On September 24, Manege hosted a lecture by Yekaterina Shulman, entitled “The golden age and the digital concentration camp: techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic utopias in our views of the future”.

The information space has provided us with so many opportunities, from instant access to any information to a daunting pace of scientific and technological progress. The development of technology makes our lives easier, but at the same time it evokes more and more apprehension: how much does the government know about an individual? To what extent can we counter informational manipulation? Will the social rating system become a worldwide phenomenon? At the lecture, we discussed our views on the future from the standpoints of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism.

The speaker is Yekaterina Shulman, Russian political scientist and publicist. She is a candidate of political science (2013), a docent at the department of politics and law studies at the Moscow Higher School of Economic and Social Sciences (Shaninka), and an instructor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration’s Institute of Social Sciences. From December 2018 to October 2019, Shulman was on the President’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights. She also hosts Status, a weekly radio program on Echo Moscow. Her works have been published by Vedomosti, Republic, the Carnegie Moscow Center, and others. Shulman also has a Youtube channel, where she posts discussions on political and non-political topics.

You can watch this lecture on our YouTube-channel.

General Partner for the exhibition – SIBUR.
Partner for Manege’s educational program – The Mikhail Bazhenov Foundation.