Existentialism and flamethrowers at SXSWi

At SXSWi, I was expecting to be sold the shiny digital future, but what I found was something stranger and unsettling, somewhere fragmented, confused. Is the web getting a bit existential?

After its angry adolescence, the web is growing up and beginning to realise that its parents possibly aren’t total bellends. To bludgeon the metaphor, you could say that after totaling the car, smashing up the house and pissing in the pool, the web and its pilgrims are expressing a growing awareness fear of the consequences of all this youthful abandon.

Jaron Lanier spoke of the internet’s inability to let us forget those teen embarrassments. Could Jack Kerouac have gone on the road if he’d had a FaceBook page knocking about with his embarrassing old teen identity? ‘Dignity is the opposite of real time’. Will we lose the ability to reinvent ourselves and move on, having spent so much time nurturing our teen status online?

Other panels were concerned about us forgetting our loopy teenage years as the pressures of the market starts to reel in all that carefree recklessness. The brilliant ‘What We Learned Watching Kids with Homemade Flamethrowers’ (with @Tim Hwang and @Sawyer Carter Jacobs) celebrated micro-genres, but raised concerns about their survival. These tiny communities producing “the dark matter in the belly of YouTube“, the “genesis of culture” on the web, are threatened because brands can’t easily monetise this kind of dangerous, illegal or utterly bland content, so why store so much of it? (There’s 25.2 hours of homemade flamethrower movies on Youtube).

‘Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design‘ explored the physical manifestations of memory, from James Bridle’s book of his own tweets made permanent as a personal history to The Newspaper Club, which rapidly distributes web content in a printed format perhaps more suited to temporal physical social distribution (handing it out). Projects like these give us something that digital cannot provide… souvenirs.

Wrapping it up. Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote focussed on the responsibility of coming of age, pondering if the web and its creators now face the real challenge of re/building the business models and social structures they/it so easily broken down over the last few years. His point seemed to be, so that real the digital natives don’t hate their parents (that’s us) when they grow up.

For me SXSWi was a new experience, but what I learned was that the digital-o-sphere is becoming rich and complex. It knows it’s a thing in the world and the world is full of other things and not all of them are rubbish in comparison. Maybe it’s finally becoming somewhere that can handle culture (art, masterpieces?) that isn’t just buffoonery.

as @karlmarx put it..

‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’

I mean, who couldn’t ponder the meaning of existence sat behind these dudes?

Yellow coats