I was born in 1975, six years after two Americans walked around on the Moon, and of course I do not remember the Moon landing. Still, it belongs to my earliest memories, which perhaps already says quite a lot about what America did to my generation: it produced images so powerful that you could retroactively install them in your own memory even if, at the time they were created, you did not yet exist as a remotely viable biological project.
For a long time, the Moon landing was simply a fact about the nature of the world. There were mountains, dinosaurs had once existed, adults stubbornly insisted that red beet was good for you despite all available sensory evidence, and the Americans had been to the Moon. It had happened.
And somewhere in my childhood brain this must have produced a fairly consequential, if perhaps still somewhat underdeveloped, theory of foreign policy: if the Americans can send human beings to the Moon, they cannot be completely stupid. That was more or less my first geopolitical analysis, and looking at some of the geopolitical analyses produced since then by people paid considerably better than I am, I do not think it holds up too badly.
I grew up in Stockerau, in Lower Austria, in a world that knew quite precisely where East and West were. The Iron Curtain did not run through our front garden, but it was close enough to be more than an abstract historical metaphor. You could get in a car and drive there in under an hour. Beyond a border there began another world, a world adults talked about in a particular tone of voice, and that tone was part of the political geography of my childhood.
The other world I was actually interested in lay in the opposite direction. America arrived as a signal, through science fiction and television images, space travel, comic books, later VHS tapes, computer magazines, modems, bulletin board systems, and all the technological and cultural electronic debris out of which, as an adolescent in the 1980s and 1990s, you could solder together something resembling a personality.
I was reading cyberpunk before I found punk itself, looking westward from an Austrian small town at hacking, underground publishing, science fiction and spectacular cultural waste. Official culture often felt like a badly heated waiting room. Counterculture had at least found the service corridor.
My father had a VCR quite early. In 1983, a video rental store opened in Stockerau, around the same time as the first Chinese restaurant, and I mention this because for a Lower Austrian boy both were forms of intercontinental space travel. You went in and came out with things that had previously not existed in your universe. Suddenly there was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Poltergeist. Later William Gibson, cyberpunk, computers, networks. And Carl Sagan. Especially Carl Sagan.
Sagan stood there in his turtleneck in front of some galaxy or other and explained, with an almost indecent calm, that we were made of star stuff. For a small human being in Stockerau, this was a perfectly serviceable metaphysical offering, certainly better than much of what was available in that market segment at the time.
I had America in my head long before I had America.
In Stockerau, I was the UFO-Hannes. I was interested in things for which my immediate surroundings did not necessarily offer many social reward points, and eventually, through American computer networks, I discovered that there was already a term for people like me: nerd.
America had a word for me before Austria did. That is not nothing.
We tend to underestimate how powerfully countries act upon people simply by giving them terms in which they can recognize themselves. Empires do not merely export aircraft carriers, agricultural products and Coca-Cola. They export categories, identities, roles, lifestyles, and the notion that certain kinds of person can exist at all without somebody immediately asking, in a concerned voice, whether it is likely to go away on its own.
The nerd I recognized myself in had a particular psychological construction, which I know rather intimately: a wonderful combination of inferiority complex and the secret conviction that everybody else is an idiot. You are socially peripheral and epistemically central. Nobody wants to sit next to you at lunch, but fortunately you have understood the universe.
I know this creature intimately because I am this creature.
Something rather strange happened to the nerd during my lifetime, though. The figure of ridicule became a consumer demographic, then a cultural hero, then an entrepreneur, and eventually something resembling a ruling class. The people who once occupied the service corridor somehow acquired the building.
The garage became a data center and hired lawyers.
And with that came one of the great ironies of my own cultural biography. A lot of what had attracted me to American nerd and hacker culture was its suspicion of hierarchy, bureaucracy and gatekeepers, its pleasure in making things without permission. Then parts of that culture became very rich and very powerful and discovered that being a gatekeeper is actually fantastic if you own the gate.
That does not erase what attracted me in the first place. It merely gives it some extremely irritating footnotes.
Because America also had something I found deeply exotic in the Austria of my childhood and adolescence: the idea that you could simply make things. You build something, you try something, you arrive with a completely absurd idea and the first response is not automatically a question about which department might be responsible and whether there is a form that should have been submitted three weeks ago announcing the existence of the idea.
I still love this quality about the United States, that pragmatism which, at its most charming, is a socially acceptable form of megalomania. You want to start a company? Okay. Make a movie? Make one. Build a rocket? Where?
American thinking rather strikingly tends to begin with a verb, whereas Austrian thinking often prefers to begin by establishing jurisdiction. There are disadvantages, obviously. Under the American model a rocket occasionally explodes. The Austrian model, in return, develops remarkably reliable conditions under which it never gets built. I am exaggerating, but only a little.
The difficulty is that this wonderful appetite for doing things also developed its own ideology. Silicon Valley took a whole bundle of countercultural impulses and eventually turned them into theology: disrupt, break things, destroy bureaucracy, think different, put a beanbag in the office and somehow make labor organizing sound conservative.
For years, “disruption” was presented as though it were almost a moral category in itself. If an institution was old, it was probably bad. If you broke something, you were probably innovative. If millions of people depended on the thing you were breaking, this was apparently evidence of insufficient scalability.
I still believe in the American “why not?” I am simply less convinced than I was at twenty that breaking something is evidence that you have improved it.
Then there is the friendliness, which Europeans love to mock. “How are you doing?” Well, how the fuck do you think I’m doing?
Of course the cashier in some supermarket in Nebraska is not genuinely invested in a full diagnostic assessment of my emotional condition. She knows that. I know that. Neither of us believes we have accidentally entered psychotherapy. Still, at some point I decided that superficial friendliness is actually a rather useful social technology. A ritual does not have to be profound in order to work. We Austrians have other rituals. At least the waiter hates you sincerely. One should be cautious, in general, about treating authenticity as an automatic moral virtue.
Later I spent a great deal of time in the United States. I worked there, made films, gave talks, made art, developed projects, argued with people, drank with people, slept in motel rooms whose air-conditioning systems appeared to have only two settings, “off” and “Arctic mass casualty event,” and slowly the America in my head turned into an actual place.
This is inevitably disappointing, because actual places have the irritating habit of being more complicated than projections.
I was never naive enough to imagine that the United States was some enormous transatlantic charity event. Pax Americana was not run by Caritas. A hegemon does not wake up in the morning wondering how it can best organize world affairs out of pure altruism, and the United States pursued its interests, fought wars, overthrew or supported governments, backed dictatorships when convenient, spoke about freedom and occasionally understood by it surprisingly specific forms of market access.
The postwar American world order was a power structure. America benefited from it. This is about as shocking as discovering that a wolf does not possess teeth entirely for aesthetic reasons.
Even my sacred Moon was dirtier than it had looked from the children’s room. The American space program led straight back to Wernher von Braun, Peenemünde and the V-2. That enormous, beautiful Saturn V, which to me had long resembled some kind of cathedral of the future, had a family tree containing forced labor, concentration camps and German engineering in one of their historically least fortunate combinations.
You have to digest that. One of the most beautiful images of my childhood had Mittelbau-Dora in the basement.
And this is precisely where things become interesting to me, because I gain nothing by retroactively declaring an old enthusiasm invalid simply because I later read the footnotes. That would be a suspiciously convenient version of adulthood. You discover the dirty history, tear up the childhood image, and declare yourself enlightened.
The footnotes remain, and the image remains too. The rocket flew. Armstrong stood up there. The pictures did not become false. They became heavier.
Perhaps that is a reasonably good definition of growing up anyway: things become heavier without thereby becoming worthless.
In 2016, I made an entire film, Traceroute, about my relationship with that world. I traveled through the United States, met people, visited places, followed cultural wiring that somehow ended in my brain. Basically, I wanted to understand why such a substantial part of my inner life came from a country in which I had not grown up.
It was a pilgrimage, except that the relics consisted of video games, computers, science fiction, technological history and people who had once made something that electrified me as a teenager. By then it was also impossible to ignore what had happened to nerd culture itself, because I was traveling through the homeland of people who had once been weird little outsiders and were now building the infrastructure through which several billion people experienced reality.
There is a darkly comic revenge story hiding in there somewhere. The bullied child grows up, gets stock options and discovers platform capitalism.
It was a love letter, one with a scalpel.
That is probably still my relationship with America. I like the country too much not to take its bullshit seriously. And there is a great deal of bullshit: slavery, the displacement and destruction of Indigenous populations, segregation, imperialism, racism, a degree of social inequality that becomes especially grotesque in a country that has wrapped so much of its national mythology around the word freedom.
American innocence never interested me much, partly because it would have required considerable effort to believe in it. What did interest me was the fact that the country kept invoking concepts larger than its actual condition: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, the possibility of belonging.
Historically, these things never applied to everyone, and precisely this created a strange political mechanism. You could use America against America. You could say: excuse me, but you said all men were created equal. All? Really all? Well then, let’s talk.
That is politically potent. A broken promise gives you something to grab onto, something you can demand, quote back, wave around and become extremely irritating about. You can point at a constitution and ask whether the thing was meant as decoration.
Perhaps hypocrisy is better than its reputation. Hypocrisy at least means there is still some standard somewhere whose violation requires explanation. If a politician does something appalling and then spends half an hour explaining why it was not appalling at all, morality still has a small HR department. Once someone simply says, yes, of course I am doing this, so what?, something has changed.
And that is where, for me, the break of the last ten years lies.
Donald Trump did not fall onto the United States inside a meteorite, and 2016 did not crash through the roof of an otherwise perfectly healthy liberal household. The material was already there: nationalist rhetoric, racial resentment, conspiracy thinking, contempt for expertise, the cult of wealth and success, the peculiar American capacity to operate politics simultaneously as religion, reality television and a real estate transaction.
The political material was old. Old sewage found excellent new pipes.
Trump did not drill the holes in the American dream. Many of them are very old. Some go down into the foundation. What the Trump era did was remove the cover plates from a remarkable number of them, shine light inside, and make visible things that had been easier to obscure under rituals, conventions and elegant descriptions of national purpose.
And then you stand there and think: ah, fuck. That goes down pretty far.
The selfishness of a great power does not surprise me. States pursue interests, and if this surprises you, perhaps you should not keep states. What has been harder to watch is the change in American self-description.
America long claimed more than mere strength. Its power was supposed to be connected to an idea, to the belief that democracy, freedom, science, openness and individual self-determination had some value beyond the territory of the United States itself.
Much of that was propaganda. Some of it was cynical. Some of it tended to disappear at exactly those moments when it became economically or militarily inconvenient. Still, the promise existed, and propaganda does not become ineffective merely because it is propaganda. You can spend decades telling people that freedom is wonderful and then discover, to your great annoyance, that they have begun wanting some.
Serves you right.
With “America First,” I keep getting stuck on where the phrase ultimately leads. A government puts its own country first; governments do that. But if every relationship slowly turns into a deal, alliances are judged by the last invoice, strength becomes self-justifying, and anything without an immediately quantifiable return begins to look like sentimental waste, then something rather more fundamental has happened.
Even the pragmatism I always found so attractive begins to mutate. “We can do it” eventually becomes “We can do whatever the fuck we want,” and individualism without some concept of society rather quickly degenerates into fuck-you-ism.
The last few years have also revealed something I find fascinating as a nerd, and at the same time deeply unsettling: how much of democracy does not appear anywhere in the official documentation.
A nation state is, among other things, an enormous pile of legacy systems insisting on being called sovereignty. A constitution is not an operating system you install once and then allow to run democracy reliably as a background service. A surprisingly large part of it consists of undocumented dependencies: habits, norms, embarrassment, restraint, people refraining from doing certain things even though they technically could, because at some point a social intuition emerged that perhaps this part of the machine should not be stress-tested all the way to destruction.
Then someone comes along and stress-tests it. What happens if I press this? What if I ignore this institution? What if I simply stop recognizing this norm? What if I lie, then lie again, then say truth itself is basically an invention of my enemies, and afterwards simply keep going because apparently no one is entirely sure which part of the system is responsible for making me stop?
And suddenly you realize that a surprisingly large part of the elegant machine worked only because enough people had never felt the urge to ram five screwdrivers into the motherboard at the same time.
Europe has absolutely no grounds for smugness here. Sitting at a safe distance, pointing across the Atlantic and saying, look at those lunatics, becomes particularly unconvincing when we have more than enough lunatics of our own. Many of them speak excellent German.
Still, what is happening in America hurts me in a peculiar way, and I think this has to do with the fact that I owe the country something. It gave me an idea of possibility.
As a child, America taught me that the future is something you make, build, screw together, calculate, test, occasionally blow up with enormous noise and then build again. That sounds kitschy, but look at the Saturn V. The thing is 110 meters tall. At some point, kitsch is simply a question of thrust.
The Moon landing was the Cold War, military competition, propaganda, prestige, national megalomania, a gigantic dick-measuring contest between two geopolitical systems, both of which possessed enough nuclear weapons to turn the planet into an exceptionally unproductive ball of glass. And then they went to the Moon.
I mean that completely seriously. One of the glorious and horrible things about human beings is that we occasionally manage to produce things from extremely questionable motives that are larger than the motives from which they emerged.
Perhaps my idea of an American soul lives somewhere in there, in that peculiar mixture of megalomania, openness, self-confidence, curiosity, practical intelligence, and a willingness to fall spectacularly on your face in front of the entire world because you tried something. Rocket explodes? Fine. Look at the data. Build another one.
I like that attitude, and I do not want to see America eventually hide behind a wall from the very world it spent decades helping to create culturally, economically and technologically. Perhaps that is sentimental, and fine, I can live with that.
I am 51 years old now. I know the footnotes. I know Wernher von Braun, Vietnam and Iraq, CIA coups, racism, redlining, Guantánamo, the lies, the interests, the dead, and that astonishing reserve of historical shit every great power eventually drags behind itself like an overfilled portable toilet on wheels.
I also know that much of the America I admired as a child never existed for a great many people in the way it appeared to me through films, books and television images.
But I also know the eccentrics, the tinkerers, the scientists, artists, activists and nerds, the people who build something in a garage even though nobody asked them to, the people who hear a completely absurd project and do not immediately explain why it cannot be done but ask how big it is supposed to be, the people who tell you their whole life story after seven minutes, and that peculiar willingness to give another human being a little space with the words, “Sure. Why not?”
Maybe “why not?” seems like a small thing. I do not think it is.
Societies are also made out of the sentences they allow themselves. “That won’t work” produces a different world from “Let’s try.” I have spent much of my life breaking rules, fucking with systems and encouraging others to look behind whatever interface claims to be natural, inevitable or simply the way things are done. I am unlikely to develop an ideological commitment to obedient behavior at this point.
But there is a difference between asking why a rule exists and assuming that its destruction is automatically liberation. There is a difference between opening a system so more people can understand and change it and smashing the control panel because smashing control panels looks good in photographs.
I still want the “why not?”
I just want to know what happens after it.
Of course even “why not?” needs limits, responsibility, and occasionally somebody who says, no, Johannes, we are not building a nuclear reactor in the garage. Historically, a little less napalm would also have helped.
But I want to live in a world where that “why not?” exists as a possibility.
I know much more now about the rocket than the boy in Stockerau did. I know where it came from, who built it, what is buried in its history, what political system launched it, and what stories that system told about itself. All of that is part of the image now, and it is not going away.
There were still human beings up there. They stood on another celestial body and looked back at Earth, this absurdly small blue object on which we have since continued, with remarkable persistence, to make life difficult for one another.
The Americans went to the Moon. That sentence still means something to me, and I would miss it terribly if America, of all places, forgot how to look up.