How Do Cultural Platforms Like SXSW Build a Better Future?

In 1841, the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a public lecture titled Man the Reformer to an audience in Massachusetts. “Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness,” he thundered from the pulpit. “Our distrust is very expensive.” Almost two hundred years on, Emerson would find much to recognise in the current state of the world, which is more mistrustful than ever.

According to the 2026 Edelman…