Digital Activism: "Dropping Knowledge" Launched in Berlin

On Sept. 9, prominent scientists, artists, activists and thinkers got together in Berlin for what the organizers -- a German-US non-profit organization Dropping Knowledge -- called "the world's greatest roundtable discussion."

In what was a peculiar combination of political theater, performance art, a focus group and a corporate gala, 112 participants launched a new Internet platform for promoting social issues through dialogue by answering simultaneously 100 most pressing questions facing the world of today and tomorrow.

The questions -- such as "Are brands more powerful than governments?", "When might it become necessary to break the law?" or "What is God's religion?" -- were submitted over the past year over the Internet and rated by the general public on the Dropping Knowledge website.

Each of the participants in the so-called "Table of Free Voices" -- among them the ubiquitous human rights activist Bianca Jagger; the only professor of Princeton University who produced a rap CD and starred in "The Matrix" trilogy, Cornell West; and, in a commendable spirit of inclusion, US anti-globalist and critic of modern technologies, Jerry Mander -- were seated in front of a microphone and a video camera, and given three minutes to answer each question.

11,200 answers

The whole event was broadcast live over the internet. Additionally, some 11,200 answers that were collected this way will be archived, transcribed and translated into English if necessary. They will be made available permanently and for no charge as part of the Dropping Knowledge audio-visual library on the internet. The general public will be able to donate more questions, comment and answer the existing ones and use the platform as a virtual meeting place, research library and a permanent networking venue.

This remarkably glitzy all-day event was moderated by human rights activist Hafsat Abiola and US actor Willem Defoe. The round-table -- 38 meters in diameter, 119 in circumference -- was constructed on the historic Bebel Square in downtown Berlin, where, on May 10, 1933, the Nazis burned some 20,000 politically or artistically "degenerate" books from the library of Humboldt University as part of the nationwide war "against the un-German spirit."

"This place has a lot of history," said organizer Ralf Schmerberg at the opening of the event. "Books used to be burned here. Thoughts got burned. Freedom of speech got burned. Bringing new ideas to this place is a good thing."

Think globally, act digitally

The striking thing about the Dropping Knowledge project is that its view of activism, social progress and participatory democracy of the 21st century is inseparable from the development of modern technology.

The Dropping Knowledge platform was developed by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in co-operation with Dropping Knowledge teams from Berlin and San Francisco. It works as a semantically organized catalogue of 23,000 different topics that non-government organizations have addressed over the past twenty years, a database of social and environmental themes ranging from soil erosion to minority rights. These themes are filed in different categories and can be searched, both using a traditional keyword search and visually, using an intuitive navigation system.

"As we know, the Internet opens new possibilities of collecting, sharing and using knowledge," said Hans Uszkoreit, who leads the research lab on language technologies at DFKI.

"Many experts believe that the web of tomorrow will become more semantic. That means: Machines will no longer be able only to scan keywords, but will be able actually to understand language. The technology that I am working on connects digital pieces with a collective memory," he said.

Mapping knowledge

The goal of the system is to become a virtual map and universal repository of knowledge that individuals or organizations can use for networking, research and inspiration. Most importantly, however, all the content -- including the audio and video materials -- will be made available with a so-called copyleft licence, which allows content use and distribution for non-comercial purposes without any restrictions other than proper attribution.

"We are in the process of liberating knowledge," said Mae-Wan Ho, a professor of biochemistry and prominent biosafety activist, during the roundtable. "That is what we're doing here."

It has been estimated that some 1 billion people on earth are using the Internet today. Dropping Knowledge is made for them. As such, it is a brainchild of techno-romanticism, a utopian vision of social integration through electronic communication. Yet, Internet users today still make up only 16 percent of the world population.

Almost one half of Internet users come from Europe and North America. And while almost 70 percent of North Americans have Internet access, only 2.6 percent of Africans do. The digital divide, which is a mere reflection of economic and educational inequalities in the world, is a reality that no amount of optimism, good will and investment in online communities can change overnight.

Circles of love and power

The Internet has, nonetheless, a potential for unpredictability. The founding partner of Dropping Knowledge, Germany's insurance giant Allianz, contributed alone 2.5 million euros ($3.2 million) to the project. Yet it was Internet users who asked if big companies could at all act responsibly and voted on this question as one of the top 100 . Numerous questions submitted to the project website had to do with Allianz and its drastic job cuts -- the company announced in June it would axe 5,000 jobs at its insurance division and shed a further 2,480 jobs within its Dresdner Bank division until 2008.

And while German director Wim Wenders -- answering the question about the future of the city -- passionately spoke about encountering a flea market under a highway in Brasilia as a kind of urban wilderness, "the only place in the city they forgot to plan," and praised Berlin for its adventurous "no-man's lands, which are actually every man's lands," the "Table of Free Voices" did not leave anything to chance.

Security, clearly demarcated and sequestered zones -- the press, the guests, the general public and, of course, Allianz -- made it obvious that this was no revolutionary grunge party and that corporate-sponsored revolutions must follow certain, traditional rules.

"How do I as a member of the press enter the inner circle?" asked one professional photographer.

"No clue," answered his journalist colleague.

Winds of change

The only subversion of the rules of corporate engagement came -- unexpectedly and serendipitously -- from a force of nature. At the beginning of the discussion, the organizers used small explosions of white smoke in the middle of the square to announce when three minutes had passed and when it was time for a new question.

"Look, they've elected a new pope," said one observer, jokingly referring to the ancient Vatican tradition of announcing the election of a new pontiff by a puff of white smoke.

The low wind, however, started pushing the smoke back to the roundtable, creating for a while a surreal scene that resembled a large, open-air opium den. The practice of smoke signals was then abandoned and the moderators, visibly amused, took over the role of monitoring time.

A tour de force

There were, according to the organizers, around 10,000 people watching the broadcast over the Internet at any given moment. What they got to see was an exhilarating piece of video art: a hypnotic symphony of voices and languages that at time -- especially in moments when different voices would fade into each other -- reminded of Wim Wenders' 1987 cinematic masterpiece "Wings of Desire."

This ecumenical stream of consciousness, a rootless cosmopolitan's dream come true, was in itself a powerful symbol of cross-cultural communication: imperfect, struggling and not easy, but with a sense of common purpose.

"It is the multiplicity of languages that divides us," said novelist, poet and Holocaust survivor Raymond Federman. "We don't understand each other. We live in a tower of Babel... But I wish I could learn all the language of the world."

It remains to be seen what kind of effect Dropping Knowledge will have. It is impossible to predict whether the platform for social dialogue will have a significant or, in fact, any impact in our post-industrial, digital world. Nobody knows if individuals and organizations around the world will adopt it and put it to use. "The Table of Free Voices" was simply a symbolic beginning of a social experiment.

"Why have we become so anti-radical?" asked German artist Jonathan Meese at the end of the day. "What happened to our humbleness? Why do we not love anything anymore?"