Hack The Promise Festival Basel 2024: Reflections on Truth, Uncertainty, and the Digital Society
The Hack The Promise Festival in Basel has firmly established itself as a pivotal platform where international experts, activists, and engaged communities come together for interdisciplinary discussions on the social, political, and technical challenges of digital transformation. The 2024 festival revolved around the theme “fact/fake/fiction,” exploring how truth, fiction, and manipulation increasingly intertwine in digital spaces and what this means for democratic societies.
At last year’s event, Schoresch Davoodi delivered his lecture in German, titled „Fakten und Fiktionen – Wie die Gesellschaft durch Unsicherheit gestresst wird“ (“Facts and Fictions – How Society is Stressed by Uncertainty”). His presentation moved beyond a mere description of digital phenomena, analyzing how overlapping global crises—such as pandemics, wars, and economic challenges—create a collective societal stress that heightens vulnerability to misinformation and manipulation.
Davoodi critically assessed current political responses as often symptomatic, addressing surface issues rather than the underlying causes like diffuse social anxieties and psychological strain. His approach combines technical perspectives with socio-psychological insights, offering a holistic analysis that remains relatively uncommon in the programmatic discussions of many Pirate Parties.
He also reflected critically on the role of NGOs in political discourse, cautioning against the risk that NGO-affiliated structures might act more as instruments of control than as independent actors, potentially limiting democratic pluralism and open debate. This perspective encourages important discussions regarding the influence of civil society organizations in net politics and democratic participation.
Philosophically, Davoodi’s lecture drew on Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment theory and critiques of dogmatic thinking, emphasizing the necessity of independent thought and the rejection of authoritarian mentalities. This normative framing adds depth, extending beyond purely technical or political considerations.
The Hack The Promise Festival is widely recognized for fostering critical and interdisciplinary dialogue. Within this context, Davoodi’s lecture provides valuable programmatic impulses for Pirate Parties internationally. It signals a strategic shift away from solely activist-driven approaches towards a more reflective and mature political stance that emphasizes education, resilience, and a pluralistic discourse culture.
By addressing current challenges in digital society and highlighting the necessary evolution in net politics, this contribution holds significant relevance for Pirate Parties worldwide. The festival thus plays an important role in advancing the international debate on democracy and digital freedom, helping to strengthen it for the future.
Looking Ahead: Hack The Promise Festival 2025
The next Hack The Promise Festival is scheduled for October 3–5, 2025, and will take place at the Padelhalle Klybeck in Basel. The upcoming edition will explore hacking as a socio-technical practice. This goes beyond computer specialists, focusing on opening up systems to challenge and change societal structures—be they technological, political, epistemic, or social. The aim is to disrupt power dynamics and envision new futures beyond imposed limitations.
Lecture by Schoresch Davoodi from “Hack the Promise” Festival 2024
by Schoresch Davoodi | July, 2nd 2025
This lecture by Schoresch Davoodi, originally held at the “Hack the Promise” festival 2024 in Basel and recently taken up by Pirate Party International, illuminates how the ongoing information war and increasing uncertainty are putting our society under stress. It examines the vulnerability to fakes and criticises the often helpless reaction of politics and society to these phenomena, which tends to suppress problems rather than fundamentally solving them.
Facts and Fictions – How Society is Stressed by Uncertainty
This is about information warfare, stress, and the susceptibility of a stressed society to fakes. It can be stated from the outset that society as a whole, as well as the political sphere, still reacts very helplessly to this phenomenon, and that “it’s always the others who create fake news.”
One can see how, in recent years, the argument for why the internet should be censored, in the eyes of many political parties, has shifted from the issue of copyright infringement to the supposed defence of democracy and the warding off of “fake news” and “propaganda”. With this, some political circles hope for a “one-size-fits-all solution,” which appears seductive as it means one does not have to deal with the deeper underlying causes of the problems. They are tinkering with the symptoms instead of addressing the root causes.
Later governments will then inherit the greater and more dangerous consequences of this policy. In addition, this shift in argumentation, particularly in Germany, has led to a situation where online voices with influential opinions and discourse power could be more easily co-opted, thus often winning them over to the discourse in favour of internet censorship. This year’s re:publica in Berlin, the disinvitation of the then Pirate MEP Patrick Breyer from a panel discussion there shortly before the EU elections, and the statements made on that panel by the German author and journalist Caroline Emcke shockingly summarise that voices warning of the dangers of internet censorship were deliberately excluded from the discourse. The magazine Cicero called her statements there those of a “preacher of the only truth” and contested: “The euphoric applause for Carolin Emcke’s demand at re:publica to refuse discourse is a chilling testimony to woke double standards. They want to defend democracy, but no longer permit two opinions.”¹
Overall, it shows how “net activism” in Germany now has different priorities and has since been tamed, and how formats and many net-political organisations have manoeuvred themselves into political insignificance through the promise of supposed attention. The risk that these net-political formats, organisations, and activists in Germany will soon definitively become nothing more than a (net-)political fig leaf has, as a trend, massively increased in recent years.
The Promise of the Internet in Times of Stress
The promise of the internet is coming under increasing pressure. A promise that, according to the vision of the 1980s, was to have created a place with the internet where anyone with an internet connection could participate equally in political communication. The journalist Tarek Barkouni, in an article for the Federal Agency for Civic Education from March 2024, called it a “forgotten promise” in this day and age. He sees the dominating factor of social media, above all, as a significant cause for these developments. ²
We are currently in an age of multiple crises, be it the Corona pandemic from 2020 and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2022. In Germany, this goes hand in hand with an energy crisis which, according to a report by the IW Cologne from September 2023, led to a loss of prosperity in Germany,³ and although the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs assessed it differently in April 2023,⁴ this does not change the fact that it is, in any case, perceived as a crisis by the population, which now expects answers from politicians. The fear of social decline and, often accompanying it, the loss of social prestige and political significance.
The Foreign Policy Working Group of the German Pirate Party stated in a report from that year that we are currently undergoing a disturbing development in which politics and the media exploit and fuel our diffuse fears for their self-promotion. This implies not only questionable ethics, immoral behaviour, and aggressive political dogmas. It also leads to decisions with very real consequences for our stability, security, and national defence capability.
Our human psychological defence mechanisms (defence against disinformation campaigns, propaganda, etc.) are endangered by this vulnerability. One easily forgets how our living conditions affect our behaviour, and vice versa. The recent crises have, however, shown us how much we can change under the right circumstances – for better or for worse.⁵
The internet, for better or worse, offers many avenues for this stress and for how we can react to these reports. The Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, in its recently published report on the Russian Doppelgänger campaign, showed how Russia’s information war specifically aims to use these fault lines to divide our democratic societies.⁶
Fatally, the only thing that occurs to politicians and the security authorities here is to rely on short-term repression and censorship. This approach is meanwhile loudly carried further into the discourse by political organisations and activists. These supposed short-term and rash actions only lead to a suppression of the problems rather than truly addressing them and solving them comprehensively as a society, in an ideologically neutral way, free from dogmas. The dangerous thing about dogmas of any stripe is that they promise stability. They simplify complex issues and are therefore powerful.
Peter Neuner, in a lecture series for the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2006, addresses the effect and function of dogmas. In his view, perhaps the sharpest challenge lies here: dogmatic thinking demands submission to an external authority. It is part of the general understanding of a dogma that it cannot be comprehended, but can only be believed on the basis of someone else’s insight. Thus, Neuner says in the 2006 lecture that appealing to a dogma always implies an authority that is fundamentally beyond one’s own comprehension. Now, in our complex and complicated world, it is certainly not unusual to have to rely on the authority and capacity of experts. They will have done it correctly and will continue to do so. But this authority of experts is always subject to the reservation that—in principle, at least—anyone can verify this insight and that other experts have verified it. The dogma, in contrast, is in principle exempt from such verification. Here, belief is and always remains dependent on an external authority.
Such an attitude, however, is becoming less and less possible for the modern person. To the question “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant gave the famous answer: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. […] Have the courage to use your own understanding! is therefore the motto of enlightenment”.⁷
Promise Broken – What Is to Be Done?
The internet itself acts as a Janus-faced multiplier here; it can help to spread these dogmas powerfully, but it can also be a means to oppose these (political) dogmas.
Today’s activist milieu has, in the past, increasingly chained itself back into a corset of simple dogmas and friend-or-foe dichotomies. Many parts of the activist net movement in Germany have also gone down this path, as the long political road through the institutions was too arduous for them. Due to being overwhelmed in an increasingly complex world and the desire to be part of the fight for the supposed good, contradictions and consequences of one’s own activist actions are pushed aside. Fatally, for many, conformity-compatible rebellion has now become a means of attaining status and supposed relevance, so that for this milieu, the internet’s promise of freedom and equality in debate has grown into a threat to its own social status.
One recognises the double meaning: that activists in general have now become political window dressing for supposedly progressive parties, and that in Germany we have a revolving door factor between parliament and activism in general. Dogmatism has here become a reclaimed means of gaining power. Freedom in debate on an equal footing, without a dogmatic activist superstructure, is thus perceived as a threat by various gatekeepers in the media and institutions, a threat that must be countered according to their own preferences.
Historically, we have already experienced these developments in net politics and the breaking up of the status quo in discourse once before, in the mid to late 2000s, with the emergence of the Pirate Party, which demanded a reaction from the established top dogs of net-political discourse, such as Mario Sixtus.⁸
The failure of the vocal parts of the net-political movement in Germany and their willing detachment from and surrender of their own party-political and/or political identity is a political fall from grace from which the net movement in Germany has de facto not yet recovered, having been absorbed into a mural of many different quasi-non-governmental organisations. By definition, this is an organisation that acts independently within the framework of a government mandate and is partially or fully financed by government funds or is otherwise indirectly controlled by the government, for example through the appointment of front men or straw men to positions. In terms of its legal nature, such an organisation is to be classified as a non-state body that is not integrated into the state administration. Warnings about this general development were made early on in the specialist literature,⁹ but for many years they found no echo in the journalistic or social debate in Germany. In this context, these quasi-non-governmental organisations were already accused in 2005, for example in the United Kingdom by Dan Lewis, author of the book “The Essential Guide to Quangos”, of merely receiving things expensively at the taxpayer’s expense but often not providing any impetus of their own.¹⁰ Similar criticism can now also be found in the German critique of many NGOs, partly because the more precise term quasi-non-governmental organisation is unfortunately hardly ever used in Germany.
It is therefore more important today than ever that the net-political movement emancipates itself again from supposed role models and supposed opinion leaders and organisations and remembers its own strengths. Furthermore, it is important that it demands the promise of the internet, to redeem it anew and to begin to fight for it again.
Sources:
¹Bernd Stegemann, »Predigerin der einzigen Wahrheit. Republica-Auftritt von Carolin Emcke« in: Cicero – Magazin für politische Kultur (7.06.2024), https://www.cicero.de/kultur/republica-aufritt-von-carolin-emcke-predigerin-der-einzigen-wahrheit, (Accessed on 23.09.2024).
²Tarek Barkouni, Das vergessene Versprechen: Wie die Idee der Sozialen Medien scheitert, Berlin 01.03.2024.
³Michelle Koenen / Thomas Obst, Energiekrise führt zu spürbaren Wohlstandseinbußen in Deutschland,, Cologne 2023.
⁴Energiekrise überwunden – Aufschwung setzt ein. Bundesminister Dr. Robert Habeck stellt die Frühjahrsprojektion der Bundesregierung vor, Berlin 27.04.2023.
⁵Sara Hjalmarsson, / Schoresch Davoodi / Alexander Kohler, Angriff auf unsere Sicherheit: Die langfristige Wirkung latenten Stresses bei gesellschaftlicher Verwundbarkeit 17.12.2023.
⁶Interne Details zu russischer Desinformationskampagne „Doppelgänger“. TEIL 2 – VOLLANALYSE, Munich 2024.
⁷Peter Neuner, Was ist ein Dogma?, Munich November 2006.
⁸Christian Stöcker, Nerd Attack! Eine Geschichte der digitalen Welt vom C64 bis zu Twitter und Facebook, Munich 2011, S. 261.
⁹Adama Sow, Chancen und Risiken von NGOs – Die Gewerkschaften in Guinea während der Unruhen 2007, Stadtschlaining 2007.
¹⁰Wikipedia, Quango, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango, (Accessed on 23.09.2024).
Author: Schoresch Davoodi
