4. How to see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I f you live in Europe like me, you'll only have caught a bit of the buzz around Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, but you can be sure that her appearance at South By South West was one of the zeitgeist-y things  you might want to catch. The way the SXSW schedule works is that you flick through thousands of sessions on the website, or on the app, and if you like the look of something, you favourite it. 7000 people favourited AOC, so if you wanted to see her you needed to do something else. The room she was speaking in only held 2500 people (only!).

The answer was the SXXpress pass. You apply for these online. The problem was that they open at 9am on the day before the talk. I arrived in Austin on the 7th and casually started looking for express passes for the opening day. Nothing. Lesson learned.

The next morning you had to get up early, you opened up the windows of the things you wanted to see on your laptop and watched the clock tick through 8.59 to 9.00. I refreshed the AOC page, clicked on the pass, confirmed, then moved to the Trevor Noah daily show page. Gone. Everything else. Gone.

A bit shellshocked I went back to the AOC page. It seemed okay. And then, if you were lucky, like me, you got this little nugget of joy on your phone.

So you went on the Saturday, slightly embarrassed as you hustled in at the front of the line. But the embarrassment was worth it. She gave an eye opener of a talk. More about that later, the lesson. Get the SXXpress pass. Worth it.