It’s a cheerful crowd at the seventh edition of the PICNIC festival . The EYE museum is completely taken over by red balloons, bottled messages and 1600 cardboard boxes as a DIY interior. This year’s theme seems equally positive: “Technology gives people, companies and organisations the power to bring about change on a local and global level. The internet has increased our knowledge and the invention of social media has made it possible to take action. Everyone now has the potential to implement their ideas, regardless of position or location”.
New ownership
In short, PICNIC states: a new idea of ownership is not only necessary, but also inevitable in this day and age. But how should this new ownership be shaped? To inspire, PICNIC offers a diverse program, which, in addition to many side events, also offers a set of lectures by experts from various fields. Regardless of whether they come from the arts or sciences or are entrepreneurs: the speakers all have a rock-solid belief in the change that technology can bring about and, more importantly, that they can play a role in this.
The first speakers of the day, historian and philosopher George Dyson and Byron Reese canada telegram data Chief Innovation Officer at Demand Media, nicely illustrate the enormous change that digital technology has caused. Dyson focuses mainly on historical examples. For example, it is startling to think that in 1953, only 53 kilobytes made up all the available memory on the entire planet . For comparison: that now corresponds to about the size of an e-mail.