I just like - I hate con culture. I hate how centered it is around buying crap you could get cheaper on eBay. I hate the motte and bailey of “geek culture is just about unabashedly owning your interests!” “jk by ‘interests’ we mean games and comics what the hell are antiques?” I hate the idea of spending hours in line for an autograph. I hate collectively pretending that being interested in something is the same as being an interesting person.
I do not hate people who love these things! You do you. My opinion needn’t mean anything to you. But I am very frustrated with how cons are touted as The Place to Be for anyone’s who’s nerdy, and then “nerdy” turns out to mean “into fairly well known pop cultural icons”.
I hate cons like that and don’t get the appeal, but it’s not like that’s the only kind. why not find one where you do things you like?
I think you’re accurately describing the pathologies of generic mass-market cons. Comicon, PAX, Anime Boston, etc. I saw a DC comicon knockoff recently and I didn’t even investigate because I knew what it would be like. If the con is advertised in a subway, that means it has to be heavily commercialized and broadly targeted. Any place where actors get a lot of focus and attention probably suffers from this
I love Readercon, and it doesn’t do the thing that you’re describing. A third of the attendees are professionals in SF&F, whether that be editors, authors, or other people involved in the process. There’s a space set aside as a bookshop, and a few more sales areas, but that’s never made the focus of the con. The focus is the written word, and the discussion thereof.
I suspect you wouldn’t like it: it’s very focused on writing and reading SF&F, and if you’re not invested in that, if that doesn’t fascinate you, then it probably won’t work out, and you have other passions. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s really possible to have an enjoyed gathering of all people who are passionate about all interests. It’s much better when there’s enough focus that people can at least talk about related things that they really care about.
Vericon, another con I have loved, has a small auction room of donated items, with all profits going to good causes. That’s it for commercialization, aside from, one time, an author selling copies of an audiobook that they had narrated. There are two rooms, each with one screen and a gaming console. LARPs upstairs, panels everywhere in the building, and really big-name authors (Tamora Pierce, George R. R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, those are probably the biggest names of the past decade but they always pull impressive people) for a 300 person con. Authors famous enough that people in their pajamas will literally run up to them on the street will get invited to join a LARP in progress.
I totally agree that there are a lot of unpleasant cons out there, and I suppose those are the ones that dominate media. But there are smaller ones (I haven’t been to Boskone, but I hear nothing but good things about it) that are more in the spirit of what I think you’re looking for, even if the particular topics wouldn’t be good.