#rp15 Speaker: Eric "NeinQuarterly" Jarosinski
His Weltschmerz breaks our hearts, his gloomy dialectics fill us with delight - we look forward to #FailedIntellectual and #rp15 media partner Eric Jarosinski, better known by his Twitter handle, NeinQuarterly.
Many of you already know NeinQuarterly as an integral part of your Twitter timeline, and now you can see him live: Eric Jarosinski is hitting the re:publica stage for the first time! He is best known by his virtual persona on Twitter, where he has been causing sensations since 2012. NeinQuarterly is basically the fictional personality of the former professor from the United States, a public mouthpiece that nevertheless has a very distinct character. Working in university research, the scholar eventually found that his work on German literature was becoming more of a burden than a pleasure for him. It was the pressure to publish books in particular that tormented him, seeing how they would only be read by a very small group of German scholars at all. Eric decided to leave the ivory tower, and began to tweet as a #FailedIntellectual. Lucky for us – imagine what the world might have missed out on otherwise!
Eric’s tweets are a tiny universe of dialectics. He gives us the good news first, but the second part will bring his readers back to miserable reality. NeinQuarterly reflects the world with such harshness for a reason – his readings of world pessimists like Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin or Theodor W. Adorno come through here. NeinQuarterly has now compiled his aphorisms into a tour format, "A Compendium of Utopian Negation".
And with this manual of utopian negation, he now travels the world. He is concerned with the Internet as a space for options and utopias, and enjoys playing with the friction between vision and display, or reality and virtuality. NeinQuarterly is also about to publish his new book: "Nein. A manifesto" (Fischer Verlag 2015). In any case, his visit to re:publica promises to be terribly (dis)-enchanting.
But the best part is: Eric is #rp15 partner in a very special project. His NeinQuarterly Twitter account is the official re:publica media partner, an unusual constellation for a conference in any case. This is our kind of response to contemporary questions of who or what a "medium" is today, a way of exploring new kinds of media partnerships. With NeinQuarterly’s support, we can also view this as a parody of the marketing apparatus of the traditional media business. Because which radio station acquires an audience of 100,000 in under three years? Which newspapers persistently engage in instant dialogue with their readers? What kind of TV channel broadcasts from the shady side of the world with so much passion and sympathy?