RIP XOXO

Hugs and kisses! | Image: Cody Peterson (Each Other)

Though I’d heard this XOXO festival would be the last one, many people I spoke to seemed not to believe it. I was told by previous attendees that festival organizers Andy Baio and Andy McMillan — affectionately called “the Andys” — “always say that.” But from the festival’s beginning, it also seemed clear that the Andys didn’t plan to do this forever.

Anyway, this year’s XOXO felt like an Irish wake to me. It was like we had all gathered over the body of a specific period on the internet to pay our respects.

XOXO began in 2012, born on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where Baio worked. The basic idea was to celebrate “disruptive creativity” — that is, to take all the artists who make a living online and bring them together with technologists. Kickstarter was part of this: a place for people to fund their creative projects without having to, say, pitch VCs or impress an A&R guy. At the time, the idea was that the internet would make it possible for people to make a living without the compromises made by 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, lies at the center of everything.”

Ten years after Casey’s visit, I attended for the first time. The festival, held at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, appeared to have been stripped to the minimum viable product. It was shorter than previous iterations, and the murals, rental drones, rock concerts, and other goodies from a decade ago were nowhere to be seen. But then 2024 is a worse time for independent creators than 2014 was.

“There just became a greater and greater understanding over time that platforms are not your friend,” 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 more at risk you are, that they are going to change or shift in some uncomfortable way.”

Those shifts affected XOXO, too. The festival had scaled down because there were fewer sponsors. The tech companies that had been important for the creator economy stopped spending money on independent events like XOXO. Instead, they focused on their own events, which they could control. “In the last five years they’ve cut their, I assume, marketing budgets,” Baio says. “They’ve tightened their belts.”

Still, it was basically a party. There were large outdoor tents, tabletop games, two days’ worth of programming and hangouts, karaoke — The Verge’s Sarah Jeong did “Enter Sandman” — and plenty of food and drink. Darius Kazemi, an internet artist, attended every festival except the first and told me that this final one was his favorite. “I do think smaller events are better, generally,” Kazemi says. “They’re more productive in terms of making good conversation and emotional connections with people, that kind of thing.”

Plus, the single track of talks meant that all attendees were focused on the same things. On Friday, there was an “Indie Media Circus,” featuring talks by 404 Media, Casey, now of Platformer, and Ryan Broderick of Garbage 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.

The evenings featured new and upcoming video games such as Time Flies — a standout among my friends — Despelote, and XOXO tradition Johann Sebastian Joust, a no-graphics game that involves moving in time to the Brandenburg Concertos. There was a tabletop evening as well, which I missed because I was at a party thrown by The Verge, where, once again, I got drunk with Casey.

If this all seems pretty dorky, that’s right. XOXO is a gathering of the terminally online, many of whom met each other on Twitter. One recurring punchline throughout the two days of talks was that whenever someone wanted to evoke platform degradation, a photo of Elon Musk would flash up in their slides. “What difficulties have increased for us in the last five years?” says McMillan. “It’s all stuff to do with fucking Elon.”

“Well, not all of it,” Baio says.

“It certainly hasn’t helped matters,” McMillan says.

“It’s so agonizing to have something that is like the connective thread between a community go away,” Baio says.

Early on, XOXO was referred to as a “meeting of the mutuals,” as in people who followed each other on Twitter. But when Musk took over the platform and began shredding it, it meant many users peeled off to Bluesky, Mastodon, and “dark social” spaces on Slack and Discord.

XOXO originally came into being as a response to the commodification of festivals that had once been about oddballs — like South By Southwest. Gradually, these events had been swamped with marketing types, pushing out the weirdos who’d made the festivals interesting in the first place. Attendance at this year’s XOXO was capped at 1,000 paying attendees, and there was a lottery system for getting in. But to even make it into the lottery, you had to fill out a questionnaire that the Andys reviewed. They prioritized the people who would make the festival interesting.

After the first year, “all these people showed up in our inbox and were like, ‘How do we do some like, stealth marketing activation, whatever bullshit,’” McMillan says. He stressed that the point of the lottery was not to judge whether people were cool enough to come — “we’re two of the least cool people on the planet, sorry” — but rather, whether they were members of the community that the festival was built around. “Anyone who is stupid enough to say, ‘I love crypto, it’s my entire being, I want to come here and talk about crypto a whole bunch,’ okay, great, you’re going to hate it,” McMillan says. “You’re not going to get prioritized in the lottery quite so much.”

Even the name is a way of selecting for attendees. If you’re the kind of person who gets turned off by a festival named, functionally, “hugs and kisses,” you aren’t going to apply.

When XOXO began, Cards Against Humanity had emerged as a megahit from a Kickstarter campaign. (Max Temkin, CAH’s creator, was banned from the festival in 2014, after allegations of sexual assault came to light.) But as time wore on, the challenges of trying to make a living as an indie creator increasingly became a festival focus.

In 2014, Kazemi’s talk about winning the creative lottery was one of the festival’s breakout hits. In it, Kazemi spoofed the archetype of talks given by successful creative people and suggested it was more important to continue rigorously creating (that is, “buying more lottery tickets”) than trying to strategize around how to pick the right numbers.

In his most recent talk, Kazemi revisited his 2014 themes. He’d quit his job, moved to Portland, and begun living the indie dream. Except, it turned out, living the indie dream just meant different problems. Kazemi described becoming a landlord as part of staying afloat and also noted that his output of creative projects had declined relative to 10 years ago. Other creators make other compromises — podcasters doing ad reads for less-than-savory companies, for instance — in order to continue making things.

The Andys told me that they’d planned to make 2020 the last festival — but their plans were interrupted by covid-19. “We did make the decision in 2019,” says McMillan. “We were like, ‘I think we have one more left in us.’” This final festival, five years after the last one, was attending to unfinished business. But the Andys want you to know: XOXO is over. “We are not coming back next year,” McMillan says. “That was the end of XO.”

People are still making independent projects, using resources as only the internet can. Erin Kissane, for instance, talked about processing covid data with the Covid Tracking Project. Molly White discussed “Web3 is Going Just Great,” the timeline of various crypto crises. Kazemi’s work at Tiny Subversions has involved a fork of Mastodon and teaching people how to run their own social media sites.

It wouldn’t surprise me — or for that matter, the Andys — if this group of people were to create spinoff get-togethers from connections made at XOXO; it’s a tightly knit group. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Darius, like his talk asks, ‘What’s next? What are we going to do next?’” McMillan says. He doesn’t have an answer, and he doesn’t expect to be responsible for whatever it is. “That is important to think about, and answering that question in the not-too-distant future will be important.”

Update and correction, September 11th: Adds that Max Tempkin of Cards Against Humanity was banned from XOXO in 2014. Corrects quotes about the lottery incorrectly attributed to Baio — McMillan was the person in the joint interview who said them.