The sophomore edition of the SXSW offshoot brought creative collisions back to London.
London played hosted to its second SXSW in June, celebrating diversity, openness and collaboration. As Mayor of London Sadiq Khan noted in his opening keynote, “London is the birthplace of business giants and creative legends,” and being the “tech capital of Europe” the likes of DeepMind, Revolut, Synthesia and Isomorphic Labs are some of the exciting startups born here. In the first quarter the city attracted “over a third of European equity and over half of all funded AI” thanks to London-based startups. Khan goes on to say that “London is not waiting for the future to arrive, we’re busy writing it now.”
This year’s edition was again hosted across the east London suburb of Shoreditch, with part of the charm delivered by an array of venues from the Old Truman Brewery and Shoreditch Town Hall to the famed Nicholas Hawskmoor-designed Christ Church in Spitalfields. The event was graced by celeb royalty (Michelle Obama) and the real thing (HRH Prince William) but the biggest crowds showed up for the creator class (Max Klymenko, host of You Tube’s Career Ladder show).
The cultural conversations mingled with music, film and a roster of XR experiences while attendees could also participate in brand activations from the likes of Pepsi, Zumba and Waymo (driverless cab included).
Despite torrential rain and tube strikes, VML Intelligence was on the ground, attending more than 40 talks, panels and activations across the week. Some familiar themes recurred, but the most pressing questions of our time don't resolve in a year, and SXSW London 2026 reflected that urgency. Here are the major themes that defined this year's conference.
The culture wars provided much fodder for debate at the festival, with sessions debating the manosphere and the rise of far-right populism, to those mulling the suppression of issues like climate and equality from public discourse.
Speaking at a panel on the rise of authoritarian power, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard set the stakes plainly: "We are in the midst of a cultural war, and we need to win it." As fear, disinformation and censorship seep into media, social platforms and public language, speakers suggested that creativity and storytelling are our best line of defence.
"Totalitarianism destroys creativity," Callamard observed. "That's how it works. Creatives are therefore on the frontlines. The first act of resistance is to be aware of it. Be creative. There is no small act of resistance."
Photographer and filmmaker Misan Harriman invoked Nina Simone's famous observation that to be an artist "is to reflect the times we live in," underlining the power of stories to illuminate resistance against unchecked power. For "a blueprint of resistance," he pointed to the second series of HBO's Andor, which depicts a story of rebellion against an authoritarian state in the Star Wars universe.
We are in the midst of a culture war, and we need to win it.
Agnès Callamard
Secretary General, Amnesty International
Photographer Dennis Morris, in conversation with Dylan Jones
The stakes extend well beyond politics. Scientists' well-evidenced climate warnings have gone largely unheeded, in part due to a lack of compelling storytelling, argued rapper and zoologist Louis VI, which has allowed naysayers to seize the narrative. Panellists at Nature Needs a Publicist showed how visibility can scale movements with the example of new environmental charity The Nat. The launch took a radical approach, treating nature like a brand and anchoring it in the worlds of sport, fashion and music, and building to a cultural centerpiece dubbed The Nat Gala on New York's Hudson River. Where a UN treaty moved almost no one, the event reached 290 million people worldwide and mobilised millions of dollars for the cause.
Yet speakers were also quick to sound warnings. The first: we must question who gets to tell these stories. Palestinian writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd gave the example of news media in conflict zones, which often marginalizes local journalists and reduces them to fixers, by defaulting to high-profile international names.
The second warning was subtler but no less urgent. Culture's power to carry waves of change also makes it a target. Legendary British photographer Dennis Morris (known for his photos of Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols) noted how the grassroots punk aesthetic was quietly repackaged into designer ripped jeans. Meanwhile Ben & Jerry's founder Ben Cohen described how the brand's new corporate owner moved to gut its activism, "neutering the social mission and dismantling the independent board" built to protect it.
1. The Free Ben & Jerry's campaign. 2. Mohammed el-Kurd in conversation with journalist Julia Mills.
So what's the way forward? Cohen's answer is to keep evolving. If power seeks to co-opt and dilute your ideas, stay ahead of it, and ensure your values are structurally protected, not bolted on. Ben & Jerry's, he argued, is a case study in both the threat and the strategy.
Culture also needs room to breathe. Sadiq Khan cast SXSW's UK host city as precisely that kind of refuge, declaring: "We are the antidote, the antithesis of nativist populist movements." If the battle for culture is to be won, it will need cities and communities willing to hold the line.
2. Intentional creativity
Visual from the "WTF is Neuroaesthetics?" session
The rapid rise of AI dominated the SXSW stage. Moderator Ben Woods joked during his session that it is now “obligatory” to ask about AI’s influence. Indeed, Mayor Khan noted in his opening keynote, "AI will be the biggest game changer in my lifetime." Yet, amid this technological revolution, the festival’s overriding theme was not the erasure of humanity, but its elevation.
Industry leaders argued that automation is driving a "human premium." During the session, “Building a better internet for creativity,” Paige Fitzgerald, COO of Patreon, emphasized that "human creativity has persisted throughout every technology change in history, and that is not changing." Fitzgerald noted that as AI-generated content floods the market, "there’ll be more of a premium on human connection," with audiences seeking intentional content rather than algorithmically driven attention.
Paige Woods, COO of Patreon on stage with creator economy analyst Ben Woods
This shift is forcing a re-evaluation of leadership and self-expression. In a keynote speech, Sir John Hegarty, co-founder and creative director of the Business of Creativity, declared that "AI has made creativity non-negotiable." Defining creativity as "an expression of self," Hegarty suggested a radical corporate rethink, posing the question, "Should the Chief Executive Officer now be called the Creative Executive Officer? Because if the way something appears is fundamentally important to its success... the person at the top has to rethink what they do."
Crucially, the future of creativity is also biological. Robyn Landau, co-founder of Kinda Studios, discussed how neuroaesthetics—the science of how our bodies respond to art—proves that human-designed environments are vital for our well-being. Landau explained that thoughtful visual stimuli can trigger "soft fascination," freeing up cognitive capacity.
The messaging around creativity during SXSW London is clear: the human premium and true creativity will rise to the top. This sentiment is widely shared beyond the festival stages; according to data from VML’s “Future 100: 2026” report, 75% of people globally agree that AI will never take creativity away from humanity because it is fundamentally part of who we are. Ultimately, while AI may master the mechanics of production, the heart of creativity remains an irreducibly human endeavor.
3. The friction imperative
Technology has spent decades removing friction from our lives, but SXSW London speakers issued a collective warning: by outsourcing our cognitive and emotional lives to frictionless interfaces, we are weakening the vital mental and social muscles that make us resilient.
On a cognitive level, people are suffering from a lack of "depth of processing." During the session “Have we lost control of our brains?” Dr Gloria Mark, chancellor’s professor emerita at the University of California and author of “Attention Span” explained that when people actively struggle to summarize or evaluate information, neurogenesis is triggered, strengthening essential neural pathways. Deferring this cognitive work to AI weakens these pathways. Mark highlighted three recent studies showing that over-reliance on generative AI directly correlates with weaker critical thinking. "AI is creating a distance between the user and the information," she warned, urging people to use AI as a critic rather than a creator, and to intentionally build screen-free routines.
Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos at "Comfort Is Costing Us Connection"
This aversion to effort is equally damaging relationships and human intimacy. Panelists during the "Love (AI)ctually" discussion shared that 61% of Americans face a loneliness epidemic, a crisis tech companies claim to solve via AI companionship. However, panelist James Muldoon, associate professor in management at Essex Business School, argued that these tools merely exploit social neglect. Because AI is a "clever simulation" that cannot judge or challenge us, we avoid the vulnerability that true relationships demand. True connection requires navigating "the tensions and the frictions of other people’s points of view," Muldoon noted. It is this very compromise and conflict that "softens the edges of how we see the world."
Indeed, avoiding healthy discomfort makes people intolerant of real-world intimacy. Jackie Jantos, CEO of Hinge, agreed, noting that the dating app actively designs "a little bit more friction" into its experience to help users build the muscles required for real relationships. During her session, “Comfort is costing us connection,” Jantos made the case for having difficult conversations with friends rather than AI, arguing “it would be a richer discussion” and that only another human with context could offer a genuinely diverse and human perspective.
"Two Decades of Mating in Captivity: Exploring the State of Modern Love & Desire with Esther Perel"
Meanwhile, renowned relationship psychotherapist Esther Perel warned that our obsession with optimization and instant gratification has left us with a "lack of tolerance for uncertainty" and the messiness of others. To counter this, Perel urged us "not to replace the ritual with the virtual, the IRL with the URL." True thriving, she concluded, requires physical "presence"—a quiet, focused, and often challenging attention that has become humanity’s greatest treasure. To preserve critical thinking and meaningful human connection, embracing friction and discomfort is the obvious solution.
Don't replace the ritual with the virtual, the IRL with the URL.
Esther Perel
Relationship psychotherapist, author and podcaster
4. Dysoptimism rising
Baroness Beeban Kidron in conversation with columnist Chloe Combi
We live in interesting times, as the saying goes, with many of the systems governing society apparently creaking. But in the spirit of dysoptimism – one of VML's key themes for 2026, in which people reframe chaos and breakdown as a catalyst for change – speakers across the festival were finding ways to rethink them: reworking the rules, redistributing power, and pushing back against the gatekeepers who decide who gets access, visibility and influence.
Baroness Beeban Kidron has been focused on protecting children's rights in the digital space for decades, and as a filmmaker who has made several documentaries on the topic she has seen the issues up close. With the advent of AI and chatbots, she believes the problem is only growing more acute. Her proposed fix is to recategorize technology as a product and end what she called "tech exceptionalism" – if tech were an air fryer, she noted, it would be recalled. Yet her framing was ultimately optimistic: that we can unpick the problem the same way we created it. "It's not the technology, it's what we've allowed the technology to become, and that means we have a route. Bit by bit by bit to go in a different direction."
It's not the technology, it's what we've allowed the technology to become, and that means we have a route. Bit by bit by bit, to go in a different direction.
Baroness Beeban Kidron
Member of the UK’s House of Lords and Founder of 5Rights Foundation
That optimism was a uniting factor across many sessions. Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd called it "a political obligation… we must believe that we can win in order to actually work towards winning." And despite drifting support and political animosity, Louis VI spoke for the climate movement when he said, "we have fun on our side, we have the joy and we have the truth on our side."
But optimism alone isn't enough – and the cost of inaction is high. Sadiq Khan warned of what happens when we fail to offer an alternative to broken systems: leaving a vacuum allows bad actors to take control, as with the manosphere. "We vacate the pitch," he said. In response he launched a mentoring initiative for young British men, accompanied by a media campaign encouraging them to "Ignore the noise" and think for themselves.
1. London mayor Sadiq Khan at a conversation on the manosphere. 2. Charlie, an AI assistant that allows individuals to control their own data, from Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt. 3. Mojisola Adegbile, CEO of luxury fashion brand Torlowei (standing), cultural strategist Lulu Shabell and Harrods MD Michael Ward at "Can Africa Reset the Rules of Luxury Fashion?"
The lesson, echoed by speaker after speaker, was to stop waiting for old models to fix themselves and start owning what comes next. In technology, Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce continue to push for individuals to control their own data, building a new AI assistant, Charlie, where "the value of the individual is the highest on the stack." Paige Fitzgerald of Patreon described a platform building a better internet for creativity – one that thrives on "intention rather than attention," funded "in art, not ads."
The same instinct is rising in the corporate world. A panel on African luxury fashion explored an industry that has never been built for Black women owners to succeed, and showcased the work of platforms like Brand 63 Africa to nurture African designers in a market that still looks to Paris and Milan. The ultimate goal, said Lulu Shabell, was "to own the culture, own the supply chain, own the house, and own the money." Maike Kauffmann, Colead of the Purpose Foundation, in conversation with Ben Cohen, introduced the model of steward ownership, which ensures that "business interests, the stakeholders' interests, and also justice interests are all aligned towards a common purpose." And if all else fails, there's always Cindy Gallop, who offered the ultimate solve: "I'm gonna build my own f***ing ecosystem."
5. AccelerAIting drug discovery
Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince, cofounders of Basecamp
If much of SXSW London debated what AI means for human creativity and connection, one strand of sessions pushed the question further: what does it mean for human survival? The answer, at least in the field of drug discovery, is potentially transformative. A bolder proposition took the stage: AI that doesn't just analyze biology but generates it, learning evolution's grammar to design molecules never seen in nature.
A key demonstration came from AI company Basecamp Research, which has trained a biological AI model on what it calls the world’s largest evolutionary dataset that is capable of generating therapeutics from a simple disease prompt. The team explained how they fed the WHO’s critical pathogens list into the model and asked it to invent novel antibiotics for them. The model was able to generate peptides with a 97% success rate. The real step change is that it’s an unsupervised model, which means it can teach itself and generalize creatively, beyond the limits of human understanding.
Basecamp’s data is crucial to that success. Rather than relying on existing genetic databases, the company ran expeditions to gather samples, scaling, as cofounder and CEO Glen Gowers put it, to "32 countries, more than 200 different locations." Cofounder Oliver Vince noted the resulting leap from "roughly today about 250,000 species cataloged in the genetic databases" to over a million discovered, heading toward their "Trillion Gene Atlas," which will expand the genetic known universe significantly.
That collection method is also the guardrail: working with local partners, Basecamp operates what Gowers called "access to benefit sharing" — securing consent from source nations and channeling royalties back. The result, he claimed, is a model "where every single token, every single training piece of data can be traced back to a consent agreement." In an industry dogged by scraping and copyright fights, building the dataset deliberately, across sites in Costa Rica and Cameroon to Antarctica, is offered as proof that unlocking the tree of life needn't mean extracting from it.
Where will this take us? At a panel titled “AI’s next frontier: life itself,” Junaid Bajwa, an NHS doctor and senior partner at biotechnology company Flagship Pioneering, sketched a clinical co-pilot that could input "the characteristics of a patient, their genome," then "reason its way to designing a personalized therapy,” — moving medicine from treating the pathogen to treating the person. Basecamp’s Vince foresees a future in which doctors will be empowered as real-time drug developers tackling and perhaps curing serious diseases.
Nevertheless, as always, the guardrails matter. Bajwa warned that "most of the data that exists doesn't represent people that look like me..if I was a 40-year-old white guy, amazing." And humility tempers the hype. "We don't really understand how cells work. We don't really understand disease," Bajwa admitted. This wave of AI, he reminded the room, is barely underway. We are at the very beginning.
6. Generation AI
Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, leaving the next generation to inherit a world where the lines between the physical and virtual are entirely blurred. At SXSW London, speakers shared a dual mandate for safeguarding the young, urging everyone to actively protect children from the digital harms of today while aggressively preparing them for the highly automated workforce of tomorrow.
Synthesia avatar studio. Courtesy of Synthesia.
Protecting the next generation starts with reclaiming their attention from predatory business models. Baroness Beeban Kidron, founder of the 5Rights Foundation, built on her earlier call to end tech exceptionalism by urging a more specific shift in focus: away from content moderation and toward dismantling the addictive business models that drive harm. She also delivered a blunt wake-up call to parents: "Put your own phone down—[your children] are abandoned."This urgent need for a "triple lock on childhood" is already gaining political traction; following Australia's lead, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced plans to ban under-16s from major social media platforms to protect their mental wellbeing.
Yet, protecting children doesn't mean keeping them in a tech-free bubble, especially when their future colleagues will be silicon-based. During the session “From Pixels to Places,” panelist Jack Parker-Holder, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, forecasted that within ten years, humanoid robots will be normalized in society. Separately, during the “Your Next Colleague Will Be an Avatar” session, Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli shared his belief that AI avatars will routinely handle baseline "busy work" like job interviews and surveys.
Whatever is scarce is more valuable.
Victor Riparbelli
CEO, Synthesia
Crucially, speakers agreed this shift is an opportunity, not a threat. Riparbelli argued that as AI automates routine tasks, human-centric skills will skyrocket in value. "Whatever is scarce is more valuable," he noted, urging young people to master these tools. Nathan Wallace, head of robotics at NextGen RI, echoed this optimism, "The risk isn't robots taking the jobs, it's us failing to prepare when they do." By establishing regulatory guardrails today and embracing technological literacy, we can pave a path where the next generation doesn't just survive the future—they shape it.
Across the stages, a single conviction ran beneath the surface: that the decisions made now–about technology, creativity, culture and power–will determine the shape of what comes next. SXSW London 2026 didn't offer easy answers, but it made one thing clear: waiting is no longer an option. The future is already being written.
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