Although I had heard that this XOXO festival would be the last, many people I spoke to didn't seem to believe it. I learned from past attendees that festival organizers Andy Baio and Andy McMillan – affectionately known as “the Andys” – “always say that.” But it also seemed clear from the start that the Andys didn't plan on doing this forever.
Anyway, this year's XOXO felt like an Irish wake to me. It was as if we had all gathered on the internet over the body of a particular time to pay our respects.
XOXO started in 2012 on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where Baio worked. The basic idea was to celebrate “disruptive creativity” – that is, to bring together all the artists who make a living online with technologists. Kickstarter was part of that: a place where people could fund their creative projects without, say, pitching VCs or impressing an A&R guy. Back then, the idea was that the internet would allow people to make a living without the compromises that come with corporate culture. My former colleague Casey Newton attended in 2014 and wrote of the festival: “It's a place where the ideas are dangerous, where culture matters, and where art, not commerce, is at the center of everything.”
“Over time, the realization has simply become more and more widespread that platforms are not our friends.”
Ten years after Casey's visit, I attended for the first time. Held at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, the festival seemed to have been pared down to its minimum. It was shorter than previous editions, and the murals, rented drones, rock concerts and other treats from a decade ago were nowhere to be seen. But 2024 is a worse time for independent artists than 2014.
“Over time, the understanding that platforms are not your friends has evolved,” Baio says in an interview after the festival. “They are your partners, but they are uncomfortable partners, and the more you rely on them, the greater the risk that they will change or shift in uncomfortable ways.”
These changes also affected XOXO. The festival was downsized because there were fewer sponsors. The technology companies that were important to the creative industries stopped spending money on independent events like XOXO. Instead, they focused on their own events that they could control. “Over the last five years, I guess they've cut their marketing budgets,” Baio says. “They've tightened their belts.”
Nevertheless, it was basically a party. There were big tents, board games, two days of programs and meeting places, karaoke – The edgeSarah Jeong of The New York played “Enter Sandman” — and there was plenty of food and drink. Darius Kazemi, an internet artist, attended every festival except the first one and told me this last one was his favorite. “I think smaller events are generally better,” Kazemi says. “They're more productive in terms of having good conversations and building emotional connections with people, things like that.”
XOXO is a gathering of people who are incurably online and who mostly met through Twitter.
In addition, the scheduling of the talks meant that all participants focused on the same topics. On Friday there was an “Indie Media Circus” with talks by 404 Media, Casey, now from platformand Ryan Broderick from Garbage collection day. An “Art and Code” section featured the work of indie artists such as Julia Evans of Wizard Zines, Teresa Ibarra of “Analyzing my text messages with my ex-boyfriend” and Shelby Wilson of The HTML review.
In the evenings, new and upcoming video games were presented, such as Time flies — an outstanding friend — Despeloteand XOXO Tradition Johann Sebastian Joust, a game without graphics where you move to the beat of the Brandenburg Concertos. There was also a tabletop evening, which I missed because I was at a party hosted by The edge, where I got drunk with Casey again.
If all this seems pretty silly, you're right. XOXO is a gathering of those who are incurably online, many of whom met on Twitter. A recurring punchline during the two days of talks was that every time someone wanted to denounce the platform's denigration, a photo of Elon Musk flashed up in their slides. “What difficulties have increased for us in the last five years?” says McMillan. “It's all to do with damn Elon.”
“Well, not everything,” says Baio.
XOXO was originally created as a reaction to the commercialization of festivals that were once about eccentrics
“It certainly hasn’t made things any better,” McMillan says.
“It is so painful when something that is the common thread within a community is lost,” says Baio.
Initially, XOXO was billed as a “mutuals meeting,” meaning a meeting of people who followed each other on Twitter. But when Musk took over the platform and started to break it down, it led to many users migrating to Bluesky, Mastodon, and “dark social” spaces on Slack and Discord.
XOXO was originally born as a reaction to the commercialization of festivals that were once about oddballs, like South By Southwest. Gradually, these events were overrun by marketing types, crowding out the weirdos that made the festivals interesting in the first place. Attendance at this year's XOXO was capped at 1,000 paying attendees, and admission was decided by lottery. But to even get into the lottery, you had to fill out a questionnaire that the Andys reviewed. They prioritized the people who would make the festival interesting.
The name itself is an opportunity for the participants to choose
After the first year, “we had all these people showing up in our inbox asking, 'How do we do some kind of stealth marketing activation or whatever shit?'” Baio says. He stressed that the point of the lottery is not to judge whether people are cool enough to come — “we're two of the least cool people on the planet, sorry” — but rather whether they are members of the community the festival was built around. “Anyone who's dumb enough to say, 'I love crypto, it's my whole being, I want to come here and talk about crypto a lot,' okay, great, you're going to hate it,” Baio says. “You're not going to be prioritized quite as much in the lottery.”
The name itself is a means of selecting participants. If you are one of those people who is put off by a festival with the convenient name “Hugs and Kisses”, you will not apply.
When XOXO began, Cards Against Humanity was a mega-hit Kickstarter campaign. But over time, the challenge of making a living as an indie creator became more of a focus of the festival. In 2014, Kazemi's talk about winning the creative lottery was one of the festival's big hits. In it, Kazemi parodied the typical talk of successful creatives, arguing that it was more important to keep being consistently creative (i.e., “buy more lottery tickets”) than to try to develop a strategy to pick the right numbers.
In his most recent talk, Kazemi revisited his themes from 2014. He had quit his job, moved to Portland, and started living the indie dream. But as it turns out, the indie dream brought with it other problems. Kazemi described how becoming a landlord was part of his livelihood, and also noted that his output of creative projects had decreased compared to 10 years ago. Other creatives make other compromises—podcasters doing promotional lectures for lesser-known companies, for example—in order to keep making something.
“We thought, 'I think we have one more in us.'”
The Andys told me they wanted to make 2020 the last festival – but their plans were interrupted by Covid-19. “We made the decision in 2019,” says McMillan. “We thought, 'I think we have one more in us.'” This final festival, five years after the last one, was a work in progress. But the Andys want you to know: XOXO is over. “We're not coming back next year,” says McMillan. “That was the end of XO.”
People are still making independent projects, leveraging resources as only the internet can. For example, Erin Kissane talked about processing Covid data with the Covid Tracking Project. Molly White discussed “Web3 is just running great,” the chronology of various crypto crises. Kazemi's work at Tiny Subversions included a fork of Mastodon and teaching people how to run their own social media sites.
It wouldn't surprise me – or the Andys – if this group of people started spin-off meetings from the contacts made at XOXO; it's a tight-knit group. “I've been thinking a lot about Darius, like in his talk, 'What's next? What are we going to do next?'” McMillan says. He doesn't have an answer to that, and he doesn't expect to be responsible for whatever it is. “That's important to think about, and it's going to be important to answer that question in the not-too-distant future.”