My experience of XOXO 2024
I'm glad I got to experience this event at least once
As someone who lived in Portland during most of its run, I’ve been adjacent to XOXO as friends from elsewhere would come into town and I’d get a chance to catch up with them. I’d never attended, myself — I was always too busy and it seemed expensive, and I was perhaps too focused on narrow things that could further my career instead of broader things that could enrich my life, so when these friends had a difficult time explaining what XOXO was about, and despite admiring many of the previous speakers it didn’t fit into my mental picutre of things I’d be interested in.
I saw the announcement for this year’s event on the Fediverse, was impressed by the comprehensive COVID-prevention policy, and figured it’s been a while since I’ve been to any technology-adjacent event larger than a local meetup, and despite not really knowing what I was getting myself into, I put my name in the hat for a ticket, and was fortunate enough to get one.
I understand now why XOXO is hard to describe — it’s not focused on particular topics so much as a cluster of interests by the community that surrounds it, it’s more a celebration of internet culture by people who see the internet as something with culture rather than some resource to be exploited.
Thursday night and Friday were representative of this breadth of interest: there were clusters of meetup groups at nearby venues for all sorts of different topics, of which I made it to ones for artists & music makers, and one centered on ADHD but was organized so last-minute it didn’t make the schedule.
I would have gone to more of these, but really wanted to see some of the the main events for Indie Media Circus — featuring among others 404 Media — and I caught the tail end of Art + Code, which featured a wonderful presentation about One Million Checkboxes and a hilariously thought-provoking talk by Danielle Baskin. I was pretty tired after all this and my body was reminding me I can’t do this sort of thing like I used to, but I stuck around for Sideshow despite not knowing anything about any of the presenters, and am glad I did — Annie Rauwerda’s comedy act for Depths of Wikipedia was worth staying late for.
Saturday was the main, main event, and it’s where I truly felt like I was among my people. Every one of these talks was great, but it’s hard to describe how amazing it felt to be around people who unyieldingly shared the values spoken to by the underlying themes of collectivism, community, independence from coroporate powers, and mental health, especially in a time where the scraps of internet culture we get from corporate behemoths makes those values feel rare and isolating.
Co-host Jenn Schiffer opened the festival by saying “I don’t hate tech, I love it, and that’s why I’m critical of it” and I think this captures the spirit of Satruday’s talks.
Personal highlights for me include Molly White giving a very punk-vibes talk about starting Web3 Is Going Just Great, Erin Kissane expertly threading the needle from the COVID Tracking Project to the importance of independent, open social spaces, and Ed Yong talking earnestly about the personal cost of his deeply empathetic coverage of the pandemic: “I have achieved every professional accolade I could have ever dreamed of, and more, and it completely broke me.”
This speaks nothing to the hallway track – or well, the park track since all the socializing happened in the adjacent field which provided a tent and live video feed for those who didn’t want to risk being inside. I met a lot of great people, and had for the first time the experience of people coming up to me to thank me for something I did that impacted them.
In all, the thing I came away with most of all is the sense that it’s possible to get the weird internet back, that our participation — that my participation — not only has value but is wanted and necessary as a part of that goal because we get the internet we build, and that it’s still possible to carve out areas where we can thrive in spite of corporate dominance.
Despite (or perhaps because of) being very honest about the cost of burnout in a piece that has gotten over a million views in the nine years since I published it, I haven’t been very open about the burnout I’ve almost continually grappled with since. Partly that’s because I can’t easily pinpoint it to a single source — it’s much more systemic, it’s much more fueled by the sense that working inside the technology industry’s structure as dictated by those who control most of the money is fundamentally at odds with my mental health.
To that end, even as I’m dealing with the comedown from the high of the event, I’m feeling more optimistic than ever that it’s possible to do technology work outside of hugely corporate structures, and that a better internet is possible — but that also relies on us getting back to what made the internet interesting to begin with, and by “us” I mean me and I mean you, dear reader. Publish, and damn the AI Scrapers.
It’s sad that this event was the last one — I was one of the approximately half of attendees who had not attended XOXO before — but it’s an event that has meant a lot to a lot of people and there was a deservedly teary conclusion to something for which I only got to see a fraction of. But I’m grateful to have experienced what I did. Thank you, Andy & Andy, for reminding me why I got into technology work to begin with.