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I’m at South by Southwest and have half an hour to compose this note. I was writing on the plane about young women and older men, notes out of a Philip Roth novel. Also notes on a pornographic novel about an enslaved teacher and Melissa Febos’ reading from Whipsmart. I was thinking about a Korean girl, fathered by an American soldier, and later adopted and brought to America and raised in Atlanta.

At SXSW I’ve been thinking about the culture of people who develop iPhone apps and their optimism. I spoke with a journalist about the end of bullshit, the difference between preference and predictions, and all the media prophets and snake oil salesmen bilking the system with their crystal balls. We talked about how Twitter was this year’s Twitter for the third year in a row, and how Evan Williams, Twitter’s founder, bombed the keynote. Why? He wasn’t hopeful enough, he didn’t inspire you to do the same.

The journalist said people behind startups speak in a language to justify staggering greed.

Then I was at a panel with Rachel Sklar and Jacob Lewis. They were talking about the iPad. Jacob asked, “How will this new platform, that we haven’t seen, change everything?” Rachel said people are caring about content again. The pendulum is swinging. Maybe free is costing us. Conde Nast, Jacob said, is basically an ad selling company. Later he said magazines are, on some basic level, database companies.

The question is, Jacob said, does anybody care? People don’t just want content, they want service.

And it did make me think, with all the platforms, and the fragmentation of consumers, that magazines were about more than magazines. That if you’re website makes money, for example, maybe the only purpose of the magazine is to drive people there. But still, the question hovered, the white elephant in the room: How to make it in a fractured landscape.

After, somebody said, it was never about paid content. Someone else said, The best thing I’ve learned is that this is a great time to be telling stories. And the journalist said, I write up panels about nothing to justify coming to Texas and getting drunk.

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