This time at Next Fest

Now I left you off with me having to go to the hospital, but it was nothing serious, got a nice ambulance ride, had the chance to zoom through the busy streets of Milan full speed and sirens wailing. Again, and I’m gonna repeat this (mostly cause if my mother reads it) nothing serious, I’m super healthy and the ambulance ride was only for transportation to another hospital cause they didn’t have the equipment necessary to check me properly. You’ll be thinking what hospitals do they have in Milan, well funny story about this little adventure is that the hospital I found was a paediatric hospital, so I was a bit out of place, and the worst part of all of this was that I didn’t even get a lollypop at the end of the whole checkup.


Stoya

Okay, so after finding out I was healthy as one can be, we marched on back to the festival to see Stoya, a professional pornstar, talk about the effect of pornification on advertisement, media, and society. That at least was what we thought. Instead, we found ourselves watching an interviewer stumble upon his words, because too embarrassed by the fact that he probably has seen a gazillion of her productions. It was a perfect actualization of some of the topics Stoya began to talk about, patriarchy and preconceptions of sex workers.

Music in the Park

Like day 1 in the evening we had the chance to “enjoy” some music, I mean I wasn’t a fan, but it was packed and in the end even if we didn’t quite enjoy the tracks and genres presented, it was nice to just chill in the park while listening to music and chatting about.

Let’s get to the final day, where two of the most influential speakers of the Festival had their segments.

As usual, it was nice and hot, and the park had a great mix of families and festival goers all coexisting in the same environment without disrupting one another. Because of this, we decided that we were going to listen to the first of the two speakers, Amitav Gosh, on the big screen.

Amitav Gosh

Amitav Gosh made some deep considerations on the fact that we today are not addressing the problem of climate change with literature, as writers such as Dickens would with the Industrial Revolutions coal-era, and also went on to give his own two cents on the immigration crisis the world is seeing today.

Once Amitav’s conversation ended we decided to start getting ourselves in line to go see the next speaker. Now some people (at least this is addressed to my American compatriots), aren’t gonna be happy about her presence, but free speech is free speech on all the political spectrum.

Chelsea Manning

After 7 years in jail because of the information, she passed on to WikiLeaks, and a transition period to change gender, we had the chance to see Chelsea Manning in the flesh. Now she wasn’t there to talk about what she went through in jail, or about topics of gender, rather she talked about cybersecurity and the importance of Net Neutrality in America and in Europe. She addressed this topic with such expertise (she was a security analyst all her life so you know she knows this stuff) that at the end of the talk the whole crowd gave her a standing ovation.
It was a beautiful moment to see someone out of jail and fighting for what they believe in again.

Anyway, that concludes the whole tirade of my weekend at the Wired Festival in Milan, and next September it should be in Florence and you should go, but if you don’t we’ll keep you posted right here on StudentsVille.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.