A few months ago, I attended the final XOXO conference in Portland, Oregon.
XOXO is (was) an IRL gathering of “the good internet” — bloggers, hackers, artists, journalists, makers, all coming together to bounce off each other for a few days to see what happens.
Each annual installment was a place of learning, of inspiration, of friendly collegiality and of bonding over shared interests (and shared distress, sometimes — after all, the subject at hand is the internet, and what it does to people).
This year, XOXO returned for the first time since before the pandemic. It was billed as “Once more, with feelings.”
One of the themes that emerged from the talks, presentations, and conversations was the state of community on today’s internet.
Lots of people at XOXO, myself included, have spent the last few years reeling from the hyper-fragmentation and accelerating commodification of online spaces.
For example: Twitter used to be a place where I could reliably converse with and broadcast to a lot of like-minded people. Now, personally, I’m done with Twitter. I’ll never post there again.
That space has become toxic, and not merely toxic, but useless to me with respect to what I want out of a social network (conversation; reach; entertainment).
Bluesky…Threads…Mastodon…Private Discords and niche subreddits…Substack newsletters and Facebook groups just one spam DM away from being hacked…Everyone I know who works online has had to face the question, lately, of what is going to work now.
For now, I’ve personally shifted my focus to Bluesky – here is my personal profile, and here is one for Wondermark comics. I hope to see you there!
As for the video linked above…
All the XOXO speakers were great, and you can watch all their talks on YouTube (from this year and years past).
But I’ve chosen to highlight Cabel Sasser’s talk in this post for a few reasons:
- It’s very entertaining. The entire audience was on the edge of our seats the whole time.
- It’s on a topic I care deeply about: remembering, and cherishing, artwork from the past that can speak to us in the present in a new way.
- It’s about taking time to save, and bring along with us, things we love that might otherwise be lost as we move from place to place, platform to platform, website to website.
Watch the whole talk, and then, visit the website Cabel set up in its aftermath. (No spoilers from me.)
[ Cabel Sasser describes how he discovered a forgotten artist – XOXO 2024 ]
