In this year’s edition of MFRU the large banner on the main square of Maribor is used as a surface to launch a critical message to passers-by. In line with the history of MFRU and the current discourse on intermedia and networked technologies, the MFRU30 team has developed an intervention in public space that takes a radical position on the uncritical belief in technological progress. The current advances in digital and networked technologies should not be mistaken for something capable of providing solutions to all kinds of man-made problems, as well as the many other complex crises that cannot be solved by digital bureaucratisation.
The real emergency seems to be the disappearance of the collective capacity to imagine a better future for all - together - and its replacement by increasing individualism and decreasing empathy. In fact, any technological development that is not accompanied by social thinking will end in further social fragmentation and computational exploitation of the individual. Technology alone will not save us, and critical events like the MFRU are the spaces that should remind us of this and help us question our beliefs and habits.