On joining the SXSW Pitch advisory board

Hacking SXSW’s registration

It’s been a few years since I’ve attended SXSW. My last visit was in 2019—prior to the outbreak of COVID-19—when I served on a panel to discuss virtual reality and immersive experiences. At the time I had recently departed Unity to join Amazon Web Services in support of their WebXR creation and publishing tool, Amazon Sumerian. (Only a few years later I would leave AWS and its silently deprecated Sumerian platform to return to my Unity family.)

I must have been feeling a bit spicy the day I registered and redeemed my SXSW ticket. I recall filling out the registration page’s HTML forms—a list of fields that expected firm, absolute answers. I bristled at the terribly limited and unimaginative drop-down list for Job Titles—and the required task of choosing one of them in order to complete my registration. None of the job titles in the queue seemed to correspond with my new role at AWS—at least, not emotionally so. (An admittedly silly frustration, but one that I harbored nonetheless.) And the situation was the same for Industry Category—none of the descriptions in the list felt aligned with our creative platform. “I have to identify with one of these options? Why? What other bullshit awaits me further down this registration form?” (Apologies to the folks who spec’d and built this registration system. I mean no offense. As I said, I must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed that day.)

Global thermonuclear war

In a fit of inspired frustration I opened my browser’s Elements Inspector and lasered in on those annoyingly anemic dropdown lists. I knew I wanted to add my own custom entries for Job Title and Industry Category—but what should those custom entries be? My thoughts turned to the playful hacking featured in the 1980s Cold War classic, WarGames. (The main character, David Lightman, nearly triggers World War III when he breaks into a computer network that he believes to be a video game company, but is instead a US defense system.) Industry Category? Why, it’s global thermonuclear war, of course. And Job Title? What if I’m not a human being filling out this form, but an artificially intelligent computer program? I took the name WOPR (War Operation Plan Response, pronounced “whopper”) from the fictional defense system in the film.

Winning

The form did choke a bit on submission, but ultimately validated on the server-side. (I won’t go into detail here; some secrets do keep the world safer, eh?) When the confirmation page loaded and the email receipt arrived, I saw no references to my altered entries. I figured the backend sanitization code must have stripped out my creative additions. (And that was all for the best, I supposed.)

But a few weeks later when I downloaded and logged into the official SXSW app for its schedules and live announcements, I noticed that within the Networking tab there was a curious “Industry” entry: Global-Thermonuclear-War,—yes, including those hyphens and that trailing comma, oddly. So I had succeeded after all: I’d injected my own custom labels into the SXSW registration flow and these made it into the live social app shared among all attendees. Marvelous. It sparked joy in myself and a handful of gobsmacked friends who caught the hack as well as the cultural reference. (No SXSW employees or attendees were harmed in the execution of this adolescent, yet harmless prank.)

Peacetime

It feels about right, these years later, to be doing something a bit more constructive with my relationship to SXSW. I’ve joined this year’s Pitch advisory board and very much look forward to sending a selection of exciting new startups to the live panel convening next March in Austin. Do you have a fresh startup? Are you seeking funding? Submit your application to SXSW Pitch here!