Bruce Sterling's written a marvellous rant for the Austin Chronicle that explains why SXSW is still a vital, active conference, while other conferences are cratering. It's a great piece. Bruce and I will be delivering a keynote at SXSW next week-ish, about the "Death of Scarcity." It's gonna be tonza fun.
If you think the business scene at this year's Austin 360 was morbid, and demoralized, and pitiful, and I was there, and boy was it ever — well, you should have seen the Davos World Economic Forum up in New York City. Which I also witnessed, for reasons I don't much care to explain. Okay, I'm topic-drifting here, but don't flame me just yet. You see, everybody at Davos was scolding, not the computer-crazy Americans, but the Japanese. They expect the Japanese banks to crater just any minute now. And get this: The Japanese never swallowed any New Economy Kool-Aid. The Japanese bend metal, they make Sony Walkmans and cars. They're still royally screwed. Try explaining that. It's sure more than Fortune or The Economist are able to manage.
Houston is supposed to be a solid, non-nonsense, oil-bidness town. Houston doesn't have any SXSW. Poor Houston is the snakebitten home of Enron, while Austin's feckless cyberslackers are still grinning and hitting the Return key. Yeah, Dell fired some people here, so maybe local rents will drop and all the potters and tapestry weavers will return from Wimberley. Man, anything's possible these days.
(Thanks, Hugh!)
