AUSTIN, Texas — Washington insiders are used to industry coming to them to curry favor and collaborate, with suited delegations filing into the District to explain to the policy elite why their highly profitable operations are so good for the nation. At this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, the tables are turned: Washington is showing up to pitch itself to tech. That kumbaya spirit is a sharp contrast to this very moment in D.C., in which Congress and TikTok appear to be at war, and tech CEOs are reliable hearing-room punching bags. At the nation’s best-known hipster tech conference, officials from numerous federal agencies are here to build connections with techies, from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to the Biden administration’s National AI Initiative Office to the Pentagon. (One scheduled headliner was Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who had to cancel at the last minute.) These officials are making a case that they and the industry need each other, as artificial intelligence and other powerful new technologies are poised to upend modern life — in some cases even directly trying to recruit Austin’s techies from the conference stage. “Come to civil society if you can make it work. There is a dearth of knowledge about the things we know on this stage,” Megan Shahi, the Center for American Progress’ director of tech policy and a former employee of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, said during a panel Sunday where she pitched the “opportunity… to move the needle on responsible tech, and global engagement between civil society and tech.” It might sound a little like an Obama-era pitch to weave cool, newfangled tech into oldfangled government. But it comes with a fresh jolt of energy thanks to the past year’s boom in AI tools, which have brought feelings of both anxiety and opportunity on both sides. The U.S. Army, of all institutions, is one of the tentpole sponsors of this year’s main event, with Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and General James Rainey of the Army Futures Command presenting Saturday on the military's adoption of high tech. “We have all these labs, universities, kids in garages innovating and we don’t have a door for them to knock on to bring their ideas to government,” said Kirk Westwood, the public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Reserve’s 75th Innovation Command (and whom I happened to meet while waiting in a line by striking up a conversation about “Dune”). He was in Austin to assist with programming for one of SXSW’s many side conferences. Given the global shadow that social media has cast over world politics over the past decade-plus, it’s not just Washington with a significant presence in Austin this year: The European Union sent an impressive delegation of its own, with Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s digital czar, holding a featured session to pitch Europe’s vision for the relationship between tech and government. “If you trust technology, it's much more likely that you will actually embrace it and make the most of it. And what we have seen with these products or services that everyone uses, every day, is that it's not a given that they can be trusted,” she said, touting Europe’s Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, and forthcoming AI Act as efforts to build that trust. It’s clear from walking the conference halls this year that Europe is taking its relationship with American tech and regulators very seriously. The first audience question at a panel I moderated Sunday morning was from Dutch Minister of Digitalization Alexandra van Huffelen, who asked the VR industry experts assembled whether they think the use of such devices should be restricted in classrooms in a manner akin to smartphones. When I met today with CAP’s Shahi, she described how it’s ultimately going to take a shared base of knowledge — and a reservoir of good faith — for regulators across the world and tech to navigate the AI era together. “AI makes good things better and bad things worse,” she said. “You can’t effectively regulate an industry without perspective from that industry.”
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