There is nowhere better to address the disconnect between consumerism and happiness than at South By Southwest. For twenty years the interactive portion of the festival has been a launchpad for products and services that do something new and interesting: the most visible winners have been Twitter and MakerBot, both products that used the intense concentration of young, open-minded geeks to propel their products into viral stardom. But being on the ground in Austin doesn’t feel like a launchpad for great ideas anymore. It feels like a playground for tired ideas tweaked slightly and marketed into the ground. At all of the trade shows I go to, the looming question above all new products, no matter how cool or terrible they are, is “Who needs any of this shit?” I mean, really: I never, ever, ever want to hear about an app with a name like Vendly, Foodzy, or Plotter again, or find out about a product that will revolutionize the way I watch TV / talk to my pets / share moments with friends. No matter how interesting or well-intentioned their goal, I can be quite certain that its impact on my life will never be as important as Yahoo! was. Or Friendster.

Being on the ground in Austin doesn’t feel like a launchpad for great ideas anymore

The most interesting part of Daedone's talk was when she addressed this very issue, which is at its core about happiness. What is happiness? Traditionally it has been associated directly with homeostasis: that is, when one transitions from one state (like being very cold) to a more pleasurable state (being nice and toasty), we get happy, and we associate the vehicle of that change (a down jacket or a space heater) with the happiness. The problem with this model is that it produces diminishing returns in the long run. It’s most easily seen in overconsumption: on drinking a single beer, the euphoria and whatever else that comes with being tipsy is at its highest. The second beer, while it’s still great, isn’t as good as that first one was. And so on. By the time you’ve jammed through a twelve-pack, the liquid itself is almost meaningless to your brain and the bottle becomes little more than a prop in a probably not-too-pretty scene.