DiEM25 meets in Conway Hall, London, 28 January 2017.
Like all DiEM25 gatherings, more than half of the meeting was made up of conversations involving those attending. To set the scene and introduce some important initial ideas, the morning began with brief contributions from Brian Eno, Elif Şafak, Agnieszka Wiśniewska, Igor Stokfiszewski and, finally, Yanis Varoufakis.
The first speaker, the British musician and composer Brian Eno, began by noting that the venue, Conway Hall in London, was a place he knew personally because in the late 1960s he used to come here to hear avant-garde music concerts. This memory, in turn, reminded him of another time, like the present one, when everything was changing and when a great deal of radical rethinking was going on. He noted, however, that in the 1970s much of this kind of thinking was reversed by an Ayn Rand-inspired selfishness that developed into simplistic ideas of how societies should run themselves and which even begun to question, as Thatcher famously did, whether there was, in fact, any such thing as society. Eno pointed out that although the 70s were followed by a few decades of prosperity and a huge amount of wealth creation, this wealth was eventually concentrated in only the hands of a few and we simultaneously saw the stagnation of the wages of everybody else. For Eno this dangerous gulf finally became clear to everyone last year and marked the end of a forty year period of decline. Suddenly the idea of doing politics, which people of his generation often thought was “akin to masturbating in public and to be avoided at all costs”, was something once again worth engaging in.
