Speakers at 25C3: Christian Heller

Christian Heller aka plomlompom self-identifies as an identity and meme machine currently living the future in Berlin so you don’t have to.

His talk Embracing Post-Privacy: Optimism towards a future where there is “Nothing to hide” ponders opportunities of a world we might live in all too soon. The loss of privacy we decry now may very well transform into something very utopian: A society where the borders of “public” and “private” life are blurring and human identity itself must be redefined.

Born and raised in East Berlin, Christian’s life as a media person started early when he became a child TV presenter on ORB (today’s RBB) from 1992 to 1994. Academically trained in philosophy and film studies and hardened through troll attacks on Usenet, his interests include all things futurologic: From Mars colonization to the technical singularity to questions of post-identity.

Christian blogs (in German) about the future at futur:plom and movies and Internet memes at cine:plom. He is involved with the theory and practice of co-working spaces and the future of work at the Hallenprojekt. His enthusiasm and techno-optimism, together with his witty style of critique, earned him recognition as a speaker at places so diverse as the NextCity Symposium on the future of networked cities in Graz, Austria and the Goethe Institute in Namibia.

While “embracing post-privacy” caused quite some controversy at the program committee that selected the talks for 25C3, the consensus was that while on first sight it may sound like an antithesis to privacy activism, it is really a necessary (and maybe heated) debate we should have. The Chaos Communication Congress is a place to think outside the box and we are happy to have Christian as a speaker. Let’s just hope he’ll be able to give us his talk before the nerd rapture (aka The Singularity) takes us all away and we all become post-human Foucauldian discourse functions, independent of bio-politics and Club-Mate.