To be clear: SXSW is still fun, and very much worth attending. I did two panels with absolutely brilliant people; went to events to launch fantastic new initiatives; had worthwhile meetings; and saw incredible work. There was live music, there were tacos, there was Shiner Bock. But overall, the festival feels just a bit less essential then it did five years ago.
Part of this is the nature of live events post-Covid, but there's something bigger that SXSW can't really control. We seem to be stuck in an in-between place, where the second wave of the web is cresting and coming back down, and the third wave has yet to build up. All the great tech that drove the buzz at SXSW in past years (Twitter! Uber! Foursquare!) has either disappeared, been en-shittified, or is just something we take for granted. Meanwhile, AI is getting booed and despite a strong market, crypto is has lost its buzz. XR continues to grow slowly but steadily, but we're not all hitting the streets in headsets quite yet.
We're hanging in a trough of disillusionment for several reasons. While the AI products we've seen have a whizzy quality, they haven't managed to solve that many real, day-to-day problems. We're going to hit a massive infrastructure hole that not even all of Jensen Huang's leather jackets sewn together can fix -- digital money is the future until the internet in the store blinks out and the terminals don't work. How exactly do we think all this will work when major countries can still just shut off the internet?
So here we are, stuck in the middle of two eras. For those of us building, it's a good time, albeit a strange one -- we just have to keep our eyes on the horizon and plug away. For everyone else, just hold on -- things are going to come back around soon.