Though I’d heard this XOXO festival would be the last one, many people I spoke to seemed not to believe it. I was told by previous attendees that festival organizers Andy Baio and Andy McMillan — affectionately called “the Andys” — “always say that.” But from the festival’s beginning, it also seemed clear that the Andys didn’t plan to do this forever.
Anyway, this year’s XOXO felt like an Irish wake to me. It was like we had all gathered over the body of a specific period on the internet to pay our respects.
XOXO began in 2012, born on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where Baio worked. The basic idea was to celebrate “disruptive creativity” — that is, to take all the artists who make a living online and bring them together with…