The Nerd Olympics
re:publica wrapped up yesterday. Third time I’ve been, and if you didn’t go, you didn’t miss anything.
They moved to the Station this year because the old place got too crowded—this warehouse by Gleisdreieck that they converted. Big spaces, good light, easy to walk around. The food wasn’t terrible. That was pretty much the whole experience.
The conference could be something real. Current, informative, worth your time. But it keeps failing for the same reason: the people running it, speaking at it, working it.
You walk around and it’s like the entire German internet is just reblogs and a fake elite—journalists and PR people who either found in social media a way to feed their insecure egos with favorites and retweets instead of, I don’t know, joining an emo band or eating ice cream for comfort, or they’re just there to make money without actually understanding what any of it’s about. Basically people you spent middle school avoiding and throwing wet paper balls at.
The panels are the worst part. Either they’re run by people who are way too into Twitter and shouldn’t have been dragged away from their iPads, or by people who actually have something interesting to say but who spend their time talking about things that have been online for nine years.
So of course by afternoon, when people are supposed to be taking it seriously, most of the crowd is out in the courtyard with a beer and their phone, tweeting about how bored they are. Some try to sit through a talk, give up after ten minutes of nothing, go eat something. The food was decent.
The only moments that actually worked weren’t from the speakers. Just some dumb video someone found, or just the people who’ve been online forever sitting outside, getting sun, eating a bratwurst or a weird vegetarian pocket, maybe feeling something like what a festival is supposed to feel like.
re:publica has become this smug nerd olympics. Totally disconnected from how people actually use the internet. Living in its own world of memes and data plans and half-baked rebellion, without the real creativity or actual new ideas or anything that actually changes you.
I think this is where the German internet is heading. Can’t say I’m thrilled about it.