#rp17-Speaker: Maciej Ceglowski
The United States in crisis? At the re:publica 2017, programmer and essayist Maciej Ceglowski will analyze the first six months of the president’s term of office to help explain how things can be expected to proceed in the USA after Donald Trump’s election victory.
Maciej is truly an all-round talent. He studied Russian, French and “Studio Art” at university, developed his first website in 1998 and, after a few years, was employed as a developer for companies such as Twitter and Yahoo. By 2009, he had had enough of working for the IT industry’s big players and developed a minimalist website for bookmarks. Besides doing all this, he also writes essays for his Idle Words blog, covering a range of different topics from travel and technology to politics, all while staying true to his motto that “brevity is for the weak”. Wired, the New York Times, The Economist and The Guardian have all discussed the multifaceted works of this man from San Francisco.
At the re:publica 2017, Maciej will be speaking about the USA’s future following the “coronation” of Donald Trump as president. In his talk “Notes from an Emergency”, the tech activist will be discussing the consequences of the election results and the first half year of the Trump presidency. How will the internet develop under Trump? Will it even be possible to keep dreaming of a humane internet in the coming years? Maciej already seems to have an opinion on the matter.
His tweets indicate that he doesn’t exactly have a rosy vision for the future. His oft-cited posts now take aim at Trump and the American media landscape on a daily basis. He uncovers Trump’s questionable claims in an uncompromising yet very funny manner, with the media regularly gets chided for their uncritical reporting.
It isn’t just his tweets that give off the impression that he has, for some time now, come to the end of the line as far as his relationship with his adopted home is concerned. Together with his mother, he emigrated from Poland to the US at age 6, something that he himself refers to as an “accident”. He has never completely warmed to the American system and way of thinking. Though authorized, he considers himself to be “unwillingly” free to work in the USA. Maybe this is the reason for his many travels, which he portrays extensively in his highly enjoyable essays.
Maciej is currently working on the development of a tech solidarity movement, which he will hopefully be able to tell us more about this coming May. We are thrilled to have Maciej Cegolewski as a speaker at the #rp17!
Image credit: happy.apple (CC-BY 2.0)
