Back in 2015, I was working in the US and lucky enough to attend the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
It felt like the whole US media industry was in the Texan capital that week. Even back then people were complaining that the event had become too corporate.
What began as a gathering of creatives to showcase music and art (and later film) had been overrun by the tech sector. A few years before I attended, Twitter was the breakout success story of the event. The year I was there, everyone was talking about the live streaming app Meerkat.
Despite the grumblings from the ‘South By’ veterans about how it had changed for the worse, I was still taken aback by the sheer scale of the event in 2015, and also how it felt like the entire city of Austin — an oasis of weird in one of America’s most conservative states — had been totally consumed by it.
