I’m at SXSW, and rather than tweeting about it incessantly, I think maybe I’ll just post some things here.
I suspect that my mood will improve with the weather and after eating some tacos, but right now SXSW is a very alienating experience. I was last at this conference in 2007, with a bunch of people from EchoDitto. Emily and I had just started dating. Twitter launched here that year, and although I never thought it’d take off the way it has, it did immediately feel like something special — maybe it would only ever be used by the kinds of people there in Austin, but for us it would be a new, enriching layer on top of reality. I was thrilled and amazed at what technology could mean and by this new, fascinating class of people who seemed to believe — quite earnestly and intensely — hunches about the future that I had secretly harbored but been half-embarrassed to express. I’d never known these people were real, but now I was really one of them and everything was going to come true.
That feels very far away right now. The weather’s worse, and there are way too many people — they’re everywhere, all the panels and shuttles and bars are bursting. They’re the same kinds of people, but by now everybody’s settled on the same dream — the mad-lib details vary, but the basic story is about startups and a kind of “innovation” that seems indistinguishable from a dreary march toward the combinatorial exhaustion of the current technological landscape’s possibilities.
I’m older, and it’s easier to see the contours of feasibility and to recognize how many of those dreams are unworkable or ill-advised or just mundane. Websockets are a great technology, but they’re going to change interfaces, not lives, you know? Real-time data and self-quantification are interesting and will be useful in a few domains, but reality is not as procedural and deterministic as programmers’ minds; most of these speculative possibilities will not pan out, even after we’ve built the dehumanizing foundations necessary to really put automated Taylorism through its paces and see what it can do. There is a terrifying amount of talk about cognitive psychology results, and I’m starting to think that the actually-quite-limited predictive power of these models at an individual level is the only thing that can possibly save us from people like my twentysomething year-old self.
Well. Like I said: tacos are indicated. In a moment, off to the airport to pick up a rental car and escape the shuttles. Later: panels from activists, journalists and political folks, which I think will be both less inspiring and less frightening, both of which strike me as healthy things.
I’ve never been to SXSW. I do know that every conference I’ve ever gone to more than once has seemed worse every year since the first one I went to. This is certainly in part because of how bad humans are at replicating what made something great. But in general, I distrust nostalgia and find it difficult to separate “[Thing I loved X] used to be so much better” from “I used to be so much younger and the air was sweeter”.
100% agreed with this. The boosterism should be so offputting to any thinking person, and yet, sadly, it isn’t.
I do think that self-quantifying and real-time stuff is important, particularly for solving Big Social Problems like obesity, but the all-encompassing attitude (“We can fix it!”) reveals a depressing lack of understanding of actual society.
[...] SXSW is mostly an empty, sad place » SXSW: It Kind of Sucks I want to affiliate myself with the thoughts of Tom Lee, from DC’s Sunlight Labs: SXSW is an empty, empty place. I’m only 27 – probably [...]
You’re right to be skeptical, Eric. And to be clear, I don’t really think it was better back in 2007 (though I would argue that there probably were at least a few more interesting and easy problems left to tackle). But like you said: my younger, credulous self enjoyed it more.