Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
There was a particularly strong thread that ran through most of my conversations at XOXO this year.
xoxofest, and a reintroduction
something that i noticed over the weekend that really stuck with me was how other people were introducing themselves. a large number of people i met introduced themselves using "i'm an x, but in my day job i'm a y", or maybe just "i'm an x" and then later mentioning that they have an unrelated day job later, which was really powerful to me.
I understand now why XOXO is hard to describe — it’s not focused on particular topics so much as a cluster of interests by the community that surrounds it, it’s more a celebration of internet culture by people who see the internet as something with culture rather than some resource to be exploited.
10 years after the first XOXO I attended I went to the last XOXO, held on August 22-24, 2024 at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. I’ve talked previously (here and here) about how XOXO reflects the importance of community and in being heard and seen, as a creator who lives entirely too much online, as well as the tension between the desire to connect and the hostility of many of the spaces on the internet where we seek that connection. This year’s XOXO, befitting the final one, felt even more focused on that tension.
It was also a space all too rare these days, one that acknowledged that we are still in a global pandemic, that gathering in person carries its own set of risks, significant and sometimes life altering. We are also all changed now by the experience of that pandemic. Whatever our own personal lessons and challenges have been, we’ve all experienced a collective trauma, loss and grief a constant undercurrent, whether we are able to express or even acknowledge it or not.
One of the things that so moved me about that first XOXO was being in a space that stood apart for recognizing that the wave of harassment and toxicity hitting my industry was real, and serious, and that speaking up about it mattered. This time, the realities we were collectively acknowledging are so much larger – the pandemic, the waves of transphobia and anti-trans and anti-LGBT legislation in the US, the genocides happening in so many places (Gaza, Ukraine, Tigray).