Can we imagine living in a world in which profits go not only to a small elite of digital innovators but to the entire society? What if Silicon Valley’s marketing mantra to “make the world a better place” became the true political program of a leisure society based on fully automated wealth?

The Digital Bauhaus Summit 2016 takes up these and similar questions. Luxury communism is the name of the thought experiment that the boutique conference, now in its third year in Weimar, will tackle. Of course there will be workshops and lectures but also an algorithmic Show Gala and our own revolutionary attempt to drown capitalism and the financial crisis with the Slime Economy. High-profile thinkers and critics of the digital era such as Evgeny Morozov, Bruce Sterling, Sarah Sharma, Vinay Gupta, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and Mark Fisher will be joining us.
A digital wish list of demands will help kick-start the event: from the nationalization of all social networks to the abolition of the second class in public transport. Over the course of the conference the 150 participants (a.k.a. Luxury Cadre) will work up this catalogue of demands into a Luxury Communist Manifesto, which will outline the contours of a world society aiming to advance the motto “Wealth without Work!” to a civil religion.
 
With these goals in mind, the conference hopes to forge a path into the future that overcomes the seemingly inevitable dystopia created by war, financial crises, and the global rise of populism. At the same time, our luxury communism parade is determined to march resolutely past the infantile utopias of 3D printed urban gardens. In our temporary Kulturpalast, only seriously desirable futures audition for the role of political prima ballerina. Because, as the old Luxury Communist Friedrich Nietzsche famously put it: What good is a revolution where I can’t dance?!
 
Sebastian Olma