Last week’s news tonight, my SXSW London hoohah

Posterity post — archival content — from LI originally. My response to the SXSW organizers upon being informed they were removing my panel from the program despite it being officially selected in committee.

Dear Charlie & other SXSW London organizers,

While I understand the challenges of curating an event of this scale, the reasoning provided on the phone when I asked for an explanation regarding your abrupt email (not the right “caliber of speakers”) raises significant questions about which values SXSW seeks to import to London from the USA where the festival began. It’s concerning when platforms which claim to be stewards of innovation dismiss people who literally invented parts of the internet or discovered anti-matter for lack of celebrity or willingness to let the marketing team pilfer through their rolodex.

After we spoke, I did contact quite a few of the famous names you requested that you knew were in my network to explain the situation. The first few replies of these better known names knocked me to my senses, telling me what they thought of SXSW for treating me as you have given I deserved to be there as much as anyone. Their replies reminded me there were others who probably wouldn’t even read my txt or emails, including those I was drafting a message to send next to ask for help bc they had fancy names & were once friends. The replies I got forced me to ask myself why I would beg people who I have a history with, who early on benefitted from my work themselves before they got their name, but who rarely have time or interest these days to do much for anyone else they knew back then. Why was I spending any social capital at all for an organization like SXSW when I now see they are nothing more than a carnival barker working for the Wizard of Oz, & people buying tickets were just seen as an extension of their own wallet.

This whole experience, however, forced me to realize possibly the most important lesson any parent might, that our children internalize the struggle their parents go through & we don’t get to say what they do with their knowledge. This situation was hitting almost all areas of our lives when I thought about it, my kids deserve an explaination that is real, not an rationalization for why the world is like this. That's what I will seek to do next as a parent, teach my kids their worth is not defined on the terms they've seen mine to have been.

My panel was composed of the following friends whose names you think should be better somehow on a topic of my invention for which none of us would be benefitting financially before or after being on your stage:

• Josh Brewer: ex-Twitter, ex-Abstract, Jasper, father of two & husband to Dana

• Kyle Cranmer: Physics Professor, Higgs Boson citation, married to Danielle, father of two children I’ve watched grow up via SM, like we all do everyone we care to know about these days.

• Jim Harding: coauthor of DOS, inventor of Amazon Marketplace, founder of Otonoma, inventor of the Paranet. He & his wife Jill are ranchers in Seattle and raised six children.

• Nathalie Nahai: behavioral scientist, podcast host, author, said she would be honored to moderate

• Yolanda Martin: energy & data systems designer, mother of three daughters, one of my most inspiring friends

• Charles Oppenheimer: had been hoping to reengage in my above misguided fashion the grandson of J Robert Oppenheimer, husband of Karen & dad of two daughters

• Silo Williams: nuclear science A-levels student with autism living in rural Wales who scored the highest in the UK on their GCSE physics & maths exams. Also my sister’s youngest child, raised in relative poverty like the rest of my kin, struggling with mental & physical conditions, & openly identifies as queer despite the potential backlash on top of the rest. Silo is the type of future leader I am doing this for.

I didn’t even have to be on it, as I explained when we spoke last week, if it were my name your team seemed allergic to, even though all of this was my idea & my doing. It is the conversation that is important, the one that isn’t happening anywhere else in public that I care about. The one about the future of humanity should we continue to act like this. But if you cared to look at my credentials & all that I have done with such an unremarkable name as Sara Wood, your team should be ashamed to have not done more homework. My work is legit, the backchannel reputation is typically that I’m too intense, too “pushy,” too hard headed about ethics & doing what’s right.

Truthfully, I don’t like to ask favors of friends and colleagues much less the husbands of former employees, but thankfully, many are all still friends because of how I treat them, with respect, transparency, and dignity. I know Kyle bc his wife worked for me in Geneva when I was a UN diplomat at WHO and we kept servers at CERN in Robert Cailliau’s offices. You might not know his name either, he was Tim Berner-Lee’s partner in the development of the WWW protocols, the tech that made possible the internet as you know it.

Having been part of the startup tech industry from the beginning, I was excited abt the prospect of SXSW bringing ‘adult spring break’ over here bc frankly, I think we all could use a bit more fun in our lives rn. I said as much when we spoke on the phone & I offered my help in other ways as well, free of charge, to make this first year a succes. I then went to work leveraging decades of professional & personal relationships to assemble an incredible panel of brilliant friends willing to travel internationally in summer at their own expense.

My panel was selected on merit, I went by the books, no backchanneling, no favors, no trying to find strings to pull. As it should be for these type of events which are meant to be free of office politics & social hierarchy horse sh*t. These gatherings are important, they’re so that the creator community might converse openly on topics of shared concern where they have something to teach, an interest to learn, & a willingness to exchange ideas with the broader world. In other words, genuine conversations showing equal respect for all individuals regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or socioeconomic status is what I thought SXSW was all about & why I was so exciting to participate.

On Saturday, Kyle Cranmer called at 6am to confirm dates so that he could attend. He called while boarding a plane for vacation with his family hoping the panel’s time slot would be possible between upcoming work travel, a daughter’s music recital, son’s graduation ceremonies. On Friday, Nathalie Nahai asked for the same info to lock the date in as well. Seems you wanted me to ask my friends to hold an entire week free to be here on their own dime while you decided if their names would sell enough tickets bc I still had not heard back from you about day or time, much less travel stipend, when I received a tactless email revoking the offer to host my earned spot on the program.

Rescinding the offer with no explanation two months after being offered, four months after submitting seven proposals to the committee, is not only an insult to me and those I was working with to pull it together, but to everyone who submitted ideas and the community of voters who took the time to vote in what turns out to be a hoax by a false idol.

This approach — discarding substantive dialogue  & disrespecting people that helped create the industry in which you now find yourself working — epitomizes why we face global crises. The disconnection between your stated mission and operational reality reveals the hollow center of what was once a platform for meaningful exchange of new ideas.

I've spent my career working across industries to advocate for technology that serves humanity rather than exploits it. I've done this often without recognition or compensation, driven by ethics rather than ego. My panel wasn't designed to advance my personal brand—it was to present solutions for energy independence that could alleviate suffering and create sustainability. What message does it send when organizations like yours, which claim to champion innovation & progress, reject ideas based not on their merit but on the marquee value of the messengers?

Rather than apologize for not being "caliber" enough for your ticket sales strategy & try again to impress you, I'll simply acknowledge this as a revealing moment, one that confirms why we should be scared. I would request a more transparent explanation of your decision-making process, but I suspect the truth has already been made painfully clear — you don’t have a clue how to change the trajectory we are on, & no one is in charge to do anything to stop it, so in the meantime why not cash in?

Something like that anyway. But back to my children & their friends, this is for them. They need to see more of us acting in a way that helps them make sense of what’s going on. All of my panelists already knew this when I was being my “pushy” self, they hesitated for the right reasons, I just wasn’t caught up yet. So we are removing our panel from further consideration, but not these ideas. We’ll just need to find better venues to have a more authentic conversation bc the one SXSW offers might as well have been make believe.

May the odds ever be in your favor.

<3,

Sara E Wood, swoodie, mom, ma, aunt, sister, daughter, cousin, ex-colleague, ex-partner, but ever your friend