Orgy of Irrelevance

The way I’d describe re:publica 2011: take the two biggest nerds from every high school graduating class, the ones even teachers won’t talk to, hand them each an iPhone and iPad, and lock them in a hall with beer and Club Mate for three days. Except it’s real and it costs money to get in.

I went expecting something—I’m not even sure what. The promise of it, maybe, this place where people were building things and thinking clearly and creating without someone telling them what was acceptable. Instead I found a lot of people very serious about the wrong things. Two hours of talks about ancient defunct social networks, parties that felt like a church youth group discovering Club Mate, endless lectures about which Facebook button was newest.

The only moment that landed was when actual outside people showed up—people doing real work somewhere else—and talked about their actual lives. Everything else was people treating the tools like the point itself. Some kid in glasses giving solemn lectures about APIs while someone projected badly flirted messages on a screen. By flirted I mean people basically screaming please fuck me in 140 characters and calling it digital communication.

What got to me was realizing these people had become the official representation of German internet culture. Nobody elected them. They were just loud and on Twitter. And now when regular people encountered internet culture, it was filtered through people who wanted nothing more than to be known for being known. No wonder people are scared of the internet.

I know the actual internet is nothing like that. I know the real work happens elsewhere, with actual curiosity, with people who aren’t constantly harvesting attention from the same platforms. But it doesn’t matter. These people are in the press. They’re at the conventions. They’re what people see.

You can watch something die in real time and be completely powerless to stop it. The possible-self of the whole thing—where something real could happen—got buried under people who were never interested in anything bigger than existing publicly. And all you can do is watch.