Event horizon
From time to time I will see a promotional image — I'm tempted to call it a poster out of habit, but I have never seen one anywhere but on a screen — for a music festival that presents the viewer with a brick of text as solid as a word-find puzzle, presumably inviting viewers to dive in and become overwhelmed with all the names, the Coachella sublime, aspiring to an endless, infinite promotion of performances that by their very nature could never actually be entirely seen, a misty mountaintop obscured by clouds, or one of those rococo paintings on the domes of cathedrals where innumerable saints and cherubs spiral recessively into the trompe l'oeil heavens.
What these kinds of promotions make you see is that you can never see it all, you can't even bring its scope into focus, but you should nevertheless fantasize that by being there you will resolve your own inadequacy and magically achieve the capability to have more than enough, to negate the very idea of "enough" and become a kind of infinite consumer, a glutton who can crush the buffet of life experiences and turn insatiability inside out. Why see a specific performer when you can instead transmute quantity into quality and enjoy "excess" as a neatly packaged, methodically formatted object?
Sometimes I get caught up in the idea that if festivals like this didn't exist, music-making would somehow be purified of the incentives that produce this kind of spectacle. Music will be good again, I will be young again, everyone will see their favorite band in the most authentic and legendary small club where nobody but true fans are there. That is, I want to believe that music can somehow be autonomous of the forces that organize and commercialize culture, in the same way that some people like to insist that technology is "neutral." But certain technologies can only be developed, can only exist under capitalism, when they are produced at scale, when they can affect the lives of enough people to be profitable. Pop music also only makes sense at scale; it exists to materialize scale, to manifest it, to be bricked together and establish "the masses."
The queasy feeling I get when I imagine having to attend such a festival as the one advertised above is a kind of disavowal; I want to refuse the idea of myself as being part of that indistinct, indiscriminate audience that basically wants to see every musician who is currently on tour performing on a single stage. I often have similar reaction to my phone screen as well — "everything" is on there, and I want to disavow the services and the content and the apps that are all, in their various ways, trying to amalgamate me to a scaled-up audience even as they insist on my targetable uniqueness, no different from everyone else's.
It can feel as if everyone else has surrendered — how can they be enjoying all this? All the content, all the constituted audiences, all the metrics, seem to prove that this is in fact happening over and over again, and I am here looking on as if to bear witness, Ulysses tied to the mast, Metallica and Dua Lipa and Lil Baby and Low Cut Connie are singing each to each but I'm incapable of breaking the ropes that hold me back, in a position where I can only be tormented by it all. Then again, everybody is tied to their own mast; the "masses" enjoying collective experiences and becoming one with it all are always elsewhere. You can never quite get there on time, when it is "really happening."
The point of events like SXSW is to be where things "really happen," where the products are not merely launched but achieve some magical quotient of genuine adoption by the users who matter — "scale" not as "the masses" (a bunch of sheep) but as "critical mass" — and suddenly a business model becomes actual culture. That transmutation becomes the expectation, and many of the journalists who go to trade shows don't want to merely report on an industry showcase but want to make culture happen, to know themselves as creators and not part of an audience themselves. So it is that articles are produced that try to "both sides" the metaverse or Web3 or crypto into being cultural phenomena rather than money-making schemes. We can't sit idly by and ignore this opportunity to inflate our sense of our ability to dictate the zeitgeist!
Again I fall into the trap of wanting to believe that if you canceled SXSW you would also eliminate the mendacious stink pit it exists to sufflate. I want to take heart in pieces like this one by Edward Ongweso Jr., which tries to emperor's-new-clothes the whole scene:
This week, while at SXSW to speak on two panels about crypto-skepticism and algorithmic labor, I was able to check out if crypto, NFTs, web3, and the metaverse really were taking over Austin. What I found was a deeply underwhelming, mundane, and frankly pathetic series of demonstrations and setups that suggest if these digital technologies do take over the world, it’ll be because of how much money their biggest boosters have and how easy it is for that money to generate interest as opposed to anything of true social utility.
Probably the same thing could be said about any music festival where 3,423 bands are playing: I've no doubt that it comes across as a "deeply underwhelming, mundane, and frankly pathetic series of setups" once you are there, if you are capable by that point of being honest with yourself. But where is the value add in that? You already bought a ticket.
I really want to believe that "true social utility" is out there and is something distinct from "that which money can generate interest in." But it seems like I would have to go to events like SXSW or Lollapalooza to garner that feeling, in an ecstasy of negativity. The genius of crypto (like that of capitalism, of which it is a concentrated expression) is that it conflates "social utility" with what the momentum of money can do; it takes "money makes things interesting" as a kind of mission statement, and then points to itself as its own irrefutable proof. Crypto's enemies — basically anyone who cares about human flourishing — are cornered into trying to prove a negative.
But this predicament too can be inverted: Rather than see true social utility as some eternal essence that can be defined abstractly, it can be recognized instead as something that is ever changing but has now been brought into acute focus by the crypto threat. In other words, it has now become clear that anything is socially useful that stops crypto from thriving.