2023-06-07 20:28:11
The fun is over: At this year’s festival for digital society, optimism and high spirits were kept within limits. A comment.
Republica co-founder Johnny Haeusler at the festival opening.Stefanie Loos/re:publica
Elon Musk has recently been allowed to have computer chips transplanted into human brains, but with his company Neuralink he has not yet progressed far enough for it to be possible to feed these brains more than, let’s say generously, four percent of the content implemented on the Republica. Over three days, there were almost 600 sessions to see, i.e. lectures, workshops, discussion groups and much more. An overall impression can therefore only be very subjective. A visitor who mostly hung around the Center Stage, the largest of a total of 18 stages, got stuck: The Republica was more fun.
The relationship between criticism and partying seems to have shifted, or at least the way the criticism is presented: fewer cat pictures, fewer inside jokes, less spirit of optimism. One can understand. Too much of the crap that has been criticized at the conference in the past has stuck. Promises made by the traffic light government in terms of network culture and digitization have not been kept – and after almost half the legislative period, the hopes that this could change are fading.
Fiber optic expansion is sluggish, there are still hardly any politicians with digital skills and the national education platform, which was actually supposed to be set up for half a billion euros in tax money, is in danger of collapsing again before it is completed. In general, it is mostly private companies that ultimately benefit from programs created with public funds, while the authorities continue to license expensive Microsoft software.
Boos for Christian Lindner
What else? Edward Snowden remains on the run, and the intelligence agencies whose surveillance practices the whistleblower revealed have expanded rather than curbed their activities. Twitter slides unchecked to the far right. In order to train artificial intelligence, workers are exploited, not only materially but also psychologically, because they are constantly exposed to traumatizing images of, for example, torture or child abuse.
The topic of exploitation was generally omnipresent, because this year’s motto was: “Cash”. Sociologist Jutta Allmendinger once again stated that a West German woman who was born in 1985 and has the same education and professional career as her husband is likely to earn 1.5 million euros less over the course of her life after the birth of her children her male counterpart. The heiress Marlene Engelhorn impressively traced the growth process of her private wealth, exemplary for that of all the super-rich. And she reminded that the two richest families in Germany own as much wealth as the poorer half of the entire population.
The activist Marlene Engelhorn will inherit in the tens of millions. She is one of the founders of the “taxmenow” initiative, which advocates reforming tax policy. Jan Zappner/re:publica
The digital euro, which Christian Lindner promoted when he took his seat on the stage after Engelhorn, will probably not change anything about that. The heiress asked the Federal Minister of Finance why people like herself could enjoy so many tax advantages, à la Matthias Döpfner with his multi-billion dollar share gift from Friede Springer. She already anticipated the answers, although they had long since been refuted in fact: the rescue of the modest middle class, grandma’s house, the state can’t do business, etc. She should be right. At least that was followed by numerous boos from the audience and suddenly it was very noticeable again, the feeling of togetherness and empowerment that characterized the Republica from the very beginning.
It’s still burning, the network community. Bundling the heat, involving the many conference visitors who no longer belong to the inner circle, not losing courage in the face of the world situation and then not losing your good mood may not all be possible at the same time, at least not every year. And then there was one meme that was remembered. At the end of his lecture “A better Internet is still possible”, Republica co-founder Markus Beckedahl showed a little mouse with a crash helmet, his eyes on the cheese cube in the trap.
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