Enlarge image
Moderator Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim: Back on YouTube with a surprising announcement
Photo: YouTube
It's been exactly ten months since Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim announced the end of her popular YouTube channel maiLab. This Tuesday a new video surprisingly appeared on the channel, briefly titled “Statement”. Nguyen-Kim, also known for television shows such as “MaiThink X,” announces that he will become politically active in the future. However, she does not reveal any more details about it.
According to her own statement, she is deliberately keeping her announcement vague because she does not want to use her YouTube channel, which was created in collaboration with the public youth program funk, for “party politics” for the time being.
Criticism of current discussion culture
In her video, the doctor of chemistry says she is worried about the future of Germany, "simply because it is becoming increasingly difficult to find even the smallest common reality." There is an information and discussion climate crisis: "It's not what is most important or informative that gets the most attention, but rather what outrages or emotionalizes the most," states Nguyen-Kim. She describes the climate of discussion in Germany as "catastrophic": "Black and white, under-complex, unobjective, agitated, full of false arguments and insults." This would significantly intensify other crises.
Populist politicians are "definitely" part of the problem, says the presenter and science journalist, who once became known through online formats, just like the media and algorithms and "all of us" "because we are so outraged and because we click and spread the word." At the same time, however, the fight against the information and discussion climate crisis is “anything but easy.”
However, two things, Nguyen-Kim diagnoses, would help the government of a democratic country: courage in communicating problems and crises and objectivity, with Nguyen-Kim also meaning scientificality by the latter term, as she emphasizes.
»Communication is a very important part of political work«
Currently, even solid scientific consensus is constantly being questioned or distorted in politics, criticizes the moderator and points, as an example, to the "love of homeopathy" and the "hatred of genetic engineering" of the Greens and FDP positions "with their thermodynamically questionable openness to technology." And Nguyen-Kim addresses Chancellor Olaf Scholz with the following sentence: “Communication is a very important part of political work.” She firmly believes in a “reasonable majority,” is one of her interim conclusions, but this reasonable majority is “just frustrated.”
Regarding her planned commitment, Nguyen-Kim says that her competence is science and that one cannot make politics with science alone: "But firstly: Sometimes it's not so bad to shake up a deadlocked company with an outsider's perspective. And secondly: Of course I'm not alone." In the past few months she has spent a lot of time in Berlin. She built a strong team and continued her training.
“So nerds in power,” she says towards the end of her video, which no longer has anything to do with the funk network, as Nguyen-Kim emphasizes. There is already a discussion on social media about what exactly her announcement will entail. Initial assumptions range from founding a new party to taking on a political position - to show what contemporary communication looks like. Nguyen-Kim herself only says in her video that she is looking forward to being able to comment more specifically on the topic soon.
mbo