Wall-to-wall street art in Austin, Texas, 2009. (image via Jairus)

Guest contributor Kyle Outlaw just returned from SXSWi where he moderated the “Mobile Ubiquitous Banking and the Future of Money” panel. Kyle is a Senior Information Architect at Razorfish.

What follows is by no means a comprehensive summary of this year’s South by Southwest Interactive event. It is a highly subjective snapshot of some of the themes that I was exposed to during the short amount of time I was there. This is probably fitting since this conference in particular is really subject to individual interpretation, versus an event such as TED in which the user experience can be a little more uniform. The organization of the panels (many equally interesting ones competing against each other for attention) often requires that you make quick and difficult choices and there is a serendipitous element which guarantees that every attendee has a unique experience. This could be by design, and despite the appearance of chaos, there seems to be at the heart of SXSW careful attention to the development of an uber-takeaway on the part of the planners and this what I will attempt to briefly describe here.

Release Early, Often, and with Rap Music

On the day I arrived James Powderly from Graffiti Research Lab was being interviewed by Virginia Hefferman for that day’s Keynote Address. Hefferman writes The Medium column for The New York Times Magazine. James Powderly, a former robotics engineer who worked on tools for the Mars Exploration Rover, is a technologist, artist, “open source evangelist”, and as you may recall recently grabbed headlines for his brief stint in a Chinese prison during the Summer Olympics. Powderly expounded on the mythical role of the trickster in his oevre, and he highlighted the often underrated technical accomplishments of urban graffiti artists. Subways, for example, were being used as a medium to display art to the masses long before the internet. Rap music blasted intermittently from massive speakers on stage as Powderly showed some examples of collaborations with his long time partnership with artist Evan Roth (including LED Throwies and L.A.S.E.R. Tag), and various Chinese rappers such as MC Yan. Powderly discussed how the Graffiti Research Lab’s work eventually landed himself and his team afoul of the law. It was the ‘Free Beer’ laser signage on buildings that initially caught the attention of Chinese authorities, but it was their collaboration with the Free Tibet movement that eventually got him arrested, interrogated, and ultimately put in prison for ten days prior to being deported back to the US. What was perhaps most striking about this panel was how open source as a movement is beginning to transcend the technology industry and is now seeping into global politics, often with disruptive results.

The Death of the Audience

Later on that afternoon, I went to Bruce Sterling’s speech. The death of the author has been predicted for years, however, it is the death of the audience that concerned Bruce Sterling. Sterling is a veteran science fiction writer and Visionary-in-Residence at Wired Magazine. He is best known for his novels and Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology, and he was heavily involved in the creation of the cyberpunk genre along with such luminaries as William Gibson and Rudy Rucker. Showing a feigned (?) lack of deference to his audience, the much-anticipated speaker consumed chips and beer during his hour long discussion on the state of journalism, the economy, and micro-blogging. A regular at SXSW, he did not disappoint. While demonstrating his usual high degree of social media literacy, he expressed some bitterness toward Twitter because of its proclivity to distract audiences (particularly at SXSW), and ruin his legendary house parties. Sterling mourned the current state of journalism, offering a few suggestions for writers looking for alternative payment schemes such as becoming a ‘micro-brand’, maintaining multiple streams of income and so on (Sterling himself keeps residences in Austin, his home town and Italy – where he writes for the Italian version of Wired). On the subject of the user experience of SXSW, while Sterling still believed the South-by-Southwest to be relevant he also thought that it should be split up into smaller more manageable events.

The Power of Free

That was followed the next day by Guy Kawaski’s interview with Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the forthcoming book FREE which is slated for release in July. A central theme of the interview was that content creators need to think differently about what ‘free’ means and moving beyond these preconceptions will be key to figuring out alternative methods to get paid for the goods and services they make. According to Anderson, whereas in Italian there is libros (freedom), and gratis (zero cost) the term free in English is both one dimensional and suspect. When something is offered as free we tend to think it is less valuable or of lower quality. A new economic paradigm is taking shape, argues Anderson, and it is based on the idea that the costs of creating goods and services (particularly software) is being rapidly reduced – to zero. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are just a couple examples of bands that are beginning to make most of their money from performances while giving away music online in stark contrast to the previous model in which concerts promoted album sales. They are pioneers in this newly emerging economy, says Anderson, in part because they are able to get beyond the stigma of free.

Uber-takeaway

On the surface, there wasn’t a huge difference between this year’s SXSW and last year’s. There were the usual impromptu debates in the hallways, cool t-shirts, mohawks, and excellent Tex Mex cuisine. Last year was mostly about Facebook and Twitter (and the frenzied convergence of both at Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote speech). If there is a broad theme that could be applied to this year’s SXSW, it was one of mass systemic upheaval (the logo was a fist clutching cellphone), and how artists and technologists should consider responding to it. No answers but lots of really big questions. At least that was my interpretation of it.