About Me and My Universe

I'm Michael Tänzer, a student of computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). My majors are Telematics (computer networks) and Cryptography (I guess that shows in my posts). I'm a big fan of open source software and in addition to my studies I also work on a few open source projects of my own.

Places in My Universe

Here are some places where you might find me:

  • On the KIT campus. Especially:
    • AStA, the students union executive committee's office
    • AKK, the autonomously organised student café
  • Open source events and hacker conferences. I often attend:
  • neo@nhng.de for emails and XMPP/Jabber
  • GitHub
  • Ohloh
  • @NEOatNHNG on Twitter
  • +NEOatNHNG on Google+

My View on the Universe

Politically I would describe myself as a leftist libertarian, a supporter of the social market economy and protector of civil liberties. Unlike neoliberalists, I believe that a free market also needs an regulating entity to make sure that basic principles of the market are kept intact, such as limiting mono- and oligopolies, enforcing fair competition and protecting the balance in the labour market. When it comes to fundamental rights I strongly argue for civil liberties. Here in Germany we had a few regimes that showed us how important it is to restrict the powers of state authorities. I think that giving too much power over individuals to state authorities or other big organisations severely hurts the democratic process and reinforces power structure up to a point where opposition and change is not possible any more. Embracing civil liberties for me also means that church and state have to be completely separated, because the fundamental right to freedom of religion (or not to be religious) is best supported if the state is secular.

Philosophically I would best identify myself with Karl Popper, with his idea of social liberalism, critical rationalism and his motto “let our theories die in our stead”.