SXSW’s Reality Check

At this year’s South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, attendees of the big festival and conference were greeted with gigantic, skyscraper-sized signage for Taylor Sheridan’s new TV show The Madison. They also may have seen a mural for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming movie Disclosure Day. And then there was someone I’m calling Agentic Alan, a Broseph of a dude wearing a backward cap, distressed jeans and a subtle smirk splashed 40 feet high on the side of the Austin Hilton Downtown. He represented a company called Glance that wants you to use AI robots to do shopping recommendations for you.

Tech and entertainment culture have gone hand in hand at SXSW for decades: it’s the place credited (blamed?) for launching Twitter in 2007, where Mark Zuckerberg famously participated in crowd-shaming a journalist during an interview just two years before he’d be the subject of an Aaron Sorkin movie. Around that time Spielberg last showed up at SXSW to show off Ready Player One, which was supposed to be fun, but instead depressed us with its dead-eyed view of future VR addicts.

SXSW 2026 felt like it’s careening past another inflection point like the social media one of 2008-2010: this time, AI, the metaverse and robotics are making us question what’s real, what’s organic and whether it even matters anymore.

Panels, films and chatter in between addressed these anxieties, and the backlashes, and the backlashes to the anxieties as SXSW attendees pondered a future that feels on the edge of collapse, economically, socially, maybe even technologically.

It didn’t help that SXSW, which has generally been a good way to hear from smart creatives and get a glimpse of two or three years into the future, is going through its own major transitions. Last year, Penske Media Corp., ended up with a majority stake in SXSW and subsequently replaced top leadership with its own executives. The timing was not great: SXSW arrived after the Austin Convention Center was demolished, making this vast event, with upward of 37,700 badged attendees, a more decentralized, tougher-to-navigate affair.

Those two unrelated events made conference attendees – many of whom struggled to get their bearings as they rushed to movie screenings or stood in line for crowded panels in hotel ballrooms – question the future of SXSW and whether the new leadership can keep the event relevant.

They were already anxious about the ongoing possibility of a giant AI bubble burst, the conflict in Iran opening up the possibility of another mass shooting incident downtown and the tumult in streaming TV, where everything is consolidating. How much longer will streamers like Amazon Prime and Apple, tech companies like Rivian and IBM keep footing the bill for downtown activations, red carpet events and free-flowing open bars?

My marker for the health of SXSW and where it’s going has always been less about the attendance numbers and more about the level of quality in the movie and TV premieres, tech panels and music acts. And it would be hard to argue that attendees lacked for options and wow-factor at this year’s SXSW. You can’t get much cooler than a Boots Riley world premiere with Keke Palmer and Demi Moore in attendance for the director’s I Love Boosters, the opening night film. Or higher profile than Spielberg doing a live podcast recording and talking about aliens. Or for the older crowd, Alanis Morissette and St. Vincent screaming in duet to “You Oughtta Know” as part of a Spotify showcase. Or a podcast award ceremony led by Will Ferrell and SNL’s Miss Eggy, Ego Nwodim with Eric Andre waiting in the wings to sow chaos. Or a premiere of Irish director John Carney’s sublime “Power Ballad,” a funny and sweet musical that draws career-best performances out of Paul Rudd and pop star Nick Jonas. Or Larry David previewing a hysterical sketch from his upcoming HBO show about American history.

Those were just some of the things I saw personally and I still missed most of the must-see panels, screenings and musical showcases.

It’s hard to be so cynical about the future of SXSW when there was simply so much good stuff and so much of it for days and days, the creative artists with that stuff inspiring other creative artists to make their own stuff. Maybe the money will run out, maybe the robots will take over, but for now, for a little while longer at least, SXSW was thriving.