Stephan Urbach

with Ingo Petz

.REBOOT
extract

translated by Anwen Roberts

0. Intro

1. This Is My Story

2. Seeker of Worlds

8. It’s Political, Stupid

19. Making the Web, Even If Your Local Dictator Hates It

Imprint

0. Intro

by Jürgen „tante“ Geuter

There are these moments in life that are just etched into your brain. The excitement of your first day of school. The warm sensation of your first kiss. The beating of your heart when you fall in love. The bleak pain of losing a beloved person. There are moments like these defining the biography of every human being – moments you will talk about for years to come, surrounded by friends and family, laughing and back-slapping. Happy and sad moments, quiet or thoughtful ones.

„Do you remember back when…?“

I don't actually remember when I talked to Stephan Urbach in person for the first time. It must have been sometime in 2011, at that point somewhere between spring and summer when the days are getting longer, and the evenings are still radiant from the heat of the day. I also don't remember what the topic of our first net-induced conversation was. It most likely had to do with the interview I was planning to conduct with this well-known spokesperson of the Telecomix network for my podcast. Thanks to their astonishing activities during the Arab Spring, Telecomix had become quite famous, and so had Stephan Urbach.

Actually, I should be able to remember, because this was how one of my best friends ever stepped into my life. Maybe that first moment is lost to me precisely because the person I first talked to was „the other Stephan Urbach“ – the prominent Internet activist, well known from radio and television. I hadn't yet met my friend, tomate. Only later, when we started working on texts together, when we started communicating more frequently, did I realize how clearly the line was drawn between the public persona, the hero, and the man behind it. How the success of the Internet activist tomate had led the person Stephan Urbach to the brink of collapse. How despite the „getting things done“ attitude of the activist Stephan Urbach, the immediate experience of the people suffering in Syria had slowly begun to eat away at my compassionate friend tomate.

The story that this book tells is a tale of almost failing. A story of self-abandonment and self-destruction, and an eye-witness account to all those things that the relevant press photos and newspaper articles neglect to tell us. We forget all too easily, and happily, that all notable achievements and events are driven by the people invested in them. People who stand up in the face of disaster, in the face of suffering and injustice, and say: „No more“.

When the flurry of headlines has passed, and the media circus has moved on to its next arena, the people – the ones affected, as well as the activists – stay behind, alone with each other.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell began the preface of his autobiography with the following words: „Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.“

I always had this sentence in mind as I was reading the story. This compassion for the suffering of mankind could break even the strongest in our midst, I thought. Those who make valiant gestures for all of us, we tend to elevate them, and transform them into larger-than-life, heroic figures. And then we act all surprised when they have a breakdown. From all the stress, the burden, the suffering; from their own inability to lead the world onto a better path.

That is another reason why stories from people like Stephan Urbach matter. Not just for us to understand that great deeds can come from our midst, even from within ourselves, but for us to accept that we really have to take care of these people who are throwing themselves into the fire for us. Support them, as friends, as an anchor on the firm side of the world, in the tide of the near-mythical events of world politics.

I am lucky and privileged to call tomate my friend, and grateful to have him in my life. This book has unveiled many new facets of my friend's personality for me. It leaves me in awe of what human willpower can accomplish. And it has rekindled my desire to take better care of the people who are close to me. My desire to make the world just a little bit better, now, at this very moment, with this very breath. And you can't expect more than that from any book in the world.

1. This Is My Story

I have something to confess. Something very personal. I wanted to die.

I gulp and keep staring at what I’ve written, probing every single word with my eyes and scanning its underlying meaning. DIE. The word burns a hole in my retina; it hurts just to look at. Did I really want to die? Yes, in fact I did. I was ready to be liberated from this nightmare that the others called „life“. But on the night of August 12 to 13, 2011, I chose otherwise. I chose life, even though at the time, I had no idea what that was supposed to mean any more. What life might even be any more. After all I had experienced, I felt like an empty shell, ready to dissolve into thin air.

As for my suicide, I had it all worked out. I had thought about how to do it, and acquired the necessary tools. And I had made arrangements for my family to gain access to my Internet accounts. I had spent ninety percent of my life on the Internet – it was simply where I lived. So I wrote down how to retrieve my e-mail accounts, my server, my chat sessions, and made a list of those who were to be notified of my death. I will not describe how I was going to do it. That’s none of anyone’s business, and in the end, it hardly matters. My death was supposed to set a marker. A full stop. Nothing more.

On my server, I had installed a "dead man’s switch". Which meant I had to type in a certain command once every 24 hours, so that my system knew I was still alive. And if I neglected to enter the code, the system would know what it had to do: One last blog post would appear on my website, automatically disseminated through my Twitter account. My father would receive a farewell note by e-mail. My chat sessions would terminate automatically, simply by having my nicknames exit all active channels. Another e-mail with the access details for various online systems would be relayed to a few members of the Telecomix activist group. And, most importantly, my private e-mail account would empty itself automatically, while the details for yet another account were to be sent to selected friends. There was not much else for me to pass on, but even my will would have been sent out automatically. I had thought of everything. My depression had forced me into wanting to leave it all behind. But before everything came to an end, I wanted to prepare that ending in an orderly fashion. My life had been anything but orderly. Still, that’s how I wanted the ending to be: orderly.

I was suffering from depression. It seems strange, labelling it so clearly now. I must have been aware of it for a very long time, yet I had been unable to put my state down in words. Because I was scared, because I wasn’t willing to bear that truth. Depression… that was what other people had. Those overambitious workaholics and burnout-ridden CEO types… but not me. Depression was for the weak. But me? I wasn’t weak. I was tough as an old boot, and never one to be easily shaken. It had all just been a tiny bit too much. Finding yourself unable to work, drained or just overtired – that could happen to anyone, couldn't it?

But I was not just temporarily overtired, over-worked, worn out, exhausted. I was literally at the end of my physical and mental resources. The symptoms were clear. The emptiness that welled up inside me whenever I was not sitting in front of my computer. That dreadful emptiness. The sensation of futility that inflated like a sponge in my mind whenever I couldn't find the distraction that I sought like a junkie on withdrawal. This deep sense of worthlessness that crept up every time my computer screen stayed blank, every time there were no symbols flashing up to indicate that someone wanted to communicate. This diabolical void would turn into pain when I was alone with myself for too long. A pain that came from deep within my soul. The emptiness was a light-dark grey, filling up everything inside me with that great nothingness, suppressing reality, leaving no more space for the real world, banishing all colour and wholesome feeling.

It sounds silly. But nothing could fulfill me except for the blinking of the cursor on my screen. If the cursor was blinking, everything was all right. No emptiness, no fear. It lent some meaning to my existence. Someone wanted to connect. I had something to do. Or at least an urge to be active on the Internet. I was stuck in an infinite loop, sucking me downwards in a spiralling tailspin. The windows of my chat room were more real to me than the trees outside my kitchen window. More real than the sun heating up the windows to my apartment.

A single Twitter message was more relevant than daily hygiene. Even taking a shower would cause me pain. Standing under the shower, I could feel my heart beat. I could hear the rush of blood in my ears, and sense how lonely I was. Even the sound of water would fade behind the droning noise in my ears. A sound that could drown out everything else. But life sounds different. It doesn't sound like this noise in my ears. Life, that's the wind in the treetops, the roar of an engine on the street, the patter of footsteps on cobblestones. Life is the sound of playing children, the sound of music drifting out of a café, the song of birds hailing the new day. All those sounds most people would dismiss as mere noise. But I constantly had this other noise in my ear. The sound of loneliness. And with that sound, the fear started to creep in – the dread that my own existence was nothing but petty, meaningless functionality. An organism just functions. You just have to function. Day after day after day. Get up, get dressed, work, eat, sleep. But that was not what I wanted to settle for. And who would? Mere functioning. Like a damn robot, like a zombie. But how do you really live your life? How do you live it well? How do you find happiness? I had never learned. I simply did not know.

Then I fought. I fought my own sleep patterns, my eating habits, the need for recreation that my tired brain desperately craved. It became normal for me to stay awake for thirty hours or more at a time. I fought sleep itself. I fought life.

Death, the brother of sleep. I just wanted to sleep. Sleep forever, and finally get some rest. Just for once, sleep well, sleep tight. Just spread out my tired arms, close my eyes and make the world outside vanish. Make it disappear so I wouldn't have to bear it any longer.

Then all the terrible news started pouring in. Day after day, I followed these tragic events. Even though they did not concern me directly, because I lived so far away, those news items touched me – and they hit me hard, like arrows fired into my soul. I felt increasingly under pressure to support those who were fighting for their freedom under such dangerous circumstances. I was a member of the Internet activist group Telecomix, an international network of hackers and net activists. We had decided to help the protesters of the Arab Spring, for example by restoring the Egyptian Internet via dial-up connections when the Mubarak regime had it shut down. We helped the opposition in Syria publish their videos online, documenting an inconceivable level of cruelty. But the more we helped, the greater our responsibility became, and the greater my responsibility became. I was swamped, 24/7, and inclined to forget about my own life, which just seemed to be retreating further and further into the grey fogs of depression.

Cairo. Tripoli. Damascus. All those places where people had stood up to fight for their rights, from December 2010 onwards, during what would come to be known as the Arab Spring. Fighting for freedom of speech, for freedom of choice. Against the rule of old men, for more self-determination.

We just had to help. After all, that was what our European culture was built on. Freedom and self-determination. Or wasn't it?! These values that had to be defended, any time and any place, just like we’d learned in school. Or could it be that "freedom" is little more than a hollow term for most of us? Those who have always lived in freedom hardly know what it feels like when it’s lacking. And there are many who don't even require it, don't even want it. They are happy as long as there is someone telling them what to do, day after day.

"Freedom" – in many ways just a word with no flesh and bone. "Self-determination" is a similarly vague term, of the kind that Western politicians like to toss into the debate. But with that decision, with Telecomix resolving to help the people of Egypt and Syria with our technical skills, these concepts suddenly turned to life, from one moment to the next. We who had grown up with the Internet, who had come to know and love it and experience it as a haven of liberty, we understood this freedom intuitively. We wanted to help people to be just as free. Because we too were free.

Of course, that was a naive idea. We were young and driven by the righteousness of our actions. We never had a doubt. We were sure we were doing the right thing. And so we helped people from all over the world to make their voices heard – we gave them a voice on the Internet. But when the first of these voices died, the first of them were killed, everything escalated. On the outside, and then: in ourselves.

I was obsessed. Obsessed with the idea of having to help these people. The obsession deprived me of my mind and sleep. I was drinking too much. I smoked like a chimney. I saw no meaning in my life. I forgot what was good for me – sleep, leisure, music, movies. Just hanging out with friends, without constantly thinking about what was happening to the people in all these cruel places during the revolutions. I had forgotten how to take care of myself. Probably I couldn't have anyway, even if I had wanted to.

Then came the day when I realized I was lost. Lost in a life that no longer felt like mine. That was when the reset came; my reboot.

In order to understand why I wanted to kill myself, I have to go back. I have to go back in time to understand how this could all come to pass. I have to tell this tale. My story may seem shocking, it might in parts ring hollow and hard to believe. Sometimes I feel as if my whole life is a soap opera. Or a thriller... But I assure you: Everything happened just like that. That was the way it was; I’m certain of it, because I experienced it. Because this story is my story.

2. Seeker of Worlds

It’s dark and quiet. Only the bright light from my laptop illuminates the room. My moving boxes are still stacked in a big heap. I haven’t unpacked a thing yet. But the time for that will come. I can sense it when I look out into the night . My window opens out into a deep black ocean, I feel like sinking into it and drifting away. As black as the coffee I'm drinking incessantly. I normally have it with milk and sugar, to take the edge off the bitterness. But today I'm drinking it black, without milk, because of course I haven't been shopping. Typical.

Outside, the Hessian backwaters. I still can't quite believe I came back. After all that's happened. Back to where I became the person I am today. Or at least in part. I just had to come back. I literally know every cobblestone here. It's where I feel at home. And after all the madness, it was just what I needed: a sense of security.

You may have already noticed: I have a penchant for the theatrical, for pathos. And when all these memories surface, when they bubble and churn around in my belly, I am prone to sentimentality. Is home even the right word here? Home is a strange word. It has an empty, hollow sound to it, something people say although it doesn't mean much to them. Fog is creeping through the garden, its ghostly fingers reaching for the grass, the bushes and trees, the world. It really is difficult: remembering, snatching my memories back from the fog that has already taken hold in my head like a tumor, and then setting them out in front of me, sharp and clear like photographs. My childhood, my family home, my life at the time. What was it like, then, my life?

Maybe that's where I should begin my story: When you talk about the reasons for a miserable childhood, you often evoke that image of a boy who is always chosen last for the school football team. Because he is too small, too fat, too clumsy. Because he looks different or is different. Children can smell that sort of thing. And they are relentless, of course. I was one of these poor little suckers. Not only was I picked last, no, the boys would even argue which team would finally have to take me in! When you're young, something like that just hits with full force. It can tear your heart out. You just can't understand why the others are so mean, why they don't want anything to do with you, why they leave you out. It takes a lot of time for that pain to pass, for you to draw strength from it – from being different. And when it passes, you grow beyond yourself, and shout out: Fuck you!

It just takes a while to get there. And even so, it's not self-evident that all would have turned out well in the end. The first four or five years of my life were spent in a rental house in Mörfelden-Walldorf, a small town in the Rhine-Main area. Mörfelden-Walldorf. Which is exactly as it sounds: boring, stifling, toxic to anything with a semblance of freedom. My family lived on the first floor of a three-party house. Our landlords, the Frank family, lived on the ground floor.

I don't remember much from this time, except that the Franks let me play in their garden. I was a curious child and enjoyed exploring my environment. Which meant: the garden. At the time, I hadn't yet developed my phobia of nature, with all its disgusting creepies and crawlies. Nor my phobia of the petit bourgeouisie. Until one day, the Franks slipped a letter underneath our apartment door, as the middle-class society will do when it's unable to come out and say something in so many words. The letter read: "We are sorry but we can no longer allow your son Stephan to play in our garden, because he always demolishes the flowers". So now I was a garden hooligan… and my explorations soon came to their untimely end. Some three decades after its founding, the Federal Republic I was growing up in was still a small-minded village, a place where people eyed their neighbours with resentment and mistrust, sneakily restricting each other's mobility and freedom. What mattered most was social status, careers, prosperity. Who had the nicest car? Who had already built a house? Who could afford to go on holiday twice a year? Most people were well off, financially. Those who wanted to find work could. Or so they said. You voted either SPD or CDU. The 1968 student movement had been the first to question the staleness of the Bonn Republic. Then came the punks, who shat on the affluent society, and spat on the future. Then the Greens, who attacked the establishment and their nuclear energy politics. If you wanted to be more independent, more free than the rest, you could. Or so they said. Because we lived in West Germany, of course, and not in the Soviet bloc. Although this freedom apparently did not extend to playing in neighbours' gardens.

In 1986, in the fourth year of the democratic dictatorship that Helmut Kohl would sustain until 1998, my parents bought what all West German, middle-class families bought in the Eighties: a family home, a storage space for life, complete with garden and garage. My father, who was from an old Frankfurt family of bureaucrats himself, worked, quite unsurprisingly for Frankfurt, in a bank. So an income that guaranteed our credit-worthiness was forthcoming. My mother stayed at home.

For the sake of completeness, I should mention that my parents are not my real parents, or rather not my biological parents. They adopted me as a baby, just like my brother who is three years older than me.

I have known I'm adopted since I can't even remember when. It was always clear to me that my parents were my parents. My so-called biological parents didn't interest me. They apparently had not wanted me. That can happen in the best of families. Only once I hit puberty would I turn it into a problem. Why? Because that's what teenagers do, make a problem out of anything. You don't understand the world, and yourself even less, and all those egos are just populating you like monkeys on a rock. I met my biological mother once, later. Just that once. And even that I could well have done without And my biological father? I know who he is. But I never met him, which is just as well too.

My new home was to become a small, aspiring community on the other side of the river Main, north of the pulsating metropolis of Hanau: Nidderau. The most exciting thing that ever happened here was that Saint Boniface once ambled through Nidderau on his travels. We moved into a house in one of those modern housing estates, where one house is like the other; dull, rectangular boxes of middle-class housing, with rectangular gardens, neatly crafted and arranged, and orderly driveways. A place where the sense of being over-and-over-protected, the silence on weekends, will pound inside your head like a jack-hammer. The kind of silence that can drive you out of your mind.

I would take the bus from there every morning to go to kindergarten, and come back home at lunchtime. On the bus, I always sat at the front, to have a better view out through the large windshield, out into the world. My gaze travelled over lush fields and meadows and into the dense forests we drove through. Right there, in the front seat of that bus, I could forget about everything, go on thought-journeys, and just daydream. Without my stupid neighbours prohibiting it.

Every hill the bus ascended was a little adventure for me: What would be around the next bend? Another deep forest? A ravine? A valley dipped in luminous green by the sunlight? Reaching the top of the hill, my daydreams would finally hit their peak too: Would the bus manage to lift off this time, and fly out into the sky, shiny blue or glowing with stars at night? Of course, they never happened, those adventures on the other side of the mountain. But that did not stop my young self from continuing to dream, and from seeking out those dreams beyond the hills.

Kindergarten, though, was no place for dreamers. I was faced with the tough reality of kids. Which meant: Little Stephan was on his own. The group didn't like him. I couldn't even say why exactly. Even back then, I must have smelled like a nerd and misfit. But the longer the ostracism lasted, the more it hurt, the more firmly I would say to myself: You don't really want to play with these bores anyway, do you?.That thought firmly took hold of me. And pain turned to rage, a sublime kind of anger that turned into an insight that has since crystallized inside me: I didn't want to have to like the other kids.

But there was one girl in my group that I did like: Mareike. She had somehow managed to sidetrack my now-customary aversion towards my fellow kindergarten kids. She happened to live very close to my parents' house in Nidderau, so we would occasionally meet up to play on the gray asphalt of the housing estate. Mareike and I were on the same wavelength with our games. We made up wild adventures for the dolls, but they rarely had a happy ending! In the end, a greedy, gruesome monster would always turn up to devour our puppet heroes. I enjoyed that: spurring fantasies, playing fate. And Mareike was enjoying it too. Her small eyes lit up with pleasure when the deadly monster had struck once more, and we both laughed. Mareike would finally disappear from my life again – like almost everyone else with whom I have been reasonably friendly. Until today, I am not exactly good at keeping in touch and maintaining friendships.

School at last. In 1987, I was more than ready. I could hardly wait for my first day of school. I was ready to leave behind the desolate kindergarten with its senseless, prescribed play. I was ready to finally learn to read and write. The world of books and words had caught my attention early on. I had always been fascinated by my father, who would sit in our living room with his nose stuck between the covers of a book, staring at pages filled with strange black squiggles. He could do this for hours without even moving, and I had come to suspect that the character combinations were some sort of code. A code which obviously mesmerized him and somehow transferred him to another world. And that was I wanted too – to get away, out, into another world.

If someone had told me beforehand that it would take this long to learn to crack the code of reading, I likely would have lost some of my keenness. My mum told me years later that I would often come home from school, and in place of a greeting like Hello, would immediately launch into a frenzied complaint along the lines of: We still haven't started writing, what am I even going to school for anyway? Patience has never been my strong suit.

But I found other ways of satisfying my curiosity. As a respectable middle-class family, we would regularly go on skiing holiday to Austria. To pacify me on the long drives, my parents gave me a red Sony Walkman – the ultimate possession in the Eighties. Then a friend of my brother's gave me a cassette. I slid the tape into my Walkman, put the headphones on and pressed the play button, and was instantly assaulted by the sound of screeching guitars, frantic, frenzied, pulsating drums, and infinitely angry vocals that snapped right into my synapses. Before I knew it, my fingers were drumming, my feet were stomping, and my heart was throbbing. This was like nothing I had ever heard before... a sound like a slap in the face, especially for all those teenies and Modern Talking

dorks populating my world! At last, this was music that understood me, without me ever having to say a word. This was music that could build me up when I'd had enough. Enough of the over-protected, drowsy life in Nidderau. The German punk of those BRD years, notably the Toten Hosen and Die Ärzte with songs like Dein Vampyr and Mysteryland, were to become the soundtrack for my life. I was particularly taken by the Ärzte's slightly gloomier songs, like the one about the outlaw, El Cattivo: "And he smiles because he knows: Evil will always win! Yes, that's how a cowboy should be, filthy, cowardly and vile – heya ho heya ho, oohoohowoo!"

A badass outlaw, that was what I was going to be... a lone force against everything and anyone. Nobody likes us, but we don't care. I put my headphones on, pressed play, and took it on, that fight against the phantoms of my senseless existence.

Even today, I briefly feel young again whenever I hear one of those three songs. The unwieldy sound was there to fill the unwieldy void that was already forming inside of me like a dark, bulky shadow. There was nothing that could make me feel truly content, let alone happy. I felt empty. And that made me angry. But even that somehow felt pointless. So I went back to feeling empty again. I was trapped inside myself and knew no way out. It might sound silly. Because my family didn't have to worry about money. Because everything was all right. I had parents. I had a home. We regularly went on holiday, even to the United States. I had a Sony Walkman. So where did this infernal emptiness come from? Is it breathed into some children at birth? Or had the great spectre of the middle class sucked out my soul? I simply didn't understand.

We had a garden of our own, one of those with a well-kept lawn and trimmed shrubs. But even that I used to avoid like the plague. Like a vampire shuns sunlight. My brother had a C64, which we would play Summer Games or Maniac Mansion on. Sometimes I would meet up with Martin, who was a small, chubby nerd like I was, to play around with his Lego Technic. To put it bluntly, Martin was no friend of mine. I liked his toys. But we were too different. He was the quiet, restrained one. I was the loud-mouthed, misanthropic daredevil. It was never a great match. "You're a real couch potato", my mother would scold. "Just go outside!" But what was I going to do outside? Peer into the sun, squash some ants, hug a tree? Outside – that was where nature lurked, where people and other dangers lurked.

Once I had learned to read and write, my enthusiasm for school quickly waned. I was neither an outstanding nor a poor student. I was frequently restless in class, I tipped my chair back and forth and worked my own way through my textbooks, reading about foreign countries, about history or agriculture. But that meant that my grades in Conduct would regularly only yield an average "3" on my report. The whole full-frontal lecturing style has never really been my thing.

When I think back of my primary school years in Nidderau, I don't see clear images in bright colours, I see a milky grey veil, from behind which I am trying to discern the absurdities of my life. I realize now that this was when I experienced my first depressive episode. At the time, all I could feel was this deep desolation, flowing through my veins and poisoning my soul. And since I couldn't understand what kept me from being an average kid, I couldn't talk to anyone about it either. What could I have said anyway? Hey, Mum. I feel so devoid of hope. Very funny. Go outside and get some fresh air, she probably would have advised.

Sometimes I would stand at my bedroom window at night and stare into the darkness. I would stretch out my arm, trying to snatch away the cloak of darkness, trying to see what was underneath. But my hand only grasped thin air. If I'd have known at the time that this dark cloak would stay with me for a lifetime – I'm not even sure I would still be here today.

Then I moved on to one of those secondary comprehensive schools. Some of the boys in my class had it in for me right from the start. Hey, weirdo, I could hear them call out behind me. At least they didn't beat me up. The middle class kids' preferred form of violence is bullying. A blunt kind of weapon that can be more hurtful than a slap in the face. A blow hurts, briefly and badly. But bullying worms its way into your belly and your heart, and finally, your head. Then came the day when I had really had enough. "What's up, scumbag? In a bad mood again?", one of them said. I could hear the others laughing. I clung on to my chair, squeezing it tighter and tighter. Anger was boiling up inside me, the veins in my neck starting to pound. I grabbed my chair, and threw it towards the other kid. I had aimed well: My missile hit him right in the face. He bent over and began to howl. His lip was bleeding. I'm not proud of this episode, and I detest violence. But at least the incident brought some good in the end: For the rest of the school year, these kids left me in relative peace. I had made a statement, I'd made my message more than clear.

And a second statement was soon to follow. My brother and his friends were short one player, which was how I got to know the strange and magical world of The Dark Eye. Witches and wizards, dwarves and warriors, fighting to survive the most reckless adventures. Role playing games soon became another means for me to plunge into faraway, exciting worlds, even to become a builder of new worlds myself, all as a way of filling up that emptiness. I must have been inspired by the fashion standards of the pen-and-paper games world on the day I decided that I would henceforth only wear black clothes. This felt like the right way of articulating my dark and empty soul outwardly. That's how I became the boy in black, as I soon came to be known throughout Nidderau. Now even Toten Hosen and €rzte could no longer console my feelings of emptiness and rage. Give me more. I want more. Give me more. I needed harder stuff, and discovered punk bands like Slime, Hass, or Daily Terror. Then goth punk like Der Fluch. Then I got into metal and goth metal as well.

My mum wasn't too delighted by my change in style. The more she complained, the more I nurtured my new look. I became the black angel – the lonesome boy in black, the outcast, the one who doesn't belong and doesn't want to.

I wanted to have friends, of course. Because who wants to be alone all the time?! At the same time, I found most people incredibly boring. So there was a dilemma I couldn't resolve. Even my tendencies towards sub-culture didn't bring me any friends, or at least not right away. I was not posh enough for the goths, and not colourful enough for the punks. In that sense I was an outsider even with the outsiders of society. And these sub-cultures didn't get much of a look-in at my school anyway, where most students were the sons and daughters of bankers, doctors, lawyers and teachers. I was one of those middle-class kids myself, but at least my fighting spirit hadn't been operated out of me entirely at birth. Of course there were bitter days, when one of the cool guys was having a big birthday party, one of those to which I was never invited.

Today I can no longer understand why there were these times when I still somehow wanted to belong. Most likely because it just feels shitty when you are left out, when you are lonely and misunderstood. Loneliness undermines you, it eats your soul out and kills your whole being. Looking back more soberly, I can sense that I in fact found the cool kids boring. Their conversations were so superficial that I felt sick to the stomach. They would talk about clothes, about girls, and worst of all, about pop music. My own world was far more exciting and inspiring than that. In my world, I could experience the most fabulous adventures. But not in the desolate world of Nidderau, of course. No, in the world where I had lived ever since I learned to read: in the world of books.

8. It’s Political, Stupid

How do you find your place in life? What do you do when you don't find it? And when you've found that place how do you know it's even the right one? After several years of hanging around, in 2008, a part of my life began where the threads of my biography were finally coming together, converging towards a common point. At last, I would get some answers to the question of all questions: What is this all about anyway? And what kind of role am I playing in it? Because that's what life really is all about: asking yourself which role you want to play in this society. Without subjecting yourself to the risk of going insane in the long run and seeing unidentified flying objects on a sky of promises.

The early 2000s were not a good time for someone who was convinced that freedom should be the foundation of social coexistence: September 11, the Iraq war, new fears of terrorism. The anti-terror laws of the German federal government further cut back individual liberties (which had already been slashed successively in the course of legal battles against left-wing terrorism since the 1970s), giving the state and security services ever more opportunity to stick their noses into the private matters of respectable citizens. It was enough to make me angry, livid even.

From 2008 onwards, mobile phone and land-line operators alike were obliged to store all phone connection data for a period of six months. On January 1, 2009, new guidelines for the disgraceful Data Retention Act came into effect, which were, admittedly, overturned later on, but continue to attract a stream of conservative politicians, who even today will pull these directives out of the voting hat at every opportunity. From that point on, Internet service providers were also required to save six months' worth of data about who was sending whom emails, and which users had connected to the Internet for how long. In addition, law enforcement agencies were entitled to confiscate logfiles and force providers to hand over information on who had visited which websites when. Already by 2008 it been revealed that the German Telekom had been digitally monitoring various journalists and employees.

For those who understood the Internet as a space of hope and longing, these were frightening developments. This wasn't how I had imagined the future of the Internet, the self-regulating space that I had come to know and appreciate. All this was taking place, ostensibly, in the name of protecting those democratic freedoms, hard-won from the demon of autocracy since the times of the French Revolution. And these freedoms are the foundation of all social and individual existence in a liberal democracy. This is something we never should forget. Even if democracy can seem tedious and arduous at times. But our liberty is not at all self-evident. It did not fall from the sky. It was fought for. And we have to continue to fight for it, every day. Even more so in a democracy, which has to fortify itself against autocratic structures. Which again will only succeed if we hold our civic liberties in esteem, and are prepared to defend them. Against anyone and anything.

I am not only talking about political freedoms, but about the kind of liberty that guarantees we are able to develop and live our lives as we see fit. And the same attitude should guide us in all our dealings with our fellow human beings. Democracy needs the freedom of dissent, too, the freedom to be different – that spirit of resistance that the younger generation usually develops. In this manner, a true democracy is constantly obliged to rectify and readjust its civic liberties.

Preserving liberty by restricting it? That's never worked before. The discussion about watch lists for child pornography on the Internet, which picked up in 2008 throughout German politics and society, was my personal last straw, politically speaking. Of course, no one could possibly approve of child pornography. But handing this dubious toolbox to law enforcement, enabling them to block all kinds of websites by way of flimsy and opaque allegations, meant effectively censoring those websites. I took this to be extremely dangerous, and completely undemocratic. Fundamental rights, such as freedom of information, were endangered here. For me, it was reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984. At the time. Today, I have a very different take on this novel. As I see it, Orwell wasn't primarily concerned with total surveillance. The book is about absolute power, gained through control. Surveillance is only one aspect of that. In his novel, Orwell created the perfect totalitarian state, which at the same time is the perfect constitutional state – a state where justice itself is unjust.

A generation of nerds suddenly found that the Internet, a space they had help shape and build for years, back when it was still hardly regulated and monitored, was in danger. And 2009 was the year in which the seeds of resistance against the dark machinations of governments, intelligence agencies and corporations on the Internet began to open up to the public. I followed these debates on the Internet, of course, joining chat channels to converse with like-minded people.

My political passion – anger even – had been sparked. For this debate touched upon so many of the things that were important to me: personal freedom, privacy, daring to be different, supporting dissent. For the longest time, it hadn't mattered what you looked like, on the Internet, how old you were, where you came from. It hadn't mattered whether you were Christian, Muslim, Atheist, male or female, white, black, yellow or red. In 1993, the New Yorker magazine printed a cartoon by Peter Steiner. You can see a dog sitting in front of a computer screen and apparently typing something. To another dog crouched behind him on the ground, it is saying: "On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog". Over the years, this phrase became the favoured statement of belief among nerds.

This may sound exaggerated and pompous, but in the early days, this fundamental belief in the equality of all human beings was inherent to the Internet, this profound faith in reason that provided the foundation of its self-regulation. Today I believe it was the watch-list debate that showed me what was important in my life in the first place. In terms of personal interests and preferences, everything before that had always been clouded in a vague mist, but through the publicity of the debate, it finally received clear outlines. The issue gave me some idea of what I wanted to do in the future. So I decided to become politically active. Not least because I wanted to preserve what had made me the person I was at the time.

19. Making the Web, Even If Your Local Dictator Hates It

Muhammad got in touch almost every day. He talked about his life in Aleppo and the growing protests in Syria. I was fine holding off in these conversations, despite my at times egomaniacal character, always trying to dominate and control communication. The space we had established between us was for Muhammad. Or he was more in need of it, to cope with the stress that enshrouded him day after day. That I had accepted and understood. And so we became friends. If I had no word from Muhammad for three days (which didn't happen very often), I would start to get nervous. Our contact, and the developments in Syria which were noticeably picking up pace, had accelerated a specific process in me, which had already begun before with the events in Tunisia, and is somewhat hard to describe. I felt needed. A good feeling. But I was forgetting about myself more and more. In retrospect, I realize that the life I had been leading until had destined me to lose myself. I had to lose myself in order to find myself.

In the following months, the protests became so much more radical and brutal than anyone had thought even then. March 2011 had still been a relatively quiet month for Syria. No one was concerned about the situation escalating. Instead it looked as if the same thing was being repeated in Syria as in Tunisia and Egypt before: As more and more people start protesting, the regime switches off the Internet, Telecomix jumps in, the government resigns, Assad retreats, and a transitional government with the aim of initiating democratic transition is installed. At Telecomix, we were selectively providing technical support, but this was hardly something to keep us busy around the clock entirely.

So though my self-preservation instincts were drilled on escapism and did what they could to keep me busy on the Internet, there was still time left. Time that had to be filled, so that it wouldn't begin to torture me. By now I had been living with Thomas, Beckj and Sophi for almost three months. It was time to find a place of my own and get my life together. And indeed I managed to introduce myself for an apartment in Schönhauser Allee in upmarket Prenzlauer Berg, where I was greeted by two thirty-somethings. He was gangly, with cavernous eyes and a hipster pompadour, working in PR. She was petite, smart mouth and squeaky voice, doing something with graphic design. It felt like a job interview. What do you do? What goals do you have in life? I played along, said I was working for an Internet company and wanted to start my own business one day. Bla bla bla. The petite one stared at me the whole time with those narrow, poisonous eyes of hers, as if trying to x-ray me. The guy was taking notes, and occasionally took a sip of his apple spritzer, which he had prepared beforehand from unfiltered organic apple juice.

Of course, I didn't get the room. But their pretentious manner and posturing left me in such a bad shock that I immediately lost any desire to carry on flat-hunting.

Instead, I got back in touch with the Berlin Pirates. I became a member of the "Seetiger" crew, which had a regular meet-up in a Friedrichshain bar called Jägerklause. Alex, who I hadn't seen since my arrival in Berlin, was on board too. He had heard about my activities with Telecomix during the Arab Spring. "What you've set in motion there is quite something", he said to me over a beer. "Cool idea with those modems. I'm proud of you, Stephan." He raised his beer glass. "To the Revolution. „No pasarán!" I smiled sheepishly. I was mildly embarrassed and at the same time, quite flattered.

Through Alex, I got to know a number of other great people. Lotte for example, a computer science student and Pirate, and awesome woman all round. I was out on a roll, discovering my new-found love for this so-called social life.

Telecomix had in fact become quite well-known within the net community. Words like "hero" were on the tip of everyone's tongue. To this day, I have my problems with this expression as it relates to our technical support. We had done our bit, we had contributed, but in a rather minimal way compared to what the protesters on the ground had accomplished. These demonstrators who were willing to risk their lives were the true heroes. But I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't enjoyed the reverence and appreciation that was handed out to me. Doubtlessly I felt pretty cool about myself. I was riding on a wave of euphoria, and that made it easier for me, who had been wrestling with other people all his life, to get along with others.

My life, however, kept refusing to get along with me. One morning, my boss came over to me. "Stephan, come with me into my office. We need to talk." I knew what was coming. I knew I hadn't been meeting the daily challenges posed by this online gaming magazine with a great deal of enthusiasm. I had been taking more care of my personal interests and Telecomix activities than of anything else, even during working hours. "You don't have to say anything," I said guiltily as I sat down in front of my boss. "I probably haven't survived the probation period." "That's right, Stephan. You can pack your things together." So I had screwed up. Everything was back to square one. I registered as unemployed, but decided not to go looking for a new job for the time being. I had been fired during the probation period, and would receive fairly decent unemployment benefits as these were oriented to my old salary from back in Frankfurt. At the employment office, I simply registered as sick, so that I wouldn't have to look for a new job and they couldn't force me into one either. Then I resumed doing what I did best: aimlessly drifting through life.

My room-mate Thomas was travelling in the Himalayas in April, which meant I had the room to myself. There is one day I remember particularly well. The spring sunshine was bathing the whole apartment in a warm light. Sophi was sitting in the kitchen, cramming. I grabbed a mug of coffee, sat down at the table with my laptop, and started playing "World of Warcraft". For hours I could run through this fantasy world, a sorceress striking down her enemies. Every now and then, Sophi would smile at me, and I would smile back. In fact, nothing special at all happened that day, it was simply the feeling of being very relaxed and at ease. Everything was so tranquil and pleasant. The hissing noise in my ears had gone. I was not alone. It was as if I had found a home.

Even if it was just the illusion of a home... But that hardly bothered me just then. Sometimes you need illusions, in order not to fall victim to madness. In mid-April, I had my first appearance at the Berlin conference re:publica, which since 2007 has established a regular forum for debate for topics like the Web 2.0, Social Media, and the digital world in general. The Arab Spring, and the role the Internet had played in it, was one of the main topics of the current event. For example, the Egyptian blogger Noha Atef was invited to speak about the revolution in her country.

I had submitted a proposal to talk about decentralized clusters in my capacity as a Telecomix agent. This was the first presentation I was doing by myself, and I was super nervous. As a subtitle for my talk, I had thought of the following: "...making the Web – even if your local dictator hates it." My hypothesis: clubs and associations, action groups and working groups were, in Germany at least, very common, but cumbersome devices, which were rarely able to respond quickly to change or adapt to the dynamics of events. The activist group Telecomix, hailing from Sweden, presented an alternative. Based on our example, I wanted to explain the functioning of a decentralized cluster: secure and decentralized communication, fast decision-making procedures, and fulfilling, enjoyable work. "Telecomix has no directors or executives," it said in the announcement for my talk. "It just works." The announcement text was quite a mouthful: "This is an ever-expanding jellyfish cluster, and so the responsibilities of each individual agent are expanding too. What we need today is openness – openness to new ideas, new ways of working, new people. First of all, there is no wrong way to get the job done, only ways that are different from your own. This is to be absolutely respected, because without mutual respect, the cluster will not be able to work together in the long run."

If I read this announcement or my lecture notes today, I can still sense the exuberant enthusiasm that I had cultivated in this matter. All of it sounds a bit like I was on drugs. Which is true in a way. I was high on dopamine, the messenger of bliss.

My enthusiasm hasn't evaporated entirely, but it has given way to a certain sense of disillusionment. Today, I would have said it all in a slightly more pragmatic way. While I do continue to believe in this form of decentralized work, back then, I was positively euphoric about it. Probably I was still under the impression that I could change the world – the big picture.

Meanwhile in Syria, the protests continued. By April, the number of demonstrators throughout the country was steadily increasing. A new government under Prime Minister Adel Safar had been sworn in, which then quickly decided to abolish the national state of emergency that had been prevailing since 1963. Even so, the protests didn't subside, on the contrary. Protesters were already calling for Assad's resignation, but Assad of course had no intention of vacating his throne. Finally, on April 22, 2011, tens of thousands of Syrians from all over the country gathered on the streets. Soldiers and militiamen shot sharp at the crowds. Until the end of April, another estimated 500 demonstrators would lose their lives in the protests.

< muhammad> tomate. Hello.
< tomate> Hi, Muhammad. What's going on?
< muhammad> I was at a demo. It was terrible. The militia were shooting at us.
< tomate> Damn. Are you all right?
< muhammad> Yes. I wasn't hurt. But I'm still scared. I saw other young people being hit. Just falling over, from one second to the next. I looked into their lifeless eyes, staring up into the sky. I will never get these pictures out of my head. There were snipers and soldiers there. All we wanted was to demonstrate peacefully. But they're not going to shoot all of us, are they? They're not going to kill all of us? They're not allowed to do that. So they are going to have to stop at some point, right?

My heart felt like it was scrunching up into a ball, trying to hide inside me. That night, I couldn't get to sleep. Thousands of questions went spinning through my mind. In the middle of the night, I got up to open the window, and stared out into the clear night skies. I lit a cigarette and blew puffs of nicotine up towards the heavens, watched the clouds waft through the darkness for a while before they vanished. I picked up my phone and tweeted:

Now, for some sleep. Or whatever that's called

The Telecomix crew started uploading video material from participants in the demonstrations, mostly showing heavily armed soldiers and dead protesters. These videos were sent to us over the Internet by our Syrian contacts. Before we republished them online, we removed the metadata from the video files, so that the origin of the recording became untraceable, or at least very, very difficult to trace. In mid-May, I attended the German national convention of the Pirate Party, this time in Heidenheim in the south of Germany, where I was elected head of the national party headquarters. I plunged into this new (volunteer) job head-first with loads of enthusiasm, and managed to get the office into shipshape. Apart from everyday office organization work, my tasks also included negotiating contracts for the federal party committee, as well as supporting the federal executive board as an assistant. The work suited me fine, because I could keep up with my Telecomix activities and my Internet life at the same time. Mr Urbach was back on all channels.

So finally, I was willing to do what grown-ups habitually like to demand of their wayward children: get my life back together. And at last it felt as if I might succeed. Which is not that easy if your head is stuck in a parallel universe most of the time... By now, the protests in Syria were in their third month. In Egypt meanwhile, a military government had taken over, and had started arresting and trying Mubarak's former henchmen. An official commission had been set up to investigate the violence committed against protesters during the Egyptian uprising. The National Democratic Party of Egypt, Mubarak's ruling party, had been disbanded, while the former dictator was being remanded in custody. But in Syria, Assad was still sitting on his dictator's throne with an ugly grin on his face. Early May saw the arrest of thousands of Syrian activists. Oppositional activists counted a total of 8,000 detainees. Eight thousand!

< muhammad> So many arrests, tomate. So many. Even some of my fellow students are in prison. And you know what happens there. They torture them, torment them with electric shocks. And some of the prisoners are just killed and buried somewhere.
< tomate> I'm so sorry to hear that. It really is terrible.
< muhammad> I'm pretty sure I'm being monitored. Yesterday, my father's boss said to him didn't he think it strange what his son was up to. My father told me later. Don't you see? That was a warning. They know what I'm doing. And now they're trying to pressurize me. Conventional tactic. If I don't give in, then...
< tomate> You really have to be careful. But you know that.
< muhammad> But I'm going to keep going. You know that, too. This is our best chance. The chance for my generation to make a difference. There is no way back. If we give up now, I will never forgive myself. Never.

Altogether, there must have been around fifteen to twenty Syrian activists cavorting about in the Telecomix channel at that time, who were all being taken care of in some way or another. I still don't know exactly which of our agents had been as closely in touch with which activists as Muhammad and I had been. But I did hear later that this had been the case. That these contacts occasionally weighed us down, that we were haunted by their worries and fears – that was something we agents never talked about among ourselves. We were the tough guys, remember, who showed no sign of weakness, who could cope with anything. Even John Wayne had nothing against us gun-slingers from the Wild Wild West of Supernerddom. Don't cry. Work!

That's what I stuck to. Or rather, what I held on to. Organizing the party office, making appointments, answering emails, sending emails, giving interviews, organizing interviews with Syrian activists for international news media, making phone calls, posting tweets, reassuring Muhammad, trying to understand and be there for him, living Berlin, meeting friends, debating with other Pirates, living my life, understanding myself, understanding anything, keeping cool, not losing it, staying on track – understanding the world, finding the world sucks, changing the world. I was watching myself coming and going, was, literally, in constant motion. Fourteen hours a day. Firing nonstop from all synapses. Yeah, baby!

I startled in my seat, sat up and rubbed my eyes, which were burning like hell. I must have fallen asleep in my desk chair. A quick glance at the computer screen. What was the time? 1:20 am. Damn. My fingertips and feet were tingling. A cigarette I had forgotten about had decomposed into a sad little heap of cold ashes in the ashtray. But the IRC channel was still active. The last line of my conversation with Muhammad said:

< muhammad> tomate. Hello. Answer me, please. Are you there? tomate! Are you still there? Are you all right?

If there's one thing

that we should have learned,

it's that... you know,

our brains have always outraced our hearts.

Our science charges ahead,

but our souls lag behind.

Let's start anew.

Lee Adama, Battlestar Galactica

Imprint

Copyright © 2015-2018 by Stephan Urbach

Copyright © 2018 Ach je!

Ach je! is an imprint of Ach je Verlag Stephan Urbach, Berlin

https://ach.je

Cover Artwork © by Christopher Willner of Criss Cross Media

https://chris-cross-media.de

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This eBook is DRM-free. Please handle this responsibly.