Berlin, Spring, Too Many Business Cards

re:publica is the kind of event that only makes sense if you’ve spent a significant portion of your life arguing about the internet with strangers on the internet. Germany’s biggest digital culture conference lands in Berlin every spring—no bands, no mud, no portable toilets, but wall-to-wall people with extremely strong opinions about social media, blogging, and the general trajectory of civilization online.

I went with Wenke. The lineup had some genuinely interesting threads: Teresa Bücker scheduled to philosophize about love, Sascha Lobo going deep on the intellectual vacancy of trolls, Heiko Hebig delivering what was billed as a talk about party pages, pearl farmers, and pony porn—which is either the most eclectic panel description I’ve ever read or the most honest one.

There’s a particular taxonomy of re:publica attendees you learn to recognize fast: the greasy social-media consultant who hands you a business card before you’ve said hello, the blogger visibly anxious about whether blogging still matters (it does, it doesn’t, it does), the corporate observer in civilian clothes trying to blend in. And then actual interesting people, scattered throughout, who you’d find eventually if you were patient.

Wenke and I had a good time the year before and I was hoping for more of the same. That’s the honest reason to go to any conference—not the talks, which you can watch later, but the low-grade chaos of being in a room full of people who care about the same strange things you do, even when you disagree about all of it.