Before I even saw the Austin skyline, the trip itself had turned into a referendum. Friends, family, a few colleagues with a flair for worst‑case scenarios all asked some version of the same question: are you sure you want to go to the United States right now. Some worried I would be stopped at the border because some of my writing drops the polite mask and says what I actually think. Others fretted about violent spillover from the war in the Middle East, or about ending up in the wrong place when someone decides that dissent and disloyalty are the same thing. A few sent me links about ICE and its cousins that read more like horror stories than policy. There were quieter objections too, not about safety but about values: why spend money in a country whose government is doing this, and this, and this. My own decision never really wavered. I was not going to boycott a whole country for the actions of some of its leaders, and there was only one honest way to understand what is actually happening under the headlines: go, walk the streets, sit in the rooms, and see what the temperature feels like on your own skin.
SXSW has always been a weather system more than a festival, but 2026 felt like I was walking into a pressure front.
I could feel it before anyone said a word about politics. The badge check lines were longer, the branded activations louder, the security and blue in the street (actually black in the street) more visible, the off‑the‑record whispers sharper and harder. On paper the story looked familiar: tech, film, music, tacos, too many parties. In practice the whole thing felt like a country talking to itself in a raised voice and pretending this was just networking and bathing in steaming pools of innovation.
Trump’s second term sat over Austin like a low, grey, smelly cloud. Nobody needed to name it in the schedule; no one needed to name “him”: it seeped through panels as “regulatory uncertainty,” “threats to public media,” “the new information ecosystem,” “polarization.” Sometimes to “the deranged one”, or the “convict in chief”. Every euphemism translated to the same thing: a man is back in the White House who openly treats the country and its states as a private business, and the line between governance and grift has blurred into a single smear. At SXSW that blur becomes a design constraint. You could see and hear some speakers and panelists struggle with “What can you say on a stage whose livestream will be clipped into a rage‑bait reel by nightfall in White House somewhere in D.C.? What can your newsroom publish when your license, your grants, your donors sit one angry quote away from a ‘we wish you a lot of success with you future endeavors’ phone call.”
The joke writes itself, but the punchline hurts. Public media people explained how culture wars now pass through spreadsheets. Cut this series or lose that funding. Avoid this topic if you want legislative protection. Arts leaders talked about “community standards” with the body language of people who have read the book bans and the broadcast threats and know exactly what happens when you fall on the wrong side of a newly invented standard. Lawyers outlined how censorship in 2026 rarely arrives in jackboots; does not show up in an obvious, overtly authoritarian way: it arrives as compliance training and “risk management.” Fear and apprehension sat in the back of a few sessions like an uninvited panelist, and understandable: some institutions, foundations and academics are needing their grants to do the work.
And then there was the war. Outer wars and inner war.
Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, the rest of the Middle East hovered just offstage, even when the slides politely stuck to “geopolitics” and “misinformation.” Some speakers tiptoed around it, folding their unease into careful language about regional stability and information operations. Others dropped the filter entirely and went full j’accuse, naming names, tracing supply chains, asking out loud why and how the United States keeps making choices that leave so many civilians buried in rubble and so many veterans broken at home. A few dragged casualty numbers and hospital footage from Gaza, Ukraine, and Iranian‑backed fronts right into the middle of their talks, forcing a room full of founders and creators to sit with the fact that this is not abstract strategy, this is bodies. And then there were people like José Andrés and the Marvell crew, who turned the projector away from blame and toward logistics and relief, talking about kitchens in bombed‑out cities and connectivity in places where electricity has become a rumor. Every time someone put up a screenshot of AI‑generated war clips or deepfaked speeches, the room flinched a little. Not from awe at the tech, but from the sick knowledge that somewhere, at that exact moment, someone was dying under a real bomb while a synthetic version of their suffering got harvested for clicks. SXSW is always a little surreal; this year felt like a green room a few meters away from the end of the world.
That dissonance peaked around the AI infrastructure story.
On one side, OpenAI talked. Multi‑gigawatt sites in a country where a single complex eats more than a percent of peak national capacity. They described AI data centers as automated factories, thousands of GPUs humming together like a single nervous system, turning electricity into inference and inference into product. They invoked a bitter lesson that scale rules: more compute, better models, more users, more revenue, more demand for compute again. The flywheel.
On the slides it looked like progress. New jobs. Reindustrialization. A way to turn the cloud back into steel and concrete and tax base. They talked about community benefits packages, HVAC upgrades for rodeo halls (I know), STEM programs for schools in towns that used to be footnotes in someone else’s economy. They talked about modernizing the grid, building new transmission, rewriting the social contract between tech and place. Sitting in the audience it was impossible not to feel the seduction of that story. The future as a set of very large numbers marshaled in your direction.
But we wanted to know about water, not wonder. How much does a gigawatt of intelligence drink. What happens to lakes and wells. The engineers answered coldly that modern designs are mostly closed loop, that the big water hit is the initial fill, that once charged the system uses less than a brewery, that the real bottleneck is electricity, not liquid. The physics sounded fine, and very fake. The unease was not about plumbing: it was about who holds the authority to decide that this land, this aquifer, this sky full of power lines will be sacrificed so a cluster of models can think a little faster about someone else’s problems.
At the same time, in other rooms, people talked about mattering, about higher education’s slow crisis, about young adults who do not believe in the old promises anymore. Futurists took a flamethrower to trend reports, arguing that leaders must stop pretending linear forecasts mean anything in a world of converging storms. Education panels quietly confessed that we are building shiny new AI tutors while starving the institutions that used to produce scientists and citizens. Mental health experts connected the dots between algorithmic feeds, ambient war footage, and the numbness people carry into their daily scrolling. Doomscrolling that eats braincells for breakfast. Everything rhymed.
Threaded through all of this ran another chorus: people calling out the unchecked power of the tech bros and the megalomaniac platforms they have built. You could hear the impatience harden whenever someone mentioned engagement, scale, or “time on device” as if those were neutral metrics rather than levers on human attention. Speakers from wildly different backgrounds kept circling the same point: we have handed an enormous slice of our psychic commons to a handful of companies whose business model depends on keeping us scrolling, numbed, and fractionally more angry than yesterday. It felt less like a critique of technology in general and more like a reckoning with a small priesthood of founders and investors who have been allowed to treat whole populations as A/B test cohorts, and who still act surprised when politics starts to resemble their feeds.
The festival felt political and not just from some clever slogans but because every track, from AI to education to wellness to media, kept orbiting the same three forces: concentrated unchecked power, fraying democracy, and a culture learning to be ashamed of its own voice.
Concentrated power looked like Trump’s second term on one side and trillion‑dollar platforms on the other, each able to rewrite reality for millions with a post, a policy memo, or a ranking tweak. Fraying democracy showed up as gerrymanders, voter intimidation by uniform, threats to broadcast licenses, textbook rewrites that scrubbed Rosa Parks’ race out of history. The shame showed up as creators and teachers silently updating their internal list of topics that are no longer worth the trouble to touch.
In that atmosphere, Gavin Newsom reads as counter‑programming.
He walked in with the practiced ease of a California governor and the nervous energy of a small business owner who still remembers arguing about mop sinks with inspectors. The book he wrote gave him permission to talk about money, shame, and power in the same breath. He told the story of the stranger who tipped him twenty dollars as a teenage busboy, how that gesture rewired his sense of agency so deeply that years later, as a young supervisor, he would hand seven hundred dollars to a toll worker and buy tolls for every car behind him just to pass the feeling along. A personal anecdote about what a system can be when it chooses generosity instead of extraction.
Then he turned, hard, to extraction. Tariffs as an illegal tax on everyone’s grocery bill. Cuts to Medicaid and food stamps dressed up as fiscal discipline. A tax code tuned to funnel extraordinary gains to billionaires while the first generation in American history stares at a future worse than its parents. He called Trump a jackass, an invasive species, a man whose talent lies in destruction rather than creation. He accused him of bending foreign policy around personal business deals, of using tariffs and national security as props in one long grift. The attack was not polite, and it was not vague.
What stayed with me was how he knitted the macro to the micro. This was not “democracy in danger” as poster copy. This was democracy as rent, as insulin, as housing permits, as whether your kids can afford to live within driving distance of you. He framed California’s progressive experiment as a proof of concept: a state that taxes the very rich harder, lifts wages, expands preschool, enforces emissions, rams housing reforms through by stapling them to the budget, and still anchors much of the world’s tech innovation and Nobel‑level research. His argument was simple enough: democracy cannot survive without a more democratic economy. In a week dominated by corporate decks, hearing a sitting governor say plainly that plutocracy is a design flaw rather than a law of nature felt almost subversive.
He did something else politicians rarely do on a tech stage: he went after the cult of the business genius president. He dismantled the fantasy that the country should be run like a profit‑maximizing firm. Government, he reminded the room, cannot choose its customers or its zip codes. It inherits all the externalities markets happily ignore. Coming from a man who built a hospitality group to dozens of locations, that critique carried a different weight than the usual blue‑check dunk.
He said, in front of a room of podcast listeners and start‑up kids, that unless Democrats take back the House this cycle, he does not believe America will have what older generations meant by a free and fair election in 2028. Not because tanks will roll down Main Street, but because the map will be pre‑cooked, the voters pre‑sorted, the intimidating uniforms assigned to exactly the right polling places. He pointed to deployments of National Guard and Marines to American cities as early trials. He described Trump trying to “light democracy on fire” on January 6 and then pre‑rigging the next rounds with phone calls to governors and legislative tricks. He presented all of this not as alarmism but as a preview, George Orwell scenarios in American cities. The other George must be turning in his grave. .
We went quiet in a heavy way; just mental fatigue. I could feel people thinking: probably true. Then, almost immediately, filing that thought somewhere deep and unreachable so they could still enjoy happy hour.
Newsom’s answer to that fatigue was more than a polished optimism script. It was something sharper: responsibility. He floated universal basic capital as a step beyond universal basic income, a way to give people actual stakes and assets instead of just stipends. He defended progressive taxation not as punishment for success but as insulation against the kind of inequality that rots democracies from within. He admitted his own missteps, including his state still having wau too many poor people. He acknowledged the backlash when he started marrying same‑sex couples in 2004, and said he would still do it again. The point was not that leaders must be flawless. The point was that leaders must risk something real.
Listening to him, I realized how little risk most of the week had asked of anyone onstage. The AI panels gave us immense numbers and careful assurances. The media panels offered worry and exquisite self‑awareness. The education talks laid out models and polite dread. Everyone saw the storm. Very few described what they were personally willing to stake to change its path, and that is worrying. We… are the last line of defense.
For all his theatrical instincts, Newsom put something on the table. He named Trump as the central obstacle. He predicted a broken election on the record. He tied his state’s choices to a moral claim that “we are all better off when we are all better off,” and he dared an audience in Texas to consider whether their tax system truly favors workers or only the one percent. In a week where so many powerful people were managing downside, he swung.
I stepped back into the Texas sun with the usual conference hangover: too many ideas, not enough sleep, that strange sense that the world is collapsing and rebooting at the same time. The AI grids will rise, the water will be pumped. Wars will continue their grim arithmetic offstage while our feeds remix them into clips. Book bans will not dissolve because of one cathartic panel. Oligarchs will not retire out of boredom.
What did matter, to me, was that inside a massive hotel an elected official treated the audience as a civic force rather than as a market segment He insisted the pocketbook is political, that your rent is a referendum, that your student loan statement is a ballot with a due date. He laid his own contradictions and regrets out as part of the story instead of sanding them down for electability. I do not know whether Gavin Newsom will be the person who bends this era away from its worst instincts. I do know that in that room, in that hour, he felt less like another talking head and more like a flawed, ambitious human trying to inhabit a role nobody understands anymore: someone willing to say that the barn is burning, that the jackass is not a joke, and that carpentry remains possible if enough of us pick up tools instead of phones.
The smell of street food mixing with the imagined hum of servers two hundred miles away, made me realize how hungry I am for exactly that. Not salvation, not branded resistance. Just a politician ready to name the oligarchy, count the bodies, talk about the bill, and still believe that a state can be run on something more radical than fear. For a few hours in Austin, Newsom made that belief feel less like nostalgia and more like a rough draft of the future.
I walked away wanting, against my better judgment, to see what he does with that next.
