Intro

I am very honored to speak at this meeting today which is taking place in the most serious of times since we can remember, yet we have the obligation to bring hope, humour and even hilarity into these times.

Thank you your excellency Thomas Chepaitis - who I had the honor to welcome 11 years ago in Vienna at our videobridging workshop, and here we are doing our first real videobridging - for granting me an exceptional 11 minutes maximum contribution time. In these 11 minutes I would like to present 11 theses or a manifesto if you wish that might sound hilarious, but I think there is a good chance that we also can understand this as a message of hope and our good humour will allow us to stand the difference between the real and the possible.

I send this message from Uzupis embassy at the Slovenian border, it is still located in Austria, but the name is very fitting. Just yesterday we decided to take part in an ambitious program launched by Schweisfurth Stiftung in Munich, called "A hundred participatory Regions". Our proposal is to create a region across borders - including 2+2 border regions in the River Mura Valley - thus creating a new center by bringing together four countries, four languages, four cultures. We have a biosphere parc project which is also just starting, shared by Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary. But we also want to involve our Serbian neighbors. So the first change in perception that we want to promote is that we are not border, but center, if we see the potential and the need and the benefit of that.

1. Implosion rather than Expanse

Those who know me know that my main mission is to promote the concept of Global Villages - which is the idea that with the right communication channels, each and every space on this earth can win incredibly.

Marshall McLuhan - who coined the expression Global Village - was well aware of this paradox, als I also mentioned recently at the Paradox conference. A small village can become a space of diversity, abundance and self - sufficiency, if it utilises conducive and not malignant communication channels and builds up a global virtual community.

This is why I also gladly joined the Uzupis community, because here is a living example of the positive impact of global connectedness.

McLuhan predicted that the media revolution, as the first technological revolution in human history, would not lead to the usual explosion and aggression, but rather to something he called the "big implosion", Every place will be able to complete itself. Technology is decentralising and miniaturising, allowing us to create circular and organic self - feeding environments.

2. Cooperation rather then Competition

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