I’m sitting at a desk in Web Summit’s Media Village. Nominally this is a drinks reception and most people are chatting but my queer neurodivergent ass, even tweaking on ADHD meds and with all the bolstered confidence that entails, is still too socially awkward to make conversation with the presumed cis.

I don’t drink so I’m sipping a can of fanta, occasionally turning down non-vegan canapes and champagne glasses filled with unknowable blue liquid and garnished with Web Summit logos.

The waiter offering canapes pretends not to understand the english “vegan” or the spanish “vegana”. I’m not sure what the portuguese word is. A young reporter next to me expresses sympathy.

The desks in here overlook the mythologized Speaker Lounge, where speakers and their guests (and anyone whose employer shells out the extortionate cost of Web Summit’s highest ticket tier) mingle.

There’s a vague mix of business-casual wearers and t-shirted tech guys with a few influencers, marked by their more striking and deliberate presentation.

Not many suits and those few are mostly in sneakers. No one here wants to look corporate. Everyone here is youthful and disruptive. Everyone here moves fast and breaks stuff.

It’s time to head to Centre Stage and I go to take another can of fanta from the ice bucket. A waiter stops me and pours an already-open room-temp can into a glass with ice. I turn the glass down and feel like I’m being a bitch.

Centre Stage seems like it’d be an overwhelming space but, with no english-language conversations happening in my earshot, it’s not hard to tune everything out. After raving until 9am on Sunday it’s hard to resist dancing, even with the arena’s sound system turned down low.

The event begins and the question on everyone’s mind is “is Paddy really tall or is the mayor of Lisbon really short?”

Paddy tells us it’s good to be back in Lisbon, which triggers some knowing applause, and highlights meetups as the big addition to Web Summit’s format this year.

Lisbon’s mayor emplores the crowd’s most darwinian capitalists to give something back once they’ve made it to the top, and then Portugal’s Prime Minister (CHECK THIS) talks about cutting taxes. Then I get jumpscared by pyrotechnics while typing. I can probably smell them afterwards but the smell could conceivably be an olfactory hallucination caused by doing shrooms at 1am on Sunday.

I’ve now heard the word “nerds” twice and I don’t like it.

The first actual content-containing talk is Etosha Cave talking about turning CO2 into jet fuel. That sounds like magic but the speech itself feels stilted enough to keep me from instantly dismissing it as an investor scam.

The tech sounds neat. Like charging a hydrocarbon battery. Assuming the required electricity comes from somewhere sustainable, which is a big “if”, it seems like something that could meaningfully cut down the environmental impact of flying.

Cave does mention that the fuel’s first recipient was the US airforce though, which definitely dulls that new-tech shine.

Then she dives into talk about colonizing Mars.

Now for a talk on GenAI, because apparently that’s still either worldendingly terrifying or transformatively positive. This talk feels borderline nonsensical, unless the idea of GenAI being meaningfully open source has become dramatically more coherent since I last checked.

I guess not, because apparently we’re getting AI robotic plumbers next year. Fascinating. Max Tegmark is making more sense but looks like he’s tweaking.

They’re talking about AGI which appears to be AI in the “actually Skynet” sense, as opposed to GenAI which is AI in the “called AI for marketing purposes” sense.

Opening Night is closed out by Pharrell Williams, nominally shilling Visa but in practice this is just a guy from Visa interviewing Pharrell Williams about his inspirations and process. Which is weird, but kinda interesting. Lots of mentions of A Tribe Called Quest.

Pharrell talks a little about dream jobs, and advocates for taking work in fields you’re passionate about because working the popcorn stand at a football stadium, you’re working on your passion. This feels like it comes awful close to advocating for people to be exploited, using their passion as an excuse.

He talks a lot about racial justice and black empowerment to the overwhelmingly white audience and we never find out exactly what Visa is trying to sell us.

Maybe I just missed it. Frank Cooper, the Visa guy, talked a little before Pharrell came on stage.

Paddy lets us all go as quickly as he can and then the attendees head out on the town.

I’m not in the rhythm of introducing myself to random strangers right now and I don’t want to solidify that into social anxiety by trying to force the issue – I’ll go pester some startup stands tomorrow and then brave Night Summit.

Amy Grace from Lissbon Tags: Websummit