The "other now" described by Varoufakis could exist somewhere in a fissure of the time-space continuum. In this dimension, capitalism (as we know it) is dead, but a liberal and democratic society is thriving.

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician and a former Minister of Finance of Greece, member of the Greek Parliament, co-founder of the European Transnational Party "DiEM25", and science fiction writer.

This episode is hosted by Giuseppe Porcaro, and co-hosted with Alberto Cottica, from the Science Fiction Economics Lab and sees the participation of Teresa O’Connell, acting chief editor at Are We Europe, and Samuel Doveri Vesterbye, director of the European Neighborhood Council. Edited by Stefano Montali. 

In this final episode, Giuseppe Porcaro, Alberto Cottica, and the Architect of Witness, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, talk about to the history of Witness, and wrap up the whole season. 

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness. 

Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. 

Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. 

You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.

Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama

Edited by Stefano Montali

Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond 

We explore the fictional academic discipline of aethnography - the study of the behavior of humans engaged in mutual interaction - which has a solid tradition in the universe of Witness. 

Giuseppe and Alberto are joined by Amelia Hassoun, senior researcher and lead ethnographer at Edgeryders. 

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness. 

Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. 
 

About Aethnography in Witness 

Aethnography is the study of the behavior of humans engaged in mutual interaction. It explores the phenomena that those interactions give rise to, taking into account the point of view of the interactants themselves and maintaining a stance of openness to evidence of different kinds and coming from different directions, known as epistemic pluralism. 

While all social sciences are taught in the education establishments of Witness, aethnographic thinking plays a special role in informing much of decision-making, both in business and public policy.

Aethnography is applied to the three domains of high theory, applied analysis and action.

Aethnographers engaging in high theory are called theors. They reflect on general patterns and cross-domain intuition, invoking mostly the principle of the chemical wedding.

Aethnographers deploying on the ground to understand a concrete, situated set of issues are called augurs. They immerse themselves into a river of observables, from which they extract intersubjective meaning. They invoke mainly the principle of the pluriversity.

Aethnographers who leave their research institutions to engage in direct action take on the title of incanters. Invoking the principle of the broken tower, they shift to working in favour of a particular outcome: a reform, the starting up of a successful company, a military campaign.

An accomplished aethnographer is expected to have covered all three roles at least once during her career.

Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. 

Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. 

You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.

Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama

Edited by Stefano Montali

Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond 

In this episode, Giuseppe and Alberto, together with guest Hugi Ásgeirsson, sail through a sector of the fictional world Witness known as Avantgrid. Hugi is one of the co-directors of Edgeryders and director of blivande - a participatory culture hub in Stockholm.

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness. 

Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. 

Avantgrid is a large archipelago Distrikt between Assembly and Libria. Originally a zone of Libria, built to cater to an exclusive, high-income clientele, it fractured after the collapse of a geoengineering company left the ownership of the archipelago in dispute. Avantgrid is the only Distrikt in Witness that is not connected to the Harvest grid. In contrast to the mostly urban other Distrikts of Witness, Avantgrid is a largely rural Distrikt which even contains patches of uninhabited wilderness. Of the 1.1 million inhabitants of Avantgrid, 150.000 live in Akur, its only urban zone. There are 149 islands in the archipelago; outside of Akur, boundaries are being made and remade all the time, and new islands are under construction by various parties within Avantgrid.

The Avantgrid economy is highly cyclical, closer to zero-waste than anything else on Witness; in fact, some Cantons import waste from other Distrikts - especially electronic - to repair, rebuild, and to extract materials. Avantgrid attitudes towards waste have been compared to the water beliefs of the sand-nomads in the pre-Sundering religious text Dune.

Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. 

Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. 

You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.

Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama

Edited by Stefano Montali

Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond 

The Covenant is religious institution Distrikt of Witness, tracing its history back to the grand powers of Roman Catholicism.

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness. 

Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. 

The Covenant is perhaps the least-understood among all the major Distrikts of Witness. Notable visitors have describe it alternatively as "a kind of feudal paradise" or a "fascist religious hegemony" or "a work of art". As always, the truth lies somewhere in between. 

The Covenant is indeed a religious institution, tracing itself back to the grand powers of Roman Catholicism. Broadly united under the Officium Auctoritatis Summae - loosely rendered as "the Office of the Highest Authority", and generally shortened to "Auctoritatis", it is possibly the single greatest concentration of material wealth on Witness. Magnificent churches stud the landscape, surrounded by carefully planned farms and estates; buildings of singularly brutalist art nouveau style line the streets of Hyborean, the 'center' sprawled around the Officium.

A unique feature of The Covenant’s economy is the strong role played by monasteries and other religious institutions. While by no mean numerically prevalent, these institutions tend to be over-represented among the most advanced, most successful operations. This observation led economist Malivalaya Nut to describe The Covenant as a dual economy, where two sets of economic agents with completely different objective functions co-exist. 

In a series of empirical investigation of The Covenant’s economy, Nut discovered a pattern: the economic activity of religious institutions tends to be amplified by businesses that are legally part of the secular economy, but have evolved for taking advantage of the turbulence created by the existence of the religious institutions themselves – for example lifting innovations invented in the monasteries and re-engineering them for secular markets.

Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. 

You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
 

Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama

Edited by Stefano Montali

Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond

Hygge  is the first Distrikt of Witness. It was initially meant to be the " nervous system of Witness."  The political history of Hygge begins with the founding of Witness itself. 

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness. 

Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. 

In this episode we explore Hygge with co-hosts Giuseppe Porcaro, Alberto Cottica and Joriam Ramos - author, networks specialist, and proud owner of a sci-fi YouTube channel.

Hygge went through a tumultuous time after the Zero-Day Fracture set in motion a chain of events that would see Distrikts seceding and throwing aside the careful top-down planning engine that Hygge was designed to be.

Today, Hygge is a democratic socialist structure, with a military presence left over from the short but bloody history of the Marches and the Distrikts that broke off. It is still an emblem of power, the seat of many debates for representatives, and boasts perhaps the single largest peacekeeping presence in Witness. Outside of the the Library of St. Benedict in the Covenant, Hygge is the only Distrikt truly critical to the State Machine’s existence, as it houses key hardware, along with CIVICSMOD, a multi-distrikt team that operates the machine.

You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
 

Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama

Edited by Stefano Montali

Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond

In this episode, we sail to the Witness - an open-source fictional world exploring the future of economy. Giuseppe Porcaro and Alberto Cottica, your guides for the season, along with Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, a science fiction author and Architect of Witness, take you there.

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab as they had an incredible idea. Instead of writing academic papers, they decided to channel out-of-the box economic research by building the world of Witness. 

Witness is a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth, where people are organised by districts each experimenting a different social contract and a different economic model, but all of them connected by being constrained in that floating space. 

Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world/
 

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.
 

Follow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Get in touch with Giuseppe Porcaro on twitter @porcarorama

Edited by Stefano Montali

Witness is a project by SciFi Economics Lab supported by EIT Climate-KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond

For this season, Europarama joins forces with Edgeryders and their Science Fiction Economics Lab by building the world of Witness - a fictional city floating in a post-climate change Planet Earth. On Witness, people are organised by districts, each experimenting a different social contract and economic model. Witness is an open-source fictional world. You are encouraged to contribute to its making or to freely use it for your artistic or research projects. Join in: https://scifieconomics.world

This podcast is brought to you by Are We Europe, a border-breaking media trying to bridge the gaps in European culture and identity. You can become an Are We Europe member and connect with storytellers across the continent starting at €4 a month. Just go to areweeurope.com/member and help Are We Europe build a new media for a changing continent.

Hosted by Giuseppe Porcaro (Twitter: @porcarorama) and Alberto CotticaFollow Europarama on Instagram @europarama

Supported by EIT-Climate KIC and Nordisk Kulturfond

In this episode we explore, with Julijonas Urbonas, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, the so-called Karman Line, at 100 Km above us. What new politics, culture, and art can be conceived when the law of physics as we know them get completely subverted? 

This episode was originally foreseen to be recorded live, in the frame of the Culture Forum of Kaunas, European Capital of Culture 2022. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the Forum has been moved online. It takes place on 20-22 May 2022 and can be accessed on https://forumas.kaunas2022.eu 

Episode Guest: Julijonas Urbonas – artist, designer, researcher, engineer, founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency. Associate professor and former prorector at Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA). Former CEO of an amusement park in Klaipėda. Lithuanian representative at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Currently he is about to defend his PhD thesis on gravitational aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, London. 

Composer of hypergravitational piano project:  Gailė Griciutė

Why should it be unscientific to think about the future? Why shouldn’t we be allowed to take a critical scientific stance in thinking about the future? There is no contradiction in being scientific and turning towards the future—towards what is not yet known. 

Wouldn’t it be scientific, in the best sense of the word, if researchers examined utopias and investigated, with the best available knowledge, why they cannot become true? 

The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) offered scientists a platform for imagining utopias beyond the usual research. The visionary stories address the opportunities and challenges that digital technologies present for society in the future of 2040. And they have been collected in a book available on: https://twentyforty.hiig.de/   

In this episode we have spoken with Bronwen Deacon, coordinator of the project a the von Humboldt Institute, Gianluca Sgueo, Policy Analyst - EU Parliament and New York University Global Media Seminar Professor, and Isabella Hermann, scientific coordinator on Artificial Intelligence at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 

Pandemics have been a running theme throughout science fiction and many cross-genre movies, from zombies to aliens. But what happens when Europe (and the world) has become a huge set of a pandemic, and it is not a science fiction, even if it closely looks like it?

Giuseppe Porcaro is in conversation with Anthony Straeger, the director of the Berlin Sci-fi Film Festival, and Isabella Hermann, political scientist and expert of A.I. and ethics. 

A (partial) watch list of the movies we speak about in this episode: 

• Contagion (2011)
• The Host (2006)
• 12 Monkeys (1995)
• 28 Days Later (2002)
• Andromeda Strain (1971)
• It comes at night (2017)
• Outbreak (1995)
• Quarantine (2008)
• Virus (1980)
• Children of men (2006)