Conference

Gaby Dunn is one half of Just Between Us, her enormously popular comedy channel with Allison Raskin, and creator of Bad with Money, her new podcast about financial anxiety. After quitting BuzzFeed last year, she’s raised awareness of the challenges facing independent artists — the exploitation of marginalized creators and the sad economics of internet fame.

After her open letter to Yelp’s CEO, writer and comedian Talia Jane was fired for blowing the whistle on the treatment of “lower tier” employees in Silicon Valley, and faced a non-stop barrage of personal attacks and accusations of “millennial entitlement.” Two months later, Yelp raised wages company-wide for the employees of their food delivery app who could barely afford to eat.

Balancing a full-time hip-hop career while pursuing her PhD in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo’s been producing beats and rapping under the moniker Sammus since 2009, a powerful voice at the intersection of music and technology, covering subjects as diverse as video games and cartoons to social justice and mental health.

One of the most prolific creators of weird and wonderful internet, Neil Cicierega is an artist, comedian, filmmaker, musician, and game developer. His many, many projects include Potter Puppet Pals, Lemon Demon, and his stunning Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence mashup albums.

Star Simpson builds hardware with soul, currently working on sky machines at Otherlab. The creator of the PLIBMTTBHGATY series of coding events and the TacoCopter drone delivery concept, Star’s latest project is Circuit Classics, reviving the hand-drawn circuits of Forrest M. Mims III as hardware kits.

A belt buckle. Britney Spears’ book. Jake Gyllenhaal’s true height. After years of producing stories for This American Life, Starlee Kine joined Gimlet Media and launched Mystery Show to instant acclaim, chasing every lead to solve everyday mysteries, revealing quiet moments of humanity along the way.

A frequent guest at XOXO, John Roderick is the frontman and songwriter of The Long Winters, the receiving end of Merlin Mann’s weekly phone calls for Roderick on the Line, and one of our favorite storytellers of all time.

Lucy Bellwood is a tall ship-sailing, dual citizen cartoonist best known for her adventurous autobiographical comics. When not recounting her life at sea in her nautically-themed series Baggywrinkles, she publishes travelogue comics from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the last wooden whaling ship in the world.

Swedish inventor Simone Giertz is the self-proclaimed “Queen of Shitty Robots,” exploding online with a series of hilariously extreme robots to wake her up, feed her cereal, apply lipstick, and more. Simone joined Tested.com in April, collaborating with Adam Savage on her first project, a Popcorn Helmet that worked about as well as you’d expect.

Jersey City-based artist/engineer Jenn Schiffer makes art with code, teaches code with art, and open-source tools for playing with both. Her hilariously deadpan writing satirizes tech culture and programming tutorials, roping in clueless mansplainers for literally years after publication.

David Rees is the creator of clip art comics Get Your War On and My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, a world-renowned artisanal pencil sharpener, and host of the recently-concluded, Going Deep with David Rees for National Geographic and the Esquire Network. His latest project is Election Profit Makers, a podcast about election prediction markets, produced by Starlee Kine.

Itch.io is the chaotic and beautiful heart of the indie game universe, with nearly 40,000 games added so far, many free and experimental. Unlike every other app store, founder Leaf Corcoran dropped every barrier to entry and chose an open revenue sharing model, allowing developers to set their own revenue split.

A journalist trained as a lawyer, Sarah Jeong writes about technology, policy, and law as contributing editor at Motherboard. Last year, she published The Internet Is Garbage, a deep dive into online harassment, the failed attempts to remove it from online platforms, and the balance between free speech and thoughtful community management.

Launched only last year, Another Round quickly became one of the internet’s most-loved podcasts, propelled by co-hosts Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton's candid, funny, and often tipsy banter about race, gender, and pop culture. In April, Heben announced she was leaving BuzzFeed to join the writing staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Bahraini civil rights advocate Esra’a Al-Shafei is the founder and director of Majal, an organization building platforms to amplify underrepresented voices, such as CrowdVoice, an open-source tool that curates and contextualizes social justice movements worldwide, and Mideast Tunes, the largest platform for underground musicians in the Middle East and North Africa.

Note: For her safety and security, no photos or video will be permitted during this talk.

Frank Chimero is a NYC-based designer and author of the Kickstarter-funded The Shape of Design, a book that investigates the influence of design on our lives and the world. Earlier this year, Frank co-founded Abstract, a secret company making a pretty neat thing.