15 March 2006
From Texas, back to life
I’m flying back home after my first time attending SXSW Interactive. Laura and I went for the music last year and to be honest it was kind of a drag. This year, after five days of panels and parties, I’m exhausted – but I feel great. As silly as it sounds, I feel rejuvenated.
I always had a pretty vague idea of what it was about conferences like this that got people so excited. Something about learning, parties with free booze, and meeting your heroes. All of which was fun. But if that was all there was to it I don’t think I’d come back every year. Something happened between the geek-studded panels and VC-funded free drinks.
The fun part
To be fair, I hang out with smart, creative people every day. I never thought of myself as “burned out” or coasting. But there’s something about a few hundred of those kind of people (most of whom you’ve never met) making a pilgrimage to hang out in one place. They bring all that energy with them, and it multiplies. Everyone I talked to or overheard in the halls or in the bars was excited about something. Spending all day and night talking to people about things they’re excited about had a surprising effect on me. I’m excited too.
When Jeff and I ran into him in the elevator on our way out on the first night, the inimitable Shaun Inman described the breakfast buffet at our hotel as “breakfast with your blogroll”, and he was right. Our hotel was one of the closest to the convention center and it felt like “everybody” was there. It was pretty surreal to walk downstairs every morning and eat scrambled eggs with your RSS feeds.
And dammit if everybody isn’t just so freaking nice. I don’t know why I’m surprised, but it was just so consistent. These are people who I respect massively, who I already felt like I knew (but didn’t), and they all seemed to go out of their way to act like friends. People like Shaun and Jon and Bryan and Paul and Jemma and Mike and Greg, people whose URLs I knew better than their names, who just turned out to be amazingly nice people. And they weren’t the exception by a long shot.
The part about the panels
Overall the panels were also better than I expected. I started off with Traditional Design and New Media with Khoi Vinh, Mark Boulton and Jason Santa Maria. Despite being the first panel on the first day, it was a fascinating discussion and a great start to the conference. Everything kept coming back to the same question: where is the emotion in web design? Mark asked, “When was the last time you felt something about a web page, the way you’ve felt about a car?”. When we still have to spend so much time on every project reinventing the assumptions, we can’t focus on things like art direction and creating emotional (not just functional) experiences. We’re investing in (re)creating the platform instead of creating experiences.
Then, on the last day of the conference, during the Next Generation of Web Apps panel on the last day (which was also fascinating on its own) Jeff nudged me and pointed up at the screen. Jeffrey Veen was talking about open APIs and giving users the power to bring data and tools together. And there on the projector was a screenshot of chicagocrime.org, a site I designed!
As if having the slide up in front of that audience for a good five minutes wasn’t cool enough, hearing the Jeffrey Veen go on about how excited he was about the site made me feel like getting asked to dance in junior high. Of course I have to give Adrian all the credit for coming up with the idea and building the site, but it was great to be a part of it. Besides, he wasn’t there.
The thinky-feely part
As the interactive panels started winding down, the music festival was just getting going. All the bands and fans and execs were milling around town, but it was still the geeks who were the rockstars. The geeks had all the good parties, and packed audiences hanging on every word. It got me thinking. There’s a lot of ego on the web. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It’s egotistical of four designers and bloggers to quit their jobs and start their own consultancy. It’s egotistical of a designer to charge people for software he made on his own as a side project. It’s egotistical of an entrepreneur to tell people he thinks their jobs are a waste of money (and charge them $19 to read as much in a PDF). It’s egotistical of a blogger to quit his day job and ask readers to support him with donations. It’s egotistical of anybody to think their idea is new and what they have to say is valuable.
Maybe sometimes it’s about believing in an idea more than in yourself, and maybe sometimes there really isn’t anything but pure ego backing it up. But from the outside it’s usually hard to tell the difference.
This year a lot of panels were about going it on your own. Starting your own business, creating your own products, being independent. Ego is a powerful tool for independence. Ego allows you to ignore being wrong, or incapable, or unoriginal. It forces you to advance on the foolish and impossible idea that you have anything worthwhile to offer. Maybe the theme of this years conference should have been “how much is your ego worth?”.
By the time the famous closing speech came around, my attention span was waning and my eyes were starting to glaze over. If you’ve ever heard Bruce Sterling) speak, you’ll probably chuckle and tell me I had it coming, but man. I was blown away. Talk about ego. This guy doesn’t so much speak as pontificate, routinely describes his own books as “visionary” and throws out high-concept memes into the wild with full intent and confidence that they will stick. 37signals have got nothing on this guy.
And it works. People listen, because it’s worth hearing. I’m told that in past years his speeches were “more techy”, but this year he was in a “dark, literary mood”. I won’t try to describe what he actually said – suffice it to say that it was inspirational in a weird, dark and sometimes unintelligible way – but I will link you to the audio. There’s lots of intellectual hand-wringing of the worst kind, and ideas of questionable merit with dubious explanations. But it’s also thought-provoking, entertaining, depressing and a little hopeful. And after all that, the headline for the society page report would probably still read: Grown man reads poetry in public, weeps aloud.
The part about me
I mentioned at the beginning that I was feeling rejuvenated – all hopped up about taking over the world with geeky ideas. But there’s more to it than that. I just feel excited about doing things again. I remember spending hours in my room when I was in high school picking out songs on the guitar and not even thinking about getting up to do anything else. I forgot what it was like to be so excited about doing something that you don’t think about how much time it’s going to take, or whether it will pay off in the long run.
I haven’t touched my guitar for months – it’s been packed up in the case. I always say I don’t have time. That’s been my excuse for everything lately. I don’t post to my site because I don’t have time. I don’t take on new freelance work or start new personal projects because I don’t have time. I chalk it up to living a “balanced life” and pretend I already have too much to do.
But what am I doing that’s so important? I have a job that doesn’t require me to work long hours, I spend weekends watching too many movies and playing video games too much. I’m not raising a family, or running a community center, I’m just being lazy. And I’m buying into the myth of busy-ness. If I’m busy, I’m important. And if I feel busy, I can feel important. I don’t have to risk criticism or failure or really anything at all. That’s not ego, that’s just dull.
I’ve been trying to act like an adult since I was a little kid. I didn’t leave my home state for college, and I didn’t leave my college town after I graduated. There’s nothing wrong with that. I love where I live, I love the experience I’ve had and the people I’ve worked with. But I’m always getting ahead of myself.
Lately I’ve been dreaming of backyards with fences and dogs and children. A certain, stable future is the kind of thought that comforts me. But I need to learn act my age sometimes. And right now isn’t the time for me to turn down opportunities to preserve a routine I haven’t established yet. Maybe when I have four kids and a successful freelance business, I can turn down amazing opportunities and have balanced priorities. For now, I’m going to keep my options open.
I’m excited about that.
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