THE COACHELLAFICATION OF CULTURECON

Once upon a time, Coachella was a music festival, a place people went to hear their favorite artists and chill with friends. Maybe grab a few snapshots before the fit got dusty. Now, it’s as much an influencer event as anything else, where being seen, photographed, and documented is often more vital than being present.

When you enter the gates of CultureCon, that same energy washes over you. The first thing you see is tripods, ring lights, vlogging cameras, on-the-ground recording, three-foot selfie sticks. And for an event built around a simple idea—put Black creatives in the same room to meet, learn, and build something together—being at CultureCon has started to feel almost as important as what you actually do there.

That doesn’t mean the networking has disappeared. It means it now has to compete with the other reasons people come: To make content. Get a selfie with Aaron Pierre. (That's Mufasa!) And to prove they were in the room.

But was it inevitable that a networking event growing this fast was always going to become something else too? And how did we get here?

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In 2016, Imani Ellis invited about 10 friends to her Harlem apartment to talk about what they were working on, what they needed, and how they could help one another. It was casual by design, just a crew of creatives sharing resources and realizing they weren’t the only ones trying to figure all of this out.

Ten years later, CultureCon has grown into what organizers call the nation’s leading gathering for Black creatives. These days, it takes over Duggal Greenhouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for two days, pulling in more than 10,000 attendees and over 200 speakers for panels, workshops, career programming, networking, and the increasingly elaborate brand activations that now come standard with any major cultural event.

But the weekend isn't even where things begin. CultureCon is a whole week. This year, there were events running from September 28 through October 1, a kickoff party on October 2, and then the main festival on October 3 and 4.

A single-day ticket is $129. The weekend is $239. VIP is $649. Additional events cost additional cash. And there’s even a $19 digital pass for people who can’t make it to Brooklyn.

People, myself included, are investing in being there.

The appeal has always been pretty obvious. Creative industries run on relationships, but access to those relationships has never been distributed equally. CultureCon offered a room where Black creatives didn’t have to spend the first half of an interaction proving they belonged there. You could meet somebody working in your field, hear from people a few steps ahead of you, get advice, find collaborators, and maybe finally put a real-life face to somebody you’ve been mutuals with for three years.

And CultureCon still clearly wants to be that.

This year’s programming makes that obvious. Alongside the stages and workshops, there’s a Career Lounge, speed networking, Brain Dates, and other spaces built specifically around getting people to actually talk to one another.

At the same time, the other side of modern CultureCon is impossible to miss. There’s Activation Alley, where major brands build out experiences for the weekend. There's celebrity panels, creator appearances, lounges, and photo opportunities. The VIP Lounge is advertised as a place to recharge and “run into the right people.” CultureCon is a networking event, yes. It’s also an event where there is increasingly a right place to be seen.

People have been noticing this shift for a while. In one Reddit conversation about CultureCon, a prospective attendee wondered whether events like it had become more about people wanting to “dress up and impress.” Someone else described the vibe as a “glow up parade” despite the event ostensibly being about something deeper.

CultureCon is supposed to be about connection. But connection gets weird when everybody is performing.

Walking through CultureCon, specifically the Culture Stage, can sometimes feel like everybody is cosplaying as “somebody.” Somebody™.

To be clear, this isn’t a complaint that people dress up. Black people have never needed much convincing to turn any event into a fashion show. What can I say; We're fly without trying.

But networking requires a little vulnerability. You have to walk up to somebody you don’t know and admit, however indirectly, that you would like something from the interaction. Maybe that’s advice. Maybe it’s a collaboration. Maybe you simply think they seem cool and want to know them.

But personal-brand culture rewards almost the exact opposite.

Throughout the weekend, I started asking people how they felt about CultureCon. The answer I heard most was intimidated.

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CultureCon now contains several different levels of access: attendees, VIPs, speakers, creators, brand representatives, celebrities, executives. Some people are there specifically to network. Others are there to work. Some are being paid to appear. Some are trying to get hired. Some have access to rooms, lounges, and events other people don’t even know exist. And it can be hard to tell who's actually available to meet, who's moving between obligations, and where a normal introduction fits into all of that.

That uncertainty creates a unusual amount of social calculation.

A week before CultureCon, Sable Williams, founder of Sequin Soirée and a first-time attendee herself, organized something called Table for 12, a virtual pre-conference brunch for CultureCon attendees. It wasn’t sponsored by CultureCon or connected to the event. It was simply an independent, 45-minute Zoom gathering for 12 people who were attending alone, coming from out of town, or walking into CultureCon for the first time. The idea was straightforward: introduce yourself, swap tips, talk about what you hoped to get out of the weekend, and arrive in Brooklyn already knowing a few names and faces.

And there’s something telling about a first-time attendee looking at an event built around connection and needing a warm-up first.

And maybe that gets closer to the real problem. CultureCon has become very good at putting people in the same place. The harder part is creating the conditions that make those people feel like they can actually reach one another.

A packed room can create opportunity, but it can also create distance. The more status, access, and visibility get layered onto an event, the easier it becomes for networking to feel less like community and more like navigating a social ecosystem with rules no one bothered to write down.

That doesn’t mean meaningful interactions weren't happening. Quite a few attendees spoke about the conversations in lines, the people they met between sessions, or the random introduction that ended up being more valuable than whatever was happening onstage. (My personal favorite interaction happened while watching some incredibly talented people jump rope.) Those moments just increasingly have to fight for space with everything else CultureCon has become.

None of this means CultureCon has lost its purpose. If anything, the fact that it keeps growing proves there's still a real hunger for spaces like it.

And there are plenty of signs that CultureCon is trying to meet that hunger in more thoughtful ways. This year introduced a Creative Business Stage focused the business side of making art, interactive Brain Dates built around peer-led conversations, and an upgraded app that helped attendees sort themselves into more tailored tracks. The “Museum of Us” theme also gave the weekend a clearer creative identity, framing Black creativity as something worthy of being displayed, studied, and celebrated on its own terms.

Look, CultureCon started in an apartment with a handful of people figuring out how they could help one another. The challenge now is making sure all that growth doesn’t crowd out the intimacy that made people want a room like that in the first place.