What Lobo Got Right

Sascha Lobo’s the kind of guy you either get or you don’t. The mohawk, the positioning, the whole thing where he’s decided he’s the internet’s conscience—yeah, it’s a lot. But people listen to him, actually listen. And when he got up at re:publica and started talking, I understood why.

The hall was packed. Journalists, bloggers, everyone holding their breath like something was about to break. And it did.

Beer in hand, watching this guy with the hair rant about NSA, about Merkel, about the government destroying the internet while we do absolutely nothing about it. The anger in that room was real. Justified. You could feel people actually waking up.

But here’s what gets me: the people in charge know we’re angry. They’re fine with it. They know by next month we’ve tweeted ourselves out, signed some petition, written something furious, and forgotten about the whole thing. Next scandal comes along. We’re performatively outraged and basically powerless.

Lobo’s point, the thing he kept hammering on, was that we’ve convinced ourselves talking about a problem is the same as solving it. We haven’t. We show up at conferences feeling smart and connected and think that’s action. It’s not. Real change needs work. Persistence. Money. The unsexy stuff. And we’d rather tweet than do that work.

Maybe he’s right about everything, maybe he’s not. The man’s definitely full of himself. But on this one thing—the gap between performing activism and actually doing something—he was completely right. And the rest of us, sitting in our comfortable little bubble, have no idea how to close that gap anymore.