Losers Save the World

Sara and I spent a weekend saving the world, which is somehow both harder and easier than it sounds, and in the end we failed anyway, but that’s not the point.

Saturday morning we were at Freedom not Fear, marching against data retention and mass surveillance and the whole digital apparatus designed to watch you piss. The moment I realized how many people showed up, I knew the truth: every nerd in Berlin had crawled out of their basement. WoW servers were running on fumes. Linux forums were ghost towns. We shuffled along with all of them, and for a few hours it actually felt like we were shifting something. Like showing up mattered. You feel that way sometimes even though you know it’s partly theater, but you feel it anyway.

That afternoon we caught District 9. It’s not bad—aliens in a camp, apartheid as analogy, the machinery of displacement and dehumanization. I spent the movie wanting to punch the main character, but something about the setup got to me: the way people just disappear into bureaucracy, the way systems are designed to keep you in your place. Sitting there in the dark, I felt like maybe I’d done something for them just by sitting there and agreeing they mattered. Ridiculous, but there it is.

By evening we were at Cargo for some Vice launch party for Dirt 2. Hipsters, lasers, game screens projected on the walls, the whole fabrication of cool. We lasted an hour, maybe less. The artifice was suffocating—the posture, the effort, the desperate construction of nonchalance. We bailed without a word and found ourselves on the U-Bahn heading home, and that’s when we looked at each other and knew: we were absolute, complete, irredeemable losers. Nerds at a protest feeling politically alive. Too earnest for a movie. Too weird and tired for a room full of people performing being cool.

But we’d tried. We’d shown up for something.