Spend enough time online and you’ll come across a meme that ‘Furries run the internet.’ Some of us build networks, write code or work as sysadmins, but alongside those who build or maintain our spaces are those who shape the world we want to live in – creatives, organisers, educators and other non-technical furs. And yet, although we are stronger together, we rarely look back out into the wider world to compare. At a time of intense real-world uncertainty, what could the wider world learn from the furry community for safety, community and economic resilience? Join a live conversation with Ån (Systems Design Lead at VRChat) and Shibco, (founder of New Design Congress). We will discuss how the social and technical savvy of the furry community offers hope for a more just wider world, and how the tools of furry expression – VRChat, Blender, Unity, OBS, Godot and others – serve as a hybrid “third space” between the digital and the physical, in stark opposition to the doomscrolling mainstream.

…because while we’re busy having discussions about the complexity of infrastructure itself, our opponents are busy making things that work, or things that cognitively make so much sense that a small child unsupervised can become an international criminal mastermind in the real world.”

In this 2023 talk at the Institute of Network Cultures, New Design Congress founder Cade Diehm lays bare the multi-decade failure of tech criticism and open source, and the hubris of European funders masquerading as operatives for change. While big tech continues its march unimpeded by civil society, the para-real political activation of hidden international subcultures offer a fresh perspective on truly transformative tactical media.

At the height of the worst economic crisis in nearly 50 years, an underground creative class was putting the finishing touches on one of the largest showcases of digital assets assembled to date. VIRTUAL MARKET 5 brought together modelers, animators, coders and visual artists from all over the world in a month long international flea market. Over 1000 stalls, all filled with buyable items, attracted an unprecedented patronage - the market saw a staggering 700,000 unique visitors. LilBagel shares his expertise as Virtual Ambassador and how this enormous international event is a model for real material stability for a multi-disciplinary creative class.

The Para-Real: Finding the Future in Unexpected Places / EPISODE 3
In an era of fractured exploitation and inequality, how can we take health and care back into our hands? The Hologram is social medicine for a cooperative species and is a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network. Years in development, the Hologram had already begun to grow before the events of 2020. But it's timing could not have been more critical. The Hologram's online work began almost exactly after the moment when the day before became "life before." And when we sat, minds racing in our homes and thinking and fearing the unthinkable, the Hologram was already in motion. One part art, one part activism and one part science fiction, Cassie Thornton, Shawn Chua and Lauren Klein describe their process of seizing and re-purposing platforms to create a desperately needed and blossoming practice based support structure.

The Para-Real: Finding the Future in Unexpected Places // EPISODE 2
The Para-Real mirrors real world politics into digital spaces, amplified by hardware costs, supply chain injustices and connectivity access. Though celebrated as a refuge for the weird, the 1990s digital culture overwhelmingly favoured a demographic with the material means and luxury of time to immerse themselves in it. The result of this historical lack of access is a homogeneous digital culture with narrow definitions of identity, aesthetics and functionality.

Through reflection on their trailblazing work and experiences as an artist, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley details the shortfalls of today's digital identity systems, the missing voices from early digital culture, and the unexpected outcomes when game engines, creative tools and hardware are liberated from class barriers and become universally accessible.

The Para-Real is an ephemeral space that exists in the moment where digital systems and the real world collide. But what does that look like, and how does it affect us? The most immediate examples of the influence of the Para-Real is on our understanding of identity, intimacy and social ties. A Wider Screen (2019) is a remarkable short film that follows VRChat players as their experiences within the platform changes their internal and external lives. As the Para-Real affects the early adopters of social VR, filmmaker Joe Hunting intimately explores these new and surreal interactions, romances and the embodiment of social self beyond the flattened digital world. After streaming the film, Joe Hunting and Cade “Shibco” Diehm reflect on identity and self-discovery, and the affect of the Para-Real.

Read The Para-Real Manifesto

We are in an endless and breathless scramble for the future, a goldrush in the debris of depleted digital societies and crypto-scams. Experimenting with a new format for documenting expert interviews, NEW DESIGN CONGRESS, C/O BERLIN'S C/O DIGITAL and RECLAIMFUTURES present The Para-Real: Finding the Future in Unexpected Places, a livestream/research series about subcultures building livelihoods and solidarity in networks of exploitation and austerity. These subcultures, communities and movements have seized upon the para-real now offer an ever-growing, compelling multitude of cohesive, nuanced and battle-tested imagined futures. They transact, skill-share, and have built just enough power to have the guns of the global neo-fascist pointed directly at them. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.