Hello Hello. Hello So what? It only took me 800 years to get to the stage. Wait, let me see how I can put my crotches here. Hi, and welcome to the second day of Republika. I'm extremely happy to be here yesterday. Today me What an upgrade. So first of all , just a joke. Just a joke. I love nails. He did a tremendous job yesterday. I followed it live from my bed where I could put up my leg. So let me do a little housekeeping and. And afterwards, I can lead you through the program. We shared our days yesterday and yields today.
Me an and tomorrow needs my might have to take over when an if my leg doesn't want to. So a little housekeeping thing now the live translation is being announced if you're hearing me, you've already found it designated spots. I actually don't know where the designated spots are, but I hope that you can find them. So. So I'm doing it like in an aeroplane. Yeah. Somewhere over there. Okay. It looks like we found it so now there's several spots where you can get headphones. So at some of the partners stands at the makerspace. But also at the home base. So let me see what happens at the new places. Arena Hall Main Stage. Stage two Expo Area Stage two Maker space and home space. The Badeschiff. There's the kids place where kids can hang out. There's the meet up spot and the free program. And in front of that, the food court, which is very important, Glass house contains stage three and workshops.
Marina has art installations. There are niche perspectives on the Republica. 23 topics. This is a space where we and the co-creators have created the program Festsaal Kreuzberg and Beer Garden. Also important, there's stage five, Stage six workshops meetup and on Wednesday is today. Wednesday No, it isn't. Tomorrow is Wednesday and tomorrow on Wednesday there is the Tenkan and then there's stages at the Trudell Hall and the Over Hafen Cantina. So let me see what's important. Every day we de questions of the day that are presented in the brakes on stage and you can participate by QR code.
We didn't have a lot of participation yesterday and I placed a bet that today there will be more people. So a handful will be enough. It wasn't many for me to win this bet, so but I can need everyone right now. All right. I am. Be aware of each other. There's awareness teams who are wearing vests and you can also mail and contact them by telephone and. And anything else can be found in the app. There's a really cool program today. We have the bingo session and it dalhalla at 8:00. The performance pop. There's also a chat to prompt battle.
That sounds interesting on stage three and my personal highlight the wedding performance in the bar at 730. So again, welcome to Republica. I'm Anna Alchemy and I'm extremely happy to be here. I'm happy. I'm a little fit and I'm looking forward to our next speaker. Just a short anecdote. I broke my ankle. I'll talk about that a lot. And I was in the hospital and I got to know a doctor. And before she came to me, I overheard a concert session between two colleagues. And it was a little racist. And And I felt sorry because I didn't know it was about the doctor.
But when the doctor approached me, I recognised that it was about her and I put on my little whistleblower hat and I tattled on her colleagues to her because I would have liked to have known what my colleagues talk about me when I'm not there. If it's racist and the doctor kind of put it off and said, well, I've heard a lot of that. I'm sorry, but thank you for telling me. And later, before the operation, the doctor put me pulled me aside and thanked me again. And we talked a little bit of about everyday racism and she told me, you know what I always do? I always give people the book by Chipoka ojete, except racism. And then I said that I'll soon see Tupac on stage and.
And if you don't know who she is, I've got a few key facts for you about Tupac to poker is an anti-racism trainer , author, podcaster and speaker. Her first book, I just. I just meant and is a Spiegel best seller. So it's a very good gift . But Tupac also does a podcast that I really love. It's called to Pod Cast. And it's not just a good wordplay, it's also a safe space for black women to talk to another.
And come together. She's not an unknown person On Republica 22, we had a VR installation based on Tupac's book and her vision of Happy Land. So I'm happy. We're happy that she'll be talking to us. She'll be giving a presentation, and after that we will have a short interview with her here on stage. So welcome to Puka OJ. Thank. Thank you so much, Anna. I'm looking forward to our conversation on Canva. Can we dream a little bit? Epoch Dear Bipoc Siblings Imagine that tomorrow we would wake up in a world free of racism. What would be the first thing that you would do? Or you would stop doing? Please write your visions in the comments by your house in the East. Go to the supermarket or other stores in sweatpants and without an idea, walk through, go out again, relaxed without having bought anything.
Just be giving 100% instead of 200. And still be evaluated fairly. Laugh as loud as I want . I think I could breathe for the first time without being angry. I would feel enough and not always have the feeling of having to do more, having to fight and prove myself again, having to defend my existence again. I could just finally be and then go out and enjoy this existence without being stared at, asked hurtful questions, persons without being categorised and without headaches and without fear. This is an Instagram post on my platform that I shared almost three years ago, and some of and received about 200 responses. That is how I started every almost every keynotes in the past two years with a dream, with the desire to dream, with a message to the Bipoc listeners. Today I'm Typekit since ten years I've been a communicator for racism, critique, workshop leader, podcast and author.
Ten Years of Racism critique That means more than a thousand events. Thank thousands of people and even more stories. Hundreds of. Conversations interview marathon podcasts, bestsellers, award awards, a Grammy nomination, but also hate mail. Click Picks, Panic attacks, A loss of balance and shingles. It means Germany, Switzer Island, Austria, the United Nations, the Foreign Office and Oxford University. It means small, dedicated charities and parties, state theatres, art galleries, film academies and television stations. It means schools, day-care centres and universities, telecom, Rothman, Netflix. Disney. Google. Spotify So, dear audience, I admit I'm tired. I'm tired and exhausted as I stand here.
Before you. But people aren't. Institutions actually invite me to give them confidence to motive. Hate them for the fight for a society critical of racism. Not for nothing. It's actually almost every question I get at the end of an interview or at the at readings or lectures like this. Miss OJ, do you have hope? It sounds like an open ended question, but it's more of a plea now.
At the end of the interview of the lecture on this heavy and hopeless topic of racism that you've just given, Can you leave us with hope? Ms. OJ, Will you? But I'm tired, my dear friend, the journalist and author, bestselling author Alice Hastings here at The Republica last year gave a lecture called The Revolution of Exhaustion in view of the world situation, Alice has writes, It's becoming increasingly clear that society cannot avoid radical change. We urgently need a revolution. The only problem is no one has the energy for that. Perhaps it's time for a change of perspective .
What if the revolution in is not in activation but in exhaust an Oh, Alice, I can only relate to your words, especially now for three years after a black man was murdered in front of the eyes of the world by a police officer for racist reasons. Three years after, for many white people realised for the first time that racism is an actual issue after the black tile post, after the many big corporate actions suddenly jumped at the topic of racism. And after I and many of my colleagues had mailboxes filled to the brim. A time when even we had no space, not a single second for our own grief. No time to catch a breath. Although all we wanted was to do just that. Just breathe where we had to explain racism 24 hours a day, seven days a week, where every door that was cracked was used to place the issue where we networked, light argued, and yet held on so tightly, where we wrote what we could explain and discussed, where we opened our hearts, presented our scars to a public, made ourselves vulnerable and risked and received new wounds to accompany , explain, convince and motivate where we ignored any pleading of our exhaust bodies and permanently went beyond our own resources because we knew that the doors that opened would close again, that black tiles and professions of solidarity on Instagram would disappear.
The hopeful is everything different now to Odette will become a racism still, isn't it about time we got over the issue? So we knew that the media spotlight would just move on. Many white people would become tired, retreat into the city of collective oblivion, or even even join the backlash. That's very alluring. The one that promises healing in the eternal past. In the way of everything used to be better, and many while many white people were closed, their privileged eyes again. Black people would continue to die because of racism. So I ask you, how could I not be tired and how could I? Could we not go on anyway? Because I am not only tired, I am also angry.
This is a very strange reality. But this is this anger that drives me to nevertheless stand here today and speak to you. It is a transformative anger. It is an activating one. It is an arranged, angry love. And as long as it burns within me, I will continue to make an was like manner. The following plea . This example that rage is what invites you. What invites you to start with me? With a farewell. A farewell from Happy Land. But before we do this, let's breathe in and breathe out together. Happy land. That is happy land. That's an analogy that I coined in my first book, Exit Racism. And I'm happy that this term and the concept it describes have has made it to the theatre stages. University curricula, schools and demonstration posters.
In Happy Land is where most of us live. And that's because we were born and based on it and Happy Land, we have learned that racism is bad and evil. We also believe that racism is where we are, not in the right corner to where the right wing German party, AfD, is , where the right wing radicals are, where the racist neighbours with the others. And it is discussed in a highly moral way . This racism we have learned anyone who says or does something racist is a bad person . On the other hand, whoever does not mean it in that way. So whoever can show that his own intention was a morally good one cannot be racist At Neverland, because we in Happy Land believe in racism. That is intention, situation and morality. So in this logic, only morally evil people could be racist. Conversely, this means if we reject racism, if we condemn racism, we must be good. And above all, we cannot be racist in happy land. It is clear racism that's the others Happy land is cosy and comfortable.
And yet and perhaps precisely because of this, we have to leave Happy Land. Or at least at the very least, understand it. At first, this parting is necessary because life in happy land leads us to not see the forest for the trees. Happy land paints a picture of racism that is incomplete. Yes there are racists, people who believe in spread right wing populist theories. This is scary and it is a big problem in Germany. But it is only the cruel tip of the iceberg. In short, my address and my offer to talk is directed at people who find racism bad and reject it. I assume, like almost like everyone here in this room with out any exception . But you also like me, were born into a world in which the racist imbalance has been in the bones of the systems for centuries and in which we all, whether we like it or not, have inhaled it. And continue to inhale it. God wants me to. The poets Goodwood's conquerors. It's like being born into air. You pick it up as soon as you breathe. It is not a colt you can recover from.
There is no anti racism certification. It is a collection of socio socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are launched every time we interact with the world . Because the racism I want to talk about is the one that sits inside all of us and the one that comes along with the smile , but can still be as powerful as a punch in the stomach. It is a racism that denies people access or resources. The one that can be found in children's books and textbooks in the way we speak and think it is in the books. We read, the media we consume the jokes we make, the way we're taught to think about ourselves and the presumably so people that are so different and is accordingly found in the systems that we create.
And this racist is harder to decode, harder to understand, to comprehend, to recognise, especially if you are not negatively affected by racism and believe me, most people who still linger in the cosy happy land do not want to hear this. Not only do they not want to hear this, they often get angry and aggressive with one glance at the corresponding comment columns on the internet makes this clear. Their relative eyes, emotional eyes and turn victims into perpetrators. Happyland must be protected and this with almost all means sometimes means white fragility.
Is this is the name of this border police that happy land needs to remain intact. That prevents feedback on racist behaviour from being reinterpreted as an attack where it is not possible to really think about racist structures and racist socialisations because on the inside the same record plays over and over again . And I'm not a racist. Never Not me. I'm not a racist. Never. It is this defence that ensures, again and again that discussions on the subject of racism are always hung up on whether something may be called racism. This leads to the actually nice teacher from Wuppertal writing nasty, threatening letters to me, the CEO of the big company assuring me several times that he had a black girlfriend, that the employee at the Caritas runs out crying, runs crying out of the workshop because she actually wants to help refugees after all, the defence that seems to challenge the absolute individual self image to the utmost.
Because what seems to be at stake is a question of profound moral consequence. Am I a bad or a good person? Therefore. At the first glance out of Happyland, the following realisation awaits us. There is an important difference between being a racist and being racially socialised. Racists are those in the right corner, but every one of us is racially socialised. But yes, I know it is not easy to understand the centuries long racist history of a system that is active in every corner of our society that does not even stop at the youngest members of our society. And even righteous, particularly strongly in areas that we consider order to be protected, areas such as the kindergarten and schools. Also because the understanding that this cruel, degrading and dehumanising system does not even stop at our living rooms, our relationships, our families . And because this understood ending this realisation, this awareness can be devastating at first, white fragility, white fragility wants to protect against this from the realisation of one's own privilege, from being maybe even jointly responsible for a system that oppresses and hurts us.
My fellow human beings, sometimes even my loved ones around me. And you know, I can even understand the white fragility as a reaction. I too have had fragile reactions in situations where my own social privileges in another areas have been pointed out to me. I know the feeling, but the effect of white fragility is a stalemate in the discussion. A perishing of the discourse. I brought an anecdote with me today. My man and I have a patchwork family of three sons.
There are 37, 25 and 12. A lot of anecdotes are happening in anecdotes also like this. So imagine a big city in Germany and in this city there is a school and it's a neighbourhood that's like a hipster fertile where everyone thinks they're cool. Everyone speaks English, even those that can't. And this school is called himself called itself liberal, open, tolerant, all of that. So my first grader at the time does something with another pupil at the time and the guy comes to him and says to him that what you do in there that you can't do that because you're African and Africans are stupid.
And I learned about this from my son and not from the teacher that stood next to it. And because it was important to me and my husband that this can't stand like this, it should be said that Africans aren't stupid and just be like not fighting or scratching or in the school. We should also not be racist and I called the teacher and she said, I don't know. I can't I don't know how this works. But I said, okay, but it's important that the parents of the other kids can't talk about it with their kids. And they said, I don't know. I can't I don't know how to do this.
So we agreed that she invites us with the other parents and us and just sits there and doesn't do anything. And as you can imagine, this is not a very good starting condition for any discussion about racism. So I gave in the beginning a monologue which felt like an hour, but realistic was a minute where I said, I don't think anyone here had bad intentions. I'm sure everyone here is a good person. I don't think anyone here calls himself a racist. And the woman became more and more red while I was speaking. So the mother of the other kid started and said and wants to say in the beginning that her husband is at the moment in Africa and climbing a mountain.
It's interesting information, but of course it's not really a lot to do with the discussion. The reason we were there and she continued, Yeah, we were in Africa a lot. It's a beautiful country and it became more and more absurd at some point, she said to me, Her kid doesn't see any skin colour. She could have said to everyone, even blonde, even white, and then often have an out of body experience that exactly like my book. But I'm completely be knocked out. And in these situations, I'm not as chill as I'm now here. But in this situation, I'm a mother and it's about my baby. And at the end, she she took her last punch , which I also Googled you. You're a very aggressive person.
And then I started crying and she came to me. Touching my back and she said also to me, very bad things happen, but I'm not doing anything about this. Just be proud about the African ancestry, whiteness of goes hand in hand with the notion of having even a neutral, rational perspective on racism. How often am I and people like me told we are too emotional, concerned being the subject of racism too affected, too sensitive? I think it is a central lie inherent in the definition of whiteness to believe that you are looking at things in the context of racism from the outside prudent, pragmatic diabetes is the case, I think, between us.
I hardly know any more emotional spaces than those in which we accompany our people to move out of Happy Land because of white fragility is closely linked to feelings. The vehemence with which people become defensive when racism is made an issue is clearly related to emotion driven impulses. Feelings are political and not neutral. White fragility is like a bit like emotions on steroids because they come in a combination of interpretive serenity, and this has consequences for Bipoc the white anti-racism research researcher Robin D'Angelo says white fragility is like white racial bullying. We in this case white people, make it so hard for people of colour to talk to us, white people about racism that they rarely do it. We need to understand that most people of colour who live and work a majority white environments take home far more daily rejections, hurt in insults than they bother to talk about because their experience is double risk. More punishment. They will put the relations at risk.
They experience will be talked down. And the way and then they recourse. And the other person a feel of being of being attacked and hurt. And that's how white fragility works as something like a daily weight, racial control and in almost every situation where I or my children experience racism, I experience a kind of internal freezing. I start to think for hours about for sometimes even days and weeks, about strategies, how I can address the issue, how I can confront the person, when is the right moment, what tone of voice do I choose? What words do I take my mother that is white with me or not? Do we? As a pair, my husband and I? Or does that seem too confrontational? Does he speak first or do I? My fear does not only refer to the immediate reaction to the Relativising, the emotional izing, the getting angry, or even the so called white years.
My concern relates to the fact that which I made over and over and over again that white fragility can have serious after effects and I am not alone in this. So so many black people, people of colour, tell us in workshops about similar fears and concerns, not in frequently. It leads us to not name racism anymore. I'm fortunate enough to be able to tell my stories, share my stories on a public platform, and it's only one of many. We but I am sure that the entire stories of the black people, the people of colours, indigenous, indigenous, indigenous people, as well as the parents of black children in the room, could fill entire volumes of books and the tragic thing for me about these stories is not even the experienced racism.
Even if that might sound weird. Now, I. I have as if most people, black people that I know have come to terms with the fact that racism is part of my everyday experience and that of my children and that of my black siblings. I don't expect to not happen. I know if I send my children out into this world, they will experience racism. The thing that often makes the experience of racism unbearable and also triggers such powerlessness in me is white fragility. But that there is a way out of this endless loop of being hurt, not being able to name, react defensively, punching, punishing the other person for showing being hurt. And it's called learning to think and learn. Learning to live critically about racism. Blick in Die so an step can be to get to know and understand othering. We need to understand how deeply racism is rooted in our everyday lives. We should search for the degrading, demonising and dehumanising picture of by POC in all areas of society. We in philosophy, biology, ag and in the health system, in advertising, in school textbooks and children's books to develop an analysing gaze critical of racism with which we can re-examine in texts and images and learn to understand how strongly we feel shaped by them and continue to be shaped by them every day.
And accept can be to get to know and understand the othering othering that means making another person the other. It's a racist practice that. Gives people a very powerful norm stereotype and on the other hand, we have the visible demonised, stereotyped others. A classic example from our workshops is when an educator asks a kid to use the skin coloured pen or the almost obsessively asked question about the roots, to just name two examples. What we can do is to look at our language and not in an offended way to search for what we're still allowed to say. But on the question what do we want to say? And above all, for what? We can take responsibility for so that we can understand better how how the linguistic dualism that began at the time of the enlightened and that keeps people in prisoned up to the present day in a linguistic position of the civilised on the one hand, and the uncivil alized on the other.
The modern and the obsolete, the society and the tribe, the mayor and the chief. I've got another anecdote for you. A few years ago, my husband and I were invited to the wedding of my younger brother in South Tanzania and when I told people about it here, they were absurd questions like How many women did he marry? What tribe rituals did you have? And I was just thinking about this wedding. It was in a big city in Tanzania. It was five days, 800 guests. There was a fantastic buffet. There were DJs and DJs. And the biggest stress my husband I experienced is that we felt underdressed. There was a reporter team that life streamed to the different location. There were drones that filmed the whole affair and then I think of the wedding of my white German cousin in Bielefeld. There was a log and a saw, and then people started fidgeting with the log and the saw and while I experienced in Bielefeld is more of a tribe ritual than anything I experienced in Tanzania. ABBA But we all know. The context. It's there that certain terms belong in certain circumstance as we need to know what what our own designations are and designations from others.
That language shapes reality. Language has power. And what we can do is understand how powerful whiteness is as an invisible force. That's omnipresent and that the invisibility of whiteness and they're not having to name and not having to perceive whiteness. And it is in itself a privilege. And what we can do is learn that the flip side of privilege is my micro and macro aggression. What we can do is dare to question seemingly innocuous and often cherished, cherished traditions A word on a subject of uncertainty. It may be disappointing to you because you expected clear recipes and instructions like just like the man in one of our workshops who angrily said, I now want a list of all the terms that are allowed to be set, and that should then be valid for 100 years.
I understand him. I understand what he needs as it's part of a great uncertainty around the topic of political correctness and criticism of discrimination. People want clarity and ambiguity, but we have to accept that there aren't any simple answers to complex questions. Us But maybe we can do more than bitterly surrender to it. Maybe we will manage to actively develop a joy and even motivation to work on these complex questions and answers as we have to start talking to your partner, your supervisor, the teaching staff at your child's school, The Godfather. Learn to talk about racism, exercised their racism. Critical conversation. Muscle. Yeah, maybe. Perhaps it's often awkward, insecure, but it's courageous. And yes, it's an emotional topic for all of us. But for some it's exciting, and for others it's just survival and not volunteer free black people and people of colour and indigenous people are grappling with this because we have to. We black people and people of colour. We can and we have and we will continue to fight racism to write against it, to work against it, to dance, sing, explain, discuss.
Ally engage scientifically. We give workshops, take legal action. But we will also stay silent. We will pick our battles. We'll be afraid in Sicure feel powerless , get angry and seek places of healing to empower ourselves and our children. We do this because we do not have a choice on whether to confront racism or not. Because as we're born into a world that doesn't give us a choice, that never gave us a choice. Hoffnung Do you have hope? Ms. OJ and George Floyd, after the murder of Black Floyd, has racism become better? Did something change? Miss Odette I don't answer these questions anymore because honestly, it's too much to ask to ask black people to explain racism, to take white people's hand and guide them through the current debate. And to have to negotiate your own humanity over and over again. But in the end, to send out these people with a good feeling, to give them hope, to have them look positively into the future. So today I would like to turn this whole thing around and give it back to you. Dear white people in the room, What has changed about racism since the murder of Black Floyd? What have you learned? What have you? What have you forgotten? What have you? Which conversations have you had and what patterns of thinking have you disconnected and what have you done in your everyday lives to reduce racism.
And a few? For a few years ago I thought naively. I see that it's enough to understand happy land, to understand that you can't go back, can't fall back into the collective silence and ignoring I was wrong. So wrong. You have to do it all over again and again because the biggest privilege that white people and I call you allies. Hopefully is the choice to confront racism, the choice to get up in the morning and not have to think about racism.
The choice after being officially engaged and showing face against racism to take time off to rest, to not have to get ready for the day, to not have to put on an invisible armour that many of us wear. And at the same time, you have a golden key in your hand. It is you who you can who can help deconstruct racism. Because racism is a white invention, not from you personally. I'm highly aware of that. But just as we were born into a world that made us victims of racism, you were born into a world where racism as a structure benefits you.
And this is where response ability is also in your hands. Because Michigan and I don't mean in shouting along and being anti racist at protests. I mean the responsibility to have an honest, self reflective, self-critical discussion of racism, racism is an individual ideological, institutional, structural and internalised system. And you have to get to know it as such. So it's a conscious choice. And at the same time a responsibility that I would like to make my final appeal about here today may this choice be allies in the fight against racism. I'm just ask you . Also used it today, tomorrow, this week, this year, and the year after, again and again. Because you're also our parents . You're our friends, our partners, our colleagues and supervisors as And your the ones we trust our children with with. Please make this choice because you feel responsible and take that responsibility seriously. Make the choice because you know that that hold them construct of racism also constricts you.
It's like Martin Luther King Jr already said in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm having a moment. This is an applause. This is your applause . Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. To and us. Will take a moment to head over to the is. I'll take the chair. That is nearest. So yeah, I still haven't figured out to do that elegantly. So thank you so much for your fascinating presentation. It's not it doesn't matter that you took a little more time, so we been back to back all of this time. Really creepy. So So Tupac, the anecdote that I told in the beginning from the doctor, Do you hear something often? Because I know you. I admire you. I love your work, but that your impact is so big, I often I tend to forget that. And it also made a connection between me and the doctor. I felt a connection from the hospital.
So I conscious of the fact that you have this kind of impact. Are you told stories like that? Oh yeah. Many people write me stories like this and I'm really touched by that. But and there's also many things I don't know. I really don't know. It's a difficult question, but I'm really, really happy and grateful about those seemingly small anecdotes that really touched me recently in Leipzig. A little black girl.
Leipzig is my home city, sat in the first row and told me that she read my book and now wants to fight against racism. And this really touches my core. So I asked myself, what is the biggest misunderstanding about racism? You you already mentioned it in your presentation that we think that racism is only the bad thing. Well, yeah, that's the biggest issue. The morality and the differentiation between being a racist and being socialist lies in racism and this whole debate of am I a good person or a bad person? And people will just block out anything thing when you say this was racist and they only hear you're a bad person, and then we have this whole debate and we only talk about that and not about what actually happened. So actually, it's so easy. Right, when someone steps on your toe.
Sorry, I don't want to hurt any feelings here. The normal reaction would be to say sorry. I'm sorry, Anna. I'm sorry that happened. I would apologise and try not to do it again. But with racism, it's like, Oh, sorry. Well you and your foot, you know, my foot is hurting too. And you were standing in a bad place, so you just mentioned in your presentation the Arab culture and being courageous. I understand what you mean, but. But how can that look practically in everyday life as a person affected by racism, but also as a person who might say race biased things without wanting to? How can we establish a culture of caring without hurting feelings and with having the best learning effect possible? Yeah it's difficult also for me in everyday life, but I think it's important to just breathe whenever racism is raised as a topic and not become defensive as a white person, or maybe sleep on it, breathe with, try to understand and what was meant by the feedback and think of the fact that people affected by racism have a really difficult time raising awareness of the issue.
And we almost never do it. We only do it if it's the last resort and so it's really important to develop a kind of respect for the fact that the person spoke out. So except that as a token of trust , it's difficult for me and many of my colleagues. It's a learning process. And for people affected by racism, I have to say, you'll be okay at the end of the evening. That's the most important thing. And any strategy is valid. So maybe that's a personal question. I often ask myself this question about you and friends and colleagues who do that every day to do this, this awareness work . Professionally, it's sounds like it's a very annoying hobby . So if you do that professionally, I imagine well, I, I never have a day off from racism. And you do it professionally. It affects your whole life. So I'm not I don't want to ask you, how do you relax, but how do you relax? Yeah, I'm tired.
I've said that at the beginning. It helps me that I work together with my husband and we have ways of decompressing. It can be writing, dance ING, punching a bag, playing tennis, hugging a tree. I recently hugged a tree. It was awesome. Just whatever works. So the older I get, I realise that I have less and less energy and that the approach I wish for myself and for everyone else to work from a place of love. I often have two deep, very dig very deep for that. And I have to make more breaks and longer breaks. For example, my podcast was You've also had an appearance.
You should absolutely listen to my podcast with Anna Rasheema Those are healing moments where we exchange with a glass of wine together. Yeah, You mentioned love. You didn't only say it in your presentation, but also in an interview that you have rediscovered Rage. I would like to hear about this journey. Me and the transfer Formative Power of Rage. What can rage do? What love can't do? I think love and rage can coexist very well. For a long time I learned to repress rage, especially as a black person. Even if I'm not even angry, I'm angry black woman.
And to repress that never to be angry, never feel rage and present well, I take the other person into account and I have the feeling that this rage eats you up from within. It's like a cancer. A cancer. And I always think of Maya Angelou, who says, Be angry, but don't be bitter. So I don't want to be bitter. So I have to let out the rage somehow. So it's not always with a punch being back.
But you can also write, write, speak, dance , give speeches and this rage can be something very positive. Rage has always been a motor of societal transformation. I mean, we can't exist without rage. Yeah I've got another nice question or topic in the video of you from Germania. I recommend you all this format. I know very well just because I stalked you to death, I can recommend you this video where you speak about that. You and your husband created a space for your children where they can be creative after school. They can do pottery, paint, pictures and the concept of safe spaces is often misunderstood. Recently see the association in poker that that is engaged for black and bipoc children to go out into nature and it was really, really wrongly constructed on social media in a clickbaity way .
And the association was met with a and people didn't want to understand why we have to have safe spaces. And it was a total, a totally flipped racism. Um, well, there are so many safer spaces for white people that are just not called that way. There system of white privilege has made so many safe spaces for white people where they can be themselves and I think if we have a fitness studio for women, for example, a gym for women, it's actually socially accepted . And this is just what it is. We want a space for a moment where we can just chill and where certain violations and experiences don't happen or happen less.
Of course, they also can happen in those spaces and we also have to negotiate things, but we can just exhale for a moment because sometimes we just need a break. It's for black people and not against white people. So looking at the time, I'm afraid that I have to close our discussion on to poker. Thank you so much for your conversation and for your presentation for all of you to Poker has brought to book with you. It is available at the book Stand and she will also be signing copies of her book at the book stand. So please reserve a copy for me because I won't be able to get to the book stand that quickly. But you can and we will continue after a short break with Constanza Kurtz . I'm really looking forward. And now let's hobble off the stage in opposite direction. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'll manage. Now Hello And welcome to the stage. Hello and welcome back on stage. One I'm still well. Let's go.
So I'm very happy to invite Constance Coates up on stage here. She's a representative of the chaos Computer Club. She shares a background in computer science, and she writes a lot about surveillance. It She's a fellow at the Society for Computer Science, and she's going to take a look back on ten years of Snowden. All of the surveillance going on.
And then she's going to talk about like what happened up until today. And the current developments in the surveillance space. So I'm very happy that she's here. And welcome, Constance Kurtz. So I'm going to make some room. Yeah, Hello. Good All right. Hello. Welcome everybody. Dear friends of surveillance Secret Services , ten years that have been it's been quite a long time since the first Snowden papers have been published. And I'm going to try to give you a you know, a brief overview. And we cannot do a complete chronology because there's not so much time.
But I'm going to talk about the points that I think are important. And so we're going to, you know, going to see what still relevant today, technological mass surveillance is done by secret services. So it's pretty clear that the Snowden River revelations have been this major turning point in how secret services are being discussed. So, for example, in Germany, we had this parliamentary investigation into the surveillance that was going on. But yeah, when we go, you know, when I'm going to give a summary at the end, we're going to see, well, there haven't been like it's there hasn't been like a 180 turn right when it comes to mass surveillance, that's done technologically, but yeah, I want to talk about the scope for me, even though I you know, wrote about this topic for 3 or 4 years, some of the details and the prioritisations of these public actions, I didn't have them.
You know, in the back of my mind. And so I'm going to want to give you a brief recap. And so I have this German term. AUSMUS scope in the title of my talk because I want to, you know, want to try to measure, like the technical and. What sort of technical papers and the content of these papers, you know, what's published and what we know about that today. And so I have this, you know, very well known quote back then, the German minister of the interior said the following that that the technological surveillance measures, if the revelations were true, would. He would have to call that that the it's without constraint. And so even though he's conservative, he he made this statement and so I think, you know, there was just this feeling of, well, they just surveilled everything. And so even like technically skilled people didn't like really look into what exactly what measures exactly were, you know, going on, on a technological level.
And so we have this conglomerate of five states the so called five eyes. And so now when we look back ten years later, we can, you know, try to project like what happened in the last decade and where are these secret services are today. They and what they are capable of today. And so here's a slide from a American NGO and, you know, here you can see like a summary of all the programs that were being made public in the Snowden revelations. And I really liked this for multiple reasons because it's, you know, sorted. You can see a bulk on the x axis is.
And then. We have . Foreigners because, you know, this was made in the US and then targeted. So how targeted were these measures? And back then there were these measures called prison and upstream and we saw that like how, how far the secret services collaborated with tech companies, us and there were some consequences. So I would say the big tech companies, as you know, they the CEO of Microsoft back then called the Secret Services a persistent threat. And I don't think those declarations would be made in the same way today. And so because of these publications actions, one of the consequences is that these tech companies that were publicly named in these revelations, they they changed their whole approach to security.
They they did encryption and they changed the way they look at outside attackers. And they see this really as a persistent threat that's still ongoing. And yeah, a lot of these in the upper part, it's massive alliance. Right. But but sometimes it's about the surveillance of you as nationals was talked about a lot in the US press but there was also global surveillance. And so I'm just going to talk about some of these programs because they were very impactful or because they were, especially in a technical way or because trials and legal consequences. Were going on and so Tempora is very interesting to me. This was a fibre surveillance measure also in Germany. And so this map is a little bit older. So this is from around 2013. So the topology of fibre today looks a little different, but really.
If we go back more than 100 years, you can see this is from around 1900 turn of the century. And so you can see why the British see GCHQ has been chosen as the sort of like fibre cable data collection agency because of the telegraph. Back then it was all you know, Britain was central to this whole network. And so. Modern fibre cable systems still follow these old routes. And so there are some estimates that 80 or 85% of the European continental traffic are routed through these undersea fibre cables that belong to the British Isles. And so this source has been used in excessively and I think the technical community didn't expect this. So this was a full take, like the complete traffic in all of these fibre cables. Is was as they try to filter it, they they threw away what they couldn't analyse and kept what, you know, could be interesting to the secret services later on .
And so this was a large scale operation that I don't think anyone expected on this scale. And so this was part of the biggest trial. In front of the European courts for Human Rights . And so, yeah, I want to you know, make clear what we're talking about here. We're talking about 50 billion points of metadata per day. And so, you know, probably this has grown since then. This was the data from 2012. So. 1.5 trillion each month. Or 18 trillion per year. And so these metadata, according to the British, you know, the British law, there were no protection for metadata back then. And so there are a few things about the Snowden revelations that haven't been like talked about in the public debate, even though I think you know, the sort of the crown jewels from the Snowden debate priority framework, the list, the global lender and the Internet and the interception and the espionage, that's done for Deutschland is as cyber espionage export as one had for land.
The priority pioneered or upward. This is the cornubian. These are it has the Blick, then the Snowden papers were the program, the and so all internal technician Deanston the and then control parlamentarischen control came van and often vertically between the two the black budget and the Gibson Aufarbeitung the black budget is quasi thus milliard dieser dienst and the Washington Post had some analysts and these and had nicht von Dieser Zwei and 50 million Bundeswehr had to gain and deutlich das the from Dayton is to how does it tracks partner is the dieser Dienst Sharon and battalion it has the um the technician dienst in an adviser It so it was it was not publicly known before that. They basically built up the whole industry of third party contractors around the security agencies and Snowden didn't work at the NSA directly, but rather at a third party contractor.
So this shows how this was built up and these agencies have got bigger and bigger and they were built up by this slush fund for the for these agencies. And we should really take note of just the leak in which these agencies play much bigger than all of the other Democratic states in the world, much, much bigger, more basically the same level that they put into their military funding. So so much, much bigger than other countries in the in the first world. So it should be noted that obviously the whole operation is technically very involved and I want to come back to that Viacom later.
There's also a belgacom hack. There's those are classical all security operations is thinking about how can I get a backdoor in? How can I weaken the technical security ? There was shot giant it it was an operation where they for many years were hanging out on on Huawei and spying on the whole organisation and there's the there was a one publication that changed the whole crypto world, i.e. the design of cryptographic algorithms. The question whether any of the algorithms that we currently use on our phones for example, if they can be undermined and the question is answered clearly with yes and it could be shown the crypto community that now sits in the standardisation bodies, for example, for the nest and they're thinking about future proof algorithms. They're not in a very nicely playing mode. They're basically made sure that even the, the submissions that are coming out of these espionage agencies have to follow the same purview and the same standard of transparency. And yeah, just to make sure that this backbone of our encryption is safe. Okay. I want to just put out one sentence for this.
This is a price list. As you can as you may know from Zerodium, it's one of these bigger resellers of technical weaknesses or vulnerabilities. They buy vulnerabilities at. And you can see here the prices that they put out into the Internet themselves. And you can see the systems that are currently expensive. So the most expensive are still Apple iOS and Android. Obviously of course, on the European market, the preferences are a little bit different than in the US, but these two are the main OSes in the US and the European market are also the most well paid. But there are also others like like Windows obviously very popular, but there are very high monetary incentives that are being put out for vulnerabilities. And this is the whole ecosystem around the agencies that are yeah, being goaded into supply, buying them. And one of the more positive changes brought about by the Snowden revelations, there are more you know, trials in court about this.
There are, yeah, more doubts are being sown and there is a whole scene of people, both European and international, partially academic researchers, that look at these vulnerable parties and malware and create demands mostly regulated free that hope to rein in this situation. We have our own demands, obviously , but I want to say something about the Belgacom hack now. It's one of the most offensive of hacking operations that they did. And quite honestly, be impressive of hacks. Impressive in the sense that if you look at the technological approach, you can be impressed that quite rightfully and they did that on a very large scale and they did it for a very long time and they weren't detected.
And they the victims were the EU. Some bodies , their embassies in Belgium and so on. Very many ISPs that Belgacom has a contractual relationship with, especially towards the Asian continents. And there are Belgacom is in in the last third of the Snowden publication where there was not as much public interest anymore. But it's a very central hack, to be honest, especially in the European theatre.
It affected basically all of the decision making bodies in the Europe, in Europe. And now that I'm already in Europe, let me mention the Yeah, it was very painful for the Germans to see that their own head of state was being hacked and nothing happened after that. I don't know if you remember, but there was a discussion going on for months that that about discussions between Merkel and Obama and nothing whatsoever was being negotiated or there were no concessions by the US in any way, not even not even open to discussion. And there was no mention at all of. Yeah. Not of basically stopping any kind of espionage against a friendly state, but in the yeah. In the wake of that situation, there there was a very interesting session on for the. Yeah. The spokesperson of the German government. It was very awkward for him but not a lot of people remember the physical espionage on embassies. There was a whole tourism really it took days to deacons instruct them if you remember, there was espionage equipment placed on equipment to spy on other nations.
And there was there is a website called now, you know, there are texts that have been. When we read those, I, I reread my own texts that I wrote about this situation. And to be frank, I would never use that tone anymore that I wrote back then. And it's I recommend you to Netzpolitik .org has the complete transcript of the sessions the for the parliamentary inquiry into the Snowden leak. I want to recommend you to reread that. Steinmeier Basically had complete blackout on what he said back then. It's very interesting to read that from this very interesting time back then. But all of these physical monitoring equipment went on the embassies is gone now. So at the end of the NSA, BND parliamentary inquiry, there was a public debate in the parliament and about the final report and what the conclusions were of the whole situation. And I was visiting with Hans Christian Schily, a German Liberal politician. He basically was, yeah, clearing his office and he gave me an interview for an hour.
It's also in the podcast, the Netzpolitik.org podcast. I'm going to read that to you now. Someone who did five parliamentary inquiries. He was very clear about how little the espionage agency even tried to inform the parliamentary control . We now know the work of the parliamentary investigative. While they were saying we don't know at all what this is about, what this is supposed to be, especially what we have to do with it. They were negot debating with foreign intelligence services about it. First of all, about what had already been going on there in joint cooperation. So for example, in the Canal project.
But they also negotiated new access to the networks that was this. This deception of a sensational kind, the likes of which I could have not have imagined. So he's clearly saying , commenting on the audacity of the lies that they put out and the new investigative committee of the. And so the German agency is not in any way more efficient or better at. And none of the people who clearly lied to parliament had to face any kind of challenge to that. And this is really not adequate. And the parliamentary controls are not adequate to the kind of technical espionage that is going on currently. And even despite Snowden, all of this is normalcy. Now So same in France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, UK, UK. It's even to a higher degree than here. There is a new there is not just a new law about automated espionage. They are actually allowed to do automatic hacking. So no person involved and what is the bad. So the German espionage agency allowed the was a longer talk by Bijan yesterday if you're interested in that I can definitely recommend that in Karlsruhe they were debating about that law for two days and back then I only heard the argument about Afghanistan and it was the central argument.
You may not allow take away the automatic instruments that we have for surveillance because of Afghanistan. And the moment that law was not figured out to be unconcerned additional, it turned out that we know nothing about Afghanistan. So the whole reason they put forward is moot . It basically collapsed because none of the espionage agencies gave no hint whatsoever at the taking of power by the Taliban. And that's why the argumentation is so hollow. The success of this mass surveillance case that is happening, either the anecdotal or the basically zero. So that's the result of the parliamentary inquiry by the US Parliament. And they basically try to quantify what was happening, that the surveillance of metadata gave us any hint to prevent of terrorism acts and the only result was one one single case where they found hints towards the terrorist act and obviously there is no relation to the yeah.
To the scale with which they tap our data. So so they only are allowed to the German agency is only allowed to tap in three different cases if it's in in Germany. But talking to foreign nations. So the we at the C.c.c. did a survey of that and we clearly showed proof that this cannot be done, you know, based on technological features, differentiate data into data of German citizens and foreigners. Secondly they are allowed to do secret mass surveillance once abroad, they are allowed to do hacking. They are allowed to cooperate with. Other secret services from partner states. And this was explicitly stated that that's the case. And thirdly, they are allowed to cooperate with other states on an automated level. So automated surveillance, even cooperating with foreign military and so there's this 30% limit. They're allowed to they're not allowed to trespass 30% of global telecom information networks, which they're never going to reach. Right? That's absurd.
And so but somehow that was like passed as legislation and next to the communication content, they are also allowed to do specialised search for metadata and transport data. And they also allowed to do surveilled of machine to machine communication . And so you can see that that's like becoming more important, right? Because the devices we carry around with us, they talk to each other and we're not part of that communication. It's not actively initiated by the users right. And the budget for the German Secret Service. BND is more than 1 billion by now. So so it has grown over the recent years. Um, and so no, no one questions that is secret Service is important that we need their activities.
And so all this talk after Snowden of like, do we really need that much Secret Service activity and they have a new building in Berlin and they have this massive budget. And so but I don't want to end on such a negative note right? We definitely we have like this really great outcome from the Snowden revelations, which I could have not imagined as someone, you know, dealing with technology on a day to day basis and so after Snowden, when we look at the statistics of encrypted traffic, we can see that there was this break even point after Snowden and further growth of encryption, encrypted traffic on the Internet.
And so those are, you know, the services that we use day to day services like Gmail and WhatsApp . They turned encryption on for their day to day activity. And you don't even need to know about that as a user. But that makes it so much harder for the secret services to surveil the content of communication. Of course the metadata is available, but but yeah, this was unexpected. So this, you know, before Snowden, it was always just a small part of the technological community that were promoting encryption and I'm very proud to be part of this. We have this ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that means we get more political control over the activities of secret services, which we need more in Germany and there's this really important point in there that it treats the content of communication the same as metadata of communication, and also machine to machine communication. And so this differentiation between content and metadata, the court said that that's not allowed to happen. You cannot differentiate between these types of data. And I think that's really important that, for example, when we talk about data retention or other discussion means, you know, where data is being stored.
I think that's a really important conclusion. And so I think Snowden got that wrong when he was happy about the first ruling. He didn't know that this large group of human rights NGOs would call the large chamber of the European Court of Human Rights because we weren't that happy with the first ruling. And so we. Went to court again. And so the final ruling, yeah, that was it. But a few judges his from the court still feel that this ruling was too weak that it was not based on facts.
And this one opinion, one by one of the judges clearly stating that this ruling is not enough. For privacy rights for European citizens. And so I really feel like we need you know, we now have a new government in Germany, and it's not the conservatives anymore. And so with the new red yellow and green coalition in Germany, I feel like we should really demand that we get new measures that we need. You know, measures that decrease the activity of surveillance. That's that's going on by the secret services . Yeah, I didn't make this photo, but yeah, so you get the point. We don't want to wait forever. And so of course now there's like critique. It's you can critique that the Snowden revelations didn't have that much. Action that followed it. And so now the discussions, you know, that we had following Snowden, you know, that was that was thanks to him. And so we should give him credit for that . And so not just in Laura Poitras, this movie about him, but also like from the beginning , the way he like talked about his conscience and in the way he collaborated with journalists, It's I think he really he was a role model for other people, even though you know, the way the state handles his revelations and went after him, you know, clearly they didn't want another Snowden after him.
But so the way he did all of that and how he talked about, you know, his thoughts, his feelings and his conscience and how he argued for breaking the law due to his conscience. I really feel like that's a role model for other people. And so I really wish that our current government in Germany, you know, had the guts to. Yeah give him a chance. And I really think that's something we should demand from our government. And it's been for me, it's all right. So now I'm at the demands and I think I'm going to be shoot offstage right about now. So two more things. I really think that, you know, this this sort of like normal state of democracy between different democratic countries, there should be like anti espionage.
Agreements. Right And so these discussions, we should pick them back up that we had right after the revelations. So this quote by German chancellor, you know, we don't spy on our friends. I I think that's important. And so we yeah, we should like turn this, you know, we should keep going that way. We should try to stop technological mass surveillance. And so these quotes, so mostly the German liberals and the German Green Party, you know, they they they made bold statements leading up to the last German federal election. And so I don't think we should let them off the hook. I, I think we should request that from our government that yeah, they, they follow through on that.
And so in ten years from now, I'd wish for Edward Snowden to be able to stand here and talk here. And I yeah, I just wish that we can say it is now different than back then and this sort of like detour or of like analysing all data that, you know, we have. I think we need to stop that. And so, yeah, that's my wish for a civilised society based on digital reality. Yeah. Thank you very much. For congrats. Creepy hinted you. I'm creeping around behind you. Here. Thank you so much. Constanza. That was so interesting. Thank you for these insights. I don't have any questions. I wish I could go into the audience, but yeah, that's not going to I'm not able to do that with my legs today. So following Constanza, we have an icon of sociology. We Professor Uta Allmendinger, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.
She teaches at Humboldt University in Berlin. She has got and also at the Social Science Centre, Berlin. And she's going to talk about about equality, politics in Germany and intended and unintended consequences. So please welcome to the stage. Give a big hand to Professor Jutta Allmendinger. Would okay. I was welcomed and I said, oh, it's great that you recognise me. And the person says, well, last time when it was online in your talk went off like fireworks. I don't know if I can repeat that success with so many people here in person, but thank you so much for being here in my yet again.
I in my much loved Frankfurt Sunday Times as I was able to read that I was someone who's been looking for gaps for my entire life. Gaps between the rich and the poor, especially between men and women. And I mean in addition to this really annoying undertone that sounded somewhat cynical, it's a bit strange that they think I need to be looking for gaps. These gaps are everywhere. We don't need to look for them. The biggest problem with these gaps is that they are often presented in this very trivialised way.
And what I mean is that if you, for example, look at the gap between the income of men and women, and then you look at the gender pay gap and usually people say, oh, abracadabra, we just adjust this pay gap. We take out all the differences between men and women, and then suddenly it shrinks from 18% to 15. And it's not really you don't need to 5, sorry. And then you don't need to feel bad anymore because what are 5% per hour? We do the same with the gender pay gap and just take everything taking care of children and find, oh, there's 30% and then you do some more magic adjusting it down. And then again you end up with a gap where you essentially say, Ah, so what? It's not great, but it's not that dramatic. And so the, the I would ask people working on gender equality policy to really call these gaps what they are and to talk about these real gaps and not these mathematically magically adjusted gaps that look better somehow.
And so I mean and I mean, we shouldn't just look at hourly wages. Of course, we also need to look at hourly wages and we need to change something about these 18. But primarily we should be looking at the income , especially the income across someone's life and the pension that someone has a right to at the end of the working life. For example, there's these huge differences. For example, if you have people born in 1985, a man and a woman, they have the same training, the same experience they have.
Both have two children, then they're pretty equal until the birth of those two children. Also, when it comes to their position and their income. But then once the children are there, their lives diverge so much that in West Germany it's essentially we you predict that for the entire life there is a difference of ■k71.5 million in income differential, right? So the women make ■k71.5 million. Yes. And that's the number that I'm interested in. It's specifically it's also about the hours that people have worked. And it's not simply the difference per hour, but this huge difference across someone's life. And of course, you see that massive difference when you look at the amount of pension that someone gets. Also when you for example, take into account the time that people spent caring for their children. And so when it comes to the gender pay gap, it's very similar. We calculated in minutes and in hours. But our measure is not we don't look at mental load, which which we've been talking about since COVID, but when but if we look at the mental load, which is something we just did in a recent study where we looked at 23 different tasks and asked who is doing this task? Is it primarily the men? Is it primarily the woman or is it both of them together? And out of these 23 tasks that we looked at, there are three tasks that were primarily done by the men and these were repairing things, finances and handicraft.
And you all know that these tasks are not tasks that need to be done on a daily basis. It's much more flexible when it comes to the timing. While most of the other things are being primarily done by women and maybe sometimes together. But the really terrible thing about this is that this one sided focus on women is not something that is visible in this contrast of cash versus care or maybe cash versus love or understanding that caring also costs money, but that this lost income, income, this unpaid work is something that doesn't come along with more respect. You might, of course, you can say money isn't everything. I would be the first to say that money isn't everything but recognition and respect for this. Invisible labour is something that people do not get and it simply doesn't exist, and especially not for this mental load. And so my first demand would and so my first demand for German gender equality, politics or gender equality politics is to take these real differences, this real gap, and to recognise this real massive difference and essentially implement policies and make politics that combats this real gap rather than trivialised, magically reduced and adjusted gaps.
My second point is that I am constantly be missing and I constantly try to remind people and try to tell politicians that we need a conversation when it about which direction to close these gaps in . Right now we are assuming that we close these gaps in a one sided way by turning all women into men. Right So we say, well, women don't work part time, don't just work part time. They should work full time. They should work in they work in men's jobs. And then they also receive more money and they work also more or less without a break. And this one sided approach approach to closing this gap is extremely problematic, in my opinion, because firstly, we simply don't have the infrastructure for reliable childcare that don't collapse where you don't wake up every morning and, and think, ah, I and you just essentially pray.
Hopefully, hopefully the kindergartens open today. And so in addition to that, there's like all these problems with really bad schools, unreliable schools, schools that don't really run all day in a meaningful way. And so I think it is since Nicole to tell women to close the gap themselves, close the gap by simply take on the man's lives, and then you will figure out how to take care of children. And of course, it's not just about taking care of children. It's also, for example, parents or parents in law that need care. And again, also with the care sector, an elder care sector in Germany, it looks not good in any way. There's this huge dearth of qualified labour and skilled workers in this area. Another reason this is not realistic for women if they're working full time and have children, we know that they nevertheless, in their free time, they are essentially the ones who take on the vast majority of care. Labour and also mental labour. This mental load. And so all the work that's happening outside of their official working hours is taken on.
And in addition also when it comes to other emotional labour, such as keeping friend circles together, keeping social circles together. And so to ensure that this small we turns into a true community, there's this saying that women have these double shifts and when you look at all kind of calculations of paid labour and unpaid labour, you see that especially women, women, especially when they work full time, they work so much more than men in like an extreme way. So in this case, essentially cash is being paid, but then care is being added to that and it has a massive negative impact on the mental and physical health of women, but also the mental and physical health of our children.
Right now, we can see this in every single statistics that are essentially represent the physical, the mental pressure on people and the disproportionate application for mother child care. And we can't essentially play out care and cash against each other. That's the completely the incorrect act approach of talking about it. And in conclusion for me, I think politics of gender equality also needs to take its name seriously.
So it's not just a politics of gender equality for women and men, for women and mothers, but also a politics of gender equality, also for fathers. So it's also about moving fathers into women's jobs, moving them into having them in part time jobs to empower fathers to take paternal leave. Right now, only 45% of fathers actually take parental leave. The numbers you find, for example, are fathers. On average, take three months of parental leave. That's statistically completely untenable because these 3.6 months on average, essentially are only distributed across these 45% of fathers that take any parental leave at all. So we should really take this number for all fathers. And so if you look at all fathers, they take 1.2 a month of parental leave. And then when you compare that to the time women take off, it's completely in tolerable.
And so politics of gender equality needs to be politics of gender equality for fathers and mothers . For me, for me, this means that we need to talk or think very seriously about working hours. If we don't want to have this zero sum game between cash and care and cash and health or in fathers and mothers, then we need to have a serious conversation about working hours .
Also from these different directions where we are having this conversation right now, but especially really from a direction that is currently under underappreciated, which is a genuine politics of gender equality. I just do not see why a family in these different cycles of family life that we all have, even if we don't have any children, we have parents that need to be cared for. I myself took half a year off from work when my mother was in the middle of dying. Right. And it was incredibly important for me to take this time. We can't just have a politics of working hours where the family needs to adjust to these working hours, but we finally need to get to a point where we move from a society of working to a society that's essentially taking care of things regardless of the sector in which these tasks are in.
And if we look at our society that way, in my opinion, we will undoubtedly end up with a four day week, a four day week where it is absurd to hear people say that it lowers the productive city because especially for women who are well trained, who have a lot of experience, who want to work, their productivity is already essentially being diminished, diminished. And you can't tell me that that men's productivity is lowered so, so much that it will really affect anything if we if they finally have to help out with this other stuff.
Now, of course, we can look at the numbers across the life entirely right now. For example, I have a lot more time. I'm part of this golden generation whose child survived the whole COVID time because my child was already in the labour market and I am not old enough to be part of the really vulnerable group. Of course we can do that, but we can't simply fix these working hours for your entire life. When your life changes so much. And we are all affected by these coincidences and these moments and punches from fate. And so thirdly, it is absolutely non-negotiable that we need to emphasise that we need. To move from a society of focussed focusing on paid labour to focusing on activity.
And it's not simply about cash, but that cash also needs to be attached to all the tasks that are socially valuable and societally valuable. So even volunteer work needs to be paid . The I think many speeches by people who were lamenting the lack of social cohesion in our society or the low birth rates and conclude from that that we lack social cohesion in our society, that we need to do more for our sense of together ness. But at simultaneously one to continue to holding up the society that is focussed on paid on this. All of this like employment, this paid labour because all of this like type of employment is tied to cash. But all of these things that we actually do for being together and for turning a society into community, all of this work is unpaid and that's something we should not accept. Nor newer Studies show something that was to be expected and that should have been expected for a long time, but especially due to COVID for people, including myself, I have to say that in a self-critical we looked at this differently to date.
We used to say that women will. That even if women say that they would like to work and if they say that they want to be out there and out in society, they want to do volunteer work, but they also want to make their own money. So they want to be out in the labour market. We were we worried that women would return retreat into the family. And what we can now see with new data from this legacy study about what what people recommend other or recommend others do, and for the first time, the importance of children is diminishing.
And it's not just a tiny little bit, but it's essentially a landslide, especially young women, even if they have children, they say, Oh, I actually I wouldn't recommend it. The next generations to have children, they cost too much money. They create too much work. And that's also something that young women say everyone is pointing the finger towards us and saying that we can't manage things.
We're told that it's our fault, that we can't domesticate our men, that we can't make them take on their part of the burden to take on their part of parental labour, that we can't that we have no chill, that we take on all of this work and don't let anyone do it. And people say they're just tired. It's victim blaming discourse and this thing that we see in all of these situations, situations, there is this argument based on this differential saying are women don't want anything else.
They want this mental load and they want this care work. And that's just why we can't change anything about the status quo. And we can't just let that stand. This claim. So we really need a politics, something that I've already said. But this is my fourth point. We need a politics that doesn't create this zero sum game between kids and cash that does this victim blaming, but that actually engages in gender politics of gender equality, also aimed at men. And so this politics of gender equality, that's my fourth point. That's not something that's aimed to be against fathers, at least not when at least not when we assume . At least not unless we assume that all of these fathers are lying in. These young men are lying to us. They keep saying over and over that they want this equal partnership. And that's important. And we that's something that we want to do. And that's something that we plan to do and want to do together more.
And so when we look at what happens when the children come, the opposite happens. As I said, men, fathers, young fathers increase their working hours. Women decrease their working hours. And it kind of just ends up in this equilibrium where from a certain point on, it's just not something that you can disentangle and reverse anymore . All fathers, all young men that are here, I can promise you that our I can assure you that our studies are reliable and robust, and you can essentially reproduce this math. They are all all publicly available. The fact that nothing happens to fathers when they take parental leave, I give you a few examples.
For example, if we think of many companies in Germany and you send them an application without there being a job opening and in in in this application, there is just two differences. One difference is whether it's a father or a mother. And the other difference is whether the person has taken two months of parental leave or 12 months of parental leave, and then we wait with our fictitious and fictitious mailbox to see who is invited to a job interview.
Unfortunately we can't test the other case, which would be even more interesting. Who actually gets hired? The ethics review boards won't let us do that, but so we wait and we send out these applications and we find and that fathers even even when they break these social norms and don't conform to these societal expectations about what's considered acceptable for men, which is taking 12 months of parental leave, they are invited to interviews at the same rate as fathers who've taken two months of parental leave. Nothing happens there is no damage for them. There's no cost, at least not when it comes to this indicator. But for women when they decide to rebel against these women's norms. If they only take two months of parental leave and not 12, they get way really sick, inefficiently noticeable, fewer invitations to these job interviews.
So basically women are punished for doing the thing that the thing that they're supposed to do. So from this from this employer's view and based of this market view, and when we ask why, why people say maybe this woman is a bit over motivated, maybe she doesn't fit into our team or whatever you say, all the stuff you say about women is something that also was said to me again yesterday, just yesterday evening, of course, that's something that reflects the norms and stereotypes in our society. That's one way of looking at this. But also for young men and young fathers, it shows an incredible potential.
It should give them courage to do what they want because either way, they don't take any damage from it to their career. When if we do further experiments to see maybe what happens if a woman takes on her husband's name after getting married, or when fathers take on the woman's last name after getting married, We see the same thing for men, regardless of whether they take on their name or whether they keep their name or take on the wife's name, they are perceived as career more career oriented than women by all of our respondents than women, regardless of whether women, regardless of whether they take on their partner's name or not.
But the difference again, is realistically huge. Again, that shows stereotypes that we need to overcome. And so my demand or ask for family politics would be to really implement a politics for fathers that to begin with to begin with. We give fathers we get somewhere where fathers just take much more paternity leave and that we finally do these things that have happened in other European countries already that it needs to happen right now. We also need to break up these old structures. This is yeah, and the tax benefits for married couples with one high income and one low income spouse also needs to go. And so women within these spousal relationships, you know, it really goes against women's interests. So it's not as it's not just a little thing, but it's really like we can really show this along economic data. There's really no understanding why why we wouldn't start exiting and quitting these tax benefits, getting rid of them, why we get rid of these mini so-called mini jobs and get get proper jobs for which you get pension points.
So you earn you actually earn pension once you exit the labour force. And so especially for young people, this really weird like. Culture of funding the because again, there's no like Social Security with in these types of employment. And so we see that in our research. And so for example of future fathers and mothers and what I'm about to say now does not mean that we should have these fathers focussed politics, you know, that that we're winding down the women focussed politic that we had so far. Again, a new study has shown that the quotas. Hurt women a little, but no, not as much as to reach a conclusion that we should get rid of quotas , that they're unnecessary and so the experiment that I'm relating to now, we have two types of organisations. The first type of organisation has a quota. So, you know, it's clearly states that they want like equality of men and women in the workplace.
And the other organisation says we just go by the quantity of, you know, a person's work and the quality of their work and so the result is that both of these organisations . It's fairer. The promotion of women is being seen as being more fair and that's the progress, right? Because we see that there's something changing in the consciousness of the people in Germany. And so what we see is that the organisation with the equality quota. This understanding of fair, this the, the, the, the thinking that women are intelligent, that go goes down a little bit and so even when we have this quota for equality for women in the workplace, we still see these old old pejorative attitudes towards women. And so I would really wish that all women are don't stand against quota.
I think, you know, this is like something we see in the younger generation. And, you know, I have this generation in my heart because I see them at my university in first and second semesters. Students were not at this point where we don't need quotas. We still need them very much. And we can only we put these quotas aside once we've reached age 30, 35. And on at the same level, you know, we have the solidarity that we as women, with the help of men, are able to do and land in Kansas. Can really, you know, bring this big jump forward. This progressive movement to our country and just really is a collective effort. And there are so many challenges. You know, I don't need to talk about this. Maya Gopal is going to come on stage after me. And so, you know about the challenges we're facing. And so I'm in between in showing all of you that we need social cohesion.
And that only works when the younger generation sticks with us. And we're all working together to form a gender equal society. Thank you very much. Thank you, Emma. It's my mind. All right. 2.5 minutes. I thought, you know, stretching would be nice. So maybe you want to ask a question, but I try to be, like, fast, so we have more time. I just wanted to say thank you for your talk. I became a mother recently, and I took notes on your talk. This was really interesting and some a quick question I have is how do you like start a conversation about this? Right? Maybe, maybe in your own home, in your family? Well, I don't think that's the, you know, task of women to be the teachers of their men.
Right It's not your task to educate your male spouse is. And yeah, totally. And the sentence that I really think about that, you know, you shouldn't pit kids and care against each other. Right. I think as women, we find ourselves in a situation quite quickly that you fall back into these traditional roles, right? Once a child arrives. Yeah. Yeah . Yeah. The father should be around here somewhere. Yeah, but somewhere around here. It's not with the child. Right I saw that backstage. Thank you. Yeah. So for some. All right. Yeah So much for compatibility. I try to nurse my child backstage and.
Yeah, the speaker noticed me. So thank you very much for saying we're going to have a quick break. And after the break, we have Maya Gopal and she's going to hold a talk and then afterwards, we're going to have a quick impulse and then we're going to have a discussion between those two up on stage. And so, yeah, ten minute break is left. So at 12:30, we're going to continue up on stage here.
And so see you then. Hello Shin. Hi, nice that you're all here still. I'm always happy to see known faces, which makes me feel I have started to build a relationship. I'm very much looking forward to our next speaker here. When I was having a choir practice at the bus stop in smoking, my first cigarette. I hope my mother isn't watching the live stream. I was wondering if I could kiss my love of and my good at the same age.
She was wondering why we as a society are not creating the world that she would want as an individual. So these are how different people can be. She's done a lot since then. She's a transformation researcher. She's an author and so much more, and we're very happy that she's here to give us our session. Cash, everything in flow. Let's say that again. Cash everything in flow to make us think with that session and after that we will have a session with Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and Maya. But I'll come back in between those two. But first, let's have a huge applause for Maya Gupta. Yes, Thank you, Anna. Now I'm the nerd woman here. Okay, I'll deal with that. I think that this curious question of things is a good feature to have a good characteristic.
And I think it would suit us all very well, especially in times when there are many answers that say, Oh, there isn't any other way. That's how it is. And that's exactly what science does, is at least a science that looks at things with a historic interest and asks, asks, How did the things that we perceive as normal today come into the world in the first place? And would it be interesting to think how we could change them to create a different reality in the future? And from that perspective of I would like to look at this phenomenon that is called money .
And I don't know if you've received this all, but we are scientists sometimes conduct experiments and when I got this at the entrance, I thought, Oh, this is a perfect object for an experiment. So a question to you who of you would exchange the would get me three coffees for this change for this ■k710 and t them to the stage. Take them to the stage for me. Just one. Okay. Well after the break, please. Okay Now we've got this top object. I don't know if you've received it. It was my goodie bag. I can really see Trump and say ■k7500. Who of you would take these ■k7500 and gete that coffee? Those three coffees? Okay. Okay Sometimes experiments don't work as you want them to. These are very kind people. All of you. What I wanted to find out is one and the same.
Completely useless thing. How is society valuing one of these very highly, which is this one and another which at first sight doesn't seem very different. And you can actually chew on it where whereas this other one doesn't have any use at all. So this would more likely end up in a bin unless you're a complete fan of, what was it, Strawberry. So it would be very interesting to see how can money be perceived as something else than this object? Because this object, as it is, isn't very valuable. And that exactly is the idea that I want to share with you. And that is money as a social technology, because we are in a technology oriented event here and it's very interesting for me to interested to find out what does the term technology origin originate from? It's a means to an end, but also something artistic, isn't it? The word comes from technical Greek, ancient Greek technical meaning something like skill craft artistry, which is something very nice indeed.
And if you think of how money came into the world, it's one of the most crazy inventions of all that humanity had. And that's why it's so sensible to view it as a social technology and not just an object to understand its effect in society today. And this particular change, I think, happened when we introduced fiat money, which didn't always exist . I'll talk about the functions of money in a moment, but this was an idea with which credit became possible and became very much, very, much easier. And it was decoupled from other processes and fiat money, which is the big difference between this piece of paper and this edible piece of paper. This was created by committees and printed, which, as you can see with this underlined Bank of England signature here, this bank promises the person that bears this note to hand over the sum of £10, which is crazy, isn't it? Through this promise, this piece of paper has received a value that is much higher than the objective value of this piece of paper.
And which is what is also interesting is this takes us to a point when this Fiat money was created. It was a social innovation oriented towards the common good, which is supposed to take cooperation and division of labour to a very new level. So interesting how the origin again is in Latin fiat. It should be done. It should happen. And to get to this effect and understand the functions of money regularly, there are three functions that are being pointed out. So first it's the means of exchange. I don't have to carry an apple with me to exchange it for a potato. So you create this general means of exchange. Everyone changes into money and I don't have to run around the market until I find someone who has what I have to offer for the things I want.
So very easy. It's very much easier to take with you to compare a cow to a banknote. So the efforts for paying has much decreased through money. Second function measuring value. So it's about something like equivalence and units of value. So I can through sum of money, I can represent a value and I can rank it, I can compare it not by a collection of mussel shells, but something very abstract. And the third function is to store value because as money doesn't go off , apples do. But I can hold money and use it in the future, which means that it's a very interested form of keeping value or storing value. But that leads us to three questions.
If we say that these are the functions of money, and that's if we bring money into the world and say it is something for the common good because it is banks mostly central banks and states that actually promise that this money is worth something. And that's why financial market cannot exist unless regulatory measures make sure that the contracts that they have entered into can be kept through jurisdiction or in financial crisis, that countries as a last resort can jump in and say, we guarantee that these values are not going to be cancelled.
So the idea that financial markets are separate from the state that is complete nonsense. There are no financial markets without state regulation, and that's why it's so important to ask who will who go forward. The state regulation of financial markets is second about measuring value. Which results do we want to have? How can we show that we have found a good means of measurement and also, when it comes to storing, what do you want to keep and store? If we say that we are going to run a balance sheet and express it as a value, I'm going to start with means of exchange, means of exchange, because there are two problems here that I want to talk about because it's very important to me.
We always hear these days that we can look either at social issues or ecological issues, but not both . I would like to turn this around and say if we had a different money system, we could do both. And we could much better achieve our social aims objectives. Why? And that is the focus I want to place today. If we talk about this equivalence as a means of exchange should be used in a way that I can produce enough in society and contribute to achieving social objectives. That would be a useful structuring of this tool and we then get to the question what happens then? Last week I was at a conference on social economics and this is the summary of a success story. If you look at it from a clearly monetary point of view.
But it's also an overwhelming story of overwhelming. If you look at it from the human perspective, what does this do with us if we want to have good health care in society for the people that cannot provide for this by themselves, this is care work in the small scale, but also on the large scale. What you see here are calculations of value creation. This is a sector that contributes to gross domestic product, which is a great success story because social economics grew the social economic sector grew faster than the whole. And maybe that was due to the fact that many private investors came into the field. So the health sector grew by 4.2. And the overall economics by 3.1. And the number of employees only rose by 2.2. So productivity was increased, which is which is a huge success. We achieved the same objectives with less cost.
But what that means for the people is maximum burden. They cannot go on holiday anymore. The only thing they can do at the weekend is slouch down on the couch. You cannot go on strikes anymore because you know that people will be left without care and would suffer in wherever they are. So this is a complete misallocation of a means of exchange. If you consider what we actually want to exchange. And that goes through the whole story. This is a story that looked at the wages in system relevant profession.
And if you say relevant to the system, then we should say we should always have enough means of exchange to achieve these results relevant to the system means that if these services would fail, well then our system of social fabric would break down and you see the overall average. For jobs of salaries is higher than for these jobs. You look at logistics, care, professions and the only outlier are doctors, the people with their white gowns. The deities in their white gowns. But look at the people that work for these people to make them do their job. They also are sliding down the scale. And what's also quite relevant is if we talk about value of money, what value are we expressing? Because it's mostly prestige, reputation that is involved here. If you look at this, this green value, which is the average of all professions that is higher than for all these jobs that are relevant to the system.
So in a double way, we have an expression of money, money expressing a value and if we talk about the appreciation that we give to these people, who are these successful people in our society, those that have managed to earn a lot of money, of course. Why is that? If we look at the way these values are negotiated, there is just too little coverage of organised labour here. And even these negotiations for organised labour cannot strive to achieve the amount of money that they should or would want to have. What I want to say is that money is political value, is political and the question what creates money should be politicised and should be questioned and we should call for the right kinds of value because that is the equivalent of the ecological side. Agriculture in Germany is under a load of stress and that is for two reasons. This is the first one, the first point I want to make because we are not actually be modelling the value creation in appropriate way.
We pay for the goods, but that amount of money doesn't reflect the systems that create it. The safety, CO2 storage in the soil , water and air purification or just the erosion of soil. The factors that stop these are very tightly coupled to the way how I create these values in agricultural goods be i Our sals seen as more relevant to society . But if we could if we would ask what could we have less of tax advisers, finance advisers or food production? Again, prices don't really reflect where we are. And for those that are trying to uphold the relevance to the system are not matched at all. So there was an interesting study from Finance vendor great noticed that is crf value. And that means that we have to understand that if we disrupt this too much, the systems and the values they create, we are going to destroy these value What happened with deforestation and with ecological. Destruction and you know, on a macroeconomic scale, everything is been. You know, everything is great. But we are basically just, you know, if you have a look at it in physical terms, then we are destroying biodiversity and we have we're distributing plastics and those are all risk zones that the creation of value means that the creation of value cannot continue to.
And if you look at the map a couple of days ago from the Earth Commission, then that map looks like this. And, you know, even Europe doesn't look like that. Well if you look at it, the left side number of boundaries, transgressed, transgressed nitrate phosphorus in the grounds and usage of land by the destruction of biodiversity. And the completely different perspective on that, whether we protect the cultural capital or not, if we take the price is that don't say this to tell this truth or whether we create prices that actually put this all in relation. And if we want to tax these things, we have to adjust the prices. And the good thing is then we could also manage all these things without creating, without taking up more debt. So this is the Ariadna research process project. We could, if we just control the things differently, manage the things differently, we could just at. Is equivalent to create the equivalent of so if you want to achieve this same objectives, you need something like philanthropic money perhaps.
And that's why it's so important to have this effect of welcomed to know how money is created and how it gets into the world. And we have to ask about this. And this is why initiatives like this are so important in governance and what we need is ecological or social governance initiatives. These look at how is value created, how does it look and how do we treat those resources. It's a very reactive standard still from the European Union, but but there are financial markets, people behind it, too. And a lot of movement was created in restructuring portfolios and investments, which turned cash flows in different directions. And that is why we have to ask, how can we direct cash flows in in a two direction in that that we actually can retain values and regenerate them. And that is, of course, a very precarious thing to do if the European Union in the Green Deal, the ACT for the Regeneration and Restoration of nature in is dealing with the fact that protected areas by 81% of them are not kept well. So there is no guarantee if a if a protected status is achieved, this EU Green deal that is supposed to tackle this issue is simply is currently being attacked by Mr.
Weber, the Bavarian politician in the EU because he, according to him, foods production is not secured if should not be, it would not be secure. If this deal was to be adopted, which is completely absurd because that is exactly what this deal is about. And then there was this call by 160 scientists. Can you please think to start thinking in the long term and create incentives so at least in that part of the EU budget, the 30% that go to agriculture directly restructure those that they have the right incentives and that is why it's so important to not just look at the flow, but also the stocks.
This is the most easy way of depicting systemic thinking is an input and an output. But we do have to make visible is how does the stock change in this input and output in the way that money works? Are we going to recreate the wealth that is nature or is it depleted . If if, if ■k740 billion are being paid to regenerate something that is something that is regeneration is not just the summarise raises the issue what is being produced? The capital that people have at their disposal has grown. But on the obverse, the blue line shows what we have available in the future for natural growth and that has shrunk and that's why it's so important to ask what kind of value do you want to build up and keep in store.
So we have to realise that financial values are not always related to what's actually happening in the real world. In particular, if financial values increase. S in relation to a gross domestic product that at least tries to model the value creation but not perhaps the right kind of value creation, then there is a kind of tipping point. The relationship between the financial value and what is actually created is changing the rest. Credits only half of credits are going into real society, a real economy and the rest goes into financial finance and if you consider who's actually invented these technologies and what state is guaranteeing, that involves securing the common good, and if only 30% go into the real economy, not half, but only 30, and the rest go into financial products.
So numbers on screens which we have much more of than products in the supermarket these days, 1.55 million derivatives and 25,000 products in the supermarket. So if 13% of German gross domestic product and 3% of these goes into the real economy and the rest on the other ten equivalent in in derivatives and the rest into derivatives where value isn't created, but only money is created and increased. And then there is a totally excessive form of value creation where no one could argue that any value is being created and that is high frequency trading that has increased so much. So we finance the increase of money for a few actors, but this kind of value creation has very little to do with what we actually want to use this technology for. And the interesting question, of course, is how the institutions that are involved contribute through taxation in feeding some of this value back into to the common good, into the kind of budgets where nature could be regenerated through state intervention or where money could be given to those in this systemic relevant jobs.
If you look at countries such as Puerto Rico and Ireland, where the tax levels are very different, if you look at the ratio of foreign money versus domestic money that is so striking. And of course, it looks very good if you have little costs in terms of taxes and so on. If I have 240,000 profit per employee in some countries and only 60, 65,000in others, the effect is very different.
Everyone in Berlin can see it. It's a very interesting investment these days. Real estate. Everyone needs a space to live. If you look at how cash flows are directed, then this is the perspective on investment into the city. I was at a real estate conference the other day and the potentials for increase were very much on the agenda. But we could also say investment that isn't just extraction for people that are on the other side of the world has very different parameters that it should achieve, and that's when cash flows would look very different to and the other term that I would like to hack with you is growth. And that's not the sum of money that is circulating in a society. It is the availability of offers that are there for the common good. It's the availability of solutions for human problems that would make life relatively better and that would make us truly rich. And that is a definition economic thinking by Oxford Institute in Oxford. Thinkers. By Nick Hanauer, Oxford Institute for New Economic Thinking.
So three relevant answers if you want to look at value creation, the appreciation of appreciation of value is built into all prices and salaries. So let's get involved and ask for transparency and ask who makes these assessments and why. If it's just by oligopoly oligopolies, oligopolies, where so value creation is only a positive story if there is truth about costs, that tells us what is happening to people in reality and in nature and wealth is more than just cash flow and it's a social. Measure. And if we want to is it to create a society and a life worth living in the future? That's what we should look at.
So let's stop up with a tyrannic tyranny like a term by E.O. Wilson, who said if numbers and everything that controls actions, that is a way of not facing the consequences. And we could change that. And that is our task. And the wizard community can contribute a lot to this transparency. The cynic is a human who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Quote Oscar Wilde on the slide. Yes the Amish. Kept us immer schneller. Yeah what a fool. Yeah Aircraft. Maya da in im gesprache mit Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, Susan Zine, Dr. Ramphele is Mamphela is now going to join us from South Africa and we're very happy that she is going to be here.
But first of all, please, a huge applause to Maya Gupta. Thank you so much for your talk. Now let's come. To start, as I said, with Dr. Theodor Ramphele, who's going to join us from South Africa. And she's an icon of the black consciousness movement, that which she co-founded with Steve Biko. But it's not just that she's a doctor economist, human rights activist and anti-apartheid activist, and she's also the co-president of the Club of Rome, author of many books. And for many people, including myself, an inspiration . She will be in her session. She will be talking about how finance in the digital age must be rethought and after that, there'll be a conversation between Maya and Dr. Fela. We're very much looking forward to that. I don't know if she isn't with us yet, is she? Slide says Cash. Cash. Cash After that conversation, I think there will be no break. And we will talk with Brent Scott, but there will be more on that later.
But first, talk by Dr. Ramphele and then the conversation. Enjoy. Thank you. Good afternoon. And thank you very much for having me as part of this very important occasion , I would like to engage you on three key themes. First, what does the reality of global commons require of us as as humanity? How can we reimagine a future in which Africa and Europe are engaged in mutually just transformative of conversation, ins and collaborative actions for the benefit of future generations.
And then I'll share a few takeaways at the end. But let's start with the Commons. We live in a world in which cooperation is an essential new reality. The polychrome axis we face at the political, socio economic and ecological levels cannot be tackled appropriately without acknowledgement that humanity is interconnected and interdependent. No region can go it alone. We are in this together as one human family.
We are in the global commons. Our common ancestors in Africa, the mother continent aeons ago deserve and the wisdom of Ubuntu , which is an essence which you find in all Indigenous cultures across the globe. It developed a value system upon appropriate to living in harmony with one another and with nature. Elinor Ostrom. The 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics challenged the notion of the inevitability of the crisis or the tragedy of the commons. She did a field work inuntability are are essenl to good governance of the commons, to ensure equity, accountability and sustainability benefit of all. So measures for each citizen is the best invention investment we can make to secure our future.
And this requires us a value system that attaches value to life. Human dignity, fairness and compassionate action. These values are in contrast to those of our current global economic system. At the club of Rome, we have concluded that the current finance system is a major impediment to the fundamental transformation of the global economy, which is generating inequities and damaging Mother Earth. The finance system has become the tail that wags the dog. It sets its own rules, trades with itself to take making money out of money and attaches value only to those things that can be measured. But can you measure life? Can you measure love? Can you measure dignity? We believe that the mythic assets that the finance system builds are a recipe for the rich. Repeated crisis that we face. People in most of the world where I come from, live under the tyranny of money.
The dollar is king. The finance system is totally unaccountable and it needs to be reconstructed. We created the finance system and we have the power to change the finance system. A new paradigm is critically important to enable humanity to create a new economy that is fair to people and to society and to the planet. Such an economy requires mindset that shifts to new levels of human consciousness that value life and the well-being of all within . In a healthy ecosystem, people all in most of the world are becoming more urgent in their quest for change.
Many are liberating themselves from the impacts and the effects of the 19th century education system, which is a global phenomenon. In that system teaches authoritarianism, linear thinking and scarcity, which fires competitiveness, which is unhealthy, more and more people are embracing the abundance of their heritage from the cradle of humanity and the first human civilisation on it is when we think of ourselves living in a world with above guidance that will be able to share and collaborate these shifts in mindset are essential to enable people at grassroots levels in institutions, whether they are in the private sector or in civil society, to be able to rediscover what it means to be human governance of the commons demands this.
These shifts are absolutely essential so that we can show up with the best version of ourselves in our personal relationships, our professional relationships, and in our political and civic engagements. So how can we reimagine an Afro eurometaal reality which can lead to a just just transition for both our regions? Africa and Europe are conjoined twins as they are geographically. We historically and socio economic intertwined there is no just prosperous future of one region without the other. And so we are bound by this interconnect rootedness to start out and to invest in in conversations that will build trust, that will be based on values of Ubuntu and that will re-examine what we value in life and how those valuations are done. I also believe that core investing in the most important opportunity is to invest in the people of Europe and Africa who are the key to success. But what about a few examples? Africa has its youthful population, which is fired up with energy, with creativity.
They need to train up with the ageing population of Europe with experience and critical skills that can become , um, a combination that is a winning one. Africa's natural resources are well known minerals, a rare earths abandoned land. So sun, wind, you name it. And that twinned with Europe's established institutions would be a winning combination. And so I believe that that we in these two regions bear we have the opportunity to demonstrate at what level in a global community party with mutual benefit could look like. So what are the takeaways? From what I'm saying, First, that we need to accept that human beings are interconnected and interdependent and we benefit from them living in environments where we are in harmony with others and what needs to be done is for us to liberate our mindsets from the scarcity mindset.
The me, myself and I to embrace the we second the global commons, impose a responsibility on us to invest in conversations that build trust and extract accountability from all of us so that we can create environments where there is well-being for all. For a healthy planet. And finally, I believe that Africa and Europe have an opportunity party to lead these major mindset shifts. We must invest in promoting mutually beneficial just transitions in our regions.
Liberal dating the present from the icy hand of the past would unleash the future in which human dignity, equity and compassion, which is love in action, will reign in that environment. We will truly celebrate our living in on a global village where global common good is shared by all. Thank you. Thank you so much. Mamphela I just wonder, can you see me in any meaningful. I can't see you. I can't see you now. Okay. Oh, yes, I can see you there on the sense if I look this way or shall I look somewhere else? So that you feel I'm actually looking at you? I think it's okay.
Yeah There we are now in a good shape. Yeah. Nice. Thank you so much. I think the perspective that you have been taking the global commons is such an important one. Because. Because it makes very clear the point that we have inherited certain wealth on this globe that we can only maintain if we collaborate and this collaboration is something that we see in climate protection being one of the global commons, a stable climate very conducive to human well-being and to reliable provisioning from nature by diversity is another. We can only protect when particular territories aren't undermined too much. And we've had this talk about collaborating to protect the commons. When Brazil was really going into the fastest process of deforestation ever under the Bolsonaro government. And it's still very difficult to reverse it because it was so much more lucrative to cut down the rain forest in the short term, to sell the raw materials or the soy to feed the cows in Europe for example, rather than maintaining that biodiversity rich and basically lung of the world area of the Amazon.
So maybe if you could elaborate a bit more where you feel this notion of common iron and stewardship of the commons is hampered by a financial system as we have it right now, and which kind of maybe thinking to the principles of Elinor Ostrom or another way we would have to change it so that this steering effect act could be improved. Thank you, Maya. The most important recognition is the aim gird for the short term coat and returns the highest profits without looking at profit.
It comes at a cost and the cost to the ecosystem, um, is a cost that is going to be borne by future generations. And so the first important thing that the finance we have to challenge the finance system to move out of is this short termism and the externalising of costs and the internal izing of profits. Second, whenever the finance system goes into a crisis, they stop that talk of the business of business as business. They run to the public sector. Yours and my tax money have to then bail them out. We need to hold them accountable. Account able to being able to internalise both the costs and the profits and those profits must be done must be utilised in a way that goes into investing for the long term. So what we have to do as the global community is challenging the idea that the finance system is unique. It plays to its own rules and money and money is the only thing that matters.
We need to bring back the people running those systems are human beings like me and you. They have to re-embrace their humanity and we got to hold them accountable. That's the only way we can stop the current and short termism and the damage is doing to our ecosystems. I would I would also love to pick on the point where you said Africa and Europe, because I also have this feeling we talk about this geopolitical reshifting, right? And the competition between China and the US and what's going to happen with the rest of the world. And to me, it seems a bit underlooked or under perceived that opportunity of that collaboration between those continents sitting next to each other.
Do you have an idea why that is? Because at least here in Germany the conversation is a lot about how much can we still collaborate with China? When is that impossible? But how do we make sure we're on the side of the US? And it feels like where is the European way to actually look at the neighbours that are in vicinity geographically and that we're dependent on so many levels? When you think about the resource flows coming out of that continent into our economies, do you have an idea why? A It's under looked at and what we'd have to change? Well, the problem is that of mindsets, the mind set of the world is that that value is measured in terms that make make Africa look like a place which is overburdened and with debt, which has nothing to recommend itself except as a place to extract value from and ignore, ignoring the most youthful population in the world is really the epitome of short termism.
But I think at the heart of it, Maya, if we are to be very honest, it is that the colonial narrative of the dark continent that Africa is a continent without history, is driving this continued ignoring of Africa. And that is why I'm talking about the need for mindset shifts and that shift has to also involve our education system, our children in both in Africa and in Europe, are taught European history before they can understand where they are. There is very little taught in our school systems, including at university level, about ancient history and the fact that Africa is the cradle, not only of humanity, but of civilisation.
Even the pyramids , the very extensive, um, agri civilisation that was built around the Nile indicates that we had a people there, a culture there that was highly sophisticated and that sort of sophistication came from learning from nature. So ignoring Africa is leading to the ignoring of the, the intelligence of nature and nature's intelligence comes out of millions of years of nature, Mother Nature doing is field work.
And when we learn from nature, we become a lot more able to be creative and to be sustainable because because Mother Nature knows just how to regenerate, to regenerate, we've got to return to the essence of who we are. Nothing wrong with Europe trading with China or to with the US, but Europe is tied to Africa through geographic links, through socio economic links. Historically links which are painful. But we need to talk about that pain and acknowledge it and put it aside. Died as lessons learned about about the danger of treating people as less than you and then embrace the idea of one human family. When we do that it we can only succeed wars and conflict come out of the notion that I am better than you rather than we are human beings. Members of the same human family. When you think of things that you would want the sometimes arrogant European. I still hear things like we have to teach the Africans how to look after their environment. What would you like those people to look at? Where do you say learn from here? Or what is the inspiring pieces that you see happening in the African continent where you say this can be built on and this is how partnerships should look like? Give an inspiration for all the ones that want to see the potentials that you're describing can be local projects, can be bigger initiatives.
African Union, whichever comes to mind to you? Yes What we need to remember is that the indigenous Africans like indigenous people across the globe in the Amazons, the Amazons, the stewards of the Amazons are the indigenous people, Indigenous people in the world constitute something like four comma, 5% of the human population, and yet they are looking after 80 plus percent of the sensitive ecosystems.
And so the arrogance of Europeans or North dominant northern country is comes out of this misguided and unscientific idea that they are different races with different capabilities. Now, I cannot ask them to learn from, um, something if they are not in a mental mode to learn. But what I can point to is that the devastation of Africa's wildlife, which was largely by Europeans who used to kill elephants by their millions during the colonial period, those elephants are now they have regenerated and the people looking after them are Africans. Look at the African, uh, white Wildlife Fund. It is run by a Ugandan man who lives in in, in Nairobi. He is able he was able to gather with his predecessors to organise networks of people all living around nature parks to be co stewards of those of that wildlife. Let's look at how Africans, some of them in the poorest areas, have revived regions. Native agriculture that if they were given the opportunity to get greater inputs and investment, it would be able to feed the world, including Europe instead of Europe trying to continue with this common agricultural, uh, uh, agreements which have led to the damaging of the little land that Europe has.
So I think the facts from a scientific point of view are in front of us, but it's not the science which is the problem. It's not the evidence which is the problem. The problem is the people who know more than me say is we need a chorale, a spiritual group, and that that what gives me a hope is looking at the in Africa . If you remember financial system I mean the technology that has transformed the financial system much of it was done by young Africans in Kenya in terms of exchange of money.
When I was in the World Bank in the early 2000 and people used to send money through a very expensive mechanism, including sending people who are coming and going for now at the price of a mobile phone. You can have that. You can send your money that that technology that innovation was developed by young Africans. There are many more apps that they are developing in including charging phones in the sun with a tiny little solar panel. And so what Africa has is an abundance of riches as its young population, its minerals is a abandoned land.
And of course, the beautiful flora and fauna. What is needed by Europe or for Europe to do is to see Africa not as a place where you do your charity, but as a partner for a more just prosperous future. For I'm putting my hope and my faith in young people, both young Europeans and young Africans. I believe they should show the way , they should team up and work together to leverage the complementary strengths between Europe and Africa to and develop the kind of progress, aims and projects that will lead the way . Thank you.
I would love to invite you because we're here with a crowd of listening people that are very tech savvy and very educated, and we have the topic of cash, but also technology. If you have three things just short, what do you want them to take away? And look at tomorrow to see things a bit differently ? Just as the final, I'll throw out. Open your eyes to the enormity of Africa as a place where whatever technology you are developing, if you were to partner with the young Africans, you have a ready made huge market to work with. But also whilst you are working here in Africa, you will be enjoying the sun. The beauty of the flora and the fauna. But in addition we have to look at how Europe can sustain itself by partnering with Africa. There is no no future without the minerals and the rare earths of this continent.
If we work together to invest in their benefit initiation, both continents stand to benefit and then we can have sustainable well-being for all and a sustainable, healthy planet. Thank you. Also for joining us from afar. Thank you . Thank you to Mamphela for joining us here. And I am very glad we've had your perspective in in a rather nice and warm, sunny Berlin today, not comparable to the flora and fauna that you've been describing, though. So you do have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you, Maya. I'm going to take over again. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Ramphele. As a young African and a young European, I definitely feel the pressure. And let's get. Newton gleich kommt. And for Brad Scott is with spanned is journalist, activist and broker wir freuen uns. We're very much looking forward for that continuation after a short break. Thank you. Hello Hello. Hello Yes. Of. Name. You as you decide it's good. Yeah this is nice as Hinton. This is this is. Oh yeah , this is at least up here I don't know what it's like where you were at, but here in Berlin, it is.
I'm looking forward to our next speaker, which is Brett Scott. He's a journalist and activist and a former broker. He wrote two books about cash and finance markets, and he also writes for The Guardian Business Insider, HuffPo, CNN and many others. And he often writes about cashless society, crypto, fintech and so on. But what I noticed primarily that he has to be first Twitter name ever suit possum, please follow him all. And we're lucky. And we we're happy to have him here and his talk the Luddites Guide to Defending Cash. Welcome Brett Scott. Lotta Lotta. Thank you. Thank you. Hello See my friends in the front row. Good to be here. And. This photo will hopefully make sense by the end of the talk. I spent a huge amount of time creating that photo. I don't know if you see, but I've inside asserted a ■k72 coin into a mountain bike and I'm not really a graphic designer.
So actually this this was a lot of work, but I quite like it. I even did this like lighting effects and the basic idea here is I'm trying to reclaim the Luddite movement, as it were. I don't know how many of you guys know about the Luddite movement, but there was a group of people who were attacking machines back in the 1800s, and they often vilified as being anti-progress and anti well, basically anti-progress. But I think the Luddite movement is going to have a resurgence in the coming years. And actually, what the Luddite movement is all about, maybe the neo Luddite movement. What's it all what's it's about? It is restore dating, what progress actually means, and having a more balanced idea of what progress means.
Because right now, the way that progress is defined is a very particular vision of progress. And I think the mountain bike in a way kind of encapsulates maybe the neo Luddite movement because it's a kind of like a semi low tech kind of piece of equipment, but it's also so I don't know, we'll discuss it as I go into the talk. We can we can see what you guys think about this. I never quite know how to how to introduce myself. I go by many different names. But actually yesterday when I was checking in to this conference, the person who was doing the accreditation referred to me as she said, Oh, you're the cash legend, which I don't quite know what that means , but I'm thinking I'm going to claim this title. The Cash Legend. Because when I talk about cash, I talk about literal physical cash. I've been noticing that some people in in this at Republica have been using the term cash to refer to money in general. But when I talk about cash, I mean literal physical cash.
All right. So I guess I'm one of the people right now in the world who's trying to provide an alternative vision for cashless society, trying to reclaim what it means , I guess, to have a kind of balanced monetary system with different forms of money. And today I'm going to try and take you through some of that. I have a book out about this as well, if you're interested. And this came out last year in May and it's out in a bunch of different languages, probably about nine languages.
Now, this is this is the new paperback version that will be coming out in July this year. If you want. There's actually copies of the book at the Dustman's stand down there and I'm happy to sign them If you want. But basically, this book is about in broad terms, the fusion between big finance and big tech. All right. It's about the growing amalgamation between big banks and big tech companies, but also how this then plays out in the monetary system and in particular about how it plays out in an attack on cash.
Now if you live in Berlin, you probably have noticed this fully, yet Berlin still actually has quite high levels of cash usage. But if you go to a place like London, you will see how this has accelerated incredibly , It's becoming very, very hard to use cash in a place like London, and you're starting to actually feel the big finance and the big tech companies almost seeping into the environment.
It it changes the entire feeling of the city, right? Where basically every thing starts to go through these mega institutions and you actually cannot interact with the society unless you interact with these institutions. And this book is about about that process and about how we have these narratives, about why cash is in decline. And the narrative is always that somehow it's ordinary people who are demanding this. But if you zoom out and you look at the big structural processes in the global economy, actually what's happening is mass automation, the level of finance and tech, and this is what's leading to a structural attack on the cash system, but also an ideological attack on the cash system, which is starting to seep into our culture.
And this book is basically going through that now in the process of releasing this book, I've got a huge amount of flak. All right. I get lots and lots of attacks from people who who basically think that there's something futile about trying to protect the cash system. Um, all right. And this is where this term Luddite, I get called a Luddite, like a person who is against progress. But also there's a growing number of people who are starting to associate pro cash position with conspiracy theorists. They say, Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. If you think there's something wrong with cashless society.
Even in Germany, where I now live in Berlin, lots of people in the far right have started to sort of promote the sort of pro cash thing and people on the sort of centre left. It's kind of like urban sort of liberal people are starting to become a bit like Sketchy about promoting cash. They think that maybe it's going to be associated with conspiracy theorists of the right and it's becoming a big problem in terms of the politics of this issue. So what I want to do today is to try and give the progressive argument for the protection of cash and what to do if you're faced with people who are very pro cashless society and you want to be able to actually articulately give you an articulate account for why cash is super important for maintaining the balance of power in a monetary system.
All right . So that's the basic mission you guys are into it. Okay good . I feel like I got like the graveyard shift here, but I love the enthusiasm nevertheless. Okay. So I'm going to do this in a few steps and each of these steps is basically going to try and help you to understand the process I go through when I'm trying to defend the cash system . Like the first thing you got to do when you're thinking about this issue around cash versus digital money is to understand the global meta narrative that we are subsumed under all the time.
And this goes way beyond the issue of cash and physical cash. This applies to many, many different industries, many different areas. Wherever I go to in the world, no matter what stage I'm on, no matter what forum, forum I'm in, Business leaders and political leaders will endlessly talk about the digital transition in. All right. It's a kind of a mantra that's endlessly repeated. I was at the Brussels Economic Forum a few weeks ago, and literally every single speaker who got up with these sort of policymakers all recited a mantra about the inevitable digital transition that they were helping to try to bring forward.
All right. It's a deep ideological construct in the world right now. And the basic idea is that what progress is, is ever more speed, scale and interconnection brought about by digital automation. Now if you look at this this narrative, it's actually the latest in I would just call it capitalist automation narratives for the last few hundred years, we've had the same process repeating with many different technologies where there's always a leading edge of technology and the leading edge is always like, what is accelerating the system and expanding our system Right now in the world, digital technology is accelerating the capitalist system and expanding it.
So at an ideological level, it's the one untouchable thing. And so this whole endless digitisation type of narrative comes in my perspective. And you might disagree with me out of corporate capitalist ideology, because this is what you use to expand and scale systems as digital technology. We all right now, how this applies to any industry across the world, not just not just payments. And actually you'll find a series the or series of sub narratives that this major narrative generates and you might you'll probably be noticing this right now for example, in the AI debate, these will these will start to be popping up in any kind of digital debate.
All right. So the first the first sort of like sub narrative is the idea that this digital transition is not only inevitable, but there's a race towards it. You'll find all sorts of stories about a race to AI and a race to consciousness and a race to whatever it is. Okay And you're encouraged in the situation to keep up with this race and to not be left behind. Right. You've got to. And if you don't want to lead the way in this race, you better like adapt or sort of just get used to it. Right. Because there's no there's no way of escaping it. Okay That in turn generates a secondary narrative, which is the left behind narrative, which says if you do not do this adaptation, then you will be left behind, right? And that's a very bad thing because you'll basically be chucked off the edge of society in a sense, in a way, it's a little bit like being thrown off the back of a treadmill.
Well, okay. It's like if you if you sort of slow down, you're going to be ejected off the back of a of an economic system that in turn generates an inclusion narrative which says we better save everybody who's about to be left behind. All right. So we better get, for example, the state to onboard people into these new systems, or we better find a series of initiatives to onboard people into the inevitable digital trajectory, for they fear they'll be left behind.
And there's a related narrative of which is the delay narrative, which is to say, give them more time to catch up. Everybody who hasn't yet using the new systems sort of slow down the transition a bit so they can kind of have time to be included and catch up to this this process. I guarantee you in the next like six months with AI, this will start to play out. We're probably in the kind of stage one of the AI debate right now where it's all like, Oh, it's so exciting, isn't it? Who's leading the way? It'll soon be the left behind narrative will come soon after saying, If you don't use AI, you'll be left behind.
And then we better find a whole bunch of programs to include people into the system. Otherwise they'll be like, basically screwed. All right. Now, if you want to understand the payments version of this, this is where the sort of anti cash narrative comes in. All right. Cash is a non-automated physical form of money. So under the context of the digital ideology or that acceleration and expansion ideology, basically cash is cast as something that's slowing down the system. It's causing friction. It's something you basically can't automate, right ? So you'll find all those sub narratives playing out in this debate around cash. So for example, one of the most common things you'll see with with stuff about cashless society is this imagined race towards cashless society. All right. And you can see this, this idea of these players who are or countries who are sort of running towards this this cashless system and some are being left behind, you know, Vietnam, Japan and Thailand are still behind. All right. And one of the fascinating things about these concepts of race is, is that nobody ever agrees to join these races.
Right? It's just something you're sort of told. You're told that you're part of this inevitable trajectory. And this, of course, then generates, according to the overarching ideology, a left behind, a narrative. Right? So there's loads and loads of stories. If you go to the UK right now, you'll find tons of stories about the problem of all the people who will be left behind by cashless society, right? And it's always about vulnerable groups and people who can't get access to bank accounts. And it's like and this generates in turn the inclusion narrative. It says, Oh, well, we better get the British state and we better get the banking sector to work together to basically onboard everybody into the banking sector for.
All right. I remember being on this show with this guy from Citigroup and Citigroup is obviously a massive bank that provides the so-called cashless systems. And the guy was asked, he was like, what do you think the biggest problem of cashless society is? And he said, ensuring that everybody is included. That was his answer. Right? Basically like ensuring that everybody becomes a client of my bank is the major problem, right? Because some people are not yet clients. And he's like, We must work with the state to onboard people into our systems. All right. So it's very much like, imagine like a McDonald's executive is asked, what's the what's the major problem with McDonald's? And he's like making sure that everybody has access to McDonald's.
All right. Because some people don't yet have it. So we must help people get on board with McDonald's. This is literally this narrative, right? All these people are not yet onboarded into corporate capitalism. We better find a way to onboard them. Okay. And along with this comes an upgrade myth, right? This idea that basically we what digital money is, is a kind of upgrade to physical money. Right. Something that's just sort of naturally emerging. And you can see that if you type digital money into a search engine, you always get this kind of like story about like what cash? What digital money is, is some kind of like cash dissolving into data or like cash coming out of computer or cash flying through wires.
Right? This is the idea that there's what it's like a digital form of cash. It's more advanced than than the cash form. And cash basically ends up getting cast as the horse cart of payments. All right. And you can see how this also goes on with those inclusion narratives. Like you could imagine in the early 1900s, people who were into cars saying, you know, my granddad still uses his horse cart, you know, it's like, well, he's a bit of an old timer.
He'll eventually get used to the new world of cars. Okay, This is very much how many politicians present this issue around cash right now. They say, Oh, there's still some old people who use cash. There's still some people who rely upon rely upon it. They'll eventually get used to the inevitable transition and give them some time. All right. But more than this, we'll have it actually being demonised, right? So the anti cash proponents and many of them around the world right now will cast it as being old, inefficient and dangerous. All right.
And they'll compare it to a new efficient and safe digital systems. And they say it's naturally going to happen. That everybody organically wants to upgrade to these digital systems. All right. And along with this is a political narrative about why this happens . So we're this diagram is slightly obscure, but it's based this is a diagram that I use to represent how I think about economies.
Okay Any economy is a giant sort of mesh of interdependent people. We're all like locked together, all right. In the huge sort of interdependent mesh. And in the middle of that, there are all the big corporations. Okay So you can imagine this diagram as being like if you if you're looking at a pyramid from above. All right. So you have these big sort of like players in the middle and then it sort of spreads out into the peripheries, right? So on the streets, all the ordinary sort of people walking around doing transact.
This is the outskirts. And then all the big kind of corporate players in the middle. And in this sort of narrative around cashless society, we have this idea that agency he relies or lies in the outside. So the reason why this is all happening is because ordinary people are choosing to make it happen or everyone just naturally sees that the desire to upgrade to digital systems and these players in the middle simple respond to the demand they like. Almost like a servant who says, We see what you want and we will provide it for you. Right? This is a standard part of corporate ideology. The idea that corporations are mere servants that respond to our demands rather than active players who try to shape your demands and try to shape systems in their in their favour. Okay. So this is the sort of state of play right now when we're thinking about the cash system. I have some water. Okay In the remaining part of the talk, what I'm going to do is introduce to ways to destabilise that narrative. All right. And I'm going to introduce two sort of bodies of metaphor to do this.
Um, so part three and four here are kind of like tactics to use once you've understood the meta narratives that are at play in the overarching debate. Okay. So the first is this concept of the casino chip society, and I've crossed out cashless there because I what the cashless society is, is essentially a society where you're relying upon. I'll go into this, you'll see what I mean.
All right. Well one of the biggest problems we have right now when we when you deal with money systems in the public domain, is what I would call myself, the one type of money illusion. So many people believe that, for example, the euro or the pound or the dollar is a single currency. Right They'll sort of see it as being this sort of singular thing. And it has maybe a digital form and a physical form, but it's a singular kind of a currency, a bit like, you know, comparing a electric guitar to an acoustic guitar. You're like, Well, they're basically both guitars, but one is like slightly automated and one's not right. So people have got this idea that there's this one type of money in society. When in reality actually there's multiple forms of money in society and they all go into the same name, right? So the euro actually has multiple different issuers, has multiple different layers and multiple different forms. They all go under the single term euro. All right. Now, one of the easiest ways to grasp this and to understand this is through the metaphor of a casino.
Okay? So if I go to a casino now and I hand in cash at the cashier, they will hand me chips. All right. Those chips are a secondary form of money issued out by a private player, a casino that can be used within the confines of the casino. All right. And I can then take them back and redeem them back for cash at some point. But you can see there's a conceptual difference between the cash held by the casino and the chips that I use.
All right. Those are two different forms issued by two different players. Okay. And actually, this is very similar to what happens with the banking sector. So all those units that you see in your bank account are essentially privately issued digital casino chips issued by the banking sector. Right? So if you hand cash into a bank, they don't hold that cash for you. They take ownership of that cash and they issue out these digital casino chips to you. Right. It's the same. Even if you get digital transfers in the background. This is what's happening. You're receiving bank issued digital casino chips or what's referred to as the cashless society. It's a situation where you basically become totally dependent upon these second tier corporate issued privately issued digital casino chips. There are some nuances to this.
One of the great superpowers that banks have that casinos do not have is that banks are able to issue out far more of these digital chips than they have in cash in reserves, as it were. And this is sometimes called fractional reserve banking or more accurately referred to as credit creation of money. Basically, banks can push out these chips into society to mobilise whole sections of the economy when they issue when they're giving out loans. All right. So there's a huge power thing going on with the banks ability to create money like this, create the second tier form of money.
Okay. But the basic point is that all those units you see in your bank account are a privately issued form of money issued out by the banking sector. And every time you're you know, if you're here buying coffee with your with your contactless card or something, you're being routed through a huge system, through an oligopoly of banks that are basically have a background system for moving these digital chips between between themselves.
All right. And visa and MasterCard and all these players get involved. This is a somewhat obscure picture on my um, I have I have a substack where I sometimes draw these like pictures of the monetary system. And this is one of my earlier ones. And it basically shows the banking sector hovering over society and the processes that happen when you're sort of pinging your card in one of those terminals.
And it's pinging through these data centre structures. But the basic point is they are transferring these digital chips between themselves and they're getting fees and huge amounts of data in the process. And there's a huge industry around this. All right. And they have a massive agenda in promoting a cashless society. And this means when you go, for example, to an ATM, the way you should be thinking about it is you're taking those digital casino chips that have been issued out by the banking sector and you're redeeming them back for state money, a bit like going to the casino cashier and saying, I want to exit your system.
All right. So when you go to the ATM, you're basically exiting the banking system. You're exiting that sort of secondary form of money. And so this becomes very important in the context of what's happening in places like the UK right now in Berlin, you can still easily go to ATMs, you can still go to bank branches. But in places like the UK, it's becoming super, super difficult. And basically it's a bit like a casino saying we're not going to allow you to redeem your chips anymore.
We're not going to allow you to exit our systems. You'll be permanently stuck in our systems. You will only be able to use our digital casino chips, as it were. Now what happens is when you can't cash your digital chips, this is a bunch of issues and this is the sort of first line of concerns about cashless society for a start, there's a legal problem. Imagine you went to a casino and they refused to redeem your chips for you. You could basically sue them and say you're trying to you're not. You're reneging upon your promise. Those those casino chips that I'm holding basically only have power to because they are redeemable back for cash.
All right. As soon as you can't redeem them, there's a huge legal issue, but there's also a massive financial stability issue. The reason that you believe in those chips is that you believe that they can be redeemed back. For state money. It's the same thing with those bank units. The reason people people believe in the cashless systems, as it were, is that they believe at some level those units are redeemable back for state money. And I'll let you in on something here. If you are following the digital euro debates and there's probably some talks at this event about it, actually, the Bundesbank has got a stand about it somewhere there. The reason why the digital euro debates are happening right now is central bankers know about this. They know that there's a huge problem, that if the cash system goes down, there's going to be massive public, basically a crisis of confidence in the digital systems. Right. So those those digital casino chips, basically the public loses belief in them if they cannot be redeemed for cash.
So ironically , cashless systems depend upon on the cash system to give them their very legitimate legitimacy and stability. See, now this is more of like a technical kind of point. Many people in the public don't really see this. They don't really understand this so much. It's a more of a kind of a background structural issue about the monetary system.
So when I'm dealing with people sort of more on a kind of day to day basis who are not really interested in the sort of legal and financial stability issues of this, I will use a different metaphor. Um, and I'm going to go into it. I have to have some water here. Okay So I mentioned earlier that the way that the digital payments industry and many people who are being caught up in digital ideology will present cash as being the horse cart of payments. All right. Competing against some kind of sports car of payments if you want to rewire this narrative and you want to totally change the perspective, all you to do is this here, right? So you cast cash as being the bicycle of payments and the digital systems as being the Uber payments.
And it immediately shifts power dynamic and immediately immediately shifts. It breaks people out of this kind of digital ideology in a way, because actually, you start to realise that our society is full of systems that are slower and less automated, but we actually value them deeply. All right. And I can give you many examples of this. For example, we might enjoy a fast lift in a skyscraper, but that doesn't mean that you asked for these stairs to be removed from the skyscraper, right? In most systems, you want to keep a balance of power between the different elements of the system. And this creates resilience in your system right . And it's very similar with the transport system.
If you're designing a resilient transport system, you want to have a balance of power between the different players. And this is why I like this metaphor because actually I don't have a problem with Uber. I actually use Uber quite a bit, right? But I do not want Uber to be the only form of transport and the transport system. I want the ability to use a bicycle too. And this is the best way to start thinking about the payment system. Payment system as well. Cash is not the horse car to payments. It's like the bicycle of payments. Or maybe it's like the mountain biker payments, depending on which of those you prefer.
This is a very good thought experiment as well, because once you can start to tease out the problems that emerge when this balance of power is disturbed, you can imagine what would happen in a society where Uber was the only form of transport. So right now you perceive Uber as being convenient, right? And one of the reasons that you perceive it as being positive is that you have the option to not use it, right? You have alternatives available in the situation where you have no alternatives available. That's when all the negative sides come out and you can imagine what would happen in a society where your only means of transport was Uber. You'd have massive problems of centralisation, of power, you'd have a massive attack on your autonomy.
Essentially, you wouldn't be able to move without this entity giving you permission. You'd have huge surveillance problems, right? You would also have massive resilience problems. If the system goes down, your entire system freezes up, you would have massive exclusion problems, too, right? If you can't access a system, if you don't want to access a system, you wouldn't be able to move and it would basically be an attack on localisation as well. Any any attempt to move would have to go through a huge central entity all the time. And this is one of the best ways to think about this cash debate. Often when you're debating people about cash, they want to they want to get you into this either or style of thinking like only using cash or only using digital. But the point about any monetary system is that you can get a balance of power between the different types and the two sort of competing tenants that you have in the cash system is that you have autonomy over it.
You have personal control over the cash system, plus it runs on a public infrastructure. It's a public system, right? The private systems, they might be convenient, but you build a huge amount of dependence upon them and they relydon't necessarily mind moderate degrees of dependence, but when you have total dependence, that's when all the problems emerge in a society. So I'll call this in the last few minutes. I'll sketch out the main sort of categories of problems that emerge when this balance of power is destabilised. So one of the first ones, of course, is that you have huge resilience problems, cash systems.
These digital systems are hugely vulnerable to systems failure. I was even at a music festival in the UK recently where they basically were forcing everyone to use these cashless systems and the internet went down and the entire festival basically ground to a halt. All right. And some of the vendors that still had cash facilities so they were able to get get money but loads the main beer tent in the festival was turning away hundreds of people who were trying to get beer right. So it was sort of like convenience in a very sort of like narrow sense, but deeply, deeply vulnerable to a systems failure .
And there's many examples you can give of this type of issue in these systems. The second big category of problems that emerges is about inclusion versus exclusion in the cash system is inherently inclusive, right? It's a public infrastructure. You don't need permission to use it. You don't you basically don't need any form of account. So one of the big issues around inclusion is people who can't get access to accounts, but more, more deeply people who are deliberately excluded from account accounts. So if you're looking at authority systems, if you want to exclude people by basically banning them from using digital systems, you can shut out their ability to survive. All right. And this is becoming a huge issue in people's concerns about the control that you can exert via digital payments when cash isn't an option to be to use the another big category of concerns that people have, and this is one of the biggest ones, people often think about is privacy versus surveillance.
And it's worth thinking about this in balance of power terms. Sometimes it's useful to have certain degrees of transparency in society, but you don't want total surveillance, right? So cash provides that bulwark against total surveillance use. But there are other deeper ones as well. Localised action versus centralisation. I don't have time to go into this, but basically when you start to look at what's happening in cashless society, you're having a huge transfer of power to these centralised entities. This basically means that even the smallest interaction at a local scale always benefits a large player, a large, distant player. So if you want to maintain any form of local economy, it basically becomes impossible in these types of systems because every single small scale local transaction basically makes a large central entity bigger and more powerful. Finally actually, there's two more to go. This one's a bit more obscure. We often told that frictionless ness is a natural good because under the digital ideology it's imagined that endless acceleration and expansion is naturally good.
But when you start to look at one of the main reasons people use cash is to actually slow down spending. The reason why low people from lower socioeconomic groups will use cash is often for budgeting purposes and there's loads of studies that show digital payments basically accelerate spending. This here comes from visa in its benefits of going cashless. PAGE Right. Visa has a massive agenda, obviously in promoting digital payments because they make huge amounts of fees from it and they try to sell it like this by saying people spend 25 to 40% more with digital payments.
So if you basically force people to use digital, you can make more money, right? But this has huge implications for indebtedness. People with mental health, all sorts of issues like that. And then the final my last 40s, the final category, which is actually one of the most obscure, but also one of the most important, I think is the balance of power between informal systems and formal systems. You know, one of the reasons why Berlin feels is so alive to many people is it's got a good balance of power between informal and formal.
Right? You've got big state structures that underpin certain things and corporations, but there's also a lot of community spaces. There's lots of peer to peer spaces. It has a kind of sort of edginess that sort of coexists with the formal systems. And most people actually like a balance of power between formal and informal, but often informal economies are demonised in sort of modern and many sort of mainstream circles. But if you think about what informal economies often are, it's friends playing poker at home together, and it's a kid selling lemonade on the street. You know, it's like an honesty box in a farm in rural in in rural part of a country. Right. And there's many of these sort of small scale situations where cash actually makes a lot more intuitive sense to people.
But imagine what happens when basically these digital corporates like Visa, MasterCard, banking sector, basically creep into even the smallest of these informal interactions. It changes the entire vibe of your society. Now, this is one of the hardest arguments to make, especially to kind of mainstream policymakers . They kind of like glaze over when you say this, but I think it's actually one of the most important things that's at stake here. What do you want your society to feel like? Do you want to feel basically MasterCard cards, executives breathing over you every single time you're doing even the smallest thing in the society? And I'm going to end there and I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you can make use of this framework to start to build arguments for the promotion of cash. And thank you for your attention.
Brett. Thank you. Light is come. Thank all right. Here I am. Brett Cash legend Scott and yeah if have much time, but you can ask him and you can buy signed copies at the book table. We're going to continue straight away without a break with Lena Swartz. And she also knows something about cash. She's a professor at the University of Virginia. She does research on digital payments and digital currencies. And she also has a background in journalism. And she wrote a book about scams and which is really interesting to me. I'd like to be a scammer myself. Seems interesting.
And so she's going to talk about how scams are a fundamental part of technology change, and I'm really looking forward to it. So welcome, Lana. Hello. Thank you so much. So today I'm going to talk a bit about some recent research I've been doing. I'm a professor, as we mentioned, so I normally talk to academic audiences a little bit smaller than this one, but I'm super excited to be with you today. So according to various reports in the popular media in the US, but also beyond the years that every year for the last half decade or so. So we're all year of the scam except 2017 for some reason I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever called 2017 the year of the scam. But otherwise, 2016, 2018, 2019, 20, 20, 21, 22 and so on have all been described as year of the scam scam comes from catfishing to multi-level marketing schemes to sham crypto currencies abound on the social web and some of the flashiest investment opportunities adjacent to the tech economy have been turned out to be scams. Social media has proven to be fertile ground for a world in which scams make sense and for the diffusion of scams themselves.
And we can't seem to get enough of these scams and scammers. Some of the most popular fictional non-fictional movies shows, television, podcasts, etcetera have all been about scams. So what are we to make of this apparent scam age? So I'm going to use some research today, drawing from my longer term research on FinTech cryptocurrencies, which I've been looking at since about 2011, and some a little bit of recent research on Central Bank issued digital currencies to explore the idea of scams, to reflect on various facets of the work that scams do and the idea, the work that the work that the idea of scams do in both the production of the future and of money itself. So like I said, I'm a professor, so I tend to turn to historians and scholars from a variety of perspectives have identified the idea that scams are indeed a social construction history in Stephen Mihm has described how in late 19th century America at its that at its core, as he put it, can capitalism was little more than a confidence game because as long as confidence was nourished , even the most far fetched speculation could get off the ground and wealth would increase the same could be true today.
I theorise scams. Therefore as a kind of capitalism out of place is what we call a scam is used to perform boundary work that justifies some and legitimates some form of capitalism and some forms of exploitation and illegitimate others. Scams are particularly important. I argue now to understand now, because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism seem to be in flux. In part, this is due to the larger turn away from traditional institutions of the capitalist market economy and of its twin consumer protection. In a turn that the transformation of money from crypto to the platform economy and fintech are very much situated within and accelerating. We are now told that nearly everything in the college degree, the 9 to 5 job, the promise of retirement, at least in the US, the entire market democratic system is a scam. This may be true, but the claims are almost always as an advertisement to move on and jump ship to something far more ambiguous, far more multi valent and in a word, scam me scams.
Then in fill and also reveal unmet human need need for identity. Need for sociality need for agency. Need for a future for scams. Not only fill the gaps of failing institutions, but take their shape. And again, as I mentioned with retirement, this may be a particularly American experience, but America is very good at exporting. Both affect and business models. And a key point I want to make in this presentation is that this boundary work with drawing lines between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism is currently being used to design monetary infrastructure, to terraform the economy of the future. I also want to be sure that we put the kind of gloss global racial politics of scams at the centre for while the withering of institution loans and the rise of the scam economy feels like a crisis, it is likely only understood that way because this structure of feeling has moved from the fringes.
Poorer women, black and brown people, people in the global South to the core of the white global North. There are many people for whom institutional promises have never worked, for whom hustling was always a way to get by, for whom respectability was always a losing strategy. And I would point to two key books here. One LaShawn Harris's psychics number runners and black women in New York City's underground economy, and Jovan Scott Lewis's fascinating, provocative work on Jamaican call centre scams as a form of economic reparation In both Harris and Lewis, find a kind of liberatory potential in scams.
But as the hustle once racially coded, becomes more mainstream, I'm I am wrestling with how to understand and its liberatory potential in an age where mainstream white supremacist movements in the United States, at least, are saliently marked by grift and scams as the main thing that they do. It's easy to see that scammy populism is far from inclusive, so I want to always kind of remember that talking about scams is also, though, a way of talking about power and privilege. When more people, white people, men are not being served by institutions, is that's when it starts to feel like those institutions are collapsing. So I also want to constantly remind myself, as I study scams, to ask how new scam institutions re-entrench whiteness? How does the work of categorising and building infrastructure around scams serve existing power? So in order to kind of tackle scams, I'm going to look at it through three angles. Three key ideas that are perhaps seem very different from each other, but I think are very interesting facets to unpacking scams. Part one FinTech. So as a starting question, I want to ask how do scams shape fintech? And in my in some ways I am perhaps uniquely qualified to study scams because I spent the last decade studying cryptocurrency and payment systems and have become an accidental expert on scams.
And to some extent, their prevention and mitigation. In my 2020 book, New Money How Payment Became Social Media, I argue that money is among other things, a communication technology, e.g. money communicates value. I pay you $20 or ■k720 and my account is debited and yours is credited. Or you now have a ■k720 note anI don't. But these transactions don't happen telepathically in. Instead they are enacted through infrastructures and technologies which are always instantiations of meaning and power. We often imagine that the politics of money is economic. Who has money , who doesn't and why? But if focus on money in its communicative form on payment allows us to see new meaning and new politics, it's who gets to control and profit from communication infrastructure, who gets to access on what terms , what travel gets, what kinds of traffic.
Get to travel over it, what kinds of transactions are labelled scams and what kinds aren't. And so the history of money tracks alongside that of other communication medium, including print money, including the post office, including modems, which that is what this is. This third picture is a modem powdered point of sale system from the 70s and indeed the very same systems that were used to build the early Internet were also used to build the infrastructure of payment. And of course, today, mobile phones and social media are the site of innovation for our communicative worlds, including money and so too, just as commerce, like any other form of communication, tracks alongside these communication channels, so too does its shadowy other scams.
There have been new scams native to every new financial technology. Many scams are a fundamental part of technological change. Each new innovation creates new opportunities for innovative exploitation. So scams work by pushing up against and discovering the limits of technological economic and social systems. In turn, scams like all undesired behaviour shape the norms and rules of communication systems. These rules have institutional effects and consequences far beyond the initial case they were meant to deal with. One of my friends and favourite communication scholars, Tarleton Gillespie, has described that in platforms , every traffic light is a tombstone in that is every rule is an evidence of a previous lack of a rule. Scams Then tell us something about the important sociotechnical vulnerabilities in the economy and in communication, ecosystems and so it's also important to note that how the category of scams and the work of fraud prevention authorised surveillance and other forms of social control over the years of studying FinTech, I have become obsessed with chargeback X, which is like an obscure detail of the way car transact loans work.
That pretty much controls everything about the way payment systems are priced and managed. And you don't have to understand or follow this chart, but if you're interested, I presented it quite a bit in the book. And so chargebacks essentially are when a customer formally requests their money back from a cardholder. And this is rather a customer formally request their money back from a merchant. And this is usually pursued as a last resort when the customer can't come to an agreement or satisfaction with the merchant themselves, when they, in a word , feel as though they have been scammed.
And in my book, I describe how chargebacks or rather the imagined risk of chargebacks structure, nearly all pricing in the credit card industry. Those merchants who are considered at high risk of chargebacks, whether or not they actually have chargebacks or not , are likely to pay a much higher rate for receiving credit card payments. And this is a market for risk that enables merchants to access this. The network, some of these are truly scammers, right? Chargeback fees, indeed have been used to choke off scammers from payment infrastructure. But like all categorisation work, there's power here and lots of ways to wind up on the wrong side of this categorisation. And so is a particularly interesting case for two reasons. I mean, it's considered high risk for two reasons. First, because of the social stigma, right? A lot of people falsely claim that their spouse or parents or employer that they didn't make this transaction for, even if they actually did. And so there's a lot of chargebacks for, but also the industry itself is scammy. There are lots of surprise recurring payments. She was selling of user lists. And so on .
And so now, well, I'll skip this and say and so it also means that anyone who winds up getting categorised as risky can wind up losing access to payments in my book, I explore this through the case of a sex worker, an online sex worker named Eden Alexander, a creator who's medical fundraiser, which, yes, we have medical fundraisers in the United States, was labelled and thus risky. Risky for chargebacks. When she and thus prohibited to be used on the crowdfunding platform because she retweeted a friend who offered to donors. There are countless examples of people suddenly losing access to pay or be paid and blocked.
Users have very little means of challenging the platforms assessment of themselves and their transactions. Any person who wants to get paid electronically is beholden to and governed by systems that are inconsistently enforced experimental, opaque, and offer little recourse for contestation. And it's the scam imaginary via chargebacks that drives most of these decisions. This is the case in the US, but across the world, mainstream electronic payments in mainstream electronic payments, there is this slippage between disputes and scams, money laundering, all of which authorise know your customer regulation, which creates heightened surveillance and control, all which I which will certainly be an issue for emerging cbdcs and may make the difference between what could be called a surveillance coin and something that looks more like digital cash. And so to return to the question, how do scams shape fintech scams create a paradox for fintech? Most of the time, people want to transact without being scammed. ED But new payment technologies are fundamentally criminogenic. People are always finding new ways to do crimes with them.
At the same time, scams are supposed to be exceptional, and yet how much of the mundane infrastructures of our everyday transact lives are shaped by them? How is the future form of tomorrow's FinTech being built during this scam age shaped by them? Part part to the future and same question How do scams shape the future? Much any I alongside many other scholars argue, is a form of futurity. We only accept money because we think it will be accepted by someone else tomorrow and tomorrow. And tomorrow. And indeed all crypto projects are characterised by this futurity.
They are, at their core an attempt to summon an alternative future in the present, they promise a range of possible futures. Some cryptocurrencies are valuable because the blockchain systems they entail will someday be seen to have triumphed over centralised and surveillance. Incumbents as in other visions exists financial and governmental institutions have become so authoritarian or so incompetent or both that cryptocurrencies are necessary to sustain economic and communicative freedom. Um. All of these visions are, on some level, imagining what comes after liberal market democracy. But some of these are also no scam cryptocurrencies or scam communities and scam futures.
Crypto is, at its core, an attempt to build a future in which institute questions their paternalism, but also their safety nets are made obsolete by organising collective action beyond their purview. Crypto promises freedom, including the freedom to scam and be scammed. Crypto is worth something now in the market and maybe in the future that is promise. But this leads to scams like rug pulls where blockchain creators take the money and run and pump and dumps where the trading value is artificially driven up and bag holders are left with a worthless token and maybe a dream shattered again and again in crypto, the blockchain dream of a radically decentralised future was deferred to a yet more distant future. But some people make a lot of money in the process, perpetuating the hype that drives interest in the blockchain in the first place.
So crypto then could be seen as a frenzy to bring about a future driven by a collective that doesn't even really believe in that future. When I talk to people in crypto through my interviews and research, they tell me time and time again to beware of everyone else that I'm interviewing or talking to. They say to me things like, You have to understand that you can't trust what anyone says because everyone else is just pumping their bags. They're trying to realise a return on their investment in crypto currency. In this context, just pumping your bags is indistinguishable from promoting your vision for a better world. A true believer is indistinguishable from a shill. A shill is indistinguishable from a rational actor or someone trying perhaps desperately to protect their investment, maybe even their life savings.
Everyone tells everyone else to hodl, you know, hold on to their investment. Don't sell it off. But no one wants to be left holding the bag. No one wants to be the last one left who still believes in the blockchain dream. Crypto scams are ambivalent, but therein lies Is a Phrygian a kind of collective effervescence that makes an ambivalent belief in the future and thus collective action even possible all in the popular imagination as well as in academic literature.
Though scams are often seen as individualistic, right? A game with two actors. There's the con artist and the mark. But the scams I see in crypto and in the digital economy more broadly are better understood to maintain the game metaphor as a kind of massively multiplayer online game. They are networked, decentralised without a clear sense of perpetrators and victims. And it's an everyone who participating sort of oscillates between the two roles be on crypto, the digital economy seems to be fertile ground for similar formations. These kinds of activities are both a reaction to the precarity caused by the withering of institutions and a deepening of it multi-level marketing.
You know, popular retail investor as exemplified by the GameStop rally work in the pyramid shaped attention economy drop shipping online certification courses from yoga coaching to life coaching, growth, hacking and various other forms of passive income. All of this sits within what could be called the hustle economy, where everyone is reminded to respect the hustle of the next person to always try to out hustle them and accept when they themselves have been outhustled. And these activities are frequently described as scammy, if not outright scams. But it's difficult to pin down who exactly is the scammer and who exactly is being scammed like crypto. All of these network scams are an attempt to bring about a shared future wealth for individuals, but also maybe a change in how the economy is run.
And that effort is fundamentally characterised by ambiguity and asymmetry among participants. There is an uneven likelihood of benefit from the scam and an uneven belief in the likelihood of the promised future. And it's impossible to know who really believes and who doesn't. And of course, network scams, as I've described, are not new. Herman Melville, in his 1857 novel The Confidence Man, offers what sets this novel aboard a steamship sailing down the Mississippi River and everyone on the steamship is trying to scam each other and ultimately, it's unclear to whom the confidence man of the title refers.
Everything is blurred and the commerce and con con artist and chump. The novel satirise uses the idea that there that that scams are an aberration within capitalism, but rather indicates that all capitalism is on some level a form of a con. And literary scholars have analysed this novel and asked questions like how is it possible that noted that this novel is asking us to think about how it's possible to distinguish fact from fiction? Entrepot commercial ingenuity from a well disguised fraud? And what kind of moral universe are we living in? If we have to walk around asking ourselves these questions every day? But the novel itself is ambiguous. It's, as one literary scholar puts it, that the implicit message of the novel is that it's better to take the leap. Trust the confidence man, including our own inner confidence man. Because a retreat from commercial society is miserly in a moral sense. You have to be willing to enter into scam full relations to participate in free association for social life itself. And the same could be true today. Our participating in scams are a preconditions of terms of participating in the digital economy.
Part three Florida. So I've grown to kind of begun to realise that there might be sort of deeper audio autobiographical roots to my interest in scams. I grew up in Miami, Florida, in the 80s and 90s, and I've spent my entire adulthood trying to run away from Florida and I consider getting out of the swamp one of my greatest achievements. And now I find myself drawn back to Florida for the very reasons that drew me away. Florida is, quite literally, a land terraformed made possible by scams. The security regulations in the US, notably the Howey Test, used to regulate crypto today and other licensed other unlicensed security keys were developed in response to Florida swampland scams in the first part of the 20th century.
Florida was the crypto, the network scam of the 20th century, the early 20th century. It was the future, but it was mostly a scam future. Florida was also the infrastructure works of the time and that true. That too was also mostly a scam. Indeed, I grew up right near the terminus of Dixie Highway, which is a highway that was built to connect the Midwest to the to Miami as literally a part of a scam to defraud the federal government and create a highway corridor for to sell scams. History tells us that the Florida land boom scams went bust in the night with the 1928 hurricane, which devastate Miami. But of course, it didn't . It TerraForm TerraForm Swamp Land is also TerraForm ING a future Dixie Highway. So that scam highway building project and highway of scams, of course, still exists.
I know this because it now has ten lanes in both directions. Us and I could hear it from my bedroom at night just because all was revealed to be a scam doesn't mean it just goes away. Life in Florida. When I was a kid was marked by the experimental, the entrepreneurial, the scammy. Everyone's parents sold vitamins , some sold or smuggled drugs or timeshares or modelling contracts or ran a church or a cult, or were lawyers to those who did. Everyone had a hustle. It feels to me like the Florida of my childhood, which felt like the edge of civilisation, has gone mainstream to a modalities of scam kind of diagonal in the American geography. A Silicon Valley in the Northwest and Florida and the Southeast are closing in on the rest of the world and there's this kind of osmotic threshold in which scam reality becomes just reality.
Even the promise, even if the promised future, doesn't come to be some future inevitably does. And so the what happens when the future is actually just something that happens in the aftermath of a scam future. So the question I'd like to leave with the task I think is really important to answer right now as we imagine new forms of economy, new ways of building infrastructures is how do you keep living in futures that were never meant to be? How do you keep living in futures that were supposed to be scammed? Us and I will point you to my two books which are available wherever books are sold.
Little scamming myself. And also I have one article that's been translated into German and the link is there. Thank you so much. Hi. Sorry if my baby. Sorry I got distracted by my baby. Terrible So thank you very much. Lana Swartz. We're going to have a short break and afterwards, we're going to have Gerhard Schick up on stage with a really cool talk about who has the power to go against the finance lobby. And I'm going to really look forward to that. So see you then. Hello Hello. Welcome to Hello. Welcome. Happy to see so many of you here. I'm sorry to talk about my fracture all the time, but I really feel like it's getting better all the time. I hope it's not just adrenaline.
It's actually getting better. I'm happy to announce Jacek. He is the co-founder and the CEO of the organisation Finance Vendor, which is a financial turn. He was a member of the Green Party in the Parliament and he was working on bank regulations. Since 2018. He's no longer in the German Parliament, but he's fighting in the finance vendor for a fair financial market. I just heard in the backstage that he also had a broken ankle at some point, but he can work very well now and he's coming on the stage now. Gerhard Shake, thank you for being here. Yeah, hello. And yeah, hello. Thank you for the nice introduction. I'm happy that you're interested in the financial lobby, but maybe it's considered a kind of a dry topic .
My idea is that we start with a little walk, a little walk that will lead us to a cemetery . You might have imagined something nicer for the sunny afternoon. But it's not just any cemetery. It is the cemetery of deceased financial market laws. The cemetery of failed financial market regulations. We have a first prominent deceased, the European separate bank Banks Act . It was brought up very well by the parents in the European Commission under the leadership of the former Finnish Central bank president Liikanen. And then it suddenly died during a meeting of the European Council . One says that Richard's murder was committed by the big French banks. Another significant, significant casualty casualty is the auditory form might be something for connoisseurs after it was the attempt, after the financial crisis 2008, to get more honesty into into the financial sector. The father was the EU commissioner, Michel Barnier. But the involved parties said the auditor lobby basilius That's the worst they've ever seen. And so in the end it died.
No one really noticed, no one until yeah, until the Wirecard scandal, when everyone started asking how the auditor did not notice the fraud, we continued on our cemetery and we arrive at something maybe more, more famous. That person, the financial transaction tax. It's a bit older. It was introduced in the 1970s by the Nobel laureate James Tobin, and for the longest time it was rather a rather obscure life in academia. But then after the financial crisis, it gained great prominence in the sense that it became a symbol of whether it would be possible. All to reintegrate the financial markets in society and have them partake in the costs of the financial side. But then consumption, one state after another withdrew from the project. And then in the end, the assessment basis became smaller and smaller until at some point in 2020, the reform was buried. We can continue the next victim would be the regulation of the money market funds. Also very tragic. But I don't want you to I don't want to bore you anymore with these sad things, but we want to talk about something nice a billions with nice return turns.
And I want to tell you how you can succeed if you already have some problematic business strategies. What all the deaths have in common is that many of the initiatives that started in 28 to reregulate the financial markets whenever it starts to get close to the concrete business strategies where money is being earned, its started to fail. Let's look at something more concretely. Where it went, where was there was concern with high returns and billions of profits for example of why occurred. A DAX company whose business model apparently contained fraudulent elements. A judge in Munich who do not envy for this task is currently decoding this in more detail. But what we what we can see that Marcus Brown, the CEO, and Jan Marszalek, the CFO, managed to win over all the key people. The financial regulator Bafin. Did not fight the fraudsters, but instead the people that tried to uncover this scandal. The prosecutors office did not investigate the Ministry of Finance and the Chancellor's office intervened on behalf of the Freudian corporation, for example, when they wanted to expand into China for the money laundering supervision.
They didn't have to do anything because it doesn't work anyway. In Germany, many analysts and journalists dutifully taught the success story for Muschenheim. How did they manage to do that? Well from 2016 to 2020, Wirecard . Spent ■k762.4 million on lobbying activities as, for example, the former ministers were hired to make guest appearances and told talks in Berlin, Spitzberg Partners, the company of the former minister, Guttenberg, for example, earned ■k7760,000 for the engagement fr in the service of Wirecard. So I want to invite you to look at these business models from a different point of view. They make problematic businesses, earn millions or billions, and then they take a fat chunk of this to influence politics and the public. And in this way they can continue undisturbed with their crooked business.
This has worked like a charm for Wirecard over the years, and we wirecard damaged German reputation a lot and 20 million billions of euros in market capitalisation just vanished into thin air, into thin air. And many investors and banks lost a lot of money. But these are bygone times. Let's look at the topic that is still going on today. Some families in Germany have assets worth billions and they don't want to pay inheritance tax on them. They organise themselves in the family Business Foundation, according to the lobby register , their budget was a little less than ■k71 million in the year 2021, where it was first accounted record.
And if you take into account that in addition, there are some private discussions between billionaires and individual members of the Parliament in their constituency offices or with some some ministers, then we can estimate that they spend about ■k72 milln per year to influence politics. So since 26, that would add up to about ■k735 million as a rouh estimate. And in this way they have succeeded in various ways for years having their assets transferred to the next generation for free of inheritance tax as much like Queen Elizabeth and King Charles . This is astonishing because the federal constitutional court has in 2006 and 2014 criticised the precisely this privilege twice and requested the government to change that and for two times the they've created a law twice that was evidently only against the federal Constitution. But federal government, parliamentarians and all institutions guaranteed these types privilege for billion families and over and over and the consequence of that is that the largest tax subsidy in Germany goes to the very largest , very richest family in this country.
This is I think this is scandalous. Since 2009, these privileges have saved over a saved over ■k776 billion in inheritance taxes. Let's put that into relation. An input. About ■k734 million, resulting n in about 736 billion in illegal privileges. That's a amazing return of like 2,000% hit none of these billionaires whether they were washing washing machines or detergents, would get generate any that kind of return in their business.
So what would you do. Put money into research or. With the prospects of 5 or 10% of return? Or what do you all also bet on the super return of lobbying. The Grundgesetz. Unfortunately, the billionaires in this case won against overall constitution, and this should not be happen. It's also very nice. Other example is that something that virtually everyone here is involved in? You maybe know that almost everyone who is talking about giving financial advice in Germany is actually a salesperson when they. Against the commission, they are being recommended financial products that are being offered by the company. Not really what you actually need at the moment, 290,000 people earn earn in this way. Their money, their money in Germany, independent fee only financial advertisers. There are 639. It's a huge discrepant fee. So almost everything that happens in Germany is a financial advice by salesperson . Maybe someone else also remembers the Lehman granny. There was discussed in 2008.
In before the 2008 Financial Finance crisis. Financial crisis , they had customers. Oh, and see old and stupid where who were sold the certificates of the of Lehman when the professionals at the financial markets had long stopped to give money to the bank and they did this for a good commission. Of course. So after the financial crisis, there was an initiative to really finally stop this commission business, business. There is a study by the commission of the by the EU Commission that female customers pay around a quarter more for products sold on commission. But just recently, another attempt, this time by EU Commissioner McGuinness, failed. It was already the third attempt to ban to ban this necessary financial market law. I refuse. I left this out earlier when we worked through the cemetery because this law died three times already.
But why can't this. How is it? How is it possible that this problematic form of financial sales keeps existing even though people want it? A financial advice that is in their interest, like the tax adviser or the lawyer that is only allowed to work in the client's interest. You would also want a financial adviser to work like this. But if you look at life insurance companies, they generate acquisition costs of ■k78.3 billion in 2021, and around two thirds of these are commission earnings as the saving banks generated a net commission income of ■k78.5 billion in 2020.
So this is one of the most important financial product distributors in Germany and in Germany, an important actor is Hedvig, the German Wealth Advisors. And if we now look at how this works in practice, then we can look at the biggest donors to party. The German Wealth Advisors was one of the largest political donors in Germany, and in recent times they especially distributed a lot of money close to the time when the Commission ban was overturned. This is the flywheel of lobbying that we see in everyday. Those who have billions use apart for lobbying and get great returns from this and can save the billions for the future.
This is especially problematic when, as in the case of Wirecard criminals use this model. But more about this later . I now want to invite you to look at what this leads to in the end, with every single example you can say, Well, okay, that's how it is. But if you look at the total picture, then you can see that it is a very dangerous development. We call it financialization. We mean by this that the encroachment of the short term return logic of the financial markets on new areas of society where it probably shouldn't exist within the last 20 years, the financial sector in Europe has grown significantly faster than the real economy.
I'll try and display that for you. My example talked to you about that before . The relationship between financial markets, financial market activity and real economy was at 1 to 4 for each car that was produced for each unit of gross domestic product. There was. Four times at financial market activity. Now it's at 8 to 1. So the relationship between financial market and the real economy has doubled. So these are numbers for European Union, but this counts growth. Well, that's McKinsey published that recently from the financial sector has grown globally from 460% in 2000 to 6, 600% of global GDP. And now ask yourself if that is anything that is sustainable. Can this continue, continue in the long term? Can the financial sector really grow quicker than the real economy? So the you know, something that some are the returns have to generate it somewhere and, you know, we'll show illustrate that and in an area of society and the activities of financial investors and so-called private equity firms in nursing.
So in a sector characterised by relatively labour intensive business and tightly calculated calculated care rates, private equity firms are pulling out 15 to 20% returns. How does that work? Well all the building, the real estate that was the houses, the nursing home, they can embed that into an investment firm in Luxembourg and now the property becomes a tradable security. The nursing home becomes part of an international corporation in the where the profits are channelled abroad into a tax saving manner with many saving many financial transactions and the third, the date are taken on to buy the nursing home are charged onto the nursing home itself so that a home that used to be seriously financed now uses only about 5 or 10% of its own money to finance the rest with debt. Debt And so when there's no money for the original needed caregivers, there's a 15, 15 to 20% return for the investors as. And. Now how many people in the financial sector are earning more with that but not these those who need care are benefiting from this situation in so if you were looking for nursing home for your where your elderly parents could be well cared for now you should probably not choose one that mean where returns are so much put into the fund front.
So that's what we mentioned with financialization. The term logic , short term logic of the financial market is being transferred to areas of society where it was not to be found in the past. And that means and which shouldn't probably have no place and that leads to nursing , for example, areas of society where the profits are made don't end up where the where people need them. But it ends up in the most important financial centres and the most the highest growing areas. The where bank towers are rising to the sky. While many people are with normal incomes in Germany, cannot can no longer afford to buy their own homes. Canada Panama, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Dubai, London. New York. And you can see that with individual people. Stephen Schwarzman, head of the private equity firm Blackstone, has made . 1.3 billion in 22 alone in income. This is a firm that owns nursing home like this, for example, the crisis year 2020 brought record profits to hedge funds in one month. Unregular investment funds gained. 144 billion by letting on falling price betting on falling prices , a return of 15% in the shortest time.
Let me make a direct comparison with Das failed. Deutsche Bank board members may make an average of about ■k76 million a year. Nexto that, we map the annual salary of a nurse is about ■k736,000 euros a year. So with the salary of ■k78.8 million, Christians leaving only has a work has to work about 1.5 days to earn as much as a nurse in a year. I one could say that's just the May the market works, but I want I would say that we want to take someone, someone to take decent care of us in our old age. We have to change that. Speaking of change, that's where Frank Bender comes in. The counterweight to the financial lobby. We start on two sides. First, we try to stop illegal, illegitimate businesses.
How we do that, for example, how many One company in Zurich just unilaterally reduced the pension schemes for receiver unilaterally and that was clearly illegal. And the regional court in Cologne, we supported that person in the court and the court ruled that it that they have to pay back. And we opened the door for tens of thousands of other customers who can, you know, feel the same way.
So the unilateral exercise of power can be stopped that way . We also try to stop loving to limit its impact. The financial lobby is currently strong and big and. The we're trying. To put the brakes to a. To the bank restructure. So the bank there's a bank restructuring pot that needs that has ■k72.2 billion ad they're getting trying to get their hands on it and I'll spare you the details, but the question is, if you can get, you know ■k72.2 billion through a little lobbying, that would be nice. And. The bank lobbyists would say, you know, the day to day activities can stop. Well, to quickly try to get this finance and finance vendor heard of that and we are trying to, you know, lobby for using that money towards the debt that we get from got from the bank saving in 2008. And this this struggle is still running. And the question is still banks are the citizen who will get the money. And we we're trying to stop them in their running for those money run for those money. And. That's that's a obviously a question of power.
For we're trying to we're taking on a very strong opponent against the billions that can be deployed on the other side. We can only be successful if a lot of people join in this was that's why it was kind of a bet on the commitment of citizens in Germany. When I left the Bundestag in 2018 to found finance vendor with a few fellow campaigners and indeed, you know, if we want to do something like that, then we have to, you know, people to join us. And if we knew that it would only work if a lot of people join us, but we the response has been good. But we need more supporters. Therefore I therefore, I would like to I'd like to you to get out your cell phone. This is I wouldn't normally not do that at my talk.
So I would like you to ask to get your telephone and sign up for a mailing list so that we can contact you when we need your support. There's a long, strong NGOs in the environmental field there. You you know, there's social associations, but there's so far no financial NGO, no independent civil society that tries to counter the financial lobby. So that we want to make sure that no attempt at regulation after one after another and ends up on the graveyard and now while you're browsing our homepage, I would like. To ask you, it's not only about money, but about our our legal and constitutional state. An institute as criminal business and then finance is lobbying to work that it can get away with these deals.
The owner of the institute uses his social position and political contacts and it sees at first the tax office did not doesn't reclaim the criminal loot. After several conversations with the head of government. Sounds like Southern Italy or Mexico or something. Yeah, far from that. It's about Cemex and the Vyborg Bank in Hamburg. It's about ■k790 millin that are supposed to be reclaimed. So So it's probably worthwhile to spend a couple of hundred thousand of your euros for the SPD politicians.
Carver Cars and Pavelic who are doing the lobbying work. There's a couple of talks with Olaf Schulz, Chancellor. There's a small party donation of. Although I think that is the head of Rabobank was a little mean. There But it's even more it's about the flywheel of financial lobbying, but it's not only about the question of whether the customer is being ripped off, who bears the risk of big banks? It's about whether rich people in Germany who have done criminal business can virtually buy the support of politics and the administration and that cannot happen if we want to live in a remain in the constitutional state.
It's very important for me to not just complain about this, but it is about changing something that's why we did in this case, what we think is the most important, namely support the prosecutors in Cologne, because as they did what the prosecutors in Hamburg were actually responsible did for some reason, not they investigated those responsible at Rabobank and recovered the money for US citizens by quarter . Please give us an applause for the public. Prosecutors in Cologne. So our DAS problem is none. But the problem is now that they're like structurally too weak. More than 1700 have been accused at Comex or in relation with Comex and when we started it was clear to us that it's impossible with so few people to get this 1700 people in front of courts.
So we campaigned to get more personnel involved so that Comex criminals can get prosecuted and we have a chase achieved and an increase in staffed this is a clear success for the constitutional state. We doubled. We more than doubled the staff after we with hundreds and thousands of citizens, demand did this. Is built begonnen. I started with a picture of a salmon cemetery because part of the idea is that the we cannot just ignore that financial regulations after 2008 failed, but we as a society have to find an answer to the problem that there financial sector is not being regulated so far. But there are initial successes which are encouraging. And that's why I would say it's also fun to hurt the financial lobby. Join us and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. God Thank you a lot. Gerhard Schick. I already knew I preferred Cologne over Hamburg. And now I have another argument and I am looking forward. And I hope you do too. The next talk, namely Zu zu Qatar. He is a professor who will come on stage in a second.
He's Research Award. He's going to talk to us about the hybrid mind, how machine and brain can fuse. I'm happy that you're still here despite the heat. Please give a big round of applause for Professor Zuckerberg. Thank Yeah. Thank you very much for the welcome. I'm speaking a bit longer than 20 minutes about the fusion of the human brain with machines. The idea to fuse human machines with the human brain is not that new.
Even in the beginning of the 16th century, goods from Berlichingen also called guts with the Iron hand had. Had built a mechanical prosthetic arm to build single objects and hold them. He lost his right hand, which was shot off with a cannonball. And this machine allowed him to grab objects again and do other various things in the everyday life. Now, 500 years later, we are able to simulate the hand movements by so-called neural electric prosthesis, prosthetics , where the muscular muscle movement is from the stump. Can be translated into a single movements of the prosthetic of the fingers and if you train, if you let patients train with this prosthetic, then after some days and years, they feel like it is part of his own body at some point. And this is called embodiment. And from this point to the idea of connecting the machine directly to the brain, it's not that far, far. And this idea is about 50 years old now, But for most of the time it had been talked about in science fiction. These are a few examples from various kinds of movies.
Think about the Matrix Matrix or the Borg. And about seven years ago, two you main actors of the global media, namely Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, invest in neurotechnology. And with this it became a mainstream topic. Neurotechnology. But these two, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were not the first that had this idea. But it was already already before. In the last 12 years, about 500% more patents have been filed in the field of neurotechnology. If you look at how the market developed, you see you can see that about every five years. There's a threefold increase in the market. And if you look at where it is, it what's being invested in the market of neurotechnology or where invest is being made, you see that the US is leading in China.
It's probably a lot of investment as well, but we don't know the numbers as well. But you can see that in the US, more than $25 billion per year in the field of neurotechnology and then you realise that that in the near future us outside of the America field, we will encounter for it the age of AI empowered neurotechnology, but what are the technologies in the main technologies? Technologies in neurotechnology One is the brain computer interface, which is a machine that translates its brain signals into external systems like machines, prosthetics, prosthesis, robots or ex-celt ions. This can be either non-invasive from the outside of the skull or invasive from the inside of the skull. If you do not want to be non-invasive, which is probably what everyone knows, the EEG you bring in, you connect electrodes directly, you add them to the outside of the skull, and then you can measure magnetic fields of the brain, but you can also do it without direct conflict with so-called calls.
With the so-called magnetoencephalography . So far yet you need a huge machine where you were not allowed to move in and liquid helium and was very complicated . But she could also use light then. It's called near-infrared spectroscopy. Then you send the light through the outer part of the brain and then you measure how much oxygen is being used there. And then you can say things about when the brain becomes active, where and we've known this for longer time with the functional. Topography. Where you can measure inside of the brain, deep inside the brain, if you open the brain, you can add electrodes there that you here, for example, for the ECOG, you put the electrodes on top of the brain and then there are electrodes that you actually put inside of the brain through microelectrodes there rigid system is in the bottom right. You see the Utah array, which is about 100 electrode, which is being put with the air pistol into the upper part of the cortex. You can also add flexible electrodes and that's what a lot of media attention has been directed to because this company Neuralink, wants to use this flexible electrodes to sue them into the brain.
There's also a way of adding electrodes intravascularly So into the veins. So you put them into the veins of the brain. This is a method that is known from the stands. It's an old method that's very established in medicine, medical field, and you put a stent in a part of a of the brain and then you get an EEG from inside the skull. The first clinically relevant brain computer interface was developed and presented in Germany by Leo Baumer in Tübingen and was in the end of the 90s, who had a patient who was completely unable to move in the so-called locked in state so he could not speak or move and he allowed this patient to select individual letters on the screen using his brainwaves.
And he was able to direct dictate the letter. And this was published in Nature and revolutionised the field and also showed how these interfaces can be useful in practice. They were also being used to restore the locomotor functions. For example, with patients with strong strokes. You see patients here with the uteri in the brain. Some times even several of these areas, you can see the cables coming out. This guy, this has two areas on each hemisphere. And with that, it's possible to have to control to prostheses at the same time.
And what's also possible here, if you do this in the it's not just controlling the prosthesis, but also stimulating the brain directly. And if you do that in a way that the brain can understand, then then you can also recover the ability to sense and this is shown here, the force receptors in the in the fingers. And every time the prosthesis grabs something and the sensors notice something, then it's being translated into an electric signal that's being added directly, linearly into the brain, completely simple. And if the patient controls a robot or arm and the arm grab something, then the patient can feel it. And the results you can see in the video, the patient can grab the cylinder much faster and easier, almost twice as fast.
This shows the possible city that you can through electrical stimulation directly at it into the brain, which is called bidirectional brain computer interface because you just don't just read, but you also write into the brain. So what's also possible is that if you have electrodes in the motor cortex where the hands are represent and if you have a patient who has a high. Quadriplegic situation, he you can imagine hand movements and then you just say, imagine that you're writing an A C or other character. And then from reading that you trained a computer that understood what the patient thought about and that looks like this. And the patient writes and every patient has a different handwriting.
But the computer just needs to learn to decode these. And then the character has to imagine what he wants to write and the computer can just translate that into writing and that the first system had. 15 to 20 characters per minute and just in the beginning of this year, it they added, you know, something up and the I algorithms that can increase the speed and allow now to read 60 characters per minute that's quicker than most people can write on their mobile phones . But you can also implant the electrode deeper into the brain, not only the cortical surface, but to read hand movements. But we can implant it into the deep tissue and. Implanted where feelings are processed. So that's a patient called Sarah. She had therapy, severe therapy resistant depression. And since her youth and this this depression could not be broken through, she tried everything medical medicine, psychotherapy wasn't even possible. She wasn't even possible to be able to follow this psychotherapy. And she they implanted ten electrodes into her brain. And she described when the depression happened that she had really pressing dark thoughts that paralysed her.
And this these ten electrons were implanted into the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala and different regions of the brain deep into the brain, where you know, that the emotion processing has changed during depression. And they said, well, Sarah, every time you feel bad, you tell us and you press a button. And she did that over one week. And then they could find out where in this brain, when she has the bad thoughts, there was activity and they found out that her amygdala had there was where there's an electrode implanted there was a high activity and the second step they had to look at where do I have to stimulate that brain that this activity is suppressed, that it doesn't come up.
So they implanted a stimulator with two contact, one contact in the amygdala and one contact in where they stimulate to make the amygdala silent in the medical centre. So every time the amygdala reached a certain threshold, the computer understood that and stimulated it. And then brought it to silence. And after one week the patient didn't have one, had any depression at all anymore. So this was about so they found out that it was there was called for about 300 times a day, and they always, you know, stimulated the amygdala for like 2 or 3 seconds.
And then after we after one week, Sarah was symptom free. So for her, the device was an extraordinary blessing. However, implanted and you can't implant these electrodes in every patient. It's a lot of infection and bleeding and. If there's a device has a certain defect, you have to operate again. And this is not a realistic option to treat these psychotic symptoms broadly. It's you can't not heal depression with this system. You can suppress symptoms of depression . And from this support, depressed situation, you can help people to stabilise people through psychotherapy for example, but they will still appear. And then it's only a symptom of symptomatic treatment .
So if you have dealing with motor motoric systems, there's no certification for these robots. There's all demonstration for TVs. You know, and they don't do this in there. They don't do the do this. And the everyday lives that these machines cost hundreds of thousands of euros. They can't do this in their everyday life, so they don't have everyday relevance and they can't use it outside of the laboratory. And my team and I were worked on non-invasive computer brain interfaces that you can see how this works.
These are patients with high aerobic state who are still able to move their shoulders. They're still able to move their elbows, but they can't move their fingers. And that makes the whole arm useless and if you want to reach into a can or anything, that's not possible. We added an exoskeleton for these people. And if they wanted if they imagined every time they imagined that the hand should close, they could grasp these everyday items. And if they wanted to open their hand, they just moved their eyes into a certain direction. You can use this outside the laboratory. And this man drove into a restaurant and then eat with a cutlery for the first time in many years.
And we asked the people what do we want to do? And this guy, this guy said, I want to eat potato chips for the first time in his life. And this made this man. You can see this. This made this man very happy. Now you can see that he he asked for limoncello. After that. We didn't have that, unfortunately . You can see this this system can increase the life quality of these patients immensely. You can see this. We also used it for stroke patients that were were paralysed for decades. And the way that they didn't do anything with their arm.
And for these people, we put on the exoskeleton, we trained for them for an hour per day just to open my hand and close and after one month, they were able to open the hands again without the exoskeleton. So through the training, there is still remaining resource is in the nervous system were reactivated and in this way patients could rehab again. So then we looked in the at the brain and this was what happened before when we said like grab with your hand. The entire brain was activated. Even the healthy part. But even though nothing happened and after the training, only the part of the brain that's connected there was connected to the exoskeleton was activated.
This was the side that was damaged. So the activation was really localised, like went back to the part that was damaged and this increased the ability to use the hand. So and this doesn't just improve communication or improve the movement of hands, but if you use it every time at the training, it could be that the, the hand motion or whatever ability was lost is being brought back. And this is an important aspect because if it happens in the motor, it it works in the motor, then it might also work for other parts of the brain, just not just for the motor. Also for emotion and attention and so on. And that's why we're working at the at the Charité I had to think open hand , open and close. And then from time to time it happened at the same time. I thought and the hand did it and there was an indescribable, indescribable. There was a net. Dreyer, who had a stroke with her 18 years and no longer could use her hand after that, she came to us and came to us and we told her, Yeah, we're going to give you the exoskeleton.
And she was griped how it was after many years to be able to use a hand again. Yes. This her. So now the big question is if you have none invasive machines that we don't get a lot of information from the brain from the EEG. We only get open and close the problem is that the EEG has a very limited spatial resolution in through the volume contractions , the contractions of the skull , so we can only see very few frequencies is that we can measure because a lot of frequencies are being damaged by the skull bone. Much better would be to use to measure the magnetic field of the brain with the MEG, which I already mentioned before. And with that you can get much higher spatial resolution because the magnetic fields are can easier travel through the magnetic through the bone and they're not being modified.
So this leads to a higher spatial resolution. And you can see in simulations that the resolution, the resulting resolution is high, equally high to for implementing an electrode on top of the brain inside the skull. But the problem so far was that you had to helium cool everything. And here we did an experiment with an exoskeleton on the human. Can't really move freely. It's not an every day solution. You have to solve it with helium. And in Europe there are 40 devices like this, and it's not really many. Now in recent years, we've seen so-called the development of so-called quantum sensors that are so sensible and can work at almost room temperature and can measure the brain signals in such a way that you can attach them to the outside of the skull for the helium cooled sensors, you need a few centimetres of distance. Otherwise the jihad is going to freeze here. You can put the sensors directly on top of the head and get a very high spatial resolution because of this. And here in Berlin, we are working with a federal institution to first to develop the first quantum BCI.
So this interface, based on quantum sensors that allow to move single fingers with this system . So not just open and close, but move single fingers and move different kinds of grasping. And then the next step in a German white research, we will do this with diamond based sensors. These sensors are on the basis of gas and they cool up to 150 degrees on the inside and they have to be isolated and cooled. And this wouldn't work here because there is too much noise around us. But there are new technologies that are also being developed in Germany. These magnetic this diamond magnetic sensors that also work inside the magnetic field of the earth. So now it's also possible to stimulate the brain non-invasive , for example, through electrodes that use electronic stimulation or strong magnetic stimulation.
But you already see that the areas are very large. It's not very localised, so you stimulate large parts of the brain. So now charity, we are developing a new system that through temporal interference, allows us to have millimetre precise stimulation of the deeper brain areas. And then Sarah comes back into mind where the deep parts of the brain were had to be stimulated to overcome the depression. And you don't have to move the cords, which was necessary so far. But through the temporal temporal interference, there are several coils and with that you decide where it's being stimulated through changing the amplitude of the stimulation inside the coils. So you can choose the target area. There is no so-called sensory stimulation when there's electric stimulation, there. There is. But if you do magnetic stimulation, then high frequent magnetic field is being used and don't feel anything, anything. It's like a bramming, but you don't really feel anything on the skin. It's not being stimulate. And the important thing is that we can stimulate and measure at the same time.
The brain activity. And at this in the last years, we have made a lot of advantages, advances where we measure the brain activity, why the brain is being stimulated, and this to prove that this also works with the quantum sensor we just shown. And soon in the next years fund it by the ERC, we will research this further. And so of course there are a lot of ethical questions not just about privacy and data security, but it's also about the question on the end, because it's about system that improves the everyday life. What happens is if the companies that invest billions give these a systems to patients and then the companies go bankrupt, what happens to the patients after this? I want to give one example. This is Rita. She had or she still has suffers from severe epilepsy. And that just happened some how she doesn't really know when some people feel it, but she couldn't but she couldn't do anything anymore.
She couldn't drive a bus because she was afraid she would get an epileptic. Case and now she has a system that where every time there is epileptic seizure might happen, the system warns her and then she knows to stay at home and take medication . And she says that this improved her quality of life a lot. And she described it like this. At first the interface felt like a foreign body, but later it became a part of me that I couldn't rely on. She knew she could drive a bus, use a bus, go to Republica. Nothing would happen. And then the company went bankrupt and it was suggested to her to refuse the product. She didn't want to do that. But then that was a small infection and she had to return the product at the end. And then she describes this like they took this part of me that I could rely on and what remained was scars. And I cried a lot. And I'm still crying. And this angers me a lot that this was taken away from me again, that I wish it had not be removed from me.
But this is the reality. We of people who get these systems, she's not the only one. There's an an entire group of people that have had the same happen to them. And nature. The Journal made a story where the fate of these people is described. What is new is that when works not yet. It's reading thoughts because it's currently booming. I wanted to talk a little about. And how does that work? And is there like heard language and can it be decoded and the patients listen to 16 hours of podcasts that computer was trained to decode the language and if they heard something, they can really immediately decode that. But it wasn't exactly precise as they could. They would ask to imagine. I read something we wait for some pedestrians to cross the road. Then I take the right and it says, I saw him, walked on the road to the end of the block and then turn left.
You shouldn't use a wheelchair because it would be going the wrong direction. But they are what they also did. They showed films an and translate it into the thoughts and it he goes right into my face. I can't stop the punch from coming. He knocks me to the ground. That's what is translated. And then that's the next clip. I had to stop the bleeding and gave her my shirt to put over it. I took the stitches out. It's fairly similar to what the subjects saw on the screen. And that's it shows the possibilities non-invasive only from the you know, what was read from the entire to the brain.
Not just like what Dask is doing reading a couple of electrodes like a thousand electrodes. That's not nothing for the brain. The patients were in the scanner that nobody was allowed to move. But it wasn't exactly precise. But it's quite of course, it's quite interesting because it shows where the journey may go. This they were using a GPT algorithm to create the sentences from the brain pattern and from the brain activity. With this view, I'll come to the end. I showed that the neurotechnology can significant improve the quality of life of people with diseases or injuries and regular use of brain computer interfaces can stimulate neuroplasticity.
Plasticity and improve the brain function. Then invasive methods, while more effective in the short term, are associated with the severe risks and several risks to and not only that, the company could go bankrupt and you have this thing in your brain. Nobody cares and not invasive and approaches, for example, based on qu. An And ofe new numerous neuroethical aspect have to be thought about data security, ensuring mental integrity, autonomy. But also the possibility of an self-image. ET cetera. And we must consider that and draw red lines at what we want and what we don't want. And I'm absolutely for that. Using that for medical purposes. And there's a moral imperative to do that. But but when we talk about neural enhancement, but then we have to look more closely because we are not sure what kind of consequences that has for social and individual perspectives and that's what takes me to the ends. And thank you for your for your presence. Again, thank. You Thank you very much. That was great. Thank you for the mind blowing session. I've set along for that joke. 15 minutes break and then we continue with Paris Marx and Sebastian Griezmann.
We're really happy to see that. And then short break and then motivate and continue. Bye bye. Not smile in the mic sign and there our next speaker of the DAF, Paris Marx hosts is podcast tech won't save us Tech Critica and author in podcast Paris Marx, The Tech Industry and oppression in book Road to Nowhere was the Herausforderung Der Zukunft der Tech spoiler nicht so good. Vizo de grosser Mobilitat Revolucion als als mit cash zu tun hat ver verantwortlich English. He's a he's going to talk Paris Marx is now going to talk about the future of transportation in give him a warm welcome. Please. Hello Republica. It's great to be with you today. To come over here to Berlin and talk to you a bit about what's wrong with Silicon Valley's vision for the future of transport Nation.
So let's get into it. In the past 10 or 15 years, the tech industry has proposed a lot of different ideas for what the future of our transport system should look like. You know, obviously we see in the top left here the vision for the boring company, Elon Musk's idea to drill a bunch of holes under our cities and fill them with cars to solve the traffic problem, then next to that, of course, is self-driving cars. You know, this idea that our cars were going to start driving themselves in just a few years. And of course, next to that or sorry, below that, the flying taxis, you know, the idea that Uber and companies like that were going to offer these taxis that you'd be able to take to escape traffic to go above the cities, you know, where are they today? I haven't seen very many of them. And of course, you know, the final image there is Uber, which is a platform that is out there that has had an impact on our cities.
But as we'll talk about the promise that was made with Uber has not been the reality of what that company has actually delivered. So when we look at the tech industry's approach to transportation, we see a lot of serious issues. We see that the tech industry recognises that there are real problems that exist in the transport system, right? Whether it's the deaths that happen on our roads and the amount of time that people spend stuck in traffic. You know, the inaccessibility of many of our transportation systems and the ability to get around.
But when they identify the problems that they want to address, they focus most on personal grievances, on the things that affect them most. So you see Elon Musk, for example, he's really focussed on traffic and the fact that he gets stuck in traffic just like the poor people driving next to him because that's not something that he can escape. Then of course, you know, someone like Travis Kalanick, who founded Uber, he was really frustrated by the fact that he couldn't get a black car service. And later taxi services because they were difficult to access. So they needed to be disrupted and changed. So that it would work better for someone like him. The big ideas for these companies and that these founders put forward are not grounded in the fundamentals of transportation. You know, these are people who have a lot of experience in computer hardware and software and feel that because of that, they can apply these ideas to virtually any industry and any sphere that they want to enter.
But what we see time and again is that when they step outside their competence is they don't actually deliver on the benefits that they claim to be delivering to us through these companies. They believe that technology alone will solve the serious problems in our transport system. They argue that this is not inherently a political problem, but a technological one. So the problem is not the legacy of decisions that were made over many decades and centuries by governments that have created the transport system that we have today. But simply the fact that we're using the wrong technologies and if we put our faith in them, they'll develop the right technologies and then they'll solve these problems. But we've seen that they've not been able to follow through on that. You know, they tend to over promise what they're going to deliver through these companies. They start with the thing that personally motivates them that they find to be a problem and then they act as though it's actually going to solve a whole range of other problems that exist in the transport system as well.
And that leaves them to under deliver because they're never going to be able to follow through on those promises as and you know, at its core, these people are very interested in maintaining the dominance of the car in cities. They have a particular experience of the transport system. They see transportation through a particular lens of a wealthy guy who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, who is used to getting around in cars and doesn't want to be on traffic, doesn't want to be on transit with other people. So they want to see the car maintain its dominance within the transport system. And that motivates them. So let's look at some of the ideas that these companies and these founders have put forward over the past number of years and ride hailing is the core here.
Obviously, this is by companies like Uber and Lyft and these other services that kind of disrupted the taxi industry over the past 15 years. And they really made a lot of promises to us because we were going to use this service because we were going to have this shared service that we'd all be using to own cars anymore, or we wouldn't need to own as many. These services would connect people to public transit. They'd be complementary. They wouldn't take people away. They would reduce vehicle traffic in cities, they would serve underserved communities who aren't properly served by the transport system. Right now. And they would, of course, provide freedom to the drivers who are delivering these services by disrupting the taxi model that existed before. But what we actually see is that they've not been able to deliver on this promise. In studies that were done in the United States and Canada, they found that 70% of us ride hailing trips are in the nine largest cities and they add 5.7 billion miles of travel that makes congestion a lot worse because you have a lot more cars that are filling those streets, ride hailing When you use one of those services in the United States, it tends to add 2.8 miles of driving for every mile that it takes away of personal driving.
Because not only does the person need to drive to pick you up, then needs to take you to your destination. But then afterward they need to find a new fare and they might circle for a while until they actually get that again. Adding miles of travel. And in San Francisco in particular, you know, the hub of these companies, the hub of the tech industry, what they find is that the rides with these ride hailing services are most concentrated in the densest part of the city. That is also most walkable and best served by public transit. But instead, you have a bunch of people taking cars to get around. So it's not addressing this issue. And also, when we look at transit, of course, when there's more traffic on the streets, it means that transit gets worse, it gets delayed.
It's not as reliable, it's not as frequent because the buses and the trams and the streetcars are all stuck in traffic as well. And so they can't serve people as well. A study in the United States found that 49 to 61% of ride hailing trips wouldn't be taken at all or would have been taken by cycling, by walking or by public transit. If ride hailing services didn't exist. So that's taking trips that were done more efficiently and making them less efficient and again, adding traffic to the roads.
We can see here, this is an ad that Lyft put in the New York subway. It says, they say to dress in layers, you know, referring to the winter. Of course it's okay if one of those layers is a car or, you know, get out of the subway or go take a car with Lyft, it's not really improving the transport system there. So who actually benefits from these services if it's not actually fulfilling the promise that Travis Kalanick and that Uber made to us? What we see in studies that were done in the US and Canada is that the users of these services are overwhelmingly college educated and higher income living in urban areas, and young people, you know, they're the types of people who are developing these services in the first place to serve their own needs and what they actually want from the city when it comes to these services, there are barriers to use, right? You need to have a credit card.
You need to have a smartphone in order to use them. Some seniors, low income people don't have access to those things. Not to mention a data plan. And in the United States, Uber and Lyft constantly fight the, you know, to provide wheelchair accessible service. They argue that they are not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act because their technology companies, not transportation companies. And so like a taxi service, they don't need to provide wheelchair accessible service to the same degree. And so they get away with that as well. And of course , at the core of that model is that workers have fewer rights than under the model that existed before the taxi model that they disrupted. They are paid less and they have less control over their work. Even though Uber promises otherwise. So Uber made a lot of promises as I outlined, but they have not followed through on it. They have not solved problems in the transport system. They've made it better for some people who have the best access to transportation services, but they haven't made it better for the people who are most in need of better transport nation.
So let's move to self-driving cars, which kind of built on the idea of ride hailing services. Obviously, Uber and those services are becoming popular in the United States at the latter half of the first decade of the 2000. In the early 20 tens, that's around the time that self-driving cars and the idea for self-driving cars is starting to take off at companies like Google and they are basing their idea of what a self-driving car is going to look like off of the ride hailing model. So you're still going to hail a vehicle from your phone, but instead of being driven by a worker now, that car is going to be driven by a computer.
So we don't need to pay the human labour to actually get you to where you need to go. So the promise here is similar, right? We're going to eliminate car ownership because instead they're just going to be self-driving cars all around the city that will be able to pick you up whenever you want. It will eliminate parking because you won't need to have a car, so you won't need to have these spaces where cars need to be stored.
And, you know, because all these cars will just be going around, we can reorient that space in the city. It will drastically reduce, if not eliminate vehicle deaths in the city, because obviously computers are better driver than humans. You know, that's just that's just obvious, right. And of course, there are only a few years away, you know, starting about ten years ago. So I'm sure they will arrive pretty soon. I could talk a lot about the history of self-driving cars and everything that's happened over the years, but I think it's important to note the moment of kind of the wake up call right when the narrative really starts to shift on self-driving cars away from they're going to be here a few in just a few years.
They're going to transform everything. In March 2018, an Uber test vehicle killed a woman named Elaine Herzberg in Arizona , in the United States, and in that moment, you know, before all that leading up to that, all of these CEOs of these companies were making these huge promises about how self-driving cars were going to transform transportation. And of course, in this moment, as soon as this happens, you start to see those narratives shift. You start to see these people talk about some very different things because they recognise people aren't going to buy this anymore. Leaks are made to The New York Times show that Uber's self-driving team was under immense pressure to match Waymo, which was Google's competitor in the self-driving space. They were cutting corners. They were cutting safety drivers to try to make sure they could launch by a specific date and put it out there, move fast and break things, right.
And of course, the National Transport Safety Board in the United States did a report on this, and they found that Uber disabled the emergency braking in the vehicles because they didn't want the vehicle to be going along and detect something and had to stop. And then you don't get a smooth ride. So that had to be disabled . And along with that, the system had no consideration for what they call jaywalk pedestrians. So for someone like Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing at a place where there wasn't a crosswalk drawn onto the street, the system didn't think that a person could be there, so it couldn't identify who Elaine Herzberg was, what she was, and how it should react to this obstacle that it's on the street.
And of course, she died as a result. Afterward, in the months afterward, the CEO of Waymo again Google's self-driving division, said autonomy will always have constraints. S he recognised and other people in the in the industry recognise that it would be decades until this technology became widespread after months and years earlier, promising that it was right around the corner. And they also identified that they'll never be able to work in every single environment, in every weather condition, on every road condition out there, that they would be limited to specific places where they would operate.
The head of Volkswagen's self-driving division at the time said level five will never happen globally. And level five is this kind of utopian idea that the human will never have to have an input into the car, that it will be able to drive itself anywhere at any time under any weather. And he said, actually, for these systems to work, you're going to need very detailed 3D mapping of any city where it's working. You're going to need perfect road conditions and a number of other conditions that many cities simply don't have. So these cars are not right around the turn. You know, they're not going to arrive anytime soon. And, of course, what we see more recently in October of last year, Argo, AI, which was kind of a leading self-driving company backed by Ford and by Volkswagen, shut down, you know, kind of out of nowhere.
People were pretty surprised that it had happened. Apple also pushed back the plans for its own self-driving car that was supposed to arrive pretty soon. But now it's saying at least 2026. And this is just kind of a small glimpse of what is happening in this industry as there's a growing recognition that these vehicles are not going to be rolled out and are not going to become mass transportation any time soon. We also see regulators are looking more into Tesla and, you know, the autopilot and full self-driving services that it has deployed on roads around the world in the past number of years. In Munich, of course, a court a few years ago found that autopilot was misleading in what it told customers it could expect from those services in California had a similar ruling recently and Tesla is also facing not just regulators scrutiny, but legal scrutiny as well. And of course, GM and Waymo have deployed their self-driving cars in some cities around the United States. But what people in those cities are saying is that it disrupts the flow of traffic.
They don't work as well as these companies are saying. And in San Francisco, politicians are saying that they want these cars to be taken off the streets altogether because of how it's disrupting other drivers. And the transit system. So ultimately, what I see when I look at this is that tech fantasy is distract from the real solutions to solve not just transport problems, but problems in many other facets of life and many other industries because they put out these big ideas that then distract us from what's actually necessary to address these real issues that we face.
So if we look at self-driving cars, for example, this is a story from the New York Times in 2018. If you're not familiar, the Koch brothers are right wing libertarian billionaires that fund a lot of political causes in the United States. And so they were pushing a campaign against dozens of transit projects across the United States and cities and states that were pushing to improve the transport system. And they were explicitly arguing that transit that buses and trains were outdated technologies because self-driving cars were right around the corner and they use calling campaigns and they knocked on doors to tell people that they should defeat efforts to fund transit, to expand transit systems because they would just be outdated in a few years. And I was just in New Zealand recently in in February of 2023. They are having a discussion now about building a light rail system through Auckland, which is the largest city in New Zealand.
And in February 2023 there are still right wing politicians in New Zealand using this same line that they shouldn't be investing in light rail because it's outdated and self-driving cars are just a few years away. It's shocking to see how these narratives have staying power and continue to fight real solutions. Owns the boring company for example. As I said before, Elon Musk's idea to drill all these tunnels under our cities as he went around the United States and sold these projects to many different cities, never really delivering on what he promised would actually arrive from this.
In Fort Lauderdale in particular, it's a really egregious example where he went to the city because the city was looking for someone who could build a tunnel for a train for pretty cheap, and they assumed maybe the boring company would do this. So you know, they ask Elon Musk and his people if they would build this train tunnel. And when they finally signed a deal, they didn't have a train tunnel. They had a tunnel for Tesla's to go to the beach in Fort Lauderdale. And of course, that project is underwater and is likely never even going to happen. But there's still no tunnel for the train.
Of course, the Hyperloop as well. This idea that we're going to have this futuristic train service that's going to address, you know, all of these problems and it's the future. We shouldn't be building any more high speed rail. Elon Musk proposed this in 2013 and at the time some people criticised it, but other people said, wow, this this could really be a cheaper and better solution than building high speed rail. The reason he proposed it in that moment, which he explains in his 2015 biography, is that California was moving forward with a high speed rail proposal, and he didn't want to see that built because he thought that it was outdated technology. He didn't like it. So that's where the Hyperloop came from because he wanted to disrupt that plan. And then, of course, that's also disrupted and kind of distract people around the world as they pursued train projects over the past number of years. And again , like the self-driving companies that are collapsing over the past six months or so, we see as interest rates have risen and it's become harder to get money and get funding for these very speculative projects .
S Hyperloop Start-ups are dying as well because they're never actually going to deliver anything. So ultimately when we look at this, what is the real impact that that the tech industry has had when we think about transportation right. We talked about a lot of these big ideas for the transport system that they put out there, the boring companies, self-driving cars, even the ride hailing services that exist and haven't solved actual problems. But how do we see technology being integrated in the transport system right now if it's not addressing these serious problems? And you know, what is it actually doing? What we see is that the cars that people drive are increasingly connected to the Internet.
So rather than really kind of transforming and solving problems. Cars are connected to the Internet. They're sharing a lot more data with automakers and with tech companies. So that they can continue to develop their business models so that they can make money, so that they can also sell this data to data brokers that then sell it on. So that can continue to be used to build advertising profiles for all of us, really. So it's collecting more data on us and fuelling those business models that we're used to seeing from the tech industry.
But now extending those into the auto industry as well. We also see the infotainment systems, the large touchscreens that are increasingly built into many cars, not just from automakers like Tesla, but many others are making drivers more distracted when they drive. The promise here was that by putting these screens in the cars, we would look at our phones less. And so we'd be less distracted when we drive. But surveys and studies that have been done in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in the Nordic countries, have shown that drivers are actually more distracted by these screens. And that makes the entire system less safe.
We can see the push to add these large touchscreens to the cars as part of the broader idea that computers will be driving our cars in a few years. So people would need something to look at. While the cars are driving themselves and of course that hasn't arrived. But we still have the technology they've put into the cars. Assuming that that was going to happen and that's making driving and streets more dangerous as a result.
But we also see that these tech companies are moving forward and the auto companies as well with subscription business models being extended into the car itself. So now instead of going to buy your new car and you pick the features that you want, you pay for them on the day, then you drive it off and you have that for as long as you have the car. Now, the expectation is that if you want heated seats, you know, a company like BMW will charge you every month or every year if you want access to those services, you know, the tech will be built into the car.
You won't need to go get it upgraded, but you'll need to pay that subscription to unlock it. Again, Tesla kind of pioneered this, but then now BMW, Mercedes and other automakers are moving forward with this as well. We also see, of course, a continued focus on larger and heavier vehicles as we transition through to electric vehicles. Right. As we make that shift in the transport system and how we get around. But now these vehicles need to be bigger because of the large batteries in them. They're heavier, which is a greater kind of risk to pedestrians who might be struck by one of these vehicles. And, you know, obviously, all the automakers have been moving in this direction for a while.
But we even see, you know, with a company like Tesla that has set the idea for what the future of vehicles might be, that it is developing the cybertruck a large, imposing vehicle that has dent proof panels, that has bullet-proof glass that's really designed for a world that you can see these billionaires imagine is incredibly dystopia open and unsafe for them. And they want protection from it. Right? Because as someone like Elon Musk has said in the past, you know, he can't go on transit because he might be next to serial killers who might be trying to kill him. So that's the kind of idea that these people have of transit systems is. And, of course, you know, at its core, these ideas that the tech industry have put forward have distracted us from real solutions to the transport problems we face. If we really want to address these problems. It's not new technologies that we need. Rather, it's political solutions, right? It's greater investment in public transportation and cycling networks. It's making streets that are not for automobiles, but for the people who use them .
It's developing communities where people can get to where they need to go without needing to drive and building housing that is affordable, you know, social housing, public housing so that people can actually afford to live in those communities and are not being priced out. These are thing they think of the world. They're focussed on the very exclusive and very narrow interests of particular billionaires who are pushing these companies forward and these ideas forward. They're not into the political solutions that are actually required to solve transport problems, urban problems and the other problems that we face in our society. And so obviously, we need to be ignoring these things, ignoring these big personalities that come from the tech industry and having real conversations to move forward on the real solutions that are going to fix the problems in transportation and beyond. Thank you so much. Iris. Thank you so much. Thank you. I feel like it's taking me ages to get back up.
Yeah. So I wanted to kind of speak with you a little bit about your presentation. Let me find a good, good spot. First of all, thank you so much. Thank you for this. Maybe a round of applause for Paris again. Thank you. It's quite hot, so I'm happy that everyone is still around and still wondering.
I have maybe simple or difficult question. I don't know how do we get out of this? What's the solution? What's the endgame then? Yeah, it's an important question, right? Because ultimately, if we're going to address these problems, we need a way to get there. And I think the key is that we need to not be distract by what the tech industry is doing.
And I think that that's not just incumbent on us as individuals to be able to see past it. But I think that we need to expect more from government officials, from public officials and also from the media right to actually report on these things properly , to be able to see through the lies and the deceptions of the tech industry, to report properly so that the public can understand what's actually going on here. And I think at its core, if we're going to think how we propose better solutions, how we achieve political objectives, that's going to require organising from the public to demand something different, because these tech, these people in the tech industry are very powerful. They wield a lot of power. But so if we ever want to challenge those ideas, there needs to be kind of a counter power to push back against them. And that requires organising to achieve how can we. So here's the thing.
I am easily distracted by shiny things and by things that make my life easier, by convenient things, right? So when Uber first got here and also I'm not very sporty, so I don't really like, I have no idea how I manage to break my ankles because I don't move that much. But anyways, so Uber was very enticing to me to kind of get from one spot to the other. I don't enjoy driving that much. How do we, like, do we scale down our need for convenience science in sort of, you know, search for more sustainable solution that will come in the long run? Or how would you convince someone to kind of, you know, scale down on their own convenience? What's totally it's a great question, right? Because I think that when a service like Uber launches its natural that people want to try it out, especially when it's reported as the next big thing. And it offers convenience, as you say. But I think that one of the core things as well is that a company like Uber has never made a profit, right? It's a company that's existed for over ten years, almost 15.
It's never actually turned a profit. It loses billions of dollars a year . And that's so it could subsidise its service. It could offer a price that was below what other companies could offer. And it was able to do that because of low interest rates and venture capitalists giving it money. So the question isn't like, you know, a service like Uber is not inherently a bad thing. The idea that you should be able to access a vehicle to get where you where you need to go. We've had taxi services for decades, right, for over a century. And so, you know, it's just kind of updating that model. But in the course of doing it, it ensured that it destroyed the model that existed before and it created one that had less power for workers. So the workers were kind of disempowered. And it did that by selling this narrative to the public. But also by underpricing its service and being able to get away with that for so long. And so I think that the inherent issue is not the fact that we can hail a ride or something like that.
Many taxi services have added that to their options, but the issue is that they were allowed to underprice other services to cement a labour model that had a lot of problems with it and continues to, and that lawmakers weren't willing in many cases and in many places to step up and to properly regulate the sector and bought into those problems as well. Right. So I think it's less incumbent on us as individuals in that case and more incumbent on our governments to be aware of what these tech companies are trying to do and ensure that you stop them, not just to kind of protect the public, but also to protect the workers who are delivering these services. You make a lot of great points, but I still have one one thing that I hear a lot, especially in the US, but I've seen it myself off in Germany as well a little bit. And it's just that usually it's black men, but also black women have a hard time, especially in New York, for example, have a hard time getting a cab to stop for them. I've seen it in Germany a little bit, but I'm never sure if it's because of my skin colour or the pram or whatever it is.
A lot of factors and that kind of thing is mitigated by services like Uber. What would be the answer to that? How Yeah, it's a really important question, right? And equity is a serious problem. When we look at transportation broadly, like not just with the service like Uber or taxi services, What we've seen in the United States as well is that people have rejected rides from black people, from trans people. From queer people. Exactly To make sure that they can't access those services. And that's taxi services, obviously. But it's also Uber services as well, where there have been a lot of attention on Uber for not being able to deliver on these things and for hiding up a lot of, you know, kind of covering up a lot of the issues that have existed with its service.
It's now delivers an annual report where it talks about these things. But for a while, it tried to distract and distract from the fact that that happened. Right. And so I'm not going to say that it's not a difficult problem, but I think that some of the innovations and some of the changes that Uber brought in, being able to see where your ride is, being able to always be connected to, you know, know where your ride is going. I think that those are really important things and taxi services have been beginning to implement those means of kind of hailing rides.
So instead of just having to kind of flag down a taxi, you can make use of those things that Uber has kind of innovated and added to make that service more convenient for people to hopefully get around some of those barriers. But ultimately it's a wider societal issue than unfortunately, just one transport services. Thank you so much, Paris. Thank you. Insightful session. And also for this Q&A. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. All right. In English next. Okay Rose, thank you. Paris Marks and especially for the answers to my questions. And now we have Sebastian Griezmann . He's a researcher for Media in Zion, but also a professor here in Berlin in 2024. He has a new book coming out. It's. It's about practice and theory of digital payment. I already asked him a few questions. If I'm in Kegalla, where I was born, I'm being laughed at. If I'm trying to pay cash for all of the things I need, like electricity and there's digital cash called Momo that you can use and ask him why does it work in Kigali and not in Berlin? In Berlin you need cash for everything, really.
And relying on that. And I really hope he's going to answer that question for us, what the future is going to look like, what the infrastructures could be, what kind of digital euro our society needs. All these questions is going to answer. I'm really happy for him to be here. Sebastian Griezmann on. Yeah. Hello Luft. Hey, do you have an air still? It's been a long day already. I'm happy to be here. This is my third Republica 2010. I talked about net neutrality. 2015 with Michael Simon, about the budding platform economy and thank you for the introduction.
When I'm here, I'm basically outside of my comfort zone. And this is great because the work on my book about credit cards is on hold because and that's good because we have a much more important public issue that is that we need to clarify much more intensely. And this public issue is the digital euro. Usually what I do is I look at societal and economic transformations over long time frames and long meaning in the terms of digital society, we can mean 1960 back to the cashless society in the US. I and I want to try to give you very small glimpses into that. And there are two parts. The first one is more fundamental, both historically and theoretical and the second one, we're out at sea because the European Central Bank is trying to comply with its public mandate and develop a digital euro.
And I, I want to show you in the second part how that can work. And if it can work is what I want to show you or what I'm all about is the new public list of money we haven't talked about it a lot in the past, especially not about the infrastructure behind that. And this is something that we can turn on its head. We need this new public list of money. If we want to have a new money for the public, for the general public. And you see these two attributes are central to it because public media and public money are related. Very often the infrastructure is created first as something boring that's not very enticing.
But now as a digital social, digital society , we need to articulate the kind of digital euro we want. So infrastructure, that sounds boring and it's the media of the media money. So as a media scientist, I just start from the assumption that money has structurally changed in the 21st century. We mostly with data money that is currently in conflict with what remains from cash. What is important is that all media are media of public cooperation, but money in particular is one. And so if we talk about infrastructure of money, then we're talking about the society as a whole, or one would assume so. But the discussion about digital payment systems is almost entirely organised in the private commercial sphere.
And I want to show an example of an old medium. What the combination of infrastructure and also how well the public has reached its ideal culmination in this representation of money. The Euro bill. The euro bill is it's signed by I here Mario Draghi. In the meantime, it's Christine Lagarde and it has certain properties that one would normally just assign maybe more to the to the infrastructure side. So authenticity is. And that's a that's a lot now. So the great thing about the design of the euro note, as we have it today, is that all of us are continuously checking whether it's authentic. And we can do that up to a certain point. From a certain point on, you need ultraviolet light or maybe a forensic expert, but but that is something that.
Embeds money as a public medium completely differently into our day to day life. Then, for example, data, money or any kind of app wallet does and is there anything comparable in the area of digital payment systems? No no, they're usually black boxes and we just have to accept how they work for us or not. And I would really hope that we would get the opportunity to know what happens on the inside within these payment systems, or at least have the opportunity to verify that for ourselves as.
A as a minimum of history, that I want to relate to you because we're currently dealing with multiple digitalisation of payment, some of which are older than the Internet itself. If the digital publicness of payment begins in the US, the nation state whose economy and science helped bring forth digital computing on the left you can see a illustrate from the 1970s. The White travelling salesman.
To that is starting to take off thanks to the credit cards that we still know today. And a slightly different names. And this is an illustration that is not reflective of social reality in the US because the target audience at this point was already has already changed to families. And on the right side , you can see something that's almost forgotten. Meanwhile there was a European response to the digitalisation of payment systems in the US. Which has also become really necessary, really quickly because nobody could deal with only paper money anymore.
So there's a little day here for Europe. This is something that's still happening today. There was the between 1977 and 2003, a completely privately organised payment ecology in Europe. We know the names still the EC check the EC card or in this case the Euro card as the as an attempt and a successful established product of a European payment system at And why do we almost not know them anymore? Because in 2003 MasterCard had is bought everything that was related to Euro card and this payment system and this history keeps repeating because now we all have all kinds of forms of new social media where again, the dominance and the hegemony of the US and especially the US American finance system still comes to bear.
Europe was part of the game for a while. Part of the digitalisation game as well. And what we have in cards today, the cards are computers today with a powerful chip that's a transnational and transatlantic standard. That is now been EMV Europay MasterCard. Visa is primarily a European proprietary thing. Still Europe, in terms of card systems was ahead in establishing it in a day to day of people compared to the US. So this is the second digitisation of payments starting from around 1998. We're still using the technologies that were developed back then in partially in renewed and updated form, but we're still using that. The third digitisation is a something that isn't really being realised in Europe and North America, namely mobile payments. S for daily transaction happens with the smartphone, for example. Most people know it and we have a few really good sessions here as well. For example, how that looked like in the in African cultures and also here at Republica, I wanted to show an old Nokia phone that has changed the world, really, namely in the context of mobile payment systems like M-Pesa.
And you can already see that Europe is successively becoming more and more marginalised, more province of digital payments. Of course, there aware and there still are some counter movements, especially in the Scandinavian countries. But the forced digitisation wave for money and this is something that we see as completely normal. Also people here in this room starts at the moment where Apple announced his Apple Pay in 2014. And this is the shiny advertising variant of that. I spent a summer reading the patents of Apple Pay and they speak a different language.
Everything that Apple established with that and quite successfully so it came with the argument that Apple themselves cannot access the transaction data and that is an argument that we see a lot reflected in the current drafts for digital euro. Financial technologies. This entire creation of new financial technologies and new banks and. Is. Has happened in Berlin to a large extent as well as and often when we tell stories like that, we think maybe the old technologies disappear. But that's not how it goes. Very often it goes back to cards. Even Apple, six years after they launched Apple Pay, they have introduced their own Apple card, their own credit card. Successive and this successive. Loss of European competences in this area is maybe the most visible and the most obvious when we look at how mobile payment works in China and how it's part of super apps, often and these photographs clearly show that it's a completely normal part of consumption culture, mostly driven by steadily growing middle class.
So what are the consequences? What's the current situation? That's what we always want to do as media scientists. We want to assess the current situation. So first off, there is a deep financialization that started in the 1970s and. That has also changed how we are bodily involved with payment systems. It's it makes more sense nowadays to speak about data money than about any form of classical cash money or banknotes. That also means that there is a massive personalisation which goes all the way into biometrics. Some might be using it. I personally am sometimes. Using my fingerprint to authenticate for payment face ID I would never use for that, but as an indication that in this moment where data money is so much more important and the human body is then kind of the lender of last resort.
This is entwicklung. This is a I think, politically not a good development because we have to keep identifying ourselves instead of giving something. But it shows that the practice of payment is still not a virtual process, but also needs our biometric signals to even access the money and be valid as money. Then it brings with it new forms entirely new forms of financial surveillance . Surveillance. That's that's often more monitoring or capturing. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more extensively in a little while. On the PayPal example, then very important if you want to understand these payment systems, you have to also look at the social structures that are part of the consumerist society and take them into account because they're also reinforced by those. So that means we are all usually consumed in these payment systems rather than citizens. There is a displacement of cash money that we can see. Like for example, Brad Scott has called it out as a war on cash. That's one of the effects that going along with this. And we really shouldn't underestimate what financial industry components there are for this.
The CEO of MasterCard is recently just said a really good quote that said cash is a interesting competitor, an and so you can already see the way these people think the mindset of the people that offer these payment systems . COVID-19 and the pandemic have . Also in Germany and other German speaking languages, they have traditionally very heavy on cash. Money has changed a lot also through the due to social distancing and the introduction of cashless payments in many areas where it wasn't possible before. Of course, it's also more acceptable thanks to contactless payment before, it was a standard that you could almost see as failed because the media interaction then didn't really happen in the everyday life. The pandemic has shifted a lot of things, a lot. And this strong shift is also what we need to take care of politically . See that cash in its tradition of shape and form, can never be done without it. And it should also not be reduced in its usage. There is a development that we cannot even foresee now where it would end and where the plateau is.
So currently we have maybe 1.5% get reduction in the use of cash on transactions per year. And if we talk about longer terms, longer timeframes, we need to think about it. Whether we want to orientate ourselves as a society over the next 10 to 20 years. And then of course, we have something that is already commonplace in China. The Super apps that try to combine as many daily use cases as possible navigate on payment systems transactions and so on, and of course also collect and make combinable all these data traces that we leave super apps .
PayPal is not one, not a super app, at least not for me, but we know that also thanks to the GDPR. We know at least all the things that are connected to such a PayPal payment, namely a whole industry of financial and personal data in 2018. This is the visualisation that you can see here on the right. There is over 600 people or entities that PayPal shares your data with. If you open the list of third parties. Now and I can only recommend everybody to do that, either you're going to fall asleep after the third entry or you're getting into into really deep thought, like what's happening with these forms of data, money and kind of financial surveillance that comes along with that.
Is the elephant still in the room? The . Elephant in this case is Facebook book. Now, meta in the moment that Facebook started trying to install a global currency, see with their Libra project later called DM, that's when all the financial institutions, all national banks in the world woke up and got into something that Lana Swartz, who spoke here earlier today, has called a fear of missing out for central banks. And we are still riding the coattails of that. There's more than 100 projects worldwide for digital central bank money and everything more or less, because Facebook made that point with DM and they're still trying to work on even though Libra DM has officially failed as a blockchain based stablecoin coin.
And the combination of certain features, especially using any sort of payment methods and instant messaging, is something that Facebook is still actively working on. In Brazil, for example. Where after three years the regulator has approved the digital payment service, Meta tried to establish India first and then pivoted to Brazil. And in Brazil you can you can pay things using WhatsApp, the central bank and central bank Digital currency Cbdcs as a foundation for digital euro. Is this maybe a fifth digitalisation of money? And how does it differ from what we've seen so far? You already we saw that the public institutions, governmental institution are mostly excluded from these developments.
They haven't really responded to them. And in the pandemic, we've learned what it means to not being able to access public infrastructure for well, anymore. And the European Central Bank has relatively early and relatively ambitiously, as I've think tried to react to these challenges from the Facebook and meta side and is currently in a phase where they're trying to gather stakeholder input about the digital euro. If we just looking at what the European Central Bank is publishing about this, then things often depend on very small minute differences.
From about ten days ago. We have a first report, a draft report about a prototype of the digital euro that I want to look at. You look at together with you in a little bit. And there you can see that these payment systems are often born out of the administrative thinking. The European Commission has started a consultation about the digital euro, published at last year. Many citizens have followed through there and the response is relatively, relatively one sided. There's a lot of sceptic ism about state infrastructure that would extend to all financial practices and also allow states to monitor all kinds of transactions. So the outcome of this public consultation is very clear. Either you have a privacy regulation that guarantees a certain degree of anonymity or it's impossible, or at least the people that responded cannot imagine using that.
Then a short detour back to Brazil. For Central banks, there is a huge challenge in terms of communication, but also in organisational and infrastructure terms. Brazil does not have digital central bank money in the truest sense, but a payment system that since 2020 is on offered by the Brazilian National Bank, it's called PIX and even if it's not exactly transferable to Europe, it's still pretty impressive. If . With which intensity and what volume this is being used in day to day life in Brazil, there are hundreds of millions of users now and if you look at 149 million users with a population peer to peer, that is only, only a little bit larger, that is quite the achievement. So mainly the use case currently is peer to peer transfers from citizen to citizen BE So one of the effects of pix is that there is less traditional cash money in use. There's new forms of criminality that mostly target stealing smartphones with with pix enabled. But the decisive factor for us is that central banks under certain conditions with in a democratic context can enter this area and work in it and also be successful.
The this is new. So there's this new term Cdbc Central bank digital currency. And this is also what the consultation of the commission showed. No one really understands or they don't have an idea of what that is supposed to mean in certain moments where you have new social innovation, that may not be a bad thing, but ECB definitely now has the problem that they have to explain it to everyone and this is what they do with their working definition.
The digital euro is central bank money for digital retail payments by citizens, businesses and governments in the entire euro area. And the emphasis on retail means it definitely has that everyday connotation of paying in your daily life. The ECB started out very ambitiously, but we know it from the infrastructure, but we also know it as as a moment at the moment how Europe works. It is always hard to understand. It's definitely going to be easy. There are already a lot of points of criticisms that people argue about, but in a very specialised public, not in the general public. There is a lot of criticism. You have to ask is the digital euro something from the finance industry for the finance industry, there is a lot of scepticism towards the European idea and the European institutions, not just the ECB, but the others. This is also has to be overcome and the consultation also showed there is always this suspicion that there is a new surveillance state that is being built. China 2.0, as they call it. The question is also how anonymous is this? This may be the core question over all the these state funded projects that there are a lot of failed attempts in the past and there are a lot of security issues as federations.
How to deal with crime as usual that you also have to take into account and typical for the discourse, there is also an impact on the finance system itself. For example, if every single citizen in the EU has an account with the ECB that comes to the front, that's something they would tell the citizens up front. And but it can work. You know, we have to do it a little bit different than we used to do it in the past. We need to understand it as a social innovation in something like a European identity that we're creating here.
And also as an element of digital sovereignty. I would prefer to ask the digital society at large up front that could also be done better in the future for what we need is maximum data privacy that we test in public, that we have a lot of transparency, see, because otherwise you will never get trust by the public for this endeavour. How anonymous is anonymous with the digital euro , we need to demand that it would be more anonymous, not less than other means of finance and it otherwise we are missing a very crucial element of the solution and very important for all the people involved who are discussing this digital euro should be one solution among many. It shouldn't replace classical cash that you have in your wallet, but rather an alternate that is public and that gives you means of interactions with other agents.
It could actually solve a few issues like being having less barriers for use or if you, for example, know how ATMs are sometimes a problem for certain people, you might wish for something better than that, for example, using it via smartphone, for example. So you could say these are the points of criticism and this is how it could work. But this is only like a very static view of the thing as it is right now. And the ECB itself created a prototype in the industrial context and especially for the e-commerce issues as the result is that we have a we don't have a prototype that has interfaces and you could show everyone that to make the cbdc more concrete and less abstract. But yeah, this report has been out since the 26th of May and it has the usual hallmarks of communication by government bodies.
You have to read very finely between the lines in order to understand what has happened. And at least there are some diagrams that show you the system overall. So how do you have to or how how should you imagine this. The part where the payment is being processed is in there. There are also apps that actually use them there.
These are these are parts that are being developed by the private industry because that's where they think the competences lies. And these are the files, the five use cases that envision , if you look at it, if you are in this landscape, if we as a society shouldn't hesitate, we should look at this upfront front and be careful. And what we have European companies here as representatives for these use cases. So you have an idea how it's being used, even if I'm it's a little beyond me why you would have someone like Amazon as an American company here as an example for this this is I, I don't get it and if you read along further then there's many there's a good reason to be sceptic about it.
It's obvious. See our payment system is bound to our legal system and you can find interesting points here. For example, there are echoes from crypto payment systems here , but the moment where they have to be explicit about up to which point you can pay digitally, then if you read between the lines, then you can see in an invitation to the European legislature body. To create a legal framework for giving a lot of anonymity. And this brings us back into the process. So what is the political process and what is the role of the civil society? Do you want do we want to be ruled by technocratic expertise or do we as a society also want to be part of the solution and test it out? I'm obviously for the latter.
The ECB itself is definitely careful in what they're doing and for good reason. But at some point it gets easy. This is the political process as it has to be. Follow this is what anything in the EU, if any, bill has to pass through the parliament, makes a suggestion. The Commission then has to deliberate it. But what you see is that the civil society is at the very bottom and at the end of the process they're only being asked maybe by a focus groups or social research. And this is something I would change completely. This should be the first and the most important step in the process. And only then can can you create what you could, what you would consider for digital cast as a political identity. So please, a little bit more fantasy here. More innovation, more ideas where the open source initiatives, what's it really like? If it were to be a barrier free, maybe we need a money lab idea and where you can try out new ideas for payment.
Maybe in Frankfurt, where the banking industry is, where is the research community? Where is academia? Where is financial data literacy that we foster within the population so that they can actually voice relevant critiques for this approach? So there's a lot of approaches here. Some of them are also present here at Republica. There's the new taller, which was created as a decentralised alternative for payments, digital payments that can guarantee proper anonymity. But still takes all the legal requirements into account. Then something that I value quite a lot is the Money Lab and Lana Schwartz, for example. It's also part of this. If we want to have a digital euro in 2026, then we need to get started. And to be active, start being active ourselves.
We cannot just lean back and wait for something to happen and say, you know, involve us more in civil society. But instead we need to be active ourselves. So because without digital cash, there's going to be no cash. What's going to become of the traditional cash money? With a digital euro, we're probably going to use traditional cash money for a little bit longer. Still But I would really hope that we could use both in parallel and that we can manage to create a new public of money .
Let's imagine it's 2026. There's peace in Europe. Ukraine is a free country. Inflation is low. Rightwing populism is less popular. There is a regulation that requires cash acceptance and the digital euro has become a real digital currency. And maybe a lot of people are looking forward to the start of a digital euro business. Let's have another sticker in the Windows Online commerce platforms offer a digital euro as a payment means first wallets are being installed. First transactions are made. Families reorganise themselves. At the same time, new euro banknotes are published and digital cash and physical cash is unified and reinforces the European identity.
A Europe made of money that's what it could be. Let's try it together. And I hope you're going to stay in conversation. Listen and please, please, please involve yourselves in this discussion that we all need to have urgently. Because otherwise, as we're mostly going to be excluded and then we can try to find a large lobby battle in the European Parliament later. A big thank you to everybody who I worked with intensively before and everybody who's working on running current and future cash in digital cash systems. Sebastian Castro, Sebastian I'm coming from behind. Hobbling in here. Thank you very much for your talk. Very insightful and yeah, I would say we're going to take a very quick break here. We have a little bit of time, so till and then Cooper is going to be here on this stage. I'm looking forward to that already , Cooper is first going to give a short talk and then like with tobacco. Tobacco this morning, there's going to be about 20 minutes of conversation with me .
I just realised I'm showing you my backside, but it's a bit bits rude, but I said everything I wanted to say. Short break and then please come back, everyone to see Cooper for now. Thank you. Sebastian Guzman. And being was the best seller and talks about how speech determines our thinking. She cannot we cannot think of Republica without her. And I'm happy that she's here. And speaking about real and imagined utopias. Wow This is why it's amazing to be at Republica again. And it's also amazing to have done something again that I do every time.
Um, namely change everything before a few minutes before, and doing it differently than I thought. I do it. I'm inspired today by a story from Islamic history. It's in Arabic, The etymologically. Constipation, constipation and in Arabic the words for guide and constipation often have the same word origin. If everything thing we take in, we keep. We wouldn't just get constipation, but we would probably also die pretty fast. So we need the dividing. We need the giving. And not only the sharing, the food or the parts of the food that we don't need. We also share time, money, resources and knowledge and if I wouldn't have what I'm if I wouldn't share what I was going to say in a bit, I would have constipation afterwards. There are words that are like gifts. They don't let you go because they open up the road to the speaker and the listener and let them catch a brief glimpse at its own beauty , a way of looking at the world .
Poo-pourri is such a word, one that did not let go of me. A word that many years ago the biologists, Robin Wall Kimmerer, are three years before me, did not, could not get rid of Poupee means approximately. The energy that a fungus uses to push it away from the soil and grow towards the sky. The special thing is not that you used a word. You invented a word to describe a biological system that but that we can observe it from the point of view of the earth. We look at from the point of view of the earth, how it the fungus puts it puts, pushes itself away from the earth, a path that the human who is in the middle and this is not an coincidence because the language in which poo exists is a language that is on the brink of extinction.
That is being spoken in North America, where the speech that nuts have only a personal pronouns like he and she, but also way more problems for animals, stones, plants, mountains, insects and rivers. This means that the people who speak the language don't just experience the world from a human, an point of view, but also from all other organisms that we share our existence with on the earth. And so Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about what happened when she said, together with studies of natural sciences and they all talked about how much she loved, how much they laughed the earth and she asked her, does the Earth love you back? And then you could felt an uncomfortable pity in the room and this is because we humans are used to just looking at the world through our own eyes.
But this question implies that the earth looks back at us. Maybe we think we have a special relationship with the Earth plant tree animal, but maybe this is not reciprocal. Maybe the earth has some different stories to tell about us. Robin Wall Kimmerer says another beautiful, powerful phrase. She said, I realised I was known by my home place. I am, she realised she's been known that I'm known by my home place. This place knows me. Is it not just us who thinks to know the place, but also these places have something to say about us? How differently would we discuss about the climate crisis if we also naturally took the perspective of all the other living beings with whom we share our coexistence on Earth? How would we discuss our the presence or our future? What stories would the water tell about us humans as humans? Humans who wash in it every day, drink it as Europeans who let people drown in it every day.
One summer, Kimmerer writes, There was a great excitement because all living speakers of what we were supposed to gather to teach the language, and they came on crutches, on walkers, in wheelchairs, camera counted them nine, nine people who spoke the language fluently all over the world. Our language, which has evolved over thousands of years, sits on chairs. There are words that were used to praise creation, to tell stories, to lull. My ancestors, to sleep. I know on the tongues of nine very mortal men and women, she wrote. One of the older women, Kimmerer said, pushed her walker close to the microphone and said, It's not just the words that get lost . The language is the innermost part of our culture. It contains our thoughts and our way of seeing the world. It is too beautiful to be captured in English. We are in danger of losing the beauty of the world if we believe that our language is finished and perfect as it is.
If we believe it is perfect and form and not changeable, and if we believe that it actually captures everything because words are like rooms that we have built in order to meet inside them, to see together, to feel together what surrounds us is to reassure each other that what we see, experienced, sense, feel is real words can save us from madness and plunge us into madness. Is our imagination enough? Our dream, Our hope. The way we humans can be, humans on the earth? Beyond this, In an interview about futures and real utopia, a journalist asked me if there are real dystopias. I was surprised it wasn't necessary. Was it really necessary to search? Weren't we living in a real dystopia? You don't even have to think or search with your eyes. If we walk down these streets towards the train Central Station, we see in one of the richest industrial nations on this planet, people that have to live on the street in the cold, in the wet and involuntarily.
We walk along benches equipped with backrests . They do not serve our firearms which are supposed to rest on them, but are meant for exhausted backs and bodies which are not supposed to lie down on them to rest, to rest for a moment, to sleep. As an aggressive defence, I am not here for you. These benches scream or other. We humans that these benches scream hostile architecture is the name of this form of architecture that serves to expel poverty and homelessness from our inner cities, not the solution of the grievances, but its invisibility . We who dreamed up our life together like this, who conceived it like this, who decided that it's perhaps a wise perhaps a strategic strategic, perhaps a necessary decision. Whose dreams and imaginations are we currently putting into practice? S Our benches do not have to look like this.
They can on schools, roads, our economic system, our health care system, our political system. They don't have to look like this. They can . Everything could be different . More than 70 years ago, after one of the darkest chapters in German history, the mothers and fathers of the basic law did not record a social reality, but they conceived, dreamed of, imagined a different future. To regard this dream today as a fulfilled fact, as a social reality degrades this dream to a farce and a cynical illusion to stop dreaming further, I would like to claim, I want to claim here today is a betrayal to us, to the world, to the environment , and to nature of which we are a part and to our descendants as basically the fathers and mothers of the basic law, decided on just one thing over 70 years ago to be good ancestors to us. We today are the ancestors of other coming generations. It is up to us to be good ancestors.
To them. The philosopher Olufemi Taiwo writes in his book Reconsidering Reparations. Some some generations plan plant the trees, leaving it to others to build the barrels and taste what they brew. If we can do better than this, we should. But this is not enough. If we want to achieve justice in our lifetime or anyone's, we should act like ancestors. For better or worse, our ancestors constructed this world in their image. We owe it to our descendants to rebuild it in a new. One Think back to the spring of 2020, when the pandemic was perceived by society and politicians as a drastic event. But for people who have fled, who have migrated , who have experienced a system collapse, class, ascent or descent, who have fallen out of all societal norms and frameworks and have hit the ground hard. They know that it doesn't have to be like this. Everything could be completely different. But the fact that everything really everything could be completely different was brought to the attention of a broader mass of people by the pandemic.
At the latest. It works. Things can be different. Things can work differently. The pandemic, at the latest revealed . If there is political will, then measures that were previously dismissed as too radical can suddenly be implemented. After all, massive cutbacks in travel, for example, or consumption. The pandemic revealed we do not have to pollute the environment and an oppressive economic system that exploits nature and environment . Living beyond our means is not without alternate or inevitable . It is not the only option open to us as banal, as self-evident and as obvious as it may seem to be stated here, this is relevant. And sometimes unspoken in current political discourse.
The limits of the capitalist market economy are not the limits of our society. Options beyond these limits are and always have been open to us to cling so doggedly to these fictitious limits and to enter into these mental constrictions is our mistake. The pandemic revealed the ills of our time are manmade, are human made. Remember the dolphins that suddenly swam through the water in Venice? Monkeys and deer roaming the streets of cities, Wild goat, wild goats roaming through a Welsh village. We paused for a moment and already so much was different. The ills of our time. They are not natural, not fallen from the sky or just falling down. Given to us. We could live differently. Our decision in to the pandemic also showed that our pandemic is much more agile and changeable than its than it's usually suggested in political debates. The pandemic also revealed the quest for a more just society feminist critical of racism without poverty, exploitation and oppression is not a utopian aspiration.
It is real sizeable after all, and even more necessary. But it's easier to romanticise and long for a past normality than to imagine and long for an precedented future. It is easier to criticise and deconstruct the present than to construct and test a more just future. Future in the present it is easier to unite people in resistance to a dystopian future than to bring them together in the pursuit of a more just future. But it is also not possible without looking at past Normalities because they show us what was once possible.
It is also not possible without the critique and deconstruction of the present because it makes visible what surrounds us, shapes us and hinders us. We learn to see the connections and interdependence of our present, present. We recognise our responsibility or complicity and our complicity. We learn to call a spade a spade. And finally, we cannot do without looking at dystopian futures. They show us where we could end up if we remain inactive and also where it has already gone in detail already right now, looking at the possibilities of the past, critiquing and deconstructing the present and looking at dystopian futures as they are all fundamental components in the effort for a more just future and present.
But it is not enough to stop there, deconstruct then must be followed by construction. So on the as invisible as the walls are, that exist in our society, as invisible as some people feel in our society, as invisible as the gaps are in our society that divide us as invisible as the trenches are that people die in that take their lives as invisible as all of these things are, there are at least as real to reach a more just future to a future to that approaches the ideals of our that our society pretends to have does not mean to deny the existence of these ideals.
It it doesn't mean to ignore our it doesn't mean to negate the structural violence of these realities. Is constructing a more just future means studying the ills of the present in a lot of detail and do things differently regardless, not because it would be easy, but because it would be so difficult. Not because everything would be possible if you wanted, but be whoever tries to fight the ills of our times needs to live in two worlds at the same time the world as it is.
And the world as it could be . The ills to study the world, the ills of one present from one world to unlearn them in favour of the other world. And to build them to practice this new world, to practice new types of knowledge by trying, by failing, by fixing your mistakes or as the American technology, African American social entrepreneur Trevion Shorter said a really good technologist understands that in order to hack something, well, you have to understand the system well enough to get it to do something it wasn't designed to do.
Studying the systematic structure and power of violence and oppression is a necessary step to participating in a world that is different, more just, but it also means never stopping at that step, never to remain in the face of the supposed or real superiority of the present hopeless power, less in Die Zukunft Permanent Construire Deconstruction alone is insufficient in a world in which the future is permanent. Constructed in such a world, intervention in the future for the construction of a more just future is a necessity.
If we do not intervene, create, construct, experiment it think up desirable futures as these these viable futures will not just happen. They will not just happen to us. Instead the desirable futures of those who are equipped with way more resources, power to act, and money. These people will work for them. Think them out and create them. This management and sustainability researcher emphasises side this at Ashland Commission who happens to be my husband and Juliana Riniker. In researching for Disability Desirable Futures, the pitfall of merely analysing or predicting potential futures. Our analytic capabilities to predict the future will likely be dwarfed by the predictive strength of corporate research and big technology companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft employ thousands of researchers to analyse masses of data to often routinely harvested as a by-product of digital traces for machine learning Kumusha and Riniker questioned the role of science in a changing world.
How can they, as scientists theorise , study research futures that have not even arrived yet, How to research future that would be desirable in a world where masses of data are used by big tech companies to predict what will need or should consume next . In this respect, one of the central challenges we face in striving for a more just society in all respects is the step from analysing reality to intervening in the future. Because the analysis and deconstruction of the present reality can in turn become a form of constraint and prevention of an alternative future. So in a translucent investigative journalist of the New York Times quoted in a 2004 article, a former political adviser of that of then President George W Bush, we see the US government are now an empire.
Empire and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're analysing this reality, we are acting again, creating other new reality quiz which you can then also analyse . And this is how it will order itself. We are the agent of history and you, all of you will have nothing left but analyse what to do. Ever since Who said a quiet already quoted years ago. Republica. So if you've heard it before, close your ears. But I think you cannot hear it often enough. The function is quite seriously of phrases. Racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It makes you explain your existence over and over again. When someone says you don't have a language and you spend 20 years trying to prove that you don't have that, you do have a language. Someone says your head does not, does not have the right shape. So scientists are working to prove that your shape, head shape is right. None of this is necessary.
There will always be one more thing to. So why some are forced to fight for their survival. To understand, to analyse the world, hoping to move levers that will ensure our survival. Others are busy. To construct our, our and their future. So to colonise the future. Lennon who has the privilege to sit back to wonder if things couldn't be done differently, and if the how who in our society has the privilege of not being occupied with survival, but with living in a future that is not even here yet far too few and yet there are some even here in this room today. I can't see you at the moment, but I know you're here and love to you. There aren't enough. There are not enough people that know what it means not to be able to think about beyond the next weekend at the end of the month, the next day, the next physical attack, the next assassination, the next racist attack.
However it is these people, it is their knowledge that is needed to actually be able to discuss these terrible, desirable futures at all. So for several years now, defying everything, even though everything pushes me into the now, I have devoted myself to the study of the future, the influence that our ideas of the future have on us. I'm still in the middle of it. I'm searching, searching for answers. I'm studying places where people have the courage to do things differently than we were taught. Practising solidarity and concern. Responsibility and reliability. I study people who have found the courage to dream beyond their limits, to imagine, to create and to act.
And one such person is Fattoush iribarne. In the summer of 2021, I visited in Turkey Anarchist anarchist collectives, anti-capitalist initiatives and interviewed oppositional thinkers, authors, politicians and environmental organisations nations. One of them was the Kurdish artist Fattoush. Everyone in our interview she spoke about creating as an act of emancipation in the creation out of nothing, the speaking and contemplating out of nothing in a society and environment, a space in which in which she has been declared void as a Kurdish woman, as a resistant critical thinker, as an artist, as a woman, as a human being and 2016 she was falsely accused by a secret witness of terrorist propaganda and sentenced.
To three years. She describes how the purpose of prison was to make her feel nothing and how precisely through this feeling of nothing, nothing is not ever as a form of submission, but as emancipation from the circumstances, circumstances. As she began to create, especially in prison, precise in a place where the Turkish state wanted to rob her autonomy by force, she reclaimed her autonomy in prison, even start it, defying her opposition oppression and criminalisation to create from nothing. Mitica fearlessly collecting her long hair and those of her fellow inmates who gradually began to donate to her, from which she formed bolts, made patterns with stories and writing.
Clothes that she describes making insects she collects what she finds and gives things meanings that reach far beyond the walls of the confined spaces in which the state tries to confine her. She tests the coming into being out of nothing. Her first own exhibition is not only a mirror for what is the violence and cruelty of the present, but it also creates a sense of things could be different, better, more just. She demonstrates the immense emancipated connectedness s through the awareness of nothing ness. I am now citing her. She says This is what a person in prison feels. You're worthless because if you were valuable, you wouldn't be here. And if you were important, you wouldn't be sitting here. For example, if you were valuable, we would give you that. But you only deserve this much. But is that the case? And what are we going to do with it? That was what I was asking myself.
That was exactly the question I asked myself on the first day. What are you going to do now? There is nothing. You are flat. You have nothing. You are here. What are you going to do? Come on, get it done. Put it here. Fattoush if you dare. I said to myself, if Olan Zaman zamana Jacinda Fatos Sherwin has called her first own exhibition outside the present time. Let's travel back a few decades to block the philosopher distinguishes between two types of future. The real and the fake . According to block, the inauthentic. The fake future is what I might wish for, where I'm trying to get, but which is already there as a place, so to speak. The bed after which you yearn maybe right now with a full stomach, right after lunch . This future is in front of you in the evening.
But it was also in front of you yesterday and the day before. The bed is therefore, while you dream about it at your desk or here while you're sitting here in the future. But block says there's nothing new in the thing itself , but new and unexpected. It is only the journey that I am setting out on towards the bed. And in the case of the bed, he says, the object is not only something very trivial, but is so well established and so little new that one can hardly speak of a journey or a trip to it anymore. The real future, on the other hand, is one when that which is desired striven for is itself.
Not yet there, not only is my journey there not completed, not even begun, but it itself is not completed because perhaps not even begun. That is then a real future. There is in real not yet being a novel that has not yet come into any person's eye, has not yet heard any person's ear, has not yet experienced, been experienced by any person since the highest test of the novel. That has not yet sprung forth, although it may be latent and may exist in this latent way, it appears psychologically me as the place where these acts take place, these place, the place of the not yet conscious, the not yet conscious is the mental representation of what has not yet arisen in the external world. In dependent of human beings. Now this not yet conscious is another class of unconscious. Blau says it also belongs to the strange luck that this is not yet conscious or the state it denotes is experienced incessantly by every human being , but has never been noted down .
It took a very long time for the unconscious of the lower stratum, which was once known and now forgotten to be repressed for this basement existence in consciousness to be discovered and leipnitz is the first who discovered this by the curious detour of the differential, the differential calculus in a psychological variation, the petite perceptions, the infinitely small perceptions at the end from which perception builds up as a summation phenomenon phenomenon. I hear the sound of waves or the murmur of a crowd, but I cannot hear the individual water particles pattering on each other or the individual voices. Although I must hear them. Otherwise I would not be able to hear their some, says Leipnitz in the unconscious. I don't know whether Bloch is right in his distinctions.
I would argue that there is a third category, namely the unreal real future. In other words, futures that are not yet lived in the present in our society here in our societal majority, but already lived reality in some places in this very society, so-called real utopias. If social Erik Olin Wright, a sociologist, wrote When social and political equalities are supposed to be future for, then they will have to be brought about by saying farewell to the idea that everyone needs to move towards this utopia together. At the same time, simultaneous that we need to say goodbye to these large utopias and essentially create real utopias, often at the margins, places where people have had the courage to already practice these new utopias.
These places are located at the borders of our society. The margins, they can be housing experience, NGOs, networks, collective that have dedicated themselves, for example, to a new way of living together, an ecological economy or a fairer language. One such place for me was Lutzerath, a village that I was allowed to visit shortly before its demolition. This place is symbolic, is a symbolic place not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also in Lutzerath a utopia and dystopia are as close together there as hardly anywhere else. On the one hand, this deep gaping wound, the destructive violence of fossil capitalism, like an ugly grimace of avarice and the sheer insatiable hunger of our society . On the other hand, a village that has been revived in the last two and a half years by people who have had the courage to take responsibility for much more than what is conventional in our society. They test and practice a togetherness that tries to approach, and they try to approach their ideals to be more considerate, just in solidarity, respectful, turn towards, turn towards each other and peaceful.
They care for each other about the world that which is not yet those who are not yet the future. The many conflicting debates of the past years have also been fought out in this place. They have developed solutions, weapons. They had the courage to develop solutions to reject them and to start over. They made mistakes and learned. They fell down and got up. Lutzerath is a place of learning in Lutzerath I was able to catch a glimpse of a world in which a group of people quite naturally make their circles of responsibility larger and larger.
Then is commonly accepted or demanded in our society to deal with the far reaching consequence of their actions and their consumption in present as well as future. Even if lutzerath has been torn down since this place still exists. Because these places of learning and testing and alternative future and present exist in the most diverse places of this world. These places, they grow and these places are the ones that work into our consciousness and that have an impact into our unconscious, that give us the feeling that there is more out there.
Could that it could be different in these places. We experience everything could be different. Meanwhile, when I was writing my book language and being a few years ago, I tried to understand how a person can exist in a language where they are not expected. As someone who speaks, I try to imagine what it's like to live in a society where there are walls between you and everyone else and where people are unable to hear you even though you're speaking, are unable to see you, even though you're standing right in front of them. How can a human be dehumanised in such a way through different means, such as our language that abstracts so much that we are not capable of perceiving anymore what is right in front of us? I tried to describe how painful it is to keep running against these walls as I tried to show that there are doors that we can open. I tried to show that we can tear down these walls. I tried to show that sometimes these walls can be helpful and that maybe everything could be somewhat different.
But exploring these these walls threatens to leave the person powerless inside a cage, to feel a sense of powerlessness is because of language and systematics. Whoever begins to explore or sharpens their senses for injustice in this world and threatens to be crushed by the weight of all of this, well, rich man's hopelessness, powerlessness, lack of perspective, overwhelm. We feel all of this and seemingly then we have every reason not to even try and nevertheless, there is a quote that helped me find hope regardless, a quote by the African American writer James Baldwin, who he went into self-imposed exile in Paris in the 1960s. And like thousands before him and after him, he tried to figure out how to exist in a language that did not anticipate him exist thing. And then he said or wrote in an essay the following My problem with the English language was that it did not reflect my experience in any way. But now I began to see things quite differently. If the language wasn't mine, it could be because of the language.
But it could also be because of me. Maybe the language wasn't mine because I had never tried to use her, but I'd only learned to imitate her . Or if that were so, then. Then perhaps she would be malleable enough to bear the weight of my experience. If only I could muster the stamina to subject her and myself to such an effort . A subtle but fundamental difference. Do we imitate and copy the world, or do we shape it? Change it, make it our own? In the external perception, both actions can be identical, indistinguishable the exact same action supposedly. And yet intrinsically they are completely different actions. One shaped the other shaping one form or the other forming the one constricted dictated the other. Emancipated autonomous. Once we begin that very moment, we begin to shape the world. We disrupt the moment. We use the tools that have been placed in our hands. We interfere. Language laws, writes, art, music, our imagination, our power to see, to hear, to move, to touch, to change through the knowledge of how the present works and the attempt to try something different to three spaces in which we can play and imagine.
To try out a world that isn't there yet, but could be because, as the author Adrian Murray Brown puts it, we are in an imaginary battle. We are in a battle for imagination, an who dreamed up this world, who's imagined an are we living in what are our imaginations? What are we dreaming about? What are we dreaming about? How can we carry this imagination into language, into spaces, into reality, to test, test it, and perhaps realise that it is not as beautiful in practice as we dreamt it to be in order to then learn from it and continue to dream through responsibility, through larger circles of responsibility that we can draw individually to extend as far as the consequence of our actions will go not only to draw our circles of responsibility as narrowly as we currently do in and as is required of us legally, but to draw them further, not not the way we do it right now, where we don't care about our sick neighbour or don't feel responsible for a person without shelter, not feel responsible for the people in Bangladesh who produce our clothes, but drawing our circles of responsibility just as wide as our actions have consequences .
His. Infinitely wide across space and time into the future, through giving and gratitude in the awareness that we can be grateful for all the moments in which we are allowed to give. To share that we do not give with our hand on top, but may give with our hand underneath both so that people can take in dignity and eye level so that they know we are dependent on the people we are allowed to help. Judge as they are dependent on us. Those who need help and those who help are one. We are all in need of help. We are all helpers. One, one at a time. But all times we will experience other people by being one or the other.
So only when we say goodbye to our claim to absoluteness and become aware of our own limitations and nothingness, when we realise in what fundamental dependence we live on each other in our efforts to fathom and open up the world in order to be and live in it, when we understand that we are responsible for each other, for sometimes in a roundabout way, sometimes in a direct way, when we finally become aware of how dependent we are on each other that we are helpers and needy at the same time, because a part of nature is one that also depends on the other part of nature and is seen and observed that the earth has a story to tell about us.
The water, the rain, the mushrooms. When we actually become aware of our responsibility and limitations of our nothingness, when we dare to imagine and try out another world together. Only then, maybe then will we learn and experience what could be. Thank you. Gentlemen. For kubra. Thank you a lot, Dear Kubra. I was not allowed by the audio managers to clap before. That's why I'm not allowed to. That's why I'm not clapping now.
But I'm clapping my thoughts. Thank you very much for your talk. Thank you. Thank you. It's always like maybe you just saw I just made notes whenever I am allowed to experience you, I think everyone learns a lot and maybe even as a person that has for a long time not allowed themselves to think about you utopias, but had to be in the present and learn German function. Understand how this works here. My parents take my parents who maybe have even more problems. It's so inspiring to think that we also have the tools to think in Utopia or create our own utopias.
A very basic question How did you start with it? How did you start going in this direction? And was there like a starting point that moved you in this direction? I think maybe what you said just now, I think especially we are extremely well equipped to think about different futures, to think about futures where humour ins are not being forced to think about their survival or being forced to survive because we know what it means.
But I came to the topic. I mentioned a few quotes. These were always like slaps in my face, but after like almost 15 years where I invested all of my research resources into showing that there are problems in our society, I realised that there is much less knowledge about how it should be. Instead and that this leads to some kind of unconsciousness where maybe people understand there is a climate crisis or racism, but on their individual level they just they feel overwhelmed to do something differently because they don't know what else they could do correctly and because not everyone who has a privilege has the privilege to make their own thoughts.
And I realised that some kind of backlash was created. And also some kind of unconscious bias, like an inability to act and a big insecurity exists. And that's what the one thing why I started to think about this and the other was because I really I'm still in the process of it. I really want to know how does a word look like where this problems don't exist and where in our words, we already have. Where already places where we can learn from what happens? What do they differently? What does not happen.
And that's where I'm now this this discussion about our future. Our is dominated by people who do not understand the problems of our current time. Can I go even . So far in saying that these are people that are very interested in the future being the present? Because they have more privileges in the present? Yeah, exactly. The I mean, this is my prediction. I've yet to interview them and ask them about it, but for real, actually , we see what a lot of companies do at the moment that they use the mass of data and the prophecies about what will happen in the future for they will they use this to keep their their to keep themselves in power, in their position are now. So it's about securing your own future and others have to pay for it. What happens if you visit these places on the earth where this utopia is already happening? How do the actors see themselves? Do they see see how important they are in society or or how do they see themselves? What do you experience when you talk with these people? I can't speak for everyone, but I can share with you what I've noted, and I was very impressed by a lot of places where I were.
People were very paying a lot of attention with how intensely they were looking at. You how they see you, like look differently. With which humility they looked at the especially lutzerath they were. A lot of people have went there with a sense of urgency with with time and it being urgent. And I talked a lot and I asked them what was your biggest learning? What have you learned in the last two and a half years here? And they said they replied that things need time and to experience young people that have this kind of humility. That's especially in contrast with how they're being displayed on the outside like complete lunatics that are going crazy.
But these are the people I would wish to be in power that have responsibility in our society. I want to talk a bit with you about language, because the clock is working against us. Good thing that you just said that things need time. We also need it. But I'm not going to say more, but I see that the time is working against us. I have another question about language. Do you think that language can create a utopia that can create a real change age? You said that language and spaces we can fill with life. How how does this look if you continue it into the future alone with language, we will not be able to create a better society, an unjust language can be in our way. So if we don't have a name for something, a nice example or bad example is in the 60s there was no name for sexual assault in the US and this led Miranda Frye, the philosopher, described that this led to a woman that was sexually assaulted at the workplace, could not only say what had happened to her, but the perpetrator wasn't feeling like it was his fault because only with the words existing space was exist created and not just the word by itself doesn't suffice.
You need to fill the words with experience so everyone understands what it means and in this way you are able to talk about the problem and problematise the situation. And then maybe even in the future, talk about different possibilities. We currently see this in the debate about Lindemann, how this word is being filled with different kinds of experiences where people can categorise their own experience years later because they now have a word for it. I feel like because you just said.
Lindemann I've just learned about the word rho0 in the beginning I didn't know anything about this, but after about 20 articles, you know what's being meant by this. And I think this is a pretty good example of that. You can learn very fast about what's going on and this also being said a lot to us that if we talk about discrimination , sensitive language, we've never said this before. The people they can't follow, what do you reply to that you have also said language changes. We have to inflict put life into language like this. What do you say to people that say like x, Y that it's too fast for them? So I have two thoughts about that. So I don't think there needs to be a separation of labour, but so on the one hand, we need people who practice how language could work differently, how gender equal language might work , and maybe find out, Oh, this works, this doesn't work so well.
So for example 15 to 20 years ago, like a capitalised I in German was one way of using gender neutral language. But now there's a completely different way of doing it again. So we need people who practice and test different ways of creating this gender equal language at the same time, we also need other people who know that we need to make sure that like creating this more equal language doesn't turn into an end in and of itself.
And that you need to deal with these underlying issues on their own. And there also needs to be attempts to make sure that it's accessible that we write and explain in a way such that we don't build new walls around this knowledge. But to in sure that the knowledge we produce, that it's accessible and compress sensible and that that's what we need to strive for instead of creating knowledge and bringing it into the world that only serves our own or our own self-confidence and to make us feel important and big and at the same time it's very important to use very precise words that might not be accessible to the majority yet to constantly try and test how to maybe create this better language and at the same time, honestly, it's to me, it's not that important for every person to know exactly what every specific word might have meant originally.
And why you shouldn't use like this specific this or that specific word, but that we have a sense of knowing what the consequence ounces of your acts and words could be. Yeah because there are so many actions and words that haven't been coded as sexist, difficult problems like oppressive violet Not yet, but that nevertheless. Yes. Are because we can feel it. And I think it's much more important to develop the sense for such a sense for that than having a catalogue of what you're allowed to do and what not. Yeah. So earlier we also spoke about this where a person said that they had an experience where someone at a workshop said , I need a catalogue of words that I can say and that I can't say.
And that essentially they're being guided and navigate through this by someone else and that people have essentially lost their confidence in their own sense of what's right and essentially feel like it's a bit archaic and it's like imposed on them. And so they're just kind of go on autopilot. And you also quoted Toni Morrison earlier. I really think you can't quote her often enough. What do you think? What else is there? What other distractions are there right now in our society that maybe distract us from the bigger tasks and the big questions? So I would claim I wouldn't say it that broadly, but what Toni Morrison said about racism, you can essentially apply that to every single ill.
We have in our society right now. People need to prove that there are people that are existential threatened by poverty or or live in existential, threatening poverty. Right now, in one of the richest industrial economies in this country, people are being forced to prove that there is a climate crisis right now. People are have to prove that there is racism, that they are being forced to prove that there is sexism and racism. And so on. And we some somehow like start over again at this point, zero of this ill, this injustice rather than talking about how to solve these injustices, these problems, somehow we always pushed back to this starting point.
I think you can talk about this really well using racist police violence as an example. So unfortunately, we had another terrible debate about this. Again. And there was this debate that was kind of a good example of how our society debates usually. And it's people essentially enter the stage with this claim to absolute truth and enter the stage with it. But the world is much more complicated. And so a good example from Indian philosophy, but also exists in many other philosophical traditions. There's a large dark room and there's an elephant inside this room. And then all of these people are being led into the room and they are asked to describe what an elephant is, elephant is, so they can all touch it, but they can't see it. Yes, exactly. And so some people say, oh, elephants, elephants are soft and fluffy. One person is one person says, oh, the elephant is so hard and heavy. But if one person says there perspective is absolute and the absolute truth, then all other truths are in just oppressed. But we also know miss out on an opportunity to see what actually is.
And so if we use this for the example of the debates about police violence, then maybe for some people police means safety in a sense of security and for other people it is an institution that stands for racism, violence and death. And this perspective, too, is a lived reality. And in our public, these two perspectives are essentially pitted against each other. Rather than bringing these two perspectives together and, for example, saying, well, maybe if this institution of the police doesn't offer more order and safety to everyone, A, how can we can they do that? Is it even possible? And C, are there maybe other ways of creating safety and order, security and order in a society? But we don't ever get to this question of a, B or C, because we are kind of stuck at this question of whether this problem exists in the first place or.
Very well summarised. I want to there's a this is maybe not a real quote, but you said this once, where you said you long for a language that doesn't reduce people to categories. I didn't make that up. You said that. So I wonder for in many, many spaces it's become become accepted that right or common to kind of signal your position inside society but of course that creates categories or existing categories are entrenched. How do you bring these two things together? Can I can I share an anecdote? Yeah, of course. Okay. I hope I can say that in this space of time, if I speak too fast, you can listen to it at 0.5 speed. This anecdote. But before the book came out, I was at a conference and I was talking about the Museum of Language. This is a story that I'm not going to tell you right now, but it's essentially an analogy to describe. If we think of language as as a room, how people are essentially exhibited in cages.
And after I talked about this, after I talked about this idea, there was a law professor in front of me who was talking about the anti-discrimination law and essentially explained that old white men are one of the groups that profit the most from the anti-discrimination law because they sue because of age discrimination. More than many other people. And there's a lot of like excite ment and people being angry about old white men and there was one old white man and essentially said that he was frustrated at how old white men were being talked about in the room.
And so then of course the discussion boiled up even further and kept going back and forth. And I tried to intervene and describe what was happening in this room at that very moment. So this person, this old white man, maybe he was also wise, but this old white man was used to being seen as an individual or an individual with like like a complex reality, present and future failing and good sides. And suddenly he experienced what it's like to be stand in front of another person, but to not be seen to speak, but not not to be heard for the first time. Maybe for the first time in his life, he experienced what it's like to not just be yourself, but to be representative for other people and to be held responsible for other people as well.
Instead of thinking about like what you would otherwise be thinking about. He was super busy with proving all the things he wasn't that he wasn't sexist, that he wasn't racist to maybe get to the point to a point in the conversation at some point to prove to everyone else that he was kind of an equal human being, that you can talk to. So for the first time, he experienced what it's like to be behind these walls and to essentially suffocate under these walls that are being built in our language. But this thing that he experienced for the first time right in that very moment, the people are the people who are on the panel with me.
They have been experiencing that for their entire life. And so what are categories there? Essentially agreements on certain meanings, but what these rooms turn into cages is when we pretend to know that who is behind this category of old white men. I know who you are. Oh female refugee. Muslim, Muslim woman. I know who you are. And so this claim to absolute truth, this false belief that we know who someone is just because we have a name for that category is something that is really being cultivated in our society.
Well, I couldn't think of a better way of closing things out. Thank you so much. Thanks for your presentation. Thanks for your words. And in this conversation on as well. So we will continue. I think we'll have a short break. Let me have a quick look. Thank you. You Yeah, we'll have a quick break and then we'll continue. I forgot my moderation notes behind the stage, so I can't tell you right now what's happening next. But we'll just have a quick break and then we'll continue in a moment. And .
Hello and Herzlich, willkommen, Recht, Weiter. This is. Good All right. So I'm still having trouble with my crutches today, so we're going to continue straight away with Yulia Kloiber and Daniel Morton. And they're going to talk about the topic of content moderation, exploitation as a service. They're going to talk about that. And Julia is going to start with a talk and then they're going to have a dialogue. And Daniel will be joining us live from Kenya. If the, you know, tech stuff works. So I'm going to talk a little bit about Julia. She's a co-founder of the feminist initiative Super Lab, and she started various explorations into how technology can be used for societal good. There's the prototype fund, the network code for Germany.
And she's a fellow of the Mozilla Foundation. And she in her work, she deals with digitisation. And she's also on the board of various institutions means. And, you know, her focus among the things she focuses on is civic tech and I'm also going to talk about some words on Daniel Motaung. He's a former our whistleblower . He's a former content moderator and also a whistleblower at. And he sued his former employer for the inhumane conditions under which he was working in Kenya. He mentioned various ways that union ization was being sabotaged. Damages to privacy and data protection and he was diagnosed with PTSD, actually. And so, yeah, we're really it's great that they're here today, but we have to yeah, make this explicit. You know, this as a content warning, as a this, you know, might be triggering for some people.
So take care of yourselves. All right, Julia, welcome to our 23 Pakistan 2017. Amir is working with a humanitarian aid organisation. He is university educated and fluent in English. Pashto and Dari for years later, he moves to Regensburg to get a master's degree. And as you do as a student, he gets a side job to cover his living expenses. He finds a job advertised as system analyst and is hired at Amir's job is the topic of today's talk content. Moderation Amir is moderating content for Facebook and Instagram. Um, so you might be thinking now, now that his employer is meta, but they're not. Meta is outsource sourcing their content moderation responsibly. City Amir is working with an outsourcing company whose name you've probably never heard before. The early shift starts exactly at 8 a.m. and ends at 430 in the afternoon. The content moderators work in three shifts day and night. The content moderation industry never sleeps as the system keeps track of his every move. How fast and how efficient he can sort through 200 up to a thousand pieces of content per day. Amir is assigned Tier one material content moderators work in different tiers moderators who are moderating Tier one material.
I expose to the most extreme content beheadings, suicide, child abuse, animal abuse, as Amir calls himself a brave heart coming from a warring country, he thinks that he has seen it all, but the content is worth much worse than even he could think of, Amir says, as it could just be ten pieces of content when one of them is a beheading or a child being abused, it can break you. A year later, he begins to have violent nightmares as his partner tells him that he's screaming during his sleep in the morning, sitting on his balcony. He thinks about the violent content that he is subjected to eight hours a day, 40 hours a week in one year. He has witnessed about 1000 hours of violent acts, and he is broken. Wouldn't you be? He is diagnosed with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. His company offers well-being counselling, but the people are not trained psychologists. Amir fears for his job and his privacy.
He doesn't go and instead turns to his health insurance for mental health care. Amir wants to quit his job, but he needs it to keep his visa. And after the COVID 19 pandemic has started, it's become even harder for people like him who are not fluent in German to find a good job keeping in mind Amir's education background, his cultural and his political awareness, his language skills and the gruelling nature of the job.
How much do you think Amir earns? ■k714. His hourly wage is ■k714e in Berlin and high performance is not rewarded with a promotion . Amir's three years of experience is treated the same as a new employee On their first day, Amir says it's not just the inappropriate pay, the traumatic content for me, it's at the end of the day that I don't even feel appreciated. It's me who's keeping your social media feed flawless Amir's story is just one of many between March and May this year, I have met 200 content moderators here in Germany and in Kenya. Superlab together with the nonprofits, foxglove, love, aspiration and the German labour union Verdi have hosted content moderator summits, content moderators are the Internet's essential safety workers. They protect all of us. They watch the most gruesome content.
So you and I don't have to without content moderators. There are no social media platforms, has no content moderators, no social media platforms as simple as that. Many of you are aware of the harsh job conditions in content moderation today. Daniel and I want to share some insights with you that you may not be aware of. If many, many of the content moderators that I have met are immigrants, there residency permits are linked to their jobs , just like in Amir's case, a situation that is easy to exploit and that is being exploited by the employers. In Kenya, Many of the content moderators have moved to Kenya, to Nairobi from their home countries. They come from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Burundi, Uganda, South Africa. They have left their home countries to escape war and poverty. They are young for many, this is the first job after getting a university degree.
There is a high rate of unemployment in African countries. As for many of these people as educated as they are, they go without employment for years, so they take anything that comes their way. The jobs in content moderation are advertised as system analyst processes, associate customer service representative. These job titles further obscure the landscape of content moderation from public visibility. Imagine applying for a job as a customer service representative. Would you think that this would entail watching beheadings, child abuse, murder and suicide on a daily basis? Probably not. And neither do these moderators.
It struck me how often moderators told me about the fact that they did not know what they were getting themselves into when they took the jobs. One moderator said to me, I feel that I was deceived into this job. Julia I was brought to a foreign nation and enslaved. Being a content moderator is like working in an Amazon warehouse house and a toxic waste dump at the same time. You have the pressure of the factory job, the time tracking the surveillance, the targets, plus you have the extreme content. This is a toxic mix that knows human can bear for a long time. What is important to acknowledge here is , is that this is not about the most gruesome content that you can imagine. This is about the most gruesome content that someone else can imagine and post. You might be thinking to yourself, why don't they just click off? Well, not possible.
Some companies make it mandatory that content moderators watch the full length of the gruesome videos and annotate what they see A lot of content developers, content moderators develop PTSD . They are physically and emotionally, mentally traumatised by their jobs. Many of them are never diagnosed. They take antidepressants. Some take sleeping pills to block out the graphic images that their brains keep churning night after night. One moderator I'll call her Leila, told me if the employer finds out that you have mental health problems due to these jobs, they will find a way to get rid of you.
There There is no professional psychological care the employers offer in-house well-being counselling or resilience coaching by people who have no training in trauma. The counsellors advise traumatised content moderators to brief or to go for walks. More operators don't trust these counsellors that are employed by their employers. They suspect them spying on them rather than supporting them, despite the importance of their work content moderators are working behind the curtains in the shadows. Big tech likes it best when we don't see them, when we don't know their faces and their names. Big tech likes us to believe that this is a job that anyone can do, that this is basic click work, but the opposite is the case. Moderators need deep cultural expertise, eyes on the content they moderate. We're speaking satire, political commentary, sarcasm, subcultural content, subtlety. The moderators have to navigate complex policies, policies that are issues issued by the social media companies. Policies can be updated daily and if you think this is not challenging enough, then add surveillance and time pressure to the mix.
Once you've understood the complex of the job, you quickly realise that there is no quick technological fix to this. There's been talk for years that AI will replace these jobs and still here we are where we are talking about AI thousands of content moderators under the most precarious conditions are doing this job on a daily basis. As the labour union Verdi estimates that it's more than 5000 content moderators here in Germany alone .
And even if I becomes good enough to do parts of the job, what if exploiting humans is still cheaper than constantly training a system this is a quote by Roy Chardy, the former CMO of a company working on AI and content moderation. He said in an interview, If you're looking at this system from a monetary perspective, then content moderation. I can compete with $1.80 an hour and with the $1.80, he refers us to the average wage of content moderators in low income countries. That's digital colonialism. It's farming out the most dangerous labour to populations in regions where pay is cheap and labour rights are not existent. We've learned to care about the supply chains of our sneakers, of our shoes, but but we ignore the fact that there's an exploitative supply chain of a service that keeps our social media feeds flawless.
We think that it's not us. We're just posting pictures from Republic for our friends and Food on Instagram, not beheadings, suicide and rape videos. Well while we don't grasp the systemic dimension of this, the business model that is based on algorithmic timelines. Algorithmic timelines that exacerbate the problem by pushing polarising and extreme content. Resistance is rising. Young moderators are organising and fighting back moderators in Germany are starting works councils. They are joining the union moderators in Kenya just held a groundbreaking summit on May first where 150 of them voted to form a union next week. On June 14th, there will be a hearing at the German Bundestag. So content moderators will be invited to the Bundestag for the first time to speak about their working conditions. It's about time the big tech companies are powerful, but so are thousands of workers standing united for better working conditions. And they are even more powerful if users stand in solidarity with them. If we all echo what they have to say, if we stand with them in their fight in Germany, 200 of them have signed a manifesto that will be launched next week.
They demand and fair pay, proper mental health support, the end of outsourcing , the end of unreasonable surveillance and an end to the culture of secrecy. I want to bring in Daniel Mouton now. I hope he's here. He's a whistleblower, a labour rights activist and a former content moderator. He was one of the first moderators who spoke out about the precarious exploitation of working conditions in 2019. In last year, his story was on the cover of Time magazine. Daniel is joining us virtually from South Africa. Daniel Hi. Welcome. Daniel I've talked about the working conditions and about how people get into these jobs, So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you got into this job. Did you did you know what it what it entails when you took it? Hi, Julia. And thank you, everyone, for giving me this opportunity. So in 2019, when I first applied for this job, I actually only knew that I was applying for a job named Content Moderation.
But before I go ahead on that, please note that there are cases whereby in fact some of my colleagues were recruited under names such as call centre agents and all of those things. So I applied and then I went to Kenya and when I when I when I went to Kenya, I did not actually know that I was going to be working for a social media company called Facebook. I did not even know that the job that I was going to be doing would potentially be toxic and cause me to end up with PTSD.
In fact, I did not know about the job. Safe to say that, according to my understanding of the advert and to me making sense of the advert, I understood that the job was going to be merely administrative in nature. So I was going to be doing admin narrative work, maybe moderating documents, just like examiners do. So what did the job entail? So once I arrived in Kenya, I did the induction and during that induction process, no one actually told me even at that point that the job would be potentially graphic or or that the job could potentially cause me to be sick or end up with a mental health care problems. No one told me that until the time where I moderated one piece of content. Uh, a live video of a beheading and that, I think, is the one thing that really took me off course and sort of determined that the rest of my life. Because after that, after moderating that video of a live beheading and this is not a movie, it was a video of a human being, uh, whose head was being cut off.
So I moderated this video, and then I began having nightmares. I began having flashbacks and all of those things. And so I then realised that this job was actually very, very dangerous and in fact, this job potentially would cause me to be to be sick. But at that time, nor did I know and nor did I understand that I was sick because, um, no person can actually diagnose themselves. So I was not able to, to diagnose myself and say, well, now I am sick because of this job. I only understood that something was wrong with me, that I was beginning to, uh, not to sleep at night.
I was beginning to have flashbacks and scary thoughts and all of those. And you were fired in 2019, right? So why? What was the reason for the company or what did they put forward when they fired you? So in 2019, um, they, they, they actually lied and said that, um , I was engaged in um, a behaviour that intimidated other workers, whereas in actual fact, the only were looking for reasons to uh, justify their firing of me because they were only firing me because I actually began to organise, uh, uh, my colleagues, uh, for a union because we were trying to have a conversation with them about our working conditions and how those working conditions were problematic, how those working conditions were actually causing us to be sick because I am sick right now. Um, so we tried to have a conversation with them about this and they did not want to do that.
In fact , they kept on telling us that we need them. They were doing us a favour and that is the narrative that they push even today, that they are doing us a favour and it's either we do the job or we go home. So I decided , okay, let's unionise because we needed better protection and better protection actually means that you must have the protection of a union because then a union will be able to bargain on your behalf and no one can actually fire you because, uh, you have the protections of a union which is then backed by law. So I was fired essentially because I was trying to fight for our rights as workers. I was saying to my colleagues, Let's fight for our rights and let us not die in silence. And I know that Daniel , since 2019, you've been thinking a lot about how to improve the system, how content moderation, how the working conditions can be improved, but also the whole system.
Um, so what are two measures that, that the social media companies have to take in order to ensure that content moderation gets out of the precarious area and becomes a job that yeah. Is a labour that humans can do under fair and under good conditions. Uh, so, so throughout my time of thinking about this, I actually realised that the biggest problem with content moderation is that, um, we are expendable or is easily replaceable. Uh, and by that I mean for example, in 2019 they used to tell us that we are useless. They are doing us a favour and in fact if they wanted to fire us, they would fire us then and find someone on the street. And by finding someone on the street, the job right now, as it stands, means that you can you can easily go in the street and find someone who is able to use a computer and be able to speak a certain language.
Then you have your content. MODERATOR That's how easily replaceable the content moderator is. But now I have actually realised that, um, if we can professionalise content moderation, that will actually address the problem of , of easily being replaceable and at the same time professionalising content moderation would actually mean that, um, uh, the job becomes more, more professional in terms of uh, producing quality results.
So here what I mean is that if you have a content moderator who is not able to apply or interpret policy because, uh, content moderators are actually policy interpreters for content, uh, you will have people making mistakes because I'm under pressure and I, I don't. And since I have PTSD or whatever, I'm not going to be able to do my job perfectly. That's why, uh, some content would seep in or seep through and then you'll end up with misinformation or disinformation and ending up in the public sphere. And then nations or or ethnic groups going into, uh, uh, to war as we have seen. The second thing that needs to be done is to make sure that proper mental health care support is available for content moderators. 24 over seven. So when I need content, when I when I need, uh, the support of a psychologist, it can't be once a week or twice a week or once a month.
It has to be available for my, uh, for my usage. Uh, every single hour of the day. So let's say, for example, I start, I begin experiencing problems at night and I'm at home, Uh, and such support is not available with me. I might even end up committing suicide because I have no support. So this support is, is important in to respect one. It will allow me that I'm better safe. Secondly, it will make sure that I am able to do my job properly and make sure that the results that I produce are of the highest quality and make sure that, uh, I myself as a content, as a content moderator, am safe, and also ensure that users as well are safe and um, to wrap up the interview, Daniel, So there's a bunch of people sitting here and , and maybe some of them are curious to know what they can do to support content moderators.
Us So in, in the immediate, I think this is an emergency situation because I can go on a rant and talk about a host of other things that are can be done to support content moderation. And even this uh, professionalisation that I speak of, but think of the, the most important thing right now is to try and support the moderators in Kenya who are currently facing redundancy and who are not being paid, um, by summer. And here we are talking about people who are coming from different foreign countries and essentially they are stranded there. Some don't have money to buy food, some don't have money to pay for rent. So basically there are basic essentials are not being catered for. So the most important thing, while this redundancy case is ongoing, I think, uh, what the people can do is to try and make the donations however they could and make sure that those people, those moderators on top of the stress, the emotional stress that I believe they are already going through because of the job that they do, uh, at least at the very least, the shock of not being paid, the shock of not being able to buy food, of not being able to pay for rent, is absorbed in the interim.
And we can do that by donating to a fund that they have created in Kenya. Thank you. I have sneaked a QR code into my last slide, so 184 content moderators have been unlawfully fired in April and they've set up a fundraiser. So there is a QR code on the last slide if you want to support them. Thanks so much, Daniel, for joining us and for sharing some insights and your thoughts on how this field can be improved. Both of us, thank you . We would like to end this talk by shining a light on the field of content moderation by amplifying the voices of content moderators themselves. I have mentioned that 150 of them gathered in Nairobi in May and we want to show you a short clip of the gathering now to end the talk. Thank you so much. For those probably who do not really understand what is content moderation, we are soldiers, us who work in dark space.
Whose employer do not want them to be known or seen. But we are there are behind the curtains, doing whatever we can do to sacrificially withholding, nothing to offer our lives to protect what has been called community 80. And the community has forgotten about us. And I want to say we are part of that community. Have you seen yourselves? You're so young. You're so vibrant, you're so talented. And it is it is a shame to put an end to that talent while you are this young . What happens to an 18 year old person who leaves school and gets a content moderation job? They they get exposed. And after some time you are just dispersed like we have just been dispersed .
Now you can't take people from their countries and treat them like dirt, like they are disposable, like we are toilet paper. It hurts. That the frontline of defence and we need to make people like Mark Zuckerberg and every other social platform realise that without us there is no social platforms. Thank you. Thank thank you. Yulia Kloiber and Daniel Motaung for this and for the content. Thank you. Yulia Kloiber and Daniel Motaung for this reminder that content moderation isn't the job done by nameless bots, but by people like you and me. And I think that's important to keep in mind.
We're going to have a short, tiny mini break and then we're going to continue you with Tiger brain and Sam Levine and yeah, please stay seated. We're going to have a quick technical interlude and then we're going to continue with getting to net zero, the penultimate Talk of the day. Thank you. So as get better. All right. We're going to continue just like a promise, a short break. We're going to contain you with Tiger brain and Sam Levine. Tiger brain is an artist from Digital Artists from Australia, and she's also an assistant professor at the New York University for Digital Media. And in her work, she focuses on energy, infrastructure, data and automation. But she also has exhibitions of her artwork art in galleries and museums worldwide.
And she just published a book with MIT Press . Sam Levine is a teacher and an artist, and he deals with surveillance automation and language processing in his work. And he works as an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin. And in their session, they're going to show us how we can mitigate climate change and how geoengineering can be thought of on a larger scale and on a sustainable level. And so it's a bit late, but please give it up for both of them.
It's great to stay here, so please welcome them to Republica. Oh, I'm not. I'm not allowed to clap. Sorry. Okay. Okay Let's do it. There were nature. Nature same time competitive portfolio delivery, absolute emissions, strong results, dynamic market retail sites, low carbon, everyday products, convenient shops, key growth, higher margins. New offers. Shell cafe low carbon electric vehicle Joint venture. Further expansion. Key Biofuels. Electric vehicle. Electric vehicle. Pernice Refinery. Renewable diesel. Sustainable Aviation. Sustainable Aviation. Blue ALP Plastic waste. Great example. Integrated Energy. Traditional fuel. Low carbon Internal rate of tangible assets. Low carbon, absolute emissions. Clear message. Absolute emissions. Operational control. Net basis integrated energy. Other measures. Important step. Dynamic energy. Higher oil, mixed chemicals. Financial results. Outstanding. Quarterly Higher prices. Long term. Higher Spot. Strong Cash. Highest Cash. Highest Cash. Premium Fuels. Electric Vehicle. Traditional refineries. Absolute Emissions. Low Carbon. Wider Society. Hi everyone I'm Tiger brain and this is Sam Levine and in 2015, we created a new organisation, The Inter-Government Mental Panel on Capitalism.
Um, or what we like to call the IPC. The IPC is based on on the model established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but with one key difference we have limited resources. And so to launch the IPC, we transformed all the documents from the IPC about climate change into an equally truthful corpus, about capitalism. Um, to do this, we just make a simple change. We swap the phrase climate change with the word capitalism. And fortunately when you make this change, the grammar and meaning of sentences remains intact or even enhanced. In 1988, the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Program at the Foresight to recognise that the emerging issue of capitalism would soon rise to the top of the global agenda by jointly establishing an intergovernmental panel on Capitalism, the governing bodies of WMO and UNEP and shared that future decision making about capitalism would be based on sound science. The poorest people in the world were going to be most severely hurt by capitalism. What it is saying is that capitalism is a transaction in which some people harm other people, substantial and wide ranging impacts of capitalism have occurred across the world.
Capitalism is already affecting ecosystems and human health. We have the means to limit capitalism and build a better future. The impacts of capitalism will become progressively more difficult at and beyond the scope are being of our being able to adapt to them. Action has to be taken. Now. Yeah. So thank you. So we did this. We did this. Find and replace on every single thing that the IPCC has ever produced at the time. So these are our reports. The website, the entire video archive. And today we're going to talk about about four schemes that we've developed at the IPCC over the past few years to get to net zero. All of these schemes have been developed under the rubric of what we call expanded geoengineering and they all address the urgent need for radical climate initiatives. So you're probably aware that geoengineering is a broad term that refers to large scale, but still mostly speculative attempts to manage Earth's climate. And these tend to fall into two categories either carbon dioxide removal or by attempting to reduce heating song.
And indeed, we do need to be looking into these things. We do need to be building planetary infrastructures and programs to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But at the IPCC we observe how many of these proposed models in their current form are straightforward attempts to manipulate the physical environment, and they don't tend to address the kind of radical cultural and economic transitions that we need to address. The climate crisis. So expanded geoengineering is a prompt to consider what geoengineering could be beyond techno optimism and beyond sort of naive solution is how could the framing of geoengineering catalyse as much needed shifts and reforms in spaces like, say, the reform of our media platforms as how much we work and sleep and rest or the role of our knowledge institutions.
So we're going to be looking at a few examples, falls in each of these sort of categories today. So let's first consider the media crowds, gatherings, protests, wild applause. These have become clicks, likes and shares and ad revenue. And at the IPC, we've been asking how this shift towards algorithmic advertising driven media platforms shapes how we are understanding and addressing the climate emergency. So climate change and its devastating effects are here right now. And yet many times these events still fail to make headlines or front page news. And when the effects are discussed at their very regularly not described as human induced. So disasters still being described as natural and the business model of the Internet means many news outlets rely on revenue by selling ads that run alongside their stories.
So the more traffic a story receives, the more money it earns. And then there's this incentive to optimise news coverage and journalistic endeavours for engagement, for clicks and views and signals that indicate the appearance of human attention. And so engagement data then also determines how stories get aggregated across the Internet, how they get promoted. And there's amplification that happens often without human decision makers in the loop. So Earl Ping's mouse clicks and scrolls, they determine the value of reporting on different issues in including existential ones like climate change crowds where gathered in protest or support are of course central to the appearance of democratic processes. Yet when political leaders pay people to attend rallies is by hiring actors through dedicated service providers. We remind did that engagement can actually be coerced, forced or simulated effect that has become even more pronounced out on the Internet.
Opinions about issues such as climate change are increasingly sort of co engineered by the algorithms of today's digital media platforms and advertising ecologies. The stories we tell or don't tell, and those which capture our attention have atmospheric effects. So Synthetic Messenger is a scheme that examines the ad driven algorithmic media platform as a sort of geoengineering technology. The work takes the form of a hundred bots, each animated with a quivering hand and a voice, and each bot spends its days visiting climate news stories and clicks on all the ads that run alongside this reporting.
So as our bots traverse the Internet, it you'll see the strange state of digital advertising today stories about collapsing ice shelves, running alongside ads for Viagra. The new windows dongles all natural sleeping patches as it's yeah, it's strange how we've come to this place it's and with every click back on the advertisers servers of course a tiny transaction is triggered between advertiser and news outlet that and this would theoretically increase the value of each article perhaps also causing it to be amplified. And as I've described across the internet. Right. So here we're trying to leverage the digital advertising business model of the Internet to draw attention and ultimately ask questions about the role that these platforms and algorithms and AI systems are playing in how we understand the climate crisis today. I think it's also worth pointing out that synthetic messenger is a system where one automated system, our bots is talking to another automated system. So we've got like bots talking to bots all the way down.
So we first made this scheme in the pandemic and when active, each bot performs in its own Zoom account. And so we invited audiences and members of the public to sort of join this Zoom call and, and commune with all of the different bots going about their business. All click scroll, click roll, click, roll, click, click, scroll, scroll, click, click, scroll, click, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, click, scroll, click, scroll. Click, click, click. Squirrel. Square Click scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, click. Scroll. Scroll, scroll, scroll. All right. Okay. I think that's enough. Um so synthetic messages exploring what the fossil fuel industry and its supporters have known for a long time, which is those who control the media cycle, have an outsized influence on the climate cycle. Oil industry backed media manipulation strategies are, of course, well documented, and we see this understanding through sophisticated rhetorical techniques like framing emissions reductions as an individual rather than a systemic problem, which was a very effective strategy used by BP. They launched in 2004, the first sort of carbon footprint calculator, a move that successfully deflected attention away from industry responses for fossil fuels and climate change .
But these strategies also include media manipulation, like the amplify creation of misinformation that specifically leverages the logics of online platform tools. So bots spreading misinformation. This occurred during the massive Australian wildfires in 2019, where misinformation that these fires were sort of produced by arson rather than unprecedent drought was this, this, this sort of reporting was amplified online and most recently this has been happening in Canada in the wildfire ads that have been happening there over the past few weeks.
The pandemic also demonstrated how media platforms like Twitter were really willing to moderate and flag misinformation relating to COVID and vaccines. But yet would not extend the same caution when it came to the climate crisis. Even more concerning is that terms of services of these platforms remain strongly biased towards the fossil fuel industry. When we were making this work around 2019 2020, Facebook was making environmental scientists register for as political advertisers as Facebook's advertising rules, classified environmental content as political news. Meanwhile, platforms like Twitter would only let the oil industry pay and promote their content and would not extend the same privileges to climate activist groups. You see on screen an ad that was circulating when Biden signed the executive actions to address climate change in 2021. And while anxieties about bots and trolls and automated activities, particularly around electoral politics, are perhaps disproportionate to their actual impact, the use of bots to spread an ancillary misinformation is a genuine challenge in a media ecosystem, um that remains sympathetic to climate deniers and fossil fuel interests at a time when our action or inaction produces atmospheric signatures.
The news we see, the narratives that shape our our beliefs directly shape the atmosphere. Media becomes ecology. Right? So in many ways, the goal of traditional geoengineering is to maintain a status quo to ensure that power relations, wealth relations, class relations issues remain as they are right and above all else, to ensure that production continues to grow forever. And that brings us to our second expanded geoengineering scheme Perfect Sleep. Perfect sleep. Investigates, sleep and dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology. In the work we invite, participate to experiment with their own sleep cycles to explore how lack of sleep and climate change are both products of the same Extractivist capitalist system where regenerate ocean rest and natural limits go unvalued the work is realised in two parts as an installation and as a smartphone alarm clock. The app, which is available on the App Store, the Apple App Store as the perfect sleep app.
It allows users to adjust their sleep schedule slowly, increasing sleep time over the course of three years until they achieve a state of total sleep or 24 hours of sleep. As your sleep time increases, the app suggests an appropriate schedule dividing up your remaining time into leisure and work. Of course, being able to work less is a privilege that most people don't have, and we initially had wanted to make the app cost $10,000 so that only the right people would use it. But the curators who commissioned the project wouldn't let us do that.
So it's free. Here's a potential schedule so as you can possibly see, by day 613, you are sleeping for 16 hours and 42 minutes. You're enjoying seven hours and 18 minutes of leisure activities and you're working for zero hours and zero minutes and by day, 1051 you have achieved total sleep. The app also tracks your estimated economic output and carbon emissions. As your sleep time increases and your work time decreases to make these predictions, we've produced a extremely sophisticated climate model drawing on research that correlates average sleep time and GDP and GDP and carbon emissions. So here, for example, are some estimations for what happens to GDP and CO two relative to sleep time with sleep on the x axis, the App Star is already filled with sleeping and resting apps.
Silicon Valley has this deep interest in rest, but of course it's an interest in rest and wellness for the sake of increasing productivity rather than decreasing it. And you'll notice a kind of a strange thing in this graph, which is that because as the population doesn't sleep enough, generally speaking, a little extra sleep time in the beginning actually bumps CO2 and GDP. But then after this unfortunate blip, things start going in the right direction in addition to the app, the project is realised as an installation made of custom beds. The design of the furniture takes inspiration from the deckchairs.
In Thomas Mann's novel Magic Mountain, where tubercular patients doze awaiting a cure. And from the sleeping pods of Silicon Valley to assist users in falling asleep. We've also commissioned a series of dream incubation texts from authors Simone Brown, Johanna Hedva, who's actually based here in Berlin, Holly Jean Buck and Sophie Lewis. These all invite sleepers to dedicate their dream space to envisioning a world beyond our own. And the texts have been transformed into dreams. Scapes by composer Luisa Pereira. So in both Synthetic Messenger and Perfect sleep, we employed a form of digital sabotage. Sabotage is, I think, perhaps best defined by Labour leader and activist and founding member of the ACLU. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
As the withdrawal of efficiency with the aims of affecting the profits of a boss , perfect sleep takes this to an extreme but very internalised and the next project looks a little bit more outward. So this is scheme three redistribute or fragile states fragile states is an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism. Um it's an ongoing attempt to celebrate and financially support those who have experienced severe government punishment, violence and retaliation for doing direct action.
And to do this project we took a research grant from New York University and with that money we started a limited liability company called Redistribute LLC. The goal of redistribute LLC is to funnel money from organisations like NYU to the people who are actually doing the work that's needed. We ask our interviewees to explain what happened to them and they receive $1,000 honorariums. So the archive currently includes interviews with Max Kurmi, who got six months in jail for shutting down a port in Australia. Red Fawn Fallis, who got four years for participating in Standing Rock. Daniel McGowan, who got seven years for his participation in the Earth Liberation Front and an anonymous activist who goes by the name Rose, who was involved in Extinction Rebellion in Sudan and faced quite devastating consequences for what really amounted to for passing out flyers by redistributing research funds to support climate activists. The project is also asking what role academic and cultural institutions should play in the response to the climate Emergency academic timelines in the production of new insight and knowledge are now longer than the window.
We have to halt the crisis and at a time when many institutions continue to uphold a dangerous trajectory of the status quo, we ask how? How might we transform the university and redistribute its resources? And I'll just read a brief quote from Max Kirby's interview from Blockade Australia. He says, You hear a lot of people talking about the system is broken and the system is malfunctioning. We need to fix the system. ET cetera. But it's not actually broken. It's performing exactly the way it was set up as the climate crisis deepens, governments around the world are using every means at their disposal to crack down on protest and activism. You're seeing this here also in Germany. However in exercising their power, they simultaneously reveal their own fragility. The extreme legal and police response to climate resistance is also a tacit acknowledgement of the incredible potential opened up by those who are attempting to enact a liveable future for great.
So the final scheme we'll share today is one called Offset. If Fragile States was a scheme to redistribute research funds to activists, it's limited by the funding for the project and essentially it was a one off that was tied to a particular grant. And so we've been thinking about how we could systematise the redistribution of resources to those doing activism and doing this important work by leveraging the logic of emerging carbon markets . So carbon markets are where carbon offsets are traded and carbon offsets are actions intended to compensate for carbon emissions to the atmosphere. So an example, say I own a forest and that forest absorbs, I don't know, a thousand tons of carbon a year. And you are Microsoft and you want to compensate for a thousand tons of carbon emitted by your new data centre. I don't know, maybe you wanted to give your users legs in VR or something.
It's going to cost a thousand tons of carbon. So I sell you my carbon that my forest has absorbed in the form of credits to compensate for this. And so what you're seeing here is carbon offset supplies, the logic of capitalism to atmospheric interactions where for this logic assumes that all activities on earth can be quantified, abstracted and therefore exchanged. And so offsets produces this capacity to outsource the effects of one's consumption either at the scale of the individual, the corporation or the nation state to someone else somewhere else, or even to generations of the future. Therefore, offsets tend to maintain an entrenched the status quo quo rather than address the root cause of the climate catastrophe.
But does putting a price on carbon so that it can be traded like this actually results in carbon sequestration and drawdown as Dr. Sarah Bracking, who is a professor of climate and society at King's College London, has put it promises of money from global institutions and governments have financialized people's hope and expectation of government action to adapt to climate change and slow the emissions of greenhouse gases. Because of the cultural power of money. In our understanding of the world, climate finance has had the particular job of signifying action while delivering very little.
The process of converting real world actions into carbon credits is also one of data collection, quantification and calculation. So net zero is a massive computation challenge. So in addition to relying on the cultural power of money, offsets also rely on the dream of infinite compute thing and compute ability that the world can be computed and they rely on these imaginaries co-mingling the example of the forest from before is a relatively simple one, but there are many other methodologies and techniques for calculating credits that are more obtuse and elaborate and therefore problematic. So one such technique that we have been looking at is called Tanya Accounting. Tanya Accounting can be used to calculate the benefit of temporal truly storing carbon . For example, say I own that forest and I've decided I'm going to cut it down. But I'm not going to cut it down this year. Maybe I delay that decision for five years. Can this delay be counted as a carbon credit? And so the Forestry industry has come up with a methodology to answer yes to that question. And it's based on a lot of assumptions right, on the assumption that that at a meeting carbon later is better than a meeting carbon.
Now now. And this claim that delaying emissions is beneficial. Rest is on a whole lot of other really shaky assumptions. A few of these are that the well-being of future generations can be discounted so that their well-being is less important than the generations today. Do we believe that and that technologies of the future will be better? So technologies to sequester carbon and adapt will be better in the future than they are today? Again, do we believe that? So Tanya, accounting has been endorsed by big carbon registries like Vera , and it's also been being adopted by governments in their offsetting practices as the most recent example happened in Quebec, a few months ago.
Great for our part, and I'm going to go quick because I think we're out of time. We've realised that some direct action can also be seen as a form of temporary carbon storage. So, for example, in 2021, that group that Max Kurmi was involved with, Blockade Australia, they shut down the port of Newcastle for ten days. Newcastle is the largest coal exporting port in the world and through their action blockade, Australia effectively forced the port to temporarily store the carbon that would have otherwise been exported and combusted. According to their calculation or our calculations. This amounted to 4.3 million tons of coal being stored, which is about 14.2 million tons of CO2. So from this vantage point, and with the help of techniques like Tanya accounting, the act of blockade, the port can be converted into carbon credits. And that brings us to our most recent and still ongoing project offset and offset.
We're developing a series of methodologies for generating carbon credits from industrial sabotage in order to take the logic of carbon markets to their logical end research by the Indigenous Environmental Network in the US has shown that direct actions have already done far, far more to prevent emissions than voluntary carbon marketplaces. Yet this important work remains un financialized and therefore uncompensated. In the coming months, we plan on launching a carbon registry and marketplace that focuses exclusively on these unconventional but highly but high quality carbon credits. The goal is to convert direct action and sabotage into credits so the credits to companies like Microsoft and then give the money back to the activists responsible for the original actions. Our White Paper is called Industrial sabotage as temporary carbon storage and with white paper as a guide. We've been writing up case studies on recent ecological actions. These include the previously mentioned Newcastle Port Blockade and Exxon Pipeline disruption and a group of people that go around deflating SUV tires. So if you're interested in contributing case studies or more novel methodologies, please see our website offset labour, bio and stay tuned for the launch of the marketplace case.
Thank you so much. And there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank action. Thank you so much. Let's let's get here right now continue after a short break. Very really short one at eight. We have this rousing final, which will be about the end of Twitter. Stay with us. It's just ten more minutes short stage rearrangement and then we'll have them and we'll have a crazy, crazy, easy journey. And see what has happened under Elon Musk. And very much looking forward to that. As I said, short break, it will will continue by eight. Thank you. Hello from me. So this days and I'm so glad that so many of you are here and you'll be able to have a beer in a short moment. Actually, you will surely will be able to have one right now, I'm very happy to welcome you to this fantastic rousing finale. You probably noticed we have two people because there are two laptops on the stage already.
And I'll get them on the stage soon and this will be Gavin Kamiya, who worked on the audio design of Eins live with North Westphalian radio station Public broadcaster and Dennis Horn develops podcasts for Deutschlandfunk Nationwide public broadcaster. And they have a broad cast that they do together, which is called Herkenrath and kind of put a put a check mark on it and he is a very nerdy guy and he's a digital expert in the German public broadcaster. ARD. And co host of Hakkenden. That podcast . And they take us on a crazy journey through our favourite platform, Twitter. I remember how Twitter used to be and how how it is now to the strange idea of a billionaire that maybe made Tesla grow into something large. But with the takeover of Twitter, he might lose a large part of his wealth because he doesn't know how this platform that he paid so much for ticks. It's not going to be a talk, though. They have prepared a quiz for you, an interactive one. I can tell you that much. So I'll be hobbling about the area for the next 15 minutes.
But first of all, welcome very much to Gavin and Dennis. I'm very happy that you're both here . Duncanson Thank you. Worst cake ever. Welcome. Half a year ago. We decided to start a daily Twitter podcast. A podcast. And we didn't know that what that would entail since then, we've been chained to each other and I think there are several more series to follow. I've heard Dennis Horne's voice more than I've heard my wife's voice, which is a kind of compliment, by the way.
Okay. Thank you for that. And we would like to take you with us on this journey through Twitter. It's ups and downs. It was kind of morning work. I left Twitter since you're still there, but you're having a hard time, too, aren't you? Yeah, The conspiracy billionaire, which we will come to, who will come to who takes this platform, gives it a jerk to the right. And we will talk about these ups and downs. A bit. Yes, but not in a chronological way, because we have one thing. There's one thing not many things you can learn from Elon Musk, but one thing you can learn and the interesting measure that he introduced is Unregretted user minutes, the time spent by users which they don't regret. So we're not going to use go this in a chronological kind of way, but in a zigzag kind of way. And we'll adapt to your speed because we are going to play with you. We want to play a game with you.
You know, the fundamentals of this game, it's called Jeopardy. You know, this kind of board that we will now see. And these are the categories, power and arbitrariness, labour market badge, better for money value and advertising and bots and politics. Yes. We're proud of the puns that we introduced and the amounts that we have used signify the prizes for Twitter on Twitter, blue marks on Android phones, on iPhones, the cost of a golden checkmark for businesses. Then the price. If you want to use the API of Twitter in a way that is actually usable all which is 40,000, 42,000 USD and the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid for Twitter, which of course is far much than it is worth now, far more than it's worth now.
The only thing that's missing are candidates. So I'll go down and get someone. We'll talk. We've said before that if we are being filmed on stage today, one of us should become a meme. I'll jump down from the stage. Maybe that will make me a meme, but for now I'm so focussed. Are there any volunteers? If there are no volunteers, I will find someone anyway, there is a volunteer here.
Thank you. Hello. Who are you? Hannah, Have a great applause for Hannah, please. Hannah come with me, please. So you'll have to go around the stage and maybe we can talk about what our impression was in the last few months. These six months of Twitter. The impression that Elon Musk was going around in circles in a way , with everything he was doing, he. He wanted to change Twitter from the ground up. He turned various screws in this platform and he always ended up applause for Hannah. He has a microphone for you and again, for everyone . Your name? Hannah. Since when have you left Twitter? I have never been on Twitter. I'm a perfect candidate, but we couldn't have done any better. Was that a conscious decision not to use Twitter? No, I simply never went into it. So your platforms are what? Oh, well, Instagram or like, okay, mainstream, Right, exactly. Photos. Okay. So this is the way we will do it. Each candidate will be given five five fields that they can uncover. And then there will be an award for all of you that are on the stage, no matter how much how many questions I got right? Yes.
That's the way Twitter is. No matter what you do and no matter how much money you earn, it will always days get less in time because it's losing value. So what would should we use? I want a lot of money, so I'll use bots and politics and the very bottom for $44 billion. That's a commitment. It interesting So how much of a fine does Twitter have to pay in Germany if they are not caught deleting content due to a systemic failure in the management of compliance? 15 million. 25 million. 40 million. 15 million? Are you sure? No Perfect. Would you like to haggle? Perhaps. No. Actually, we'll solve it straight away. ■k725 million. Oh bad. How's tht ? So if you cause a lot of damage for Twitter for leading to Twitter being enabled to delete it all, you know that so many people have been let go. So you could in theory, drive Twitter into insolvency. See through non moderation. I don't want to give any ideas to anyone, but this is about illegal content.
So you might be actually pursue it as well. Well so these three are all levels of fines in the network enforcement law. The network settings gazettes, the German law and platforms and Twitter is in the middle tier, at least for now. And with the given the time that we spent with that Twitter takeover, it might actually be time we need to click again now. I have to click on confirm you okay misinformation next field adventure Labour market 42,000 is a good choice. Do you think so? I don't know. Actually I forgot which question we have. Why? Where on the 14th, 15th. November 20, 22. About 20 employees of Twitter. Why were they let go? A They had published internal emails and therefore violated secrecy agreements. B They stole articles from the office or C they criticised decisions by Elon Musk in an internal Slack channel. I'll I'll take number three. You'll take number three. And that is completely correct. Very good. Yeah. And by the way , after these about. 5980 more people were let go.
Were sacked, not by not because of anything they did on Slack. And sometimes it was out of complete arbitrariness, but I think it was never due to anything stolen from the office. And in the end, I think he actually got into profit just about. But what was the price? He called it? Cash flow positive. But what he meant was that he was he had less expense. His revenue new.
So he wasn't paying any. Settlements, any wage is. And many people think that the worst is yet to come because there are still settlements to come in those industrial law processes and various countries are preparing fines. Okay, cool. Right value and advertising. 43 2000. Okay The advertising agency group M has changed its rating for Twitter recently. What is their current rating? Cautiously optimistic, highly risky or conditionally? Catastrophical Highly risky. Okay, that's what you say. Highly risky. Okay This is cautiously it's cautiously optimistic. That is quite sober . Right Yeah, for us, too, because that means that companies are starting to advertise on Twitter again and their strengthening the platform. So group M shortly after the takeover, when the first decisions by Elon Musk were known, they actually placed it on highly risky, rated it that way. That was the first careful mode. Then the new CEO was announced.
Actually, she starts her jobs today from today. Twitter has a new CEO and therefore group M said now we're back to cautiously optimistic. Many people trust this woman. It's going to be interesting. It's an interesting point in time because Twitter has lost 50% of ad revenue in North America and Europe because the US Senate for senators will come back to that took a very critical view of Twitter. So has the European Union. But everyone says it's very important, but we're not that optimistic, right? Group M Group. M By the way, I didn't know them, but they are deal with small and medium enterprises such as Google, L'Oreal or Nestlé. Okay I choose bats. Better have my money. 11 bats better have my money. For $11. VIPs with how many followers were allowed to keep their blue check mark? 10,000. 100,000. A million, she says. 100,000. The background to that question is all the legacy blue check marks as they called it, were deleted. And he's now selling them via the blue Twitter blue subscription. And clearly they were important people, celebrities that were still signed with a blue check mark. Even, even people who denied it.
And who have already died have now basically become advertisements for Twitter. And then a few of them filed lawsuits and then suddenly they vanished. So now a lot of people did did certain things like change their, um, their names or their their avatars just to lose the check mark because it became toxic. The, the Jeopardy. Okay, Now, this is the Jeopardy app. Jeopardy app.com. If you ever want to make a board like this. But but you need to pay the paid version in order to get the 44 for million on the bottom. So otherwise it only goes up to six figures. It was $14. So more or less two months of Twitter blue . It's basically the unit of calculation for us these days. It used to be a packet of cigarettes and now it's Twitter, Blue. Which one can we open for you? So power and desire.
How high are the debts that Twitter has accrued as of January 2023 for tenancy. Fee $0, 7420 or 136,200, just as a hint, this is just about the headquarter in California. So let's just pick the $136,260. Yeah correct. Completely right. Hannah, I believe you won two out of five, maybe. I don't know. Let's hope the next one does better. But here for you, we have a book, Learning Made Easy Mastodon for Dummies. Thank you. Thank you. Have fun on your new favourite platform. I'll take your microphone. Thank you. All right.
I also got to join her. Oh. Do you have questions for me ? One more question for you. How are you doing with Twitter right now? Oh, sorry. I got a step out for a bit yesterday when we recorded our podcast for today. I was thinking to myself, some of these days we are just not pleasant anymore. If you think about the topics that we cover, the political dimension of it, but just when you started handing out Mastodon for Dummies, hands are going up for volunteers. So let's see. What about the backbenchers here? Yeah, I'm watching you. Who was interested? There were a few volunteers in the middle are right there at the back. Oh hello. Hello Who are you? I'm John. Johannes He is the furthest from the stage. Okay.
While we cover all that way, we didn't know that this was going to be this much walking. Do you already have a question for Johannes? Are you on Twitter still? Johannes can you maybe. Oh, he's saying just for business purposes, it's just for the job. Are you working for Twitter? No Clearly no. Yeah that's just one of these excuses I'm being forced just because I'm still here, you can't hear what I'm saying over there.
It sounds like an excuse just for the job. What are you doing for a job? I work for the Catholic Church at Twitter. Not a great job. Yeah, from. From the daily doing. Which organisation is harder for you? Twitter or Catholic Church? That's a mean question. Yeah Honestly, it's Twitter. Twitter. Blue is cheaper than church tax. And as a private person, as a citizen, you're not joining Twitter. Oh yeah. No, no, I'm on insta. Okay. Maybe we can show you a way out of your dilemma. So let's look at the five five topics or the five questions you want to cover. Let us pick adventure workplace. For $8, which what what words does Elon Musk use when he asks his employees. To put in the work or go? There will be.
It will be extremely hardcore. It would be ruthlessly chaotic or it will be brutal, brutal fury. We put that on GPT to get the answer. I'm sorry, a joke from Chatgpt in there, you know. So what are you saying? I'm going to vote extreme hardcore. Yes, that's. That's what happened. That's. I can give you the answer for eight bucks. APPLAUSE Because and he was. Yeah, he was doomed to be right. Are there any suggestions for what to pick? Okay No, no, no critique from the from the audience. I'm going to pick advertisement and value . To Twitter. In April 22nd. Has advertisement revenue. Sorry of 250 million USD. How high were they in April 2023? 88,000,112 million or 180. This is this sounds like basic eighth grade math. I'm going to use 112 million. Are you sure? Do you need a telephone joker? It is 88 million. I'm sorry. This is from an internal presentation that New York Times published in the five weeks from beginning of April to end of April.
It was about. $90 million and it was a lot less than the year before. And the weekly prognosis they made their forecast. They always failed over that timeframe. A lot of tension. Let's use power and arbitrariness is what led to Twitter space is not being reachable from on the. 16th of December 2020 22. And error in the synchronicity between two data centres between Atlanta and Sacramento and a violation of an EU law for content moderation of live streams or Elon Musk had was not presenting a pretty picture in a space on the 16th of December. And he was so angry that he took the whole feature offline and he picked the third one and it was right at. But honestly, the funny thing is all of those happened just not on the 16th of December. They All right. It's just the date. The federal Ministry of Germany is still investigating the second charge. And this the synchronisation between those two two data centres is failing constantly that something you can observe yourself if you try to delete all of your tweets, then the next day they're still all there.
That is because you're on the wrong stream of the backup. And if we suddenly also had a similar issue where we had a three year old Twitter interface suddenly so. In. So you have two more questions. Which one do you want to choose? I have my badge better have my money and the very last one, the 44 million, the one you can't read. It's just a very big number. So how many accounts have the have a subscription for Twitter Blue just after the old blue check marks were gone. Is it 28, 20, 80 or 2800? I have to explain that a little bit.
So he removed all of the former celebrity Blue checkmarks that were basically a sign of notoriety. And his hope was that if he took it away, then it would just book a subscription soon. So what's the question? What's the answer? 28, 2800 or 2800. So I would assume reasonable people. 28 Yes, that's the right answer. So let me just check where we. Travis Brown, this is a researcher called Travis Brown. He he checks the Twitter blue subscriber and he found that 400,000 of the old accounts of those only about 20,000 had a Twitter blue subscription.
And that number was has risen by 28. So clearly, you can see it's going very well for Twitter. So yeah, but I mean, that's like $160 is that you have or you don't have. So don't be so negative. So I'm going to choose a value and arbitrariness again for $11 this time. So Ben and Jerry's announced last month that it would stop advertising on Twitter completely. So this ice cream vendor or manufacturer , what's their statement in their press release, hate speech has increased dramatically. Increased dramatically because the content moderation has is basically nonexistent. At Elon Musk himself. Promote noted white nationalist anti-Democrat lies and hate speech or the platform has become a threatening and dangerous place for humans with different backgrounds like black transsexuals, gay people, women, people with disabled giants, Jews, Muslims and so on. I pick the last answer here and all of them are right. So clearly this is a right answer. So you get that point. Okay You were mainly correct.
And for that I think we need your smartphone. I've got it here. You'll get a pen from us and a piece of paper. And with that you can write down. This is a blue sky in white code that will give you, if you don't know, blue sky. This is the new Twitter. Very briefly said, founded by Jack Dorsey. Can can you send me this? A blue sky invite code that that's what and I think we're not going to read it out otherwise it will be gone .
We did this in the post podcast. We read out various invite codes. That was a bit of a nerdy game. Should we read out a few? Should we give you a few more? I have got a few. Yeah I'll read out another one. So keep write it down quickly. Blue sky. The first one that manages to get in using that code will be on the stage next. Okay so everyone watching this in the video. Well, you can skip forward a bit. So the blue sky invite codes have always got the same structure. If you want to search for them on Twitter, by the way. But you haven't heard this from us. So B, is Sky minus social, minus G, j, R5G minus five h p, d two. Did anyone manage it? I hope someone listening to the translation managed it first. So So if you're watching the livestream. Associated Thank you.
Soon. Thank you for playing. Hey, what am I given? Cancel my entire life. Nothing. Blue sky. Gavin, could you just run past him if you got the invite code? The future of your career could depend on this is blue sky. This should be great for the future of the Catholic Church, shouldn't it? In any case, this will be better than Mastodon. I'm sure. Okay. You look for the next audience member. Did anyone manage to use that invite code? Did you? Okay, I'll remember that. So So we wanted to make a joke about Twitter, Twitter, Blue subscribers based on light bulb jokes.
How many Twitter blue subscribers do you need to change a light bulb and Chatgpt answers none. They would rather have someone else switch on the light for them and then comment on how they would have done better on this platform. So let's let's hear someone say that Chatgpt has no consciousness. We'll take go into the third round, first. Henning A huge applause to you, Mr. Twitter. Are you active on Twitter? Not active, No.
Were you? Yes Okay. Henning, you are one of us. Henning, Did you stop as you can't hear this, So take the microphone to you. He can't hear because it doesn't have a microphone. Right? Hi. Did you stop because of what happened with Twitter? Well, I was kind of running it down already, but I actively stopped quite recently. And what was the reason before? Well a lack of capacity. Me. Did you find an alternative of. No, I became quite inactive on social media.
I'm more a consumer now, so Elon Musk gave you some mental health, You know a lot of about Elon Musk, but you don't know much about Jeopardy, do you? Yeah. Well someone told us that we were turning Jeopardy around because we were not able to formulate the questions in the way that they should be. So we thought, okay, we'll use the board, but the rest will be the regular question.
Answer style and no one will notice. I'm sure as a student in the 90s, I actually won 12,000 German marks from Frank Elstner, the host of Jeopardy! In Germany. So this is actually. Meaning two ways because you won't earn anything. There'll be no time. BUZZER There'll be no good music like and you don't have to write your name either. It's a very basic version of Jeopardy. Okay, let's see which. Button should we uncover first? Let's use power and arbitrariness. $8 to warm up. Do you have a strategy at Jeopardy? No it just worked out. And we don't need one here either.
So So what was the reason for search? Being a new CEO for Twitter, a vote on Elon Musk's profile be a vote of. Shareholders. In jeopardy. Master here. No, this good hold on Elon Musk's Twitter for vote among Tesla shareholders who demanded full commitment a recommendation from the tax advisor. It was a poll on Elon Musk's Twitter profile. Yeah. He did say in the end that he would only let Twitter blue checkmark users vote, all 28 of them. Well, he did actually say that this is he would introduce a feature where you can vote in your own polls.
But this wasn't to be the only announcement that he didn't put into practice. Should I step down as head of Twitter? Yes. 57.5. No. 42.5. So So what now. Adventure Labour market thousand dollars. Why did Ella Erwin, the relatively fresh head of trust and safety, quit after only a few months? A She tried and you noticed that Gavin has written the test. The text here, to try to enforce Musk's new maxim. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach in content moderation. The issue was offered a new job. Or see, she's stole office supplies. So I'm not that good in writing for the spoken word. Are you? Again, I'll use a and that is the correct answer. It's a quite silly story, actually, because she was the direct successor of Joe Roth, whom we talked about a lot in our podcast. He was held in trust and security before her and his career ended with quite a witch hunt. Elon Musk accused him of being a without any foundation at all, which led to him having to hide, escape from his flat. Very sinister story.
She was the successor and she referred to this maxim and he said, freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. And then a film was uploaded in full length which had transferred phobic content. It was to be ammunition for transphobic debates or people that want to take on such a stance. And Elon Musk contradicted her publicly and said, this is not the way we do it. And she then immediately quit and there are many stories like that on Twitter, not of them. So nice to look into, but I do recommend read the news on Twitter every day. And then you think that outside of Twitter, the word is quite cool place. Okay. What next? Okay, Labour market, 44 billion, then labour market 44 billion In March 2023, Elon Musk had called his employer Haraldur Olafsson, lazy and work shy because of his disability.
What had to happen for Elon Musk to apologise? A He had not known about the disability B and had used an inappropriate tone. B He realised that he didn't want to Twitter at night anymore and that that was no way of dealing with his employees or c he realised that Haraldur was on a do not fire list, so firing Halldor would cost Twitter about 100 million USD dollars. It has to be c a and B wouldn't impress him. Or maybe for 44 billion. That would be too easy. Okay. It was c. Yeah. So Harald ertl Olafsson actually won his game with Elon Musk on Twitter quite well. He kept supplying arguments and kept asking why will I not be informed about my employee status? Elon Musk Use these hate tirades on Twitter and then said, Let's at least have a call in the meantime, Elon Musk had probably consulted his advisors and said, Yeah, let's have a call.
Then they had this call and Harald was has ended contact with Elon Musk since then. Really meaning that Halldor talks about his life on Twitter and tweets things about his mother having opened a cafe in Reykjavik. And Elon Musk answers to all of these tweets in a very friendly Hey, nice stories, like someone who's just following you on the schoolyard . He has something to work up to and I think he started a cafe in Reykjavik.
That was his mother. I thought it was the men's wear boutique in the German city of Wuppertal with the pope. He said he had opened that. Boutique Yeah. You are too young, aren't you? Yes, I am. I forgot. Okay. You shouldn't explain your own jokes, should you? So what's this? Bots and politics, for 1000. $1,000 So for senators in the US are warning Twitter not to comply with content moderation rules. What sentence is in their open letter to Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino? Hey Mr. Musk's behaviour reveal an apparent indifference to Twitter's long standing legal obligations which did not disappear when Mr. Musk took on the company. Regardless b regardless of his personal wealth. Mr. Musk is not exempt from the law and c Twitter must comply with the requirements it agreed to under the 2011 and 2022 FTC settlements.
If the reports of Mr. Musk's actions are correct, it appears that the company is not doing so. These are two sentences, but we will leave it as that at that. Okay, I'll extrapolate from what I've seen earlier and I'll say all three of them are correct. And yes, of course. I think we were just being outplayed on stage. I did think that maybe the office items thefts was correct. But wherever this will reappear, no, no one ever did. So those were for Democrats senators, which is interesting.
So among the Republicans, he has defenders. So the question is, will they get through with that? Right. And I think you have one question left, don't you? Which one shall it be? I have my money. Better have my money. ET bache better have my money. ET On what basis did Elon Musk decide to label individual media houses as government funded a base on a Wikipedia entry, be arbitrarily D or C with a half hearted research of his barely existing team? Oh, that is actually the hardest question of them all. Do you need a joker? Well I think about everything he does is arbitrary, but I think it's C based on half hearted research. Oh, bad luck. It's a I'll have to dig out the evidence. So there was an NPR National Public Radio reporter, Bobby Allen visited Elon Musk and he was told that he had a Wikipedia page about publicly financed broadcast media to find out which of these channels would be given the label government funded and Twitter.
Then called them in this way, if the government had a part of all would be provide part or full financing. And with NPR it was 1% great. But of course it was also arbitrary and it was half hearted research as well. Good. Okay And I think that's it. You have won something to I think this is our best prize because it's $8 for one month of Twitter. Blue great. That's yours. I hope you have an Android device. An iPhone. Oh, sorry. You'll have to pay a three extra then. I hope you'll manage it. And I send those to Elon Musk in a letter. Yeah Thank you, Big applause. Kind of prize. Okay. We have no prizes left, but we still have time to kill. So who is who's interested to be another volunteer, even though there's nothing left to win? So there are still some arms going up.
Okay, I'm going to tell the other joke. Second, the second joke. How many how many mastodon users do you need to change a light bulb? None They prefer to use candles in and enjoy discussing the warm fuzzy feeling they get from decentralised using decentralised social media. Okay let's don't let anybody tell you that generative AI is not killing our jobs. So So I think someone on here who didn't laugh has to be punished for that. And we'll now come have to come up on stage. Your name is an I hope you realise we don't have any prizes left. So this is just for fun. Now Awesome. We have another two slots there with the $44 million is enough. Virtual money. Applause for an. And wanted to send a good friend of hers up on stage. Are you still on Twitter? No I'm not sorry. Okay There's a lot of expertise in the room here.
I see. Okay. What shall we begin with? What? Maybe show you first. So I hope since nothing, there's nothing left to win. So there's also nothing left to use to lose. So I'm going to start with power and arbitrariness for 44 million. How does Twitter, which has found itself in financially difficult waters, it is dealings with the cloud service provider AWS, on which large parts of Twitter's technical infrastructure are located and Twitter has fallen into arrears In the meantime. Um, and are aware of the importance of the service and have therefore requested a deferral and they always pay for the services on time or they now have 70 million in that they owe to the AWS because they just don't pay their bills. So yeah, I'm going to answer C Are you sure? Yeah. You're sure. And it's actually correct, sadly. So. I think this is truly fascinating because it's actually a true story and they know it's central to their operation because that's where everything they have runs on and they just decide not to pay it because what should happen really and they're not even paying me the money that they take from every paycheque for NGOs and that they promise to pay them and they didn't.
That's I think in the US, you basically NGOs go to companies where they they just approach the companies and say, Wouldn't you want to donate to an NGO? And and then the company says, Yeah, that's sounds good. So you do they ask their employees if they want to do that and then they just keep the money and pay it to the NGO or in this case, they don't. So what else can we offer to you? Value and advertisement. For 44 million, the ten biggest advertisement customers in the second quarter of 2022 spend around 71 million USD on Twitter. How how much was it? Half a year later is $49 million $19.4 million. Or 7.6 million? I'm going to choose the middle answer. Oh no, sorry. Wrong. Yeah, you could have sensed our scheme by now. Bloomberg was reporting on that. Um, that's research from a tracking company called Pathmatics. And it's a decline of about 90% respect and but you have to say that ten of those largest customers are all automobile all companies. And for some reason they don't want to advertise on a platform owned by the Tesla owner.
So since we're on ads anyway, let's pick the $8 question there. Elon Musk has bought Twitter for $44 billion. So So what's the company's worth? These days? 15 billion USD? 25 billion or 35 billion? So I have a tip for you. It's 15 billion. I'm going to go for the middle again. 25 billion. I'm sorry. It's 15. I'm probably still too optimistic for that. This is an assessment by Fidelity Investment. It's an investment company generally. You can probably assume that it's correct because they have a blue chip growth fund who actually themselves gave money. They loaned money to Musk for the acquisition.
So they have invested interest and they wouldn't lowball their offer. So okay, you still got two that you can pick up. So let's pick badge better about better have my money for 2000. What's Elon Musk answer to the problem? That there are no more actual verified location anymore? Is it affiliate badges? Is it a golden checkmark or just Google it. The golden checkmark? No, it's actually the affiliate badges. I think we have to explain a little bit here. Okay. Let's let's try. We have a lot of time to kill Elon Musk. Identify side that the people on Twitter apparently are open to the idea of paying for the blue checkmark So he offered them a blue checkmark for $8 and that led to a lot of Elon Musk with a blue checkmark overnight. And obviously that's not ideal because then normally you would say, okay, we can't impersonate anyone, so no one can be Elon Musk anymore.
That's what he did. But the problem is that still, if I were to register on Twitter and start the verification process, there is a verification process. If I'm really that person. But that process really only just means, wait three days and then it doesn't matter if I call myself Elon Musk or Dennis Horn. So Elon Musk knows about that problem. And that's why he was thinking about adding the golden checkmarks for companies. But you can then associate yourself with that company. So if it's my company, for example, then I get that verification checkmark after my name. So I have a verification. So problem solved. Yeah it's we ran around in circles as usual. So last one, Bots and politics. For 36,000. By what percentage did the verification subscription for money so that with a blue uh raise the bot costs according to Elon Musk about 100.
1000% or 10,000. Well he's a very modest guy, so most surely the 10,000. So yeah, you're correct. That Elon Musk. Okay. Elon Musk explained that it doesn't make any more sense if you if you've been if you hear what he said. So let me read it. It was a tweet by Elon Musk. He said in March, it's now trivial to have 1 million people that are people like bots. The verification for money raises the bot cost bots by 10,000% and makes it so much easier to have the two identify the bots. And then social media will be the only media that is still trustworthy. So thank you.
That was a thank you, Helen. That was a great showing. So So let's are we are we going to find another candidate or. Okay you try jumping off the stage again. Dennis And I thought, well, let's have another light bulb joke and let's have one with Twitter and Mastodon and blue Sky users in a bar and a bar keeper looks at them and says, What can I do for you? The Twitter user replies, Give me a drink, but make it fast.
I only have 280 characters of time to explain how great it is. The mastodon user says, I'll take a drink, but please, without any algorithms and trackings, we like our privacy here. And the blue sky user looks somewhat insecurely and asks, Can I have a drink that hasn't been published yet? Kevin Yeah, okay. Gavin What are you. And in the final I thought we would have a duel, so we'll have two people on stage. Best of five, right? Yes, exactly. Very good. They are asking whether they're allowed to take beer with them onto the stage. Do you know the rules? I don't know what the rules are, but I think we are acting in an Elon Musk kind of way.
I don't know what that means, though. I think that Johnny and Markus, if they will appear on stage tomorrow night, they always will have a beer, won't they? Yes. You can take a beer. That's what that means. Okay There's not much money left on the Jeopardy board. I'll get you the microphone. The other jokes that we had chat GPT right for us were actually bollocks. So I have nothing left to fill. Time but a huge applause to you. What were the names? How And Michelle.
Adrian and Michelle. What's your connection, by the way? Oh, he's your boss. Oh, this is an interesting Elon Musk leadership exercise, right? Elon Musk would sack him if he wins other superiors would perhaps promote him. Let's see. So So let's have it a bit of a like a bit a duel. A bit. It's actually a fantastic duel. There's nothing to win. I don't even know what the mode just everyone who answers the questions will win. Right But I want some kind of aggression to come about. We wanted some action on stage. Okay. What will you choose? The two of you together or in your duo? So So from the left to the right and from the top to the bottom.
Okay so right. What trigger the first major wave of blocking of journalists on Twitter? A technical error. That was quickly corrected and for which Elon Musk apologised personally. B a Twitter account that live tweeted the location of Elon Musk's private jet and. The deletion of it was reported on by multiple journalists and c a personal feud between Elon Musk and the journalists A, B, or C, will they have to agree? Now how shall we run this? Shall we emulate another popular German TV show and jump around on the stage? I think I'll take B you'll take B and you? Do you agree? I thought B was the thing where certain that led certain bots from being banned.
I'll take C and it's b the first point goes to Fabian. This was the story. You'll you're taking notes. So the account reappeared. But it was only allowed to report on the location with a 24 hour delay. And there's also a map showing the location of Ron DeSantis jet with a 24 hour delay. And Elon Musk really had a paranoia, paranoia attack. It was a bit of a sinister story, too. He was pursuing people with their cars and saying that they were pursuing him. We don't have the time to go into all that, but private jets. Cool idea, right? Good. So Right. If Adventure labour market $11, who decides this? Well, we have set up a rule from the left to the right and top to bottom. What happened to Esther Crawford? Crawford, who gained notoriety as the sleeping woman on the floor of the Twitter office? A she was publicly praised for her industriousness and became chief executive to Elon Musk.
B She was appointed head of Twitter payments. The company's own payment service, or C, she was appointed head of Twitter payments. The company's own payment service provider and then she was abruptly sacked in the February 2023. Well I think C will be on brand, wouldn't it? So C is on brand. What does Fabian say? I have to counter this. I'll use I'll take B okay. It is of course, C. Grimes is the absurd and the basic rule is always use the most absurd answer. Right Okay. We'll now have badge. Better have my money. 42,000. How many twitter blue subscribers would it take just to cover the annual interest payments? A 2.5 million.
B, 10.4 million. C 22.8 million interest for the bill or for the 44 for the takeover. The 44 billion. Just the interest on that, not actually the actual price. I'll take C and so will I . Oh, it's B. 10.4 million. So for once, it's not the most drastic answer. So I actually misled you quite by chance. Do you know how many people are Twitter subscribers right now? How many are still missing? You said 19,000. Well, that was the 10.4 million. So 19,000 were those that had the blue checkmark before hand. But how many percent of these 10.4 million are still missing? Is it 80% that are still missing? It would be about 10.53 million. It's 10 million. Actually. It yeah. Working well for you bots and politics, $8.
What did France's minister for Digital Transfer and Telecommunications Jean-noel Barrow, threatened Twitter with you said that in Germany it's called the traffic minister. The transport minister right? Yeah. In Germany it will be the Transport minister. So banning Twitter from France would be the threat. A banning Twitter from the EU or C, banning Twitter from his mobile phone. B Hang on, hang on. What does Michelle say? I'll take C it is B, banning Twitter from the EU. Of course, it was. So there are fewer, more drastic announcements here, not just the kind of deliberations that you hear normally. And the final question, but arts and politics . I have two more. So I'm the winner anyway. Okay According to Elon Musk, this is a bit of a calculation task, by the way. So according to Elon Musk, Twitter has gained many new users in the end of 2002, it had 220, 253 million. And at the same time, Elon Musk said they had killed all the bots. So to make this calculation work, how many new users would Twitter have had to gain within in half a year if at the same time the many bot accounts were supposed to have gone to actually have this gain of new users, A 10 million, B, 33 million.
C, 65 million. Didn't he say before the takeover that half of the users were bots? He said that because in order to not have to take Twitter over, the actual figures were between 5, which was said at some point. And then he said it's probably not that good investment. He said, it's 33. And then they kind of agreed that it would be 20. And on the basis of those 20, this is what we have used for the calculation .
This is the best question at the very end. Can I have a pen and paper, please? It's a dramatic climax. I'll take the 65 million because it's the most drastic answer. And your wife isn't a maths teacher, is she? How about you? This is the final. I am not a maths teacher either. I'll take 33 million. It is 65 million. Of course it is. Fabian, you've won. Will he keep his job? Yeah, he will keep his job. I he can stay. Yes. A huge applause to the two of you. Thanks for taking part. Thank you. A pity that we haven't got any prizes. Do we have another blue sky invite code? You can take it to them later. I'll read it out. Okay. The software that we've bought now, does it have a fireworks display at the end? If I just click continue, you can just take the cable out. Maybe that will give an interesting effect. Now I won't try that.
But you have more jokes. Don't you know? I've read them all out there. Is this Mr. Twitter mastodon Blue sky users entering into a bar. I have a second variant of that. So the Twitter mastodon blue sky user enters into the bar and the blue sky users ask at the end, Can I have a drink that isn't officially published yet? And the barkeeper looks puzzled and says, We only have the usual drinks cocktail and stuff and they didn't give me. Just give me a drink, said the Twitter user. And I'll claim to have invented it. That is funny. I think. But we're spending too much time on jokes like that anyway, so now we recommend our podcast. Kjartan Hakonarson put a checkmark on it. We recommend that you delete your Twitter. Everyone here is an argument for someone else to join Twitter and maybe by leaving you can stop that and maybe I'll start with it.
I don't know yet. I'll think about it. Should you put I should put you make I should remind you of that. Anyone. Anyway, thanks for coming. Yeah. Tune dunk backstage. Thank you. So cool. And Morgan gets off the stage und sein vater is guns, guns, guns, guns. Feel was to Gavin Republica live the gold card. Morgan Thank you, David. You had it. You had Freud Morgan here by the Republica. Dan Dan, Sean and..