Once a Year, the Internet Gets a Face

re:publica happens every spring in Berlin, and every spring I go. It’s one of those events that shouldn’t work—a conference about the internet that takes place in physical space, thousands of people who know each other only from avatars and handles suddenly standing in the same room, squinting at name badges. It works anyway.

There’s a specific pleasure in meeting the people you only know from Twitter in analog form. They’re always shorter or taller than imagined. The conversations are the same—all the familiar arguments about platforms and publishing and what the web is becoming—but warmer when you’re drinking beer in the afternoon sun rather than firing posts into the void at midnight. The veteran bloggers, the ones who’ve been doing this since the dial-up era, congregate in corners and perform their own irrelevance with ironic pride. I find that crowd more interesting than the panels.

Going back each year is a reminder that whatever the internet is becoming, there are still people who care about it in a particular way—not as infrastructure, not as product, but as a place they built themselves and still want to argue about. That feels worth preserving.