Hundert Jahre digitaler Einsamkeit

The telephone brought the voice into the home; the internet promised a community of everyone. Every communication technology of the past hundred and fifty years set out to bring people closer together, and each left behind a quieter form of being alone.

Hundert Jahre digitaler Einsamkeit unfolds this pattern across four strands: the author’s memories of a childhood in Moscow and a life in Hamburg; the history of communication technology, from Morse code to artificial intelligence; an account of the political systems that surrounded both; and a reflection on what links them.

An oratorio of words, whose music can be heard between the lines, attuned to repetition and rupture.

Roman Kuznetsov was born in Moscow in 1970 and grew up in the Soviet Union, where he initially studied computer science. In 1994, he left the country, studied philosophy and education in the UK, and moved to Hamburg, where he studied music theory and composition before returning to the IT sector. He has been managing Systola GmbH, an IT security company, since 2003.