Chapter 500

The Freaking Rolling Stones or Something

After ETech, my original travel plans now a little more than a distant memory, I decided that I would fly to Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Festival.

Held every March, the festival brings together tens of thousands of independent filmmakers, musicians and—in recent years—Internet people to meet their peers, listen to panels and talks and, in the evenings, to get blind drunk at a succession of sponsored parties.

The Internet portion of the festival is often described as “spring break for geeks.” My decision to attend was all Zoe’s fault: her readings in New York had gone well, and her publisher had secured her two gigs at South by Southwest: a reading and also a spot on a panel about online privacy. She had found a place to stay in Austin—an “amazing” two-bedroom condo right across the street from the conference center, and emailed to ask if I wanted to share it with her. Despite my not really knowing what a “condo” was, I agreed.

The price was $100 a night and I had nothing better planned after San Diego. The whole idea of the festival being a party for geeks fascinated me and on the flight from San Diego International Airport to Austin I wrote a pitch to an editor I knew at the Financial Times, likening the event to Woodstock in 1969 …

Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook is headlining and then there are a thousand other acts booked to speak on pretty much all aspects of interactive media. It seems that almost everyone in the UK and US dot-com industry is heading there—and not just for the legendary parties. Oh, the parties! And yet behind the scenes, it’s a really critical time for the industry where increased consolidation and lots of “cool” businesses coming to the end of their first funding round means that young entrepreneurs are under pressure to find a “liquidity event,” preferably through acquisition. To grow up, in other words. Like Woodstock in 1969, this year’s SXSWi could well mark the end of an era—and I’d very much like to get under the skin of it.

I titled the pitch “Fear and Coding in Austin, Texas” and felt very pleased with myself for the rest of the flight.

501

On the second night of the conference I stumbled through the door of the condo at about 3 a.m. Right behind me was a girl called Eris, an interactive designer from San Francisco who I’d met a few hours earlier at a rooftop party.

The circumstances of our meeting at the party had been slightly odd. Zoe had just introduced me to some famous website editor on whom she had a crush and, as required, I was making polite small talk about what a nice—and, unbelievably, available—girl Zoe was. My friendly duties complete, I was just about to leave them to their flirting when a small brown-haired girl ran the full length of the roof deck and jumped onto my back.

“Heeeyyyy!” she shouted, swinging from my neck like one of those stuffed monkeys you sometimes get, “how are yooooooouuu?”

“Heyyyyy!” I replied, “uh … whoooooo are yoooouuuu?”

The girl let go and landed in front of me. She stared in my face, confused but still beaming: “I’m sure I know you,” she said. I swear to God, I had a horrible feeling that her next words would be “Kos sent you.” But, actually, the crazy brown-haired monkey girl probably did know me. I have a terrible memory for faces at the best of times, but I also meet a lot of people when I’m drunk and then have to deal with the embarrassment of having absolutely no recollection when I see them again.

“Oh, yes,” I said, desperately looking for clues “where was it I last saw you?”

“I think it was in San Francisco,” said the girl.

“Ah,” I said, “then we definitely haven’t met. I’ve never been to San Francisco.”

“Oh, well,” said the girl, “let’s meet now. I’m Eris.” She kissed me full on the mouth. “And by the end of tonight I’ll have convinced you to come to San Francisco.”

I liked Eris immediately.

502

As Eris and I spilled through the door of the condo, drunkenly kissing and grabbing at each other’s clothes, I realized that I should probably have phoned ahead. Zoe’s bra was in our fruit bowl and a line of her clothes, plus those of a mystery stranger, formed a path from the leather sofa to her bedroom. A pair of thick-rimmed glasses was lying on the countertop.

I led Eris into my room and closed the door, wondering for a split second who the lucky guy Zoe had brought home was. Ah well, I’ll find out when she blogs about it tomorrow morning. It’s amazing what some people consider “work.”

Tomorrow morning duly arrived and Eris left early, heading for an early panel about interaction, or design, or something before catching her flight home. “You really should come to San Francisco,” she said. “I think you’d love it.” I promised her I’d think about it, showed her to the door and then went back to bed to await the inevitable hangover.

And, sure enough, by the time I was woken up half an hour later, it was raging with full force. So I really could have done without the shouting from the kitchen …

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckFUCK.” Zoe’s morning was apparently not shaping up as well as her previous evening had.

“FUCKKKKIING HELLL.”

I stumbled out of bed, pulled on my jeans and opened the door. “What’s wrong?” I groaned. “You can’t possibly tell me you’re suffering from post-coital guilt. Doesn’t seem your style somehow.”

In fact Zoe had a much more serious—and hilarious—reason to be upset. An hour earlier she had woken up—cheeks still flushed from her adventure on our rented upholstery—and switched on her laptop to catch up on the day’s news and gossip. And that’s when she had discovered the horrible truth—a commenter on a geek gossip site had seen her leaving the party with a guy and had decided to write about it. The blogger had become the blogged.

Stifling a grin—with limited success—I poured her a cup of coffee and listened as she explained what had happened. The problem was not that she’d been spotted leaving the party with a guy—that was hardly news for someone who blogged about one-night stands—but, rather, the identity of that guy. Not only was he Internet-famous too, but he was even more well known than Zoe.

“You mean, the guy last night was ___________?” I said, barely able to contain my laughter.

“Yes.”

“Holy shit. He’s like a fucking member of the geek A-list.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

“Oh dear.”

503

But if Zoe thought her fifteen minutes of unwanted fame was traumatic, it was nothing compared to what would happen, a few hours later, and less than a mile from our rented apartment—to a business reporter called Sarah Lacy.

Lacy had first come to prominence when she wrote a cover story for BusinessWeek magazine about Silicon Valley’s new breed of young Internet entrepreneurs, the twenty-somethings responsible for popular sites like Facebook and MySpace and Digg. The article had been so well received that she’d been commissioned by publishers Gotham to write an entire book on the subject, with the title Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good.

The book was due to be published the following month, and, while researching and writing it, Sarah had won the trust of many of her subjects, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth had recently been valued at one and a half billion dollars. Very much the man of the moment, Zuckerberg had reluctantly agreed to be interviewed on stage at South by Southwest—but only if Sarah conducted the interview.

The event was the conference’s hot ticket—so much so that two auditoria had been set aside for it: one for the interview itself and a second where the whole thing would be broadcast on a huge screen for those who couldn’t fit into the main room.

“You going to the Zuckerberg interview?” Zoe asked as we left the condo, heading for a late brunch. I hadn’t planned on it.

“One point five billion reasons why I’m going to say nothing interesting and you’re still going to lap it up?” I said. “Yeah—sounds fascinating.”

“Not jealous at all then?”

“Of Mark Zuckerberg? Please.”

“Suit yourself. I hear this Sarah Lacy girl is cute.”

“Really?” I said.

“Well, I might poke my head round the door. See if there’s anything in it for the FT article.”

“Thought you might. See you there.”

504

Sarah Lacy was indeed cute, especially for a business reporter. Wearing knee-length designer shorts and with her dark curly hair held back in a hairband, she was certainly in marked contrast to Zuckerberg who prides himself on his geek chic look—a black fleece and Adidas flip-flops. “When online dating goes horribly wrong,” I whispered to Zoe as we sat at the back, waiting for the interview to get started.

The room was chock-full-o’nerds and their excitement at seeing their hero was beyond embarrassing. As Zuckerberg walked onto the stage, accompanied by thumping techno music, a group of men in the first two rows stood up and started dancing.

“I’m not sure I can cope with this,” I said to Zoe. “Pretty reporter or not, I may have to get out of here.”

“Yeah,” she said, “and I assume you’ve noticed that the pretty reporter is wearing a wedding ring.”

“Jesus, Zoe, how can you see a wedding ring from here?”

“Comes with the job, darling.”

The interview got underway and it soon became apparent that the organizers had made a terrible mistake. The computer programmers and web designers that comprised the majority of the audience couldn’t care less that Facebook was a multi-billion-dollar company: all they were interested in were the technical details of how the site ran, how it was coded and what features were coming next. Lacy, though, is a business reporter, and so wanted to press the world’s youngest billionaire on how he saw his role changing over the coming months. It was a classic case of right content, wrong audience.

Another problem that soon became apparent was that Zuckerberg is a really, really difficult interview subject: much more comfortable in front of a computer than an audience. From the start, he answered Lacy’s questions with defensive one-word answers and awkward jokes. Lacy, for her part, tried to put him at ease by playing on their friendship to the point where she was almost flirting with the world’s most unflirtwithable man. It was painful to watch.

I was curious what the rest of the audience thought, so I called up Twitter on my phone. I’d used the service a few times since Michael had introduced me to it, but not to the point where I was convinced of its purpose. But looking at the “tweets” relating to the Zuckerberg interview, I suddenly understood it. “This Lacy chick is the worst interviewer ever,” wrote one Twitterer. “This interview sucks ass,” said another. Twitter was the perfect tool for hecklers who are too cowardly to actually shout something out. I could learn to like it. By this point, I actually felt sorry for both Lacy and Zuckerberg—the former was asking good questions and was doing her best to coax answers from her subject; the latter was clearly uncomfortable on stage and just wanted to get back to his nice, safe office.

It was a terrible interview, but it was hard to decide whose fault that was. The audience, though, was suffering from no such uncertainty—here was some woman interviewing the great Mark Zuckerberg and not even asking any technical questions. “Ask a proper question!” One of them found some courage and started to heckle.

I couldn’t take it any more. I walked out of the auditorium and headed to the bar. For the amusement of my friends back home—and maybe Maureen—I decided to kill some time writing a post for my blog: a fake transcript of the speech, with Zuckerberg parodied as a monosyllabic idiot savant and Lacy as an over-friendly bimbo …

Austin Convention Center Ballroom A—2 p.m.: BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy enters, followed by Mark Zuckerberg. The audience applauds wildly.

 

Sarah Lacy (SL): “Thank you—thank you all so much. Now let’s hear it for this guy—Mark Zuckerberg everyone! So, I wanna start by asking—as I did in my book—why do you think Facebook … which I use, like, all the time—is so great?”

Mark Zuckerberg (MZ): “Well …”

SL: “What I mean is—what is it about Facebook that has attracted not just me but millions of other people like me to sign up?”

MZ: “Er …”

SL: “I totally agree. Can you say more?”

MZ: “Sure …”

SL: “Can you believe this guy? Wow—I mean his answers are so short—seriously, I think he’s the biggest loser I’ve ever interviewed. Hey, Mark, can I tell the story about the first time you allowed me to interview you?”

MZ : “Uh…I guess.”

SL: “OK, so, like, I’m interviewing Mark—and we’ve been talking for like twenty hours and Mark was, like, ‘I need to pee’ and I was, like, ‘that’s so interesting and sexy,’ tell me more and he’s, like, ‘no I really need to pee’ and I’m like talking about my book and, like, the next thing I know he’s peed all over the floor and it’s like so cute and hilarious.”

MZ: “Thanks for sharing that.”

 

Audience breaks into spontaneous standing ovation, in awe at Zuckerberg’s razor-sharp retort. Fat guy at the front screams and faints. Twitter crashes.

It was cruel, really, and not very funny. But then again it was only really intended to be read by my friends and the maybe two hundred other people who were by now reading my blog regularly. What I definitely hadn’t expected was that the Guardian’s technology reporter, Jemima Kiss, would quote me in her coverage of the event. Thanks to that link and the couple of dozen other bloggers who then re-posted the link on their own blogs, by the end of the day my parody of the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview had been read by almost 100,000 people.

505

Later that evening I began to have serious second thoughts about the blog post. On Twitter and other social networks, the reviews of the interview had got worse as the day had gone on—most of them apparently written by people who hadn’t actually been in the room, but had heard about the train wreck online, from blogs like mine. Bashing Lacy and Zuckerberg had become the game of the day, with Lacy getting the bulk of the abuse, as so often happens with women in the male-dominated world of technology.

But what started out as criticisms of Lacy’s professional abilities had quickly become highly abusive, personal attacks. The final straw came when I noticed one commenter on a popular blog had written that he wanted to rape her. This over an interview at a geek conference. Suddenly the jokes weren’t funny any more. I’d like to say that at this point I took the post down. Zoe was right: the truth is that much of what I wrote stemmed from jealousy—Zuckerberg was younger than me and worth more than a billion dollars; Lacy was a successful BusinessWeek journalist—attractive, wealthy and considerably better known that I was. And after today’s performance, she was only going to be more famous. Damn her.

But, then again, both Zuckerberg and Lacy were celebrities, of a sort. The rape threats were pretty extreme, but they must be used to this kind of stuff: people making jokes and silly threats online—it’s just the price of fame. Meanwhile, my inbox was full of messages from people congratulating me on my hilarious parody. People were stopping me in the corridors of the convention center to tell me they thought I was “freakin’ awesome.”

They’d asked about my upcoming book, having read about it on my site, and said they were looking forward to reading more of my stuff. If I took down the blog post all of that attention would go away. Wasn’t I entitled to some fame too? In the end I decided on a compromise: I left the post up, but attached a note emphasizing that I thought Lacy was a great reporter who’d just had a bad gig and attacking those who were posting abusive comments about her:

A quick update: the following post was written straight (literally) after I walked out of the Zuckerberg keynote. I hadn’t seen any Twitters or other blog comments—it was just my own (hopefully mildly amusing) take on the performance of participants.

 

Since I posted it, the coverage of the event on certain blogs has got really personal—mostly directed at Sarah Lacy. There’s a huge difference between mocking someone for a bad gig and abusing them personally and pronouncing their career over. My intent in this case was very much the former—and I stand by it; Lacy had a duff gig and Zuckerberg was the most boring interviewee imaginable.

 

What I can’t abide, though, are the jealous little fucks hurling shit at a journalist just because they would give their right arm to be in her position. It’s a cliché to ask this but I do wonder whether people would be being quite so personally vile to her if she were male. And—hell—you have to give her kudos for making a thousand or so people feel sorry for a twenty-something billionaire.

I still felt like a coward and a hypocrite; wasn’t I one of those jealous little fucks? But any further soul-searching would have to wait. Michael had just texted: he’d decided to fly into Austin from his meetings in San Francisco and was ready to party. Tonight would be one last hurrah after the road trip before he flew back to London and I continued on my travels.

506

By the time Michael and I arrived at Pure Volume—a huge white tent erected on wasteland opposite the convention center—it was nearly 2 a.m. The tent had an all-night license, with a free sponsored bar, and so every night, when all of the other bars in the city closed, all of the conference attendees headed there to keep drinking. The queue snaked around the block, and it didn’t seem to be moving.

“Fuck this,” I said to Michael and headed to the front of the line, press credentials in hand. The venue looked half empty, but the bouncer waved away my press pass.

“We’re full,” he said.

“But it’s dead in there,” I pointed out, not unreasonably.

“Sorry, guys—we need to leave room for the VIPs,” he replied. “We just had to turn away the DJ’s girlfriend.”

Presumably the DJ booth was full as well. But whether there really was a capacity problem or if, as seemed more likely, the sponsors wanted to keep the number of peasants inside low to save on the cost of free booze, we knew there was almost no chance of us getting in before daylight. It was time to figure out a plan B. We thanked the bouncer for his time and ever-so-casually sauntered away, waiting until we were out of sight before ducking down the alleyway behind the tent.

Our way was barred by another bouncer, standing guard over the flap of canvas leading to the VIP area at the back of the makeshift venue. He too claimed that he couldn’t let anyone else in. “But the whole place is empty,” I argued. “Last night it was ten times more full and we still got in.” A harmless lie.

“I have to say I agree with you guys,” said the bouncer, “but I want to keep my job.” At least he was acknowledging the ridiculousness of the situation—but the simple fact remained that Michael and I weren’t famous enough to get into the VIP area. Clearly the bouncer hadn’t been one of the 100,000 people who had read my blog. I mean, that was a type of fame, wasn’t it?

Our fruitless negotiations were interrupted by the arrival of what appeared to be a Green Day tribute band—five or six nice middle-class boys with torn clothes and punk hair—led down the alleyway by a besuited promoter. He marched up to the bouncer as his teenage charges stood sullenly and patiently behind him like schoolchildren queuing to get into a museum.

“Hey, dude,” said the promoter to the bouncer, “these guys are with me—you’ve got to let them in; they’re like the freaking Rolling Stones or something.”

Michael and I looked the band up and down. Here’s a quick list of ways they were like the Rolling Stones … 1) They had feet.

And yet the promoter’s confidence—likening a group of children to the Rolling Stones as if the similarity were a statement of fact—had paid off; the band was whisked inside. The bouncer didn’t want to risk getting fired for refusing to let the “freaking Rolling Stones or something” in.

Well, if that’s how this has to work, I thought, so be it. The promoter was still outside the tent, making a call on his mobile. Presumably he needed to warn the band’s moms that their sons would be home late. Michael and I waited until he’d finished and made our approach.

“Excuse me,” I said, “who were those guys?”

“They’re called ‘October.’” We stared back blankly.

“You might not have heard of them—but they’re, like, huge—like the Goo Goo Dolls or something.”

“The Goo Goo Dolls? Cool! Actually, maybe you can help us—we’re journalists from the Financial Times in London, and we’re in town covering the best new bands at South by Southwest. Actually, this our last night in town,” I lied, three times—the bit about it being our last night was true.

Michael picked up the lie. It was like being back in Vegas—I secretly hoped there’d be call for a pun.

“If you can help us to get in and meet October, then I’m sure we could find a way to mention them in our article. I’ve heard they’re pretty good.”

“Like the freaking Rolling Stones or something,” I added, helpfully.

“Journalists?” His eyes widened. “Hey!” he shouted to the bouncer “these guys are from the London Times—they’re with me too.”

The VIP area was weird. An uneasy mix of music, film and interactive celebrities. You could tell the Internet-famous straight away; the Internet, as a medium, hadn’t been around long enough for any of its celebrities to figure out how to act cool.

The web kids looked like first-generation immigrants to planet fame. You could spot the old-media-famous easily enough too, because they actually had recognizable faces. I saw Moby standing at the bar talking to Mark Cuban—the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks who had made his fortune founding technology companies.

On the other side of the room, a guy who looked suspiciously like Will Ferrell was talking to a girl who I’m pretty sure was Kate Hudson. And tucked away far in the corner, the boys from October were playing Guitar Hero—and losing, badly. We’d been in the room three whole minutes, so of course Michael was already chatting up a girl. I couldn’t place her at first, but then I realized she was Justine Ezarik—or “iJustine”—an Internet-famous spokesmodel who produced web-based promotional videos for companies that wanted to play up their geek cred.

Justine was clutching an old-fashioned lunch pail with the Junior Mints logo across the front, which was all the “in” Michael needed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the half-empty pack of Junior Mints he’d been carrying since Barstow and offered her one.

Michael’s latest business is an online puzzle company called Mind Candy. The name is a play on the phrase “eye candy” and has nothing—I can’t emphasize this enough—to do with actual confectionery of any sort. And yet as I walked past, I overheard a snippet of their conversation …

“So what do you, like, do?” asked Justine.

“I run a company called Mind Candy.”

“OhMiGod I love candy!”

“Well,”—offering a Junior Mint—“that’s what we make.”

Nice work, Michael—but he could have iJustine; I was far more interested in the girl I’d spotted standing by the bar, drinking from a very large plastic cup of what I would later confirm was neat vodka.

507

“Hannah!”

Hannah is Canadian, but she lives in London where she works as design director for a very successful website. We’d only met properly once before, and it would be fair to say that we hadn’t really got off on the right foot. Much of this had to do with my being very, very drunk and deciding that it would be hilarious to accuse her of being an American. Repeatedly. For about an hour.

After sixty minutes of my drunken bullshit, Hannah had responded in the only appropriate manner: by physically propelling me across the room into a table of drinks.

I’d liked Hannah immediately. In fact, I’d had a ridiculous crush on her from the moment she pushed me into that table. Who wouldn’t fall for that girl? The fact that she was astonishingly sexy, with bright red hair and lipstick to match, also helped.

What didn’t help was the fact that she had a long-term boyfriend—and that she thought I was a drunken asshole. And yet, tonight she didn’t seem particularly un-pleased to see me. In fact, she greeted me as if I were her best friend in the world.

“Paul! I was looking for you! I read your blog post about Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerberg. I had no idea you were so funny. Wow—that Lacy chick sounds like a cunt.”

“Actually, I feel terrible about that post. I’m sure Sarah Lacy is a lovely person and a damn fine journalist; I was just being jealous and stupid.”

That’s what I should have said. But Hannah—lovely, sexy Hannah—thought I was funny. In fact, I got the distinct feeling she was flirting with me. Holy shit—Hannah thinks I’m funny? Because of that horrible blog post?

“Yeah, total cunt.” I said. “So, how have you been?”