re:publica is one of the largest and most exciting conferences about digital culture in the world. Since its foundation in 2007, it has grown from a cozy blogger meeting with 700 participants into a wide-ranging “society conference”, with 8.000 visitors at the anniversary edition re:publica TEN. Representatives of digital culture share their knowledge and decision-making tools, and discuss the future of the information society. Here they can mingle with activists, scientists, hackers, entrepreneurs, NGOs, journalists, social media and marketing experts, and many others. This fosters innovation and creates synergies between net politics, online marketing, network technology, digital society, and (pop) culture. What is more, around 46 percent of re:publica speakers are female – far more than at many other similar events.
https://republica17.network.podigee.io/
episode 4: The Utopian Impulse & Its Trouble With Postmodernity
One might argue that the collapse of communism is the loss of the future that really never was, but the fundamental source of fear of Utopianism is rooted in its formal necessity of Utopian closure and its origin in the idea of an idealized settlement and colonization. Can we reclaim Utopia to help us generate new ideas for how to survive and transcend postmodernism? Here's an idea: anti-anti-Utopianism.
- Céline Keller
We seem to drown in dystopias reflecting our surrender to the idea that there really is no alternative to capitalism or neoliberalism in particular. All these critical dystopias seem to extrapolate our current situation and what the persistence of this system (the economization of everything) holds in store for us in the future to come. It seems clear that if we want to escape this hopeless outcome we need new ideas for how a future globalized world might work differently. Yet, to generate those ideas using the Utopian impulse seems to be a door closed shut. So how do we get out of this dilemma? I will present to you Fredric Jameson's vision of how to burst that door wide open, with one of the oldest, archaic utopian ideas ever stated.