Re:publica 2010. Going NowHere Fast.

April 14th, 2010 • Allgemein

After returning from Berlin yesterday I was asked by my father if I had been to this blogger conference which he had seen in the news the day before.

‘Kind of’, daddy. Even though you’ll find a lot of bloggers there, Re-publica 2010 was again an event that focused on anything that influences us as citizens of this continent called internet. A good chance to step back and find a broader perspective. Well, and maybe to get to know some of your twitter friends live.

This year’s subtitle was ‘NowHere’. A term for the multiple facets of living real time – Now, Here and Nowhere. And Re-publica has grown big since it has started four years ago with 165 differerent events and more than 260 speakers, taking us though many many intellectual ups and downs from April 14-16 in Berlin.

It was the most disputatious Re-publica so far. No doubt, times are a changing and as we explore more and more of this continent, we, its inhabitants, got to one thing in the first place, an intense debate. Its key question – Is the glass half full or half empty?

• Privacy vs Public?
• Chance vs Threat?
• Playing vs Misuse?
• Transparency vs Exhibitionism

Position 1 is playful and concentrates on the chances of the web – maybe a little naive sometimes. Position 2 wants to defend the user from unethical and illegal mistreatment while the web supports him in his life. A not so very progressive position once in a while.

And we debated…we debated a lot.

Position 1: EVERYTHING THAT IS PUBLIC BELONGS TO ALL OF US.

The privacy debate, its perception and its management in Europe and North America, was a key aspect of the intensive discourse that I am talking about. Notorious Jeff Jarvis made his point when he opened the debate as an advocate of public digital goods and collective action. According to Jarvis, the fear about the possible misuse of private data leads us into the wrong direction. Our data should be public by default with privacy options only if we opt out – everything that is public belongs to all of us. So, the more we share, the more we add value to our public entity. A position which is not yet very popular in europe.

He illustrated this concept by explaining how much support he got when he executed radical transparency with a very detailed blog post about him suffering from Prostate Cancer. Thanks to this blog post he received intensive support by other cancer patients. More hints and knowledge than through ‘any medical bulletin’. To really execute transparency, he finally invited the audience to a post-speech debate to a good old German Sauna close to the conference center (Read more about Jarvis’ position on Ideenverteiler).

One person from the audience made a good comment on the different positions on privacy in Europe and the U.S. 

Europeans believe in the strong state while they want private markets to be regulated. They are afraid of transparency because they are afraid of corporate misuse of their data. Americans, in contrast, believe in self-regulating markets and want the state to be controllable by the citizen. Here, transparency is needed to defend Joe the Plumber not from corporations but from the state.

Position 2: DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE

Jarvis’ demand for radical transparency was opposed by speakers such as Frank Rieger from German Chaos Computer Club, CCC. I really enjoyed his presentation ‘Saving the Planet vs Privacy. How to design Green Tech Properly’. To quote from the summary of his presentation

Smart Metering, GPS-based road taxes, Personal Carbon Credits – the next wave of “green” technology aims to reduce energy consumption and emissons, and ultimately save the planet by making personal behaviour transparent and quantifiable. While reducing everyones ressource footprint is unavoidable, the currently proposed methods to achieve that goal are highly questionable.

This talk gives an overview on currently planned and proposed technologies and outlines alternatives to telling Google when you do your loundry and having every purchase tracked in a central carbon credit database. These technologies are designed and build now, by the people from our community. So here is the chance to built privacy and acvoidance of the next data scandals right into the foundation of a new industry.

Frank’s brilliant and very simple thesis. Corporations are interested in user data. The more data they get, the better their financial situation will be. Ratings rely on simple metrics – such as number of users or quantity of available data. User data is power.

And that is why pretty much every major power supplier in the world tries to come up with power saving hardware that primarily does one thing – transfer our energy-related behaviour to corporations. Designing intelligent solutions means to be careful about what we share and as a final comment to Jeff Jarvis, Rieger argued – Jeff could have received Feedback on his Prostate Cancer withouth having to reveal his real name simply by using a Forum.

Solution? Nope. But Peter Kruse explains why.

In a certain way this year’s Re-publica has reinvented itself. Never before I have perceived such an intense debate between people who want to play around and ‘do shit‘ (Jarvis) and tech-loving sceptics who believe we should be able to control what we share. While many in the audience seemed to be afraid of corporations using our data, my friends Igor and Johannes described the chances for companies in cities to work with location-based real time data. The glass is half full or half empty – it’s just a question of perspective.

But however you might want to describe the current debate – one person knew exactly where the debate came from. It’s in our head. German Psychology Professor Dr. Peter Kruse gave one of the most brilliant presentations (which I wasn’t able to attend at that time) of the whole conference. His core thesis – there are two types of people in this world talking about the internet. But they talk about two completely different things as their values are completely different. Here is the video (unfortunately in German, but it is worth it if you understand it). Do also check out his deck here.

Finally. Thanks to Re-publica once again. These were three inspiring, great days in Berlin. I would have enjoyed a little more Wifi or – alternatively – at least some kind of mobile/web access around the conference center in the middle of Berlin. But apart from that I am definitely looking forward to Re-publica 2011.

Photo of Jeff Jarvis, Illustration

Tags: Berlin, Re-publica 10, RP10, Underway, World

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