Welcome to Tech-sas #2: First Day Madness
Dispatches for SXSW 2025
Good morning y’all. I’m tapping this up from the comfort of my Air BnB at an ungodly hour because a) jet lag and b) we didn’t indulge in the yearly tradition of first night madness that is Friday at SXSW. This isn’t because we’re martyrs or anything, simply put we arrived on Wednesday, and we’ve already had quite the intro to this year’s fun and freaky antics of Austin.
A trip over here is never complete with a visit to Hotel Vegas to see a show and Thursday night did not disappoint, with varying quality of punk from across the globe taking to the outdoor tent on a warm night with cold beer. Perfection.
This is why I love this place. You can spend an entire day in back to back lectures that will expand what you thought was possible at the edge of human innovation, and then less than 3 hours later be trying to keep a crowd surfer afloat without crushing your neck in a repackaged parking lot (that’s how assimilated I am, I’ve forgotten the English word for lot).
Friday morning kicked off predictably with queues. You’d think I’d know the drill by now, but still having to get to the back of a queue to may or may not make it in for Hugh Forrest’s opening remarks remains the most anxiety inducing part of the trip. Spoiler alert, we made it in just fine and just in time to hear Hugh drop the elephant in the room. The Austin Convention Centre, iconic home to SXSW’s key notes and biggest sessions, is being torn down to make a ‘bigger and better centre’. If you have been to SXSW, you will know, this centre cannot humanly become any bigger. It takes you a good 10 minutes to get to one side to the other, and I would know because I seem to perpetually always be on the wrong side. The building itself was built in 1992, and as I was born in 1992, I take umbrage with them insinuating it’s too old and creaky around the edges now and needs a face lift.
This change is very typical of an Austin consistently in flux. Since I started coming in 2022, the skyline has changed. I walked down Rainey this week and saw 3 new buildings. The Waterway, a rendered image that plastered downtown with the CGI fervour that in London would insinuate a pipedream never to be fulfilled, has actually been constructed. Next year, I imagine what was a dank disused water way from the Lady Bird Lake will be a lush and verdant walkway, like the High Line but for water life. This convergence between high tech and progress and nature and stability has always been something that’s magnetised me toward Austin, but it does also unsettle me. Do we need to always be moving forward? What happened if we just sat in what was good for a while, and gave the pneumatic drills a rest? I don’t know.
What started off with that bombshell transcended into a textbook day of awe-inspiring stuff. I need to learn that any talk that has a sexy provocative question for a title such as, Are Whistleblowers Going to Save Us From the Harms of Tech?, always almost certainly answers itself with NO in the first 5 minutes, but that didn’t stop it being a great conversation. Delphine Halgand-Mishra, founder of the Signals Network, an organisation that protects Whistleblowers after they’ve blown, was in conversation with Sophie Zhang, an ex-data scientist from Facebook, and Billy Perrigo, a reporter for Time who breaks whistleblowing stories. As you can imagine, getting into the weeds of the real-world implications for risking it all and blowing the whistle was a really great way to spend an hour.
This teed up nicely to introduce what I can only describe as a laugh riot of a keynote with Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal. I’m sure you all know Signal, the only messaging app that actually truly encrypts your data for privacy, but if you don’t know Meredith, I implore you to watch some of her interviews. Not only did she manage to speak eloquently and clearly about the dangers of our data being held by tech monopolists, she made an entire room of people laugh for about 1 hour straight as they learnt that every message they’ve ever sent could be hacked and sent to every person you know any moment. Terrifying stuff delivered with levity and a level of ‘no bullshit’ charisma that I can only dream of emulating. I want to go for cocktails with Meredith but feel she would tear me down in 3 seconds flat if I made the wrong step, and that’s the kind of reign of tantalising terror I’m looking for in my tech CEO’s.
Future modelling and the inability to predict the future took the next step as we heard from Ariel Bernstein’s strategic foresight session. As someone who likes to play on the fringes of futurism, Ariel gave a masterclass on critical thinking and avoiding bias. Effectively, desk research is cute and all, but really you need to be doing year-round horizon scanning and developing a taxonomy for technology. My favourite part was when he cited incorrect signals clouded by biases, like the notion that all Gen Z’s are super healthy but the reality being their mass addiction to vaping is helping them age like milk.
Despite all this being as difficult as double maths, I couldn’t help myself and rounded off the day learning from the team who have built human brain organoids in a lab. It started with one man’s quest to find out what causes autism, to understanding how gene therapy can work out where the gene mutation is, to a truly wild level of creativity and innovation which involved sending human organoids to age rapidly in space based off Shaman’s uncovering DMT and other psychedelics in the Amazon rainforest. Why? To find a cure for Alzheimer’s, duh!
Safe to say we finished the day the only way you can when it’s 30 degrees and you’ve melted your brain in the name of sheer geekery – with an ice cold Modelo overlooking the Lady Bird Lake, probably one of my favourite ways to spend time. An early night was in order, via 313 Pizza because it’s the best in Austin (don’t @ me), but I cannot wait to see what’s up next. Saturday, leggo.