The Hoff Comes to Berlin to Talk About Freedom (Again)

The man who stood on the Berlin Wall in 1989 in a light-up jacket and sang about freedom to two million people—that man gave a talk about internet freedom at Re:publica. Which is exactly the kind of sentence that should not make sense but somehow does.

Re:publica is Berlin’s annual conference on digital culture, net activism, surveillance, open data—the full spectrum of people who care intensely about the shape of the web. And then occasionally it drops in someone completely unexpected. Hasselhoff, who has spent decades building a second career on the controlled absurdity of his own legend, is a genuinely interesting speaker for a conference obsessed with liberty online. His Berlin mythology—Knight Rider, "Looking for Freedom" echoing off the Brandenburg Gate, the whole accidental heroism of it—has always been half sincere, half spectacular coincidence. That’s not so different from how the internet actually works.

I would have shown up just for the selfie. The mythology alone was worth the train ticket.