The Most Brilliant Woman in the World
SXSW, or South by Southwest, has been held in Austin, Texas, since 1987, making it thirty-four in March 2020. It has steadily grown from a first year opening day attendance of 700 — which surprised everybody involved — to over 73,000 in 2019, by which time the event was many days long and included music, film, tech, and interactive media presented and discussed and paneled out the wazoo.
In other words, SXSW went from an
event friendly to music creatives and fans of, to something that was Important and Meaningful, sponsored by multi-national corporations, slap full of P-HWPCDLRSFCs [1], and covered by media outlets who were happy to spread FLOTSAM [2] everywhere.
In 2020, Austin, Texas, cancelled the event because of an overreaction to the coronavirus [3]. Since event insurance doesn't cover pandemics and natural disasters, well, the financial hit will be even worse for organizers, vendors, etc.
Actually, I don't think it was the city that overreacted per se.
One news report says it was the pullout by Facebook, Twitter, Intel, Google, and TikTok [a Chinese company], among other large corporate sponsors, that spelled the death knell for the March 2020 festivities.
Whatever.
Can you tell I'm not too upset about the cancellation? Let me tell you why.
Remember Comdex? I went to it when it
came to Atlanta in 1997. Held in the Georgia World Congress Center, it was a thing of beauty. I was fast outgrowing my first PC [running windows 3.1 over a Dos 6.0 shell, featuring a 65 megabyte hard drive, floppies A and B, and it had a modem!] and, as a power user of technology [I fully expected it to do what it promised], I wanted to know how I could upgrade and better use technology to make money. My eyes were opened and my inner nerd was born that day.
But when large IT sponsors pulled out because of the fast-changing business environment, well, Comdex was doomed even as users of technology were blossoming.
When events that celebrate creativity and are exciting and affordable, begin to be filled with conferences and panels of experts and badge prices skyrocket, naturally it will end. Conferences grow from small to large and then they fail. It's the nature of the beast.
This cancellation of SXSW in 2020, sure it hurts the pocketbook. But I've been hearing from too many attendees for too long that the event was so big, so spread out, and so expensive that it was no longer friendly to the Indie creative, much less fans. One man told me, "Angela, it would've been cheaper just to visit Austin another time and hit the bars with live acts. I would've met more and better."
The SXSW we know today is so far from its roots that it needs a course correction. Maybe this cancellation will spell the end of it, or at least the beginning of the end as, maybe, organizers will, like the Comdex organizers, try to reinvent themselves for a few years.
I'm going on record here this eighth day of March in 2020, that it won't be too very long and SXSW will be just another entry in Wikipedia visited by folks who thought it was an urban legend.
I'm not sad about that because with change comes, well, change. And that change has been in the making for some years now as Indie creators' ranks swell and fandom is being reinvented around the world.
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[1] P-HWPCDLRSFC is Pussy-Hat Wearing Politically Correct Democrat Liberal RINO Socialist Fascist Commies
