Here I am, in Austin again. Last night the lazy moon dragged a silver line across Lake Travis, and it felt like someone underlined the whole hill country with a trembling pencil. The silence was deafening, so far away from the noise, the music, the food trucks, the brain‑melting schedule of SXSW 2026. I could hear the smallest ripples in the lake sing. There were shooting stars, and I was simply… very happy. SXSW does that to me every year: it shakes my head like a snow globe and then quietly asks, ‘So… what are you going to do with any of this, with all of this?’
I realize that this is the 10th letter I write from the lake. A decade. Just trying to fathom all the changes in that decade is dizzying. You are no longer the little girl who once slipped Billy the bear into my suitcase and ordered me to ‘tell me everything.’ You are older now, even sharper, funnier, more impatient with nonsense (often mine), and far less impressed by grown‑ups who talk big and do small. You read the news. You roll your eyes at greenwashing. You challenge. You ask questions that would make entire panels on stage shuffle their slides and lose their microphones. You keep that wonderful curiosity that builds your world, one answer at a time.
So let me, for the tenth time, tell you what I saw this year, and what it made me feel, for you.
The blender of futures
My brain was once more back in the SXSW blender: AI, climate, technology, politics, the future of work, media, art, ethics, all thrown in at once and spun at ridiculous speed. In one session, people promised that AI will fix everything from homework (don’t even think about it 😊) to healthcare. In the next, someone quietly showed how the same tools can spy, manipulate, and erase whole stories and peoples. The hallway between those rooms is where the future is being negotiated, Tara. Forget the slides, the futures is hidden in the story, the ideas, in the things said and unsaid, in the questions.
Your questions. Here, people talk about frontiers and moonshots and disruption as if they are ordering from a crazy cosmic menu. Underneath those words this year is a simple, stubborn truth I relearn every year: technology will not decide for us, will never decide for us, should never decide for us. It sits there like a very powerful, very beautiful, very sparkly but very dumb dragon, waiting to see who will climb on its back and where they will steer it.
The future of technology is a shiny dumb dragon Tara, and I watch founders, activists, teachers, artists, mayors, nurses, a governor and kids in hoodies argue about how to and where to steer that dragon. Some want to ride it toward profit, power, attention. Others try to use it for clean water, fair chances, better medicine, honest information. The dragon does not care. We have to. And the smart path is not per se to know where the dragon needs to go and how… but why the dragon needs to move in the first place.
You would have loved the contradictions.
On one big stage a man spoke confidently about owning the future, as if it were a patent. Two ballrooms away, a woman told a small audience how an algorithm quietly ‘un‑recommended’ her community’s stories until they were almost invisible. No big villain, no dramatic scene. Just a thousand tiny tweaks that made them fade out of sight. That is how power often works now, Tara: silently, in the settings menu, through computer commands that obey the vision and whim of often grey‑haired, grumpy, middle‑aged men. To change the world, or to prevent the world from changing, all they have to do is make contrarian thinking unheard. You know my allergy to that one.
And yet.
I also saw people refuse to fade, fighting hard. I heard women who have been talked over for decades calmly reclaim the microphone and name the misogyny, the racism, the erasure, the lazy jokes that pass as edgy. I listened to activists pull apart lies about migrants, climate, public schools, vaccines, armed with data and with stories that could make a room go suddenly, beautifully quiet. I saw a cook challenge the President of the USA, pointing out the damage politics and war inflict on people, on kids your age in war zones. Every time someone on stage said, ‘This is just how the system works,’ at least one person in the audience shook their head and crafted a better question in their notes app. People are still resisting bad ideas, bad thinking, manipulative trains of thought. At its best, SXSW is not a fairground of shiny toys and fairy‑dust mental steering; it is a training ground for stubborn people who refuse to accept ‘that’s just the way it is.’
You belong here.
The power women and the dragon
This year some of the clearest dragon‑taming came from women. Amy Webb held a packed room and calmly buried her own famous trend report on stage, giving it a funeral because in a world changing this fast, a static report is already obsolete when it lands. In its place she offered something more demanding: convergences, those storms where technologies, politics, economics, and culture collide and rearrange everything at once. She spoke of human augmentation, unlimited labor, emotional outsourcing, as forces that can enlarge inequality or be steered toward fairness. She showed the world that even a very good thing must be replaced and upgraded. If progress moves, so do we, so do our tools, so do our choices. She did not flinch, she did not sugarcoat, she laid out the storms and then looked at the room as if to say, “Now, your move.”
On another stage, Dava Newman, who once strapped people into space suits and chairs to help them reach the Moon and Mars, spoke with the calm of someone who treats “impossible” like an engineering question (it often is, Tara). She talked about exploration as a shared human duty, about designing systems where more people can belong in the mission. All kinds of people, not just the usual suspects whose faces end up on the posters: shiny, perfect and empty. She looked like someone you could sit next to on a bus and also like someone who has spent her life quietly proving that girls do not need anybody’s permission to run the show and to be brilliant. There was fire in her eyes Tara, and it made me smile.
I wish you will meet some of this women soon, Tara. Amy with her funeral for lazy thinking, Dava with her hands still metaphorically dusty from building the chairs that take humans off‑planet. Around them, so many others hidden in the halls and rooms here, scientists, founders, storytellers, community organisers, heads of labs and agencies who happen to be women and who clearly never signed any paper that said leadership must look like a middle‑aged grumpy man or a boy in a hoodie rehearsing his own myth. They are all around you: in school, your music class, in the cars driving your friends.
Remember that when someone tries to shrink your ambition to fit their comfort: women rock, and they rock harder… and they should be give the reigns of the dragon far more often.
Chefs, comics, and changing the world
You love stories, so this will make you smile. Chefs change the world too. José Andrés, a famous cook, took the SXSW stage as a man whose kitchens race toward disasters while others run away. I looked at him as at a superhero. He talked about food as more than calories: as dignity, comfort, community. Feeding the planet, the people, the kids, mums and dads is a moral duty, the first thing you do before you even imagine anything else. He joked, he told stories, he showed images of people standing in ruins with a plate of something warm in their hands. His World Central Kitchen has served hundreds of millions of meals after earthquakes, wars and climate disasters, one plate at a time.
A cook, Tara. Someone who chops onions, burns fingers, argues with suppliers and may or may not over‑salt the soup on a tired day. Yet he bends the arc of the world a few degrees toward kindness with pans, ladles and logistics. Remember that when someone tells you your dream is too small or not “technical” enough. Feeding people, healing people, teaching people, organising people, that is also how history turns.
Your scalpel and your compass
You always had a scalpel in your mind. You slice through big words and glitter with clean questions: ‘What does it do?’, ‘Why?’, ‘Who does this actually help?’… and my favourite one, ‘How does that matter?’ You have no idea how sharp that is. Here at SXSW I heard your questions in many accents, voiced by many people: who really benefits from this model, who pays the price, who is missing from the data, who is not in the room, what is missing.
Your curiosity is your strongest tool, Tara. I do not mean the quick curiosity that swipes and forgets, but the deeper kind that sits with an uncomfortable answer and then asks another question. That kind shakes liars, bullies and people who hoard power. It pricks holes in their stories. It turns their certainty into doubt. It drags what hides in the dark out into the light.
And then there is your compass. I see your whole body react when something is unfair, whether it is a classmate being mocked or a news story about kids on boats and borders. You do not shrug. You do not file it under ‘politics’. You frown, argue, imagine a different outcome. That moral compass of yours is not fragile; it burns like a small star. Curiosity, kindness, empathy, these are your real superpowers. They sound soft until you watch them redraw hard lines. They are the things that move this planet.
Do not trade them away
Tech bros, Brian, and the human wave
You would have laughed at some of the characters here. Tech bros in expensive sneakers promising frictionless futures where nothing is messy (duh). Investors who talk about trends as if they are weather patterns. Futurists who can describe 2050 as a showroom of smart objects and somehow skip the part about who can afford food or who gets left standing outside the smart, armed city fence. They chase markets, money, minds, attention spans, even the words we use when we talk about tomorrow.
They do not have the floor to themselves, luckily. My buddy Brian Solis walked on stage this year with fresh scrapes from losing a fight with the Austin sidewalk and spent an hour talking about augmented intelligence, about what happens when we use AI to do what we could never do alone instead of just making yesterday’s chores faster. He spoke about Augmented IQ, about asking better questions because AI exists, about using the tools to challenge assumptions, expand options, sharpen judgment. His focus sat exactly where it should: on how humans choose to think and feel and act in the presence of all this new power. He loathed the fact that people use AI mostly because they are too lazy to think. We talked about this, Tara: if you do not use your brain muscle, it will turn into pudding.
Listening to him, I felt something settle. I am not afraid of the tech. I am afraid of what we humans sometimes decide to do with it. Algorithms will follow instructions. The real risk lives with the people who design them, deploy them, ignore their harm, or hide behind them. What will let us surf this AI‑driven wave instead of swallowing water is not faster chips, but our ability to listen, to care, to picture the consequences for someone far away. Empathic human skills, the ones you practice every day, are the real life vests. The world needs exactly that, Tara.
That is why voices like Brian’s, Amy’s, Dava’s and Andrés’s matter so much here: they keep dragging the conversation back to humans.
What your generation will have to do
I will not even pretend the list of things my generation is leaving you looks good.
You inherit a heating planet, swollen with plastic and smoke. You inherit democracies shaken by lies that travel faster than facts. You inherit school systems that have not changed in decades and still reward memorising old answers while the real world pays people who ask new questions. You inherit algorithms that guess what you might click before you have had time to decide what you really need. You inherit a big pile of smoking problems (I wanted to say ‘shit’, but your mum would frown at me).
But there is more to the inheritance.
You also inherit the work of people who refused to give up. The scientists who spent their lives squeezing more energy out of less harm. Your teachers who stayed late to help a child understand one idea that might change everything. The activists who stood in streets, courts and comments sections, taking blow after blow and returning the next day. The storytellers who smuggled hope into dark tales like a secret ingredient. Picard, an explorer here once told us that your generation will have to do something big: save the planet. Terrifying, yes. Also a clear invitation, heck and you and your friends can do it.
The verb of truth
Every year this festival hammers one lesson into my skull: truth is not a possession, it is something you practice; the future is not a fruit you eat, but something you build.
You practice truth when you ask who benefits and who is silenced, when you refuse to share a meme that punches down, when you name the joke that hurts someone who already hurts enough, when you read past the headline, when you admit you were wrong and let your mind move instead of locking it. Truth is curiosity with courage, empathy with a spine, Tara.
In Austin I saw people practice truth on stage and in corridors. A whistleblower who lost a job and kept their integrity. Journalists who still believe verified facts can clear fog. A teenager describing how they pushed their school to teach real media literacy, not just ‘don’t talk to strangers online’. Politicians convinced there is a better way. Truth does not go viral on its own. Someone has to carry it. Truth is a do‑thing, a fight‑for thing. Truth is a verb.
Why I keep coming back here
You once asked me why SXSW makes me so happy. It is not the badges or the barbecue (although 😊) or the comfort of being among fellow nerds who clap for good questions.
This place oxygenates my brain. It forces my thoughts to bump into other thoughts, my assumptions to wrestle with strangers’ experiences, my quiet worries to say their names out loud. If I let my mind stay alone too long, it shrinks to something small and comfortable. I cannot risk that, not while you watch and silently take notes on what adulthood looks like.
I come here to find better questions for you, to test the stories I tell myself about the world you are walking into, to check that I am not only doom‑scrolling but actually noticing the people who are quietly improving things. Then I bring it back to you, like pockets full of strange pebbles from a long walk.
You might feel like you are just one girl with a backpack, a library card, and still no smart phone.
You are not “just” anything.
Your ideas, your curiosity, your stubborn sense of fair and unfair matter now, not in some faraway adult future. The way you talk to your friends about a rumor matters. The way you stand next to someone who is mocked matters. The extra source you read before forming an opinion matters. The moment you decide to build something instead of only criticizing it matters. The decision to help, to comfort somebody matters. Be the kid who reads wildly, who refuses cruelty for laughs, who learns how systems actually work, who treats technology as a tool and keeps a slice of her heart for people she will never meet but still cares about.
There is something else that keeps nagging at me. More and more, I am convinced that what is missing in our companies and boardrooms is not intelligence or tools, but femininity. We are overrun with middle‑aged men who look tired and suspicious, and with young men in angry t-shirts who believe their own legend before they have earned it. The rooms where decisions are made still hold too few women, mothers, girls with your kind of clarity and care. The future will be smaller if you and your friends step back from leadership because the current leaders do not look like you. Please do not leave the cockpit to the boys by default. Don’t let any man decide your future.
Curiosity, kindness, empathy, tenacity… they are the legoblocks of the structure of a better future Tara.
So here I am again, last night in Austin, tired to the bone and buzzing in the head. Once more I am struck by two things at the same time: how much damage a small group of greedy people can cause, and how much hope a much larger, quieter group keeps alive by showing up, and then showing up again.
I count on you, Tara. And on the lionesses, the unicorns, the dinosaurs, the rebels, the red monkeys, the kids who build space helmets out of cardboard and then ask why space seems reserved for such a narrow slice of humanity. I count on your sharp mind and your steady compass. On your questions, your repairs, your small and big acts. Your crazy friends, around you and in your head. I think that as long as people far away from their daughters try for a better world, or turn the world into a better place, we will be ok.
Technology will not save us or destroy us on its own. What counts is what we choose to do with it, what you choose to do with it. The future is not a place you walk into. It is something you help shape, day after day.
Sleep well, little Red Monkey. I’ll be home soon. We have one thing to talk about.
The future.
