SXSW 2019: all the news, panels, and activations

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

It’s hard finding new ways to haunt a house. And Girl on the Third Floor, a horror film that premiered at 2019’s SXSW Interactive Festival, doesn’t make a point of trying. It hits the classic beats of the genre, largely established by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House: a protagonist with a troubled past moves into a grand but dilapidated old home with a dark secret, then finds a malevolent force dredging up his personal demons.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival. It has been updated to coincide with the film’s theatrical release.

When Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out hit screens in 2017, it was a revelation. Peele was known as an incisive comedian from his racially frank, wide-ranging sketch show Key and Peele, but nothing in his history suggested he had such a talent for crafting mesmerizing horror stories. Get Out is a startling, frightening film, but it’s also meticulously crafted to make the audience politically and socially uncomfortable, with a candid, unflinching message about how black and white Americans interact, and an allegorical underpinning designed to make viewers of any race squirm with discomfort — while still laughing at the ironic humor in Peele’s script.

2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes was an intriguing surprise. At first blush, it looked like yet another tired franchise reboot, but it played out more like a personal drama than an ape-centric action movie, and it led up to a thrilling climax that set the scene for further enjoyable Apes films. It’s difficult not to see Captive State, the latest feature from Rise director Rupert Wyatt, as closely related. It’s also a surprisingly subdued insurrection movie, a science-fiction feature about revolution and resistance that defies genre expectations and focuses more on a personal story than on big action beats.

Ashton Sanders stars as Gabriel, a Chicago teenager living on an Earth occupied by a powerful race of aliens. His parents died years back attempting to escape Chicago, and his older brother Rafe became a martyr in a guerilla movement against them. His father was a cop whose former partner, William Mulligan (John Goodman) keeps an eye on Gabriel, but also suspects he might be involved with an ongoing rebellion. But while their relationship is in early focus for the film, it also shifts to take in the movements of the remaining resistance against the aliens. The film feels like it was made for the current cultural moment: as the aliens exploit Earth’s resources, a handful of human collaborators have become rich and powerful by selling out to their new masters, and a permanent underclass struggles to survive.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

There’s a striking tradition of kid-disappearance movies where a traumatized parent tries to convince authorities that something has happened to their child, but evidence suggests that there was never a child in the first place. A subset of the “Who’s crazy here?” mystery, which plays with the audience’s sense of reality and understanding of a situation, movies like Bunny Lake is Missing, Flightplan, and The Forgotten rely on the audience to empathize with a protagonist who may be creating a mystery and a crisis where there isn’t one.

When Netflix debuted Black Mirror: Bandersnatch late last year, it put a spotlight on interactive storytelling outside the traditional gaming industry. Bandersnatch’s “choose your own adventure” format is one method of telling these interactive stories. For another flavor, you could try Syfy’s Eleven Eleven: a virtual and augmented reality project that premiered at SXSW this week and will get a release in May.

Eleven Eleven is a series of six interlocking stories set during the last 11 minutes and 11 seconds of life on a planet called Kairos Linea, which is about to be bombed into oblivion while its corporate overlords escape to a space station. Each story follows a different resident of a small spaceport: there’s the cyborg bartender Xi, the shape-shifting robot Viola, and the cold-blooded corporate leader Ava, among others. And as the viewer, you can move like a ghost through the entire city — exploring the 3D environment, following individual characters, and rewinding or fast-forwarding the action to figure out how they all connect.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

There’s an entire subgenre of horror cinema about the fundamentally terrifying nature of pregnancy. And countless films hinge on teenagers, especially teenage girls, inviting certain doom by having premarital sex. The horror-comedy Snatchers, which debuted at this year’s SXSW, combines both tropes — then filters them through a high-school-comedy setting.

Autonomy, a new documentary on self-driving cars directed by Alex Horwitz and produced by Car and Driver magazine, gets its most grievous sin out of the way in the first 15 minutes. Executive producer and New Yorker writer and author Malcolm Gladwell discusses his vintage BMW, while a rotating cast of other talking heads wax poetic about the rise and fall of American car culture. As someone who doesn’t own a car, or the book-deal advance to buy a vintage one, I had trouble relating.

Thankfully, the movie’s nostalgic phase passes quickly. Even better, they are actually making a point. Autonomy, which had its world premiere here at SXSW in Austin this past week, is a comprehensive, thorough examination of the state of autonomous vehicles, and a vital bit of education for people who haven’t paid close attention to the technology’s slow, steady arrival.

Talk of regulating Silicon Valley has dominated this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) pledge to break up Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook becoming a topic of conversation in almost every high-profile, tech-focused panel here.

A sit-down with Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger this afternoon was no exception. The entrepreneurs sold their company to Facebook, worked there for years, then abruptly left last September amid reported concerns over their autonomy and the future direction of the photo-sharing social network. Additionally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week announced a new, privacy-focused shift for the company that would see its disparate messaging products combined to form a unified service.

Last Saturday night, for the first time in my four years of attending SXSW, I thought I was going to die. I crossed the road at the pedestrian crosswalk next to the Austin Convention Center, and four people — each traveling approximately 15 miles per hour on electric scooters — darted around me.

Not only did I not see or hear them coming — the mostly silent scooters have lights that automatically activate at night, but they can still be hard to spot in the dark — but I also had no idea what the best course of action was. I simply froze in place, standing in the middle of the street as the scooter riders whizzed by, having the time of their lives. Would I have died if struck? Probably not, and a motor vehicle in the same situation would have been a much graver threat. But in that moment, I felt genuine fear. My heart rate spiked, and for moments afterward, I felt shaken up and on high alert, wary of the countless other scooter riders that could be one mistake away from sending me to the emergency room.

HQ Trivia made “quiz-tory” this week when it hosted its first live, in-person game with a $10,000 prize. Host Scott Rogowsky flew into Austin, Texas, to host the show (donned in a full HQ-branded suit) at Comcast NBCUniversal’s SXSW pop-up. Prior to the start, HQ projected a one-time link to the live show on a screen, which audience members had to load in order to compete. I thought they’d bring contestants onstage to make it more of a live experience; instead, everyone played along on their phones as Rogowsky cued the questions from an iPad.

Naturally, people took photos of the stage (and the screen with the link) before the show began and shared those images on social media. This meant that players who weren’t in Austin or at the Comcast NBCUniversal house could join the game. (They only needed the access link.) Nearly 3,000 virtual players were present at the start of the show, despite the fact that the house appeared to host hundreds of people, not thousands. Rogowsky acknowledged this, but he seemingly couldn’t do anything about it.

I wasn’t looking for pod-related gadgets, but, somehow, they found me. LG hosted a pop-up at SXSW this year where it showed off a few new prototypes, although it mostly demoed new models of its CLOi line of home robots. Naturally, LG also brought something called the Snow White to the festival: an at-home ice cream machine that requires capsules to produce a treat.

The machine requires two pods: one for flavor and another for a base texture, which determines whether you’re making sorbet, ice cream, or gelato. Every capsule has a QR code printed on it that’ll tell the machine what to make. The person demoing this device didn’t know what ingredients were inside the capsules, except for shelf-safe pasteurized milk, nor how cold the machine could get.

New York congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes that people should welcome robots taking their jobs — but not the economic system that can make it financially devastating. During a talk at SXSW, an audience member asked Ocasio-Cortez about the threat of automated labor. “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said in response. “We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”

The congresswoman referenced a proposal from Bill Gates, who has discussed a tax on robots that replace human workers. (While she stated that Gates suggested taxing robots at 90 percent, that’s not a number we’ve found in his statements.) Gates isn’t the only person who’s floated a robot tax. French politician Benoît Hamon suggested taxing automated productivity gains and using the money for a universal basic income. More generally, large parts of Silicon Valley support basic incomes as a fix for automated unemployment.

What keeps George Hotz, the enigmatic hacker and founder of self-driving startup Comma.ai, up at night is not whether his autonomous car company will be successful or what other entrepreneurial venture he might embark on next. No, instead, Hotz says he’s tortured by the possibility that all of us are in an advanced simulation observed by either an omnipotent extraterrestrial or supernatural being, or an artificial intelligence far beyond the realm of human conception and understanding.

“There’s no evidence this is not true,” an animated Hotz told a crowd at his SXSW talk on Friday, aptly titled “Jailbreaking the Simulation” and billed on the festival’s website as an exploration of whether breaking out of a simulated universe means we can “meet God” and kill him. “It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bombshell announcement earlier this week that his company would pivot to a “privacy-focused communications platform” that prioritizes encrypted private messaging and groups over public-facing posts and the algorithm-driven News Feed.

According to the company’s former security chief, Alex Stamos, the move could mean that some of Facebook’s toughest issues around moderating speech and curbing bad behavior effectively disappear. “Mark Zuckerberg decided he can’t be in the middle anymore. The middle is where you lose continuously,” Stamos told a crowd at Vox Media’s SXSW event series in Austin, referring to Facebook’s attempt to straddle a line between strictly controlling speech and behavior on its platform and allowing for freedom of expression.

Minnesota senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar has floated the idea of taxing tech companies when they exploit user data. Platforms like Facebook “use us, and we’re their commodity, and we’re not getting anything out of it,” Klobuchar said today during a SXSW interview with Recode co-founder Kara Swisher. “When they sell our data to someone else, well, maybe they’re going to have to tell us so we can put some kind of a tax on it.”

Klobuchar acknowledged that she was simply floating an option, not putting forward a detailed policy prescription. And the idea isn’t nearly as mainstream as passing privacy legislation or toughening antitrust policies, two areas Klobuchar also emphasized — saying she wanted to scrutinize whether companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google had suppressed competition. But she said a major problem with the tech landscape was that “we just thought ‘Oh, we can just put our stuff on there and it’s fine,’ and they’re making money off of us.”

The cosmetic procedure pop-up is as upbeat as I imagined. It’s 80 degrees and humid in Austin, Texas today. It feels like a swamp, really, but all the women at RealSelf’s house couldn’t care less about the heat. They want their free beauty treatments, and I specifically came to get abs.

RealSelf is a website and app that’s been around for a decade. It provides people more detailed information about cosmetic procedures through user-generated reviews and photos, and it makes money through doctors’ on-site advertisements. For SXSW, the company branded a house to offer people free consultations and treatments.

A decade after location services company Foursquare first launched at the SXSW festival in Austin, co-founder Dennis Crowley is back at this year’s conference with a message for the rest of Silicon Valley: beware Washington, because the tide is starting to turn against widespread, unethical data collection.

Crowley yesterday announced an Austin-specific demo of an experimental anonymized location-tracking feature for Foursquare called hypertrending. Today, in an early morning SXSW talk, Crowley tacked hard questions around ethics, privacy, data collection, and regulation, thanks largely to constant prodding from CNN’s Laurie Segall. Crowley says that companies like Google and Facebook — alongside the thousands of smaller, more unsavory data collectors and brokers — are going to have reckon with potential regulatory changes and a sharp shift in the public’s attitude toward ad targeting and data privacy.

When you walk into a restaurant at this year’s SXSW, Foursquare’s new Hypertrending feature will know. Your phone will show up as a blip on a live map that literally anyone in Austin, Texas can access. And Foursquare founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley just really wants to know: do you think that idea is creepy, or no?

“If this freaks people out, we don’t build stuff with it,” Crowley told TechCrunch, talking past the fact that he’s apparently already done so at SXSW.

Vox Media is returning to SXSW with The Deep End for the second year running, where The Verge will be joined by Vox, Recode, Polygon, SB Nation, Eater, and Curbed to feature unscripted conversations, live podcasts, musical spotlights, and good eats.

You can hang out with The Verge all weekend long from March 8th–10th at The Deep End, hosted at The Belmont. If you have an SXSW badge, you’re all set to join us at 11AM CT each day. You can also RSVP here.