I didn’t catch South by Southwest 2018 this year, but the festival archives the panels and lectures on YouTube, so I spent a few hours watching the videos that caught my eye. Naturally, that short playlist included two discussions on journalism, one between Jeff Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and the other a presentation by Vox co-founder Ezra Klein. Finally, I waded into unknown territory and braved strange buzzwords: I watched a bunch of investors and lawyers discuss blockchain startups.
Panel presentations
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg is its editor-in-chief. Watching Goldberg interview Coates was interesting, partly because it was more of a conversation between friendly colleagues and partly because Ashley Feinberg recently leaked a transcript of a staff meeting The Atlantic held on April 6, one day after they fired Kevin Williamson. Coates and Goldberg commanded the room then, for better or worse, and this interview was a good peek into what that might have been like.
They first discussed Coates’ recent gig as the author of a new Captain America comic book series, slated to release in July. He admitted to being both excited and scared, because unlike Captain America — and Obama, he added — Coates doesn’t believe in an idealized version of meritocratic America
SXSW preceded the controversy around Williamson’s firing, but questions about media outlets’ opinion sections still surfaced. Goldberg asked Coates about the New York Times’ controversial opinion pages, but Coates had little to share, saying “it’s not fun” to see some of his friends attack the work done by his friends at the Times — including James Bennet, who runs the Times’ editorial pages and once held Goldberg’s position at The Atlantic. (Coates didn’t want to get into Cornel West’s beef with him, either.)
Is Coates struck with hope when he sees his white fanbase? “I am, but I shouldn’t be.” He recognizes that there’s about 250 million white people in America. That’s a lot of people, and only so many of them are on his side.
Ezra Klein began his presentation with a simple question: “Why is everything awful?” It isn’t because everyone in power is a jerk, though they might well be. Klein notes that we’re all interested in stories about human beings making choices, and that this is how we experience ourselves and the people around us.
He draws on a quote from a psychologist and a screenshot from a Nature article to make the case that we merely feel as if we’re in charge of our decisions, when in reality, most cognition takes place unconsciously and we rationalize the decisions our bodies have made for us. (He references the studies that motivate his claims, but was thin on citations.)
“What is happening around us is driving the answers we come to. It is driving which information we think is credible, which arguments we find persuasive, which authorities we trust, and all of that comes together and gets us where we need to go,” Klein said.
Klein concludes that people don’t run the systems; systems run the people. Congress, for example, disincentivizes cooperation and fosters competition because engaging in bipartisanship is bad for members of the minority party. If the majority does well, they stay in power, and if they don’t do well, they get voted out, Klein says. Why help things get done when your party is not in power?
The press, he says, is pressured into poor practices by its bottom line. Clickbait, polarization and lack of depth are surfacing; when editors see other outlets put up stories, they want to put up their own coverage, too, even if the editing or reporting is incomplete.
While each of his arguments seem plausible on their own, the connection between each of them was not immediately clear to me. They each dealt with constraints on our agency, but the case against free will didn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of his presentation.
“Blockchain and the Decentralization of Finance” featured moderator Dan Kahan, attorney at Morrison & Foerster, and three attorneys specializing in cryptocurrency: Paul Veradittakit, a partner at Pantera Capital; Emma Channing, a former lawyer and co-founder of Satis Group; and Nick Chirls, general partner at Notation.
Chirls’ explanation of blockchains confirmed my cursory understanding: a blockchain is a sort of database, one that allows groups of people to verify records in a way that does not require trusting a centralized, third-party authority — or even each other.
Veradittakit explained that blockchains serve as legers that record peer-to-peer transactions of digital assets, usually cryptocurrency tokens. Finance folk are interested in the two kinds of tokens: utility and security tokens. A utility token is like a gift card, which you can only use at the restaurants owned by the company that issued you the gift card. A security token is like owning stock in the company; you profit along with the restaurants, and can sell the security token on a secondary market, just like any other financial security. He called the technology “a democratization of fundraising.”
Chirls was the panel’s pessimist. He notes that blockchain startups are under-performing, and says there are few cases in which distributed trust makes sense. He says there are few, but notes that the technology could be very useful for people in countries where citizens don’t trust their governments or financial institutions. He offers a measure for success in a blockchain company: Does the product actually provide real value to its users in the form of, e.g., new activities or quicker work? If it’s not usable, it has no value.
They discussed more financial and regulatory aspects of the technology, but much of it was too specific or wonky for me to follow along, in all truth.
Taking to The Atlantic
Listening to Goldberg and Coates was the most compelling part of my virtual SXSW experience. They have key roles at a major media publication, which I hope to do myself one day; their back-and-forth was productive, in-depth, and sincere.
Jeff Goldberg is on Twitter, but he keeps a pretty dry account. It’s almost exclusively him either quoting Atlantic articles, or him retweeting other media people when they share Atlantic articles. The link in his bio just directs visitors to his Atlantic author page; he used to maintain jeffreygoldberg.net, it seems, but the domain is parked by Spectrum now. No Goldblog to be seen.
Ta-Nehisi Coates used to be very active on Twitter, and he even discusses it during the interview: He says he deleted it because it was bad for him. That might be a bit of a rationalization; he deleted his account after Cornel West took shots at him online, which sparked a war between the pair’s few million followers and several friends and colleagues. He does have a personal website, but it seems more like a portfolio and marketing-publicity portal than anything worth keeping up with.
If anything, that’s a relief. There are enough channels to keep up with as it is!
Making it to SXSW 2019
With any luck, I’ll be a reporter somewhere in Texas by March 2019. From there, it’s just a matter of getting an assignment that sends me to the fest. Here’s hoping.
daniel conrad 