SXSW Lite: Mutating Social Hustle Into Couch Potato Charm

Five days before I got on a plane to SXSW, the world turned. All international travel was cancelled by my institution. A hammer blow. It took time to emotionally process this lost opportunity. There was no Covid-19 in the United States, was there? Surely this was corporate paranoia. This shock turned to grateful relief when the Austin Mayor, Steve Adler cancelled SXSW, responding to a glut of cancellations from attendees, sponsors, corporate entities and media organisations and a circulating local petition to cancel the event. Against SXSW’s $355 million of economic benefit stood the Covid-19 threat. Adler stated, “if you’re inviting 100,000 to 200,000 people into your city, you enhance the risk that the virus is going to arrive.” We all learned later that it had already arrived as background noise across the United States. The cancellation was announced on March 6, just a week before the film festival was due to start (its dates were to be March 13-21) and was one of the first major film festivals to cancel, eliciting a response of, variously, shock, grief, sympathy and even (as in my case) relief. I had been rescued from being marooned in Austin without an event to attend. In the following week there was a global crescendo of cancelled events that would make such a trip complete folly.