My favorite presentation at XOXO this year was Ed Yong’s talk about the pandemic, journalism, his work over the past four years, and the personal toll that all those things took on him. I just watched the entire thing again, riveted the whole time.
Hearing how thoughtfully & compassionately he approached his work during the pandemic was really inspirational: “My pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness — and much else flows from that.” And his defense of journalism, especially journalism as “a caretaking profession”:
For people who feel lost and alone, we get to say through our work: you are not. For people who feel like society has abandoned them and their lives do not matter, we get to say: actually, they fucking do. We are one of the only professions that can do that through our work and that can do that at scale — a scale commensurate with many of the crises that we face.
Then, it was hard to hear about how his work “completely broke” him. To say that Yong’s experience mirrored my own is, according to the mild PTSD I’m experiencing as I consider everything he related in that video, an understatement. We covered the pandemic in different ways, but like Yong, I was completely consumed by it. I read hundreds(/thousands?) of stories, papers, and posts a week for more than a year, wrote hundreds of posts, and posted hundreds of links, trying to make sense of what was happening so that, hopefully, I could help others do the same. The sense of purpose and duty I felt to my readers — and to reality — was intense, to the point of overwhelm.
Like Yong, I eventually had to step back, taking a seven-month sabbatical in 2022. I didn’t talk about the pandemic at all in that post, but in retrospect, it was the catalyst for my break. Unlike Yong, I am back at it: hopefully more aware of my limits, running like it’s an ultramarathon rather than a sprint, trying to keep my empathy for others in the right frame so I can share their stories effectively without losing myself.1
I didn’t get a chance to meet Yong in person at XOXO, so: Ed, thank you so much for all of your marvelous work and amazing talk and for setting an example of how to do compassionate, important work without compromising your values. (And I love seeing your bird photos pop up on Bluesky.)
I hope that makes sense? Sometimes you can feel the pain of others so intensely that it renders you useless to help them or to keep yourself afloat. So you’re still empathetic and open to the experiences of others, but in a much more functional and constructive way.↩
I attended the XOXO Festival back in August, and video of some of the talks are starting to trickle online. I’m going to highlight a couple of my favorites here on the site; the first one I’d like to share is Erin Kissane’s talk about fixing the social internet.
The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we — the weirdos of internet-making and online life — have to not merely retreat from the big-world social internet, but fix it.
I just got back from attending the XOXO Festival in Portland, OR. What a whirlwind few days — I talked to more people than I have in literally years. I feel grateful for the opportunity to attend and participate this year, so I wrote some thank yous.
Thanks to Craig Mod for coming all the way from Japan to share the stage with me for a too-brief chat about membership programs. In the run-up to this, Craig and I had three extensive conversations about memberships, the open web, the value of writing your own software, Walt Disney’s corporate strategy chart, and many more things. I wish you could have heard those chats as well. Maybe we’ll have to do another podcast.
Thanks to my pal Tim Shey, who shared with me the Japanese word komorebi, which is scattered sunlight that is filtered through tree leaves. Komorebi was the visual theme for this year’s XOXO, as seen in the XOXO Field Notes notebooks.
Thanks to Powell’s City of Books for the reminder that bookstores can be more than just places of commerce. Curated by people who love reading & books & people who read, great bookstores make your brain fizz with ideas just by browsing the shelves. Your algorithm could never.
Thanks to Portland for being so cool + weird. This was my fourth or fifth visit and I gotta say, I was pretty charmed. The food in particular blew me away — I can’t remember eating so well. Luce was a delicious local Italian place — I’d eat here once a week if I lived in Portland. Eem was so good, my favorite meal of the weekend. Solid pies at Apizza Scholls with great company. Ramen at Kinboshi, katsu sandwiches at Tanaka, a gin & tonic at Pacific Standard, and a banh mi at Lardo.
Thanks to the folks I saw wearing kottke.org t-shirts, including the guy wearing a design squiggle shirt who I said “nice shirt!” to without any further explanation.
Thanks to Annie Rauwerda of Depths of Wikipedia for the heartiest laugh I’ve had in many weeks. Seriously, she had the entire hall rolling in the aisles.
Thanks to Erin Kissane, not only for her great talk but for her work, alongside Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, on The COVID Tracking Project. Truly one of the heroic efforts of the pandemic that saved lives and helped millions make safe choices — talk about making a dent in the universe. (An extra thanks to Erin for not laughing too much when I introduced myself as “Erin” when I ran into her at Powell’s. Never meet your heroes…you’ll only make an awkward ass of yourself.)
Thanks to Ed Yong, whose talk was just incredible and the one I most needed to hear this year. Like Ed, I spent a couple of years fully immersed in all things pandemic so that I could keep my readers (hopefully) well informed about what Covid was doing to us and how to stay safe. Even though I didn’t go nearly as deep as he did with his essential reporting, there were many parts of his talk that resonated strongly with me, particularly the burnout part (which led to a sabbatical in both cases). I’m definitely going to link to his talk when it gets posted.
Thanks to…the universe? (This one doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to the thank you note format.) The day after the conference, I walked around Portland for a few hours and thought of Heather, with whom I spent a few lovely days here in 2015. I hope you’ve found your peace, my friend.
Thanks to all the kottke.org readers who came up to say hi during the conference (and at the airport!); I appreciate you all and hope I wasn’t too awkward in response. 😬
Thanks to Neal Agarwal for showing off some of his many web experiments.
Thanks to Nolen Royalty, creator of One Million Checkboxes, for telling one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I’ve ever heard. I hope a recording of his talk or a writeup of it makes its way online…it’s an amazing story and I’ll link to it on kottke.org when it becomes available.
Thanks to my fellow indie media travellers — Platformer, 404 Media, Garbage Day, and Aftermath. I’ve enjoyed watching you folks strike out on your own, supported and trusted by your readers to punch above your weight without corporate heavy-handedness. 👏
Thanks to all my friends who, when I ghosted from a conversation or begged off sharing a meal, understood I needed some time to myself to recharge the ol’ social battery. 🪫
And most of all, thanks to the Andys (Baio, McMillan) for putting on XOXO for all these years. It is a singularly impactful gathering that’s touched/changed/bettered too many lives to even count. XOXO is perhaps the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever experienced — I can’t imagine how difficult it’s been for them to sustain that level of kindness and attention to detail across this many festivals and years. As life’s works go, this one is pretty good. The Andys said this was the last XOXO and I’m inclined to believe them this time — buuuuut if that changes, I will totally come to the next one.
I was fortunate enough to make it out to Portland, OR for the 2019 XOXO festival back in September. It was my third time attending — I went the first year and in 2015 — and, goodness, the conference has changed a lot. XOXO used to be comfortably in my wheelhouse and now it’s more on the outskirts, so instead of hearing a bunch of stuff I want to hear, I trust the conference organizers to present some things that I need to hear, to keep me curiously exploring new ideas, viewpoints, and experiences unlike my own.
XOXO has started posting videos of all their talks online (one new video each weekday), and I’m going to share some of my favorites here. The first video is of Tracy Clayton’s barnburner of a talk: Log Off, Fam — Self Care in the Timeline Era.
Clayton and I overlapped at Buzzfeed (she was an employee and I had a desk there working on kottke.org) but have never met, so it was interesting to hear about her success and ultimately bad experience there.
I’ll updating this post with the rest of my favorites as they’re posted on YouTube.
Update: I enjoyed Soleil Ho’s talk about how the drive by her and others to shift the food world’s conversation on representation and cultural appropriation is starting to bear some fruit.
Update: My favorite talk, the one that hit me most squarely in the feels, was by Emily & Amelia Nagoski. It was about burnout, which I have been, I think, struggling with lately w/r/t to this here website. There were several points during this talk when I felt absolutely naked, exposed — like they were talking just to me.
Harry Brewis told us about the time when a goofy project he started spun out of his control in the most wonderful way:
To close the conference, Rhea Butcher talked about the importance of seeking without necessarily worrying about the finding:
XOXO is a celebration of disruptive creativity. We want to take all the independent artists using the Internet to make a living doing what they love — the makers, craftspeople, musicians, filmmakers, comic book artists, game designers, hardware hackers — and bring them together with the technologists building the platforms that make it possible. If you have an audience and a good idea, nothing’s standing in your way.
It reminds me a bit of what SXSW used to be. I bought a ticket and am hoping to be there. Only 68 tickets remaining so if you want to go, you’d better pull the trigger on the ticket gun.
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