The Flock That Always Says No
Welt Kompakt, one of Germany’s major dailies, invited this blog to help guest-edit their first July issue—a full handover of editorial control to a selection of national bloggers. Flights to Berlin, hotel covered, an actual honorarium, access to one of the country’s more significant newsrooms. There’d be time with people I’d read and respected: Robert Basic, Julia Stelzner, Hendrik Thoma. I said yes without deliberating.
That seemed, to a vocal corner of the German blogosphere, like a war crime. Axel Springer publishes Welt Kompakt. Axel Springer is the devil. Print media are the enemy. Participation is collaboration. Several bloggers wrote lengthy posts about the moral bankruptcy of accepting the invitation—Deef, Christian, Horst, and the rest of the chorus, stationed at their flickering monitors, furious on behalf of principles they’d presumably just discovered.
What’s interesting about this genre of outrage is how proudly it avoids the actual subject. Not one of these posts engaged with whether the issue might be interesting, whether it might produce something good, whether a conversation between print journalism and blogging might be worth having. The real game was positioning. Someone said yes to something, which created an opening to say no louder, and the no became the point. Vuvuzelas instead of child poverty. Newspaper editions instead of cruelty to animals. The list of substitutions makes less sense each time, which is fine, because sense was never the goal.
There’s a kind of person who experiences other people’s enthusiasm as a personal provocation. The invitation arrives and they think: what does it mean that this exists? What does it say about power, about co-optation, about selling out? These are occasionally useful questions, deployed here as a reflex to avoid a simpler one—might this be worth finding out? Might something interesting happen if you walked through the open door instead of standing outside cataloging its flaws?
Principled refusal for its own sake has always struck me as the cheapest move available. It costs nothing, risks nothing, and immunizes you against any experience that might complicate your convictions. A little openness at the right moment costs something. But it also sometimes gets you to Berlin.