Show

I want to give the future as big a stage as possible.

// Future unplugged – our possibilities for tomorrow!

We all realize that the world is changing. But how exactly? How will we experience our everyday life in the future? With the beginning of industrialization, we have invented a new form of work, social laws, insurance, supermarkets, banks and bank money, concepts such as leisure and vacation have entered our everyday lives.

Many people do not have the opportunity to deal sufficiently with the future and its possibilities. Our understanding of how we can shape the future is on the same level as the topic of health was in the 1960s. There are many misunderstandings, false statements and far too many negative things to report.

Together with Bochum Veranstaltungen and the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle, I have conceived a show in which I would like to show the possibilities of the future: for our society, for companies, but above all for each individual person. And with this format I would like to contribute to the fact that in the future more people participate in the new possibilities and we get a more balanced society.

This format can be booked: for the city, region, large companies, universities, to invite people of all kinds to deal with the new possibilities of the future – and to be well entertained (by the way: then it is also easier to remember).

But wait a minute: Future? Entertaining?

Think of it like Eckhard von Hirschhausen, who managed to bring us closer to the subject of health with a lot of charm and entertainment – for that I have great respect! Humor and good stories are much better than pure (and often far too dry) science.

It’s a new format. No one has ever done it like this before on a stage open to the public! All the more exciting when we try it out together.

What I can guarantee in any case: we will have an exciting, entertaining time! And afterwards the sensitivity to look at and shape the everyday life of the future in a new way.

I am looking forward to meeting you – and to our jointly shaped future.

Max

Future does not come.

We design it.

This is how it can look on stage. Here during rehearsals in the large Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum.

Here is a short interview about it:

Max, why a show?

Many people write a book. I found that too boring, so I conceived this show, the greatest show about the future ever. I can say that so relaxed, because there is no other one yet (laughs). In this case it is 90 minutes of best entertainment (2×45 minutes) in the great Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum with whose terrific team the show was created. Our lighting technician even worked with Pina Bausch. But everyone is unique here and without this wonderful mutual motivation and inspiration, such a big topic can’t be rocked!

Why future as a theme?

My idea is to inspire people in a new way with the topic of the future, much like Jamie Oliver once did with cooking. All people, relaxed, cheerful, with really good entertainment. Therefore also an entertainment show. We will laugh together and take a lot of these fearful scenarios about the future for a ride – also because most of them are really nonsense. The future is positive and everyone can experience that in this show!

And your goal with this show?

I want to motivate people in all areas of society, companies and regions to see their future positively, show how our entire everyday life will change. To show the possibilities that each individual, company or region have to shape their own future. And that is possible! In digitality, i.e. the combination of technology and society, more than ever before in the history of mankind. To do this, however, we have to put aside the industrial thought patterns we grew up with and discover the digital ones for ourselves. In the digital world, we need fewer large and centralized structures. We could, for example, own, manage and consciously share our data ourselves. We determine what happens to our data and to us. At the moment, we are ceding these opportunities – and the chance to earn money with them, for example – to a few large structures.

Aren’t we dependent on technology?

We like to reduce the digital to technology, which is why we also like to talk about digitization. But it’s really about shaping digitality, i.e., integrating technology into society in a meaningful way. Technology is not the decisive factor here. What is much more important are intelligent structures that link our 17 spheres of life and define our quality of life and economy. By the way, Germany is way ahead in this respect. We have already achieved this once. When industrialization began, we were not the technological leaders, but the ones who created the best working conditions, the best social system back then. We can do it again now. Crazy enough, the global crises are helping us to do just that.

What are the 17 areas of life and how are they changing?

Our everyday life is divided into 17 areas such as: Health, Housing, Work, Mobility, Education, Leisure, but also topics like Consumption & Production, Nutrition, the Financial System, Economy, Politics and of course Climate, Culture and also the very personal within ourselves. All these and a few more areas are changing right now. In the end it will be about 80% new structures in our everyday life. The good thing about it: this doesn’t just happen, this is changed by ourselves. At least we have the possibility to do so.

What exactly can people, companies and regions change?

Everything! You can completely shape the future. This was already the case at the transition to industrialization. Just one example: many of the Internet corporations that have become rich with data today use digital technologies, but they apply them in industrial structures. That’s what makes them so powerful, because we’re sort of granting them centralized collection of data and thus the power to use it – we’re so used to it. At the beginning of industrialization, there were also such misunderstandings. At that time unions had to be founded, we needed new social laws, bank money, pensions for all – a new everyday life with new procedures, new shopping facilities, care and learning (schools) for children. We need similarly weighty changes now: the digital euro is coming in 2026, new social laws are increasingly coming into focus, the tax system, how and where we work. How will we need to learn in the future – and what? Do we need schools in their existing form? What will work mean in our lives in the future. How will it be paid. Can a digital euro create a fairer tax system and perhaps balance out different regions? We can change all this – if we make ourselves aware of it. Much of this has already been initiated as well. I would like to get more people, companies and regions to become active here and to use the individual opportunities that are available to EVERYONE. In the show it goes with many examples and very entertaining about which possibilities individual humans, enterprises and regions have to form these whole structures and to produce meaningful life and economic quality for all humans – how they move the apparently large levers with small expenditure into the correct direction.

That’s what this show is for: to get people excited about the future and show them how they can actually shape it themselves – together with others.

This is how it can look on stage. Here during rehearsals in the large Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum.

Fotos: © Marian Margraf

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This post is also available in: German