Digitalisation: What comes next?

Katrin Bohn was interviewed as part of the ongoing project Was kommt nach der Digitalisierung? [Digitalisation: What comes next?] which was set up by German philosopher and digital media expert Dr. Wolf Siegert who is still coordinating it. The results of Siegert’s 2019 Berlin interviews have now been made available on his blog DaybyDay.

Since more than 10 years, Siegert has been asking more than 100 people and presented the totality of all answers on a timeline as a collection of audio and video documents. A further book publication is in preparation as part of the overall project What comes next? which will discuss three topics: Globalisation. Democracy. Digitisation. The blog Daybyday runs since 2002 and is ‘a document of contemporary history, recognised, maintained and made available by the Deutsche Nationalbiblothek in the form of a blog/journal, beyond the day for consultation in its rooms in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig’.

Introduced by a digitalised visualisation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata und Fuge in D-Moll (BWV 565) about 10 very different interviewees answer – unprepared – this sheer unanswerable question. Using people’s diverse thoughts, Siegert and producer Bernd Latzel spin a storyline that ranges from disbelief to fantasy, from precision to vision, from the personal to the universal. People’s backgrounds, captured in a 2019 presence create a (pre Covid-19) snapshot of imaginable future scenarios.

Breaking this vast question down to the scale of productive urban landscapes and the food system, food-related logistics first spring to mind, as well as produce cropping or maintenance plans. All in all technical and technological advances that, partly, are not even applied yet. So, what next?

Katrin made this point: ‘What comes after the digitalisation?… Climate change is intersecting this question… If it were up to me, digitalisation would now pause for the next 20 or 50 years, and we would look after the climate, after social equity, rather balancing out levels of digitalisation than moving it on in one place’.

Katrin speaks twice (1:26 / 8:21) in Wolf Siegert’s collection of 2019 interviews [in German] which all can be seen here.

For more information on the project Was kommt nach der Digitalisierung? see here.

Image: Extract of a digitalised visualisation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata und Fuge in D-Moll (BWV 565), video still (source: Wolf Siegert, DaybyDay, 2020)