At the end of XOXO 2014, an arts-meets-tech festival in Portland that just completed its third iteration, each attendee sitting in the swelter of an unexpectedly warm September day wrote a name on a piece of paper and handed it to one of the many friendly volunteers, all of whom were indistinguishable in pursuits and motivations from the 1,000-odd paying participants. The results were tallied absurdly fast, and shortly the name was announced.
We all rose from our seats when the name was called, applauding madly, whooping and hollering, as the lucky vote winner ascended to the stage and lay down. We filed past the front of the dais, pulling all of the money out of our pockets and bags and flinging it at the winner, balling up dollars into wads and hurling coins. The pile grew until that fortunate party was buried in money — until not even the head showed.
It's a terrible fate and somewhat arbitrary, but they deserved it, and all of us had been dreaming of suffocating in that pile for the previous year, sometimes waking in a cold sweat, sometimes imagining its sweet, overpowering weight pressing us down, drowning us in our desire for attention and success.
Then we walked out of the converted machine-parts building lost in our thoughts, consigning our sacrificial pick to browser history, and resumed our lives of creation and curation sure in the knowledge that we, too, will one day die.
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