SXSW 2012 recap
I just got back from SXSWi 2012, my third time at the interactive part of the festival. I got there on Friday and got back last night. I went to co-lead a “core conversation” pondering the question “Do People Really Want Participatory Government?” with my colleague Michelle Chronister. I’ll write more about that experience after Michelle and I process it.
SXSW can be really frustrating. I think Matt LeMay is right to describe it as people acting out the Internet. There’s a constant pressure to zip from one place to the next, to meet someone more important, to attend a more important panel, to get into a more important party. It’s just like zoning out online and clicking from blog post to TED talk to article to whatever on the Internet. It’s exhuasting and it rarely leaves you with anything.
SXSW is so overwhelming that it creates a nice foil for quiet moments. That is, my favorite parts of the event were when I was somewhere relatively quiet having a real conversation with someone or when I got to be by myself. My favorite memories of the trip were the times I walked alone from downtown to the AT&T center – a nice long walk through a beautiful city, with time to think through the countless scattered conversations I’d just had.
Presenting was fun too, but like I said, I’ll write about that later. I’ll just say that the response was overwhelmingly positive and that I was surprised at how badly I wanted to be alone afterward.
The quiet parts of SXSW this year were a nice reminder (for me) to stop worrying about what else is out there and focusing on what’s in front of you. I need to remember that all the time. It can be pretty painful when I forget it.
Bonus fact: I had a $5 bill in my wallet when I left San Diego. I gave it to a friend to pay for parking. Other than that, I used no cash from Friday to Monday. Impressive!
several black olives
permanent flower displays
two long, warm breadsticks
Haiku based on Marilyn Hagerty’s THE EATBEAT: Long-awaited Olive Garden receives warm welcome
I took the picture on the left the last time I went surfing, exactly a week before Cate was born. It’s been really popular on Tumblr (for me) and passed 5,000 notes today.
I did a Google image search on it to see how far it’d gone and found the photo on the right, which is an old Astronomy Picture of the Day. Crazy how similarly placed the moon is in both.
Why I’m an Occupier
Millions of Americans have shaped their lives based on the assumption that a variety of institutions existed to protect them and advocate for them: government agencies, banks, schools, corporations, religions, etc. They’ve taken student loans, mortgages, gone to war, built careers based on these assumptions. Now they’re forced to face a variety of painful truths, including:
- Most of these organizations don’t care about anyone’s individual rights or welfare at all. Many of them don’t even work to achieve their stated missions. They exist merely to sustain themselves.
- Beyond sustaining themselves, many of these organizations that exist explicitly to serve individuals are flagrantly serving OTHER organizations at the expense of individuals. In a horrifically ironic way, the violent reactions to protestors from our police forces has made this case brutally clear. Another good example of this is congress’s recent capitulation to dairy farm lobbyists at the expense of our children’s health by defining pizza as a vegetable. Wall street bailouts are another great example. The seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are another. This disingenuousness is insulting.
- Many of these organizations are partially or fully funded by tax dollars. These are tax dollars that are forced from individuals’ hands. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are literally separated from your family and sent to jail. You have no choice but to fund these organizations that work against you. This is where the tea party most clearly overlaps with the occupy movement. Note: the UC Davis police officer who sprayed the kids made $116,000 in 2010. I paid for part of that.
Occupy, by agitating enough organizations into showing how much they truly care for individual liberties (surprise: they don’t), is now forcing more people to ask themselves: “is this what we want?”
Do we want a militarized police force? Do we want a police state? Will I want to send my daughter to a state university, knowing that she might be sent to the hospital with chemical burns if she chooses to protest peacefully there? Do we want to be at war? Why are we paying for this? Worse, why are we going into debt to pay for this? Do we want to concede so many of our liberties to so few organizations – particularly organizations that don’t care about us?
There are a million more questions. Each with a million answers. And each pointing to a fact that more and more people are aware of: many of the institutions we depend on are completely broken. They are led by cowards. We have been asleep. We are paying for it.
Wake up.
Reblogging myself (with some slight edits) here because the original post is a little too rambly. This is the pith. Also, people seem to like it, so in case you didn’t see it.
More of my posts observing the tension between humans and organizations.
Why I’m an Occupier
It’s a moral issue. The best label I’ve found for my moral beliefs is “agnostic Mormonism” and I’ve recently been fond of calling myself a “liberaltarian” to describe my politics. Having grown up Mormon and having been a Mormon missionary for two years, my morality is informed heavily by Christ’s teachings. I love Jesus’s humanitarianism. It’s this humanitarianism that makes me sympathetic to the occupy movement, particularly after this past week.
On Thursday in New York City, retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis is arrested. From a story preceding his arrest:
Mayor Bloomberg has stated the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. Mr. Lewis called that rationale “a farce.”
“They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they’re concerned about a dirty park. That’s obnoxious, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Lewis said.
Yesterday, UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike pepper sprays a group of students protesting on campus. Watch the video of this one.
The video is what pushed me over the edge. Seeing a man clad in boots and a helmet spray a group of students sitting on the ground (twice!) as if he were watering a garden, is too much for me. I’m an alum of the University of California. I can’t believe this happened in my country, in my state, at my university.
That the occupy movements lack definition is a feature, not a bug. Because occupy has no centralized leader or mission, everyone is allowed to project their own meaning onto it. I’ve seen occupy as a manifestation of anxiety over the influence of organizations in our lives. I believe it’s the same anxiety felt by people who identify with the Tea Party (which I found repulsive, probably based on my own classism).
Here’s what I see happening:
Millions of Americans have shaped their lives based on the assumption that a variety of institutions existed to protect them and advocate for them: government agencies, banks, schools, corporations, religions, etc. They’ve taken student loans, mortgages, gone to war, built careers based on these assumptions. Now they’re forced to face a variety of painful truths, including:
- Most of these organizations don’t care about anyone’s individual rights or welfare at all. Many of them don’t even work to achieve their stated missions. They exist merely to sustain themselves.
- Beyond sustaining themselves, many of these organizations that exist explicitly to serve individuals are flagrantly serving OTHER organizations at the expense of individuals. In a horrifically ironic way, this week’s violence made this case brutally clear. Another good example of this is congress’s recent capitulation to dairy farm lobbyists at the expense of our children’s health by defining pizza as a vegetable. Wall street bailouts are another great example. The seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are another. This disingenuousness is insulting.
- Many of these organizations are partially or fully funded by tax dollars. These are tax dollars that are literally forced from individuals’ hands. If you don’t pay your taxes, you are literally separated from your family and sent to jail. You have no choice but to fund these organizations that work against you. This is where the tea party most clearly overlaps with the occupy movement. Note: the UC Davis police officer who sprayed the kids made $116,000 in 2010. I paid for part of that.
Occupy, by agitating enough organizations into showing how much they truly care for individual liberties, is now forcing more people to ask themselves: “is this what we want?”
Do we want a militarized police force? Do we want a police state? Will I want to send my daughter to a state university, knowing that she might be sent to the hospital with chemical burns if she chooses to protest peacefully there? Do we want to be at war? Why are we paying for this? Worse, why are we going into debt to pay for this? Do we want to concede so many of our liberties to so few organizations – particularly organizations that don’t care about us?
There are a million more questions. Each with a million answers. And each pointing to a fact that more and more people are aware of: many of the institutions we depend on are completely broken. They are led by cowards. We have been asleep. We are paying for it.
I don’t know what to do, but I will not give another dollar to the UC system until Lt. John Pike is fired and stripped of all severance pay. I will not donate to any elected official currently holding office or any major political party. I’ll have to think of some other things to do.
Wake up.
The Words of Steve Jobs »
A few months before my sixth birthday, my parents brought home a Macintosh. It was 1984. One of my clearest early memories is sitting alone in the guest bedroom where we’d set up the computer, playing with MacPaint. It was magical. Computers have been a central part of my life ever since. I love them, and I feel very lucky that I get paid to help other people benefit from them. I’m grateful to Steve Jobs for making computers for people, even a five-year-old boy.
Five years ago, Dusdin and I collaborated on a project I called the “Decimal Week.” I wanted to celebrate finishing grad school with a series of 10 consecutive days of songs and photographs on Dustin’s and my blog, 1.618 (RIP).
The idea behind 1.618 was that mp3 bloggers talked too much and that the mp3 blogosphere created too much pressure to discover new bands or surface really esoteric songs. The Internet was at once making music easier and less enjoyable to find. Dusdin and I just wanted to share songs that we liked with the world and tried as hard as possible to select songs with as little thought as possible. I don’t think either of us could ever say why we picked the images we did, but we liked having images accompany the songs.
We named the blog 1.618—after the golden ratio—because I had developed a numerology habit from listening to too much Boards of Canada. I like the idea of a number being so precise and beautiful and irrational and infinite. I think it makes a nice metaphor for art, or for the appreciation of art. No one knows why people like the things they do. It also made a nice metaphor for the blog, as we posted one random song after another, just like the stream of digits in an irrational number.
Sometimes patterns appear to emerge in irrational numbers, and I thought it would be fun to let the Decimal Week look like a pattern was beginning to emerge in the blog. We never talked about what we were doing on the blog and we didn’t allow comments, so I don’t know if anyone noticed or cared.
Dusdin was starting to experiment with studio lighting, so he came over with a backdrop and a bunch of gels and we spent at least an hour taking pictures of me dancing around in my apartment. I had an image in my head of how I wanted it all to turn out. I was horrified to load the photos onto my computer when we were done and realize that the image I had in my head was directly informed by Apple’s silhouetted iPod ads. We’d spent an evening making really awkward iPod ad ripoffs.
I corrected our course by laying the photos over one another in Photoshop and applying different fills and gradients to create the final images. I liked how it turned out. I still do.
Five years later, I’m still happy with the mix, and I miss having Dusdin nearby (which is not to say that I want to do another project like this). The songs still excite me and they remind me of a wonderful time when my life started to take focus, and when I first started dating my Shannon who’s now pregnant with our first daughter. It was a very good Decimal Week. We don’t do 1.618 anymore, but life continues to be completely and fully irrational and beautiful and I know to be very suspicious if a pattern ever appears to emerge.
Here are the final images and links to their accompanying songs:
Junior Boys – “In The Morning” (original post)
New Order – “Dreams Never End” (original post)
Broken Social Scene – “7/4 (Shoreline)” (original post)
Lilys – “Black Carpet Magic” (original post)
The Fall – “The Classical” (original post)
New Order – “Temptation” (original post)
Vitalic – “La Rock 01″ (original post)
Wolf Parade – “Grounds for Divorce” (original post)
M83 – “Run Into Flowers (Abstrackt Keal Agram Remix)” (original post)
Here’s a list of the most popular popular government URLs from the past week:
- 4,592 clicks — NASA - Dallas Family’s Tradition Boosts NASA for 100 Flights
- 3,593 clicks — NASA - ‘Elephant Trunks’ in Space
- 3,531 clicks — NASA - Multimedia - Video Gallery
- 3,239 clicks — Air Force officials identify Frankfurt Airport shooting deaths
- 3,160 clicks — Human Space Flight (HSF) - Realtime Data
- 2,901 clicks — Magnitude 6.6 - SOLOMON ISLANDS
- 1,979 clicks — NASA - Captured From the Ground
- 1,915 clicks — Air Force Week in Photos
- 1,720 clicks — PDF of presentation by Rep Paul Ryan
- 1,702 clicks — NASA - Anchored
We’ll be sharing information on popular links more regularly in the future. We hope you find them interesting and useful.
That is, those are the most-clicked .gov and .mil URLs that were shortened using bit.ly over the past week (or so).
I’ve been working to make this happen for over two years now and it’s going off better than I’d ever imagined. No one has ever had better insight into the entirety of U.S. government content online before now. Also, bit.ly is rad.
I'm Jed Sundwall. This is my blog, which you can follow on Tumblr or via RSS. You can talk to me on Twitter.
