Conference

Art rap pioneer and podcaster Open Mike Eagle first performed at XOXO in 2015, returning in 2018 with a vulnerable talk about the market pressures to simplify your art for money. You can find him streaming most weekday mornings on Twitch, and on tour supporting the debut album from his new hip-hop trio, Previous Industries.

Jersey City-based artist/engineer Jenn Schiffer first spoke at XOXO 2016 about satirizing tech culture, returning in 2018 to host our first Art+Code event. Since then, she’s helped cultivate one of the friendliest coding communities on the internet at Glitch, and displayed her short, yet hot and smart, attention span on livelaugh.blog.

Best known for puncturing blockchain/crypto hype with her Web3 Is Going Just Great project, writer/researcher Molly White believes a better web is possible. Launched two years ago, her Citation Needed newsletter covers “tech world without all the boosterism,” while her latest project tracks the crypto industry’s attempts to influence the 2024 elections.

When he last spoke at XOXO in 2014, internet artist Darius Kazemi was making Twitter more fun with bots and toys. These days, Darius helps people leave centralized social media instead: showing you how to run your own social network for friends, working on his Hometown fork of Mastodon, and researching ways to make the fediverse more resilient.

After witnessing the upheaval in digital media firsthand at Vice’s Motherboard and Kotaku, internet culture journalist and critic Gita Jackson teamed with former Kotaku staffers last year to launch Aftermath, a new video games and culture publication that’s entirely worker-owned and subscriber-funded.

Writer/researcher Erin Kissane is working to build better and safer networks for collective survival, with efforts including the COVID Tracking Project, a powerful 40,000 word analysis of Meta’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, and current research into the culture and governance of the next wave of social networks.

After years of writing about “the internet of garbage,” The Verge’s Sarah Jeong found herself at the center of it: the target of a right-wing harassment campaign when she joined the New York Times’ editorial board. After eight years, Sarah returns to the XOXO stage to talk about what’s happened since.

Alberta-based documentarian Dan Olson is the creator of Folding Ideas, a series of filmic long-form video essays with incisive critical looks at media, technology, and culture. His feature-length skewering of NFTs and the Metaverse alone have been viewed over 20 million times on YouTube, anticipating the collapse of both bubbles.

Writer and narrative designer Kim Belair is the CEO and co-founder of Sweet Baby, a Montreal-based narrative development company that works with game companies to strengthen their storytelling, including advocating for authentic representation of marginalized characters, spawning a conspiratorial backlash right out of the Gamergate playbook.

Avid birder and Pulitzer-winning science journalist Ed Yong built a devoted audience for his deeply empathetic coverage of the pandemic for The Atlantic, while his two New York Times bestsellers, I Contain Multitudes and An Immense World, shared his curiosity about life on Earth at all scales.

“Don’t waste this. Keep everyone guessing. Make me proud.” When Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser spoke at our second festival in 2013, the Mac software company had just started venturing into games by funding the studio behind Firewatch, an indie blockbuster that launched Panic’s games publishing business and, eventually, the Playdate handheld console.

See the artwork in this talk, and more, at Cabel’s new Wes Cook Archive.

Founding io9 editor and co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, Nebula-winning author Charlie Jane Anders blends speculative fiction with deep emotional storytelling in her novels, including All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night, and most recently, the young adult Unstoppable trilogy.