AUSTIN, Texas — Some Austinites still aren’t quite used to the idea of South by Southwest as a tech festival, per se. And they’re right in part, as its music, film, and other entertainment programming still take up a massive chunk of the event’s schedule. But tech has transformed SXSW, and to some extent been transformed by it — just like the city of Austin itself. That makes the festival a sort of fishbowl, where hot-button issues including abortion access, social justice, and even the war in Gaza play out among those vying to build the tech that will power tomorrow’s world. “Access to [abortion] information online has been an issue since long before Roe [v. Wade] was overturned,” Amnesty USA’s Jane Eklund said onstage Monday. She spoke during a panel on how to ensure information about abortion is easily accessible across the globe amid a “sea of misinformation.” In some ways, the activist-oriented discussions at SXSW reflect the festival’s inherently liberal bent. Given its roots as a countercultural music festival in the 1980s, its organizers are decidedly not going to give a podium to, say, a group of anti-abortion developers, brainstorming ways to more effectively censor the internet. The politics of SXSW generally bear the stamp of mainstream, institutional liberalism, which one might expect given its evolution into a week-long extravaganza sponsored by Porsche and Delta Airlines. At a panel on “Breaking the Chains of Colonial Algorithms,” a group of activists and entrepreneurs hashed out how they might achieve a pragmatic goal they share with the assembled pro-abortion activists and researchers: How to safeguard their data in a tech environment where big corporations seem omnipotent. “We’re thinking about what technology is good for this community, and then maybe there's a bigger community for that, and then we’re working upward to shape technology instead of this [current] top-down, ‘we're here to save humanity’ bullshit” from the big tech companies, said Jason Edward Lewis, a panelist and co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group. But the cultural politics of SXSW have their limits. As I walked into the Fairmont hotel where conference sessions were held Sunday morning, a handful of protestors lingered by a moving billboard that proclaimed “FREE PALESTINE” — adding to the chorus of voices protesting the conference’s sponsorship by the U.S. Army, as well as its hosting Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of RTX, the defense company formerly known as Raytheon. The Austin Chronicle (which is also a SXSW sponsor) reported yesterday that the festival sent a cease-and-desist order to the Austin for Palestine Coalition accusing it of the “unauthorized use” of its copyrighted logo. Multiple artists also pulled out of the festival, citing what they call its implicit support of the Israeli campaign against Hamas. “Withholding art and labor is a very powerful tool… for spreading information, and, in this case, for showing SXSW that artists will not stand for this,” boycott organizer and musician Ella Williams told the Guardian. (In the world of SXSW, even activism is a matter of information input-output.) Austin is a fitting place for these debates, given its newfound status as a Mecca for disaffected conservative techies who tired of progressive governance in the Bay Area (lest we forget the existence of the University of Austin, co-founded by the journalist Bari Weiss and backed largely by Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder.) Coincidentally, the University of Austin provided a bit of direct counterprogramming to SXSW by inviting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to speak at a discussion held Saturday night. Kennedy caused a brouhaha in his own right at SXSW after the organizer of a panel on independent voters invited him to speak, leading the other participants to drop out and tank the discussion. Some culture-war divides are too far for institutional tech and business to bridge.
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