On 14 July 2025, Dr. Christopher Nixon (Berlin) gave his Fellow Lecture on the topic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Bild und Soziale Gerechtigkeit in digitalisierten Konsumgesellschaften” (“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Image and social justice in digitalized consumer societies”) (in German):

In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron published his poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, set to music on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. The criticism of US consumers and mass media television expressed in the text, which could easily be updated to social media and its platform economies, also discusses the relationship between social movements and audiovisual images, which shaped the Black civil rights movement in the US with its protest images and image protests. However, contemporary theory did not catch up with their struggle for social justice, as the Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills’ critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice shows. This was outlined in the lecture. This was followed by a discussion of the thesis that the proprietary markets of digital capitalism today promote deficient forms of socialization and subjectivation that make the success of social transformation movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement since the 2010s, impossible. Western societies have entered a global crisis, and digitized consumer societies, especially in times of AI, microtargeting, and clicktivism, are proving to be a major challenge for the future of democracy that political theory and social philosophy must address. The constitutive relationship between image and justice is once again being put to the test.

Dr. Christopher A. Nixon is a philosopher and comparative literature scholar. He has researched and taught at various universities and art academies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. He is a freelance exhibition curator and museum consultant. His research focuses on aesthetics, social philosophy, as well as critical, postcolonial, and political theory.