The "offliners" are coming

COUNTERCULTURE On Tuesday 26.01.2016, interested parties met at the Park Hyatt for this year's event organized by the advertising agency Ogilvy. The eleventh round focused on the "offliners" - the counterculture of digitalization."Offliners" are not, as assumed, people who refuse to embrace digitalization, but people who are sceptical about the exponential increase in digitalization for a variety of reasons. "The further the internet penetrates our everyday lives, the more resistance there is," explains Dr Joël Luc Cachelin in his presentation. He divides the "offliners" into sixteen groups. For example, the "self-managers", who are resisting the centralization of the internet by tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. The Internet should become more decentralized. A classic example of an "offliner" is the "data protector", who questions the data collection mania, long-term storage and generally everyone who can access data.The speaker Dr. Joël Luc Cachelin and the Managing Director of Ogilvy & Mather Gaby ZimmerlinData protection has its priceThe "offline" movement is still very young and it is uncertain how it will develop. However, there are already more and more specific offers for them. In the USA, there are so-called "digital detox" camps where participants voluntarily give up all their electronic gadgets for two weeks. For people for whom data protection and data sovereignty are important, there is the "black phone", which encrypts emails, phone calls, text messages and visits to websites.According to Cachelin, one future prospect is that only a wealthy minority will be able to afford to protect their data. As the products and services that are effectively still provided by people will have a correspondingly high price tag.fun fact at the end: Back in the summer of 2011, Switzerland Tourism ran an online campaign to promote Switzerland as an "offline" destination. Facebook stopped the campaign.