“You may all go to hell. I will go to Texas.

Scout legend Davy Crockett supposedly said it in 1835, after losing his seat in Congress. Washington had become too small for a guy like him, too petty, too full of men explaining the obvious to each other. So, he packed up, rode west, and headed straight into blue, gun smoking legend. The famous shoot-out at the Alamo swallowed him whole, but his spirit never left Texas.

History being what it is (well written), that little moment of defiant frontier irritation turned into one of the most quotable middle fingers in American history.​ Two centuries later the gesture still holds up remarkably well. Disturbingly well, in fact. Every March over 200.000 restless souls do roughly the same thing (minus the lead bullets). They leave their cozy corner offices, their design studios, their high-tech labs, their mahogany wood padded venture capital echo chambers and board a plane to Austin, Texas. Forget buffalo hide cloaks, rifles and horses…  they carry laptops, decks, half-finished ideas, laughable hats, silly T shirts, questionable footwear choices and a vague suspicion that the world might be shifting again… and that SXSW remains one of the rare places on this planet where you can feel those shifts early, while they still look like noise. I’ll be among them again next week. Flight booked for Saturday. Laptop packed. Brain already half in Texas.

South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual spring festival and conference in Austin that brings together music, film, and technology to showcase new ideas, talent, and products. The name is a playful reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, chosen in 1986 as an open, non-restrictive label for a new Austin event. Launched in 1987 as a regional music and media conference expecting about 150 attendees, the first edition drew roughly 700 and quickly became a magnet for the music industry.

In 1994 SXSW added film and interactive tracks, gradually evolving into a global platform for digital innovation and startups while remaining rooted in music culture. Through the 2000s and 2010s the festival gained a solid reputation as a tech launchpad for a plethora of start-ups, with Twitter’s breakout moment at SXSW 2007 and Foursquare’s buzz-driven debut at SXSW 2009, followed by waves of startup hype around apps like Highlight and Meerkat during the festival’s 40 years evolution from music conference to global innovation hotspot.

Pilgrimage of the curious mammals

People who know me well know how much I’m looking forward to that moment when my huge politically very incorrect rental car leaves the airport and the horizon opens and I remember that Texas light exists,  that strange amber glow at the end of an Austin afternoon that makes everything look like a Terrence Malick film, even the silly Wendy’s drive-through. And yes, I’m looking forward to seeing my beloved Lake Travis, even though the old girl is running a little low: about 203 meters above sea level as of this week, roughly 4,5 meters below full pool and slowly dropping. The region has been in drought since 2019. There’s water, yes. But Texas doesn’t give you anything for free, not even a lake.

Mostly I’m looking forward to seeing people and old friends again. David Armano will be there, strategist, AI thinker, visual genius, the man who practically invented Logic+Emotion as an operating system for the modern brand mind and is now leading digital solutions and innovation at Launch by NTT DATA. When he left Edelman, the place lost a kidney.

Stephanie Agresta will be there as well. Founder of Ascendancy Events, more than twenty years of SXSW under her belt, and one of the rare people who turned event marketing into a strategic discipline instead of a logistics exercise.  Brian Solis will be there too, recently named one of the world’s leading futurists by Global Gurus. He speaks on March 15 about augmenting human intelligence with AI. Brian and Stephanie are, in many ways, my SXSW godfather and godmother. They changed my festival experience years ago by introducing me to a remarkable circle of people.

I yearn for that extended SXSW tribe that somehow reconvenes every year like a migrating species of curious mammals with an inexplicable tolerance for overpriced tacos and wild stories. The conversations always pick up where they left off, even if a year, a FIFA peace prize and a dozen technological earthquakes have passed in the meantime. That is one of the quiet miracles of SXSW. You arrive with a program… you spend most of your time ignoring it.

The City as the Venue

This year the festival itself is going through one of its most dramatic identity experiments in forty years. The Austin Convention Center, home away from home,  that giant logistical hive that has anchored my SXSW experience for nearly three decades, that labyrinth of  massive exhibition halls and overlit meeting rooms where a thousand careers were launched and at least as many pitch decks went to die… is currently a pile of rubble. Yep. Yikes.

A $1.6 billion redevelopment is underway: it will double in size; it will reopen just in time for SXSW 2029. Until then? Hugh Forrest announced that the city itself becomes the venue. So the 2026 edition spreads across downtown Austin like wildfire on moonshine. Three new “Clubhouses” replace the convention center: Film & TV at 800 Congress, Innovation at Brazos Hall, Music at the Downright hotel on the Red River corridor. Hotels, theatres, bars, improvised venues, temporary hubs, strange little pockets of conversation forming and dissolving across the city. The whole thing runs seven days instead of nine. One weekend, not two.

For the first time ever, all tracks -Innovation (bye bye, Interactive), Film & TV, and Music- run simultaneously the entire week. The theme? “All Together Now.” ​ I like it: less convention center. more Austin. Which is probably closer to the original spirit anyway. SXSW has always worked best when it feels like a wandering conversation where you hop from one idea to another rather than “attending” a neatly packaged conference. The festival was born this way forty years ago: scattered, scrappy, plugged into the city’s nervous system, somewhere between barbecue smoke, Tito’s vodka and improbable ideas.

Something tells me this forced reinvention might actually be the best thing that’s happened to it in a decade.

The speakers: from Spielberg to Sterling

The lineup already looks absurd in that particular SXSW way where you never quite know if you’re about to hear something brilliant or watch a perfectly intelligent person walk confidently into a conceptual wall. Steven Spielberg is keynoting on Friday, March 13, sitting down with Sean Fennessey for a live recording of The Big Picture podcast. They’ll talk about his body of work, the future of cinema, and his new alien thriller Disclosure Day, dropping in June. The man who gave us Jaws, E.T., Schindler’s List, and Jurassic Park, wandering around Austin during a music festival. That sentence alone is worth the badge price.

Amy Webb, futurist, CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group, professor at NYU Stern, will present her annual Emerging Tech Trend Report, which has become one of the most widely cited foresight briefings in technology and policy circles. This year’s theme is “Creative Destruction“, borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist.  The title suggests a Armageddon kind of disruption. The real kind. The involuntary, structural, historical kind where systems are torn down and the rubble is still smoking when the new thing starts to emerge. (if ever).

Amy doesn’t just track trends or bubbles on smart slides; she maps hard and impactful consequences. Her slides alone could power a small think tank for a year. She told her audience to wear all black. Looks grimly promising.  Scott Galloway will undoubtedly deliver his usual cocktail of brutal honesty and market-savvy cynicism on the Vox Media Podcast Stage, recording Pivot live with Kara Swisher and Prof G Markets with Ed Elson. Expect him to dissect the latest AI land grab, rip into Big Tech’s consolidation of power, and maybe -just maybe-offer a roadmap for where this all leads. He’s also speaking at the SHE Media Co-Lab on women’s health innovation. Take everything with a grain of salt. Galloway is entertainingly often his own worst enemy. I loved his latest book “Notes on Being a Man”.

Jamie Lee Curtis is back, SXSW royalty since Everything Everywhere All at Once premiered at the Paramount,  with a session on pivoting, manifesting, and the philosophies that fueled her career. Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn will talk Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and their new Apple TV show Pluribus. Larry David and Jeff Schaffer are debuting footage from their new HBO sketch comedy about America’s 250th birthday.

I’m looking forward to the MIT Technology Review, and to Rohit Bhargava, founder of the Non-Obvious Company, who will add his own readings of the technological tea leaves.

Steve Carell returns to sitcoms with Bill Lawrence’s Rooster. Dr. Rana el Kaliouby and Bob Safian will keynote on why the future of AI must remain human-centric. Esther Perel, MKBHD, Brené Brown, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Garry Tan… the list spirals outward. And then there are the countless smaller sessions that will never make headlines but often contain the most interesting signals. The hallway conversations, the strange panels at 9am where someone casually reframes an entire problem space while half the audience is still negotiating coffee.

And somewhere in the city  -and I mean this from the bottom of my slightly punk heart- I hope Bruce Sterling is wandering around again, delivering his annual gut-check to an industry drunk on its own possibilities. SXSW without Bruce Sterling feels like cyberpunk without the punk. If you find him before I do, buy him a drink (again). I have questions.​ So looking forward to our yearly chat.

AI: From Horse Race to Civilization Questions

Artificial intelligence will obviously dominate the program once again -it was the most popular topic in SXSW’s PanelPicker submissions by a mile- but the tone is subtly and crucially shifting.​ The past two years were obsessed with models, benchmarks, demos, the endless horse race between companies trying to prove that their machine can autocomplete the internet slightly better than the next one.

Now the conversation is drifting toward something larger and considerably more uncomfortable.​ Systems. Governance. Infrastructure. Responsibility. What happens when these systems move from tools to environments. When decision-making slowly migrates from human processes to algorithmic ones. When the question is no longer whether the technology works but who carries responsibility when it doesn’t.

As the SXSW programming team put it: “One theme emerged prominently: humanity“.​ Amy Webb’s “Creative Destruction” framework captures it precisely: we’re not in a hype cycle anymore. We’re in one of those historical ruptures -like mechanization, like electricity, like the internet- where systems are involuntarily torn down to make way for something new (mind, new is not always better). The destruction isn’t optional, incremental, or reversible. And most leaders aren’t prepared.​ Those are not startup pitch questions anymore. Those are civilization questions. And SXSW, for all its branded taco chaos, has always been good at sensing the moment when a technological curiosity suddenly becomes a societal debate. (or debacle).

Meanwhile, the world outside Austin is on fire

Let’s address the elephant, the big orange one in the room. Or rather, the war. I was there in March 2020. I flew to Austin with bags packed and ambition high, and found the festival cancelled, the town in shock, and a pandemic quietly rewriting the rules of everything. The first cancellation in 34 years. I remember the locked doors, the disbelief, the eerie silence of a city that was supposed to be buzzing, and too many White-Russians with Wim Labie than my liver cares to remember.

Six years later, I’m boarding another plane to Texas while the world is, once again, teetering on something that feels uncomfortably large. US and Israeli forces are four days into strikes against Iran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed in a coordinated strike. Iranian retaliatory missiles and drones have hit targets across the Gulf states, Israel, and beyond. Six American service members are dead. The Strait of Hormuz is being threatened with closure. Russia is issuing World War III warnings. US senators are emerging from classified briefings looking pale and talking about “boots on the ground”. Trump says it will last “four weeks”. Israel privately thinks months.

So I was in Austine when SXSW (and life as we knew it) was cancelled for COVID. And now I’ll be going as what might be -depending on which newspaper you read before your morning coffee- the beginning of the end of the start of World War III unfolds in real time.

This raises the slightly mischievous set of questions I’m desperately curious to hear people discuss in Austin: How’s the resistance doing these days. How’s that Californian governor holding up …oh wait, Gavin Newsom is termed out, and the Democratic field to replace him is so fractured that the state party chair is literally begging candidates to drop out before a Republican walks into Sacramento.  He will be speaking on Sunday.

Will Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez show up again this year? The woman who set SXSW on fire in 2019 with her razorsharp takedown of Big Tech’s unchecked power, the same one who just accused Israel of genocide at the Munich Security Conference while dismissing 2028 presidential ambitions as a “network” conspiracy. Debates on war or peace, on Dostoevsky, on chip wars, Ukraine, the middle east and Taiwan. . Or the usual ambiguous middle ground where most of humanity quietly lives and tries to figure out which streaming service to cancel next.

Forty years of beautiful chaos

People love predicting the death of SXSW. It jumped the shark. Too big, too commercial, too chaotic, too pricey, too many brands distributing tacos in exchange for a hashtag. All partially true. And yet SXSW still performs a very specific function in the global conversation that nothing else quite replicates. CES shows the machines. Davos shows the power structures. Austin shows what happens when technology collides with culture in the open air.

This year -the 40th anniversary edition- that collision hits differently. Charley Crockett (yes, another Crockett) is on the music lineup. Rolling Stone is back with its Future of Music showcase at ACL Live. Billboard is running three nights at Moody Amphitheater. Meanwhile, down the street, someone is presenting a panel on ibogaine therapy with a former Texas governor and a Navy SEAL. Elsewhere, the team behind Breaking Bad is dissecting the creative alchemy of Albuquerque. In another room, an AI scientist is arguing that artificial intelligence must remain human-centric or risk becoming the very thing we feared. That’s SXSW. The only place on earth where you can walk from a conversation about psychedelic therapy to a keynote with Steven Spielberg to a late-night BBQ philosophy session without anyone batting an eye.

The Convention Center is gone. The world is on fire. The lake is low. And a few thousand curious mammals are packing their laptops and booking flights to Austin anyway, because the alternative -staying home, doom-scrolling, explaining the obvious to each other- feels infinitely worse. Crockett’s old sentence feels oddly appropriate. More appropriate than ever, in fact.

You may all go to hell. I will go to Texas. See you in Austin.