Absolute Lamers Save the World

Sara showed up with a new haircut and we decided to save the world. No plan, no weapons, no clear sense of whether the world deserved it.

Step one was a protest march through Berlin—the Freiheit statt Angst demonstration, Freedom not Fear, a civil liberties rally against mass data retention and state surveillance that had drawn what I can only describe as the largest concentration of basement-dwelling nerds I have ever seen assembled above ground simultaneously. The Pirate Party rolled through on a truck. World of Warcraft servers were probably running at half capacity. And yet—marching with all those people, the city actually out in force, showing up physically—there was a genuine moment in there. Something that felt like it counted.

Step two: District 9. Neill Blomkamp’s apartheid allegory dressed as alien-refugee sci-fi, and genuinely good—the kind of film that earns its politics by being a real film first. My one problem is the protagonist, a man so spineless and oblivious that I spent the entire runtime wanting to reach through the screen and slap him. If the sequel brings him back, I will hold him personally responsible.

By night we were on the guestlist for a Vice party previewing the racing game Dirt 2 at a club in Berlin, where laser shows competed with game footage projected on the walls and every single person in the room was performing some version of not really being there. We lasted about forty minutes before slipping out, taking the subway home in silence, and arriving at the mutual conclusion that we are absolute lamers. But the world’s still here, so.