As institutions place their final bets on digital governance—AI oversight, cloud platforms for cultural memory, SaaS as the new civic infrastructure—the world itself is burning. Climate collapse and data weaponisation is now, and yet the dominant response is more data, more systems, more promises that software can solve material crisis.

In this keynote, Cade Diehm presents an argument that collapse the institutional myths of digital preservation and data sovereignty. While providing an urgent and deeply real alternative—a call to rethink cultural memory, not as something we store in perpetuity, but as something we actively steward under conditions of crisis, collapse, and coercion. Through a deeply personal exploration of climate grief, digital failure, and the 'para-real' worlds being built in response, Diehm lays a case for abandoning the hopium of digital redemption, and details how to find the future in unexpected places; through a deep exploration of DIY archiving communities, local-first knowledge networks, and alternative data stewardship models, a type of archive where cultural memory is not passively stored, but actively protected, shared, and stewarded under conditions of collapse.

Cade Diehm is the founder of the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He studies, writes, consults and speaks regularly on topics such as digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitisation of cities.

With a background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team at New Design Congress work tirelessly to tease out and weave threads that can be pulled together to build a truly hopeful future.

Cade has collaborated with organisations across the world, including Signal, Google, Mozilla, Bauhaus Earth, Webrecorder, Open Archive, Superbloom Design, Furtherfield, C/ O Berlin, Art Sonje Center, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Institute for the Environment and Development, the European Commission, the World Health Organization, the London College of Communication, Protocol Labs, the Deutschland Bundestag Prototype Fund, the Center for Digital Resilience, the Algorithmic Transparency Institute and many others.

Cade resides in Berlin with his partner and two Shiba Inus, Ripley and Kodak.