Nerds Don’t Know How to Party
The pattern at these tech gatherings is always the same: people who spend their days building tools for human connection can’t make eye contact with the person standing two meters away from them. The second Social Media Week wrapped up in Berlin last week, and I went along partly out of curiosity and partly because Sara, Paulschen, and Christoph insisted the frostbite would be worth it.
Some of it genuinely was. At the MTV panel, Barbara Hallama—one of those bloggers who somehow makes the medium look effortless—and Yousef Hammoudah laid out what the music industry’s near future was going to look like with the calm certainty of people who’d already seen the numbers. Stephan Bode, who I remembered from his days at Giga, Germany’s beloved gaming channel, and his work on Game One, gave a talk on social games that was essentially a public execution of FarmVille followed by an impassioned defense of indie titles like World of Goo and VVVVVV. He was right about all of it. The best talk came from Alexander Ljung of SoundCloud, who described the internet’s future as a giant box of Lego bricks—everyone builds their own thing, but the pieces fit together. Simple enough to sound naïve, true enough to stick with you.
Then came the parties, which is where the premise collapsed entirely. The four of us navigated sheets of black ice and weather that had no business existing in February to reach events that were, at their core, rooms full of people staring at their phones. An ongoing Twitter argument between two bloggers that literally no one else in the room was following. A foosball table where we absolutely did not lose to a girl with a cock and someone from Stylewalker, because there are no photos and therefore no evidence. At some point we cut our losses and retreated to Belushi’s, where we ate an unreasonable number of cheeseburgers and talked to each other like human beings.
The contradiction at the center of all this is real. There are genuinely brilliant people hiding inside the conference circuit—the kind of minds that spray ideas faster than you can absorb them, who could actually reshape how the internet feels to use. Ljung is one of them. But the culture around them calcifies into self-congratulation fast: everyone performing relevance at each other, confusing presence on the platform for presence in the room.
What I wanted—what I’m still holding out for at re:publica—is the version where the ideas win and the posturing gets left at the coat check. Maybe that’s naïve. But the Lego metaphor has been living in my head ever since, and the cheeseburgers were excellent.