Nerds Don’t Party

We went to Social Media Week in Berlin in 2010 thinking we’d see something important happening. What we actually found was what happens when people who are excellent at talking online try to exist in the same physical space. Turns out they don’t really know what to do.

The parties were the most obvious proof of this. You’d think internet natives would throw decent parties, but there’s something about actual nerds—the ones who live on Twitter and blogs—that just breaks in physical reality. We fought through ice and slippery roads to get to parties that had no business existing, stood around trying to follow some Twitter war between people nobody knew, got beaten at foosball by someone with an interesting gender situation and serious style (no photos, no evidence), then fled to Belushi’s and ate an enormous amount of cheeseburgers. That felt more like celebrating.

During the day the talks were better. Alexander Ljung from SoundCloud spent time describing the internet like a huge box of Lego—everyone builds their own thing but it somehow all connects. I liked that. There were people from MTV talking about where music was going, and Stephan Bode from Giga arguing that indie games like World of Goo actually mattered, which was different from the usual startup hype because it came from actual taste.

But what stayed with me was this gap between some of the real ideas and how awkward most of the people were. I went in worried that everyone would be anxious and empty and scared of actual conversation. Mostly that was true. But underneath all the performance and the constant need to broadcast—there were some genuinely clever people just overflowing with ideas. The kind you want to catch and hold onto.

The whole thing felt contradictory though. You had people from Sweden, Egypt, Mongolia connecting online and making music together, which is genuinely powerful. But they couldn’t talk to someone standing a few feet away without filtering it through Twitter first. The internet gave them all these connections but somehow made them worse at connecting.

I left wondering whether anything would actually change. re:publica was coming up in a few months and I knew it would probably be the same—good ideas mixed with noise, smart people buried under everyone else’s need to perform. But I was already thinking about going anyway. You keep showing up even when you know better.