It was quite wonderful, but …. Here’s a short share of my experience at PublicSpaces Conference last Friday.
To dive right into it: the speakers at this conference spoke about the urgency and acuteness of various themes in Europe and the world. At the conference people could consider the function and speak about their interest in public and digital spaces. Spaces that influence our resilience as people, but also determine our economy, society and make us aware as writers of history. At this conference there were warnings aplenty!
Some speakers were quite interesting, like the people in my photos. And a lot of readings were just that: Readings of rehashed vicarious urgency. That’s just not for me. Of course I did not see everything, but most panels seemed rehersed: a bit like a presentation of four people, four perspectives, rather than problem-solving together.
Alright, then there were some themes: AI is bad mkay, big tech is evil = orange man, fediverse is the answer to everything…. All themes apply to wealthy economies in Europe.
Fortunately some nice exception spoke about wonderful empathic research!
More nuance perhaps: AI is ruining everything fact based, but is wonderful inspiration. We made ourselves very dependent on tech-organisations, that grew because of it, and are now carry the ‘baddy’ name: big tech.
So, there’s an interesting helplessness dynamic there, by wealthy, healthy people with choices, being frozen in their own crippling abundance. Like we’re being held hostage by our supermarkets, only it’s more important, because rather than money, we gave them ourselves, our data, our capacity to choose (odd situation).
And the solution? Complaining, restating the problem and demanding and making plans to move house to the next self made supermarket, with more rules to never capture our freedom, knowledge and democracy.
Trading urgency with overregulated and boringly bad facsimile of an old meme. It’s just unimaginative. My doctor gave me an advice when I said: “it hurts when I do this” … his advice: “stop doing that”. I feel like this needs to happen.
My take? Stop remaking the past with more rules, start building the future, so we can free ourselves from the digital shackles that are kind of long in the tooth anyway.
Need to support newly forming democracies? Stop remaking twitter, or instagram, start making something that serves the purpose, or better yet: give those communities more choice, because they will find the tools, regardless of our efforts. Same goes for our first-world problems.
The main thing that struck me was: loads of people making stuff for others. In my time we just made stuff for ourselves. People can still do that! And if they cannot: give them the capacity to make their own, rather than holding fast of the old designer as a deity paradigm.
Empower people to choose by empowering people to MAKE.