A few months ago I had my first experience of the phenomenon that is SXSW. Herewith some observations.
A preface of sorts: South by Southwest (SXSW or, in the local vernacular, simply ‘south by’) crept onto my radar many years ago; its mix of popular culture, digital media and bleeding edge tech punched a lot of my buttons. SXSW was where cool, edgy things went to happen. The event’s cachet was further burnished through chance encounters, such as when I heard Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, describing how the now ubiquitous app first found its wings at SXSW. I harbored a desire to attend someday. In 2018, the opportunity arose and I jumped at it.
Alas, like so many things in life, I fear I came to the SXSW experience too late, and only got to know it After Corporate Got Involved. SXSW has transmogrified into a colossus of an event, dwarfing its original self beyond all recognition, and while the indie spirit still burns brightly throughout the festival, corporate fingerprints are everywhere, and the profit motive omnipresent. This may not be the SXSW of yore, but it’s what is on offer today, so I’ll take it.
Backstory: SXSW was launched in 1987 as a vehicle to draw attention to the rich seam of musical and related artistic talent in Austin. It took off big time. In 1994 it added film & interactive festivals to the roster, and has continued to expand into other related streams of interest. Now, some 30+ years on, SXSW has aquired a larger than life reputation. It has a global profile and attracts a truly international audience, not to mention world-class speakers and presenters. On hearing I’d attended many friends and colleagues jumped on me afterwards wanting to know: ‘what was it like?’
This essay is an attempt to answer that question. What follows has no narrative arc, cohesive theme, or dramatic momentum; it is simply a cluster of wildly varied experiences and observations. Not unlike the event itself.
Getting there: Before I ever arrived in Austin, there was much to do. Having registered, I was encouraged to set up my SXSW account and begin to build a schedule of events, which I gamely endeavoured to do. But oh, my – so many choices. I tried to keep my focus on the Marketing stream of programming – my ostensible reason for attending – but so many other events competed for attention. I made several attempts to build an itinerary of events for the whole week but failed every time, weighed down by indecisions in the face of such a glut of choices. In the end, I headed to Austin with a patchy itinerary and hope that things would work out on the day.
Downtown flooded: I had never been to Austin before, but SX is no time to try and get a sense of the city. The festival completely transforms the downtown core. Anecdotal reports say that anywhere from 300 to 400 thousand people descend on Austin (a city with a resting population of a mere one million) for SX. Its effect on the city’s SOP is profound. The only relateable analogy I have was when Vancouver hosted the 2012 winter Olympics: the entire downtown core was sealed off and rebranded for the occasion. Everywhere you went within the Zone, it was all Olympics, all the time. SXSW was exactly like that.
SX’s nerve center is the Austin Convention Center, but as it has grown has also taken over meeting and display spaces in a handful of hotels within a block or two of the ACC. In addition, nearly all of the commercial establishments within walking distance are also co-opted to serve SX, mostly for corporate sponsors and other hangers-on with an agenda to promote and a cool event to host. (A surprising number of sovereign states have a presence, hoping, I suppose, to lure cool tech startups to their various Silicon Valley wannabes.) Nearby strips of entertainment venues – Rainey Street, 6th Avenue – are also absorbed into the SX fold, their various hostelries rented out for ‘brand experiences’ and other such events. Throughout the week, there are street closures aplenty, and you never have to walk to far to encounter the Perimeter: barricades and clusters of police cars keeping threats at bay. As an attendee, you definitely feel like you’re living in a bubble, sealed off from what passes for reality in day to day Austin.
And, yeah, everywhere is crowded.
Interesting side note: I arrived on Friday evening, as SX was just kicking off (a colleague joined me a couple of days later). On Saturday morning, I cabbed to the convention center and as I walked a couple of blocks to the registration area, I noticed a curious thing: all the streetlamp poles and sidewalk stanchions were swaddled in cling-wrap. As the week wore on, the reason became clear: every day a small platoon of bill posters patrolled the Zone, papering every available surface with announcements of events, happenings, performances, you name it. Everytime you walked one of those pavements, there were more content choices to take in….
And the clingwrap? After the event is done, the local cleanup crews simply peel away the wrap, and strip the poles and stanchions clean. Ingenious, really.
Getting around: For reasons of economy and/or availability, we were booked into a hotel about a 30 minute drive from the downtown core in an area called Sunset Valley. We didn’t want to rent a car, and there were no transit options, so travel to and fro the SX heartland was either by taxi or by ride-hail. We used both, and I had my first, first-hand experience of the latter.
And it was good. Austin apparently has some rocky history with ride hailing firms – won’t get into it here – but while Uber is active in the city (and had an aggressive presence in the SX zone) Lyft seems to be the provider of choice.
And did they provide. All our drivers were punctual, polite and knew their way around. Plus generally drove nicer vehicles than the city’s cab fleet. The most interesting thing about riding with Lyft was the drivers themselves. One was a child of diplomats, a French mother and Nigerian father. Another was in university studing marketing, and quizzed us knowledgeably about our work. Another, a practising psychologist whose professional salary was so meagre, she drove Lyft to supplement it. Intelligent, educated people … all interesting.
I did take a few cabs as well. The drivers all knew their way around, were charming and professional, and earned their tips. One did mention to me that life had gotten harder since the ride hailers came to town; business was down by half, he reckoned, and he was considering looking for another line of work.
All things considered, though, I’d have opted for a hotel closer to the zone. Being so far away made it impractical to bop back and forth, which curtailed a lot of activities.
Eating on the run: My typical diet at SX consisted of the following:
- Breakfast (muffin, juice, coffee) from the hotel buffet, including a couple of apples stashed in my pocket for later in the day
- Lunch from one of the food trucks encamped throughout The Zone as I hustled between presentations (uniformly excellent)
- Dinner gathered from the offerings at various corporate events / suites / receptions at the end of the day (also mostly pretty great)
There were, during the course of the week, very few bona fide sit down meals, but knowing the Texan obsession with barbecue, we determined that we would partake of this local specialty and quizzed a couple of drivers on where to find the best barbecue in Austin. Top of many people’s list was a place called the IronWorks, which was conveniently located in the heart of the Zone, so we made a point of dining there one night.
Presumably the building was originally a working foundry of some kind, heavy on corrugated tin siding and perched on the edge of the giant gully that runs past the convention center. Nowadays, it purveys barbecue – beef, pork or chicken – in a no frills, industrial fashion. Line up, state your preference (one meat, two sides) and find a place at one of the communal tables to savour the goods. They were pretty damn good, and in Texan tradition, not meagre.
Bow to The Machine: I must spare a few words of admiration and respect for the machinery that runs SX. The logistics are mind boggling: hundreds of events in dozens of venues with thousands and thousands of milling attendees and yet, to borrow a British turn of phrase, they keep the trains running on time. It is a marvelous conjunction of technology and sheer human energy, but it works. I don’t even want to think about the machinations involved; I simply bow in utter respect.
That said, If there is a defining characteristic of SX (and I’m not the only observer to note this) it is line-ups. Everything you want to do or see is preceded by a lineup. Attend a session, buy a taco, visit a corporate suite or after hours event – it always involves a lineup, in some cases, of truly epic proportions. Some of the major speaking events were held in ballrooms in the convention center. The lineups for said events frequently snaked through the entire floor on which the ballroom was located, outside onto a mezzanine, down several staircases, and onward through a basement level of the same venue. At SX, patience is a necessity. It becomes a virtue when you wait an hour in line for a venue to open and it turns out to be a complete dud, or at capacity when you’re within sneezing distance of the door. During my active time at SX, probably 50% was spent waiting in line. (To be fair, the same probably applies to any day at Disneyland.)
Elon Musk Answers Your Questions: One of SX’s defining characteristics is the event’s ability to attract high profile guests who drop in more or less unannounced. The week I attended, Steven Spielberg showed up to premiere his VR/gaming adventure Ready Player One and Mark Hamill popped into a presentation by Star Wars director Rian Wilson. There were doubtless many other improptu appearances of which I was unaware.
My own chance encounter occurred on the Sunday morning, my second day. First thing in the morning, I checked my SX app – a constant companion during my time there – and saw a notice posted late the night before: Elon Musk would be doing a Q&A Sunday afternoon. Admission would be by ticket only and tickets would be available from 0900 at the ACC. I booted it downtown, obtained a ticket, and (having been advised to arrive early) set off to locate the venue.
The session was being held at a building called the Moody Theatre, more commonly known as the home of Austin City Limits, a long running music show. Its capacity was some 2500 people, much larger than the largest of SX’s regular spaces. The venue itself was a cultural experience, a physical temple to some of Texas’ most famous musicians; it practically hummed with heritage.
I arrived around 10:00 for the noon show and there was already a lineup several blocks long. I duly took my place at its tail and waited and shuffled and finally, after passing an airport-grade security screening, was admitted to the building. Another hour or so, and Mr Musk took the stage.
Elon Musk did indeed answer questions from the audience, submitted via an app in the hours prior to his appearance. What do you ask a person like Elon Musk? How about: Mars: how can we help?
That pretty much set the tone for what was an almost surreal hour and a half of speculation and opinion and anecdote on space travel, flying cars, rogue AI and other sci-fi type topics which were, suddenly, a lot less far-fetched than they once seemed. It was a bit of a mind-bending experience. Indeed, it encapsulated the very essence of the SX: from out of left field into the wild blue yonder.
Of course, attending this session meant jettisoning the scheduled presentations I’d intended to take in that day, in which I was already trying to choose between Melinda Gates and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. Choices, choices…
Content is king: SXSW is, first and foremost, a flood, a deluge, a tsunami of content. A literal firehose of programming, blasting at you almost 24/7 throughout the event. There are festivals of film, music and interactive gaming, all with their own rosters of content. Then there are the conference streams – a couple of dozen, at least – offering talks and panel discussions on marketing, music, and manifold other interest streams, any one of them enough to keep you booked wall to wall throughout the week. There is a trade show, and a gaming exhibition. On top of that, every day brings a new menu of corporate events, hospitality suites, and one-time-only media performances presented for your enjoyment. (One of the hottest tickets this year was an off site recreation of HBO’s Westworld environment.) To walk down any street in the Zone was to be presented with dozens of SX themed entertainment options.
This is, perhaps, my overarching impression of SX: a constant sense of FOMO. It was like being invited to a banquet in which a hundred unique dishes were on offer every day, but you could only sample ten of them. For all the good things you consume, you leave feeling a little unsatisfied.
(There is a twisted flipside: I was frankly astonished at the number of attendees who seemed determined to avoid the content at all costs, spending huge amounts of time in active sessions engaged with their phones. It was not unusual to look down a line of any given audience at any given session and see a dozen people transfixed on their devices; on one occasion I observed a young woman who spent the entire session shopping online… they were there, I assume, on the company dime, and utterly failed to appreciate the value of the experiences they were so casually ignoring… )
So how was the content? I attended around a half dozen sessions every day, roughly a 60/40 split between Marketing-themed and Other Stuff. The Marketing material ranged from the thought-provoking and informative to mildly interesting and, in a couple of cases, dismally pedestrian. Overall, I’d give it a B+. I learned a few new tricks and trends, but nothing earth shattering.
The greater value for me was the opportunity to hear the voices and stories and ideas of a diverse group of artists, makers and other creative types: Bruce Sterling, Sadiq Khan, Darren Aronofsky, Lena Dunham, William Hurley, Nonny de la Pena, and, of course, Mr ‘Boring Company’ himself, to name but a few.
What did I expect from SX? The event website actually captures the big picture pretty well: at its core, SXSW remains a tool for creative people to develop their careers by bringing together people from around the globe to meet, learn and share ideas. (And maybe have a few once-in-a-lifetime experiences.)
If that was the brand promise on offer, the SXSW 2018 certainly delivered.
Parting words, if you go:
Splurge for the Platinum badge, It’s well worth the extra cost.
Stay as close to the Zone as you can to maximize your time on the ground.
Be bold in your content choices; you may never pass this way again.