If you haven’t been to Austin before, it may not be what you have in mind. It’s a bit like the Vatican City: it’s own unique island sharing only occasional cultural trait with the surroundings (tacos, cowboy hats donned on a spectrum of irony, and the assumption that “nice jeans” constitute business wear).

That’s to say that it’s in Texas, but not Texas. Not in the broader cultural sense, anyway, though perhaps in the Norwegian use.

Austin has long been the refuge of the weird, artistic, and those whose parents back in the suburbs didn’t quite know how to describe what their kid was doing with their life. Naturally, this made the perfect environment for entrepreneurship.

SXSW will do its very best to tell you its a grown-up conference for serious people, and serious people do find themselves among us on a surprisingly regular basis, but don’t be fooled: SXSW is Austin’s Festival of Austin. It is, on any given year, what we say it is.

This is why so many visitors arrive, get pulled into the whirlpool of chaos and spat out a week later, dazed, confused, and with only a faint idea of how they’ve spent thousands of dollars for a suitcase of tchotchkes, a couple hundred new contacts (half of which were met in line in an unrelated industry), and the vague sense that …

It’s neither a conference in the traditional sense, nor a festival, nor a forum. It’s zeitgeist manifested with a side of kimchi tacos.

This is important to know because, unlike a tech show like CES, the majority of events at SXSW are unofficial and hosted by locals. And these evolve every year based on the time-honored technique of vibes.

This makes it challenging from an event management standpoint, I’m sure.

So when you come to Austin for SXSW, you’re not just seeing the inside of a conference hall (and as it happens, we don’t have one of those this year). You’re seeing Austin.

Some useful context about Austin:

• Austin is a university town, so it’s young, vibrant, and—with several sprawling nightlife districts—slightly sticky. Dirty Sixth is the OG and is usually hosed off in advance of SXSW in respect for our guests. East Sixth is Dirty Sixth’s younger, hipper sibling who only moved to Austin a few years ago after its startup HQ relocated from California. Whether something is considered East or West has nothing to do with the East-West assignment on the street address but rather where it is located in relation to I-35.