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Hey readers! Andrew here. Welcome to a special edition of Internet Insider.
We know you usually get our newsletter in the morning, but the Daily Dot is live on the ground at South by Southwest (SXSW) to give you the essential news from the tech, film, and music conference.
For the next few days you’ll get a daily column from Ramon Ramirez, our news director, about SXSW, and a “diary” from our team of reporters who are sharing the interesting, cool, or weird things they see.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know about Friday at SXSW.
—A.W.
Why the Daily Dot is covering South by Southwest
The first rule of South by Southwest (SXSW) is that you’ll quietly seethe twice daily. A technology enthusiast will say something tone-deaf while holding a microphone. A politician will make a false promise. It’s OK.
At the Daily Dot, we cover internet culture, and few other conferences weld as many dystopian, confounding new online frontiers as the annual Austin, Texas in-person.
Known historically for music, the 10-day media bonanza has increasingly skewed toward tech ever since Twitter became a thing here in 2009. I was there. It was nuts. We were tweeting our locations and statuses and bam—suddenly you meet two real people from the World Wide Web at an area bar… to talk about Twitter.
Today that means we’re here to decode the buzz phrases that you’ve likely ignored—Web 3.0, NFT, Crypto, Creator Economy—and basically figure out what is of societal concern as weird guys with Teslas accumulate the wealth built around it and try to move to space. (Or whatever.)
So strap in, dear reader, as we untangle the mess with more earnest glee than a doomed Beto O’Rourke stump speech.
Yee haw,
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✏️ REPORTER’S DIARY
Our team of reporters are on the ground at SXSW. Here are some of the notable, interesting, and weird things they are seeing.
🗣️ Jack Conte, CEO and co-founder of Patreon, hates advice–so much so, that at his SXSW panel today, he told listeners to shout “Fuck you, Jack!” every time he gave it. I probably told him to fuck off about 15 times today. Click here to read more about the panel. —Grace Stanley
🦇 My first activation at SXSW was at WarnerMedia House, which featured the costumes Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, and Paul Dano wore in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. It also promoted something called hybrid NFT trading cards. All in all, it was a little tame on the interactive element (compared to previous brand activations I’ve attended, which have included actors, singers, and more). The house mainly serves as an advertisement for the DC brand as it attempts to compete with Disney’s massive output. But, it was cool to see Pattinson’s bat suit up close. —Tiffany Kelly
🌐 A panel on metaverse’s potential to “rebuild society, but better” introduced a lot of idealistic ideas about how VR and AR could build empathy among different groups. However, the answers to how we could get to this utopic version of the metaverse remain vague and unclear. Perhaps I’m a cynic, but many of the proposed visions of democratization, shared perspectives, and connection repeat the early hopes of Web2. When asked about how this new evolution of the internet can avoid the pitfalls of the current digital climate, the solution appeared to be “we must learn from our mistakes.” But again, how exactly will the builders of Web3 do this? It appears the only tangible piece of advice the panel had was that users should “not be passive” in the construction of the new internet. That advice seems easier said than done. —Daysia Tolentino
👏 I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep, punishing winds, or being in the presence of two strong women I admire, but tears sprung to my eyes several times during the abortion panel led by former Texas state Senator Wendy Davis and Texas state Representative Donna Howard. Particularly at the end of it, during the question section, when a young woman stood and profusely thanked the two women, explaining: “I became pregnant right at the start of the pandemic. It was life threatening, I have an illness. I take medication that could have been detrimental to my fetus. There was no way that I could’ve had a healthy baby. And I had to call the clinic every single day to find out… whether Ted Cruz… whether it was legal that day, or not. And I just want to say thank you for fighting for us. I want to burn the house down right now.” —Mariam Sharia
Now Playing: 🎶“Good Things” by The Menzingers🎶