Happy Monday War & Peaceniks. Pack your bags, we’re off to Germany!
This past week, I was in Potsdam, Germany, at the legendary Studio Babelsberg, for the MediaTech Hub conference, where I gave the opening Keynote. Here’s a snippet…
Studio Babelsberg is the oldest film studio on earth. It’s where Fritz Lang shot most of his movies, including Metropolis and Woman In The Moon. For the latter film, in 1929, Lang invented the countdown clock (from 10 to blastoff) that has been used for every space journey in history. We know this because decades later NASA brought him to their first launch to celebrate his inspiration.
In 1912, Babelsberg was a start-up, in a newly emerging industry - movies. Since, more than three-thousand films have been shot there, including Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Hunger Games and even the last installment of The Matrix.
Recently, the Media industry has lost the thirst for innovation that motivated Jules Greenbaum to open Babelsberg despite enormous risk and myriad unknowns. Greenbaum took wild chances to offer people bold, new dreams. Today, the collective elite atop our entertainment industrial complex willfully ignores what audiences want in favor of what Wall Street thinks it needs. These recent chaotic days, these “leaders” don’t risk anything, they only follow.
The majority of the Media community has replaced the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) with the Fear of Finding Out (FOFO).
Imagine a world where Jules only worried about the financial risks, instead of taking creative gambles to follow what he believed people wanted. Imagine all the films and ideas Babelsberg inspired (3, 2, 1…) that we might not have today.
That was the theme of my Keynote in Potsdam.
MediaTech Hub Potsdam personifies the kind of collisions and conversations our industry needs, so desperately, right now. Brilliant technologists and creatives from around the world cross disciplines to meet not in the middle, but at the possibility of the future.
Below is my full Keynote, introduced by MTH’s inspirational founder Peter Effenberg and followed by a Q&A with the inimitable tech journalist Kate Bulkley. I hope there’s something in there to inspire you, the way this conference and Babelsberg inspired me…
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