2026-06-14 –, Hauptbühne (Saal 1)
An Adam Curtis documentary delivered on a stage with visuals, exhibits and receipts: an analysis of the 2025 collapse, who caused it, and a concrete framework for what replaces the institution and why. The audience for this talk has the technical and financial capacity to build those alternatives and lie at night wondering, "how did we get here?".
Cade Diehm (IE/AU) is a researcher, author, founder of New Design Congress (DE, 2018), Para-Real Ltd. (IE, 2025), and is a founding member of Modal Collective (EU, 2025). Over a thirteen year career, Cade has developed a forensic practice capable of piercing opaque systems of power to make sense of their structural function. His work repurposes information security, political science, open source intelligence, game design, AI/ML, and software engineering as a single method capable of reckoning with systems of intense complexity.
With a multi-disciplinary background in information security, interface politics and digital anthropology, Cade and his team study technology's macro-influence on subcultures, economic livelihoods, identity, conflict and ecological relationships. As New Design Congress' founder, Cade leads an ambitious research programme that anticipates how digital dependence creates brittle societies by accelerating risks across economics, infrastructure, identity, and ecology.
Cade’s expertise has informed projects across major institutions and civil society organisations – including the European Parliament, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, PEN America and others – and his team frequently collaborates with research institutions, civil society, technology firms and environmental groups. Cade serves on the executive board of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics and the observer board of the Digital Credentials for Europe (DC4EU), a European Union Digital Europe Programme pilot.
Prior to founding New Design Congress, Cade was a security researcher at Tactical Tech, a Berlin-based NGO focused on digital rights. He contributed to Signal’s initial launch in the early 2010s, and headed a design-led security practice at SpiderOak, a pioneering zero-knowledge cloud storage company. From 1999 to 2006, Cade represented Australia in international disability swimming, and holds Australian and world records.
Cade resides in Berlin with his partner and two Shiba Inus, Ripley and Kodak.