The Year SXSW Sold Out To The Military-Industrial Complex

It used to be that a partier hurling on you on 6th Street was the worst part of attending South by Southwest, Austin’s annual multi-festival that covers the worlds of film, music and technology. These days things are a little bit grosser; at this year’s fest the CIA was on site handing out commemorative frisbees, trying to lure in coders and founders who were attending SXSW Interactive. The idea that down the street daring new films and exciting new bands were playing while the US Army was handing out little swag bags to Silicon Valley types exposes the bitter dichotomy that has grown inside of SXSW–not because the festival is bad but because the world has changed.

Upon its founding, SXSW was a music festival, Austin’s answer to New York’s New Music Seminar. People loved it immediately. After a few years the folks behind the fest added a film and multimedia element. That multimedia element turned into SXSW Interactive, which slowly became kind of a tech world catch-all. At the time it didn’t seem so crazy, because after all the world of garage-based founders and indie film and indie rock felt spiritually connected. They were all upstarts trying to bring something new and cool into the world, operating outside the system. You have to understand there was a time, and I swear to you this is true, where tech was utopian.

The earliest innovators, while perhaps libertarian deep down, were pursuing technology and especially the Internet as a way to change the world for the better. The earliest tech guys were birthed in the glow of The Whole Earth Catalog, and I’m not drawing that connection loosely. Stewart Brand, co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, was involved with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and then came up with the idea for the counterculture magazine while tripping on acid. In the 1980s he co-founded the WELL, one of the earliest and most formative online communities. We used to say “information wants to be free,” and it reflected the spirit of guys like Brand, but these days it’s your data that is the most coveted resource online.

Gone is the hippie spirit that drove innovation, replaced by VCs and startups looking to rush products they can offload for big bucks. The aesthetic of the hippie still remains – you have Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey doing long and intense Vipassana meditation retreats – but it’s all in the service of making more cash. Everybody’s eating organic and seeing gurus and wearing vaguely spiritual beads but they’re all essentially Gordon Gecko in a little bit of West Coast cosplay. They traded in the suspenders for hoodies.

The change happened almost overnight; what had been a future that was all about bringing people together transformed into a privacy-destroying surveillance system. The idea that all of the information in the world would be at our fingertips became a conspiracy-minded culture that believes vaccines are killing us. And worst of all, the advancements that were supposed to create more human understanding have instead fostered a time of almost unprecedented division. While social media was supposed to uplift the people the few such examples once trotted out–like the Arab Spring–have proven largely ineffective as the entire landscape of social media became a psyop playground where troll farms and misinformation rule.

SXSW has found themselves caught in the middle of this cultural shift. In 2013 it was cool that Elon Musk was giving the Interactive Keynote; this year Twitter roundly mocked the fact that the right wing CEO showed up to a SXSW party for an Amazon Prime TV show. While Film and Music have maintained their vibe–they’re still cool and fun, even when studio films or corporate acts play–Interactive has become incredibly lame, a space for guys that still talk about NFTs and crypto.

This year was when the tension between the artistic and tech sides of SXSW snapped like a femur on the ski slope. One of the moments was when a festival bumper – a short little ad the fest will place before movies talking about other aspects of the event–sang the praises of AI; the crowd at the Paramount Theater, a premiere venue for SXSW Film, erupted into spontaneous boos, captured on video. One on-the-ground film fest attendee, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was “hilarious.” He says, “[Two] days after that they changed what played in front of movies [to make sure] it didn’t happen anymore.”. There’s a certain cultural tone deafness to running that bumper at your film festival, when the recent actors and writers strikes were partially about the encroaching threat AI poses to the world of cinema.

But the ick factor of an oblivious paean to AI, which at least potentially has artistic applications, pales in comparison to the CIA and US Army being on site, and the Army sponsoring elements of the fest (co-presenting one panel with Spin Magazine, which still exists). Now, this isn’t the first year the Army has been at SXSW but it’s like Elon Musk–the fact that it was okay in the past doesn’t make it okay now. The military industrial presence was so outrageous that 80 acts pulled out of Southby this year, including every single Irish act.

One act that didn’t pull out was Vision Video, a post-punk goth band. Lead singer and guitarist Dusty Gannon, who himself was an infantry officer in the US Army in Afghanistan (where he developed a first hand hatred of imperialism), says that the band agonized over the choice but opted to perform and donate all proceeds to Rescue International, a non-profit that helps refugees. “It basically just felt for me we’re going to lose money either way so let’s make it count for something instead of just being ‘Oh we’re not doing this,’” explains Gannon.

And they did something, taking to Instagram and other socials to denounce Southby… as well as doing it from the stage. “I think the final thing I said in our final official showcase, the last words I literally said were, ‘South by Southwest, fuck you.’ And then we walked off the stage. So yeah, I’m assuming we will not be invited back in any official capacity.”

Is there ever going to be a world where art and technology can be friends again? When SXSW launched Interactive it seemed like a great relationship, but now the festival finds itself trapped in the sludge of what the tech world has become. There’s a sense that the tech bros aren’t looking to support the artists anymore, but rather eliminate them. To create an environment where computers create movies and TV shows and music, perhaps individually tailored to you, feeding you back the slop you already like and never challenging you, only enriching themselves. Half of the fest feels completely at odds with the other half… and maybe even winning.

And that’s how I was going to end this piece, with a sour and cynical view of the future, with the idea that SXSW could never heal this rupture and overcome the insidiousness of the tech world that welcomes the Army and the CIA. But Dusty Gannon, bless his goth heart, changed my mind. For all of his zesty fuck yous to the establishment, Gannon has a lot of faith in the future.

“I don’t think it has to be this adversarial experience,” Gannon says. “I look at AI and I don’t actually really worry because AI can write a really cool song about being against the military industrial complex and about mental health, but that computer can’t be me. It can’t be the experiences that I’ve had in my life. Humans are storytellers and the strength of humanity is that we tell stories. I think the strength of art is that it’s all based in stories that connect us and relate us. And I think that even if AI produces something that sounds really cool or looks really cool, it is inherently spiritually bankrupt. And that undercuts the whole point of art to me.”