Mad as Hell: Is There an End to Subversion?

Johannes Grenzfurthner, an artist, filmmaker and member of the Monochrome collective, opens by asking what subversion can still achieve when little shocks anyone anymore. He frames his practice as "context hacking," the idea that where and how a message is placed decides whether people hear it. He traces this back to hacker pranking at MIT and to his own youth in Austria, where a fanzine and bulletin board were attempts to reach people beyond underground circles.

The middle of the talk moves through personal stories, including his grandmother's reaction to E.T. and his parents' new-age beliefs, which he tested with a pendulum experiment. He contrasts the older disciplinary society, where hierarchies made rebellion easy to spot, with a society of control in which people police themselves through friendly bosses, reassuring cameras and gamified labor. He also argues that nerd culture now holds real power, and that conspiracy thinking grows from a search for meaning and scapegoats.

He closes by warning that slogans such as freedom are easily co-opted, and that meaningful change comes from many small actions in daily life rather than from a few prominent figures. He admits he has no tidy answers, leaving the audience with questions about how to reach people who disagree.