SXSW, Pictured

This morning on The Awl we saw these delightful snapshots from SXSW of Mashable’s wrecking-ball and requisite safety-waiver (“A selfie isn’t worth dying for,” wrote Gillian Lanyon).

And now here’s another image worth highlighting, caught by Can’t Stop the Bleeding (original Craigslist posting here):

This image pairs nicely with Eric Schmidt’s quote from a conference event on Friday, when asked whether the extreme profits of tech companies like WhatsApp would exacerbate wealth inequality. As Adrianne Jeffries at The Verge recounted, “Let us celebrate capitalism,” said Schmidt. “$19 billion for 50 people? Good for them.”

Not everything that happens at SXSW is hollow and ridiculous. But a lot of it is. Last year, Jacob Silverman traveled to SXSW Interactive and emerged with this dispatch, “Networking into the Abyss.” An excerpt:

When Brian first sat down at our table, gulping from what would be one of at least five glasses of red wine, I asked him what he did.

“What do I do? I do many things,” he said, before flashing a wide smile, pleased with himself.

“I prefer to ask people what they’re passionate about,” he said. “What are you passionate about?”

It was a line he used on anyone who had the ill fortune to approach our table. He delivered it—and a windy, opaque explanation of the community-building website he was developing—with the stilted pacing of someone trying to make a much-practiced speech seem off the cuff.

By the end of the evening, I still had little idea what Brian’s company did, though it sounded like some version of Facebook’s Pages feature. He hadn’t honed the sort of logline that is de rigueur at SXSW: “It’s like Twitter but for videos”; “It’s Tumblr meets Airbnb—but for business”; “It’s a place where people can meet and exchange career advice.” Like LinkedIn? “Yeah, but better.”

I never learned what he was passionate about.

Read the rest of Silverman’s piece here.