Ever wonder about the nebulous entity that is SXSW Interactive? The technology, platforms, and personalities that define "cool" in the web world, and the philosophy of this new online order? You're not alone. Read on and you may get a clue, and possibly some Web 2.0-style inspiration.
SXSW - the Music and Film festival, but Interactive?
Uber-geek Ze Frank explains, "In the mid-'90s a bunch of out of work musicians and disgruntled filmmakers bought Macintoshes and were hired by web development companies. Ostracized from our true passion, we spent years coding javascript and making Photoshop templates... and now, ten years later, it's our time to screw them."
We were colonized. But the colonists have begun a Twitter-driven revolt even more boisterous than the audience during Zuckerberg's keynote, and it spells doom for the frackin' toasters.
Around '97-'98 some business type asked me, "Hey you're an Avid editor, can you build my website?" Other than using computers to do the work, the connection between video editing and making websites befuddled me. But then the money part. The money part changes things. Overnight you can go from a guy whose parents consider him a lost cause to a financially independent adult with a cool "techie" gig. But, for me, the real lure of jumping into the web world was anticipating its becoming the greatest single broadcast mechanism in the world, and in this world I would have cleverly positioned myself to excel. Oops. Ten years later, I've edited no new video projects for any broadcasting mechanism, and we're all still suffering through choppy frame rates and 320x240 web displays (sorry Videots). Thanks to YouTube there are, however, plenty to choose from. The requests for website work nevertheless keep coming.
So there seems to be a new bubble, a harder-to-burst one, Bubble 2.0. One couldn't help but notice how the 2008 SXSW Interactive crowd carried itself with a certain swagger. Maybe that just comes with being in Texas, but the real indication that it's simply cool to be there is the very conspicuous presence of Twitterati, the profusion of beautiful people hangers-on types, and the frequent references to web celebrities as "rock stars." That's not proof, you say? Isn't this very phenomenon what proves the music and film industries are cool? Even pre-riot Sarah Lacey exuded sexuality in her now infamous interview, perhaps so much so that it overwhelmed the discussion. But her sense of sexual entitlement merely reflects a charge rippling through the whole Web 2.0 community, where 20-somethings can again become billionaires, the death of traditional IT departments has been proclaimed, and the global conversation is becoming increasingly mobile, decentralized, and hyper-instantaneous.
Over the last couple of decades the line between good code, good products, and good business practices has increasingly blurred, but recently those doing the blurring are those in control, the geeks themselves - not the business executives, not the VCs, not marketing gurus, and not cross-fertilized pundits. Jason Fried's "10 Things" presentation nimbly distilled the successful eradication of the line between the work itself, the workers, and the internet, and although his pithy ideas could easily serve as the foundation of a Web 2.0 philosophy, it was gaming researcher Jane McGonigal's eye-opening aphorism that seems to capture the high hopes and the awesome responsibility we've all seemingly adopted: "We're all in the business of happiness."
With a mission statement like this one, why wouldn't our industry swagger? No good gunfighter comes to town meekly. But are we, armed with iPhones, truly agents of peace, defenders of a new mythos? To say that it's anti-Microsoft and anti-enterprise level solutions goes without saying, since one could draw this deduction by reviewing the Interactive guide alone. But, more properly, one could characterize it as pro-creative yet simple open source web-based solutions with an eye toward, and - here's the crazy part - treating the people right. What people? All of the people, the users of the products, the employees involved in making them, the development community overall, and even the investors expecting a return. Yes, it's no longer taboo to make money on the web, so long as it's not about all about the money. Say what you want about Facebook and Zuckerberg, but he did turn down a billion dollar buy-out: "We have a chance to build a platform that fundamentally changes how people connect or communicate. How many times in your life do you have that chance?"
But don't start the victory celebration quite yet. In a 2007 episode of "the show", Ze Frank refers to SXSW as "actually three festivals, music, film and that red-headed stepchild 'interactive' - that's the one I belong to." Maybe we're no longer stepchildren but still red-headed. You'd think, for instance, that since we're in Austin as the force du jour for five days (albeit prior to the true music festival), that good music would nevertheless be in abundance. Maybe I just missed it, but the Opera party at Stubb's held out promise until it turned out to be five lame bands I'd never heard of, and even the free beer soured when I noticed that the warning label on my Opera-branded beer coozie: "this product contains a chemical known...to cause cancer." Really one of the most interesting bands during Interactive was the People's Party, whose large touring rig also serves as their stage, but who I saw play a total of 30 blissful seconds before a security guard booted them from their self-appointed location, the parking lot of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. Apparently good music is not required during Interactive. Nor is good taste in raincoats. Free raincoats during a rainy day, good idea, but ugly. Thanks Zappos, but next time please make the schwag as attractive as your shoes.
Even our own 2.0 community does not exactly agree. Is Rails a ghetto? What about OpenID? Does Facebook destroy privacy? Does the web ruin or create community and communication? If these questions and many more like them could be answered, then what? By what standard could our world be considered better off? Leaving these questions unanswered, please note that they do share a common assumption in that the answers, whatever they may be, ought to be directed toward happiness or good, and preferably (without sounding too John Stuart Mill here), the greatest good for the greatest number. So we're going to "screw them" by making the world good...exact kind of goodness to be determined. For a head start, see Gary Vaynerchuk's, "Web 2.0 Will Finally Allow Good to Put a Final Nail in Bad." Otherwise, get out your iPhones, staring firing, and maybe we'll know by 2009 SXSW.
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