On doom and panic, on finding people we vibe with. Written to rant to my working group ______________________ Yesterday evening I went to a panel discussion about data and art. The speakers were Rosa Menkman and Geert Lovink. Two people who have been on the internet since its beginning and are both very active and critical on this subject. Geert Lovink came from the squatting scene in amsterdam and rolled into the internet as an alternative way of building networks with like-minded people all over the world. Rosa Menkman is an artist who worked on image compression, and its politics and may have been one of the people popularizing the glitch as we see it in cinema, art and instagram filters today. Rosa and Geert were very interesting, incredibly kind and extremely knowledgeable. It felt hard for the host to find a good balance between going in-depth and keeping the threshold low. This bothered me a bit, but not too much. What I found more annoying was a very broad and general ‘social media bad’ attitude from the presenter's side. This attitude was mirrored by the speakers and some members of the audience tried to tell their own experiences, but we were misunderstood or talked over by the host, too interested in a gruesome tale of big data. This evening, other panel talks or talks, in general, inspired me to write this quick rant. It made me think critically about what a theme night at LUNA could be. This is not a big thing, or anything official, just read it as some post on a message board. I think we should be outspoken about the things we believe, and the values we hold. Keeping things in the middle for the sake of discussion and ‘hearing the other side’ just sounds so irrelevant and boring to me. I’d like the nights to be about the things we believe matter. What would be better than going to a series of nights on the theme ‘nothing changes’ to walk out with a new sense of optimism, of being inspired? Let’s not instil panic in people with our program. They can do that themselves every day by watching the news. Saying this, I’d like to stress that not panicking people doesn’t mean the themes and speakers can’t be critical, I think we have to be. Being critical is what our current festival is born out of, and it’s important to be critical. But being critical in the way I’d like to see it doesn’t mean stating that NFTs cost a lot of energy, It doesn’t mean telling us non-binary people exist. Can we please make a theme night on a human level, people talking to people? Not a wild fear orgy, where every speaker tells something more wild, othering, apocalyptic than the previous one. I’ve heard enough people tell me that google is bad, and marc zuckerburg evil. I know this! I had a semester in my study where every week we’d have another lecturer telling us how we’re fucked because of global warming, this doom spiral of a course sucked me into a depression, not useful at all for saving the world. I want people to tell me how they personally are affected, and what they use to deal with our changing world. I want to hear what brings people joy and for what reasons, I want to hear about people’s obsessions. How are your obsessions affected by being you? How are your obsessions affected by being you in this world? Obsessing over something that means the world to you, something that inspires you to keep taking the next step even though it sometimes means giving in to what we’re fighting against (this text is written in google docs) is something I see in a lot of media artists. And this I’d love to see in our speakers. I don’t want to listen to men. I don’t want to listen to men that are convinced they know what the world looks like, what should be changed. Men telling us what we should be afraid of. Men telling us we can’t change, even though we all know what we should do. Quit facebook, stop eating meat, never take long showers or warm ones… Men telling us we’re just like that. I don’t want to hear any of that crap. We’re individuals, our intersecting identities make us part of groups, these intersections, and these groups are entities of themselves. All way too complicated and interconnected to be talked about by one white old man wearing chinos, a belt and a pair of those leather shoes (you know which ones I mean). I’d propose to only invite people we vibe with, not because they’re so and so from such and such, and have a high status or whatever. I want to work with kind nerds like ourselves. People we can possibly work with for multiple years because we’ve become friends. Not because it’s a smart exposure and status-enhancing strategy, we don’t need that. I’m doing what I’m doing because I like it, and I want to figure it out together.