On a stairwell in the old Truman Brewery, two men and a humanoid robot are waiting for the elevator. The robot is swaying slightly, making a soft spinning noise; one of the men places a steady hand on her thin plastic shoulder. One wall is painted bright pink and stenciled in massive black letters that say: Leave Your Algorithm Behind. On another wall, it is declared: Don’t be afraid of change Reimagine it. In a nearby hotel, Hugh Bonneville – the foster father of Paddington, the nation’s favorite fictional bear – is preparing to tell a government minister how to face the future. None of this makes sense, nor is it meant to.
Much of the world is deliberately incomprehensible: the Turner Prize, high fashion, HS2. You can ask for an explanation, but you will only end up more confused. Watch: SXSW London is a tech show that’s also a music festival and a politics and business conference. It’s called SXSW (or South by Southwest) because it usually happens in Texas, but it happened last week in London. The list of acts varies from Ant and Dec to Michelle Obama to Piers Morgan to Queen of Jordan. The program also includes an unusual amount of Zumba – there are three separate sessions before 9.30am. It’s a very expensive festival to attend, but most people are here for the expense, partly because it’s a business event, but mostly because zoning out while Chelsea Clinton airs her thoughts on AI is easier than doing actual work.
It’s a situation that the BBC’s fictional head of values Ian Fletcher – as played by Bonneville in the sitcom W1A – would understand perfectly, in that he would understand the need to get on with it without understanding anything else about it. Maybe that’s why Bonneville is here, being interviewed by the trade minister, Chris Bryant, about the “soft power” that Britain somehow enjoys, because people in other countries have seen Bonneville pretending to be a good aristocrat. Bryant calls the Bonneville “one of the UK’s greatest exports”; The Office for National Statistics doesn’t publicly report how much Bonneville is exported, but I’d be very surprised if it compares materially to the £600m in fuel we sell to the EU every month. However, Bryant says the Earl of Grantham, who Bonneville plays in Downton Abbey, embodies a British “generosity of spirit” that is projected around the world. Bonneville nods. He is the ambassador of idealized Britain; he notes that he was once known in rural Rajasthan as the father from Paddington.
Bryant and Bonneville are both graduates of the National Youth Theater and are concerned about the prospects for young British creatives. That’s a reasonable concern, but it’s also an odd one to voice at SXSW, where almost all the other talk (and sponsorship) is about the AI industry, which is dedicated to stealing all human creativity and then drowning it in an endless stream of derivatives. Bonneville worries about young actors being denied the opportunities he had, but also wonders about digitizing it, licensing it as a property: “I’m nervous, but definitely excited,” he says. No more actors will be needed: we will have Bonneville ad infinitum, the eternal Englishman.
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Outside another event – at which the headline performer is Jeremy Corbyn – there are two queues: one for Platinum Pass holders (£1,560) and a much longer queue for Festival Pass villagers (£1,200). Apparently Corbyn – who famously sat in a train corridor rather than upgrade his ticket – is unaware of this, or he’d be running on the streets and telling people his truth for free. Before Corbyn arrives on stage, TV screens play an AI-generated advert for a company that makes AI-generated adverts.
Corbyn is here to talk about the Epstein files.
He is introduced as a fearless crusader for the truth about the matter, and immediately starts touting Jeffrey Epstein’s “endless connections” in British politics. “His impact is now being felt even today,” he says, ignoring the fact that Epstein has been dead for nearly seven years. He claims that Peter Mandelson “was not cleared” by security clearance to become ambassador to the US (he was cleared by the Foreign Office) and that “the Prime Minister has challenged that decision and appointed him anyway” (which would be front page news if he didn’t create it). He compares Keir Starmer to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (which seems unfair).
Corbyn and his fellow panellists agree that while Epstein’s crimes were certainly very bad, they are also unhappy with the way the mainstream media’s reporting of these crimes “distracts”, as Corbyn says, attention from “Epstein’s worldwide financial arrangements and use of the media”. He nods as a fellow panelist says it “was really a story about the oligarchy.” (It was really a story about the sex trafficking and rape of hundreds of women and children.) But Corbyn insists it was a story about how “influence in British politics, Palantir, money and the media all came together in the relationship between Epstein and Mandelson” – the man he says is behind “the lies that were spread about me”.
Of course, the real victim in this story is Jeremy Corbyn.
Back at the brewery, a queue is forming to watch Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy interview Steven Knight, who wrote Peaky Blinders and is responsible for leading a generation of young people to experiment with hats. As with the Bryant-Bonneville morning summit, this is an odd setup, in that a prominent politician is leading the interview rather than being forced to answer questions.
Nandy certainly seems excited — and, she says, “a little scared” — to be on stage with Knight, whom she describes as “one of the greatest storytellers in the world.” They talk about how great Britain is at telling stories, and also at giving tax breaks to other countries who want to come here to do some stories. Knight is writing the next Bond film, which is an interesting point for a discussion entitled “Our National History”, because while many of the world’s filmmaking talents have graduated from the BBC, Bond is not British: he is an Amazon property. Perhaps Jeff Bezos will decide to play the next Bond himself, or give the role to Eric Trump.
Again, the conversation turns to AI, and on the subject Nandy is refreshingly straightforward. She says that in the government’s early attempts to reconcile the needs of the creative industry (including the need not to steal all its intellectual property to train AI models), “we got it wrong”. She admits there’s a lot to do: “I’m not going to sit here and pretend we’ve solved this.” Knight agrees that AI is “a threat to writers” and wonders why the companies that use his work aren’t held accountable. “They seem to escape any kind of moral judgment,” he says.
Perhaps SXSW, where every screen, poster and booth is buzzing with excitement about the future of AI, is a part of that. Panelist after panelist expresses how machine intelligence will change everything in education, art, national security, marketing, sex – but never for long enough that these changes might disturb the audience. After a full day of this, nothing seems to matter. The crowd goes out into the evening to enjoy the music of 65-year-old DJ Pete Tong. Don’t be afraid of change, as the poster says. Don’t even try to figure it out.
(Further reading: Myths and the avalanche of uncertainty)
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