Still Offline

I lived online—phone, laptop, gaming, everything that mattered. That’s where my actual life happened. But Germany, the country I physically inhabited, was stuck somewhere else entirely. Slow internet everywhere. Laws written for people who didn’t know what the internet was. Schools that didn’t teach digital literacy. Politicians who clearly didn’t understand, or didn’t care.

It was uncomfortable when friends from other countries would ask why our internet was so slow, or why you still had to go to an office to handle government business. Austria, Poland, Scandinavia—they’d all created digital ministries years before, treated it like real infrastructure. Germany hadn’t. The gap was obvious.

There was this conversation happening in startup circles about the obvious questions: Why can’t we do what other countries do? Why is our infrastructure so far behind? Why don’t schools teach this? Why doesn’t government treat it like it matters? Most Germans wanted this fixed. Most business people wanted it. The government wasn’t interested.

Years went on and nothing really caught up. Internet stayed slow. Schools still taught like the internet didn’t fundamentally exist. Government still moved at a 1990s pace. And you realized it wasn’t a technical problem at all—it was that the people making decisions didn’t live where the rest of us lived. They weren’t online. They couldn’t understand why any of it would matter.