The People Who Pay Their Rent in Words

There’s a building in Kreuzberg where bloggers pay their desk rent in content. The Blogfabrik—blog factory, literally—opened last week with a party, and the premise is strange enough that I wanted to see it in person: a coworking space in a former industrial loft for photographers, videographers, and writers, where the currency isn’t money but posts, published in their in-house magazine Daily Bread. You work in the space; the space gets your words. I’ve been thinking about that arrangement ever since.

The party itself was what these things are when they go well: the right people, the right weather, no agenda. Sara and Marcus played music, drinks were on the house, and the crowd was more or less everyone in Berlin who makes things for the internet—the whole loose congregation of photographers, writers, and instagrammers who have decided that content creation is a viable way to exist in this city. It mostly is. It sometimes isn’t.

The steak was tough and undercooked, which felt strangely appropriate for a party celebrating a space where the exchange between labor and sustenance has been made deliberately strange. I liked the idea enough to overlook a chewy sirloin. The women I came with ended up in a corner discussing Bangkok, Cologne, Amsterdam—cities, ambitions, routes out or routes back. The usual conversation at a Berlin party in the summer of 2015, which is its own kind of document.