Attending the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, is a little like visiting the future.
It starts slowly. The plane lands, and your iPhone suddenly tells you that ten or twenty of your friends are at the airport at the exact same time you are. You arrive at the center of town, where you can use Wi-Fi absolutely everywhere (last year, in a controversial move, a company paid homeless people to walk around as mobile hot spots). You pay for taxis by liking them on Facebook, and sometimes the hotel upgrades you based on how many Twitter followers you have. You also know which restaurant all of your acquaintances are visiting tonight, and you detect the location of every party around through your phone.
This is just a taste of what happens during the weeklong festival, a kind of Mecca for indie types, including many Web personalities and their fans. It’s amazing how crowded the space, and your brain, becomes.
South by Southwest is a place where everyone understands where the Web is going. They all download the newest apps. They all move at the speed of Silicon Valley, not the speed of the rest of the world. So visiting it truly is like attending a party in the future, where everyone has a blog or a Web app they’re trying to tell you about. Everyone is launching a new game or a new service they want you to try. They’re funded by important venture capitalists, and they believe in what they’re doing. Unfortunately, the truth is, not all of them can win.
More quickly than you can imagine, you become immune to this bombardment of information and hype. It hits the retina and dies there before entering the brain. You begin to build a kind of mental and emotional fortress, as you would if you were walking through a village torn apart by war.
You have no choice. You can’t arrive and listen to everything. You get skeptical. You stop listening to anyone who seems too interested. Even attendees from small towns, who are used to saying hi to strangers on the street, become suddenly aloof.
This place is a kind of physical manifestation of the marketplace of ideas you travel through every day if you use the Web at all. Visiting it in a physical place is different, and most are unused to the feeling it evokes—a sense of ignoring a lot of the wildness that is going on, as if you were visiting a mining town in the Old West where everyone is trying to sell you something, or a bazaar in which you are being cajoled into stall after stall, or maybe even a carnival where barkers call out to you. Everyone wants a piece. They’re hungry for your attention, because the more of it they get, the brighter their own future becomes.
The only thing that keeps the Web from feeling like this on a daily basis is the filters that have been placed at the walls of your city, preventing most ideas from hitting you at all. You only see things that your friends post or that have been voted to the top of Reddit.com, so you aren’t exposed to every single thing the way you are in Austin during that week. So your Web experience is calmer and less defensive. You can have more faith in the things that you see, because they have been filtered. But in the real world, there are people in your physical space. Ignoring them is difficult. You begin to get a real idea of just how crowded this carnival is.
But seeing this conference in person means you can begin to understand what the marketplace of ideas is really about. You can grasp just how many ideas are out there, wanting your attention. You can experience people’s truly bad ideas instead of filtering them out at the gates. The hordes are visible and accessible. You can choose what to pay attention to, that is, if you can make sense of the chaos at all.
As you imagine this scene (or remember it, if you’ve been), realize that it’s how the future will look. If you live in New York, it may happen more quickly. If you live in South Dakota, perhaps a little more slowly. But as time goes on, as it becomes less expensive to produce and distribute content, you will be exposed to more ideas more often, and you will get better at choosing among them. In other words, you will become more discerning. The quality of ideas will have to keep up with your galvanized mental barriers.
That’s right, you and the rest of the audience, just as in a bazaar, will become even more cynical and discerning than you are now. It will be harder to impress audiences tomorrow than today, as it is harder today than yesterday.
So you must begin as soon as possible. You must realize that your ideas, almost all of them, are simply not strong enough to survive in the modern idea ecosystem. They haven’t evolved enough. They haven’t encountered enough challenges. You haven’t worked on distilling them enough or sharpening them like a sword. They cannot cut through the armor that shields your potential audience’s minds.
This will be the first step in understanding how impact works. The more complex and competitive the ecosystem, the more adaptable and targeted your messages must become.
Forget the things you’ve heard, the myths like “good content markets itself.” It may have been true once, but it isn’t anymore. Yes, the strongest ideas survive, but content creators are getting more savvy every day. They know what you like, and they are designing their work around it. They are curating the experience to make sure every part is delightful, and unless you can compete with that, your work will be forgotten.
Ideas are not organic things that are simply born out of a brain, fully formed. They are crafted the way writers craft sentences and stories. They are edited over and over again and go from lumps of clay to masterpieces. But most people are never in the idea laboratory, so they don’t see this process. For example, imagine the difference between this manuscript when it was created and the final state in which you are reading it today. How much better is it? Would you have read it in its original, unpolished form?
This also means that most people cannot throw out one idea a year and expect to succeed. They must be consistent in their experimentation in order to understand what the marketplace wants. Everyone has to get better at designing and polishing. Only this kind of labor will allow you to truly understand how an idea survives.
Thankfully, there is a system behind all this that almost everyone on the Web understands to some degree. Some get it instinctively; others have learned over time. We’d like to help you skip the line and teach you what we’ve learned.