Re:publica 2011
Berlin. Three days in the Friedrichstadtpalast talking about the internet. The usual crowd showed up—social media consultants packaging their opinions as expertise, actual Twitter personalities, bloggers wondering if they’d become irrelevant, company people in polo shirts trying to look interested.
Teresa Buecker was going to talk about love. Sascha Lobo was explaining why internet trolls were fundamentally stupid. Heiko Hebing had something about politics and the web. I was there to cover it for the blog, but mostly because I wanted to be around people who still thought this stuff mattered enough to show up for it.
The whole thing had a particular energy. Nerds, actual conversations, actual belief that the internet could be shaped by people like us, that it might be ours to build on. This was before everything hardened, before the algorithms took over, before it became clear that it was never going to be what we thought it was.
We had this stupid code word for readers—Bananarama. If someone spotted me around the conference and said it, they got to choose between blog stickers or a kiss from my date. I recommended the stickers. It was dumb and harmless and felt transgressive in a way that’s hard to explain now.
Looking back, it was just a conference. But the internet felt different then. Felt like it had potential beyond what it became. We believed it, anyway. We believed it could be ours.