courtesy of Dutch Ramsey

Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age ends with the Übermädchen protagonist Nell taking control of the Disenchanted Army, a prodigious volume of Chinese girls who have suffered the same neglect as she did. While remaining metaphor for the Yellow Menace, they illustrate strength in numbers:

By the time she had reached ground level and burst out, somewhat unwisely, into the building's lobby, the girls had breached the walls of the building in several places and rushed in upon the remaining defenders. They moved in groups of four. One girl (the largest) would rush toward an opponent, holding a pointed bamboo stick aimed at his heart. While his attention was thus fixed, two other girls (the smallest) would converge on him from the sides. Each girl would hug one of his legs and, acting together, they would lift him off the ground. The fourth girl (the fastest) would by this point have circled all the way round and would come in from behind, driving a knife or other weapon into the victim's back. During the half-dozen or so applications of this technique that Nell witnessed, it never failed, and none of the girls ever suffered more than the odd bruise or scrape.

Somewhat macabre, but whenever there's a numerous demographic whose similarity and unity is demonstrative, it's hard not to imagine immense potential energy: something that, if only it could be tapped, could change the world.

Why can't German kids get some of that? They're legion, they're smart and overeducated, longing to be of some use to the planet. They gots cell phone cameras, and digital ones too, with dense memory sticks. We got young people riding the waves, with both an eagerness for "real world" experience and an uncomfortable uncertainty for the future.

This collection of photos from Berlin then and now -- then being the 60s, mostly -- mostly depicts young people in various stations of life. Now is now, though. There's a lot of potential energy here, but I'll set my sights extremely low -- the youth should all take pictures. Diaries are hard to keep up, but Flickr and photoblogs have diversified our holdings: all we need is a little organization to capture a Berlin that will not exist in ten years, or even one. The world should know what Berlin does.

You are all the city's interns. If you don't know what to do with yourself, take pictures.