The Man With the Mohawk Was Right
The main hall at re:publica—Berlin’s annual gathering of the digitally literate, the politically alarmed, the chronically online—was packed. Journalists with tense faces. Bloggers grinning. At least one child screaming somewhere in the back. Everyone waiting for Sascha Lobo to do something.
You can have whatever opinion you like about the man. He’s the most visible face of German internet culture—known outside Germany, if at all, by his improbable bright-red mohawk—and he plays the role of digital prophet with obvious relish. He’s recorded jingles for telecoms companies. He positions himself as the conscience of a medium that probably doesn’t deserve one. There’s a performative quality to everything he does that you can find grating or inspired depending on your mood.
But the speech he gave that afternoon was neither performance nor provocation. It was an indictment. Standing in front of animated trees on the big stage, beer in hand and genuine fury in his chest, he looked less like a tech blogger than like a man who’d simply run out of patience—and happened to have a microphone and several hundred people hanging on every word. He looked, honestly, like an angry dictator. Which felt about right for the material.
The subject was the NSA. Was Edward Snowden. Was Angela Merkel and her characteristic shrug. Was the peculiar comfort we’d all settled into—entitled to our righteous indignation, free to tweet it out, secure in the knowledge that summer would come and the next scandal would land and this particular outrage would quietly dissolve back into ambient noise. The people who benefit most from our forgetting had been counting on exactly that rhythm the whole time.
What Lobo was arguing—and this is the part that stings—is that tweets and petitions and blog posts aren’t activism. They’re the sensation of activism. The emotional reward of having said something without the cost of having done anything. What actually changes things is persistence, organization, and money. Three things the self-described internet elite—the laptop class, the conference circuit, the crowd that shows up to re:publica to congratulate itself on being informed—is demonstrably worse at than it thinks.
The speech is long. Worth every minute of it. What it really does is hold a mirror up to a crowd that’s spent years performing its own importance and ask what, exactly, it has changed. Not about its opinions. About the world. The people who want unrestricted access to your communications were counting on exactly this gap between indignation and action. If nothing gets built, funded, and fought for with real resources, everyone who comes after us inherits the wreckage—and we’ll have been complicit in it by being too busy feeling right to do anything about it.
You can have whatever opinion you like about Sascha Lobo. He was still right.