10 Things I Learned at SXSW 2008…

I have attended South by Southwest Interactive since 2000, have been a featured speaker since 2003 and on the advisory board since 2004. This year marked my 9th at the festival which was held March 7-16 in Austin, Texas.

Each year as soon as I get home, I put together a short essay on my impressions of the event in the form of a list of ten things I learned. (previous years: 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002).

Ten Things I Learned about SXSW 2008…

1. Exhaustion: The overwhelming feeling I’ve got after SXSW 2008 is exhaustion. The conference is several hundred percent larger then when I first attended 8 years ago and just getting your mind around its offerings can leave you winded. Throw in the logistical gymastics of arriving at what you’d like to see (events and sessions are now spread over an area roughly the size of Northampton, Massachusetts), wanting to spend time with friends you only see once a year, pesky intrusions like eating, sleeping, shitting and showering and by the end, I wasn’t invigorated, inspired or even conscious of where I was. I just wanted to be left alone.

A good part of that has nothing to do with the event itself. I’ll be 35 this summer and can’t go 10 days on 20 hours of sleep. I can’t skip meals and expect to be wide eyed and perky. Since 2006, I’ve also attended SXSW Music which means after one conference (which used to be plenty) I spend 5 days in the company of 1700 bands, several hundred films and the competing agendas of the dozen comrades who join me. Throw in the allergies I didn’t used to have, quality time with my girlfriend who came along this year and something called SxSARS waiting for me about about 17 minutes after I stepped off the plane in San Francisco and the conference feels like a fugue state I slipped into sometime earlier this month. I’m just beginning to remember it but the process is like picking through a room full of silly string.

2. Preparation: It’s not as though I didn’t get the hurricane warnings. I had my SXSW calendar laid out using Sched.org  and have attended long enough to block out certain can’t miss events. My geektastic friends even have a wiki so no one need ever feel lost amid the throb and clatter. We do this so that once you get to Austin, you spend your time doing instead of wasting it deciding what to do next.

3. Dislocation: Planning only helps so much. Look at the grid. At any one time, whatever you elect to do, you’re missing 10 other things you could be doing, meals and deep breaths not included. An laying out your agenda like this blunts the spontaneity that makes SXSW so wonderful. Whom will you meet? What conversation will you have and what will it ignite inside you? Where will you end up at what ungodly hour (some of my past answers have been "upside down in a cargo bed", "channeling my dead grandmother" "talking with Joseph Gordon-Levitt" and "Dripping Springs, Texas) and what story will you have to tell?

The day before the conference began, I ran into my old friend Ryan Gantz. I see Ryan once a year in Austin yet in recent years, have managed to have The Conversation That Sums Up The Entire Week with him several times. This year’s conclusion went something like this:

"Wherever you are, if you are enjoying yourself, that’s where you are supposed to be. Don’t fight it. Relish it."

That’s what I did and it worked. Whatever I missed and didn’t know about, well, I didn’t know about it. And whatever I did…

4. Co-Location: Thanks to tools like Twitter, it’s possible to know where all of your friends are at anytime. If you really feel like you’re missing the fun, follow their bat signals and join them. Also SXSW now podcasts just about every session at the conference so you can always catch up later on whatever you didn’t get to see because, in my case, you were dismembering crustaceans with the gang from Smith Magazine.

Sweating about missing something is a waste of time and energy. Even to a FOMO lunatic like me, saying "relax" in the face of a whirlwind seems counterintuitive. I know now its the only way to enjoy it.

5. Participation: I was fortunate this year to moderate a panel on the last day of the Interactive Festival called "How to RAWK After SXSW" about how the inspiration of the conference can fuel your creativity throughout the year. The final question (from Church of the Consumer’s Jackie Huba) was this

"I’m planning a business conference for the fall. How do I make it like this conference? How do I make it not suck?"

Us panelists didn’t say a word. The audience answered for us. 

• Talk to us and not at us.

• Demonstrate you passion for your subject

• Present a diversity of opinions.

• Talk about ideas, not products.

• Make us feel like participants not just attendees.

Despite its size, I still believe that at South by Southwest, no idea is too crazy and every voice matters. My fellow panelists wanted to burst through paper like a high football team at the beginning of our session. So we did. My buddy Ryan Gantz wanted a giant lego playpen on the convention center floor and nobody stood in his way. Blocks, kickball games, a keynote speaker leading the crowd in the soulja boy dance, how many other conferences have these without premeditation or a big promotion dollars behind them? No permission ordeals or paperwork roadblocks. No "what will the sponsors think?" SXSW sees the creativity of its attendees as an asset to be nourished instead of a risk to be managed.

6. Retribution. This climate of creative liberty comes with its own risks. Or rewards depending on whom you ask.

By now you’ve probably heard plenty about the Mark Zuckerberg/Sarah Lacey keynote (a fair assessment of the mess. A meaner one in cartoon form). I wasn’t there and don’t have much to add accept the feeling I left with as an attendee who heard about it secondhand. And that’s that Ms. Lacy, perhaps accidentally, certainly tragically, misread the audience’s desires and its power. Folk do not come to SXSW to be talked at but to be conversed with. And while an onstage interview might not seem like a logical forum for the audience to have their say, they’re there, in living color, in vastly larger numbers than you and twittering like mad to one another. Assuming you know better than them, in action, demeanor or speech is a death sentence. Blaming everyone but yourself afterward is just plain dumb.

What did I learn from this? People are rude when you barge in on their party and tell them how to dance. No one should be insulted when they make this mistake in earnest. But if that person isn’t on their best behavior when making new friends, something our mothers taught us long ago, they deserve whatever is coming to them.

7. Obligation: I have spend much of the last six months eating healthy, exercising regularly, losing weight, getting plenty of sleep and feeling great about it. SXSW does not provide the ideal circumstances for any of these pursuits. Nonetheless, I felt an obligation this year unlike others, to be the healthiest me I could those 12 days in Austin. And not just to my vanity but to the friends I have at this conference whom I love dearly but only get to see once a year.

I know I am the kindest towards myself and the most generous towards others when I feel like a healthy, energetic human being and a soul in fit spiritual condition. Since I have but a short time with these people, I owed it to both them and myself to be in that place during our time together.

I didn’t succeed entirely (as my long-suffering cabinmate will attest) but I did try. And I will try harder again next year.

8. Recitation: One foggy, aimless night this year, I was tired, ready to turn in early when a friend informed me that a gathering had broken out at the Omni Hotel, a regular watering hole of conference’s past. I took my sagging self over there and ended up in brilliant conversation with three strangers, all of were relatively new to South by Southwest. Somehow I ended up playing elder, telling stories of how it used to be and laughing along with them at the changes.

At some point, one posed the question "What is SXSW for?".

"I always thought it was about letting designers and developers meet up and share ideas" said one of my new friends, brave enough to go first. I replied that I’ve always felt that this gathering was about technology being more than just design and programming but about how it shapes our collective culture. That SXSW Interactive meant more than just those who worked in and made money off technology but for those who used it in humanistic pursuits as well.

My new friends and I continued on for another hour, grateful for this awakened camaraderie. I left that with a new sense of purpose: To share what I’ve experienced these last nine years as part of cumulative history, one that belongs to all us each spring in Austin. And respecting that each year is someone else’s first year.

9. Inspiration (a different kind):  In one of many great conversations with my friend Jessica, I found myself asking "Where is this year’s great moment of inspiration? The utterance that changes your entire world view and makes you thank God Almighty you came to Austin?" At past conferences, it’s come from Bruce Sterling, Alex Steffen and a breakaway lunch with two new friends. This year, it arrived with a whisper instead of a yell.

I no longer come to South by Southwest to be hit by a lightning bolt but to fuel the fires I’ve already lit. I first came to Austin in the spring when I was 25, unemployed, angry and looking to give purpose to my newly-minted adulthood. It’s almost ten years later. I’m now an experienced professional with a little community respect and confident in my own next moves–projects borne of creativity, passion and good will. These are values SXSW taught me many years ago. I now arrive each spring not only to be reminded of and reinvigorated by them, but to say thank you for setting my life on this path.

10. Gratitude: Nearly two weeks after South by Southwest 2008, I can best sum up its lessons as appreciation and gratefulness. It is not the same friendly intimate gathering I arrived at those many springs ago. But neither are we the same people nor is this the same world. And since I don’t sanctify the past nor wish away the present, I believe this conference’s growth and success are as much a reflection of what we’ve learned and how we’ve grown over the last eight years than the economy, culture, or technology itself.

If we think we’ve created a monster, then why come to Austin each spring to feed it?

I can’t expect SXSW to be what it once was anymore than I can expect myself to be. Nor can I deny that hurts some even to read that out loud. But if we stay fixed on what has been lost rather than what can now be found then we might as well stay home because that kind of forced sorrow is a pit with no bottom. And I don’t see the point of spending a week down there.

Instead I’m going to can look at what marches on: excitement and itch I feel when March approaches, the joy at arriving amidst all the wonderful friends I’ve made, the passion we have for this time together and the role it plays in the rest of our lives. Most of all, I think of the profound gratitude I have towards South by Southwest for giving me the life I celebrate today.

Yes, I am tired, the kind that comes from shouting at the sky, the kind that needs a full year of thought and recovery just to be able to dream it all up again next March. But not the kind that is too sick of it all to say thank you.

Thank you.

(2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002)

• Category: Our Web, Ourselves.