Over-aged and under-powered

I'VE just landed in Austin, Texas, for "South By Southwest", known to its regulars as SXSW (in print) or just "South By" (in speech), a ten-day-long conference-cum-festival of music, film and technology. Though this is its 25th year, the tech part, SXSW Interactive, which I'm attending, has ballooned and now enjoys roughly the same status among young tech devotees as Woodstock did for their parents.

Or maybe grandparents. If you had conceived kids during an unguarded moment in the Summer of Love they'd be about my age, and if your kids were similarly fecund, their kids would in all likelihood be packed four to a hotel room within a couple of miles of me right now.

Which is why I approach this event with some trepidation. That I'll be a good 10-15 years above the median age is the least of my worries; there will be grizzled gurus of technology here too, moving among the fresh-faced youth like the rock stars of 1968. But I am neither guru nor rock star, and just as in New York you're nobody if you don't have an award-winning book or a killer business idea that you're nurturing in between your two jobs, three sports and five hobbies, I have the impression that at SXSW, not to be at the cutting edge of something, no matter how inane or trivial, is simply not to be at all.

I also worry that I will be unable to cope with the endless stream of panel discussions, secret parties, impromptu concerts, free apps, mystifying product launches and high-jargon late-night bull sessions. I will fall asleep at the parties, get lost by the jargon, crash my phone with the apps, do something stupid with the products, or just drown in the sheer idealistic ebullience of it all. Two of my techiest friends in their 30s, both of whom enjoy distinction and even a modicum of fame among the SXSW crowd, rolled their eyes when I asked if they were going. "Too much of a zoo," said one. "Can't handle it," said the other.

I will be here for three days, and I'll blog the experience—or as much of it as I can on my hopelessly uncool five-year-old Windows laptop, my lead-weighted first-generation iPad, and my iPhone, which is running a version of iOS so old that it can't even install the official SXSW events app. That is, if I can carry them all.