Something on the Internet
My cousin asks via ICQ what I do so I don’t end up unemployed, and I answer with a Berlin shrug: "Something on the internet." The silence that follows is total. I can picture her face exactly. Yeah but… what exactly?
In the Bavarian town where I grew up and survived the most formative disasters of my adolescence, you’re considered digitally advanced if you managed to register on Facebook without calling someone for help. The bar is low. The fields are wide.
In Berlin-Mitte, by contrast, you barely exist as a person if you’re not working on the web. In a digital agency. As a freelancer with a tote bag and a considered opinion about Quora. Social media consultant. Growth hacker. Some guy with a MacBook Air permanently open to seventeen dashboards, brainstorming PR concepts in a café that plays Boards of Canada at tasteful volume. The more money you pull from the networking of international information systems, the more respected you are in this particular microcosm of mutated nerds. Construction workers say: What?
So I try to translate. SEO. Online marketing. WordPress. Digital communications. Social networks. Public relations seasoned with independent blog and webzine know-how. Nothing lands. Eventually I bottom out at: I design websites. That one they get. At least I no longer have to say I draw flyers, which was the explanation a few years ago and was somehow worse.
What I can’t always tell anymore is whether I’ve simply drifted—lost the ground under my feet in this bubble of status updates, software releases, and Apple products—or whether the world outside the city center is just years behind and will discover all of this eventually, probably right around the time I’ve fused my ruined soul with a smartphone, a cloud subscription, and a neural implant.
Maybe the honest move is to let the signal pass without catching it sometimes. Do something analog. Give the battered mind a rest. And if my cousin asks again, I could just say: I was lying in a sunny field reading a book. Everybody gets that one.