“When you are in the middle of it, you almost never realise that you are witnessing an event that will change the course of history,” wrote the Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic recently. e suspects that the start of Donald Trump’s second term in office marks the beginning of such an event: the end of global neoliberalism. “Nobody knows, not even Trump himself, where his mix of ideas will lead the USA, the West and the world. We will only recognise the logic of this development in a few years’ time.”
So we reach a turning point once again, one of those situations in which really anything—or the exact opposite—can happen. This “rocking of things” (Mathias Greffrath) also opens up unique opportunities for new beginnings and innovation. A look at past turnarounds can help us to recognise this uniqueness and position ourselves within it.
Karin Frick, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute’s long-standing Principal Researcher, looked “back to the future” on the occasion of her farewell. She joined the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute in 1986 and was enthusiastic about its openness right from the start: as editor of the magazine “Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute Impuls”, she was in a position to take an interest in everything, and that’s exactly what she did: “The opportunity to be there at the very beginning of new developments, when everything is new, unknown, exciting and not yet commercially interesting, is absolutely unique.”
This also meant that she was fully involved when a global turning point occurred at the beginning of the 1990s. The collapse of communism led to uncertainty, on the one hand, and to great room for manoeuvre, on the other: “Back then, so much was unclear, so much was possible—not just at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. We simply utilised these possibilities as much as we could.”
New technologies appeared on the horizon—microchips, mobile phones, the Internet—but what would become of them remained vague for a long time. This opened up new possibilities.
These are just some of the things the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute did:
- A fake excavation in the “Park im Grüene”: in June 1993, during a conference at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute on “Quality of Experience”, a team of people pretending to be archaeologists appeared on the scene right next door and began an excavation on the park grounds. In conversation with the conference visitors, “excavation manager Schmidt” claimed that a grave from the Etruscan period had been found. But they were merely a group of artists from Berlin who had come to demonstrate how fascinating a well-staged story can be.
- The installation of an electronic confessional: the taboo zone of religion was breached in March 1994 at a Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute event on marketing as a “service to the customer”. The “Automatic Confession Machine” by the Canadian researcher Greg Garvey was designed to show the extent to which technology has penetrated our lives; Karin Frick was forced to take 911 Hail Marys as atonement.
- Events on techno and boycott culture: in spring 1995, the dispute between Shell and Greenpeace raged on the “Brent Spar” oil platform. At the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, a mind management seminar on “panic strategies” took place at the same time, and in autumn 1995, the Institute even hosted a “boycott conference”. The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute had already issued “energy survival kits” the year before—for a techno cult event in Zurich’s Hallenstadion.
During this time, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute became a playground for the “creative class”—at a time when this term had not yet been coined. The US economist Richard Florida first used the term in 2002, describing one of the trends that had emerged from the turning point of the previous decade.
What characterises the creative class today is called “woke”, and it is one of the candidates for decline in the epochal change that has just begun. The new interim period will therefore be open in a different way to the last one—but it will also create new spaces and playgrounds.
Because new technologies are entering the playing field once again: this time, they are called artificial intelligence, which we are currently in the midst of and biotechnology, the age of which is yet to come. And once again, upheaval is engulfing politics and society: the chainsaws at work will produce so much scrap wood that wondrous plants may grow in the rooted-out clearings—plants that would never have had enough air and light in an intact forest.
And where could this create new room for manoeuvre? On a small and very large scale, says Karin Frick. On the one hand, there are “social innovations that allow us to decide for ourselves whether we are heading for Heaven or Hell”—including the revitalisation of very old concepts such as family, friendship and a sense of community And on the other hand, the “challenges that technology presents us with, but also allows us to solve”: democratisation of AI, multi-stakeholder negotiationscircular society. And for the most part, we still lack the terms for what the new leading science of biology will make possible.
For Frick, technological progress remains part of the solution rather than the problem: “Technologies naturalise over time”, she says. “Electricity is technology, cooking with a hob and oven is technology, clothes made of synthetic fibres are technology. But we perceive these things as commonplace as soon as they are no longer brand new. From this perspective, there is not always more technology, it is more of a constant change.” And, in keeping with the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute’s motto, the focus is always on people: “What isn’t used won’t become established.”
“It was a great privilege to be able to work at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute for so many years”, summarises Karin Frick, “with so much freedom to explore and set new topics.” She, and we, will not run out of freedom and topics in the future. We thank Karin Frick for her exceptional work and commitment.