[02:05.210 --> 02:06.550]  Hello, hello, and welcome.
[02:07.570 --> 02:09.190]  A New HOPE continues on.
[02:09.410 --> 02:12.010]  And our next speaker is a very exciting speaker.
[02:12.050 --> 02:13.430]  I think you'll like what he has to say.
[02:13.550 --> 02:15.530]  He looks at where we are and what we can do.
[02:15.790 --> 02:16.830]  I give you Johannes.
[02:17.190 --> 02:17.870]  Thank you.
[02:17.990 --> 02:18.210]  Thank you.
[02:18.950 --> 02:19.990]  That was fast.
[02:21.330 --> 02:22.430]  Ah, yeah.
[02:22.890 --> 02:24.110]  That was a fast intro.
[02:24.370 --> 02:28.210]  And by the way, this animated GIF here is a summary of my talk.
[02:28.590 --> 02:34.410]  So let's look at it one more time in all the GIF glory it has.
[02:35.270 --> 02:36.230]  And yeah.
[02:36.510 --> 02:37.290]  So there we go.
[02:37.910 --> 02:40.650]  So hello to A New HOPE.
[02:41.350 --> 02:41.570]  Yay.
[02:44.110 --> 02:45.870]  There's a f*cking umlaut in it.
[02:46.050 --> 02:46.450]  Yes.
[02:46.770 --> 02:47.250]  Excellent.
[02:47.690 --> 02:49.450]  And by the way, that's the cross downstairs.
[02:49.490 --> 02:51.350]  They put a googly eye on it yesterday.
[02:51.350 --> 02:54.390]  So I enjoyed a subversion.
[02:55.350 --> 02:57.290]  They removed it again, of course.
[02:57.470 --> 02:59.950]  And I think there has to be more googly eye stuff on it.
[02:59.950 --> 03:02.670]  By the way, it is a very Catholic school.
[03:02.870 --> 03:03.950]  And it looks so Protestant.
[03:04.290 --> 03:06.570]  Like, I'm a good old Catholic atheist.
[03:06.950 --> 03:12.710]  And I do not approve of the non-garishness of this Catholic facility.
[03:12.710 --> 03:13.130]  Okay.
[03:13.470 --> 03:13.870]  Anyhow.
[03:14.030 --> 03:15.370]  So my name is Johannes.
[03:15.770 --> 03:20.770]  I'm part of an art and theory and film collective called monochrom.
[03:21.430 --> 03:22.630]  I'm mad as hell.
[03:23.010 --> 03:24.670]  Let's talk about that later.
[03:25.250 --> 03:34.350]  And it is actually the second part of a talk I gave at HOPE in 2006, which is a long time ago.
[03:34.470 --> 03:36.510]  So some of you weren't even born yet.
[03:36.510 --> 03:37.850]  Good for you.
[03:38.990 --> 03:43.570]  So why revisit a talk I gave in 2006?
[03:44.290 --> 03:46.910]  Because here's the hill I'm going to die on.
[03:47.030 --> 03:47.470]  That's why.
[03:47.830 --> 03:51.210]  It's one of my pet projects, subversion.
[03:52.270 --> 03:53.510]  I am from Austria.
[03:53.670 --> 03:55.570]  That's how Austria looks like.
[03:56.110 --> 03:59.910]  Austria has many hills and lots of mass murder and stuff like that.
[04:00.030 --> 04:02.030]  But I don't want to talk about that today.
[04:03.410 --> 04:05.430]  But I want to talk about subversion.
[04:05.570 --> 04:12.010]  And there's a lot of face palming and double face palming if you think about counterculture and subversion nowadays.
[04:12.230 --> 04:13.230]  So I'm an artist.
[04:13.410 --> 04:14.350]  I'm a filmmaker.
[04:14.590 --> 04:15.390]  I'm a technologist.
[04:15.630 --> 04:18.370]  And I'm also a consultant, which pays some of my bills.
[04:19.090 --> 04:23.550]  I'm also an insultant, sometimes in the capacity of being a consultant.
[04:23.550 --> 04:26.810]  So I insult people and they still pay me money for that.
[04:27.670 --> 04:28.650]  So that's good.
[04:29.450 --> 04:38.370]  But I deal a lot with the art world because I consider myself an artist, although I have a very strained, toxic relationship with art.
[04:38.810 --> 04:40.450]  Art, well, yeah.
[04:40.710 --> 04:46.110]  Do what you love and you will work super f*cking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries.
[04:46.370 --> 04:48.790]  And also take everything extremely personally.
[04:49.010 --> 04:50.090]  Yeah, that is art.
[04:51.730 --> 04:52.250]  Art.
[04:52.250 --> 04:55.610]  It's from Alamy, whatever that is.
[04:55.610 --> 05:00.130]  So art is a special place for special people in a really bad font.
[05:01.270 --> 05:08.550]  And that's why most of the time I refer to the work I'm doing as context hacking sounds a little bit nicer.
[05:08.910 --> 05:13.870]  Something that's a little bit more compatible with TikTok or something like that.
[05:14.050 --> 05:15.450]  So why context hacking?
[05:15.630 --> 05:20.070]  So first of all, the context of where you put something is extremely important.
[05:20.070 --> 05:28.710]  You could have, I mean, there are some of these like YouTube videos where like a million dollar cellist is playing in the New York subway and nobody gives a f*ck.
[05:29.850 --> 05:33.970]  And yeah, because that person is suddenly in a different context.
[05:34.190 --> 05:40.710]  You can, he can do that or she can do that very performance in Madison Square Garden and in the New York subway.
[05:40.710 --> 05:49.410]  And it would be maybe technically the same performance, but of course it's not because the context of where you do something is very important.
[05:49.630 --> 05:54.470]  And hacking is super interesting for me, first of all, because I'm a nerdy person.
[05:55.510 --> 06:00.550]  But the history of hacking is also related to the history of pranking.
[06:00.870 --> 06:05.630]  So at MIT in the 60s, it was a very good hack.
[06:05.910 --> 06:15.430]  If you would pull off a good student prank, you would, I don't know, take a Volkswagen Beetle and put it on the roof of the biology department or something like that.
[06:15.590 --> 06:16.770]  That would be a good hack.
[06:16.770 --> 06:28.510]  And that term of hacking then got adopted, like in the 70s, of course, in the emerging markets of the personal computing sphere and the Internet sphere.
[06:28.930 --> 06:34.470]  So context hacking is what I define most of the work I'm doing.
[06:34.610 --> 06:41.470]  So there's always a way to get a message across, but sometimes you need a couple of adapters to do that.
[06:42.590 --> 06:47.010]  So I'm interested in playing with the absurdities of power.
[06:47.470 --> 06:50.830]  And I mean, our world is sheer power.
[06:51.070 --> 06:54.070]  And there are people who have more power and there are people who have less power.
[06:54.390 --> 06:59.310]  But power nowadays, and I'm going to talk about it a little bit, is more like a jellyfish sometimes.
[06:59.310 --> 07:02.430]  So you have to know how to tickle the jellyfish.
[07:02.590 --> 07:06.490]  So I'm interested in emotional machines, let's call it that way.
[07:06.490 --> 07:11.930]  As a filmmaker, that's something quite obvious, because a film is a very...
[07:11.930 --> 07:14.650]  Why is this moving faster than I talk?
[07:14.970 --> 07:19.290]  Okay, so an emotional machine is something where you...
[07:20.390 --> 07:25.950]  Let's call it where you construct something that should have an emotional reaction in a person.
[07:26.070 --> 07:32.670]  You create a film that is making you cry or making you aware of a problem or something like that.
[07:32.670 --> 07:40.370]  So, but it should make you aware of the problem in a way that you can relate to it, that you have a good emotional response to it.
[07:40.510 --> 07:47.590]  A good horror film will make you scared, or a good comedy will make you laugh.
[07:48.110 --> 07:49.810]  But of course, there's more to it.
[07:49.890 --> 07:56.210]  And I think that most art, and also most hacking, is an emotional machine of some sorts.
[07:56.210 --> 08:06.630]  So, best of 1986, I was 11 years old, and it was the year that the Challenger blew up, and it was not the timeline of For All Mankind.
[08:08.310 --> 08:19.370]  Chernobyl blew up, which was a good TV show on HBO, and this strange guy, Jörg Haider, came to power in the Austrian Freedom Party.
[08:19.370 --> 08:22.090]  And, of course, when there's freedom in it, it's the fascists.
[08:23.090 --> 08:33.650]  So, Jörg Haider became pretty much the blueprint, although not many people know of him, besides growing up in Austria in the 1980s and 1990s.
[08:33.970 --> 08:40.730]  Jörg Haider became the blueprint of what people like that f*cker are doing nowadays.
[08:40.730 --> 08:53.530]  So, Jörg Haider created the blueprint of something that we now call the old right, or, like, the right-right mainstreamization of politics.
[08:53.890 --> 08:57.290]  And he was super good at it, until he killed himself in a car crash.
[08:59.090 --> 09:01.430]  So, what about you and the car crash?
[09:01.530 --> 09:02.750]  But, okay, let's talk about that later.
[09:02.750 --> 09:17.590]  Okay, so, in 1986, that was also the year, because of the glory of late-night TV, I first saw this film, and it's called Network, from 1976.
[09:17.710 --> 09:22.170]  So, it was already a little bit less than 10 years old.
[09:22.330 --> 09:25.990]  And Network is still one of the best films of the 20th century.
[09:25.990 --> 09:33.350]  If you have not seen Network, I cannot believe how incredibly dated the film is, if you watch it.
[09:33.530 --> 09:36.590]  And, at the same time, how incredibly visionary.
[09:37.130 --> 09:46.810]  It's a film about the TV age, and it's a film about subversion in the TV age, and how advertisement takes subversion and uses it for its purpose.
[09:46.870 --> 09:49.890]  But it's just, like, an incredibly great film, and you should watch it.
[09:49.890 --> 09:53.530]  Also, if you want to learn about late capitalism.
[09:53.530 --> 10:12.770]  So, it was also the time that I kind of grew up and became a political person, because I was interested in weird science fiction stuff, like Neuromancer just was translated to German around 1986, and I read it for the first time.
[10:12.770 --> 10:37.350]  I watched Robocop, just an incredibly great satire of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, but also an interesting film where, like, a European auteur cinema guy comes to the States and makes pretty much, like, the best satire about what's wrong with 1980s capitalism.
[10:37.350 --> 10:53.970]  And he just bluntly says, you do not want this to happen, the world should not look like this in 25 years, and, of course, it looks like this 25 years later, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, why I think that happened.
[10:53.970 --> 11:09.690]  It was the year that I got my first IBM computer, and I first got a modem, and was online, frequented, like, bulletin board systems, stuff like that, weird.
[11:09.690 --> 11:11.310]  I looked like this.
[11:12.330 --> 11:18.730]  I downloaded my first online porn picture from Austria, from a German bulletin board system.
[11:18.810 --> 11:20.070]  It took seven hours.
[11:20.390 --> 11:24.730]  It was 320 times 200, black and white, you couldn't see shit.
[11:25.350 --> 11:31.370]  But it was like, if you convert it to nowadays currency, it was like 1500 bucks download.
[11:32.550 --> 11:35.170]  Because it was a long-distance call from Austria to Germany.
[11:35.490 --> 11:38.290]  And my dad found out and said, like, what the f*ck?
[11:38.310 --> 11:40.350]  I have a stack of porn in the basement.
[11:40.350 --> 11:41.350]  Why did...
[11:43.930 --> 11:49.370]  And I said, like, well, you know, like, hacking is a crime of curiosity.
[11:50.170 --> 11:50.890]  I don't know.
[11:51.450 --> 11:53.410]  But, well, okay, but, yeah.
[11:55.110 --> 11:55.550]  Yes.
[11:57.150 --> 12:04.970]  So, but around that time, like, all of that stuff, like, in a young person's life, kind of, like, shaped me, and it got me interested in stuff.
[12:05.070 --> 12:09.150]  So, there are a couple of personal emancipation stories.
[12:09.410 --> 12:11.590]  So, like, actually two anecdotes about that.
[12:11.750 --> 12:14.070]  So, first of all, actually, that's E.T.
[12:14.110 --> 12:16.950]  I'm not sure if you're familiar with E.T. anymore.
[12:17.770 --> 12:19.550]  But I watched E.T.
[12:19.570 --> 12:24.570]  with my grandmother in the small cinema in my hometown, yeah?
[12:25.010 --> 12:29.290]  And I was completely blown away, of course, because of special effects and everything.
[12:29.470 --> 12:30.830]  And it was scary and it was exciting.
[12:30.830 --> 12:32.190]  It was just, like, wonderful.
[12:32.450 --> 12:36.370]  It's still a good example of an emotional machine, E.T.
[12:36.710 --> 12:43.450]  And my grandmother was a little bit, you know, she didn't know what to do with that.
[12:43.450 --> 12:51.890]  So, she didn't really understand or... I think she got it and she liked it, but she was also kind of like, what the f*ck happened?
[12:52.430 --> 12:59.230]  And, of course, I mean, she was, like, the war generation and she grew up with all the Nazi propaganda and all that stuff, yeah?
[12:59.230 --> 13:07.170]  She was never a real Nazi or anything like that, and she wasn't even specifically reactionary or right-wing or something like that.
[13:07.250 --> 13:14.070]  But I remember that I was there, like, eight, nine years old, looking at her, and she was kind of, like, talking to herself.
[13:14.230 --> 13:14.830]  Ah, yeah, yeah.
[13:15.170 --> 13:15.530]  Yeah, yeah.
[13:15.630 --> 13:15.990]  E.T.
[13:16.550 --> 13:18.070]  That was interesting.
[13:18.250 --> 13:19.170]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[13:19.690 --> 13:20.090]  Spielberg.
[13:20.510 --> 13:20.990]  A jew.
[13:21.170 --> 13:21.790]  Yes, a jew.
[13:23.750 --> 13:26.150]  And I, like, I looked, and I was, like, what the f*ck?
[13:26.590 --> 13:31.170]  Even with, like, eight or nine years old, I didn't know, like, what the f*ck has this anything to do with anything?
[13:32.150 --> 13:40.530]  But for me, it was, like, one of these moments where you think of, like, hey, there is something bigger going on that I don't understand yet.
[13:40.530 --> 13:42.350]  There are kind of, like, cultural tropes.
[13:42.570 --> 13:43.450]  There's racism.
[13:43.670 --> 13:48.850]  There are underlying powers going on that burst out.
[13:48.850 --> 13:54.310]  And that was one of these moments where one of these, like, things burst out of my grandmother.
[13:54.750 --> 14:10.270]  And I kind of, like, saw with, like, nine years, I would say, it was almost, like, the entire 20th history, 20th century history, like, combined in, like, this one moment of my grandmother trying to put the film in a context.
[14:10.270 --> 14:19.450]  So, the second story, that's a couple of years later, when I was, like, 15 or 16 or something like that, is my grandparents were very Catholic.
[14:20.850 --> 14:28.590]  My parents super fast, like, abandoned Roman Catholicism and became super new agey.
[14:28.690 --> 14:33.570]  And new agey also in the context of, like, right-wing conspiracies and stuff like that.
[14:33.570 --> 14:36.850]  So, stuff that is now pretty much mainstream, yeah?
[14:37.350 --> 14:42.630]  And so, my parents were pretty early with that stuff.
[14:42.790 --> 14:45.950]  They had all the books in their little library.
[14:46.070 --> 14:52.650]  And I remember I always had strange conversations with them because I couldn't understand what they were talking about.
[14:52.650 --> 14:59.310]  Or I didn't understand how they would put things in their ideology or whatever, in the frame, in their context.
[15:00.610 --> 15:09.850]  And so, my first rebellion pretty much was, because my parents were so new agey, my first rebellion was to adopt the scientific methods.
[15:09.850 --> 15:13.450]  Because it was a strange way of, like, enraging them.
[15:14.190 --> 15:17.390]  Like, asking for proof or stuff like that.
[15:17.470 --> 15:19.170]  Or, like, peer review.
[15:19.730 --> 15:24.670]  Which is kind of weird for a 15-year-old guy to ask for peer review when debating with your parents.
[15:24.810 --> 15:25.990]  But it was like that.
[15:25.990 --> 15:29.130]  And I'm showing this picture here with this little pendulum.
[15:29.370 --> 15:34.130]  Because my mother was always, like, using the pendulum, for example, on food.
[15:34.590 --> 15:35.990]  She would have a moldy apple.
[15:36.030 --> 15:40.030]  And she would use the pendulum and ask the pendulum, can I still eat this apple?
[15:40.150 --> 15:41.390]  Can I still eat this apple?
[15:41.830 --> 15:43.550]  And the pendulum would say yes.
[15:43.550 --> 15:44.750]  And then she would eat the apple.
[15:44.850 --> 15:45.670]  And I was like, what the f*ck?
[15:45.890 --> 15:50.490]  And so, at some point I said, like, I want to have an experiment with you, mother.
[15:51.250 --> 15:53.510]  And she said, like, okay, I'll do it.
[15:53.510 --> 16:02.890]  So what I did is, I said, I want you to use your pendulum to tell me the first 50 digits of pi.
[16:04.290 --> 16:08.630]  And she kind of knew the 3.14, but not the rest.
[16:08.670 --> 16:15.350]  So she was sitting there a whole afternoon with like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on a piece of paper.
[16:15.370 --> 16:21.150]  And she would put her finger on zero and then ask it if it's that number.
[16:21.150 --> 16:30.250]  So for a whole afternoon, hours and hours, she was really like doing the first 50 digits of pi and not a single number was right.
[16:31.130 --> 16:34.870]  And I came back and said like, hey, well, not a single number is right.
[16:34.870 --> 16:39.070]  So I assume you now see the point that I'm trying to make.
[16:39.530 --> 16:41.430]  You should not do that.
[16:42.170 --> 16:45.350]  And she said like, ah, I was just in a bad mood.
[16:45.350 --> 16:48.590]  I'll do it tomorrow and then it will be right.
[16:48.590 --> 16:56.490]  And then she got a Coke or something and then she came back and said like, who tells me that your numbers are actually correct?
[16:56.730 --> 16:58.210]  Maybe my numbers are right.
[16:58.210 --> 17:12.110]  And there you have anti-vaxxers and all the other guys like condensed in this one story because there is no use of, to a certain degree, arguing with a person like that.
[17:12.330 --> 17:22.730]  Because it is so ingrained in their personal belief system and ideology that whatever you throw at them, they will not accept it or they will find a way around it.
[17:23.470 --> 17:26.150]  Okay, but let's leave it there, okay?
[17:26.510 --> 17:32.570]  So when I was 15, 16, I started reading stuff like the Industrial Culture Handbook by research.
[17:32.690 --> 17:36.230]  I was interested in novels by Ian Banks.
[17:36.370 --> 17:42.590]  So I got politicized in my nerdy ways.
[17:42.590 --> 17:58.230]  And that was very, very interesting to me and it also opened up... I made connections and I started to understand what Robocop is about and what those books are about and that they are kind of like warning signs.
[17:58.530 --> 18:03.110]  They are like these cautionary tales about how the future should be or should not be.
[18:03.110 --> 18:08.930]  And so I also was super interested in stuff like H.R.
[18:09.030 --> 18:19.250]  Giger, who created Alien, so it was kind of like an early way of like being interested in underground culture or strange culture, but also mainstream art.
[18:19.550 --> 18:22.750]  And out of all of that, monochrom started.
[18:22.930 --> 18:28.930]  So monochrom was my way, also with my friends, to find a way and monochrom started as a fanzine.
[18:28.930 --> 18:34.130]  So, and also as a little bulletin board system, message board.
[18:34.370 --> 18:38.050]  So I wanted to kind of like talk about all of that stuff.
[18:38.170 --> 18:43.330]  All the stuff that was interesting to me that people should talk about but didn't talk about.
[18:44.050 --> 18:46.950]  I wanted to find a format to talk about that.
[18:47.170 --> 18:54.090]  Also kind of like share experiences like My Crazy Parents or a book I read or something like that.
[18:54.090 --> 19:03.690]  So we started this like bulletin board system, but not many people were on there because not many people were in bulletin board systems in Austria in 1991 or 2.
[19:04.830 --> 19:09.490]  And also the fanzine was a good thing, and we kind of still do it.
[19:09.590 --> 19:15.270]  But if you do an underground fanzine, you can be happy that 200 people read it.
[19:15.270 --> 19:27.830]  Maybe 400 if it's sitting in someone's bathroom, you know, but you can't reach people if you are using a medium that is, it's inscribed in the medium that it is underground.
[19:28.190 --> 19:35.230]  That you would only find those fanzines in specific shops that everyday regular people wouldn't go there.
[19:35.410 --> 19:44.990]  So, and the idea was always trying to reach people and telling them something about our life and what we think we should make to or do to change the world.
[19:45.270 --> 19:47.270]  So, by the way, that's a picture of me and H.R.
[19:47.330 --> 19:49.950]  Giger when I was like 17 or 18.
[19:49.950 --> 19:54.150]  I called him on the phone because he was still in the phone book back then.
[19:54.290 --> 19:56.030]  And I called him, hey, is this H.R.
[19:56.070 --> 19:56.390]  Giger?
[19:56.650 --> 19:58.010]  Can I drop by?
[19:58.010 --> 20:00.650]  I would like to do an interview with you for my crazy little fanzine.
[20:00.710 --> 20:01.410]  And he said like...
[20:02.990 --> 20:06.950]  And then I went there and I saw his Oscar.
[20:06.950 --> 20:15.270]  And he glued a dildo onto his Oscar because he had some problems with some U.S.
[20:15.750 --> 20:17.150]  movie studio or something like that.
[20:17.290 --> 20:19.490]  So, I never took a picture of that.
[20:19.510 --> 20:23.610]  And I should be more like Jason Scott sometimes.
[20:23.950 --> 20:24.090]  Okay.
[20:24.570 --> 20:25.830]  So, good.
[20:26.410 --> 20:32.790]  I grew into the punk and post-punk world because I was definitely too young for punk number one.
[20:33.030 --> 20:35.850]  But I got into punk number two and number three.
[20:36.050 --> 20:38.510]  I guess in the meantime it's punk number 12 or something.
[20:38.650 --> 20:39.850]  But I don't know.
[20:40.110 --> 20:41.510]  It looked like that.
[20:42.090 --> 20:51.790]  And so, what was important for me is that that was always the ideology of monochrom was people don't want to listen to you.
[20:52.770 --> 20:55.590]  People don't want to be told about things.
[20:55.610 --> 20:59.450]  So, you kind of have to find a way into their brains.
[20:59.690 --> 21:04.370]  You have to find a good emotional machine to make them interested in something.
[21:05.230 --> 21:08.070]  A thing that is more and more relevant nowadays.
[21:08.410 --> 21:14.290]  For example, in the 90s, one of the hills I wanted to die on was telling people about the Internet.
[21:14.630 --> 21:16.270]  And especially as a leftist back then.
[21:16.270 --> 21:21.850]  Many leftists in Austria and Germany were extremely anti-technology.
[21:22.250 --> 21:27.910]  A little bit later, they wouldn't touch cell phones or they wouldn't want to be online.
[21:28.360 --> 21:34.270]  There was this ingrained angst of being controlled or surveilled.
[21:34.750 --> 21:39.130]  I guess with the European history of Nazidom and all that stuff.
[21:39.130 --> 21:47.510]  I guess, to a certain degree, it's true that, hey, you don't want big institutions or governments know too much about you.
[21:48.990 --> 21:50.630]  We shouldn't be controlled by them.
[21:50.750 --> 22:04.990]  But I had the feeling in the 1990s that many, many people in the left were overly anxious of that form of communication, that form of reaching out to the world.
[22:06.070 --> 22:15.010]  And the problem was that I saw is that more and more kind of like libertarian-minded people, especially in the U.S., were going online.
[22:15.190 --> 22:17.070]  And you're like California Ubalis, you know.
[22:18.430 --> 22:24.750]  That many people, what we now call kind of like the Silicon Valley elite or whatever it is.
[22:25.070 --> 22:27.030]  Of course, that started back then.
[22:27.150 --> 22:28.530]  It started actually way earlier.
[22:28.530 --> 22:35.550]  But you could see this ideology kind of like manifest itself in the Internet.
[22:35.730 --> 22:49.110]  This strange combination of hippie-dom and ultra-capitalism that is super represented, of course, by a character like Steve Jobs that just like took hold of the Internet.
[22:49.110 --> 23:03.670]  And I just wanted my friends and people that I trusted and people that had similar political views online to help shape that new medium and to help it stay weird.
[23:04.600 --> 23:07.150]  And to a certain degree, of course, we all failed.
[23:07.680 --> 23:13.270]  But that was one of my hills of the 1990s.
[23:13.270 --> 23:22.610]  But in general, the question was also as a group, as a fanzine, as an art group, what can we do to make the world better?
[23:22.830 --> 23:32.050]  And the question was, to a certain degree, what is the best medium of mass distribution, the best weapon of mass distribution of an idea?
[23:32.190 --> 23:34.250]  And sometimes it's okay to make a fanzine.
[23:34.370 --> 23:39.850]  Sometimes it's okay to have a 25-page essay with 100 footnotes or something like that.
[23:39.850 --> 23:45.230]  But it will only reach certain people in certain domains and in certain spheres.
[23:45.550 --> 23:49.230]  So you have to be open-minded about the media that you use.
[23:49.410 --> 23:53.270]  So the idea was like, what is the best medium to spread a certain message?
[23:53.470 --> 23:56.850]  And I could tell you like many, many stories about things that we did.
[23:57.650 --> 24:00.130]  Many of the things I still can't believe we did.
[24:00.310 --> 24:04.530]  And I probably couldn't tell you about them because we would probably still go to jail.
[24:04.530 --> 24:15.530]  But the thing is that the experimentation of my life and the experimentation of my group was always trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work.
[24:16.070 --> 24:26.790]  And so talking about art and tech and subversion and disruption, although disruption is a really bad term in the meantime, there's fail.
[24:28.470 --> 24:33.570]  The question for me was always, what is going on?
[24:33.730 --> 24:34.870]  What is changing?
[24:35.090 --> 24:47.630]  Because I have this image here of the stop sign and this strange image from 1986 in Vienna, which is one of the early performances of the so-called Viennese actionists.
[24:47.730 --> 24:58.370]  The Viennese actionists were super hardcore artists in the 1960s who did extremely martial and extremely brutal, I don't know how else to describe it, brutal performances.
[24:58.550 --> 25:02.910]  They had performances like this where people were shitting into college auditoriums and stuff like that.
[25:03.090 --> 25:06.970]  And of course, they were the talk of the nation.
[25:07.130 --> 25:08.450]  So everyone talked about it.
[25:08.910 --> 25:15.810]  Austria was a very, still is, but back then even more so, Catholic country, conservative.
[25:15.810 --> 25:35.930]  And doing something like that would bring some of those people on the verge of going to jail for many, many years or bring you on to the headline of, like, would bring you on the front cover of the biggest Austrian newspapers of the day.
[25:37.650 --> 25:43.390]  And I kind of, like, didn't really grow up with that kind of stuff, but as an Austrian, you kind of know about it.
[25:43.470 --> 25:48.390]  You know about, ah, there's this crazy niche guy who paints with blood, and there's this and that and that.
[25:48.550 --> 25:52.910]  It's somewhat part of Austrian popular culture that stuff like that happened.
[25:53.250 --> 25:55.350]  So it was interesting to me.
[25:55.350 --> 26:07.330]  And, for example, that's Gunter Bruce, who was arrested for this performance where he was, like, walking around in a white suit with white face paint and just, like, kind of like fake blood on his body.
[26:07.490 --> 26:10.170]  And he got arrested for this and went to jail for three weeks.
[26:10.690 --> 26:20.010]  I mean, nowadays, you can be happy that something like that happens, like, in the year 2000 on Jackass, and nowadays that it's on some mom's Facebook.
[26:20.310 --> 26:23.630]  So, because nobody gives a shit about that stuff anymore.
[26:23.630 --> 26:30.310]  This is just, like, you know, this is, like, the attention economy of everyday influencers on TikTok.
[26:30.630 --> 26:37.910]  So what happened between 1968 in Austria and the same, of course, true in the United States?
[26:37.910 --> 26:48.850]  We had people here like Abbie Hoffman, et cetera, who did very interesting, very, very, to reuse that frame, brutal performances.
[26:48.850 --> 26:53.330]  But nowadays, I mean, you can't really shock anyone with this shit anymore, yeah?
[26:53.630 --> 26:58.850]  And the thing is that, of course, society has changed and subversion has changed.
[26:59.370 --> 27:07.630]  So back then in the U.S., also in Austria, we had a very strict disciplinary society.
[27:07.810 --> 27:11.910]  And a disciplinary society is a society where you kind of know how the hierarchies work.
[27:12.070 --> 27:15.970]  You know who is the boss and who has to obey that boss.
[27:15.970 --> 27:26.350]  You have the classic capitalist who is running a company who is controlling everything and who is throwing out people, firing people or not.
[27:26.610 --> 27:31.030]  You had factories where it was quite clear who is working where.
[27:31.530 --> 27:34.910]  So the hierarchies are super clear in a disciplinary society.
[27:35.110 --> 27:40.990]  That's why it's called the disciplinary society, because it is clear what person can discipline what person.
[27:40.990 --> 27:42.650]  And it never changes.
[27:43.450 --> 27:52.510]  You had stuff like, for example, surveillance cameras, where something that people would look at in fear that there is a surveillance camera.
[27:52.670 --> 27:53.730]  They could see me.
[27:54.610 --> 27:58.830]  Like 1984 is like the wet dream of a disciplinary society.
[27:59.770 --> 28:07.550]  But the cool thing about 1984 in a disciplinary society is that it has subversion embedded in that society.
[28:07.890 --> 28:12.050]  You can disobey the stop sign and just cross the streets.
[28:12.250 --> 28:19.990]  You might get killed by a car, but there is this moment of subversion where you, for yourself, decide, I want to not obey that stop sign.
[28:19.990 --> 28:21.810]  I want to smash that camera.
[28:22.050 --> 28:27.470]  I want to create a union to stick the finger to the man or something like that.
[28:27.470 --> 28:41.010]  So there were, because it was so clear how it's created and how it's functioning, the machine of the disciplinary society, it was easy to find ways to hack it, in a way.
[28:41.430 --> 28:48.690]  The gold standard was a classic form of a disciplinary society in the financial terms, in the financial realm.
[28:48.890 --> 28:54.090]  Because at least the world could say, like, there is one standard in finances.
[28:54.090 --> 28:58.410]  And it is gold, and we all agree to it, but they got rid of it in the 1970s.
[28:59.690 --> 29:00.730]  Is masturbation a sin?
[29:00.730 --> 29:02.250]  We're in a Catholic institution.
[29:02.530 --> 29:04.730]  Of course it is a sin, and you will go to hell.
[29:05.210 --> 29:10.810]  But then the f*cking second Vaticanum happened, and everything was a little bit more flubby.
[29:11.070 --> 29:12.870]  But still, okay, masturbation, sin.
[29:12.990 --> 29:15.270]  You do it, you go to hell for all eternity.
[29:15.270 --> 29:19.350]  So even, like, God is a concept of a disciplinary society.
[29:19.350 --> 29:34.030]  Because even if you can prove he exists or not, there is still the factual weight of that strange, non-existing institution of God that makes people behave in certain ways on Earth.
[29:34.350 --> 29:35.950]  So, yeah, the stop sign.
[29:35.950 --> 29:45.210]  In a society of control, and that's what's happening right now for the last 20 years, some people call it, like, the neoliberal reformation, blah, blah, blah.
[29:45.290 --> 29:45.650]  It doesn't matter.
[29:45.930 --> 29:47.890]  I like the term society of control.
[29:48.110 --> 29:52.850]  Because a society of control, it's a little bit misleading, a term.
[29:52.930 --> 29:58.330]  Because it is not that someone is controlling you, but you're controlling yourself.
[29:59.330 --> 30:05.210]  Smile, you are on camera, is like a classic thing that you would see, like, in a bar or something like that.
[30:05.210 --> 30:18.990]  So where suddenly this Orwellian, they are watching us, and it's bad, and we should resist it, is suddenly turned into, like, a smiley face, almost like a racist caricature of something, of an Asian person.
[30:20.210 --> 30:21.610]  Smile, you're on camera.
[30:22.030 --> 30:25.790]  It's a good thing that you're on camera, because we want to protect you.
[30:25.990 --> 30:28.630]  And people actually really feel protected by that.
[30:29.910 --> 30:35.230]  Your boss is your friend nowadays, because, you know, he's your buddy.
[30:35.450 --> 30:43.650]  And if he asks you, well, can you stay in on the weekend, because I want to go on my yacht with my new girlfriend, or something like that.
[30:43.730 --> 30:46.590]  And we really need someone to do this paperwork.
[30:46.590 --> 30:48.150]  You say, like, of course I'll do that.
[30:48.330 --> 30:49.970]  You are my friend, Harry.
[30:50.850 --> 30:53.030]  And, of course, Harry is not your friend.
[30:53.490 --> 30:58.010]  Harry is just, like, using the mechanisms of psychological control on you.
[30:58.530 --> 31:01.430]  The next week, he might kick you out of your job.
[31:01.550 --> 31:06.750]  But you still feel bad telling your friend, no.
[31:07.610 --> 31:14.930]  So that's how, for example, at IKEA in Austria and Germany, there is this, like, formal way and informal way of speaking.
[31:15.530 --> 31:17.590]  So, C form and do form.
[31:17.770 --> 31:19.550]  So, do is only with close friends.
[31:19.730 --> 31:25.010]  And C is, you know, like, with people of authority or teachers or something like that.
[31:25.250 --> 31:33.530]  So, at IKEA shops, they forbid the formal way of talking to your boss.
[31:33.530 --> 31:36.110]  So, they enforce the informal way.
[31:36.310 --> 31:38.930]  They enforce the do address.
[31:38.930 --> 31:46.190]  Because they realize that if you're per do, if you're talking informally with your boss, then you work better.
[31:46.450 --> 31:48.530]  And you obey your boss better.
[31:48.870 --> 31:50.210]  So, that is classic.
[31:50.450 --> 31:55.650]  This classic disciplinary society is shifting into a society of control.
[31:55.890 --> 31:59.610]  Of course, the basic power lines are the same.
[31:59.970 --> 32:01.770]  The same people have the money.
[32:01.890 --> 32:03.870]  The same structures are still there.
[32:04.010 --> 32:05.250]  There are still hierarchies.
[32:05.390 --> 32:07.850]  But the hierarchies appear flatter.
[32:08.210 --> 32:11.850]  And because they appear flatter, everything looks a little bit more nicey.
[32:11.850 --> 32:15.370]  Of course, I'm talking here about Western liberal societies.
[32:15.370 --> 32:18.670]  I'm not talking about Iran or something like that.
[32:18.730 --> 32:18.830]  Yeah.
[32:18.990 --> 32:19.930]  Or North Korea.
[32:20.210 --> 32:23.150]  Those are still strict disciplinary societies.
[32:23.510 --> 32:34.350]  And, for example, with, like, gay and queer people in Iran, where they are really fearing to be killed if they're outed or something like that.
[32:34.350 --> 32:43.330]  They have, of course, very interesting subversive tactics to meet or to do their stuff.
[32:45.030 --> 32:48.910]  But let's stay in the realm of the Western liberal societies.
[32:49.190 --> 32:54.030]  And I couldn't find an image of masturbation online, so I took this one.
[32:57.790 --> 33:02.430]  Even nowadays, like, masturbation, even for the Catholic Church, there is a difference.
[33:02.870 --> 33:04.910]  You're not going strictly to hell anymore.
[33:05.130 --> 33:14.030]  But I remember when I grew up, after the second Vatican, I was learning about masturbation in my religious class at school.
[33:14.250 --> 33:19.990]  And they would say, like, yes, yes, you're allowed to masturbate, but please be considerate about it.
[33:21.990 --> 33:24.890]  And then you want to masturbate, and you...
[33:24.890 --> 33:30.490]  How can I do this in a considerable way?
[33:31.790 --> 33:33.510]  And then you don't want to do it anymore.
[33:34.310 --> 33:36.050]  So that's how they get you.
[33:36.190 --> 33:37.450]  They get into your brain.
[33:38.110 --> 33:38.550]  And...
[33:38.550 --> 33:39.210]  You're doing it wrong.
[33:39.370 --> 33:39.650]  What?
[33:40.010 --> 33:41.290]  You're doing it wrong.
[33:41.310 --> 33:42.630]  You're doing it wrong.
[33:42.930 --> 33:49.190]  Yes, maybe we can learn from the Catholics that you really only masturbate in a proper way if you feel guilt.
[33:49.910 --> 33:50.390]  But...
[33:50.390 --> 33:50.950]  But...
[33:51.630 --> 33:52.510]  Who knows?
[33:53.450 --> 33:53.930]  But...
[33:53.930 --> 33:55.850]  And even, like, the gold standard doesn't exist anymore.
[33:55.970 --> 33:57.330]  Now we have, like, this, like...
[33:57.330 --> 33:59.150]  2008, what can I tell you?
[33:59.270 --> 34:01.710]  Nobody knows shit about the financial system anymore.
[34:01.910 --> 34:03.770]  It somehow works or not.
[34:04.330 --> 34:06.570]  And, yeah, well, yeah, good.
[34:06.770 --> 34:07.730]  Society of control.
[34:08.050 --> 34:09.690]  And even stuff like Ingress.
[34:09.850 --> 34:12.370]  I'm not sure how many of you have ever played Ingress.
[34:12.730 --> 34:12.870]  Yeah.
[34:13.390 --> 34:17.270]  Ingress was this, like, interesting trap that Google created.
[34:17.270 --> 34:22.030]  It's an augmented reality game where you play on the green or on the blue side.
[34:22.170 --> 34:24.170]  And you have to geolocate things.
[34:24.370 --> 34:32.630]  You have to put, like, a blue or green sticker, digital sticker, so to speak, on a monument, on a building, on something like that.
[34:32.630 --> 34:38.110]  So millions of people played and are still playing Ingress because it's a fun game.
[34:38.110 --> 34:48.330]  But they are actually working for Google and not even knowing that because they are putting geo-information, geo-data into Google's system.
[34:49.370 --> 34:51.350]  And Google, of course, uses that.
[34:51.830 --> 34:55.650]  But so in a society of control, we work for corporations.
[34:55.650 --> 34:59.850]  They don't pay us, and most people don't know it.
[35:00.030 --> 35:09.030]  They are tricked by interesting forms of gamification to do labor-intensive data entry work for free for a company.
[35:09.310 --> 35:09.490]  Okay.
[35:09.890 --> 35:12.950]  So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[35:13.070 --> 35:15.190]  World's largest company doesn't own caps.
[35:15.490 --> 35:17.530]  Largest accommodation provider, no real estate.
[35:17.810 --> 35:19.290]  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[35:19.290 --> 35:21.570]  So the world somehow changed.
[35:21.850 --> 35:28.550]  And it also is in a strange form, a bad form of disruption that's going on.
[35:28.630 --> 35:29.910]  So who is running the planet?
[35:30.210 --> 35:30.850]  That guy.
[35:31.330 --> 35:32.930]  Of course, the white nerd.
[35:33.830 --> 35:36.850]  And, well, actually, that guy.
[35:37.330 --> 35:44.330]  So, and why do I use this picture of f*cking Elon Musk with a flamethrower?
[35:44.330 --> 35:46.470]  Because I think it exemplifies...
[35:46.470 --> 35:47.570]  Look at that.
[35:51.630 --> 35:54.150]  And the fun part is...
[35:54.150 --> 35:55.390]  The fun part is...
[35:55.390 --> 35:56.630]  So let's jump back.
[35:56.730 --> 35:57.690]  Who is running the planet?
[35:57.970 --> 35:59.830]  Of course, nerds are running the planet.
[36:00.090 --> 36:02.990]  It's the same people that grew up in my generation.
[36:02.990 --> 36:05.510]  It's the people who watched Robocop.
[36:05.610 --> 36:08.950]  It's the people who read the same magazines like I did.
[36:09.110 --> 36:12.910]  Who watched the same films like Spaceballs, etc., etc., etc.
[36:12.910 --> 36:22.310]  And those people decided that it's so cool that there is Robocop that we actually should build a world that is Robocop.
[36:22.450 --> 36:28.110]  They didn't get the message out of some strange form of nostalgia or something like that.
[36:28.110 --> 36:42.070]  And it's people really like Elon Musk who said in an interview in a documentary recently that he really started a little company selling flamethrowers because he likes Spaceballs so much.
[36:42.190 --> 36:46.890]  He saw the Spaceballs flamethrower and decided, I can do that.
[36:46.890 --> 36:48.530]  I can actually sell flamethrowers.
[36:48.770 --> 36:50.830]  Well, Elon, you didn't get the message.
[36:52.150 --> 36:53.250]  It's a joke.
[36:53.410 --> 36:59.750]  It's a joke about the f*cked up merchandise cult going on in nerd culture.
[36:59.990 --> 37:02.470]  And Mel Brooks did an interesting statement here.
[37:02.570 --> 37:05.550]  But it got kind of like misunderstood.
[37:06.090 --> 37:09.590]  And I think a lot of that stuff is happening in nerd culture.
[37:09.650 --> 37:14.410]  Especially if people still think they are underground.
[37:15.410 --> 37:21.090]  In my age, I got like actually really beaten up in high school because I was a nerd.
[37:22.010 --> 37:23.450]  It kind of changed.
[37:23.910 --> 37:25.470]  Nerds have a lot of power.
[37:25.670 --> 37:26.670]  A lot of buying power.
[37:27.650 --> 37:29.090]  We are mainstream.
[37:29.650 --> 37:32.210]  At least some of us are mainstream.
[37:32.850 --> 37:37.390]  But we have to kind of like remind ourselves what we do with this power.
[37:37.550 --> 37:42.350]  And what we do with this creative, wonderful energy that we all have.
[37:42.350 --> 37:45.470]  And not started on a f*cking Gamergate or something like that.
[37:46.070 --> 37:53.710]  So the mainstreamization of dissent, I would call it, is that capitalism is a very adaptive entity.
[37:53.970 --> 37:55.790]  It likes new stuff.
[37:56.010 --> 38:00.670]  And it likes to adapt that new stuff and incorporate it in its structure.
[38:00.930 --> 38:03.510]  That's why most of Hollywood films out there...
[38:03.510 --> 38:09.730]  I think in the meantime, it's 90% of old Hollywood films are made by Marvel or something like that.
[38:09.810 --> 38:13.770]  I'm not sure about that statistics, but you can probably Google it and find it's true.
[38:15.470 --> 38:18.610]  So does subversion itself need to change?
[38:18.770 --> 38:19.690]  It has to.
[38:19.950 --> 38:23.270]  Because society works differently nowadays.
[38:23.270 --> 38:34.550]  So we have people who think they are subversive and they are anti-mainstream on the street, demonstrating against vaccination, demonstrating against COVID measures or something like that.
[38:34.730 --> 38:37.570]  They all think they are underground.
[38:37.570 --> 38:40.950]  They all think that they are sticking it to the man.
[38:40.950 --> 38:47.950]  I somewhat agree with the whole thing about that the government wants to control people, but not.
[38:48.550 --> 38:52.570]  Because the problem is this quote.
[38:52.830 --> 38:54.190]  I mean, this quote is not the problem.
[38:54.350 --> 38:55.770]  I like this quote a lot.
[38:55.950 --> 39:00.510]  It is not important what you want to know, but why you want to know it.
[39:00.550 --> 39:01.750]  And that's by Michel Foucault.
[39:01.950 --> 39:06.110]  And I think this is exactly what I'm talking about this here.
[39:06.370 --> 39:08.770]  Why are these people on the streets?
[39:08.770 --> 39:12.110]  Why do they want to stop vaccination?
[39:12.570 --> 39:17.910]  Why do they want to storm the Capitol?
[39:18.130 --> 39:18.950]  Whatever it is.
[39:19.190 --> 39:23.210]  So what is the agenda behind all of this?
[39:23.890 --> 39:25.830]  So why are they doing it?
[39:25.910 --> 39:27.230]  It's not important what they are doing.
[39:27.490 --> 39:32.690]  I mean, of course, it's also important what they are doing, but it is important to analyze why they are doing it.
[39:32.890 --> 39:35.250]  So why in Comic Sans?
[39:36.330 --> 39:40.530]  I guess it's getting a little bit back to the story that I told you about my mother.
[39:40.810 --> 39:43.450]  Why is my mother so obsessed with New Age?
[39:43.550 --> 39:46.570]  Why is my mother obsessed with creating a new form of mathematics?
[39:46.650 --> 39:51.730]  Because she failed in the test I gave her about the pendulum and pi.
[39:51.730 --> 39:53.970]  They are all looking for meaning.
[39:54.730 --> 40:15.490]  My parents are the classic boomer generation that got like hit over the head by popular culture and by the change also that disciplinary society turning towards society of control happened and all that kind of stuff.
[40:15.490 --> 40:20.530]  So the question is like, and I try sometimes to do that, but of course I know it's hard.
[40:20.670 --> 40:27.570]  It's hard to talk to my parents why they don't want to get vaccinated, why they are still using a pendulum and stuff like that.
[40:27.570 --> 40:36.590]  It's super hard because we're talking about ideology and at the same time we're talking about morality and at the same time we talk about agenda.
[40:37.110 --> 40:38.330]  Everyone has an agenda.
[40:39.550 --> 40:42.370]  And the agenda might be as simple as like, I want to get rich.
[40:42.670 --> 40:45.690]  Okay, that's one of the prime agendas in capitalism.
[40:45.850 --> 40:46.510]  Yes, of course, yeah.
[40:47.270 --> 40:50.530]  But the question is getting a little bit more tricky when you talk about morality.
[40:50.810 --> 40:54.850]  So my dad, for example, who is anti-Semitic to a certain degree?
[40:55.010 --> 40:56.830]  And I always ask myself, why?
[40:57.690 --> 41:02.390]  And I kind of found out that he is actually deep in his core.
[41:02.930 --> 41:04.710]  He doesn't like what's going on.
[41:04.850 --> 41:06.410]  He doesn't like what's going on in the world.
[41:06.410 --> 41:10.110]  He doesn't like that the world is polluted, that people are being killed.
[41:10.270 --> 41:12.430]  And he always looked for an outlet.
[41:12.710 --> 41:14.870]  He wanted to know why is that happening.
[41:15.150 --> 41:18.950]  And of course it's happening for him because the jews are running the planet.
[41:20.410 --> 41:21.930]  Of course, that's not true.
[41:22.870 --> 41:26.350]  Most jewish friends of mine, they don't have a dime.
[41:27.370 --> 41:45.850]  But there is still this strange form of racism, this anti-Semitic form of racism, where it's a racism where you don't look down at a certain people, but you look up at them and say, like, they are so all-encompassing and powerful and they run everything in Hollywood and blah,
[41:45.910 --> 41:46.210]  blah, blah.
[41:46.430 --> 41:47.710]  We have to fight them.
[41:48.010 --> 41:50.250]  We don't look down on them.
[41:50.290 --> 41:52.550]  We actively need to fight them.
[41:52.670 --> 41:55.350]  And that was pretty much like the basic core of Nazi ideology.
[41:55.750 --> 42:00.130]  Try to get rid of them and rid the planet of all its problems.
[42:00.130 --> 42:01.450]  Nah, no.
[42:01.970 --> 42:11.370]  So the question is like, how do I deal then with a person like my dad who basically has the same vector?
[42:11.630 --> 42:23.510]  He wants to make the world better, but he has a completely different mindset applied onto why he thinks the world is bad and why he wants to change it and how he wants to change it.
[42:24.050 --> 42:27.870]  I mean, the problem is we're all little context hackers in that sense.
[42:27.870 --> 42:31.330]  It's so hard to sit at home, you know, Thanksgiving dinner or something like that.
[42:31.470 --> 42:38.950]  You have, like, strange parents or strange relatives or whoever it is that you're talking to or the cab driver who is racist or whatever, yeah?
[42:39.350 --> 42:50.790]  But, I mean, it's all our job to a certain degree to play with them in a meaningful but also powerful, powerful way.
[42:51.590 --> 42:54.230]  Well, yeah, I'm not saying it's a lie, but it's a lie.
[42:54.230 --> 42:57.710]  So, how can you get that message across?
[42:59.050 --> 43:07.490]  Sometimes, as I said, it's good to make a film or write a book or do a performance in the public sphere.
[43:08.050 --> 43:16.550]  Sometimes, it's almost like having little theater plays for people that you need to educate or need to play with.
[43:16.710 --> 43:22.810]  So, for example, in my case with my parents, I'm not fully engaging with them with what I really think.
[43:22.910 --> 43:26.330]  I could never tell them that I'm pretty much like a Marxist or something like that.
[43:26.410 --> 43:28.410]  No, they would never accept that, yeah?
[43:28.670 --> 43:31.390]  Some people in the audience here will probably not accept that.
[43:31.570 --> 43:34.190]  But the question is, like, how...
[43:34.190 --> 43:37.770]  What is the best way to implant the virus?
[43:38.150 --> 43:52.910]  So, freedom not fear, for example, was an interesting statement that the CCC came up with, the Chaos Communication Club, a couple of years ago, that is now used by the alt-right in Germany and other cities.
[43:53.470 --> 43:56.990]  So, sometimes, slogans are not enough.
[43:57.170 --> 43:59.770]  A slogan will be abused.
[44:00.290 --> 44:05.350]  Freedom not fear is not a statement that can be put in a category.
[44:05.570 --> 44:07.850]  A right-winger can say it, a left-winger can say it.
[44:07.990 --> 44:09.370]  It's kind of meaningless.
[44:09.750 --> 44:16.890]  The question is, like, how can we instill meaningful viral communication into the world?
[44:17.230 --> 44:19.650]  So, for example, what does freedom even mean?
[44:19.990 --> 44:31.070]  So, in this room, there are probably libertarians, there are anarchists, there are Marxists, there are so many different forms of people who probably can't agree on what freedom is.
[44:31.190 --> 44:33.570]  So, for example, for me, freedom, no.
[44:33.770 --> 44:36.390]  I just, like, don't deal with this term anymore.
[44:36.390 --> 44:41.430]  It's so laden with wrongness that...
[44:41.430 --> 44:41.510]  No.
[44:41.910 --> 44:48.110]  I mean, from my personal perspective, I say that freedom, in the way that we're debating it, only exists because there is a nation-state.
[44:48.350 --> 44:52.090]  And a nation-state grants you a freedom as a citizen.
[44:52.390 --> 44:56.070]  If you're not a citizen of that state, it doesn't grant you anything.
[44:56.430 --> 45:02.530]  So, freedom is nothing that is human or existed for thousands of years.
[45:02.690 --> 45:02.770]  No.
[45:02.850 --> 45:12.390]  Freedom is something that is, as a concept came up as a concept within the concept of the nation-state that is, like, now 300 years old or something like that.
[45:12.510 --> 45:14.510]  So, what happened to solidarity?
[45:14.810 --> 45:15.470]  Like, another term.
[45:15.650 --> 45:22.370]  So, why do we have to fight with people about vaccination when the vaccination is helping us all?
[45:22.450 --> 45:27.290]  Of course, there are counter-ideologies going against the solidarity.
[45:27.550 --> 45:36.010]  And some people would even say, like, it is my solidary duty to not being vaccinated because we have to fight big pharma.
[45:36.350 --> 45:40.690]  I mean, I agree that we have to fight big pharma, but not because they make science.
[45:40.870 --> 45:44.970]  There are better reasons to fight big pharma, not because of vaccinations.
[45:46.030 --> 45:49.710]  So, what is the root cause of conspiratorial thinking?
[45:50.050 --> 45:54.210]  So, the root cause of conspiratorial thinking is that there are conspiracies.
[45:54.210 --> 45:55.970]  I'm not disagreeing with that.
[45:56.090 --> 45:59.650]  I'm not disagreeing with that there are people conspiring to do things.
[45:59.650 --> 46:01.490]  It's corruption.
[46:01.810 --> 46:06.950]  I mean, corruption is a form of conspiracy, if you want to call it.
[46:07.090 --> 46:15.410]  But it's not that strange, all-encompassing, a couple of people on the tip of the pyramid controlling everything.
[46:15.410 --> 46:17.350]  That's not how capitalism works.
[46:17.890 --> 46:20.570]  We all are biggest enemies ourselves.
[46:21.090 --> 46:26.050]  Because the very moment you believe in something like the profit motive, you are your own worst enemy.
[46:26.950 --> 46:33.010]  If I say that from my personal ideological background or from my belief system.
[46:33.590 --> 46:39.050]  In German, there is this nice term called Kapitalismuskritik, which is like the critique of capitalism.
[46:39.630 --> 46:43.970]  Or Verkürzte Kapitalismuskritik, which is like the shortened...
[46:43.970 --> 46:47.110]  It's hard to translate the shortened Kapitalismuskritik.
[46:47.310 --> 46:53.670]  Like a reduced or reductionist way of critique of capitalism.
[46:53.670 --> 46:57.190]  And that would pretty much be what my dad does.
[46:57.330 --> 46:59.370]  My dad does the easy way out.
[46:59.470 --> 47:01.030]  He says like the jews are to blame.
[47:01.310 --> 47:07.770]  We have to find a way to get rid of the jews or like deal with it or curb their power or whatever it is.
[47:08.770 --> 47:10.710]  And of course, that's not how the world works.
[47:10.870 --> 47:20.390]  He takes one aspect of the very dynamic system of capitalism and just finds a scapegoat for that.
[47:20.390 --> 47:36.210]  So he gets validated because every now and then he sees things on television or reads on his telegram f*cking fees or whatever it is that gives him like the moment of like, I was right.
[47:36.850 --> 47:37.830]  Look at that.
[47:37.970 --> 47:39.030]  There is another person.
[47:39.030 --> 47:48.030]  Yeah, it's pretty much like the more toxic version of my grandmother thinking about like, why this film is so weird with E.T.
[47:48.290 --> 47:49.710]  Ah, a jew made it.
[47:49.850 --> 47:50.890]  Something like that, yeah?
[47:51.190 --> 47:51.790]  So there's...
[47:51.790 --> 47:52.770]  People are...
[47:52.770 --> 47:54.230]  We're pattern machines.
[47:54.430 --> 47:55.550]  We're looking for patterns.
[47:56.110 --> 48:03.530]  And if you don't have the right tool set, you will find patterns where there are no patterns or you will find patterns that are completely meaningless and useless.
[48:05.590 --> 48:10.090]  So the way how we talk about fears and problems changes everything.
[48:10.330 --> 48:15.350]  So I think that is why it is on us to a certain degree because it's also...
[48:15.350 --> 48:21.270]  They are out there, all the anti-vaxxers, all the people, the old writers, they have their agenda.
[48:21.510 --> 48:23.890]  They like to talk about their stuff all the time.
[48:24.590 --> 48:26.970]  And sometimes I have the feeling like we gave up.
[48:27.110 --> 48:30.910]  We gave up on it because it's just like too much a hassle of dealing with them.
[48:30.910 --> 48:33.550]  It's just like there, it's just like, yeah, I agree.
[48:33.770 --> 48:36.410]  Sometimes it's just like not worth dealing.
[48:36.890 --> 48:42.670]  And the emotional labor that you put into that stuff is just like too much.
[48:42.990 --> 49:04.650]  But if we all go back into our own digital Biedermeier, there's this like period in Austria in the early 1800s where there was so much oppression, so much suppression of thought and free speech that led up to the revolution of 1848.
[49:04.990 --> 49:09.830]  But for like 20 or 30 years, people didn't talk about politics in Austria.
[49:10.050 --> 49:16.950]  They didn't talk about anything because they were so fearful that they might be captured or they might go to jail or something like that.
[49:16.950 --> 49:24.910]  So what happened was this Biedermeier, which is this time frame that it happened, where everyone was just like at home.
[49:25.150 --> 49:29.610]  And if there was a political debate, the political debate was at home and nowhere else.
[49:30.170 --> 49:36.050]  But we cannot kind of like succumb to come into this like new age of the digital Biedermeier.
[49:36.250 --> 49:52.770]  And the strange thing about the digital Biedermeier nowadays is that although we're all succumbing to this idea of like, we don't want to deal with it anymore, at the same time, we're dealing with it all the time, online, on Facebook, on Twitter, everywhere.
[49:52.990 --> 49:59.550]  There is so much opinion out there that we're all kind of like being washed away by opinion.
[49:59.790 --> 50:16.330]  So the question is like, how can we in this like super fragmented ocean of opinion that's still out there, that has a couple of influences shaping it, a couple of big media players shaping it?
[50:16.370 --> 50:17.910]  How can you make a change there?
[50:18.090 --> 50:19.970]  And sometimes the answer is you can't.
[50:20.110 --> 50:21.150]  It's not possible.
[50:21.590 --> 50:31.070]  But then the answer is also we're all individuals, we're all people who have our own lives, who have our own friend circles, who are going to whatever conferences that we enjoy going to.
[50:32.090 --> 50:34.530]  And you have to start at some point.
[50:34.710 --> 50:40.010]  And that's the big difference between something like micropolitics and macropolitics.
[50:40.170 --> 50:45.070]  There is no way for me to change what f*cking Trump is thinking or trying to do.
[50:45.350 --> 50:49.650]  But on a micropolitical level, there's a lot you can do.
[50:50.110 --> 51:00.070]  The micropolitics, I think, there's this idea in history that history is only changed by the big man, of course, most of the time in history, man.
[51:01.370 --> 51:02.670]  But it's actually not true.
[51:03.710 --> 51:10.630]  History is an accumulation of many, many small decisions, of many, many, many small players.
[51:10.890 --> 51:21.550]  And of course, there are a couple of people like Napoleon Bonaparte or Hitler or whoever it is, or Trump, that have a lot of weight in the history of the world.
[51:21.730 --> 51:29.990]  But sometimes that weight is only because it ends up in history books and people haven't witnessed what really happened 200 years ago or something like that.
[51:29.990 --> 51:34.230]  I mean, I'm not saying that we should distrust history books or something, not at all.
[51:34.850 --> 51:41.010]  Then you're in the same, like, you know, like, conservation camp, holocaust denial bullshit and stuff like that.
[51:41.070 --> 51:42.130]  No, no, no, I'm not talking about that.
[51:42.310 --> 51:48.530]  I'm talking about that we all have a power that we kind of forgot that we have.
[51:50.110 --> 51:53.350]  And democracy, to a certain degree, helps us forget that power.
[51:53.350 --> 51:56.830]  Because we all have a vote, but at the same time, we all feel so helpless.
[51:58.150 --> 51:59.870]  But yeah, it's kind of by design.
[52:00.010 --> 52:04.910]  Every four years, people ask you what you want to vote for, and you vote for, and then something happens.
[52:04.910 --> 52:08.350]  But most of the time, our world is not democratic.
[52:08.870 --> 52:09.950]  Art is not democratic.
[52:10.510 --> 52:12.370]  The workplace is not democratic.
[52:12.670 --> 52:15.870]  Like, hardly anything is democratic in our world.
[52:16.050 --> 52:23.150]  But we have this strange feeling of that every four years or every two years, it is important to say something.
[52:23.390 --> 52:24.830]  No, you have to say something every day.
[52:25.250 --> 52:29.450]  And I understand, as I mentioned before, there is emotional labor in that.
[52:29.450 --> 52:31.270]  And it's incredibly hard to do that.
[52:31.390 --> 52:36.350]  But there is no way we're going to change anything if we don't do it.
[52:36.470 --> 52:37.550]  So it's complicated.
[52:38.650 --> 52:43.090]  And if you fight with a jellyfish like this, it's even more complicated.
[52:43.090 --> 52:58.250]  Because how is it possible that Trump, who is like one of the most mainstream people you can imagine, suddenly, for many, many people on the globe, not only in the U.S., also in Austria and Germany and other places, is the big underdog.
[52:58.250 --> 52:59.350]  He is the underdog.
[52:59.510 --> 53:01.390]  He is the one who fights the powers.
[53:01.570 --> 53:03.290]  He is the one who can really change things.
[53:03.530 --> 53:04.950]  He is the one who fights for all of us.
[53:05.090 --> 53:05.810]  No, he doesn't.
[53:05.850 --> 53:06.610]  Of course he does not.
[53:08.110 --> 53:12.970]  So just a couple of examples that I think that are super important that we should talk about.
[53:13.210 --> 53:15.910]  But how do we do it?
[53:15.990 --> 53:17.810]  For example, talking about privacy.
[53:18.350 --> 53:20.330]  I think that privacy is an important matter.
[53:20.650 --> 53:23.150]  But privacy is also a very bourgeois fantasy.
[53:24.570 --> 53:27.630]  And it's also very Protestant in certain elements.
[53:28.150 --> 53:30.250]  And so privacy is important.
[53:30.450 --> 53:31.290]  We need privacy.
[53:31.510 --> 53:35.030]  But there are certain ways that we have to sell the concept of privacy.
[53:35.190 --> 53:41.250]  And the concept of privacy should not be sold with pretty much like a very conservative approach to it.
[53:41.250 --> 53:50.730]  And most privacy advocates out there have a strange reactionary almost way of selling why we all need privacy.
[53:51.450 --> 53:54.650]  So privacy important, yes.
[53:55.070 --> 53:59.890]  But let's try to tell people why it's really important that you have privacy.
[53:59.890 --> 54:05.050]  And not as an empty vehicle for something.
[54:05.630 --> 54:06.830]  Open culture, yeah.
[54:07.150 --> 54:07.310]  Really.
[54:07.510 --> 54:09.790]  Or are we just remixing our despair?
[54:10.050 --> 54:14.610]  So what can we really do to change something like the copyright system or whatever we call it?
[54:15.450 --> 54:19.110]  The material side of our world is extremely horrible.
[54:19.410 --> 54:27.630]  Even if we have open-source software, all the shit that we are running is somewhere like dug out in the Congo in horrific conditions.
[54:28.390 --> 54:29.910]  And so what can we do?
[54:30.050 --> 54:32.170]  Of course we have to talk about the material side of things.
[54:32.270 --> 54:36.690]  And if we talk about the material side of things, then we have to talk about capitalism and how it's working.
[54:37.350 --> 54:39.070]  There is no way besides that.
[54:39.210 --> 54:42.330]  Otherwise we are just like, you know, remixing our despair.
[54:43.170 --> 54:47.090]  And so what does it mean to be subversive in a meaningful way?
[54:47.210 --> 54:49.010]  That is pretty much like what I'm talking about.
[54:49.330 --> 54:51.890]  I don't have an answer to many things.
[54:53.030 --> 54:55.210]  There is a little exploit from 20 years ago.
[54:55.330 --> 54:55.570]  I'm not sure.
[54:55.630 --> 54:56.650]  Do we have some time left?
[54:56.650 --> 54:57.370]  Or is it...
[54:57.370 --> 54:58.250]  We are over?
[54:58.470 --> 54:59.130]  We are over.
[54:59.250 --> 54:59.390]  Okay.
[54:59.570 --> 55:00.750]  Then let's...
[55:02.870 --> 55:03.270]  So...
[55:05.150 --> 55:05.770]  Forget it.
[55:09.850 --> 55:10.250]  So...
[55:13.580 --> 55:13.980]  So...
[55:13.980 --> 55:17.220]  I'm not even sure it made sense what I told you.
[55:17.380 --> 55:20.760]  It's stuff that I'm, as I said, struggling for many, many years.
[55:21.120 --> 55:24.280]  I gave a talk that was similar to this one in 2006.
[55:24.520 --> 55:26.220]  And I'm still trying to deal with it.
[55:26.220 --> 55:32.000]  And I'm still trying to adapt my models of how to apply this to the real world.
[55:32.060 --> 55:35.860]  Of course, I do it in my art, in my performances and all that stuff.
[55:35.940 --> 55:39.740]  Of course, I try in my personal life to do that.
[55:39.940 --> 55:43.140]  I'm not sure I can give you any wisdom.
[55:43.460 --> 55:46.160]  I don't want to be Gandhi here or something like that.
[55:46.160 --> 55:54.900]  But if I helped kind of like raise up a couple of interesting questions in your mind, then I'm totally happy with that.
[55:55.180 --> 55:55.560]  Yeah.
[55:55.680 --> 55:56.880]  And that's me and the World Trade Center.
[55:57.060 --> 55:57.320]  Good night.
[55:57.320 --> 55:57.400]  Thank you very much.
[55:57.400 --> 55:57.440]  Thank you very much.
[55:57.480 --> 55:57.500]  Thank you very much.
[55:57.500 --> 55:57.580]  Thank you very much.
[55:57.580 --> 55:58.160]  Thank you very much.