At Sxsw, Tech Reckons with the Problems It Helped Create

Hangovers are a fixture of South by Southwest. Free branded booze abounds, turning late nights into too-early mornings filled with product demos and repetitive panels. But determined marketers and wide-eyed founders pitch on through the pain, in the unbridled belief they might just be SXSW’s next breakout star. Or at the very least, its next Meerkat.

But this year, the conference itself feels a lot like a hangover. It’s as if the coastal elites who attend each year finally woke up with a serious case of the Sunday scaries, realizing that the many apps, platforms, and doodads SXSW has launched and glorified over the years haven’t really made the world a better place. In fact, they’ve often come with wildly destructive and dangerous side effects. Sure, it all seemed like a good idea in 2013! But now the party’s over. It’s time for the regret-filled cleanup.

An entire track of panels at this year’s conference revolved around technology under President Trump. In endless others, speakers related how the very platforms that were meant to promote a marketplace of ideas online have become filthy junkyards of harassment and disinformation.

On Sunday, journalist Julia Ioffe and Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone frankly discussed the rise of anti-semitism online. After Ioffe wrote a campaign season profile of Melania Trump in GQ revealing, among other things, that the model-turned-First Lady had a secret half-brother, Ioffe was inundated with death threats and Holocaust memes. At first, she said, she found the trolls’ Photoshop skills funny. Then, she began waking up in the middle of the night to phone calls asking if she’d ordered a homicide cleanup or a casket.

“These trolls had found my information online, and they were going to these vendors’ websites and putting my contact info in,” she told the audience.

Ioffe, who eventually filed a police report over the threats, said she went public with her story because even though she risked feeding the trolls, she wanted the world to know that “something in the discourse, the water, and the air had changed.” As she spoke, a woman in a hijab sitting in the second row nodded knowingly.

Life online has been no easier for pop star Kesha. The singer, who accused her former producer, Dr. Luke, of raping and abusing her, says she can no longer even look at the comments posted about her online. “I use the internet to connect with my fans, but aside from that it isn’t a healthy place for me,” she said Tuesday, during a packed panel on reclaiming the internet.

It’s not just harassment that circulates more easily online. Yasmin Green, who leads an incubator within Alphabet called Jigsaw, focused her remarks on the rise of fake news, and even brought two propaganda publishers with her on stage to explain how, and why, they do what they do. For Jestin Coler, founder of the phony Denver Guardian, it was an all too easy way to turn a profit during the election. “To be honest, my mortgage was due,” Coler said of what inspired him to write a bogus article claiming an FBI agent related to Hillary Clinton’s email investigation was found dead in a murder-suicide. That post was shared some 500,000 times just days before the election.

In another panel, titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism,” Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford warned that artificially intelligent systems provide the perfect cover for autocrats who want to demonize vast swaths of people without any of the accountability. As proof, she pointed to a piece of Chinese AI research that claims to predict criminality based on people’s facial features. In the end, it was people whose faces looked most different that the system viewed as criminals.

“Always be suspicious if you hear that some machine is ‘free from bias’ if it was trained through human-generated data,” Crawford cautioned. “Our biases are built into that training data.”

The dark consequences of all this innovation were the throbbing right temple of this year’s conference. There was no escaping its incessant pulse, or the crippling awareness that this pain was largely self-inflicted.

While prior years’ panels may have optimistically offered up more tech as the answer to what ails tech, this year was decidedly short on solutions. One of the few noteworthy launches at SXSW this year was not a new chat app or augmented reality headset (though there were plenty of those), but a new Anti-Defamation League command center for fighting cyber-hate. There seemed to be, throughout the conference, a keen awareness of the limits human beings ought to place on the software that is very much eating the world.

“If I hear someone say we’re going to hack the refugee crisis, I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” said former National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor during a panel with his fellow Obama administration alums Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett.

Of course, no hangover would be complete without a guilt-inducing Sunday afternoon lecture from Dad—or, in this case former vice-president Joe Biden. Same thing, really.

The dark consequences of all this innovation were the throbbing right temple of this year’s conference.

Biden and his wife, Jill, received a standing ovation as they took the stage at the Austin Convention Center. A grown man in the audience dabbed at both of his eyes with the sleeves of his shirt. For 60 sobering minutes, Biden spoke about his foundation’s work to fight cancer, his son Beau’s death, and how it thwarted his plans to run for president. He bragged about the progress he had made getting government organizations to finally work together in this fight.

Then he trained his attention on the hundreds of attendees in the audience, and pleaded with them to buckle down and focus on what really matters. “Many of you are developing technologies and innovations for purposes large and small, fun and serious, entertaining and lifesaving, that have nothing to do with cancer,” he said, “but you could make a gigantic impact.”

At that same moment, a young woman with a blonde ponytail, seated near the middle of the crowd, hoisted high a pair of Snap Spectacles and took a picture. Some people just don’t know when to quit.