The ideas, apps, music, and film of SXSW 2014

Mike Judge has been taking shots at pop culture — and making people laugh in the process — ever since Beavis and Butt-head took MTV by storm. From Office Space to King of the Hill, the writer–director’s satirical gaze has spared almost no one, and now he’s taking on the tech industry. His new HBO show Silicon Valley debuted at SXSW, and while there may be some surface similarities to other recent shows Valley is most certainly its own thing: it’s snarky and unafraid to call things like it sees them. We spoke with Judge about what makes him laugh, why startups are a perfect subject, and whether we’re still on the path towards Idiocracy.

Your work has been exceptionally good at pointing out the absurdity of certain work environments or attitudes. Why did the tech world seem like such a good target?

Daan Roosegaarde invites me into a cramped, pitch-black photo booth no more than a couple feet wide. “Hold on,” the Dutch designer whispers into my ear. “Just give it a minute.” Soon, the tiny cucumber plant in his hand begins to emit a faint glow.

As my eyes adjust, it gets brighter. Roosegaarde’s specimen was created by genetically modifying its molecular structure to include luciferin, a chemical that gives jellyfish their radiant glow. “I’m completely obsessed with jellyfish,” Roosegaarde says. “They create their own light without a battery or solar panel.” Roosegaarde’s plant is nowhere near as vibrant as a jellyfish or a fern from Avatar — it’s in fact still quite dim — but serves as a proof of concept for his technology, which he hopes to employ on a much larger scale.

A new, functional art project by Thibault Brevet that debuted this week at the South By South West festival in Austin, Texas turns ordinary receipt printers to speedy replicators of the US Constitution. Called Consti2Go, Brevet’s device uses an Arduino processor hooked up to a small battery pack and serial cable that can be plugged in for “hijacking the existing network of standard receipt printers.” Each time you press the button, it proceeds to print a copy of the Constitution — all 4,543 words of it — in just six seconds.

danah boyd’s SXSW keynote is sold out. When it’s over, a dozen fans rush the stage.

These fans aren’t young groupies hoping to get a closer glimpse at their favorite rock star, but full-grown adults hoping to hear one more word from boyd. She’s one of the world’s sharpest authorities on how teens interact with technology, and for many, her word has become canon for understanding why teens do what they do.

The last two Godzilla trailers have given us a hint of what’s to come in the upcoming film, and at SXSW a small audience got the best look yet at the new monster. After a screening of the 1954 Japanese original, director Gareth Edwards introduced an extended sequence from the 2014 version in which the new Godzilla lays waste to Hawaii before squaring off against another giant monster. Even with some unfinished visual effects the clip lived up to our highest hopes — in fact, the only downside was that the clip hasn’t been formally released for a wider audience. The morning after the screening we sat down with the filmmaker to talk about the design of the new beast, how his film ties into the rest of the franchise, and the challenge of making monster movies that mean something. We’ll get to see Edwards’ creation in all its glory on May 16th.

Half a decade ago, some of the brightest minds at South By Southwest Interactive came together to create the worst website in the world. Jeffrey Bennett proposed online image search for the blind. David Friedman pitched PeopleIPO, allowing anyone to buy shares in you. The winner, though, was Merlin Mann’s FlockdUp, an incomprehensible social network for “thought leaders” that seem to be constructed entirely of buzzwords. “FlockdUp is really uniquely positioned at this juncture to suction all of the oxygen out of this vertical, vis-a-vis an incredibly sticky, almost uncomfortably sticky, humid-weather-seated-on-a-vinyl-seat kind of approach to an accretive social network,” Mann told a rapt audience in Austin.

It was goofy fun of the sort that helped to define SXSW over the last decade as the thinking person’s tech conference. While other gatherings concerned themselves with flashy startup launches, SXSW offered a place for fellowship among bloggers, designers, and other creatures of the web. “Worst Website Ever”, which was organized by the beloved first-wave blogger Andy Baio of Waxy.org, was a bit of harmless fun. But the event also reflected a growing unease with SXSW’s evolution from a relatively intimate gathering to a rollicking corporate brand orgy, the internet’s own Lollapalooza.

Early Monday morning, more than 3000 people filed into an auditorium at South by Southwest to see a jittery video stream of Edward Snowden, the man behind the NSA leaks that have become inescapable in the last eight months. The stream kept stalling, often coming off more like a series of stills than a video. Even worse, for a talk that focused so much on encrypted communications, the channel wasn’t secure. “The irony that we’re using Google Hangouts to talk to Ed Snowden has not been lost on me,” said Chris Soghoian, part of the ACLU team that put the event together.

But from another angle, it made perfect sense. Here was the world’s most famous IT professional, using the power of the web to speak in a country where he would be arrested on sight. The audience was exactly what you’d expect at SXSW, technologists and coders, the kind of people who make tools like Google Hangouts. And, befitting the venue, all Snowden wanted to talk about was tech.

Looking through the posters at your local movie theater, it’s easy to forget that the medium hasn’t always been the domain of Photoshop and graphic design. Movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were once the gold standard, artists like Drew Struzan capturing the essence of a film in a beautifully composed painting. That’s mostly been replaced by posters consisting of the bare essentials: the photographed faces of the actors the studio wants you to see, the branded title, and a release date.

But over the past 10 years, a small company in Austin has been fighting that trend, creating some of the most gorgeous original movie posters you’ve ever seen. Mondo is an offshoot of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a chain of speciality movie theaters that cater primarily to film aficionados in places like Texas and New York. Back in 2004 Mondo mostly dealt in T-shirts, but Drafthouse head Tim League brought in artist Rob Jones — now one of Mondo’s art directors — to create a poster for Rolling Roadshow, the Drafthouse’s traveling film series. “That’s when I suggested, ‘You know what? I can probably get other guys to make posters for each movie rather than try to do just one poster for the entire event,’” Jones says. Mondo started to bring in more artists, produced more limited-run posters, and in 2012 relocated to a new gallery where it could show off the artwork in a more appropriate setting.

Ernest Cline was planning to drive his tricked-out DeLorean to Austin for a talk about his upcoming novel Armada, but Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin called him up and asked for it. Cline said he could borrow the car for as long as he wanted to, but asked for a dragon egg in return. Martin obliged.

When I meet Cline, a DeLorean Motor Company T-shirt peeks out from behind his black blazer. He looks like a grizzlier Milton from Office Space, his bright blue eyes framed by thick black glasses. Two gray patches of hair in his beard are the only signs that he isn’t still a kid. He’s the archetypal geek that never quite grew up — except this geek became one of the world’s most acclaimed new science fiction writers.

In March 2007, Twitter became the breakout hit of the South By Southwest Interactive when attendees used the service to discover hot parties and connect with friends at the festival. Two years later, Foursquare replicated the feat, introducing the world to the check-in and giving rise to location-based services. It was only natural that SXSW is the place where Twitter and Foursquare took off — the festival attracted a then-rare concentration of smartphones and the tech elite who used them, giving big new ideas a singular place where they could take root and spread when festival attendees returned home.

In the wake of those successes, an optimistic tech world has descended on Austin, Texas each year in search of new breakout successes. But 2010 came and went without a notable success. The 2011 festival was keynoted by the CEO of SCVNGR, a mobile take on the scavenger hunt that failed and pivoted into a QR-code-based mobile payments company. In 2012, “people discovery” apps like Highlight took center stage, but they struggled to maintain their momentum after SXSW ended. The festival attracts more attention than ever, with some 70,000 people expected in Austin this year for the nine-day celebration of tech, film, and music. But there hasn’t been a true breakout hit here in five years. So why is Austin still crawling with startups?

For its latest iTunes Festival, Apple is getting some outside help. The 2014 edition of the festival kicks off tonight at SXSW in Austin, and Apple has partnered with music video service Vevo to stream it live. The festival can be streamed for free using the Vevo apps for iOS and Apple TV, and you can also watch it directly from Vevo’s site (though you’ll need to be using Safari to do so). As with previous editions of the event, you’ll still be able to watch the show directly through the iTunes store as well. The five day-long event features 15 different artists, and this year marks the first time the previously London-only concert series is taking place in the US. Tonight’s headlining act, Coldplay, takes the stage at 11 pm est, while subsequent nights will feature the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Soundgarden.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden addressed a packed auditorium at South by Southwest today, speaking via livestream from Russia. In response to questions from ACLU program director Ben Wizner, Snowden called on internet service developers to thwart the NSA by making strong encryption ubiquitous. “They’re setting fire to the future of the internet,” Snowden told the audience. “The people who are in this room now, you’re all the firefighters. And we need you to help us fix this.”

In conjunction with Wizner’s co-presenter Christopher Soghoian, Snowden called for end-to-end encryption that would keep the NSA from snooping on data simply by tapping into servers or internet backbone cables. The goal, they insisted, wasn’t to “blind the NSA” but to make bulk collection unfeasible. Encryption technologies like Tor can effectively secure communications, but they’re difficult to implement for many people, especially when less secure options are virtually painless (Snowden’s talk was held through Google Hangouts.) Nonetheless, Snowden said they could provide real protection against surveillance. “Encryption does work. It’s the defense against the dark arts in the digital realm,” he said.

Sebuh Honarchian, a developer from Los Angeles, showed up at the South By Southwest Interactive trade show in Austin, Texas on Saturday because he heard there would be a Bitcoin ATM and he needed to pay rent. He found the machine in a corner of the trade floor, flashed it a QR code on his phone, and retrieved $3,000 — less than five BTC at current prices.

“I just cashed my Bitcoin out because I need to pay some bills, you know I got rent and other things,” he tells The Verge. “You have to cash out your Bitcoin sometimes whenever you need to spend it. These machines make it really easy.”

Even for noir, the Veronica Mars series ended on a remarkably melancholy note. The titular teenage detective, played with giddy resolve by Kristen Bell, was hopelessly torn between her bad-boy true love and the college boyfriend who went with her to hell and back. In the show’s final scene, she cast a ballot for her father for sheriff — just as he was implicated in a scandal that doomed his prospects forever. The last time we saw her, Veronica Mars was walking alone in the rain.

No wonder, then, that fans have been clamoring for a Hollywood ending ever since the CW declined to renew the cult-hit show for a fourth season. Warner Bros., which owned the rights to the series, declined to produce a movie: the show never attracted more than 3 million viewers, and prospects for success at the box office looked slim. But in the sort of plot twist that the series pulled off so capably, Bell and series creator Rob Thomas used their social-media savvy to finance the film themselves. In a landmark Kickstarter campaign, more than 91,000 fans donated a collective $5.7 million to bring Veronica Mars to the big screen. (Disclosure: I was one of them.)

Andrew Busey and I met to talk about apps, but we’ve gotten off-topic. “I think there’s a possibility,” he says between sips of a quad espresso, “that we see the emergence of true artificial sentience. Where something exists in an ecosystem that has been created, and it interacts in an intelligent way with other things in that ecosystem, and understands them and develops around them, and that creates intelligence… but it’ll be a sort of alien intelligence.”

The idea is at the center of Busey’s as-yet-unpublished novel Accidental Gods, about two scientists who accidentally create a fully formed universe inside a supercomputer. He wrote it during a six-month break after two decades of entrepreneurial success, a resume that includes inventing iChat long before it was Apple’s primary messaging service, and founding a game company he eventually sold to Zynga. But soon into his sabbatical the impulse kicked back in, and he created a team to build Banter.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new version of Cosmos is a more populist take on science programming than most, but an upcoming show could take the genre even further from staid professors and opaque equations on blackboards. Discovery is bringing I Fucking Love Science, a popular Facebook page with over 10 million likes, to its Science channel in the fourth quarter of 2014. This follows the launch last year of IFLS clips starring page creator Elise Andrew on Discovery’s TestTube online video network.

The Wrap reports that the “one-hour show will feature a mix of live-action, animation and recreations that demonstrate the random manifestations of science that connects us.” It will be executive-produced by Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson, who announced the new show at SXSW with a video message. “Science has a naughty secret — it’s that all things are connected,” said Ferguson. “And this show is going to explore the randomness of science. Think of it as a late night Google search that goes a hundred pages deep until things get weird — and then you just keep going.”

The age of the iPod might be over, but music artist Neil Young doesn’t believe portable media players are dead. On March 15th, he’ll offer pre-orders on Kickstarter for the PonoPlayer, a $399 triangular digital music player designed to sound worlds better. The company describes the sound as “studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible,” giving listeners the ability to “experience music the way the artists intended.”

The player is designed to be paired with the upcoming PonoMusic.com service, which will offer “the finest quality, highest-resolution digital music from both major labels and prominent indpendent labels,” according to the company. The device will ship with 128GB of storage, enough to store between 100 and 500 albums of such music, with expansion via memory card, and will feature an LCD touchscreen in addition to its three physical buttons.

Speaking today at the SXSW conference, Google’s SVP of Android and Chrome, Sundar Pichai, said that in two weeks, Google will be releasing a developer SDK that will make it easier for companies to create wearable devices that run on Android. Pichai didn’t drop any hints as to whether or not Google itself was working on any devices, but instead said that when it comes to wearables, he thinks about it “at a platform level.” That means that Google is focusing on the low-level operating-system hooks that are necessary for the sensors in a wearable device to talk to the Android operating system. Focusing on the “platform” is a clever way for Pichai to position Android as a real player in wearables without committing Google to building them itself.

“We’ll lay out a vision for developers as to how we’ll see this market working,” Pichai said. He noted that he sees a parallel between the evolution of the smartphone ecosystem and the wearables ecosystem. Where smartphones became tiny computers, wearables are becoming nexuses of an array of sensors. Google wants to standardize how those sensors send their data to Android — and that standardization in turn should allow device manufacturers to opt for Android instead of a custom OS. “We want to develop a set of common protocols by which they can work together,” Pichai said, “they need a mesh layer and they need a data layer by which they can all come together.” So far, we’ve mostly seen a set of subpar smartwatches running Android, but Pichai said that “when we say wearables, we are thinking much more broadly” than just that. Google is hoping that Android will become a more broadly used embedded OS in lots of different form factors.

A master chef can think about a combination of two, maybe three ingredients at a time. Watson, the same IBM supercomputer that won Jeopardy in 2011, can crunch through a quintillion. That’s a one and 18 zeroes, as the IBM researchers like to say. But does that make their computer a good cook?

For about two years, IBM’s cognitive computing group has been working to apply Watson’s vast processing ability to food. The system analyzed about 35,000 existing recipes and about 1,000 chemical flavor compounds, which allows it to make educated guesses about which ingredient combinations will delight and, just as importantly, surprise. From there, it tries to encourage unconventional combinations — like chocolate, coffee, and garlic — in order to produce dishes that have never been made before.

Whether he’s discussing NASA’s impact on our cultural psyche or emailing James Cameron about the night sky, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a remarkably consistent message: our future depends on a passionate embrace of science, and for that to happen, science needs to be cool. It should come as no surprise then that Tyson serves as host of the new show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which debuts tonight as part of a major global event that will see the show simulcast across 10 domestic networks — with an introduction by President Obama, no less — before reaching more than 180 countries.

A reboot of Carl Sagan’s landmark 1980 program, the new Cosmos aims to be a primer on the incredible grandeur of the world around us, lionizing the scientists that have made our greatest discoveries, and hopefully stoking the fires for education and learning in the process. It’s hard to find fault with such noble ambitions, and while the presence of a new Cosmos is certainly welcome the initial episode tries so hard to appeal to modern audiences that at times it feels like it’s missing its own point: that the greatest wonders aren’t CG spectacle, but our own marvelous universe.

Marvel is hoping that sound will be as revolutionary for comics as it was for film. The company just released an updated version of its subscription app, Marvel Unlimited, which includes access to a five-comic storyline carefully scored by Emmy-nominated composer David Ari Leon. It’s dramatic. It’s engaging. But is it really what people want from digital comics?

Captain America: The Winter Soldier by Ed Brubaker, issues 8, 9, and 11 through 14, is the first sample of Marvel’s “adaptive audio” feature, something it’s been working on for over a year. Publishers have experimented with adding animation to comics — Marvel has been testing the effect for a few years in its Motion Comics — but it’s an expensive process and the result still doesn’t look quite right.

In a studio in downtown Austin, we’re tasing a dummy. We’ve been instructed to stand back and not to move at all during the test itself, which consists of a six-pronged copter-drone flying closer and closer to a silver mannequin, before it shoots a pair of electrocuted barbs into the layer of foam sitting in front of the dummy’s torso.

The drone is called CUPID, a Tarot hexacopter equipped with an 80,000-volt stun gun. (Most police-issue Tasers top out at 50,000.) That same morning the team tested it out on a Chaotic Moon intern, who hopefully got at least a stipend out of it all.

On a spare, concrete track circled by billboards and ads in Austin, Texas, Mario slammed his go-kart into mine (or maybe I slammed mine into his — the exact details are in contention) and my kart sputtered and slowed. Mario — actually fellow Verge editor David Pierce — sped ahead. The race ended, and I placed where I started: dead last.

This is “Mario Karting Reimagined,” a real-life go-kart track set up by Pennzoil and Nintendo to promote motor oil and video games at the increasingly corporatized SXSW. It seems like an obvious and compelling idea: imagine if you could actually drive around in a go-kart and experience the sort of wild, joyful, destructive abandon that characterizes Mario Kart. Sadly, the reality of Mario Kart in real life, at least as it exists here, is much less exciting.

Speaking via Skype before an audience of thousands at South by Southwest, Julian Assange made the case for a new golden age of national security reporting, conducted largely by Americans in exile. “National security reporters are a new kind of refugee,” Assange said, then ran down a list of American reporters and activists who have left US borders in order to continue their work, including Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Wikileaks’ Sarah Harrison, and Tor researcher Jacob Appelbaum.

“I see this as quite a positive phenomenon,” Assange told the audience, “that where people would have been completely crushed and not able to work anymore, they are able to use these basic tenets of classic liberalism like freedom of movement... to keep working.” Assange also commented on First Look Media, Glenn Greenwald’s new venture funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, saying Omidyar has realized that “even those with $8 billion are not free anymore.”

In addition to a live discussion with Edward Snowden on Monday, The Texas Tribune is today streaming a conversation between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — joining via Skype — and The Barbarian Group’s Benjamin Palmer at 11AM CT. Watch the full discussion live below: