At this year’s SXSWi, I met several such types. At a bar called Javelina, I ran into a twenty-five-year-old employee of a social media startup, backed by Marc Andreessen’s high-flying venture capital firm. We were both attending yet another party hosted by yet another tech firm. When I told her I was a journalist, she showed her disgust by pantomiming a hand job. Why, she asked me, speech slurred almost beyond intelligibility, do we need journalism when we have social media?
I met another person at an otherwise anodyne dinner for Israeli startups, where a dozen or so entrepreneurs presented their companies to potential investors and partners, along with a few journalists. To protect the guilty, I’ll call him Brian. In his late twenties and hailing from South Florida, Brian had the kind of hazy résumé that defines a number of unaffiliated SXSW participants. (While many SXSWi attendees, buoyed by expense accounts, are sent by their employers, 37 percent paid full freight this year.) He was some sort of entrepreneur or consultant, or a serial entrepreneur, someone who had helped launch others’ startups and was now working on his own.
I learned this in fragments. When Brian first sat down at our table, gulping from what would be one of at least five glasses of red wine, I asked him what he did.
“What do I do? I do many things,” he said, before flashing a wide smile, pleased with himself.
“I prefer to ask people what they’re passionate about,” he said. “What are you passionate about?”
It was a line he used on anyone who had the ill fortune to approach our table. He delivered it—and a windy, opaque explanation of the community-building website he was developing—with the stilted pacing of someone trying to make a much-practiced speech seem off the cuff.
By the end of the evening, I still had little idea what Brian’s company did, though it sounded like some version of Facebook’s Pages feature. He hadn’t honed the sort of logline that is de rigueur at SXSW: “It’s like Twitter but for videos”; “It’s Tumblr meets Airbnb—but for business”; “It’s a place where people can meet and exchange career advice.” Like LinkedIn? “Yeah, but better.”
I never learned what he was passionate about. None of us could stomach flipping the question around, as he clearly wanted us to. Finally, he stood up and reached out to shake hands.
“Follow me on Twitter,” he said. “I’ll follow you back.”
He stumbled to the door. I saw him enter the hallway and spin around, confused. A fleeting look of sadness appeared on his face, before he found the stairs and was gone. That evening, as I unloaded the day’s haul of business cards out of my pocket and left them on a table, likely never to be examined again, I imagined Brian doing the same. Perhaps he called his wife and told her he had made some important contacts. More likely, he passed out with his shoes on.
In fairness, many of the people I met in Austin were nothing like this. From the Belgian startup founder working on a new kind of courier service to the average attendee in the convention center elevator, SXSWers were often friendly and solicitous—a style of self-presentation entirely consistent with the festival’s networking ethos. But these aren’t the encounters that stick. And the attitudes reflected above—the condescension and privilege, the irrational self-belief and contempt for opposing views—indicate something wrong at the heart of the tech industry’s preeminent festival of ideas. More broadly, they’re part of a rotten culture that garishly celebrates itself while remaining divorced from the concerns of its customers. During SXSW, Austin becomes a money-soaked mélange of hyper-consumerism and techno-utopianism. In the bazaar of terminally bad ideas—amid the panels on DJ epistemology, the hackathons, and the Spotify parties—it was completely unexceptional, say, for a VP from Demand Media, the notorious content farm, to be preaching from his designated panel (which was, of course, called “Perfection: Algorithms to Optimize Human Existence”) that ubiquitous sensors “will usher in a new golden age of humanity.” (The event’s Twitter hashtag provided its own unwitting miniaturist commentary on the self-regarding folly of it all: #perfect.)
by Jacob Silverman, Baffler | Read more:
Image: Michael Duffy
