The Instruments, Not the Music
Three days in a large hall, beer and Club Mate on every surface, and approximately five hundred people whose defining characteristic was that nobody—not even the teachers—had ever wanted to sit next to them. That was re:publica 2011. Short description. Ticked off.
The problem isn’t that the German internet community holds conferences. The problem is that the wrong people keep speaking at them, and through some failure of collective imagination nobody has been able to correct, these same people end up representing the German internet to the rest of the world. The self-appointed elite. Mostly awkward, mostly indoor-facing, mostly convinced that a Twitter account with four thousand followers constitutes a form of power.
What they celebrate, always, is the instrument itself—not what you do with it. The iPhone. The tweet. Two hours of recycled clever sentences in tweet form. Parties that feel like youth group nights organized by a provincial church. Topics that should have been buried three years ago dragged back out and presented with fresh urgency. Someone showing flirt-tweets on a giant projection screen—the kind that, stripped of the irony, reads as a very loud and public cry for someone to please fuck them. Bespectacled boys talking for forty minutes about the newest Facebook privacy settings. You want to walk up to all of them and shout: stop the software incest, go outside, and actually change something. Except Sascha Lobo, who understands the difference between a talk and a performance. And the international guests, who arrived with actual experience. And Tessa, who was great.
What I can’t forgive is the presumption. Nobody asked these people to be the voice of the German internet. Nobody elected them. And yet here they are, stealing precocious observations from Reddit, posting them on Twitter with quiet confidence, then refreshing Favstar in five-second intervals waiting for the numbers to move. This is the face that ends up in the press. These are the people who get quoted when someone wants to explain what the internet is for.
And then you wonder why so many people in this country are still nervous about being online. When the only ambassadors the internet has are people who’ve mistaken a follower count for an identity and a handful of web services for the entire world—of course it looks unappealing. Of course it looks small.
The internet I actually care about is nothing like what was on that stage. It’s stranger and more generous and harder to summarize. The people I find interesting online aren’t in the front row at re:publica. They’re just somewhere making things, not attending conferences about making things.
I’ll probably go again next year. That’s the genuinely depressing part.