Everything is bigger ...
17 March 2010
… in Texas.
And this trip sure feels like something that Texans would be proud of.
It’s my last day in Austin and the USA, I’m sitting in a t-shirt on a bench at the Austin Town Lake Park while writing this post. After 48 hours of not so great and shitty rainy weather, Austin decided to make us feel very sorry for leaving it with a glimmering blue sky and a sense of summer that will surely be evaporated after touch down in greyish Germany. Ah well.
What a trip. Definitely the best I’ve had in a couple of years and one that made me think about a lot of things. New York, the hellish pit and every urbanist wet dream, was heavy lifting. As always. It doesn’t want to be any other way and it always delivers on it’s promise. The city isn’t something you would call “nice” or “pretty”. It’s impressive, massive and very well structured. The sense of pure chaos dissolves itself after a few trips or a longer stay into a well functioning system and only then one really understands what the city is all about. It’s easy to overwhelmed by its initial presence, but it’s actually more stunning to understand why everything works as it does.
That said, there are obviously a lot of things that can be better about New York. I’m painting a romanticized picture of an already overhyped city, but it works for me and I would sure as hell would want to be living there at some point in my life. And rather sooner than later. Let’s see how that goes.
But it’s not only my urbanist soul that got more that it could handle from the big apple. My mind got a nice beating from all the different impressions. It was a hard trip, emotionally wise. Being on the run for a few weeks before the trip didn’t help me as planed and so I only managed to get really excited about journey after a few days in. The combination of a baggage full of thoughts, my family and the new spark (ok, more a full fledged fire) of ideas made it all very confusing, but also very worth while. It kind of felt as it was just the right time to be doing some thinking and it will hold on for a while too. It’s fun being on this road with a lot of facts, but not a clear view where it will lead me.
Austin.
What a nice city to be living in. Yes, it’s a city that actually can be called “nice” and carries this responsibility with a great sense of hospitality. People are friendly in Austin and
nobody feels like it’s a bad thing that a crazy amount of people are coming into town for SXSW. Instead everything seems very well adjusted. Except for the cab and “getting food or coffee without waiting for way to long” situation. But than again, it’s a really big crowd here and it’s really hard to scale up the existing infrastructure for that. It ain’t all bad either, because one can sometimes use the free city wifi to bitch about the long waits on twitter. It’s not available everywhere and more often than not it’s a rather poor reception, but it’s still beats everything I saw in Germany and it’s definitely better than walking around as a wifi junkie through New York. Which we did and it wasn’t pretty.
On a side note: The whole data roaming / getting a data plan situation is very unsatisfying. Data roaming is obviously way to expensive and on a scale that just doesn’t make any viable sense. Why the hell does it cost so much? Would somebody care to share some obvious reasons for that or are they just ripping us of? And buying a pre-paid data plan isn’t really easy either. AT&T seems to have only very few good customer support people and most of the time you will receive the answer that it’s not possible to get any pre-paid data plan. We’re still not sure, if there is actually one. T-Mobile does have a plan, but one needs to pay for the whole month and with all the activation charges it will cost you about 100 Dollars, which is also way to expensive. At least, if you just want the liberty to be checking in on foursquare and telling everybody how awesome your stay in New York and Austin is. Yes, this is a luxury I enjoy very much, but not enough to be paying 70 Euros for that. If you do know a better solution for that, please let me know.
Back to Austin or even better to South by Southwest. For every technology conference geek, SXSW is kind of the holly grail. There is no conference as big, as legendary and one that seems more like a tribe gathering than SXSW. Reading and hearing about it from people who went there made me always want to go and I’m very happy that I got the chance to do just that this year. The unique combination of the amount of bright minds, a almost perfect organisation, some amazing talks, great weather and perfect networking opportunities (=awesome parties) is unmatched by any standard that I’ve seen before. That said, I would still pick reboot over SXSW, because there is more thought food and intimacy in beautiful Copenhagen, but SXSW catapulted itself easily on my number two slot of all time favourite conferences.
SXSW also easily surpasses every other conference by the amount of opportunities. Since most web centric innovation is still being produced in the US, it opens up its participants a crazy access to new ideas and new business chances. For me as a European its also a very good way to finally meet / see the people one only knows from their web presence. I finally got to see danah boyd live in action and enjoy Bruce Sterlings wisdoms for the second time. Also a good bunch of people from GOOD, Stamen, New York Times, Google, various open science projects and many, many more.
Let me come back to the whole tribe metaphor for a second. I’ve seen Jeff Jarvis call the SXSW not a conference, but a tribe gathering first and later on Eike, who followed SXSW through twitter, blog posts, etc. described it the same way. And it fits perfectly here as well as at a conference like the reboot or in some cases with good barcamps. The sense of common understanding is very intense and energizing, but on a whole different level. The sheer amount of like-minded people is mesmerizing. Bruce Sterling said in his talk that he enjoys to have the opportunity to talk to people who actually get what he is saying; he was addressing about 3000 people at that point.
But yes, it’s again not all perfect. The amount of really great sessions isn’t through the roof. Blame the internet, it made knowledge transfer on conferences much more complicated. And of course, as with every conference, there is a healthy amount of marketing / PR / sales douchebags. It’s a conference after all. It would be very strange not to have them around.
Finally, I want to speak about Texas a bit. It would be easy to say that every cliché is true. Sure, some are true. On the plane from Dallas to Austin, I’ve had the pleasure to experience one of the flight assistants to make racist remarks about a Indian man. The amount of SUVs is here stunning and I’ve seen by far the largest flag in my life. It was a couple of miles away from our hotel, but it was easily possible to see this Texan monstrosity. Very surreal. But all in all, Austin seems enjoyable. 6st Street is a crazy place at night and a good place for everyone who enjoys partying till the morning dawn, the food is good and the weather seems to be more than decent. And Bruce Sterling lives here, which compensates a bit the conservative touch here. Despite being the capital of Texas, Austin managed to be a Dems city for a long while. But even the Dems are very weird in Texas.
It’s time to say thanks to a few people. Peter, it was crazy good to do this trip with you. Can’t imagine how it could have gotten any better. Thanks to Parker, who let us crash at his place in New York and Erica for bringing us safely to the airport in New York. You guys are awesome and it was great hanging out with you at SXSW. Also a big props to Caroline. We did manage to hold a part of the German delegation together. Although kind of only one of us was actually German.
See you all next year in Austin for SXSW and New York, my love, I’ll be back for more mind fuck sooner than later.
(I’ve wrote the last part of this blog post in the hotel lobby. Which isn’t a nice place to be, but there is free wifi here and access to power. Also, I think I got myself the first sunburn for this year. Which is nice.)
P.S.: Almost forgot about it. It was – of course – a great experience to be sitting on a panel at SXSW. Peter was asked to fill in on the Lost in Translation: Nuances of of European Social Media panel and as a good friend he asked me to join him on the panel. The room filled quite nicely and we had a great, interactive conversation. The feedback afterwards was rich and positive, so I guess we did good.