future. >> Yeah. So like I said, all of you possess this ability and it’s very, it’s great to have this capability. Right. And so it’s, it happens on autopilot and we, put these items in it. And so the first things first, you have to turn on future and so our perception of time is like a car. It’s like a manual transmission car, you can’t be in multiple gears at once. You can’t think about past, present and future at once. And so meditation is all about being in the present, right, and yeah, to think creatively about multiple all things is not possible. Of course, you can think about future while you’re like cutting tomatoes or something, but you can think about future and present at once. And how do you turn on future, so to speak, well, planning for once take a piece of paper and a pen and you think about, oh, I want to achieve this and that. I want to go on vacation to France. And planning is it’s hard work. It’s hard cognitive work. Who enjoys planning? All right. Yeah, of course. I’m in Berlin. So in Rome, where I live, I think the answer might have been a bit different, but the second thing is the second way to turn on the future is, daydreaming. And that contains the word dreaming. And you can also use the English term mind wandering. And that’s I prefer that because, you know, it’s like the mind is doing that on its own and you can’t really do that actively. Right. It’s just sort of your mind does that, but you have to have certain conditions for that to happen. So if you use your smartphone, look at that, that you know, prevents you from mind wandering. But if you’re in this sort of like very, nice state of being, then your mind can start to wander and you might, you know, get great ideas from that. For example, when you stare at a window on a train or when you’re listening to a boring talk. And I really, really recommend this to all of you to like, you know, have these conditions in your life to let your mind wander and so all of us put these three things into it to into this channel, to think about future and of course, you know, it depends on our experiences, on our past lives, yeah. So the personal history, you know, the history you absorb from friends, family, books, TV, without history. There’s no future. Why? Because this imaginary, like movie that’s running in your brain, you need ideas to fuel that, so, for example, you know, have you talked to a four year old about future? It’s, it’s quite hard because four year olds don’t know what is possible . And so personal history is quite important, and people who are very creative when thinking about future, those are people that had a have a diverse friendship circles that read a lot, that travel a lot and so on. And the present is has this, yeah, kind of a special role in relation to the future because everything you feel in the present, like sort of will limit your way to think about future. For example, alcohol, drugs, sex . And so I’m not going to go into detail, but, you know, I don’t think a lot of people have thought about their pension plan while they were attending a party. Right. Because all these, stimuli in the present, you know, you, you, you sort of, yeah. When you, when you drink too much at a party, that’s not your problem. That’s tomorrow Florence’s problem. And there’s a term for that that’s called future discounting. So so we mostly think about how am I feeling today? How am I feeling now? How am I doing physically, am I cold? Have I just did I just eat a cheeseburger? And so, yeah, it’s we don’t yet know why fast food, like, sort of makes time go faster in our perception, but the important thing is new newness. So for example, if I, if I showed you a sci fi movie and everything looked just the same as it does today, you wouldn’t say, wow, that’s a sci fi film, because sci fi is about difference. It needs to be different from the present. And that’s innovation. That’s something new, creating something new. And so future is always about something new that’s not here yet. And so for me and my work, because I work at NATO, you know, that’s not a field of work where creativity is, the focus point. But but as an individual in companies, the most important thing to solve problems is creativity. And so you mix these three points together, experience, present and innovation, and then you cast it away immediately. You, create it and project all of these futures every day. And then you discard them, yeah. And so with this horror scenario, you know, like as soon as my sister arrives safely home and she didn’t get run over by a car, I immediately forget about the fear that I just had. And this possible future I created. And so what do we do with this? We live in a time where not all four of these items are in balance, and I think that’s a reason why I wrote the book, a lot of people, you know, are so afraid of the future. And so how do you deal with it differently? And the first thing you do is you set aside what you know for sure. So safety securities, is that the right word? The sun will rise in the morning. Something like that. What can we depend on and for us in our work where you think about future strategically, you know, what do I know for certain and what do I and what do I don’t know? And so the second one is managing risks. Some risks you can’t eliminate completely, but you have to manage them. And in Germany, you know, we have insurance companies when we think about, car crashes and something like that. But on a higher level, you know, there’s always the possibility of something bad happening, and you have to manage that actively. And what’s the great thing about that? You immediately feel better. You’re less afraid because having a future and thinking about the future is always an active action, because if you just think about like these, you know, horror, fearful scenarios, you, you also need to come to a conclusion of what to do at the end. You think about, what do I know, what could go wrong and what could go right in this space of possibility? You know, it’s never just bad and it’s never just good. And so I did some research. And in the 50s, you know, when we look back, we, we just, we have this distorted view of the 50s of the 1950s, so in looking back. You know, people thought there would be a third World war. It would be a nuclear war, and the world would end. But there was also this idea of, progression. And so it was this mix of progression and terror. And just because, you know, we feel bad now when we think about the future, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to get as bad as we expect. >> And today we tend to forget that the future don’t always has to be bad, that there can be that positive things can happen if we work on it, and the least popular point is the last one in Germany, you can try to predict the future as much as you want. There are always going to be surprises. Some of them are going to be good, some are not. When the pandemic started, when the war started, people kept asking, well, who failed to predict this? It’s not possible to predict everything. That’s, what’s physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us you can’t predict the future. Not all of it. Not always. There are three things you should not do. Wish for thinking and catastrophic thinking. It’s cousin. Both of these are both of these are dangerous. Wishful thinking is when you have when you think that a positive vision of the future has already happened. Football fans do this a lot. There are studies that show that football fans are very bad at, predicting if their team is going to win, that’s okay, because football isn’t critical. But in the case of war, it’s, it’s, problematic if, you do think that war can’t happen, then that’s not the same, as running an analysis. And, and, being optimistic about war, but catastrophic thinking is quite similar. It starts from a point of thinking that the worst is unavoidable. We don’t need to act, and I’m showing you a picture of the last generation movement because even though I think that the this organisation is following a goal that we all should follow. Preventing the climate crisis there is there is no study that shows that we are all going to die because of climate change. The problem is that’s what, catastrophic thinking does to you. I have a person from, Greek mythology for you, Cassandra. She could predict the future, but people didn’t take her seriously, when in, humans are overloaded with catastrophic thinking, then they stop. Stop acting. And classic example of that is, for example, smoking. If you if you tell people to that smoking is bad for them, they’re going it. If you overload them, they’re going to do the opposite, and then thirdly, we have certain own assumptions. And the then CEO of Microsoft who thought that the iPhone was never going to be successful, all my recommendation would be to ask yourself what would cause me to change my opinion, and have a mental high water mark that tells you that, okay, when this happens, then I’m going to have to change my opinion. Mental agility is the secret weapon of future thinking. Can I find solutions to evaluate this space of possibilities? Can I find opportunity that I’ve overlooked? How how to repair it , find old futures and let go of them all of all of us have had to do that, for example, when a relationship ended, when a dream was, was, was over, there’s a certain amount of grief involved, but that that, you can get through it some, some futures regenerate on their own. For example. Broken relationships. You don’t have to do everything on your own. Most of these carry too much negativity. There is a double negativity in climate change. Firstly, everything is going to be terrible. Secondly unless you stop doing so, this narrative of loss. So we have a double negative here. But you need a positive aspect to engage you a positive counterbalance. I was in Saudi Arabia last year where they’re talking about climate change in this way. Hey, it’s not bad if we stop eating meat, we’re going to live healthier. We’re going to be more in balance with nature, nature, the air is going to improve. They’re going to be fewer illnesses. And that’s a story you can tell about climate change. Also in Germany. But it’s not happening. And the other aspects have too little knowledge. Novelty. That’s typical of German politics. When you look at what parties are proposing, it’s either a very negative future, a return to the past, or saying that tomorrow is going to be the same as today. And that’s not very sexy. We all want to look forward to something to work towards some something even work hard. But it has to be shown to us. And that’s what science fiction is great at. What can we do? What can you change? There’s no point in lying awake at night and, thinking about something that you can’t influence, for example, the end of humanity. But there are small things that all of us can do. Finding the vision, find something you you enjoy about the future. You want to work towards. Learn to live with the negatives and don’t be afraid of surprises. So because being human always means change. Thank you very much. >> Here. Danke, Florence. >> Thank you very much, Florence . >> Dosman. >> And you can find her later on and get her signature in her book at the Dosman stand out in the hall. >> Ich auch den Dann könnte jetzt noch hier bleiben, and you can stay and listen to the next session, which will be very interesting, because it’s about a resource, about a capability that we sort of lack today, and that we need a little bit more of empathy and yeah, the capability to, feel what other people feel, to recognise and respect other people’s point of view. >> Can you learn empathy? Can you train it like a muscle, like doing sports or playing an instrument and the woman who will be joining us on stage now, Gives us the scientific tools to deal with empathy, she’s a psychologist, a neuroscientist, a fellow at the Max Planck Gesellschaft in Berlin. And she’s a worldwide renowned expert on empathy. And she’s going to talk about the state, of the science today on empathy. And, is going to give us some tips on how to train our brain, to be more empathetic in our day to day lives. So I’m very happy that she’s here, a neuroscientific perspective on training the social brain. Please give it up for Tania Singer. >> Hello. Another session? I already heard the session before me was about future, future, future. And in this session, we’re more about the here and now and how we can relearn the here and now. I’m a psychologist, neuroscientist, and I work about how how we can train our brain, our mind and cultivate it for nice things like empathy, compassion, changing perspectives, being able to do democracy, tolerance, and so on. I give you an overview. Why did we start doing this? What we’ve been doing for like 25 years now, we as psychologists started even before the pandemic. Pandemic to see a trend which is alarming society was getting more and more lonely and isolated even before the pandemic. Young people 1825 years old feel more lonely now than the people that are older than 80. And we’re going to get back onto that. That has to do with digitalisation, with the devices we use every day. But we also saw that there’s something like a mental health crisis that has become an actual pandemic. Too much individualism, which, turns into narcissism, the question about narcissism is changing. Is going up in the US for the whole population overall, with all the climate crisis and the macro crises. And then we wanted to say, hey, lawyers or economists are talking about institutional structures and changing the institutional designs, but we as psychologists and neuroscientists look at what can we do when we get up in the morning to change ourselves and change systems from within? How can also, with upbringing, the change happen to more social togetherness, more global togetherness, not only within the nation but globally? Everything against the polarisation that we’re experiencing nowadays, how can we get together again and how can we, sustain resilience and mental health? Because there is a tsunami of mental health problems rolling towards us and there isn’t enough done against that. So we first started with a huge study ten years ago, which is the resource project we started to just look, can we train our mind mentally to train all those skills? And can we measure it? Can we do research about that in evidence based way, state of the art measurements that we know out of psychology can we capture that? And then I’m going to introduce something we did during Covid to scale. So show the results of the nine month huge study we brought it to a scalable format and we call it, healthy digitalisation. How can we use online training to get people to be healthy again and counteract the unhealthy tendencies from the social media? So the basic project was, in Berlin and in Leipzig, 300 people, nine months and, they went through three mental training modules. The first. I don’t know if you ever heard about that. It’s about awareness. What we do is we train awareness and attention to learn that the mind and the thoughts can be present in the here and now and not well. It can be useful to look into the future, but it’s better to look into the future when you’re firmly placed in the now emergent futures. For that, you need to train the ability to be present now, not to look into your mobile device, not somewhere with your thoughts. Where am I going to be later? What’s the business? What’s the program now? And if you look at how often are we now with our minds? That’s very rare. You can’t train it. It can be trained that the mind remains as in the present moment, and awareness stays here. So those were the first three months. Then we have a red module because it’s opening up the heart, compassion, gratitude and all the socio emotional emotional abilities which, train the heart like empathy. And then we have the third module, which is cognitive. It’s a male perspective of changing perspectives. I can have a mental model of the mind of someone else and put myself in their perspective. Multi perspectives. That’s a basic necessity to be able to live in a democracy. And it can be trained, but it’s not that simple. And then we had an app which allowed people every day to see how are you guys. What are you doing. Where is your mind? Where are your emotions? But also which would give people, practices. And we had retreats with coaches and trainers before the pandemic. You would actually go into rooms and sit next to each other and practice things. And then, there were like two, two, practice sessions every day in the app. One would be a classic awareness , exercise. And then there were exercises where you had two people which were about diets. I’m going to talk about more about that later. Those are great practices, great exercises you practice with someone else every day to change perspective, train social skills that you don’t know, and you change partners every week because is how are you supposed to train the social brain without being social, without someone else? And then we looked at the brain. We looked into the brain before and after those modules via brain scans and asked ourselves if those networks I’m going to show you right here those different colours. The brain is, of course, not coloured in different shades, but that just means there is an attention network, an awareness network which allows us to be focussed and in yellow. And this network can be trained through exercises, just like we can go to the fitness studio and train our muscles through certain exercises. You can look inside and train attention through certain exercises, and with other exercises you can train the red network. That’s empathy, social emotions, compassion. Those are emotional networks in the brain and the green network. That’s the one that allows you to reflect about yourself and also about others to change perspectives and then we measured the brain before and after three months of daily practice with the app. And what did we see? It works. What we saw. It was revolutionary because we were told the brain just declines. After 25 years of age. It atrophies. But what we see here, what we can measure here, the grey matter gets larger, gets thicker, and on average, how the participants in the study were 43, 53. No, no, they weren’t children. And we were always told nothing happens except ageing. But that the brain can grow and especially the social brain and trains things like empathy in red. You can see the networks that are growing. If you train something, small 20 minutes a day and do those exercises for empathy every day, then your brain grows and you can and you can also show that empathy grows and gets better attention, awareness and changes of perspectives. We call it social cognition. The social intelligence also increases and improves. So we published 70 papers. This is just the summary of all our findings from just one project. Isn’t that amazing? We just do small bits every day, but regularly and over the course of three months, and we can’t just change the plasticity of our brain and the structure, but we can be more aware and attentive. Change perspective, but it matters a lot which exercises you do. It’s like in sports, if you train your biceps every day, you won’t think that your feet get better. It’s the same with the mind. So you can see, depending on which module you did stress got better. Social stress only gets better if you do the diet. The exercises with partners, practice stress every day and not be afraid anymore to be judged, not be beautiful. Not not whatever all those fears that young people have with the social media, that they always have to be the best that can be decreased here and then we thought to ourselves, okay, but nine months, that doesn’t scale. If you go to hospitals and into schools and say, hey, we have nine month programs and you have to go into a retreat for four days, they say, won’t work. So next project we did that was more, coincidence than planning because like everyone else, we were, in in the pandemic with our lab. No, brain scan, nothing during lockdown. So we initiated a cough social project, and that is a mental health study. We took the app from the research project and took thousands of people in Berlin. How do you feel? First lockdown, second lockdown. After opening up. First time after the first lockdown, before the second one and then six months of lockdown. Remember the second lockdown? Six months and what we see is that’s just one example of a lot of more. Those were the people from Berlin. They really suffered. You can see depression, loneliness, stress, fear, anxiety. It went up after the first lockdown. Then we thought in uni, it’s over. What was that? And then everybody went into holidays. It was summer and there was a bounce back, almost back to normal. And then the second lockdown came. And what you can see here in the literature, we call it the pandemic fatigue. With each month in the second lockdown, depression, loneliness, isolation got stronger, stronger, stronger and it also shows in pretty much all of the studies coming out worldwide for about this time, women suffered the most and the youngest, not the oldest. The people 28 to 25 or even younger, 1516. They had the highest rates of loneliness and depression and so on, and the effects can still be seen. We have a huge problem and it has to be addressed. You can download all of this for free if you’re interested in this time and mental health. During the pandemic, you can find here videos, brochures and everything that is worth knowing about this discourse, this debate. What did the pandemic do to us mentally? Well and then we said we can’t keep measuring and looking. Look at this. Going down, going down, going down. Let’s take the meditation we had in the awareness module and the dyad, the partnership exercise is partner exercise. And let’s do something online. Of course we could only do it online because we never knew if we would go back into lockdown any minute. And we did this for ten weeks online with an app 12 minutes a day, like a long brushing your teeth thoroughly. But every day one group was on their own. Trained awareness, did exercises , eyes whatever, and the others worked in a dyad with a partner. We matched the pairs via the app. Then there was a control group and so on. So both groups did something similar, practised for 12 minutes via an app every week with the coach, an online sessions two hours. Then it they went deeper. Always the same teachers actually practice a skills, develop abilities like at school. And if you’re asking how does an effective diet work if like the two of us would match. So the app I would say hello, hello, we’re in the app. Tell me about a situation in, from your last day. We talked. We do this every day. So from the last 24 hours where you had stress something difficult and how that did that feel in the body? Why do we ask, how did this feel in the body? Because all health and all healing is in the body, not up here. As long as you don’t feel your body and you cut yourself off, health will not happen. So we’re practising body awareness and accept it. How do you deal with stress and difficult situations and then you explore that? I can’t say anything. It’s not a dialogue. I can only listen empathetic and not judge at all. And look, if I have emotions, look at them and let them go because after five minutes it’s my turn. I don’t want you to judge me either, because then there’s like a gong, then the second question, and now tell me a situation for which you were, have gratitude. A lot of gratitude. The Germans. Germans have a bit of difficulties. Gratitude Nah. No being thankful. No. Everything’s bad, but let’s practice that. What can you be thankful for? You can be thankful for a lot of things. And then you explore your gratitude. How does it feel in the body? And then you change it, and after 12 minutes, it’s over. And this tiny exercise is so super magic. I’m going to tell you what it all, what it does so when you, compare classical awareness, there’s a lot of, research on that. And the dyad both are great to, get back your emotional regulation and deal better with emotions. Both are great to decrease. Fear and depression have less of both . Both are awesome and efficient to get, self compassion and strengthen your compassion for others. And the alexithymia. I’m not going to talk about it. It’s a bit difficult, but now it’s interesting. It differs is awareness itself is good for the mind to calm down, that you don’t have all the negative thoughts and, that’s, what happens in depression. It’s so strong. Those cognitive thoughts . But the dyad is a lot more powerful to increase resilience. The feeling of optimism. And I can I can I can adapt, I can accept my life. Whatever happens, I’m going to do it somehow now. And that also shows in computer exercises where you can measure, subconscious tendencies. If you see the glass half full or half empty. Those are exercises where you can measure if you see the interpret the world rather negatively or rather positively. And the dyad every day, probably because of the gratitude, actually, changes a negative bias into a positive worldview. >> And only the dyad, only the partner exercise can get you out of your loneliness, which makes sense and only the dyad brings along social cohesion, the feeling of social togetherness and this works like a social glue. >> You feel more and more connected, not just to the person you just the exercise with what the whole world. Because every week you get a new person which you don’t know, so you have a university professor meeting up with a subway driver. So it’s very intimate in a living room setting. And this creates social cohesion, tolerance for one another. And also understanding that, well, other people have the same problems as I do. And we measure the stress hormones in the blood. And we could show that after one of these diet sessions, the social stress reactions with cortisol goes down. So suddenly you feel less societal pressure, did I do well ? Did he like me? Did I do bad? All of this, social anxiety goes down. So. And then he thought, great, 12 minutes. You can integrate into your day whenever it fits. Yes. You don’t need. It’s not therapy. Therapy is something else. It’s a preventative measure just for feeling good. But you may have heard during the pandemic and with this whole, problematic loneliness goes up, depression goes up. It also has to do with digitalisation. We said we have to bring this into society, we don’t call it. We call it healthy socialisation because it’s the opposite of the narcissism of, social media. You use it to connect it and you have a vulnerable, authentic dialogue where, for example, young people and children can say, I’m afraid and this is what it feels like. I feel bad and this is what it feels like. And they can reflect and hear that from other people and realise that they’re not alone in their fears and insecurities and depression. The depression rate in 15 year olds is increasing dramatically, and the suicide rate in the USA as well, that’s really bad and it has to do with the reality that social media, create pressure like, for example, on how you have to look if you’re in, you’re going through poverty and always think you have to look like people on social media, like people on Instagram. There’s a discrepancy between what you really feel and what you think the world wants to see from you. And if this discrepancy is too large, desperation ensues. And you get the so-called imposter syndrome, where you think you’re actually an imposter and about to be found out any minute, and we’ll be shamed and so on. And to close that gap, the dyad is a daily exercise where you can show vulnerability, show yourself as you are, and see the other person as they are. So you use digitalisation for a true deep con tact. And many people tell us that this experience of, it gives you the experience of friendship and a deeper connection. So we try to bring that into the branches of society. We in the fields that need it most. The health care system, the education system, you know that the burnout rates of nurses and teachers are increasing, rising dramatically. And in the education system. We just started a new study with the, where we introduced these diet programs into the education , the education system was very much focussed on semantic knowledge and the internet wasn’t as important. And you call that future skills? We often hear calls for future skills to be taught to pupils, how to regulate your emotion, your insecurity, your fears, how to be empathetic, how to change perspectives, develop democratic skills, awareness, conflict management. Those are social skills that have become more and more important because it defines our everyday lives. In this fast paced world. So this is why we have a school project where we try to bring the systemic change into the schools and monitored the systemic change at schools. So it’s not just about the, the empathy skills of the teachers, but also about the students lives. If there are any teachers here, we are doing this project, all over Germany. Just approach us. We can give you a free training, and we will ask you questions about that. And the idea is that we can bring programs into schools that are based on evidence. The teachers have to know how it works and teach it to the children, because at some point, we will have this as a, as a subject at school, just like we have a subject that is called sports. So physical importance is, physical health is absolutely important to our school system, but mental health is not. And we don’t need much. For example, a child friendly app 12 minutes. So it needn’t take anything away because people are always afraid. Like if we introduce that subject, won’t math become less important or something? No. The, diets are actually addictive and pupils will love them. So if you know any teachers, recruit them for our project. And if you want to learn about it, we also offer Reconnect master classes in, March next year. For example, we have a course here in Berlin. You can find it on our website. It’s called reconnect Masterclass and you can also take that course as an individual. Thank you very much. I think I’ve kept up well with the time. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Professor Tanya Zinger. Now so it’s a well, at 4:15, we’ll continue with the collective, research. Research from last year. >> So na wunderbar. Es noch so schön werden is Herzlich willkommen. Wir sind bereit für die next. >> Welcome. We are ready for the next session. For the next keynote on our stage. And it’s about. What a great media investigation, when they were about the secret meeting in Potsdam, where a couple of Nazi idiots met up, how they want to, lead the country in the future. So we’re all know that they’re really idiots. But of course, it was a big there was a big outcry. This investigation really led to, a lot of change. People protested. There was a lot of, a lot of things happened and how exactly they managed to do this investigation, how Correctiv managed to do that and what happened afterwards. That’s what we have. A collective senior reporter on our stage today. He will explain today what happened there, and especially what happened afterwards. So let’s all give a big applause to, the senior reporter. I think Peters was his name. Sean Peters. So it’s titled Secret Plan against Germany. The tight connection between AfD, the far right German party and neo-Nazis. So yeah, yeah, thanks for having me . I, I was in Potsdam on November 25th, and what happened afterwards? You might call the sort of most important workshop I’ve ever had about self-actualisation. And I want to tell you about them, but I’m going to sort of try it out first. Does it work? So who was behind this? There’s a lot of us , we cooperated on this and Correctiv is a media house. We’re planning on strengthening them. Democracy with non-profit journalism. And we want to reveal, disinformation on misinformation and really show what to do. And obviously, we also have conflict politically, at Correctiv and there’s rarely of one opinion. And this is great for us because you always get new opinions, new thoughts. So I’m here, of course, for collective, but the opinions that I have are partly mine. And some colleagues might say, hey, I look at this differently. I’ll try to sort of make this balance, but just to let you know. But first, I want to I want you to remember the time right after we published The Secret plan. This investigation. This was a pretty special time in the country. Okay and I would like to sort of show the next, show the next picture I had, I had seen I had asked, can I show this right after the day that sort of the, radio showed this, and now we are going to show a video or a, an audio clip. I guess that can really represent the, >> Über eine Volkslied vom Komponistin Gideon Klein und wenn es nach dem Weg der Nazis gegen den Komponist Gideon Klein notwendig complete a hat auch Nur kompaniet in einem lager quasi vom Boden verschwunden, wenn es nach dem Berliner Nazis gegangen Weil er jüdische war er gewesen in Terezin statt sorry. >> From the interpreters, this is in unintelligible for us. >> Und schon ich ihn das alles im konjunktiv. So als hat das verandert werden können. Ja hat is vielleicht auch wenn die verdammten Nazis niemals und die Macht gekommen werden. Aber so ist es doch passiert Gideon Klein hat Nur wenig das auch Nur in einem lager, eine in Terezin statt is Auschwitz und er ist von the Nazis. Mord werden Weil the Nazis and Die Macht gekommen sind. >> Because they came, because the Nazis came to power. So So if in 2023, 2024 or more in 2023, in November, people in a Potsdam hotel sort of, sat and talked to each other about deporting German nationals. And they were, industrial representatives. They were even political representatives from apparently democratic parties. Then we have to say, these are really key, these are really Nazis. And they can’t come to power. And this was part of sort of a, German Western, radio show message that just played through and really showed the importance of what the investigation has revealed. And the reaction was sort of following in the five days after this, there was a reaction. So spreading further, these untrue, these untrue statements and these, these accusations. Is really a, a political and media scandal for the Federal Republic of Germany. People These are, German Democratic Republic methods and the GDR, the new lander. They also reacted and they before there was a big protest. In front of the, in front of the Court of Administration. I don’t know if you remember, but for me, this was really special. That a single text was is actually able to, sort of cause the biggest protest that’s in Germany’s history. This has really gotten under our skin and has really all of the reactions, all of the taxi drivers, everyone talked about it. And a friend called me, his daughter asked when her best friend might be sort of when it might be her best friend’s turn, which probably means her best friend is someone who might be Remigrated or D migrated and I’ll tell you what happened and how it happened. But first, why? Why was there such such an explosion? I mean, there’s many different explanations. Everyone has their own. Obviously. Alice Weidel also has her own. I think for me, we really felt powerless . We had the Covid pandemic. We had, sort of the attack. We had, protests by farmers. We had fascists in power in, in India, in Russia, in, China. XI Jinping, Trump is obviously running again. And sort of the numbers for AfD are still climbing. And we can see that when we published this investigation, then everyone has a really, really close relation. Either I actually have some migration background, so they might be talking about, me and kicking me out or I might be or I might have Nazi background. So I need to make a decision on what I want to be doing, now, what does politics make on on October 15th, 2023, on Sicily, I , I became I got a message, I deleted everything, but the source didn’t delete everything. So they have sent it to me again . And this was the view that I saw. And I called my colleague Markus Bensemann. Had a really bad connection. You can see I was in nature, so it has to be really has to have been really important for me. And I called him. He was also on holiday and I told him, hey, I got this letter and this has to be a really important investigation in in the letter, we could see these two people signed it. A dentist from Dusseldorf, Gernot Muric and, Hans Christian Limmer, who’s an investor in a German bread and bake bread bakery chain, who has received a lot of money. And you could see sort of everywhere here, in a lot of blogs and forums there, that are researching and investigating fascism and what you could find there was these people were already on there. So this dentist, for instance, had, was a leader of a, a leader of an organisation that, is right wing and right extreme, even extreme. That is extremely right . And, what this was about was really to strengthen the German people, the other person. So the dad was actually, was actually investigated by the police, they, they found neo-Nazi, memory for neo-Nazi remembrances in there. And he had a lot of money. And the two people met and they wanted to fight for this patriotic thing, they wanted to they wanted to fundraise, fund, raise funds, raise to go to a neutral account , and we were wondering, when do you decide when to go in? So if you’re doing this kind of investigative work of hiding your own identity, going undercover, you need to really make a very good decision. I can’t just go to Repubblica and pretend to be someone I’m not, so it needs to be public, of public relevance, and I can’t, There can’t be a different way for me. An easier way for me to get to it. So when I had when I would have asked to take part in this, would I have actually gotten access to. But actually, in the letters, it was very clear that this was supposed to be secret, that there would be a neo-Nazi coming from Austria. We there were a couple of names of people who would be going there, and it was really about what this is about about the goals there. And also all of the elections at the local levels. And third, which isn’t according to law, but just how I would decide myself, I wouldn’t step down, so I would never, I would never do this kind of investigative research for a really small organisation that is sort of at a lower level than I am, but how do you actually get there? So I saw that the hotel owner, she had, I guess, tried to push the AfD within a, Spiegel article, and she actually, had bought a, another building that where there was another article that really said, hey, so she bought this piece of property to save it from Nazis. And now she actually invited these Nazis to go there. >> So actually, the person from Collectief had rented this room using Booking.com. On their website, everything was blocked. But we forgot. They forgot to block it on Booking.com and they forgot to say sorry, everything’s full, go somewhere else. It didn’t happen . So I was in. We had, gotten to known from the grapevine that, there was, other journalists also, and they supported us with vehicles and so on, like we also did in investigations on, for example, animal cruelty. So this was the right and the left entrance. And like that we could see, well, we had invitations, we for there were the names of different people. And here we could actually see whether those people would actually turn up. But how would we get images from behind? You can see the House Adlon here, the two cars, and we had a fourth camera here. We also tried it with a sports, camera, but the images were two pixelated and so I went in and there was a flyer lying about. And we thought, oh, that’s the neighbours. Why not? So. Hi Sabina. And this is how we got those nice images. We could have taken agency pictures or press pictures. Why did we do this whole conundrum, because you can see the relations. If Garrett, who’s in the ARD. Well, could have said I didn’t talk to Mackenziaena. Well, but you can see here in the picture you’re leaning forward. You seem very interested. And this person, Ulrich Siegmund from the AfD, it’s the, head of, the faction from Saxony and Altena. I didn’t know how he did it, but there’s not a single image where he’s not talking. He’s. He’s very eloquent. So we took all of those images. Let me stand here so that I can see my notes better. The question is also the third camera. How would we do that? I I, bought myself a camera watch and there was. Yeah, there was my, My bedroom. And, I prepared myself. I went to an optician. I’ll go to an AfD meeting, and he equipped me with these glasses. I can’t sell those. They just look horrible. And so I went in. He was unpleasantly cheeky and asked for milk, coffee or something. And our staff aren’t prepared to be that tough. And that’s why he kept turning up. So I was unpleasant and I was cheeky. So when I was asked, why do I have a double room alone, I just blabbed. I said, well, who of you knows what a weekender is? Some people don’t know that those are really, really bulky bags. And what you’re saying when you’re wearing one of those bags is, I only drive by car because I’m rich, and I bought a weekender car. And said, well, I’ll just pretend my girlfriend just left me and I’m sad and I, walk alone. And the next morning I’ll ask for coffee. I saw the catering plan, so I knew one when they would have breakfast. So the next morning I went through the room. I was here between the conference room and the, canteen room where they prepared and down there was a bunch of letters and the letters . Of course, I wanted them because they had names on them. So how did I go there? I took my cell phone and you can see my camera perspective from the watch. I greeted people. You can see Mario Muller there. No I’m not part of the group. I filmed an and behind my back. I just filmed the names of all of the neo-Nazis. The first time it didn’t work because I forgot to push the button, but the second time, well, I stopped because I heard a creaky noise and the third time finally worked out. Yeah, and it actually ended with a face that will. We won’t find out who it is, but, the site found out that, Eric and that is looking at me, it could have ended otherwise. So the big question we hear all the time, how did you document the content so well? We never spoke about this on any stage before. And I won’t talk about it today either because these we have to protect our sources. We know that people who tell on neo-Nazis don’t have a good life when they’re uncovered. And honestly, this is one of the things I take most pride in about Correctiv is that we they haven’t been uncovered so far. It was several. They were very talkative, but no one knows who they are. And in spite of the immense pressure from despite research and investigation from the right, who wanted to know how we do that, it remained secret. So what remains for anyone who just skimmed the research, which. Looked at faces , the, investigation groups, asked, do you know this person? Do you know that person? And in the end, we knew there’s a right wing extremist dentist. There was a meetup of AfD representatives who did a master plan on, exposing foreign citizens with a racist ideology. And if they they basically talked about this master plan, which violates a bunch of articles in the German constitution. There were several AfD, faction heads, who wanted to get donations, in secret. There were staff stories like, you hire staff for some, shady jobs and then the money isn’t ours. There was the Mario Mueller and open right wing extremist who who says that he would, that he would send, violent groups to journalists and also describes legal methods to, undermine voting. And there was also a voter donation being organised. And on 10th January, the investigation was published. At this point, I wasn’t in Berlin, I was in Vienna because on 18th January we published a theatre play in the Berlin Ensemble. We have a research that that, has a lot of content, but it could have happened that the affected persons could say, they misused my name so it could have happened that I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to publish my investigation open. So I have to ask you, have you call that confrontation in journalism? I also can’t tell you in stage without confronting the affected persons, but also I can’t go to theatre and make a play out of it because that would be disseminating the content. And that wouldn’t be okay if, if, for example, the AfD, members disclosed that they were actually working for the German shots, a secret service. So so on 8th January, I went to Vienna and talked to Kai Fogas from Volkstheater Wien. We knew each other already and okay, this person trusts that person and they didn’t know what was in it. And only when we confronted them, I worked on the text in Vienna, in Germany, the whole thing exploded and blew up and we wrote this theatre play. Within 3 or 4 days back to Berlin. Berlin ensemble, two days, three days, three hours of rehearsals and spontaneously on Thursday evening, we were able to bring this theatre play to stage. And then it went back to the audience and, and in 40 theatres in Germany, it was shown in berm. I know we had to hire an extra room. It was in pubs until today. Schools and city theatres want to use our text. It’s open source. We’re not making any money from it. You can also use this text, change it, update it, discuss it with your pupils in the pub, whatever you want. But why theatre? >> Why theatre when this is such a serious issue? >> I have a short excerpt from the theatre play, but I think the most important reason why I decided in favour of doing this theatre play with collective is because in journalism and media and democracy, we have a huge problem which isn’t talked about enough. And in one of his last books, it was about the headlines. We have to decide what is more important, the cute panda bear, the Ukraine war rockets on Tel Aviv? Or is it the, latest telenovela issue? What is most important? Which headline do I swipe through and which do I read? And theatre is where people come together and people don’t look on their cell phones. So there’s a social pressure that forces you to listen to me for an hour. An and as such, you have the opportunity to tell a story for a whole hour. And and you have meta layers, which I want to show to you. >> So. >> Remigration. That is abstract and bureaucratic. The concept behind it. He explains it like that stage character Martin Zellner. There is three target groups of migration that should leave Germany three target groups of foreigners. We want to re migrate first, asylum seekers, second, foreigners who have the right to remain here. And third, non assimilated citizens, well stop non assimilated citizens. Are you crazy? This is the term he’s using. We don’t have to reproduce this Nazi language. There are no non assimilated citizens. That’s just a specific term. Well, but it’s the point. That’s how it works about language. The cultural layer, questions the rights of people. We haven’t invented this term. Sellner has used it in his book. Well, if you want to understand what this is all about, you have to be gruesome. As gruesome as the reality may be. Can I continue? Sure The main goal of the right wing extremism is conserving cultural substance. Well, just say it. You mean race separation? Yeah. Of course. He’s from the Nazi marketing, department. So that’s. Yeah Can I continue? So this was a meeting we had in our, in our, team. What can we say and what can we not say? Which terms can we use? At the end? We used it. But using the medium of the theatre play and also the text, we were able to contextualise the whole thing and bring more meta layers to this whole thing. Who of you saw the theatre play? Okay, that’s a few. You can also rewatch it on YouTube and also in the ARD Mediathek and try that. >> Martin Zeller so yeah, it’s there. >> The figure in the play Martin Zona and if you really say Martin Zona the lawyers are coming. So yeah, it’s a contextualisation of what can you say, what can you do. And after the play everyone can say, well, this play was shite, or this play was cool. And what happened afterwards? It wasn’t just us as collective. We’re non-profit, which means that we have another stance on finding the truth. We’re in another cosmos. Donations didn’t explode. As much as you might think. There were a lot of people who were angry, people who said this, investigation is too political. So yeah, that’s the reality. Is not all rose tinted. Yeah we could work, but it’s not. It didn’t escalate as much as we would have hoped, but still we are able to work non-profit, so we had a heap of information, a lot of work that we can do ourselves. So we gave that work to our colleagues the week afterwards. The only thing I did was, distribute material from Tagblatt, and another person came from another newspaper, and I would ask about certain vehicle registration numbers, and I would provide them with the photos and so on and so on. And the next person came from Austria. Do you have pictures of this? And that person? And I gave them the pictures and, netzpolitik did, gave a, an award to a Hessian AfD politician. So there was one reaction after the other, and it was spread, spread, spread. Most media houses wouldn’t do that because, well, there’s competition and we have to do this ourselves. We have a lead. We have to, stay ahead of the competition. And that wasn’t the case with us. And this is what I find special about collective. That’s done. >> Yeah. >> So this is like, from our side. What we did now, what was special and a little bit awkward was that the, Chancellor actually did marketing for us. The, the leader of the, shots. He basically told people to go and to go out and protest, which was also strange because we thought, okay, actually, as a shots leader, you actually you should have done what we did. And there were thoughts about maybe we should prohibit the AfD, but the AfD as such actually was a little bit split. So they were thinking, what should we do? Should we, take should we sort of, kick out some people and on a European level, Le Pen actually provided Alice Weidel with a task you could say to say sorry. And, actually, only just recently, the European an ID group has actually kicked out AfD as the party because it might be too right wing even for this European group, because the SS, which is the, German secret police during the Nazi time, was actually quite active in France. So and if you can take a look at the sort of map you someone from the Bundestag actually came to us and showed us, oh, all of these protests were a reaction to your text and a couple of days later, more and more protests were happening and all of the media was looking only at this, and every sort of every media house really wanted to, look for Nazis. And sort of pulled them out. And we really thought, okay, well, this is really what democracy should do. And if we’re thinking of having this really, really key wall in between us, then this is what we should do is to shine a light onto them and to really reveal what they’re doing. These Nazis and again, a little bit weird. The Chancellor also protested, which is a bit weird. The government also protested. No, probably not of their own volition at least. He doesn’t look really happy. But this kind of, this kind of feeling and this mood, everyone really talked about it. And everyone really thought, well, we will change our we will change our behaviour. Okay Foot football players and football trainers are also citizens and managers. Business managers are also citizens. So whoever now doesn’t rise. They haven’t understood anything. This is really not a question. It’s really five minutes before 12. So very, very close to a bad situation. And you don’t need complain. >> We there’s no we don’t need complaints, and we don’t need to sort of understand that. Oh well , people vote AfD just to protest the current situation. Whoever has not understood it now and, they really should know that every single one of you also based on Germany, Germans history has to take care of it has to really take a very, very clear position and this is really what we are all called to do, right now. >> Yeah, there were some weird reactions as well, a football something decided to become, sort of the president of the European Championships. So some people also want to explain again and really reap profits from this. And but we actually think you might be able to sort of use whatever you are, wherever you are, to go against. Right. But what we didn’t think was, to sort of that companies would react like this. We really expected companies that we mentioned to maybe say something , but what we are actually seeing is that a lot of companies have actually built up these kind of, clubs. So something called club for democracy, and these are really big companies that usually have budget to donate to parties they actually want to give to civil society this time around. And I think this is really important, there’s some companies have actually collected together some Catholics bishops have really clearly said that, right wing extremism isn’t good. And, sort of lawyers and also judges usually aren’t really political in public, but in this case, they actually did what we also didn’t think is that, some politicians fans actually recommended or proposed a change in the Basic Law. And these are all things that didn’t happen because of our investigation. They were all prepared before, but they were always sort of critiques. There was a lot of conflict, and our, our investigation actually contributed to these things that had been prepared before to be, sort of implemented. Suddenly there’s some measures by, interior Minister Fazer against right wing extremism in Bremen, which is a city in Germany, that, sort of the. Yeah, the parliament of Bremen should really start collecting a lot of information to look into whether AfD could be forbidden or should be forbidden. And, sort of even someone who usually said criminal foreigners should go, but even at the European level, there was really a break. But there was also a lot of stuff that wasn’t very convenient. And very comfortable for us. Now for you guys, if you’re ever doing this kind of investigation, if you’ve ever been an investigative artist or a sort of political activist artist, then you should make sure that your old website, when you were paying collective, which where you did, maybe, some sort of acts that were not real and that maybe you should mark them as being in the past, at least in their for what you could see was my old website that still contained information about what I used to do. And this I’m really sad about and I’m sorry about for my colleagues, so what happened was my, one of my colleagues has really shown how IFD, is sort of organising the right wing media and, we have invited, a lot of people into, into a meeting at the Bundestag to think of how can we maybe create a, a public that is against the current sort of mainstream, so we can see. Alice Weidel shared this post from Young Freedom, which is the youth organisation of AfD, and there were a lot of different reports. And by the way, almost all of these sort of didn’t actually follow, copyright law, now, in this case, Repubblica, you can send a message to them and you’ll get some money. And then there was another story that, I was sort of marked as a left wing extremist. Right. And a friend of mine told me that, it’s a little strange that they use this really fun clown picture, to, to sort of paint me as a extreme artist and someone who really does violence and in this, this is the context for this, where someone who did a Hitler Hitler greeting, which is something that is forbidden in Germany and I pied him really in the face. Now, this isn’t journalism, by the way, but it is still possible, that this is a measure of political communication in Belgium now, in Germany, this is different, it’s not part of a normal sort of political communications in Germany, now the judge actually ruled that it was, sort of using force or using your hands to, to, smear someone. Now, there were sort of these spins were happening on the different, on the different social media channels. First on the website of AfD, then on the AfD channel itself, and then on the different social media channels. Now this hurt me. This was bad. And this also went in front of a judge in front of a court. I’m not sure if you still remember, Ulrich Vosgerau, and sort of some of the court shenanigans that were happening. Oh, there’s not that many actually, who are remembering, I was in the I was outside of Germany for an investigation, and someone told me, hey, so but you need to say sorry, right? It was wrong. So the PR, to some degree worked. And what it was about was that we wrote something that, seemed like he had said that, the more questions were, sort of put in on these kind of, to make sure that the election is true, then it is becoming more successful. So he went in front of the court. And this is a really normal thing. This is what, journalists do, and like, if we think, well, didn’t he say this, then then, you go in front of a court and you just decide. So, by the way, if you ever make a mistake, just say yes. Don’t go to court. But in journalism, this is really what happens. You might be saying, hey, I made this mistake. Sorry. Correction. We changed this sentence. We okay. What happened? And there were a lot of reports again. And these aren’t the very right wing party media types. Einblicke these kinds of things that really show disinformation. But instead these are really reputable media, and in front of the at court, there were sort of three things that he wanted to have changed. And in two of them, the court actually decided that we were right. But in one of them, he was right. And now it’s actually really boring. And those four sort of big media actually, he, sort of actually titled this okay, corrective had a really big made a really big mistake. They need to correct themselves now some other big, media actually was more differentiated, was more clear in what what is actually happening. But this is actually the problem, that we are, seeing of this headlines that are really, sort of bad or that are really trying to portray a message and these are the headlines that are sticking in our brain. And the AfD marks one marks me in this case. And then they’re using these kinds of reports for their own PR. But this is not really what we’re planning on doing. After my this is a German talk show after my car was burned down, the. Oh, after my car was burned down, they, the person who actually burned down my car, had sort of had gotten a good job. And now this is actually Jean Peters, the speaker of this talk. And, this really made it seem like he had burned down her car, but actually, obviously, I didn’t he didn’t. And sort of they went to court again and they decided that this person couldn’t claim in the future to be, that, that John Peters had actually burned down the car, but this is really a, you could say Moss mass attack. So it’s sometimes called stochastic terrorism. So it’s not about each individual attack, but it’s about doing as many attacks as possible. So what you’re trying to do is looking at sort of what’s happening is maybe someone saw this report and maybe this person might now look, hey, so this so John Peters is going to Republica and maybe, this, this sort of random person would decide to follow John Peters and this is now the reality that I need to live with. And personally, I decided to be a journalist. I decided to be in the public eye to some degree, black people didn’t. >> Well, I had right wing extremist bloggers in front of my front door, and that was really exhausting. >> But how did it go on? As journalists, we will continue to do our research. Recherche Nord Morgan, also about a fraternity, meeting that was, from people, from the AfD need to be supported. And the reporters are doing their work, and it’s en vogue to do good investigative journalism and also to look into whether this is relevant for a AfD ban. I’m not in the plenary rooms of the government, so I know that the AfD ban is being discussed. I can recommend you the talk from, Sandrini at. At 1:00 on the AfD ban, he will explain it better than I can, but I’ll just sum up what I know and what I think about it. The application is political. Yes, the application filing for this ban is a political decision. So these people have to decide on whether to file an application or not or to prepare it. >> Then, then there’s the Pro and counterarguments. >> Let me sum up some counter arguments. The gap that will follow, like the AfD voters, who will they vote for? Well, there’s many options if they don’t want to elect any governing parties. There’s a lot of alternative, but it’s not not part of well, it’s not written in any German law that you are allowed to vote for fascists. I think what would happen would be a diversified nation. It would split and splinter into many groups and parties. But this. It isn’t regulated in the Basic Law because there was still space. They had their reasons to put that in the Basic Law, but well, when they use that, wouldn’t they put themselves at the victims? Well, you can’t victimise yourself anymore than the AfD already does this. So The debate will be shifted from migration to, new evidence and maybe with a ban, they would be we would have a few years of silence. And we can’t underestimate that. The effect that this would have. I would say, however, it’s decided personally, I do not. I’m not talking on behalf of corrective. Personally, I find it would be a good thing. Well, how can you ban a party? Well, in Germany you’re allowed to be racist. You can trample on workers. It’s freedom of opinion. But you can’t make a master plan. Make it a goal. Try to, realise that goal. And what did we have? >> Geht es heute? >> We would have to see whether this is possible today. That aggressive groups, bully people online. If that is a, actually a putting right wing extremist plans into place und ich and I’ll show you the excerpt from the Basic Law, the I think 53 are against 53% of the population are against a ban on AfD, but a lot of people are against a finance ban, ■k710 million from start. >> I think the AfD got ■k710.4 million from the state. And they’re always saying corrective isn’t is getting tax money. Well, it’s more complicated than that. The our team is independent. We don’t have a red telephone. So this is one of the attacks that always playing on corrective. But themselves, if they themselves are getting, funded by the states by more than 40, this is normal for parties if they’re not fascist. And I have a very contested, court decision. >> What what happens? >> The, funds of the Communist Party are getting taken away. So. And it’s given to charity. And isn’t that beautiful? This is a debate we have to take on as a society and not just let the, Constitution protection agencies do that alone. I don’t know if they’re doing enough other than call for demonstrations. I don’t want to call them all idiots, but. There should be people whose entire job it is to collect evidence. And wouldn’t that be the least we could do to collect evidence? I know different organisations who are doing that, but it should be aggregated. And because many journalists are working for themselves, because if you have any ideas on how to organise, that should the journalists do it, should the civil society do it, should the, government do it? Approach me? I find it very fascinating. We’ll go on. I think that was it. Thank you very much. Jean Peters, a huge round of applause . Thank you so much. One, one more thing. >> Come. Come here on stage. >> Come here. Thank you. Thank. You. Columbus, Ohio. >> Let’s do it. >> Just have to stick this out. And. Thank you. >> So now. >> All right, you can approach us. >> Those are my wonderful colleagues. We are a much bigger, team who worked on this. And if you want to approach us, just, remember what we look like . Jeanette, can you wave that? Also? She’s also part of our team. And if you find someone else, please approach us. Subscribe to our newsletter. Tell your grandparents to donate. Thank you so much. >> Here. Danke. >> Thank you so much. >> Eine sehr wichtig. Beautiful >> Just one more important thing. We have 15 minutes of break now and then we have a very fascinating topic. Prosociality parasocial relationship townships. If does it have to do with FOMO? With addiction? We’ll get to know soon. Stay here if you want to know why you’re doing what you’re doing on the internet, it. >> So loved. >> We. We’re all here together. Before we start the next session. An important question. Who has used Tinder in this room? Raise your hand. Maybe half. So I also use Tinder. My second Tinder date was my current wife, so I guess the app didn’t work as well for us. We deleted it right afterwards, but that’s the thing. I also use field and it’s really interesting. You spent a lot of time swiping, looking, checking it out, but there isn’t much return on it. And that’s the topic of this talk. If you’re exhausted by Tinder, by all the swiping, if you’re swiping all the time, or if you’re still enjoying it, have your iPad with you on the table when you’re having lunch for many years, they said it’s an addiction to the internet. It’s FOMO, fear of missing out that you’re constantly online and always want to get, current on everything. But modern research found and a different approach. They said it’s about something else parasocial relations. The people in your device, your iPad, are people to whom I have an amount of relation and a relationship. It’s not necessarily bad, even if you might not believe me now, there is a woman who can explain this scientifically. She Doctor Deegan. She is known as Doctor Tinder and she is a real expert for purse sociality. She just wrote a book called swipe, swipe love, digital love love in the Digital Age. And she can explain as if how you can stay human and humanist in the digital age. And that’s what she will do now, man, as raw material for technology, parasocial relationships and texts and applause for Doctor Deegan. Yeah. Welcome. >> Ich freue mich. >> I’m happy to be here. And I’m very happy about the interest in this topic because what we’re talking about here, that’s cutting edge, that’s happening right now. And right now they have the opportunity to, take back spaces for creation, for action that we can check out now , what did we learn from the usage of technology up until now ? And how do we want to continue in the future? That’s what it’s about today. The good effects, the negative effects and how the human cannot become, can become not raw material for technology where is this term from? Paris. Sociality is a term coined for the relationship between fans and movie stars or bands. Nowadays, that has changed fundamentally. We saw the band, we travelled around, went to meetups and had a fan culture. Nowadays the stars are on the internet and social media. They have channels where you can get into contact with them or you seemingly get into contact with them. But we also have new phenomena like internet celebrities and most of us probably follow some influencers . Or on the micro level, the mechanisms works just as well in the micro or meso level of influence, ownership and follow people online. And that’s a significant difference. We continuously get, updates in the seemingly private about the lives of others, and we feel like we’re following them and those updates are in our private lives. The cell phone is 1.5m away from us. If it’s further away than that, you get nervous normally reflect on it. Does that happen to you? To 1.5m? That’s the distance we can usually live with. Well, before getting nervous. Paris Sociality. That’s, an umbrella term for different, faces of the phenomenon. Not all those channels work the same way, but they have similar mechanisms. And under certain circumstances, you can put them all together. Messengers, some of which you might use, some of them or all of them online dating. A lot of us do that social media. And when you’re getting intimate. Also, only fans were there. You can get your answer through monetary means. You pay, and then you can be sure to get an answer. And then we also have relationships we lead with artificial intelligence. Chatbots help us to work. We have sex with them. We might fall in love with chatbots. That also works. Why does that work? Our brain doesn’t have of an evolutionary boundary and says, oh, now we’re looking at a digital reality. So that means we know that it’s not a mutual relationship. We know that we cannot expect an answer if you send a message to an influencer, but that the social self still continues the same mechanisms, how we’re psychologically organised towards those relationships. There is no filter in our head that says, oh, careful now it’s getting digital and we’re studying this. We have a lot of methods how we study this, but amongst other things, we look at micro processes. How does everyday life work? What do these things mean that we do online? And I hope I brought a few examples. All of those are reals are real. Maybe you can see yourselves or your friends, families, colleagues in that, or those. So you’re having sex and when you’re done, you, go over to the side and you scroll through TikTok or you don’t cuddle, you don’t look into each other’s eyes. That was nice. But now we roll over and scroll and everyone is deeply immersed in their own world. Oh my social battery is depleted. I’m too tired to meet with lots of other people on Saturday. I’d rather go on to social media. I get a bit of inspiration. That’s how it feels. Or you’re in a relationship, you have a fight and then everyone goes into the room and then we continue this via WhatsApp. Feels a bit more safe, more distance. We’re riding each other, using emojis. Reflect upon messages at least you have some sort of, slowing down in the relationship. After work, you might have the feeling that you. The way to calm down is to scroll through the internet. We’re soothing ourselves. That’s a very important function. We’re soothing ourselves via using those things. It might start softly. It might not mean much. You’re buying women’s sportswear. I’m guilty of that as well. But it doesn’t end there. Some of us buy the car that’s been advertised, for instance. Those are real examples in our, in our practice , someone bought a car that an influencer from LA advertised for which, led to mould and on the roof in our Schleswig Holstein. But she didn’t criticise the parasocial relationship. Following this, she criticised herself. She felt guilty, said why was I so stupid doing this? She couldn’t explain it to herself. Why didn’t I think that through? It’s obvious that it works better for her than it would for me. During the pandemic, we saw people trust their influencers more than friends and family. When it’s about political stances, about opinion and you have the feeling they’re there. For me, they have a constant narrative and you might have noticed when influencers change their narrative, that might be annoying for people who might unfollow them. We might even take the time to write a message saying, I am going to unfollow now. Your narrative is terrible. Another fitness influencer lost to the baby narrative. It’s a pretty harsh tone and that’s really interesting. Why are we doing this? Why do we take the step to unfollow even though we know it doesn’t mean anything, but it does mean something. It was a relationship for us and we ended. We break up and, why do we know this? The brutal reality of social media is no is known to us because influencers post this and then they say, you’re so, pathetic that you message me about this. And that’s also part of it for a long time, we in research. Operationalised The usage of cell phones as FOMO that you are afraid to miss out on something or, or as addiction. There was a long discourse on. Is it addiction or is it similar to addiction? I’m of the team. It’s similar to addiction. If you throw it into the river in Berlin today, hey, nothing happens to you if you throw your cell phone into the river, nothing happens to you. It’s similar to addiction. It’s a it’s a strong habit, but but if you put it away, nothing worse happens. Then that you’re bored. I’m afraid of your feelings. But then you will start getting creative again. The feelings. I don’t mean it simple, but the feeling seem way worse than they actually are. So those relationships are meaningful to us because they are relationships we don’t have a filter that says just because it’s digital, just because it’s one sided. I won’t, work within the same mechanisms of a relationship, for instance, that I don’t relate to. This person, that I have processes related to my identity and that I have connection. We only have a limited number of, strong connections. If you follow four influencers and look at 3040 story updates a day, that’s not much. And those might be your main relations. And that is competitive to face to face relations. We only have the time that we have. And if we choose to spend it on story updates of influencers and if we choose to invest in motion, there, invest our time there, and also invest money there, then we cannot do that in other places. And then those are our relations. But that carries certain problems, because if you are in a crisis, because you’re getting divorced, you cannot crash on the couch of your favourite influencer. It’s one sided and there are always the questions, what about the positive effects? I want to criticise that harshly and I think I can do that because I also measured positive effects. It’s also my fault. So you can measure positive effects of prosociality quite well. You can measure online dating works, you can measure social media usage. Decreases the feeling of loneliness and isolation. How does that work? Well, that’s a problem of how we do research. We do fragmented research. Usually, if we look without a meta theoretical framework, that’s actually the case. Social media does decrease loneliness. You can measure that. My grandmother, who’s in a home who gets images via social media from her grandchildren, she will, of course, feel that her loneliness decreases, given the fact that if she wouldn’t have that, she would be totally lonely. Not in a situation where she would live in a multigenerational household and would bathe her grandchildren in the afternoon. We need a framework of metatheory and contextualise, why can we measure that? Well, we can measure it because the alternative would be so much worse in our neoliberal reality. We can measure that online dating is highly functional. Around half of the couples who met in the last few years are online dating. Couples That has been normalised completely. The stigma is very low nowadays, and then you ask people, what would you prefer? Well offline or at least Instagram. That’s a lot more romantic and why don’t you do it? Well, I have the feeling that the public sphere is closed. I don’t feel safe walking up to people and talking to them. I feel like I risk too much and well, I don’t dare. And the other side also exists. Not the not only the talking, walking up to talking to people, but also the ones that make it possible. We don’t send many signals that make it possible. Smile look at people for a long time. Show your hands. We don’t make ourselves approachable much and now you can’t say that sounds problematic. It is what we can also measure is, for instance, that the parasocial for instance, strong usage of online platforms or a lot of time spent on social media that has strong negative effects on self-esteem, experiencing fear and anxiety. It correlates strongly with eating disorders, with depression, hope. For the future. Those are the layers of subjectivity of the single individual. But we also have effects on the societal level. We have parasocial relationships , and we are training to accept how the social works. What do we train, amongst other things, that ghosting is okay, we don’t ghost only during online dating, but also our therapist, craftspeople, friendships, the grandma with ghost, all sorts of relationships and we also accept that social relations can be one sided. And when we follow influencers, it’s one sided. We might accept that a business case can be behind relations, that relations belong to an economic system where we pay by being online, by looking there, by create clicks. We buy things by investing money and that we get something back. It’s more at only for fans there. We pay for a chat, answer or to see something. Those are societal influences and they go far, far beyond the online platform. What we train there are traditions that, write themselves into the basics of societal structure. I get asked, you’re talking about online dating, but not everybody does this. No, not everybody does it. But the traditions that we establish through that are writing themselves into our society, that we ghost each other, that we think that we should do parallel dating, that we have a relationship. On the background of having a lot of attractive alternatives that are easily reachable and that we can externalise needs, with low thresholds. If your partner doesn’t validate you, you can get a compliment easily through online, sources. And then when we look at that, it can happen that the human becomes the raw material for technology. It means the value of a person depends on how much time he or she is online. >> So. We are being used up by technology for the economic purpose, instead of utilising technology in order to live or to lead our lives. This is obviously a problem because it doesn’t have a positive spill-over effect. If you go to a festival and you’re very unsuccessful, you don’t even get sex. Let me say, and you definitely don’t get a relationship. You still heard music, you still ate festival food. You you looked at a sunset. You where are you going? For example, you’re going out in the countryside somewhere. Usually that’s where the festivals are. And if instead you spend your weekend online, you did none of that. You were only online. You may have. Let’s you didn’t lead any nice in-person discussions. You didn’t tell stories to someone else. You were only online and for most people, that doesn’t feel like it gives you good quality of life. You don’t have any stories you can tell later on about how you try to chase after a person or something. So. Those are all real stories. As I as I said before. So how could this happen that you sort of forget about living your life? You you may have that feeling that you go into this into town and you’re dressed up nicely and you’re going for a jog and you usually get some kind of reaction out of, out of passerby’s maybe they just look at you. I, for example, I take the train a lot and you, you usually look down to the onto your phone, for example, and there’s a lot of apocalyptic memes about this, about how everybody has this doom stare into their phone and as a tendency this happens and people are getting more critical, they think about is this what I really want? But there’s no measurable change in behaviour that I can observe. There are kids that say, dad loves me, but he loves the phone more. And that’s. We kids usually construct their world very radically. Whatever they see, that is their reality. And if, for example, they start crying and you don’t run to them and say you’re you’re the most important person to me, then they usually think that the phone is more important. And this is not about shame or guilt. We don’t try to shame anyone. This is a lot of social pressure around that, especially in in, in a problem with our work life at the moment that there’s not a lot of room for being a parent. For example. But it’s a problem. And let’s say a whole group of young people are going to Budapest and they’re all hanging out in Tinder all the time. They still have a problem. You you may also have a lot of parasocial behaviour when dating. For example, you’re you’re at a date, you’re your phone may be on the table or under the table. You’re still swiping. It’s still ringing even when you have the phone on the table, your the person you’re with has a lot of negative emotions. It’s the constant possibility that something might be more important on the phone than the person you’re with. So if you’re opening your heart and letting them close to you and then they they get distracted by something on the phone, then you get jealous. And what do you do? What was more important than me right now? Even so, in a way, it’s actually true. If you’re if your partner says it’s not more important than you. That is somewhat true on a on a certain level, but it’s also only part of the answer. And so for, for example, if someone says look, I found something really funny. This is like a really cool meme and I encourage you to share it with your partner, because that at least gives you a little bit of context. And it’s better than the alternative. But you’re you don’t just argue with people when you have this kind of behaviour. You you also don’t do enough sport. You you run out of time to do important things. If you have a lot of screen time for you, you will see that maybe you were two, 4 or 6 hours online, but you then run out of time for other things and it shows the priorities. So this we are allowed to learn that this, it doesn’t only have negative effects. It’s all right. For example, you have your your, your loved one is on the other side of the world. For example, in Australia. And you’re both using sex robots. Then, for example, you’re using technology and you’re not interacting in person, but it helps you build a connection with your significant other that you otherwise wouldn’t have. So that’s good. But there’s also critique. And for example, the, the answer often is what do we do with this consumption of technology and the answer we usually give is limit the time we spend with it. For example, in school we say, okay, no phones allowed or something in at work. And I believe that is wrong. There is still a lot of effect. If even if we’re just online for half an hour, because no matter how many inspirational quotes we’re seeing that you shouldn’t compare yourself with others. That’s what you usually do. You compare your body to your fitness influencer that you’re following, or to that model, or whoever, or you buy whatever your influencer is telling you to, or. >> These. >> Context. This behaviour also happens in the context where some people have the media competency. >> So for example, if you have a an argument in your family with your kids, for example, they they don’t want to go to bed, what do you do? Some people solve it in that they say they don’t want to limit the, the media time that their kids have because otherwise they would argue when they are not allowed anymore and for parents, it’s worse because they’re in a constant limbo. You know, sometimes they just delete their phone. Sometimes they try to limit themselves to an hour or 1 or 2 a day. And it’s a constant struggle. You keep going back and forth. But the time limit really is somewhat of a futile effort. What I would suggest instead is I hope you have a lot of interest in us coming out of the lab and suggest something. What we need is a parasocial competency. We have it about 1.5m away from us. The phone we don’t need to, bewitched the technology or declare a taboo. We need to be, we need to differentiate between what is good and what is bad. And we shouldn’t despair about it, but what we what we need for that are narratives. We need to acknowledge that this relationship you have with the phone is important. Are you asking your colleague or your friend or whoever you’re here with? If your relationship with your phone is great, that’s not something we ask. We’re not asking. Is your favourite influencer? Did they block you? Is that bad? How do you feel about that? We this is not accepted behaviour at the moment, but really it should be. Okay, the technology disagrees with me. I get it. And we also need to have room for this in in the education there is nothing regarding Prosociality and related behaviours in university. How many of you are highly competent about teaching effective and safe online dating? We’re still working out the details and how that could work. It’s not as simple as saying, it’s okay if you do it for 30 minutes a day and then every that’s that’s fine. In the Scandinavia, there’s sort of doing, a rollback. They are selling all the laptops and iPads and they’re going back to books. But that’s also not the easy answer. We need the competency. What you’re saying is put down the iPad and are we then actually doing it setting a positive example. Are you then telling your kid not just put down the iPhone, but rather go out and for example, ride a bike or something? So it’s not enough to say this is not how you should do it. We should tell them how to do it and it’s also very important if you if you’re talking to someone at the end of your the end of their life, there is. They’re they’re not they’re usually telling you that they’re sad about the times that they missed. So it’s more it’s better to go to a festival and fail at, finding a partner rather than not going. So take chances and we also need therapy. That’s obviously my field of expertise. That’s why it’s very close to my heart. But we need that. We need to have therapists think about this kind of behaviour to be knowledgeable about it. Are we in a mode where we live in a way that we can use technology? We should, for example, utilise it for, finding someone who wants to go with us to a concert because we have a spare ticket for if you have that, it’s. Also great if you get a great vegan recipe for your grandma, for example, that is completely fine. It’s also fine if you’re if you program your own music, you’re utilising technology to extend yourself. It is a chance. I was so positive and then technology still fails me. There is a chance there. You can extend yourself and you can utilise it. It’s fine to spend hours and hours on it. That is great, but you need to make the distinction. Am I being consumed or or I’m living a very fulfilled life where I’m utilising technology and this is what I’m inviting you to take part in. Put the focus on for example, what should we take? What should we let go? So forget about fapping but instead said, stroke your your significant other after sex. It sounds easy, but we’re obviously none of us are idiots. We all knew that none of this is real, that we’re seeing online, but it feels real and we’re we’re imposing the needs we have regarding the relationships onto that medium and in a reflexive mediatisation where we are looking on the on the effects that media have on the human and vice versa, we’re taking decision every day. Are we going out into the woods or are we doing a dinner, or are we putting our phone under the pillow? The positive dynamic there is still a dynamic that is being established. So So I have a few tools that are great for the educational practice. How can how can dating work in online dating? For example, there is a license, a driver’s license kind of thing for porn and for dating that teaches you how to do these things. It sounds fun, but it’s real and we as psychologists and psychotherapists have evidence that these kind of approaches can work. And unfortunately, we don’t have any time for questions. But I’m at a stand over there. There’s a booth where I’m selling books, and if you have questions, please feel free to walk up to me and ask me . And, I’m available. I’m happy to talk to you about this topic. Thank you. >> Doctor Johanna Erdogan, aka Doctor Tinder, vielen dank. So gesagt nach sex ist Dutchman. >> Bücher Tisch und ihr noise book. Wir machen weiter. Wir machen direkt weiter. Denn es ist ja. So es ist mittlerweile überall auf der Welt. So It’s. >> Everybody checks out who has the possibility to, remove themselves from participation in society. That goes in two ways, people try to move away too much to, move away from Germany. There’s a model in streamer who moved to Madeira because they have to pay less taxes. This doesn’t work anymore. Since 2024, we have to change our thinking. 2024 isn’t that the year of checking out, but the year of checking in or has to be? And our next speaker is therefore she says freedom and prosperity and self-actualisation only stay, fixed ideas without all of this. The next speaker is Professor Doctor Maya Gopal. She’s a been a political economist for 25 years. Transformation and, sustainability researcher. She’s a best seller author for writing a book, she’s, co-founder of sciences for Future member of Club of Rome. She’s advisor to the government, and she brings to the point what we need. In our society here and now. So I’m really happy to, see her here and see her, translated. Talk about lost in ego fixation, warm welcome for Maya Gupta. Warm welcome to you. Good evening to everybody. Great that you’re all here. And great that you’re all in station. And, thank you for all thinking, I invite you to think about this. I’m really thankful for the talk about for the topic of Republika this year about caring and who cares. And, how it pays off to be a carer in our society and especially 2024. It’s so important to think about what impulse, if we take caring seriously, what impulse we then need and this in this washing machine time and all these times of insecurity and nobody knows where it’s going and who’s going where, there’s two prototypical reactions. One is, I put it in the title is? Then I’ll care about myself. And that’s me and mine and you know, we and I’m, I nobody everybody else is sort of an irritation. And so people are doing things differently and I’ll do sick things and doing things, differently. And in my, my own crumble abroad and, and I’ve you know, this is a natural impulse. So if you slept badly to say, get off everybody. But we also have the other possibility inside of us. And ask yourself and can ask ourselves which possibility to feed. The other possibility is taking a step back and having look what’s happening and asking myself, what is this all about? And thinking about how to do things differently with new ideas and finding stability. And, the most important messages, that is only happens in a plural in our society. So I looked, at a topic and a word and a phrase in, psychology to sociology, and that the term of coherence. Coherence, this coherence has two aspects. One is that we understand what it’s about and the, relation find, you know, the relationship between cause and effect, finding out who brings which information in and finding out what outcomes this has. And then the other, other topic is the, effectiveness. Do I have access to effective activities? Do I get the idea of what could be what what could happen? And do I get the gratification for this? And then there’s the purpose, the sense it is this, does it make, is it rewarding? And that’s what we have to, really take care is like the lost in ego fixation means that everybody, nobody else is helping me, and nobody is working with me. It wasn’t, you know, in the beginning and in the beginning, nobody was was joining me. And then it was too late. And where’s the middle ground? Where how do we. And these topics, we, we try to engage with this purpose and then we try to answer this from the complex systems. And we everything that we want to do is part of a future development. And if we’re not, don’t know if we’re on the path to 1.5 degrees. But if we don’t try it, we’re not going to be there. If we don’t invest money into digitalisation to make care work easier. If we don’t try it, it won’t be part of the solution. And this is why caring is so great to as an access to a coherent experience. I’ll have a look, about, about what is it? Where is it comes from, there’s three typical aspects that care is associated with. It’s defined with the process of protecting something or someone and providing what that person or thing needs. This is, readiness to not only me, mine, and to me. So seeing around who else and that, I the nice thing is that I’ll also others also carry the idea of if they carry the idea of care in themselves, they’ll also look out. For me, this means that it’s an attitude question and you can routinise this or. Yeah, the second is serious attention, especially the details of a situation or thing. Let’s let’s take a tape, take a step back and ask ourself, have we understood this and are we searching on the right point for, for a solutions. And this, and the last one is, caring as a feeling of worry or anxiety and, and I think in the moment we’re giving a lot of focus on the third point and that we can see this in the studies, the state of the, of the nation in a more, more in common study, the state of the nation is a lot of people are scared and are afraid about people thinking more and more egoistic that checking out. And, I’m that people are wondering more and more about the connection and the country and they are, in these moment. >> And the, the question is whether people think about the cohesion and social cohesion of the country. So we see here there are six different groups, the open ones, the involved ones, the established, the pragmatic, the disappointed and the angry. And the trend is clear across all of these parts of society. The worry is there in society, people are worried about a growing egotism in society, and we have a chance to reduce this worry. But the issue today is that for the people that are actually caring today, it doesn’t actually pay off. Or rather, they’re almost being punished for it. And these are the structural drivers that make it hard for us to decide for care. But that is also something that we together can change because there isn’t always a push towards ego fixation or to being checked out. So I brought a few ideas and let’s start maybe by looking at whether we found the right descriptions, the right terms for what we’re talking about. So the point with the serious attention on what we’re talking about and where we’re going and what the possibilities are, and that’s important because caring begins with the careful attention to the situation or things at stake . So we see a lot of election posters out and there’s a lot of stuff going on in public media. There’s one story that’s very widely known, referring to the promise of a safety zone where we get away from this, insecurity. And that is prosperity. So there’s prosperity, there’s security or safety as the second coordinate, target, coordinate. And there usually kind of thought together, but we don’t really think about what we strive for as this promise of prosperity and where we get there. And is that a way to get out of the crisis we’re in, or is it an issue in itself? Because then we get to this here where I assume that in their quest for prosperity, everybody always wants more. So I worry about falling behind. And so I wonder, is that really the formula that would give us the possibility today? And I get back to that, to take much more care about the things that are important for human life on this planet. If I worry that my house isn’t as big, my car isn’t as big. My vacation isn’t as fancy, that I’m just somehow not wealthy, not prosperous. And then the next thing is that I’m being rewarded for that by the magazines, by likes, by the narrative. Who’s successful and who isn’t. And It’s being rewarded to contribute as little as possible that others maybe are going to be as well off as I am. So I looked at analyses of wealth advisory companies because I wanted to figure out how they develop their perspectives of the world and what their definitions of desirable prosperity are, and also how to define the situation where you can grow prosperity globally. And it’s always about the financial value of the things that I own. And their conclusion was that high net worth individuals that have more than 200 million of liquid capital to invest. >> In used to be able to grow their capital over the last, several years. >> And there was a little bit of a step down in 2018 and then again in 2022. And this trend it used to go up rather quickly, suddenly inflected. And nobody asked to figure out why this is actually relevant and who benefits. And there’s this great pyramid for those people that have, I don’t know, only a few hundred thousand and a few millions, a few tens of millions, hundreds of millions and how they are distributed within ranking. And this is very stressful. This is a narrative that maybe doesn’t actually fit into the narrative of caring. Where do I belong? Where do the crises come from? How can I contribute? But instead what is valued is if I can somehow accrue financial capital, then that is what is being called a success in the media. So I looked at studies from the Hans Hans Böckler Stiftung, Hans Böckler Foundation, who looked at the distribution of wealth, and we can also see the structural drivers behind this idea of prosperity and growth, continue onwards. So the logical behaviour, once I have financial capital is being normalised, reducing taxes. The taxes on capital gains going down to 30% and then 83% of billionaire assets are still controlled by men. That’s also a normal and just kind of goes on this way. Germany’s billionaires are usually of West German origin. There is not a single East German billionaire entrepreneur family. So this normalisation of prosperity and of wealth maybe has something to do with the feeling that not everybody cares about how we as a society can grow and prosper. There is 95 food and energy companies worldwide that have more than doubled their profits in 2022, and a year where lots of people were actually worried to, pay their energy costs and rent in the middle of a financial crisis. And where the financial crisis has always been played off against the ecological crisis. So how is it even a good idea of prosperity and wealth if . These companies reap, never seen before windfall profits. 306 billion U.S. dollars, of which 84% were distributed back to shareholders. Not used to improve our energy systems or our sustainability, but instead to shareholders, so they can grow their capital and wealth. And in Germany, from 2020 to 2021, the wealthiest 1% owned 81% of wealth growth. >> Und auch das nicht. >> Finally, the tendency to tax evasion is by far the highest within the super rich compared to other income groups. And while we are discussing about Social Security payments, there is hundreds of billions of euros every year that are being taxed either somewhere else or not taxed at all, that are just plainly evaded. So there’s a lot of insecurity about who cares and if we follow these values, the influence of the people who don’t care for social prosperity will continue growing, and this will perpetuate itself. >> So aside from wealth in terms of financial wealth, what about caring as a security of supply? >> Then I can look at prosperity in wealth as something that can still grow, but also do a lot of things that would be important to do quickly today. So everybody is taking care of being taken care of. So taking this perspective of caring and turning it into a perspective of caring as a security or safety of supply would maybe bring us to an environment where we can actually feel good and feel safe . So it’s important to think about what the central drivers are. We looked at the relevant parts of the systemic issues. There’s obviously a. How do we talk about, the security of supply? >> We don’t ask about how do you feel secure that you’re supplied enough that but the security of supply is also, the thought of wealth and prosperity is the idea that everybody is getting more prosperous. So that also means that the energy consumption is also getting up and up and up. And this security of supply and this benchmark needs to be as much as last year. So the baseline is growing every year. And that’s one of the biggest sustainability lies, is that we are sustainable as if we have as much as much as last year. And instead of asking ourselves under which conditions do we, do we can we give according to everything, according to their needs and the energy supply, how can that be assured? How much? The question is how much may technology, for example, use, so the energy slaves is a topic that Buckminster Fuller brought on. So people who have access to energy might be if we want to control things by price, the question is, what are we, using in the background? So, so this is a great comic by Buckminster Fuller. So we’ve normalised that, our energy footprint has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger in the last ten years because many machines are doing things in the background that we use to do fulfil with manual labour. Decades ago. So more and more energy is used, used. And we’re never talking about this, but this is a steady increase of, rapid increase of consumption has consequence for our, our sustainability and our, security of supply. So, what kind of so, sustainable supply am I looking at? And security of supply. Supply? Am I looking? And that’s what the planetary boundaries are about. The best solutions need to be where we can tackle multiple supply problems or risks at once. And there’s biodiversity goals as one. So at after the European elections, there’s going to be a super important, topic about biodiversity and, and, land use. So, so if. Is wealth isn’t measured in a way that takes this into account. That is not this is not a metric under which we should measure our wealth. So, how to. >> And so it’s important to see this as performance of an ecological system, not just providing, but also in a way that is sustainable. Either recollected reprocessed the CO2, the microbes that process biomass, all these things that are completely invisible and also unpaid and thus usually beyond the sphere of attention between, Beyond the self attention. And that’s why it’s so important. How do we develop caring as the idea and the terms that we use and shift them. So it gives more attention to the things that we actually want as a society. So instead of going for financial wealth. We should try to figure out how humans and technology and nature can somehow get into coexistence. And we’re losing track of that where ecological sustainability and survivability is treated as a cost factor. And then, of course, we have a gender gap here with the global distribution of male versus female caregivers. >> Wow. >> And we also need to talk about fair wages. And there’s a lot of conversations that we had in the pandemic years that didn’t make it into actual implemented policy. And what you can see here is the average salary in. In care jobs. And the one outlier here is, medical doctors, and everybody else is the actual caretakers. And they’re being generally underpaid. So If the society is only going to celebrate me, if I make a ton of money, then I need to choose jobs that pay a lot of money. And those are not care jobs. And this goes beyond even the salaries. It’s also about societal reputation, like we don’t care enough for doctors are being very highly regarded and highly paid. Lots of others that do a lot of very important work are not, and they are almost basically unseen. So we finally have a debate where we talk about skilled labour or unskilled labour, and a lot of the things are just taken for granted. Caregivers are like background noise, whereas technologists coming here may be residing here for a year or two will get tax breaks. So everything else being treated as infrastructure that just has to work. And this means we lose something very, very important. And that is a society that can actually stick together in times of crisis. So how do we look at growing productivity, growing productivity and getting women into the, Into employment to grow wealth? That’s a big thing. But this actually translates to a lot of stress for the people that actually have to perform this labour. Because for some, especially in in care work, there is a certain rhythm you cannot go beyond because then the results don’t become better. It’s just more stressful and more dangerous. Everyone involved, but this is how we currently grow this productivity. So currently we have caretaking jobs at the limit. If you think of public health. >> We, the ecosystem and we have an issue that we don’t actually value or even measure all these jobs. >> Jobs I wanted like to know who, wants to declare the recipe for success and a society that both parts of, both both both parents, do the care job at work and who has no energy at work after eight days or eight hours of work and, who wants that, declare that as a successful society? That’s why we want to think about how to describe this. How do we get into the experience of Koreans coherence? We so we need to understand what the question is, and, so even. Yeah. So the question was even before the crisis, very porous. And now it’s just breaking apart. So So this systematic thinking is very, very important because there’s one component missing in all this graph graphics and this is the ecosystem. Then everybody is operating with each other. But where the resources should come from, and whether we build them up or break them down is missing from these graphics. So I, like this graphic, which is from the dive. And so some. So the question is how do we get into the regenerative, how to understand the ecosystem as something alive and getting into a rhythm and understanding each other. And, it’s much better than a design principle where you can go move on and on. So caring as a design for like a live systems and that’s how we can contribute to a system that, where we can sit down and ask whether have we found the right description, how can I inform the others, how can we improve? Creation of wealth is one of the, important KPIs. >> And again, we’re talking about finances. But what about KPIs that relate to safety of supply? Yeah, it’s annoying to talk about cptsd. But it’s important to look at what financial values mean and what has to happen in order to grow all these values. So how can we create advantages that have been on road for a long time, how we can say we can do it. We can make it with a caring business without destroying the planet. Then it’s about technology. From products to processes. This is the crowd that should understand this. Best of all, how can we use smart grids? Maybe combine the different products together, create safety, create stability from a very diverse energy supply structure? How can we get a circular economy and thinking differently? >> Monitoring. >> How can we think about different monitoring models? If in sharing models and improve circularity of our economy instead of just sitting, how can we use how can we get access? And sharing cars is just the beginning here, and that’s how we get into systemic thinking. That’s how we get into reducing the pressure onto ecosystems, but also in geopolitical systems. And that’s a revolution of rules, politics and steering. No it’s about how we want to steer our society. How do Subventions currently work? What does it make easy? What does it make hard? Many of the farmers say, oh, it’s the area benefits. That makes it hard for us to care for something we want to keep because it doesn’t pay off in a system of benefits. And that’s what policy making is about. And it’s not about who would you vote for on Sunday? It’s, policymakers often ask the economists for advice, but they they lose track of societal benefits. So if you manage to do that, then that makes you a good politician and you will also benefit from that as well. And we can all join in there. Politics in a democracy is a delegated responsibility. And currently in the political sphere, it’s really tough to act in this role, a media system that kind of does half arsed journalism and it’s all about who won, who, who got the most or who took the most from the other. That doesn’t help in reaching compromise. Personal attacks. Online systems where people aren’t protected anymore, where the barrier of interaction between I represent a, a position of power and people want threatened to attack your your family. The separation is removed. And this is not how we can how we can do these jobs in science. You need to add watchdogging and technology. How do we visualise the distribution effects? How do we talk about it? These are very important questions. And that leads me to the next point. That is care about self optimisation. How do we talk about what things are about? How can I be a role model? How can I inspire others to also look left and right and not just care for themselves? How can I grow my values, but also how what values grow? How can I manage to really establish sustainability as a principle of organisation, as a system for work, as a system for bonuses? That takes us to rethinking all of the processes and systems that we have available to us. And that starts from language to processes and rules, which need to be transformed into an approach of sustainability so we can get a sustainable outcome. Which leads me to my final point. Don’t let the people get you down and say, oh, everybody else does it this way. Why are you being different? What are you even trying for? Others are very weird category I think I can do it. I would join all the studies, all the surveys confirm this. This is how we get to a kind of politics where they try to sort out, whether people will go along. And I think that’s why it’s especially important today to stand up and take care for care, to contribute to communication, to make the society a efficient and effective, and convince them that others are with them. So don’t check out, check in. 2024 is the time and the European elections coming up. The most important time of all? Thank you very much. >> Anjuman Islam. >> All right. We continue to immediately hear on this stage, you’re going to go a little bit deeper into the social question. The gap between rich and poor keeps growing. The richest profit from beneficial tax legislation in. And also in regards to climate, the top 1% of course uses the image creates the majority of CO2 emissions, on the shoulders of oil. So the question is why doesn’t anybody care about this actually? And how can we solve this? How can we maybe transform society and get policymakers to act on this? Joining us today is Barbara Blaha, leader of the Momentum Institute and the online magazine momentum at. She’s an author of many newspapers and magazines and published books on political and economic topics. And she is a university dean at the Vienna University. So her talk today is we’ve got to do everything ourselves, what we have to do to change things. And very curious about the impulses she’s going to give us, give a big hand for Barbara Blaha. So are ich. >> Und machen un gleich weiter. Es gibt NE pause und okay. >> Actually, there is a break. 15 minutes. And then I’m just going to tell you all the same things again. See you soon. >> So. ALS die von der Führer Stunden noch nicht da. Well those that haven’t been here a quarter of an hour ago. >> A warm welcome. If you have been there. You haven’t seen anything. Welcome. We are now going to continue caring about social issues and we go a bit deeper. The divide between rich and poor is getting ever wider. And the strange thing is, well, we think that we’re in the poor side and the rich side is getting even ever smaller and more exclusive and more powerful. And it’s getting supported by politics this, that, rights, tax laws for them, tax laws that benefit the top 1. Oh, the liberals. Sorry, I’ve got to cough suddenly, well, there is a problem. And of course, this top percent also causes among is, well, the highest CO2 emissions. And it has us the rest. Who has to endure this and face the consequences. And there should be better ways and politics. Well they didn’t do that much to about this. But there are ideas, solutions, how to progress. And that’s why the next speaker is going to be on stage for us. She’s called Barbara Blaha and she leads the Momentum Institute, that is, the magazine of the online, the Institute of the online magazine momentum that she writes, she publishes books. She is a university counsellor at the University of Vienna. And her talk has the beautiful name. You have to do everything yourselves. What we have to change, what we have to do so that something changes. Give a warm applause to Barbara. Blah. >> Ich bin. >> I’m here today to collect a few debts. Yes. That’s right. To collect debts. It’s something to do with a man that’s called Franz Zahar. He won’t tell you anything, to be honest, it didn’t mean anything to me either until about 12 years ago. Back then, I moved into a new flat in Vienna, an old apartment block in a working class district called Ottakring. The year the house was built is engraved on the glass of the front door. In 1904, shortly after I move in, my grandmother comes to visit me and says, Barbara, you are not going to believe this. And out of her pocket she pulls a really old birth certificate and that is the birth certificate of her mother, my great grandmother. She was born in 1912, and on this birth certificate you can see where her parents were registered. And this Franziska, my great great grandfather, was registered in exactly the house in which I, 100 years later, moved in. Well, there you have it. The breath of history. Franziska was a bricklayer’s assistant, which is also written down on this birth certificates. And he was a bet renting lodger. He was 34 years old, and he didn’t enough have enough money to rent to buy his own bed, let alone rent a flat. And that’s how it worked. People were taking shifts, sleeping in beds, eight hours. The one person then the next, and my great great grandfather was not an exception. 170,000 workers in Vienna lived just like Franz at the time. And the world must have looked very different to him than it does to us today. He wasn’t allowed to vote back then . It was only in 1918, six years after my great grandmother was born, that everyone men and women, was allowed to vote, and at the same time, the eight hour working day was introduced. And it’s only in the last 50 years that women in Austria have been allowed to take a job without their husband’s consent, and in an absurdly short 25 years, it is that rape in marriage has become a criminal offence in this country. Now, none of this fell from the sky. It was hard won by those that came before us. Shortly before my great grandmother was born in food prices went through the roof in Vienna. In the quarter that I’m living where I live in now, there were hunger, riots, government buildings were stormed, shops looted, shop windows smashed, and then the military came along. The neighbourhood where I lived today looked like a war zone at the time, and I have no idea what role Franziska, my great grandfather, played back then. Maybe he was on the street. Did he demonstrate? But was he shot at? I don’t know, but what I do know is on these streets, democracy was hard won. Today there are no more beggars or bed renting lodges in Vienna. But there are free elections. Freedom of the press and civil rights. We can no longer imagine a world without these achievements, but that’s only because people have been there before us who had enough imagination to imagine the world with these achievements as it looks so logical, so compelling in hindsight and normal. But it was a miracle and a dream. It’s completely natural for us that women can vote, that gay people can marry. And that’s why we forget how much violence and humiliation and arrests these activists had to endure for something that today we say, well, to use a Vienna term, gnanananda. Well, it’s so natural. What are you on about? And that is an important paradox of progress. What lies behind us is completely natural when we look in the rear view mirror, but we don’t see the battles that went went on before that, just the result. And if we look ahead to the windscreen, everything seems so tough and unchangeable. I’ll give you an example. Slavery was not defeated by a war overseas. The end of slavery was sealed on a Tuesday afternoon on the 17th of May, 1787, 12 men met in a small print shop in London, and together they founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery. Amongst inkwells and sheets of paper. 20 years later, the slave trade in the empire was abolished, and another 26 years later slavery was banned throughout the Empire . The US only followed suit 80 years after this memorable Tuesday afternoon between the Haymarket riots on the 1st of May in Chicago and an eight hour working day throughout the US, there were 52 years. Nelson Mandela had to be in prison for 27 years and then negotiated for another four years, until apartheid was history. But the look in the Rear-view mirror swallows up the years of building the time a movement needs to gather strength. Saul Alinsky he is a community organiser and a civil rights activist, and he was a great inspiration for Barack Obama, he said. Successful revolutions are like a play, a theatre play. In the first act, the characters and the plot are introduced. In the second act, they are developed further and the audience’s attention must be held, but only in the last third act, there is a confrontation between good and evil. If we follow Alinsky, then movements burn out. If they enter into confrontation too quickly and skip the incubation phase. If they leave out the time they need to plan to debate and grow and convince. But wouldn’t it be so tempting to skip the first act? Well, we all have the concentrated power of social media in our trouser pockets, and that has trained us to get instant feedback. We want a reaction and we’re not going to wait for it for years for a like or looking at the climate crisis isn’t time running out anyway? If Alinsky is right, then we must endeavour together to look at the first act, but also come to the third act. Otherwise, the theatre that is all of us together, it will burn down before we’ve even learned our lines. History books shorten great upheavals to great to great moments. We know the speeches of the leaders, and we know that they in school, we learn the day when change became reality. We remember the moments when the avalanche comes loose. But we forget the years, sometimes decades of snowfall that were needed to pile up that snow for that one moment, that one moment when it comes off. And that’s why often we feel so powerless ourselves. We read in the history books, we see the avalanche, and we think, okay, with such a force of nature, of course, that will put all the obstacles aside, but I what can I change? The most common way, the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any, is what the writer Alice Walker, once said. So believing that you don’t have any power. And the second easiest way I would like to add is to be distracted from our actual power. If we don’t see ourselves as citizens anymore, but as consumers, as the chocolate bar without palm oil, we won’t save the rainforest and the CO2 compensation for the flight to Vietnam, or to the flight for the journey to the Republica will save the glaciers. Conscious consumption helps, but it is no substitute for a fair tax system for legal environmental standards for corporations, or for measures that save the climate that actually make a difference. Just as the conscious decision to raise one’s child without violence will not protect the neighbour’s child from violence, that’s what politics is for. That is where the framework is created, where change is moulded into norms and rules. But to paraphrase Alinsky, politics is just a stage on which the play is played out. It was written by thousands, sometimes millions of people, sometimes supposedly just the audience. But in fact they are the director. Every change here in your heads women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, change is completed by politics and the centre of society can then observe it. But it begins at the margins. Change always means that something that was previously accepted becomes impossible. Something that was so commonplace is suddenly rejected. But when? How does a minority opinion become a majority resolution? How do we get there? Rosabeth Kanter looked at this. She investigated US companies and she wanted to know how does a company culture change? She was looking at the women in these companies and they experienced were they were belittled, not heard. And in the worst case, they were harassed, but only until they made up about 15% of the workforce when the share rose to about 34, 35, then they changed the corporate culture to their benefit. They ran experiments at the University of Pennsylvania that placed that tipping point a bit lower. Even they said 25% are enough. If these 25% are well organised. But how does that fit in with my next figure? 80% of Germans are worried about the climate and what is happening here. Why Why is nothing coming and nothing really is tipping. I’m not going to paint the apocalypse. You have been watching that painting for such a long time, but a small update because Harvard scientists recently published something. They calculated what the economic consequences of the climate crisis would be for our society. The consequences are comparable with the economic damages of a continuous civil war, a civil war that is beyond our imagination. It’s just not going to be over in a few years, not even in our lifetimes. It will be hundreds of thousands of years. So there is no magical gap between us and the climate change out there. The climate crisis is here and it will never go away. And we know what is coming to us. And we also know where it’s coming from. We have an inequality that we haven’t seen since the times of my great great grandfather, as if we had never abolished the monarchy, the 26th richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world population. That’s 4 billion people put together. So half of the wealth that we have on this planet fits into a classroom. And money is moving upwards like a magnet. Since 2020, two thirds of all wealth growth worldwide has gone into the pockets of the richest 1. So we’re living in a plutocracy. And I would like to add in a plutocracy, Oxfam has calculated that the richest 1% emit more exhaust gases into the air than two thirds of the world’s population combined. One billionaire is as toxic to the climate as a million normal people. >> That’s interesting, 80% of that’s interesting. 80% of people are also seeing this and this survey after survey after survey really tells us this. So how can that be? Nothing changes. And >> Civilisation. >> How can that be, Antonio Gramsci called it hegemony, 80% of people know that in terms of climate change, we’re raising towards a wall against which civilisation will collapse. But 80% also say that they avoid talking about the climate because they think the issue is divisive. Ideologies are like the air we breathe. They’re so self-evident that we don’t even recognise them. And whatever we don’t recognise, we don’t recognise because we believe that we’re in the best possible world. We live in a world without alternative. So it’s unthinkable and therefore also unspeakable. And if someone thinks or says something, they are told. But what about, the economy, competition, growth, all of these things that apparently are so important, growth. That is really what is very important. We’ve really we’ve really recentered our entire economy around growth. We’ve privatised hospitals and water pipes, public assets are sold off, and it’s a really seductive ideology because, of course, what can be bad if, something is growing, but this only happens up to a certain point. Point because uncontrolled growth we actually call cancer grow for its own sake, sex that sort of sex up all resources until there is nothing left, it’s really suffocating itself. What we know is that trees are really clever enough to only grow to supply all their needs, but we as humans are not so 70 years ago, after the Second World War, the market fetishists were still a minority. A few radicals, mainstream really thought everyone one that a strong, healthy state was the best protection for us all, even the US actually had a top tax rate of almost 95, the money was used to build schools, railway lines and hospitals. The weirdos back then were the market radicals like the economist Friedrich Hayek. He once wrote that that an idea needs a generation or longer to, to, become, to persevere, to become mainstream. That’s why we are our current thinking seems to powerless to influence events, but that didn’t actually discourage them. It actually encouraged them because they understood that an extreme idea doesn’t seem as radical. If you find a more radical idea next to it, you can we can look at this today, in if you’re looking at sort of the Potsdam neo-Nazi conference, the FPU, which is a, far right Austrian party, suddenly looks like a real party, suddenly looks statesmanlike. The neoliberals really understood this back then. And they’re they’re calmly set up these institutes to flood the world with their view of things until they become the hegemon. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, was asked after after she wasn’t prime minister anymore, what was the what was your biggest success? And her answer was Tony Blair and New Labour. So when your ideology seems so natural that even your political opponents adopt it, what are successful project? What is success story? It still has an impact today. Most of us don’t actually even believe in changing or that conditions can be changed. Now we can of course, always argue, that people lack information. We need to inform people better. But I have to tell you, I think it’s wrong. Climate change research has become mainstream, but I think it’s not actually a an information problem. I think excessive inequality in wealth and climate issues is not an information problem. It is actually a power problem, a hegemony problem. 80% of Germans are afraid of talking about the climate. And I tell you, this is more about all of these hegemony factories than about than we would like to know the same institutes, the same organisations that tell us and that have told us for years and years that that we need a market that we need growth are the same , that now want to criminalise all of the climate change, climate change activists. Let’s take a look at the Atlas network. It was founded by Hayek, by Hayek, homie, who had already sort of initiated and co-founded institutes all around the world. It was financed by the tobacco and fossil fuel industry and what are they doing? Well, obviously in Brazil , for example, they have promoted the structures that help to make Jair Bolsonaro president, the homophobic, misogynistic and far right Bolsonaro, his main political concerns cutting down the rainforest, destroying the rule of law and racism. And they are pushing this agenda around the globe. Now there’s a British Atlas offshoot that is a think tank called Policy Exchange actually has started to defame, defame the climate movement, Extinction Rebellion and now they’re trying to ban them, to defame them and then to criminalise them. And they’re being quite successful at this where the laws don’t for that don’t exist. The laws are actually being made. So, for instance, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak thanked Policy Exchange last year at the summer party for the great help the policy exchange actually helped with the draft laws that criminalised this kind of extinction Rebellion’s road blockades that also actually forced the group to abandon their street protests in Germany. It is someone called Frank Scheffler who sits in the Bundestag for the FDP, his Prometheus Institute. He is really, really afraid of, the heat pumps and he says that he fights against the climate, religion and of the last generation. He he sort of reminded of the beginnings of the RAF, which was a far left, violent, protest group in Germany and climate activists and, you all know the German papers how climate activists are dealt with, how they are dragged off the roads, passers by beat up activists and these and they are being applauded and others injure them with paintball guns. >> And where are wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe at the same time. But of course, this is all not an advertisement or an incentive to become active, but it should be a call to no longer look away. The wake up call for us. 80% of Germans say they don’t talk about the climate crisis because they’re afraid of it, and they’re afraid of it being divisive and the University of Pennsylvania has told us that 25% of well-organised people are enough to turn things into the positive, or maybe the negative of if we let them. And that is just the point. If we let them, then they will turn things into something negative. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has put it very well, and he said that nothing is more innocent than just let things take their course and I’m afraid that probably he was talking to us as well. And it’s not going getting any easier. No, it’s not getting easier. There’s 12 in the printer’s shop in London. It wasn’t easy either. Slavery at the time was the hegemony. It was part of the world and of the economy. A quarter of humanity owned other people at the time. And I’m sure that everyone that agreed with these 12 said would would have continued. But the economy and they were right for the economy, the abolition of slavery was not good. Of course not. The British, economy was shrinking, but humanity grew. That’s at least the way I see it. And that example shows us that we have a gift of standing up for other people that will never see in our lives. They live on other continents, or they aren’t simply born yet. We have the ability to think ideas beyond space and time. We can imagine abstract things that don’t even exist. For example, God’s, the invisible hand of the market, or the conscience of the German politician Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative CDU party. But we can’t imagine things that do not yet exist. A world without slavery was possible. A world without oil and gas is possible. A world in which the rich make their fair contribution. That is possible. But of course, the this interesting question is how do we get there? What can we do? We only change the world by changing how people look at the world. If we dream together and talk about how the world could be different in a way that everyone is living a good life now and in the future, and that is very decisive, that is crucial. Dreaming is another form of planning. It’s just another form of planning. So that the US women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem dreaming is just another word for planning. So if a few people get together and dream together and then plan, then the hope is created and who has hope gets into action. And to turn our dreams into deeds, there are five things we need to internalise. First. Change does not come through elections. Never politics can turn change into laws at the end and sign it off. But it started on the streets. Politics can only take up what is already there, and then it can make the rules around it. It needs the pressure from below to push through the changes against the mechanisms of hegemony. Second change is training and it needs training like a muscle every day. If you use it or lose it every day, there is no sense of just getting involved in an absolute emergency, because then you are too weak to actually cause change and fighting for change, even with a lot of training, is very, very inconvenient and hard. Those that want progress is, of course at first a nuisance. That is, that lies in the nature of things you are trying to change circumstances, otherwise you would stabilise it. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher, not only wrote an outstanding theory on hegemony, he also was active. He founded newspaper, he wrote against fascism, fascism and in the aid he paid for it with his life. He said of himself that he is a partisan against indifference for him, like if meant taking sides, and who takes sides, makes themselves attackable. But if we don’t feel any resistance, then we are certainly going in the wrong direction. So fourth change is work on the system. I’m so conscious shopping. It’s great, but it won’t save our world. Slavery was not abolished by consumers who decided to stop buying slaves. It was abolished by citizens who decided that they were going to abolish slavery and we know how it was achieved through collective action. That is our strongest muscle, and we together haven’t been training it for quite a while, let’s be honest. Exactly us. Those that know what the climate crisis is going to do with us, that are well informed, we are voting for the right party. We are buying the right things, but otherwise nothing is less innocent than letting things take their course and fifth, change is very slow and it’s never finished. Women still earn less than men 6 to 12, depending on how you calculate it. But at the same time, I’ll tell you it’s the difference is much less than it used to be. Is that good? Yes. Is it good enough? No. We need the ability to recognise, to see the intermediate victories and celebrate them. We will have to keep on pushing for the rest of our lives. It’s never to. It’s never time to go home. It’s always to early to go home so we can create a different world. But the bad news for you is everything you have to do yourselves. Just like those that were before us. The generation of the 12 abolished slavery. The generation of my great great grandfather and your great great grandparents presented democracy to us, and they made a better world for us. And now it’s our turn. We owe the world of tomorrow that we don’t let things run their course. And us here in particular. We have the money to pay the ticket at the entrance. We have good education . We have the time to talk about all these issues and think about them. So we have a small, privileged minority. We. And Noam Chomsky once wrote about this privileged minority that it has a certain kind of power stemming from political freedom, access to information, and the right to free speech, freedom of expression. But with that power, sadly, there is an obligation, a responsibility, i.e. the responsibility for the change that we want to see lies in our hands. Nowhere else. So stop looking at the stage, look around you to your right, to the left of you, all those who work together to bring about the change are already here. They are sitting right here, right next to you. Stop looking at the stage. Don’t wait any longer. Start rewriting the play. Thank you. From the Momentum Institute , Barbara Blaha. >> All right. It. Wow. It’s filled up so much. >> The grand final is where everyone flocks towards us. That’s good. And you know how it is in the world. And the world is turned upside down. Crises. Crises everywhere. The world seems to be just going crazy. And of course, you have to kind of act. And the person that has to act in particular is the German foreign minister, because she well, she may not have an answer to the crisis, but perhaps a position, an opinion, an idea. So we’re very happy that she has come to meet us today. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, and she will now is going to talk with Republica founder Gianni Hausler. The session is called Foreign Policy in Turning Times. Foreign Minister Baerbock, in a conversation with Gianni Hausler. And for this grand final, I will. I hope that you will have enjoy it and I’m asking you for some warm applause. >> Well, it’s very crowded here. Well, compared to this morning. Welcome to Republica. I’m really happy that you’ve made the time. And I’m really happy that I can sit here with the. The first female foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. Hi, good evening. Thanks for inviting me. All of the photographs. Is that normal? Well, I just need to check my skirt so no one can photograph up my skirt. So let’s start with an easy question. You travel a lot. What country in the world is, like, the best? That’s great . They really got their shit together. I can really imagine living there. There’s many great, places. That’s the great thing as a foreign minister. But actually I always think, well, Germany is actually great. Except for insults. Well of course we have many things that we need to solve. Many things, many problems. But especially when you’re looking at nature, there’s really a lot of great nature. All around the world. But actually being back home, the infrastructure, health, our health system, poverty in a lot of questions in a lot of countries that are really, really like, you’re always sort of feel this. So how how would I feel with children if school wasn’t right across the street? I think it is actually the best thing for people to, re to experience the world, to experience what it means to be foreign, to experience what it means not to speak the language, what it means to and also to appreciate your, your home and what you have back home. And that’s why I think my job is actually really great. I unfortunately, towards the end we will also, allow the audience to ask questions. I think we won’t have that many laughter, that much laughter, because we have a lot of serious questions, that are on your table. And the first question I want to talk about is the, way our discourse has shifted to the worse, the way, colleagues of yours have been attacked verbally. What does this make? What how does this affect you? And where is it coming from? Okay, so there’s five questions in there. What does that how does that affect you? Of course that worries me. But I need to really make a distinction here. Between sort of, me, myself, I have police protection detail, but, I won’t I don’t need to be worried about anything if I, go around and put up a poster. But so many different people, especially those that are currently hanging all of the election posters, they do not have police protection detail. And those are really the brave people. And they’re really the ones that are being targeted currently. And I brought something with me, which is a book, about the Philippines that is about how to stand up to be a dictator. And Philippines also great country. But there’s really what it is about is a thousand cuts towards our democracy to realise that. 8000km far from us, there’s very, very similar trends and they’re not actually being ran awesomely, but instead, this is about destabilising people, destabilising citizens from below to, to really make it less secure for them so that they are afraid so that they are not willing to stand up for themselves. But what we’ve really seen in the last couple of years is that millions of people have stood up. They were all of these protests, and we checked some of these protests, and we think, what we are actually seeing is today, we have more people on the streets doing the protests than during the times of peaceful transition in everywhere around, in schools and universities, in cities, in towns, but also in villages and this kind of resistance is really what we need currently is for all of us to stand up for our democracy, for our freedom. Please allow me to just skip through all the topics. We could really be here for 2 or 3 hours and do more of a talk show. Now you were in Kiev about a week ago, and what you’ve had impressions. So every day there’s new news. So oftentimes I watch the news, I watch the phone and I’m thinking, wow, what the hell, what’s happening? And then, Sort of there’s debates around should Western weapons be able to be used on Russian territory. And that the NATO has actually called on its members to allow this? What does that mean? Now, what it does mean is that it really shows the danger that we’re currently in this destabilising tendency, this, uncertainty that we’re seeing, that sort of people who are out campaigning are actually being attacked and, and a similar kind of uncertainty we’re seeing, I just came from a foreign minister meeting in Brussels with, with someone from Lithuania, and a lot of these people thought and this Lithuanian, minister who is really in between sort of Ukraine and Germany, and he really said that we the escalation hasn’t really helped in the last couple of years that, maybe we can’t de-escalate anymore. It hasn’t worked that we need to make it clear that we really are on Ukraine’s sides, and that a regime that tries from time to time again, to sort of test out its rules, test out the limits, for instance, in the waters, before near Tallinn, so there’s this is why it’s really, really important for us to be unified. Every country has the right to defend itself and, and our traffic light coalition has really made it very clear that we don’t want to become parts parties of the war. But this is a really small line that we need to make sure that we have European unity, but are also supporting Ukraine. And this is a really, really tight rope. We are currently working esters in. Is it possible for you to sketch out a way for us to end the war? No If I knew we had, we would have done it already. Of course, we could think of a theoretical way of people come together. They negotiate the end of war. And but this would. But it is quite difficult to even negotiate peace with someone who started the war without reason. So should we talk about peace with this person? Is this a real peace? Of course we would love nothing more than to have peace again. I was in Ukraine recently, of course all of the people in Ukraine and all of the children would like nothing more than to be back in, peace, to go for the kids, to go back to school. The idea that there’s someone in Europe, in Ukraine that, wouldn’t be willing to say yes if Putin was willing to say, okay, let’s end this war. But unfortunately, what we’ve seen in the last two and a half years , whenever someone tried to try to talk to Putin about any topic, like maybe it’s about, the kids that were trafficked out from Ukraine to Russia, there wasn’t an African initiative. There’s discussions all around the world in NATO and I’ve I’ve tried to really make it clear to this, African delegation, which was led by the South African foreign minister. And I told them travel to Ukraine, travel to, Russia to talk to Putin about these traffic children. And they told and what happened was, well, Kiev was actually being attacked at the time. And these African delegations, this African delegation then went to Putin and told him, well, we were attacked while we were in Kiev, and the Putin just said, yeah, that’s just what happened. So and I think he also wasn’t willing to talk about these traffic children. So I think it’s very, very clear that if you’re not even willing to take back the to return these traffic children, then you can’t really credibly claim that you want peace. So what we are actually doing currently is to preserve peace by supporting Ukraine in its right to self-defence. >> So if you look at social media, you are sometimes surprised that from all these pandemic experts have suddenly turned into military experts. >> I am not one of them, concerning military, deployments , military action, I have no idea at all I have I’m interested in the way these diplomatic channels work, you talk about it, you read about it. Putin is not ready to do this or that. He’s not interested in this or that. So do these conversations actually happen? It’s often said that in Switzerland in mid-June, there’s going to be a new peace conference where Russia is not going to be invited, as far as I know. Please correct me if I’m wrong. So how do these diplomatic channels work? Who leads these conversations? Which countries do, and who then says, no, there’s no interest in a peace? Well, there are many, many conversations happening all the time, non-stop, because it’s not just about, troop movements. I took these abducted children as an example. Zelensky said one year ago, more than one year ago, he put forward a peace plan that has several chapters in it and countries throughout the world, he asked, including Switzerland, to take responsibility on some of these items. So the Africans said, okay, we will deal with these abducted children. We as Germans, together with the Brazilians, another country that initially wasn’t quite sure how they would judge the whole issue . Now we have taken the responsibility. It sounds very small, but you can see how many areas we have and where we are not making progress. Environmental damage and limiting the catastrophes in the environment linked to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that was always in danger to explode during the as a consequence of these attacks. So non-stop behind closed doors, we had the i’ow, the International Atomic Energy, we talked about getting two UN delegates into that nuclear plant in order to then have to ensure that the Russians would not attack these attacks because they have a Russian at the head of this organisation at the moment. So these are the threads. And this is why I say if there’s just a spark of hope, to just say that a nuclear power station is not going to be blown up. Then that is something. And we’ve always experienced that things that have been achieved were then reversed. And that is a non-stop thing. The German chancellor, has talked to the Russian president on the phone to find out whether there is anything that you can talk about. Turkey has tried this grain deal that to ensure that the grain that is exported from Ukraine that is needed in order to prevent famine, to make these exports possible, that has worked well for a few months. And then Putin simply cancelled that deal. So in all kinds of corners, the whole world at least tries to limit the consequences of this war. And we always see the opposite happening more attacks, more violence, and again, that’s why it’s so important to just say we’ll see what is going to happen, because then the free Ukraine would be seeing its end. And in a year where we celebrate 75 years of our German constitution, that is our own responsibility. This country would not be this country. Many in this room would not be together between East and West Germany. If other countries in the last decades had not been there for us after the Second World War, to ensure that Germany became part of the international community and in view of our peaceful relationship, trust that a reunified Germany, as it says in the German Constitution, would be serving peace in the world so that we had our peace and our freedom secured. And that’s why it’s so important that we are standing in for the freedom and security for all European states, because it is our freedom, it’s our peace, and it’s our Europe. Someone who probably knows more than I about this has once said, even if we had a quick peace now in Ukraine, the issue will remain with us, at least for another decade. And that, of course, includes rebuilding. And that is probably true, isn’t it? Well, I really struggle with some of the terms. So what would a quick peace be? Because there is this idea that we will freeze the whole thing. So on the one hand, that also would mean that Putin is ready to stop his army and no longer to pummel Ukraine with rockets and drones and destroy it non-stop. If that were to happen, that would be a first step. But that freezing you have to remember is not it’s not a refrigerator. Later. That would mean that in East Ukraine, where people are still being tortured and raped for two and a half years, we don’t even know what else has happened there, because even the International Committee of the Red cross wasn’t able to get in. So we would have all this, but a quick peace if that were to mean not what I’ve just talked about, which in my view would not be a peace for the people there. But suppression, but a real withdrawal of Russian troops because that would be a quick peace. Then the whole world, Europe and Ukraine would take a breath, draw breath, and then, of course, rebuilding is what would then be needed. And that’s why we now are involved in preparing the recovery conference, which will be on the 11th and 12th of June in Berlin, where companies, countries throughout the world are going to be invited, that are now working non-stop on making all that what’s been destroyed in Ukraine, for example, water supply, where people in the Odessa region for months didn’t have access to clean water, to have a German start up enter there and, and, put up solar panels on roofs because the energy supply was, of course, was cut off to ensure that water is purified and people have drinking water. So that rebuilding you always see these more than ■k730 billion, the largest part of this is exactly this. To ensure the foundations of life and survival, and to ensure that what has been destroyed in civil infrastructure is rebuilt now already, because people have to continue living even in this war. Okay, I didn’t want to interrupt you. Sorry but are there still moments where you have glimmers of hope? We have a bit of. We had a bit of conversation backstage and a few notes of hope were palpable. Well, yeah, always, for one thing, if you don’t believe that, it can get better, then I couldn’t do my job. It doesn’t mean that I think I am naive. I hope I’m not. I don’t have a magic wand to make everything good. No, the world isn’t as beautiful as that. But if you don’t believe in it, in that what you do can change things for the better, then either you haven’t been thinking enough, because obviously then you haven’t developed enough ideas, but also it is crucial that in situations like this, even if we cannot achieve peace tomorrow, we still say, okay, we haven’t had peace for two and a half years and not to say then we are not going to do anything. We have to save people’s lives non-stop. If we ensure water supply near Nikolayev in the last two and a half years, with the help of a German company, then that means that people have drinking water. Otherwise they wouldn’t have any and they would simply die of thirst. And again, it’s not just the government, it’s our whole country, all of Europe that is helping. We have so many partnerships. You were thinking, okay, city partnerships. That’s something a nice idea from the 70s. What’s the use? It’s such a relief that we have them even not in the past. But now Nürnberg has a partnership with Kharkiv, where I was a few months ago. I was going to go there again, but now I can’t because it’s turned so dangerous. There was a children’s hospital that was rebuilt through the help of the city of Nuremberg or Nuremberg. In German, that is something that we do in the midst of war, and that is what gives me a positive sense of hope. We can save lives even in war, and every human life is worth. It’s that applies to Ukraine as well as Gaza and the hostages from Israel that have been abducted. So to fight for every single life, every day, that is important. I’m very grateful for that keyword. On the 7th of October last year, we saw a cruel attack on Israel’s civil society, and then a further escalation in that same region. You wrote on Instagram, I don’t know if that was you yourself, but, perhaps with your, permission, it is part of the German raison d’etre to stand for Israel’s security, but also to ensure that Israel is not going to lose itself. So at what point in the view of the German Foreign Office has that point been reached, when Israel loses itself? Well, these are not static moments. It’s all very fluid process. And therefore it’s important for me regarding Ukraine, where I have visited 17 seven times and Israel and the Middle East, where I have been nine times since the 7th of October, you cannot understand certain things unless you actually go there and talk to the governments, and that is part of my answer already, foreign policy, diplomatic relationships are not something where one foreign minister meets another foreign minister and then has is given a tour of the building. I represent 84 million people, and I am responsible for the relationships between these people. And that’s why it’s so important to me to get into a conversation with these people, to make clear that this is, that’s what what what I want to make clear with that sentence that the, security of Israel is ours. And as the German state, it’s the human, the people in Israel and the generations. And that is why, after the 7th of October, I was so clear that the only solution, in my view, for the people across the generations can live in security is when Palestinians live in security and freedom, because only then there will be peace in the region and the whole thing is correct is true. Vice versa. Palestinian can only live in security if Israelis live in security and never again. This huge threat from the Holocaust. And now from the 7th of October, that is now, reviving that drama of Holocaust in people’s heads across generations. If that is not allowed to, to happen. And that’s why it’s important to make it so clear that we can only achieve this together for both populations in both states. And that’s why for us, the two state solution is what we’re working for, even if it seems quite hopeless at the moment, like it never has been for a long, long time, you still cannot give up hope because otherwise this world will only be governed by violence. I admire this, ability to not give up hope. And I’m very happy that you’re not giving it up. Because I have to admit, in a situation like this, when I observe the way it is, the people that make the decisions, it’s always men, it seems. I don’t see much hope for the kind of solution that you are sketching out, that is achievable. And that is quite frustrating for me. Someone who is just observing as a concerned citizen. And I really admire that you as a foreign minister, are not looking at it in the same way, and that we can actually sit here and, and that we can sense this optimism. My respect. Well, it’s not like I don’t have moments of despair. And that is something away from everyday politics. I was happy for the invitation to talk about this in a at a somewhat larger scale, because that book that I wrote along also asks, how do you protect yourself as well as democracy and society in these times? Because that is something that not just foreign policy, but a whole life, is challenging . The fast paced life of social media, of digital digitalisation. That is something that you could use to just see terrible suffering and, and violence and, and hate the whole day. You are then trapped in a world where there is no more hope. And the way I can believe in the good and not just believe, but see that we have to work on it, is that the logic in a digitalised world and that is what Maria Ressa makes so clear, but also others that are dealing with this question. There’s a voice from above that deal with the question of digitalisation more professionally. Hatred causes six times more clicks than positive news. So there is a logic behind this. Why In cases of doubt, the media, but especially those that write up things on social media, are looking for this kind of message because that is what’s happening. And we can only meet this if we not agree to be caught up into this, in this spiral of hate and even if you do despair, sometimes you have to remember to switch off. And looking at the situation in Gaza right now, I do feel that in my heart, I feel it cannot go on like this. And then to switch off for a while and take a breath and ask yourself, how do I not enter that negative spiral, but actually see these points where I can link up to and start working? That is so crucial, so decisive, because in cases of doubt, those that want to destroy in algorithms like this will be more successful with these algorithms. And that’s why it’s so important to switch off. But the best protection that I can think of. >> Is in survival, we are sometimes maybe a little bit irritated because there’s like a vibration going on, as if there’s a subway going around. >> And just now we heard a voice. We’re hearing voices. This is really, special times, turbulent times. Even on this stage. I really want to open the mic. I think there’s not. You don’t often have the chance of asking the foreign minister, but there’s one question. There’s one ask from our program programming team. We’ve been trying to include the Global South for 12 years. We’ve had a lot of problems with the for with people from the global South coming to Germany, for the Republica, because they’re not getting the visa via the German embassy. A lot of cultural organisations also know this problem. We’ve had two people. We’ve invited two people from Uganda, one AI expert and someone who was supposed to talk to Steffi Lemke, and they aren’t able to get their visa. The embassies aren’t. We can’t reach the embassies after being in touch first. I know you won’t be able to answer this question right now, but we really I would really like to ask you that after this talk, we can discuss how can we make this work better, because we want to include the Global South more, but they need a visa. Visa? How can we make that work? Yeah I would like to really reply to this question because this is one of my big projects as a foreign minister. And if we hadn’t had these traumatic two wars, two additional wars, we have additional wars. Of course, outside of these two, this is one of our key projects. One, and there’s really three points that I want to make. One, it’s true. And I have to say, unfortunate. We have a problem with, lacking skilled workers. We have a lot of, we’re missing a lot of people, not only sort of looking in at the world, but also in specific areas of Germany. So in Brandenburg an der Havel, which is a German, city, a small city, so, so what we are seeing is that we are missing skilled workers even in our visa places. Even there we have embassies where processes take so long that you would need to apply for a year, apply a year in advance. We’re currently prioritising people, people in countries where there we need skilled workers, large countries where we need to prioritise our, sort of human exchange, where we want to digitalise our work. You know, our bureaucracy isn’t really digitised yet, and the third point is it’s also related to policy. And as a country that for a long time has really struggled with saying, yes, we are a migration country because people in our society really saw it as, differently. They really because we had a policy that didn’t look into immigration, but instead looked into how we can close down our country, and I say this very, very clearly because we, as the Traffic Light Coalition, have really changed our laws and have really are really making something. I really starting to get this and I have seen that within the visa system as well, that if as a country, you think of yourself as, we are actually closed down, we actually don’t want to be an immigration country, then people . Then people are really sort of having this view. Well, we should be sceptical and I can’t really. And I can’t really put it out. Take it out of these laws. Take it out of these, take it out of all of the people. And now we have finally made this immigration law that is really up to up to par, some of these things that we’ve had in the past, like you need to know German to go to Germany. And I want to tell you this because this might be a reason, because this might be a reason for you to vote for someone. We used to have a system where for whenever there’s doubt, you go against the person who’s applying for a visa. And so. So when in Philippines, for instance, someone asked, well, this person, did they actually where did they study this, it might be three months until another person who is in Castle South actually can provide some information. So and all of this is coming from this worldview that maybe if there’s any doubt they shouldn’t come. And I really want to say that this, this we have done as our government constituting from the SPD and the green and the FDP, and to make this really immigration law strong and to strengthen our economy and our society and I really want to make this very, very clear that we as the government, despite all our differences, have done this. Now, I want to also show you, because it seems like the EU might not be doing the same thing, looking at the Spiegel research, which Spiegel investigation that there’s actually billions of EU money brought into a lot of countries with the sort of with the mandate to make sure that these people don’t go to Europe and, and the EU doesn’t look into how are they implementing this, these security services are actually, educated. They’re they’re actually get technology from the EU. And whatever happens to people in these countries then doesn’t matter. And I think this is really a scandal, last year we had more than 1 million asylum seekers in Europe. Last year. And I don’t think that’s a lot. We have 450 million people in the EU, so 1 million isn’t that much. So the EU is actually working differently to what you actually explain. And. I’ll try not to make it too long, not to make it too, long, but it’s still really important to, to really separate the different parts of what I’ve talked about is visa and, skilled workers and even that it’s still important to mention this because even in areas where we say, well, we actually need more skilled workers in the Foreign Office, in it, in restaurants, and even in this area, it was really important. It was really the system was really set up in a way that it wasn’t very that we weren’t inviting to everyone, but actually this kind of asylum migration to fleeing this idea of, everyone who is who is experiencing torture, who is fleeing torture, terrorism, these kinds of things. They, that they can sort of, go to Europe and we, as the European Union have really made a decision. It wasn’t an easy decision around the Guerra’s reform. But yes, we as a human Europe need and have the freedom to provide shelter to people and asylum seeking. And the right to asylum is one one really important area in Germany. And what we’ve also seen is that we need to really check every, every asylum seeker, and that we have to really check these, investigate these asylum seekers and also, because there might be some cases where they wouldn’t be being granted asylum. So I think it is correct that we, as the European Union have looked for a common law and this is really, really dangerous to the European Union, but also to, countries at the EU borders. I don’t really know the investigation. Yes, we’re doing a lot of yes, we’re doing a lot of development help, but no one is actually fleeing because they want to people want to stay back home and that’s why. A human rights foreign policy, a development aid should be to enable people to stay at home. Climate change, foreign policy is the same where we might be changing the location of a village. So that people don’t have to change their country to make sure that people can go that children can go to school. And I do think that we are actually supporting people in staying where they feel at home. And, providing better conditions for them to feel at home. >> Zeit für uns Dann hatten wir jetzt noch ten Minuten. >> Could you add another five minutes? That would give us ten minutes from now. Great. Thank you. Thank you to you too, because I would like I have noticed in all these discussions that I’m not just a politician, but also a mother. Not every day, not not in the same way every day, but always in the heart. But I’ll be very open at 8:05. We can stop. But that is the only evening where I can actually meet my daughter. So that’s what I give you. I think then we should not take these five minutes. Shouldn’t take these away. But we’ll use questions from the audience and if you. Then don’t say that, I have to answer immediately. Then we will collect these questions first. So we have six minutes left. So the longer I talk, the less it will be, time timing on the stage is just to change the clock. So if you answer the questions or not, or just take them with you, well, I’ll try to answer them. You have to be open. Sometimes the men say I have to watch, football, but I will very openly say, I really have to see my children. So I have to make this decision and I’m going to pick the person in the white shirt in the front, then the person with the wearing the mask. Johnny, could the people please come here? So I can have a good audio and visual from them? But I would really prefer them to be here. Okay, just as you say. Good evening, Miss Baerbock. It’s great that you’re here. Thank you. For more than 11 years, Julian Assange has been in confinement, first in the Ecuadorian embassy, now in the high security jail. And in your election campaign, you said that you would be massively striving to change this first. What have you done concretely yourself? And second, what does the German government want to do for Julian Assange? Thank you. Israel, after the Israeli attacks on Rafah yesterday evening, there were areas that had been declared safe already a new stage of the war has been reached. And is there a limit for the German government for the amount of financial support to Israel? But my question is how you are dealing with that conflict that you surely have with climate protection, on the one hand, and the support of military action on the other, which of course often is in contradiction with with each other. Okay Thank you for such an amazing three minutes, but I’ll try to answer quickly without incomplete sentences and all that, because they will then be extracted and that will immediately lead to the next shitstorm. Now, regarding Assange, all these are good questions, by the way. But back then, I made very clear that I found that it’s crucial that there is a fair process. And at the time that the there was the threat that an extradition would take place without him being able to, take legal recourse and that these last legal steps would not be waited for. And I said then and also, as a foreign minister, very clearly, that the rule of law has to be applied. The European Union is based on the rule of law. Okay. The United Kingdom is no longer a member, but it’s still part of the European Court of Human Rights. And it’s a subject to those decisions. So what did I do? This was one of the topics in my very first conversations with Liz Truss, who was foreign minister at the time, which sadly, I have to say, in a democratic state, you have to see how quickly ministers change jobs. We have the third Foreign Secretary in the UK in the two years of my office, so I raised this with her. And I also said that the rule of law does prevail in the UK. I trust in that. And I think we can see that in the recent decisions that were made where his appeal was granted, that we do see it. So the fear was that the rule of law would not be applied. Those fears have not been realised, and the UK has made it clear that all legal steps will be followed. And also the European Court for Human Rights is has a voice in this regarding Rafah. This is a so tight rope that we’re walking, especially seeing the news from last night. And I’ve said this for the last six months. It’s not about deciding which side you’re on between Israel, Israelis and Palestinian lives, Israel and Israeli and Palestinian lives. Every person is worth the same. And that’s why, and I’ve said this in the Council of the European Union today, it is so clear that regarding the right to self-defence, the international law and international humanitarian humanitarian law has to be applied. And what happened doesn’t just have to be investigated. I have made clear that surely it will not contribute to Israel’s security in any way. And no single hostage would be freed if people are burned in their tents. And seeing this is almost impossible to bear. So it’s so important to everything possible. And we’ve had three Arab foreign ministers , Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others visiting Germany and we agreed that if ceasefire has to be reached or a pause, I’m not quite sure which term was just used, says the interpreter, to ensure that people don’t suffer anymore. Now, regarding the last question, the conflict, well, that applies to all these issues regarding climate protection and the question of supporting military action. There is no balancing that you can do in this. Everything we produce, the studio, the whole that we have is all of this is produced CO2 is always emitted producing things. Houses are being built. We don’t stop this. Although CO2 is being emitted. We are trying to make things climate neutral to enable to be able to, to continue living in a civilised world while still trying to protect the climate as best as possible. The same applies to war and peace. We do say that we are defending ourselves and our freedoms, or with Ukraine, and we’re not going to stop this because it contradicts climate protection. There is no logic in this. We have to do both. We have to ensure our freedom and our peace and still do everything possible to further climate protection. And fundamentally, I would like to add this climate politics was crucial for me to have this, included as a responsibility of the Foreign Office, because the climate crisis is the threat to security that we have in this century. It is the biggest catastrophe in terms of security , and therefore it has to be tackled just energetically, just as energetically as all the other catastrophes that we are experiencing. Right now. Now, that was amazing because we only overdrawn by one minute. And I’m very grateful to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Annalena Baerbock, German Foreign Minister. >> So. So leave a light. >> My micro es nicht un lider. >> Das micro. Es nicht an wossaa. Nicht Gesetz der mich! So das was an program. >> Hier heute auf und eins. Ja ganz was gewesen ve vor der tag für dich Niels schon. Ich habe ich habe hier sehr viel von den heute. Also ordentlich gute Gefallen und ich und ich hoffe, dass wir auch eine Mischung haben. Morgen ist auch ein tag hier ist auch eine loss Oder yeah! >> Also, ich kann gar nicht sagen auf welches highlight ich mich morgen am meisten frei, das ist ein bisschen wie mit Kindern . Ich liebe dich viel ja, aber ich freue mich, dass ich habe auch sehr viel gelernt verrückt contact lens forlorn habe ich yeah, yeah, yeah. Also Alles insgesamt alles sehr galungan ein schöner bis auf die contact lens. Aber ich habe jetzt auch neu der danke danke. >> Also, wir sind uns morgen hier wieder der Abend ist aber nicht vorbei jetzt spielt Enno Bunger für uns ein kleines exclusive concert. Eine phantastische Liedermacher und danach Caraoke o die Republica karaoke mit Sherry auch das heisst Stimmen sind. Das best lead, dass ihr singen könnte und wir sehen uns am traisen würde, ich sagen und morgen hier wieder ich vielen dank für den ersten tag. >> Morgen.