This is a deeply disturbing time in American history. The basic rights and protections of the country’s most vulnerable are under attack, distrust in every institution — education, science, journalism, and of course, government — is at an all-time high, and every day’s headlines brings new horrors. Our system of checks and balances is broken, seemingly powerless to slow it down, let alone stop it.

So, why are we bothering to bring XOXO back when the world is falling apart?

A Shifting Focus

For the first five years of XOXO, the focus of the festival evolved quickly. When we started, we talked about the emerging trend of artists and creators using new platforms to make a living independently online.

Very quickly, it became clear that the most interesting stories weren’t about success, but everything that went wrong. It was less about the work they were doing, more about the emotional experience of living and working online. Being an indie online is really hard, even for those we view as successful.

For its last three years, XOXO featured many speakers covering dark and difficult territory like financial insecurity, online harassment, impostor syndrome, mental health, and discrimination. We heard stories of loss, failure, and fighting just to stay alive.

All of these stories were reminders to everyone in the community that they weren’t alone, a powerful message in dark times.

And then the 2016 election happened — two months after the last XOXO.

Now, our community is facing a host of new challenges and stresses. Along with everything they’re already going through, artists now feel like all their problems are trivial relative to larger world issues.

Being an independent artist in 2018 is a continual cycle of using your platform to balance your own activism and causes with the logistical day-to-day requirements to promote your work and be heard through the turmoil, while trying to protect your own mental health and make enough money to survive. Independent artists don’t have the luxury of stepping away from the internet — it’s a fundamental part of doing their job.

Online Culture and Activism

This year, we’re featuring people and projects who are showing us the way forward — artists balancing activism with their creative work, fighting for what they believe in while making wonderful and amazing things.

The majority of this year’s lineup came from suggestions from the community, and it shows. We solicited speaker and performer recommendations from our #suggestions channel in Slack, and the community responded with hundreds of people and projects they love.

This year’s conference lineup is full of our favorite artists and creators, but all of them use their respective platforms to fight for what they believe in.

For example:

• Cameron Esposito pioneered inclusive television production with Take My Wife, her brilliant series with real-life partner, Rhea Butcher. Cameron’s new standup special, Rape Jokes, confronts issues of consent and sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective, raising more than $40,000 for RAINN, the largest U.S. organization fighting sexual violence.
• Ijeoma Oluo is editor at large of The Establishment, and the author of So You Want to Talk About Race, her powerful new book that shifts the burden of explaining difficult conversations around systemic inequality from people of color onto white audiences.
• Hari Kondabolu is an enormously talented standup comic and podcast host whose documentary, The Trouble with Apu, made headlines and raised awareness of how the the popular Simpsons character impacted South Asian-Americans like him for decades.
• Beth Newell and Natalie Pappalardo are the creators of Reductress, the first and only satirical women’s magazine, brilliantly skewering condescending and outdated popular tropes in women’s media with cutting humor, including a newly-greenlit show for Comedy Central.
• Matt Furie is the illustrator behind Pepe the Frog, a joyful character he was horrified to see co-opted by white nationalists and the alt-right as a mascot during the 2016 election. He’s actively fought to reclaim Pepe ever since, including a high-profile lawsuit to get Infowars to stop profiting from his creation, and it’s working.
• Claire L. Evans is one-half of YACHT and most recently the author of Broad Band, her book telling the untold stories of visionary women in technology who helped create the internet as we know it.

Each speaker is challenging social inequality in their own way, some as part of their work and some with the audiences they’ve built online.

We’re going to talk about all of this and how it affects us as people and artists and businesses like we’ve talked about challenging topics in the past.

The Power of Community

For many in the community, the days since the election have been increasingly isolating and difficult to handle. XOXO went away at a time when they most needed to support each other.

Our community continued year-round in Slack, but there’s no replacement for seeing each other in person, making new friends, and bonding over shared experiences.

We need to get through this together, to support each other through dark times and fight for what we believe in.

There’s power in community, coming together to be real and raw and vulnerable and face this all down together.

Supporting Independent Art

No matter how dire things get, we believe in the inherent value of independent art. These creators, many working on their own, need our support to survive, especially in this current climate.

All our festival events will continue to feature the projects and creators our community believes in. We’re sharing the work of these game designers, filmmakers, animators, musicians, cartoonists, podcasters, writers, illustrators, and coders with you because we all want them to succeed, they deserve our support, and we want them to keep making the world weird and good.

We risk losing so much if we don’t also prioritize supporting independent artists. Their work often contains activism and criticism, can be a catharsis, or can spark curiosity or bring joy. Independently-produced art gives voice to those outside traditional publishing structures and gatekeepers, voices who might otherwise be shut out of the cultural conversation.

That’s never been more important.

So, that’s why we’re back and what we’re doing differently, and we hope to bring you along for the ride. See you in September.

Nearly ten years ago, I was talking to Caterina Fake about an idea I had: a way for independent artists and creators to fund their work directly from their fans with an ongoing subscription model.

She told me about someone she’d recently met who was working on an idea with similar goals, and made an introduction to Perry Chen, the creator and founding CEO of Kickstarter.

Here’s what Caterina wrote, in the intro email from June 2008 that changed my life:

“I was just chatting with Andy Baio, and he said he was messing around, learning Python and stuff, since leaving Yahoo (after his company, Upcoming.org, was acquired by Yahoo), and I said, are you thinking of any startups, and he said he was working on a way that musicians, artists, comic book artists, etc. could get funded through their fanbase using a subscription model — and yo. I thought of you.”

I was in love with the subscription model as a way of building a stable income for indies, who largely spend their creative lives in a state of constant financial instability.

But Perry’s vision for an all-or-nothing funding platform was so well-developed, with such a profound potential to reshape how creative projects are made, that I happily set aside my nascent ideas and hopped on board the Kickstarter rocket.

I was lucky to help build Kickstarter in its formative early days as its first CTO, and an advisor since before launch, and it completely reshaped the course of my personal and professional life. I’ve made countless friends through Kickstarter and the projects I’ve funded there.

Drip

Last November, Kickstarter announced Drip, a new tool for creators to fund their work through recurring payments.

Currently invite-only, Drip will soon be opening the doors to the public — some of my favorite creators are already on board: Mike Rugnetta, Spike Trotman, Reggie Watts, Feminist Frequency, and many more.

Kickstarter refuses to act like any other startup. They take a very long view of the future, explicitly saying they plan to stay independent forever, vowing never to sell or IPO. Kickstarter raised a relatively small amount of funding in their first year, and then never went back to the VC well, unlike so many others. In 2015, Kickstarter became a Public Benefit Corporation, with the mandate to pursue public good and positive social change in their charter, rather than solely maximizing shareholder value.

With the subscription model, the tradeoff with financial stability is vendor lock-in. You’re stuck with whatever platform you started with, and the decision to switch platforms inevitably means losing a huge chunk of your subscription base.

So if the platform you launched on decides to sell, IPO, or start pivoting in various horrible ways to maximize shareholder value, you’re out of luck.

Instead, Drip is focused on creator independence, working towards true portability — the ability to securely transfer your content, subscriber, and payment information to other subscription platforms if you decide to leave.

And it’s integrated with Kickstarter, allowing the 13.7 million people who’ve backed a Kickstarter project to use their existing account and stored payment information to easily support Drip creators.

But the most exciting and interesting uses of Drip are yet to come, and I want to be there to help shape what it becomes.

Kickstarter Fellows

Today, I’m happy to announce that I’m back at Kickstarter for a limited time under their jauntily-named Fellows program.

Here’s how Perry describes it in the announcement on the Kickstarter blog:

The Kickstarter Fellows idea is still taking shape, but it’s kinda like a visiting scholars program at a university — we identify really talented people whose work we admire and invite them in to collaborate with our team for a focused period of time.

Like with Kickstarter, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help get Drip off the ground in its formative early days. And purely for selfish reasons, I’m thrilled about Drip because I want to help all the creators I love make more weird, wonderful things, while funding my own niche ongoing projects.

You can sign up to be notified when Drip opens wide on the homepage. Or drop me a line if we know each other and you think you’d be a good fit, and I’ll see what I can do.

Oh, did I mention Kickstarter’s hiring for engineering, design, and product positions? They are. You should seriously consider applying.

Five months ago, my wife Ami came to me and said, “I have an idea for a card game.”

This was a shock for a few reasons — we don’t play much tabletop in our family, sticking mostly to videogames, and Ami’s never shown interest in game design of any kind, tabletop or otherwise. (We’ve been married for 18 years, and you think you know someone…)

Her idea was You Think You Know Me, a card game inspired by the friends she followed on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and the people who followed her, and the lives that all of us have projected online. Her game would challenge what we thought we knew about our friends, and in the process, deepen our relationships with them.

Within days, she had a handwritten paper prototype, writing hundreds of cards on every conceivable topic. She started playtesting it with friends and family, in different sized groups, refining the game rules, seeing what worked and what didn’t.

It was clear there was something unique there — every time we played, it brought out laughs and surprises and led to interesting stories and anecdotes and little tidbits about everyone’s lives, over and over again. It was definitely a game, with rules and a winner, but it was much more about conversation than competition.

She finalized the design and rules, and I helped with the card and packaging design based entirely on her vision. She did all the research, and within three months, she had a full-color, 500-card professionally-printed boxed prototype in hand.

This is Ami’s first Kickstarter project, her first game, and, believe it or not, the first time I’ve ever written about her on Waxy.org. I’m writing about it here because I think she’s made something great, and frankly, I want to see it blow up.

Her minimum goal on Kickstarter will let her print 1,000 copies, the minimum print run for working with AdMagic, the indie game printer behind Cards Against Humanity, Exploding Kittens, and countless others.

So take a look, watch the video, and grab a copy for yourself. Thanks!

Two months ago, I quietly started a new job—as the Technology Director at Fuzzco, a creative studio with offices in Charleston and Portland.

With XOXO on hiatus, I spent the end of last year closing the Outpost and the beginning of this year getting Upcoming launched. But both of those experiences made me realize a couple things.

First, I missed collaborating with a team—in person. I’d worked on my own projects for the previous five years. After the Outpost closed, I was working entirely by myself. It was lonely, and I think my work suffered for it. I need people to bounce ideas off of, and to be surrounded by smart and creative people to inspire new projects.

Second, it was clear that my web development skills were rusty after spending five years focused on running a festival and community-building. Web development moves so quickly, and my experience with modern frontend tools and techniques was too limited. I love the web medium, and there are so many exciting things happening right now, and I wanted to be a part of it again.

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A few months ago, someone posted a link to Fuzzco’s Creative Technologist position in the XOXO Slack’s #jobs channel, and the more I thought about, the more it felt right to me.

I was already familiar with Fuzzco from their stellar design work, including their work for MailChimp, Slack, and Andy McMillan’s Build festival, and my friend Eric joined last year as their Design Director.

Fuzzco was looking for someone who could push the edges of art and code, expanding their capabilities and what they’re known for. And I was looking to catch up on the modern web dev stack, and spend more time experimenting with new tech: HTML5 audio/video, dataviz toolkits, AR, WebVR, web animation libraries, machine learning, and much more.

In some ways, it’s a departure from anything I’ve ever done. And frankly, I wasn’t sure if it was a good fit—part of why I waited so long to announce it.

This is my first time doing client work, but Fuzzco is very prolific and I’m afforded the opportunity to incorporate whatever stack I like with each new build. For someone hoping to play with a wide variety of tools, it’s sort of perfect.

It’s also my first time working in an office environment in a decade, and I kind of love it. It’s a great team of artists and designers, and they’re pushing me to be better in every way.

And I’ve learned more in the last two months about web development than the previous five years combined. I built Upcoming in a self-imposed vacuum, and I’m already deep into planning where I can take it with everything I’ve learned here.

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Even more exciting for me, Fuzzco brought me on to build out a new dev team, one of my favorite challenges and something I’ve done multiple times in my career at companies big and small.

One of the things that I love most: Fuzzco is a small company, 14 people total, independent and founder-owned by the couple that started it 12 years ago. They’ve never taken money, grow sustainably, and treat their team like family. They have some of the best design talent I’ve ever seen, and they want their technology team to match it.

We’re looking to hire two developers immediately in Portland, and if you’re the kind of person who cares about the things I do, you’re quite likely the kind of person I’m looking for. Take a look and drop me a line at [email protected] if you’re interested.

 

Ten years ago today, Amanda Lynn Ferri posted this video on Vimeo, launching the budding “lip dub” meme into the mainstream, and inadvertently creating the best recruiting video in startup history.

I vividly remember watching this video from my cubicle at Yahoo, desperately wanting to drop everything and go work with this bunch of young, goofy kids making shit in New York. Judging from the comments, I wasn’t the only one.

Five months earlier, Jakob Lodwick coined the term “lip dub” in a video he posted on Vimeo, the company he co-founded in 2004.

“I walked around with a song playing in my headphones, and recorded myself singing. When I got home I opened it in iMovie and added an MP3 of the actual song, and synchronized it with my video. Is there a name for this? If not, I suggest ‘lip dubbing’.”

Jake posted dozens of lip dubs in the following few months, and the meme spread to other Vimeo employees, and then to everyone at parent company Connected Ventures (and their subsidiaries College Humor and Busted Tees), and then to friends and fans of everyone working there.

At first, the lip dub was a solo activity.

People have lip-synched to music for decades, but the lip dub was something different: it was a performance in public, where only you heard the music. Start a song on your iPod, record yourself lip synching the song, preferably in a public place, and then post a video dubbed the original MP3. It blurred the lines between public and private.

The Flagpole Sitta lip dub subverted the conventions of the meme.

When the video starts, Amanda Lynn Ferri mimes pushing “play” on her iPod, earbuds in place, and it seems she’s the only one in the office that hears the song.

Until the chorus, when Chris Collins and future Muxtape creator Justin Ouellette turn around in their office chairs and sing the background vocals, and it keeps escalating, until the entire office is dancing in a frenzy and collapses into a pile, and you realized you were watching something totally new.

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To commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Flagpole Sitta lip dub, Jon Feldman posted a “making of” video, showing behind-the-scenes footage of Jakob Lodwick directing everyone in the office.

Watching the original lip dub video again ten years later, it’s striking just how similar everyone looks. The team looks almost uniformly white and in their mid-20s. I’d like to think that diversity efforts have reshaped tech startups a decade later, especially in New York City, but I’m not too sure. This is the default of a group of young college students hiring all their friends.

One other interesting footnote: After the explosion of the lip dub meme, a consortium of record labels tried to sue Vimeo for copyright infringement, complicated by the Flagpole Sitta video and others like it created by Vimeo employees on company time. Vimeo ended up prevailing under the safe harbor provision of the DMCA.

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After that, the lip dub wasn’t something made alone—it was done in groups, the bigger the better.

Startups competed to make the biggest and strangest office lip dubs, and soon high schools and universities followed with hundreds or thousands of students following cameras in endless tracking shots spanning whole campuses in the university lib dub. Eventually, city tourism boards allocated marketing budgets—the current world record is 9,300 in a video for Lindsay, Ontario.

People proposed in lip dubs, and then made wedding lip dubs. Lips dubs appeared on The Office. The Simpsons, and Girls. (Thanks to Jake for those links.)

New lip dubs are uploaded to YouTube every day, a truly global meme. They seem particularly popular for Indian wedding videos, at the moment.

If there’s one thing all lip dubs seem to share, it’s a sense of infectious enthusiasm—the intersection of collaboration, an exhibitionist love of music, and the feeling like you’re participating in something bigger than yourself.