A Day in Someone Else’s Shoes, Posted From Someone Else’s Phone

The campaign One Warm Winter has been running for years out of Berlin, doing the obvious thing that most organizations avoid: making homelessness visible during the months when it actually kills people. This year they did something I hadn’t seen before. Instead of celebrities speaking on behalf of the homeless, they handed the homeless the microphone—or more precisely, the login credentials.

For a week in early February, homeless Berliners took over the social media accounts of six well-known figures: TV host Joko Winterscheid, presenter Palina Rojinski, rappers Marteria, Prinz Pi, and MC Fitti, and singer Lary. Each person got a full day. They posted their actual day—the food lines, the search for warm clothing, the hours spent navigating systems that weren’t designed with them in mind, and then the night.

What strikes me about the concept is how it weaponizes the attention economy against itself. These accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers who are there for music videos and selfies, and instead they get a detailed account of what it takes to survive a Berlin winter without a home. The parallel lives become legible in a way that a charity poster never manages. Things that take me thirty seconds—finding something to eat, somewhere warm to sit—become the entire architecture of a day.

Nobody chooses this. The people who romanticize homelessness as freedom are, without exception, people who have never been cold and afraid and running out of options. That’s not a political observation; it’s just what the accounts showed.