nemorathwald | Recent Entries

The following is a ~2,400-word AI re-write (lightly edited) of Duncan Sabien's 10,000+ word essay "Truth Or Dare". It was originally written as intentionally meandering, so if this synopsis interests you, you might wish to read the whole thing for the numerous examples and metaphors. I'd like more people to have access to these concepts without committing to something novelette-length.

Light World, Dark World: How People End Up in Incompatible Realities Of Danger

The Core Observation

People who share roughly the same socioeconomic circumstances, geography, and educational background often experience the social world in fundamentally incompatible ways. Some people move through life with a baseline expectation that others are basically trustworthy, that things will generally work out, and that openness and vulnerability are reasonable bets to take. Others move through the same world with persistent wariness, a strong prior that people have hidden malicious agendas, and a felt sense that extending trust is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

What makes this interesting is that neither group is wrong about their own experience. When you investigate the specific history of someone who believes the world is cold and threatening, you find a world that really was cold and threatening. Their worldview is well-calibrated to the data they've actually collected. The same is true in reverse.

What makes it stranger is that the distribution doesn't look like a bell curve. You'd expect most people to be in the middle, with a few outliers at each end. Instead, the distribution appears bimodal — people cluster toward the poles. Something is driving people out of the middle and into one camp or the other.

(c.f. the excellent Scott Alexander essay Different Worlds.)

( Read more... )

Penguicon started off in 2003 as a science fiction convention fused with an open source software conference, and blossomed into a convention of all geeky interests. The highest attendance, in the late 2010s, was about 1600. After the pandemic, it was a couple of hundred. For the first time, in 2025, there was no Penguicon. 2026 might be its last year. I'll draw its arc in broad outlines. Changes to technology and the hotel industry are equally important, but can be their own entire essays. A scene is a set of norms. This will chronicle changes to social norms over decades. I will not name specific people, and will not detail the blow-by-blow of the complaints specific individuals have with each other, which were due to our internal differences in conflict-resolution styles.

tldr: The focus of any all-volunteer org shifts from the positives we want to acheive to the negatives we want to avoid. There is a resurgence of focus on the positives, and if this excites you, please join us.

Part 1. The Decades
Part 2. The Long 2000s: Penguicon And Low Stakes
Part 3. The 2010s: Penguicon And High Stakes
Part 4. The 2020s: A World Crying Out For Resistance

Part 1. The Decades

To understand the history of Penguicon requires going back a few years, and understanding a period called "The Long Aughts" or "The Long 2000s". It was from 1994 when Netscape Navigator was released, but really got a full head of steam around the turn of the century, when the early-adopters were finding people through the internet who were weird in all the same ways. They began to speak of the information commons a lot. One might call it a time of relative social cohesion for hackers, hipsters, and hippies. The theme was anti-monopoly. The ethos of open-source. The Jargon File. The early blogosphere as it developed norms. Creative Commons licenses. Wikipedia’s founding ethos. Burning Man’s expansion. The indie web. These things all shared a kind-of cohesive ideology, combining a gift economy with self expression. Most important, it combined permissiveness with risk-tolerance.

Into that environment came a 2001 whitepaper titled "Conventions At Light Speed: What Hackers Can Learn From SF Fandom". It's still a great paper, and I recommend you read it. It resulted in the first Penguicon in 2003. That was my first convention, and I immediately got involved, and made Penguicon the central thing I was doing with my life for most of two decades.

It seemed as though every second person I met at Penguicon was carrying a concealed firearm, a root kit, a legal defense fund, and a pocket copy of the Bill Of Rights. Libertarianism was out and proud in a way that it could not be in most other spaces. But the other half of the attendance base felt very different! I've never seen so much interest in socialism or Universal Basic Income anywhere else. (UBI was the topic of a keynote, "Star Trek Economics". I held several panel discussions on it.) That decade felt like the future was open and anything was possible, so people with different norms were able to co-exist for a while, in the hopes that the contradictions would all somehow shake out. We were told that fusing the norms of hackers with that of fandom couldn't work.

The Long 2000s ended with the arrival of social media, which turned hobbyist-friendly technologies into monopolies, closed brands, and walled gardens. Smartphones as a one-way consumption device, and algorithm-driven web 2.0, drove a wave of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. The change to online social dynamics made "The Eternal September" of Usenet in 1993 look like nothing by comparison. "The Long 2000s" mostly collapsed as a cohesive social force in a storm of moral-emotional content and punitive dynamics. I'll discuss in the section on the 2010s how that affected the Penguicon vibe.

It turned out the naysayers were partly wrong and partly right. Wrong that it would collapse immediately, and right that it eventually would undergo a stark shift, characterized by a collapse of internal trust among the convention organizers and attendees. Again, I won't mention anyone by name or go into the detailed blow-by-blow here.

For the next bit, I'm going to put on a different hat. I'll speak on behalf of the spirit of that decade, and I'll advocate for decisions you might not agree with, as though we are in 2003. But we're not. It was very much of its time. You're going to want to protest that conditions in the 2020s are different. Technology, the economy, the hotel industry, and common norms have changed. But I hope you just understand why Penguicon was able to succeed in the first place, even if you think it was an unsustainable dream.

So here goes. I'm putting on that perspective starting ... now.

Part 2. The Long 2000s: Penguicon And Low Stakes

There was another time when we didn't know if there would be another Penguicon: the first Penguicon.

T-shirt and schedule book cover illustration from the 1st Penguicon

T-shirt and schedule book cover illustration from the 1st Penguicon

At the first Penguicon, bad news: it's game over! But good news: it's game over! The illustration by J.D. Frazer from the t-shirt and front cover of the first Penguicon's schedule book.

Penguicon started because ConFusion had gotten too risk-averse, and the other convention held in the spring, ConTraption, had died off completely. What made ConFusion start to decline at the turn of the century, and Penguicon take away most of its oxygen, was Penguicon's willingness to risk its own bankruptcy and dissolution, and ConFusion was covering their ass. ConFusion had a bank account and a lot of name recognition which drew attendees. They had something to lose. The upstart had nothing to lose.

A bunch of rebels struck out on their own with a vision to let people do good things for themselves and each other and get out of their way. They were people who start things, so if the whole thing crashed and burned, the same people could start something else. It's better for the event to come to an end having done something wonderful, than to prevent risk by saying "no" to the ways attendees want to provide value to each other. This resulted in a massively participatory scene.

We were inspired by an era in which open-source hackers voided warranties in order to escape control by big tech, and fans wrote fan fiction without asking permission first. In that spirit, we had a mascot and logo, Starfleet Tux, who was a mashup of intellectual property owned by two other corporations. We should not have changed it to a new logo.

The original logo.
A logo of a penguin riding a rocket, framed inside a hexagon.

The new 2011 logo.

Bear in mind this was post-nine-eleven, "if you see something, say something," a paranoid time when you could get in trouble for flash mobs or alternate reality games. Real safety is empowering ourselves and each other to get better at danger. Instead, "safety" was used to mean "control". The normies were spooked by anything that was in any way surprising, unexpected, or not under top-down control. In the wider culture, it looked like the death of all adventure, but the culture of Penguicon centered around risk-tolerance and permissiveness. We had a lot of arguments in which I kept saying to other organizers and attendees, "don't let the terrorists win". This was the decade in which, when I said that, it worked.

All of the things we did were in the spirit of Do-It-Yourself, without mediation from entertainment conglomerates, big tech, and nationalized hotel chains (a big part of our success was the flexibility that chains used to give to management of their individual hotels, to make deals to increase their business). As a result, some things at Penguicon challenged conventional wisdom. Here they are in a list.

1. We had the aforementioned logo which used IP from two other institutions who were known to be pretty lenient with their fans.

2. We served a keg of beer in the Consuite. Even though we were carding everyone, some thought it was potentially a legal grey area.

3. Some people showed each other movies and anime with no regards to licensing.

4. Attendees routinely got naked in the hot tubs and the pool. (No one would have done this if we had not sold out the whole hotel.)

5. A swordfighting group dressed participants in body armor and gave them fake semi-automatic weapons with orange tips to show they were fake, and staged something like a SWAT entry simulation exercise in selected hotel rooms. They literally rappelled from the balconies.

6. Most famously, we made ice cream with liquid nitrogen, which is about as dangerous as boiling water on your stove, but people were quite afraid of it at first. When we were done, we would throw the leftover liquid nitrogen into the swimming pools, producing a huge billow of steam. The first time we did this, I immediately put the video on my YouTube channel. Because of this, I have more than a thousand subscribers. The video has eleven million, seven hundred thousand, five hundred and eleven views. The vast majority of the five thousand plus comments are telling us we must be out of our minds.

7. At first we did not have, or want, event insurance. Again, if the event fails, the LLC soaks it up and collapses, which is why LLC stands for limited liability corporation. (You can tell me you don't believe you're individually protected, but remember, I'm putting on the perspective as if it's 2003. In that decade, I frequently heard about not being able to "pierce the corporate veil".)

8. We were able to offer 24-hour consuite (a hospitality suite full of complementary snacks and couches, with a bathtub full of ice and complementary canned drinks), because we did not yet post someone to supervise inside it. We only posted someone to check badges outside of consuite because it was a cost center, but once you were in, there was no babysitter. Likewise, we did not yet put anyone in the board game room to supervise board gamers. I routinely left my entire board game collection unsupervised on a table and got it back at the end of the weekend. We acted like attendees could be trusted even if they sometimes can't. This has a huge effect on people feeling like they're trusted, and that they're attending a convention with generally trustworthy attendees.

9. Penguicon was not for self-infantilized people. We considered attendees to be full adults capable of adulting, and if they were not, that sounds like a you problem. We did not consider them to need organizers to serve as unpaid law enforcement, investigative journalism, jury duty, emotional counseling, mediation ... and hell, sometimes even a touch of crisis management and suicide watch now and then. In the 2010s we started getting grown adults rocking back and forth in the fetal position in an elevator lobby, or discovered in a dissociative fugue state in a stairwell. We should ask them not come back next year unless they bring someone to be their caretaker who never lets them out of their sight. But that's talking about the 2010s, so I'm getting ahead of myself.

We were not able to find a way to get around the pressures for us to change many of those. But we proactively and voluntarily overturned the rest of them to cover our asses. We are now in the risk-averse place ConFusion was when Penguicon took over from it. And we are probably about to be in the place ConTraption was: stepping aside for what's next.

Self-determination, self-reliance, liking who you are, starting something new, and taking risks responsibly, are partially just aspirational qualities, which we only partially achieve in reality. But we must aspire to them. Otherwise, we may as well just attend corporate-run conventions that treat us like children. That also would mean, there would be two levels. At the top level, for-profit conventions have professionalized staff, who are employees. They are treated as trustworthy authorities, and we attendees are not. We are there to contribute only money, and they are only there to get paid money, and so, they are the only ones who need to do work. We're passive consumers. A convention of engaged participants and co-creators goes hand-in-hand with a gift economy. A gift economy withers away when there is professionalization.

Perhaps someone can say that convention attendees cannot be trusted! And they might be right. But that disproves and refutes the Penguicon experiment which caused our original explosion of engaged participation. You can advocate to change what Penguicon is, but I'm asking you, please, don't [sanewash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanewashing) it to flush it down the memory hole, as though we always played it safe.

Taking my 2000s perspective off, and putting my 2010s perspective on... now.

Part 3. The 2010s: Penguicon And High Stakes

The Early Twenty-Teens: The Geeks Inherit The Earth

I was libertarian in 2003, and by the 2010s, I was not. I noticed those who show up to help do the work are motivated by a communalist attitude. I heard rugged individualists talking a big game, but they didn't put in the work. If you want to own your computer instead Big Tech owning it, it takes work. If you want to own your convention, it takes work. Not just talk.

Penguicon started out with a lot of well-specified strong sub-pieces held together by an ethos (which I described above). Over and over, the leadership stated a deliberate intention to never say "you can't present about that here". It turns out, when you open those floodgates, it slowly transforms into a vaguely-fuzzy monoculture which doesn't know what, if anything, holds it together.

I would often describe Penguicon the way I did in the 2000s section of this blog post. But it was increasingly inaccurate. If you want to attend an event in order to talk about the issues of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you attended Penguicon in the mid-to-late 2010s, you might look around and ask yourself, "this is fine, but why did I choose to come here instead of somewhere more specific?" This is a result of our success. The geeks inherited the earth. An event for everybody isn't an event for anyone in particular. A lot of the open-source technology talks drifted away like the elves leaving Middle Earth. It's been a long time since there was a significant tech presence at Penguicon, even though it's technically inspired by open-source software. How did that happen? Part of that was a change in the overall society. We won. Geekiness was the safe and normalized pop-culture mainstream, so what need was there to go to a convention? (The answer is, you go for the permissiveness and risk tolerance.) This was accompanied by a society-wide decline of deviance.

The Early-To-Mid-Twenty-Teens: The First Wave Of Misanthropic Edgelords

I wish I could end the 2010s section here.

During its first decade, Penguicon had its share of zealots, but their perceived villains were things like Microsoft or the RIAA or DMCA. It wasn't each other.

Penguicon went through two very different waves of overly-online radicalized edgelords in the 2010s. Each wave seemed to gain strength from group membership in a shared grievance, far more than membership in fandom at large. To maintain their membership in their radicalized subculture, they had to feel futility that their concerns could be addressed. If you thought there was hope, you would be cast out of the group of edgelords, as a milktoast compromiser.

Let's start with the group that later came to be called "the alt-right". No sooner had the majority of Americans gotten on social media around 2012, these young men began to impose seemingly-endless social media moderation work on Penguicon. This faction seemed incapable of participating in a disagreement with anything other than implicit insults and implicit threats. Vitriol was used as a first resort.

Within a few years, there was gamergate, which you almost certainly know about. Then there was the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaign to do ballot-stuffing on the Hugo Awards. A few of them just wanted to get some more conservatively-oriented stories and novels onto the slate. But soon, the prevailing popular strategy among those who participated was to make the entire slate of award nominations into works that would lose to "no award", in order to ruin that year's Hugos for everyone as retaliation.

Attacking our most important awards makes one thing clear to everyone: that you no longer consider yourself part of our community and do not wish to be.

This began a slow but steady landslide of guilt by association. Soon, central members of the community, who had set the tone for our social norms ever since the founding, who were various levels of conservative, both large-C and small-c, very publicly ended their involvement in Penguicon.

At that point, you could not have conservative leanings in fandom at all. To be clear, I personally have voted straight-ticket Democrat my entire adult life, and I had just endured years of abuse as a social media moderator where exactly one side acted out performative cruelty while a broad coalition of others with various political perspectives unified against them to be calm and reasonable. I know plenty of reasonable conservatives, but where were they lately? The only "conservatives" we seemed to attract now wanted to burn everything down! We started seeing public posts about plans to sabotage Penguicon while wearing full-body costumes to hide their identities. At the time, I thought, good fucking riddance.

I was not thinking through what was going to happen when fandom became fully unified about who to hate.

The Late Twenty-Teens: The Second Wave Of Misanthropic Edgelords

It's been said that the farther you get to the extremes of the political spectrum, the more you have in common with the other farthest extreme, and the less you have in common with the non-radicalized. The spectrum is curved to bring them together like the tips of a horseshoe.

Those who tend to use cruelty will jump on whichever bandwagon provides a justification for cruelty. After the Sad Puppies debacle, cruelty in fandom could happen with impunity if the motive was that it would make the alt-right angry that we're treating each other with militance and a stance of groveling apology. Anyone who tried to speak up and say "hey, cruelty to each other is actually never the answer", would, themselves, be shouted down. The fiction publishing industry came to seem like an endless stream of moral panics on social media. The edgelords were no longer the outsiders; routinely, they were fiction authors presenting on panel discussions. During the previous wave, members of the alt-right had given me what, at the time, sounded like absurd paranoid fantasies about how the majority of us would be supposedly driven out for insufficient political zeal. I was flabbergasted when, in the late 2010s, those stories started to come true. I felt like I was going crazy. Nobody credible tells those stories, or would believe me if I told them.

Several people associated with Penguicon, who, years before, were sympathetic to the alt-right, now flipped their political valence to the opposite. When a person wants to emulate a Batman villain such as The Joker, they have no actual ideals. During the final years of the 2010s, they began a campaign of sabotage, death threats, stalking at people's homes, and intimidation, against the organizers. That story ends in an incarceration.

We could not stand up to them as easily as we could stand up to the alt-right, because the story the public was ready to believe, was that convention fandom was a cesspool of oppressors and abusers. All that a bad-faith actor has to do, is commit misconduct and sabotage, then tell that story to the public in their defense, and the wisest and most stable among us are not sure who to believe, while the most emotionally-reactive Penguicon attendees on social media amplify a false narrative without question. Some of the most valuable Penguicon organizers had always been neurodivergent, traumatized, or disabled, and in the late 2010s the language of those important concepts were being constantly misappropriated by cynical opportunists.

I was given more reason to feel fear for utter social exclusion from my community, as well as for my physical safety, than I ever had from the alt-right.

Trust evaporated. We started tripping over each other's feet because we were keeping secrets. Organizers started shutting out other organizers from crucial information, often preventing them from performing their job functions. This is because there were credible threats of murders that supposedly were planned to occur at Penguicon during the convention, and very few could feel sure which volunteers were secret accomplices. In the 2000s, organizers had monthly social gatherings, and routinely went out to eat with each other after convention committee meetings, and got to know each other, building trust which would have solved this. Ten years later, offline connections had been long gone.

Throughout the mid-to-late twenty-teens, it became more and more difficult for me to continue to describe "what is Penguicon" and have it still be an accurate description of what you would experience. For example, hundreds of times, I told people "if you want to provide value to other people in some form at Penguicon, and you're not causing anyone any problems, it's really hard for anybody to stop you." That became gradually less true as we took on a "see something, say something" set of norms. It was reminiscent of the post-nine-eleven social norms Penguicon had so vigorously opposed from the beginning.

The Loss Of Madcap Penguins In Our Symbolic Imaginary

In 2004, two attendees wore intentionally-paired costumes: one wore a blue butterfly costume (the logo of Microsoft at the time), and the other wore the Starfleet Tux mascot costume, chasing his friend through opening ceremonies with an oversized flyswatter. A writeup of Penguicon once wrote admiringly that the Starfleet Tux mascot contrasted powerfully against a Mickey Mouse corporate mascot, describing Tux as something like "running around unauthorized and off the leash". Starfleet Tux was an "imago": an image or template that activates the unconscious and can engage your personal mythology. Part of the mythology here is that by joining together, we can solve our own problems.

You can see a transformation in symbolic forms such as the cartoon representations of penguins. In the 2000s, the covers of our souvenir books showed a lot of cartoon penguins committing cartoon acts of violence.

A Penguicon 2004 schedule book cover by Howard Tayler, depicting a giant Linux penguin about to step on Microsoft's Bill Gates who is dressed as the Borg from Star Trek, who is saying "Resistance is... umm..."

Detail of part of the back cover of the Penguicon 2004 schedule book. Illustration by Howard Tayler, depicting the giant Linux penguin from the front cover illustration, walking away, leaving behind sticky wad under its foot in the shape of a Microsoft Windows logo.

Or the penguins are being boozy, singing karaoke, or engaged in a variety of intense challenges like swords or jetpacks. The style seemed to resemble that of troublemaking trickster-deities like Bugs Bunny, suitable for animation for adult audiences such as Looney Tunes.

A Penguicon 2010 souvenir book cover by Howard Tayler, depicting cartoon penguins jet-packing, swinging a sword, concentrating intensely on a book or on a laptop, singing karaoke, drinking a martini, and pouring liquid nitrogen into milk to make ice cream.

Throughout the 2010s, the penguins started looking infantilized, like they are for a five-year-old audience. One such illustration was literally Care Bear penguins engaged in a Care Bear Stare. The prototypical Penguicon participant was assumed to be afraid, incapable, in need of protection and care. In need of safety through controlling others, which is the opposite of an environment of risk-tolerance, permissiveness, and trust. In need of an authority to manage risk for them. The loss of madcap penguins is a seemingly-irrelevant detail, but it indicated a real shift in attitudes.

By this time, fandom was now more-or-less the same thing as online fandoms. Here's what that means. There are very few "walls", metaphorically, on the monopoly social media platforms. It's decontextualized hypervisibility, the opposite of a Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. It's a "panopticon", all one room, where every person is on a stage, with a spotlight and a microphone. Without walls, performances attract audiences, and audiences transform everyone into a performer. Our brains normally subtly switch our behavior because we are picking up on context clues. The mere existence of the public watching, exerts a subtle influence on every interaction to turn it into highly emotionally-charged winning and losing contexts.

Harm and danger are the most powerful argument that can over-rule any other consideration. And so everything becomes about preventing harm and danger (contrasted with the ambitions and desires of which early Penguicon was an expression). On social media, the only way to respond to help with harm and danger is not through physical violence, but through social attack as an expression of care (hence the Care Bears). A social media pile-on is a cheap and meaningless form of care which risks nothing and costs one's self nothing. It costs the social scene everything.

This is a panopticon, in which the salient factor about every person becomes their medicalized woundedness; we get classified as a harm-doer, and a victim of harm-doers, simultaneously. Monopolistic culture-producing corporations cashed in on these anxieties for market share. Culture creators ended up with the downside. This messaging from institutions then fed back into the online groups centered around those interests, contributing to increasing instability. Culture-producing monopolistic institutions increasingly adopted their audience's medicalization framework, in which, when we feel uncomfortable, we call that "unsafe".

It turned out the same lesson that applies to the libertarians who didn't put in the work to make Penguicon their own, but liked to complain about not feeling at home there, also applied to those who identified with the penguin Care Bears. It turns out if you want to have a voice in a group, actually exercising that voice takes spoons. During the 2000s we elevated and prioritized those who said (correctly or not) they could do great things competently. In the late-2010s and onward, we elevated and prioritized whoever had inabilities, at the expense of those contributing to the group. Surely there's a third way.

I made many of the arguments in this essay for years, in one-on-one conversations, and got nowhere. I seemed to be alone in saying "There is a thing that Penguicon is. Sure, it's nebulous, but it's not everything, and it's not nothing." This is culture-building, which is distinct from top-down control in that it has to work bottom-up in one-on-one conversations. If we have no intentionality about what Penguicon is, it can become anything, and "anything" includes the very things Penguicon was an alternative to. The long 2000s instilled my perspective of human nature, expectations, obligations, power, and what counted as knowledge. I saw that as the reason I gave two decades of my life on this earth to the great Penguicon experiment. Now no one was listening or interested in a vision, at any level of the organization. Had it been disproven and refuted? In 2020, when I realized I could no longer be effective, I stepped down.

Part 4. The 2020s: A World Crying Out For Resistance

Detail of one of the above images. "Resistance is... umm..."

At the turn of the century, ConFusion and ConTraption had a crisis, and it was our opportunity, and Penguicon was born. With apologies to Antonio Gramsci, in the 2010s, fandom as we know it was dying, and something new struggled to be born. In this interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms had appeared.

To move out of the morbid interregnum, I want a positive vision of what we valued about what we had, and new qualities we might have. I've been getting creative, and I seek those who also want to team up with each other. I'll give you a clue: in 2003, the way to go underground was to go online, but in 2026, being online is the least-underground place. The way to go underground now is to have a crucial layer that's strictly offline. Thriving scenes will be those in which, who gets a voice in group decision-making, and who gets prioritized, starts through in-person relationships that build trust.

I look through photos of all the past Penguicons, and I see people liking themselves. Liking each other. And uncomplicatedly touching each other.

Most of them liked to be photographed. Most of them will flirt with someone in a room party.

Are you wondering why we would need that in 2026? According to Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" and the recent Netflix documentary about Putnam’s ideas titled Join or Die, people stopped joining things which form connections. Attending a potluck or a hobby club may not directly affect GDP or climate policy, but Putnam's work showed how the loss of those small, regular, local connections has led to measurable collapse in social trust, public health, and democratic resilience. The local is the bedrock of anything that needs to get bigger.

Every good thing starts from that in our civic lives. Every bad thing comes from a lack of it in our civic lives. People touching each other, liking themselves, liking each other. That means they show off! They have good-natured competitions! They have good-natured disagreements, sometimes passionate, but usually backed by friendly curiosity. I don't see Penguicon photos of people acting like they would act if they thought they were weak, or helpless, or hopeless. They're smart or fun or sexy or all of the above, and they know it.

There are a lot of movements we need, and all the useful movements will be based on what I see in these photos. Those are the movements imaginative enough to move toward something new and not away from the supposed least-bad alternatives. "Away" is not a direction. Only toward.

Movements based on other things, such as militance, which is the infliction of fear, or penitence, which is the infliction of guilt, might sound more badass at first. They have a dismal track record as methods of improving the world. If you tell people that the world deserves to be burned to the ground, they'll burn it to the ground to prevent you from getting anything you want. And if you hear that and you're looking for who around you is to blame because they want the world to burn to the ground, your focus is on the wrong place! Because again, "away from them" is not a direction. You are smarter or funnier or sexier or warmer than you know, or all of the above, and you can do better than "away".

A popular resistance, a successful resistance, and most importantly a durable resistance, is built by people who like themselves. Who like each other. Who physically touch, in person. Throughout history, this has been the force behind the good and successful social movements full of courageous people. Liking themselves. Liking each other. Touching comfortably as an expression of trust.

You'll encounter someone who thinks being a good person requires us to be miserable, or to sit down and shut up except to apologize. Their political praxis is the same-old-same-old, and their resistance to the status quo is dead on arrival. Having said that, I will pay no further attention to them, and turn toward what works.

To make Penguicon possible, the people I see in these photos would pool together to sleep six to a hotel room if they had to, as long as they knew two of them and the rest were vouched for. That's not a hypothetical, I'm saying it's what we _did_! Someone who still would do that in 2026 is who I would trust to hide people in their attic.

Either what's going to come next for Penguicon is the most exciting thing we've ever done in years, or we go out with a bang and it's _still_ the most exciting thing we've ever done in years, and then there's a lot that gets freed up to do what comes after Penguicon. Either way, find your people, like yourself, like each other, and hold them close.

There are other Penguicons you can look back on and think, well, you can skip that one and you'll attend another one. Not this one. Whether it's the last hurrah or not, you do not want to look back and say you weren't at Penguicon 2026.

I want us to act like we realize that we have nothing left to lose. Fuck it, we ball.

I'm very excited to have completely replaced the Penguicon website with a duplicate that's faster and easier for the staff to edit, using the approach I describe here. I hope you're rooting for us to attract enough attendees for there to be a Penguicon 2027. Please spread the word.

Here's the related paper I submitted to the Call For Papers of B-Sides Detroit, a security conference in May where I spoke last year about my makerspace. The talk will be titled "Ditching Wordpress In Volunteer Organizations With Git-based CMS For Static Sites".

Wordpress exposes a terrible security surface, so this is relevant to a security conference. A static site generator (SSG) has close to zero attack surface, and can use a headless CMS (content management system) and a variety of integrations that follow the philosophy of "small pieces, loosely joined". Let me give you many more reasons that support your case.

Wordpress makes hard things easy and easy things hard. It's designed to be all things to all people: bloggers, newsrooms, e-commerce shops, portfolio sites, churches, SaaS marketing pages, and the kitchen sink, all in one interface. The non-technical users wanted to edit a page! That's all! But they're lost in a tangle of posts, blocks, media libraries, plugins, themes, roles, settings, updates, warnings, so they feel like they're standing next to a nuclear reactor. They didn't ask to "administrate a publishing platform"! But they're wading through a UI for a bunch of responsibilities they don't have. They don't want to feel like they might break something. I've learned from experience that ideally, they want an "Edit this page" button to an editing form page with the correct file preselected for them. (What they don't know is that it's making a version control merge request behind the scenes. More about this later.)

Let's also look at it from the perspective of two different levels of org leadership. On the one hand, someone with a limited scope of their role in the organization should be able to just casually and instantly edit the page of the site over which the org has delegated full authority to them. Small groups die if they have a lot of decision-approval paralysis. On the other level, though, a limited group of people should be able to edit pages about the results of votes on group-wide policies: codes of conduct, safety rules, membership requirements, disciplinary processes, privacy policies, bylaws. I'll describe an approach that makes it easier to set up this distinction.

Let's also look at it from the perspective of the one or two willing-and-able web developers in the org. We have our hands tied by Wordpress. We're the only people willing to tolerate the interface, so as all the non-technical users abandon it, we end up assigned by them to use the end-user interface intended for them, while its UI fights us every step of the way, instead of where we should be working: in Visual Studio Code and git. As the org constantly churns which staff are involved, some of them installed expensive plugins that are deprecated and no longer work, or are incompatible with other plugins, only the third-party devs who create the plugins understand how they work, plugins are compiled and compressed so you can't debug them, something silently broke, and who even installed all this stuff?

At least, did you get a good website? No. Browsing a Wordpress site is slow and expensive, because each page has to be compiled to HTML every time someone browses to it.

Enter static site generators (SSGs). They compile the site to HTML one time when an editor changes it, and then just deliver a static document, instantly. Unlike Wordpress, which is an opaque stateful system, you can open and edit your SSG source files (Markdown for pages and YAML for lists of entries), in any text editor, instead of having to futz with a database. What a small volunteer org wants, is a structured information system, not a general publishing platform. Without a database schema imposed by WordPress, the organization's web developer can define exactly what content exists: events, announcements, pages, policies, bios. Don't need it? Ditch it! "Small pieces loosely joined."

SSG content is portable independent of the software stack that created it. That's what it means for a content management system ("CMS") to be "headless". It can go into all kinds of front ends. With Wordpress, you're wondering which plugin changed this field, which editor saved this block, which migration altered this table. With SSG, the site is just a compiled version of a repo you can reason about, which doesn't differ much from one environment to the next, and everything's just version control! Guess what you can do with files in folders? Diff them! Copy them! Upload them through a file-picker!

Wordpress has unavoidable categories of risk just by exposing a live admin interface all rolled up into one. With an SSG, the public interacts only with inert files. Your staff edits files in a controlled editing layer. Sometimes also Google Forms and Google Sheets. Your web developer is working in Github/Gitlab, Netlify, and VS Code. (Maaaaaybe Airtable and Supabase if you're fancy.)

Goodbye database corruption, DB version mismatches, DB credential leakage, DB backup integrity, DB restore procedures, DB migrations. Goodby PHP interpreter, database server, and plugin execution path. You never needed any of it for your brochure site!

But wait, what about a contact form and other forms? What about comments on our posts? And how does the non-techical staff of the org edit it? Never fear, I'm going to show you!

I'll demo several successful examples in which orgs allowed me to do the following.

Create a SSG version of the site, hosted for free on Github or Gitlab. The first one I made was https://magicmeeplegames.com in 2019. Be honest, your website is just some HTML documents, not a Web 2.0 app!
Put a contact form and other forms on the site with Netlify, which will email you when someone fills it out, and has built-in spam detection. Often you don't even need that; you can embed a Google Form which will collect responses in a Google Sheet. Netlify also stores some environment variables to act as a pass-through for other services I'll talk about later.
What about if you *do* want blogging? Be honest. Nobody is going to leave comments on blog posts except for scams and spam, so why bother? Have a Discord server. But if you must, I can demo how to make that work with this approach, which I did with my blog at https://matt-arnold.com. I migrated two decades of blog posts from Livejournal and Dreamwidth into Markdown and YAML.
Connect Forestry.io, TinaCMS, or CloudCannon, so end-users in your organization get a convenient headless interface to edit the Markdown and YAML entries. I did this when I made https://columbus2020nasfic.org/ to host an online-only convention during the COVID pandemic lockdowns. Editors don't need to make an account. They only see the stuff they care about in their role. What it's doing is a git push behind the scenes (some of them have felt intimidated by being told that, but they don't need to know it at all). Those are paid services, but I'll demo one that I threw together myself that works just fine for free, which I did for https://2026.penguicon.org. A hacker defeats your auth? So what? All it's doing is submitting a pull request, which you reject so it doesn't make it on the live site. I get maybe two or three of these a year from all my websites combined.
What if you need true non-static pages driven by APIs to user-generated content? No worries, the SSG+Netlify+Git-CMS approach has not painted you into a corner! I'll demo an attendee dashboard on one of my static sites (on https://fluidityforum.org), driven by Airtable. I'll describe the authentication and authorization tradeoffs. We can log in to the UI on Airtable and edit our tables just like spreadsheets. We added some columns to some tables, and they instantly displayed on our site's attendee-facing dashboard as form UI elements automatically. This is where you start paying some money, though.
If time permits, I'll discuss adding webhooks with Supabase by showing off my board game site, https://isoriffic.com. SSG+Netlify+Git-CMS is incredibly flexible. "Small pieces loosely joined."

Let's touch on psychology. Using Wordpress is the volunteer organization's equivalent of "you never get fired for buying IBM". We often install Wordpress because we want to be part of groups that are democratic and bottom-up instead of top-down. Of course we do! But having a voice and expressing your co-leadership in a group takes time and energy. Exercising your influence as an equal contributor, equitably directing your group, consumes your availability (or bandwidth, or spoons, or whatever it may be). Therefore having run out of bandwidth, availability, spoons, is exercising less influence. Each act of exerting influence consumes it. The 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality (90% lurk, 9% contribute occasionally, and 1% do almost everything) is like a law of gravity, not something someone imposed on us by enforcing an arbitrary heirarchy. Don't choose Wordpress to pretend everyone in your group wants to make an account on it and treat the website like a Discord server.

The bottom line is that groups always depend on one or two technical people to have a usable website. So don't tie our hands. Make it easy for us so we can make it easy for you. Ditch Wordpress.

I sometimes attend an event where people use MDMA, which usually makes you feel affectionate and makes you want to dance. It also can sometimes give you an emotional crash and physical exhaustion in the days following taking it. Those who were experienced with it told me of a regimen of vitamins, supplements, and electrolytes which removes all the consequences! This world is magical.

This time, I bought a lot of vitamins, supplements, and powdered "liquid IV" electrolyte drinks. I packed them in little baggies labeled with when they should be taken, and distributed them.

6-12 HOURS BEFORE

- Magnesium Glycinate - 100-200mg

- Grape seed extract - 100mg

- CoQ10 - 100–200mg (optional)

- Vitamin E - 200–400 IU (optional)

1 HOUR BEFORE

- Magnesium Glycinate – 100-200mg

- Grape seed extract - 100mg

- Vitamin C - 500-1000mg

- Grapefruit juice - small glass (optional)

ALONG WITH INGESTION

- Alpha Lipoic Acid ("ALA") - 100mg

- Acetyl-L-Carnitine - 500mg

- Water - 250ml

- Electrolytes - 250ml

EVERY 2 HOURS DURING

- Alpha Lipoic Acid ("ALA") - 200mg

- Grape seed extract – 100mg

- Acetyl-L-Carnitine - 500mg

- Magnesium Glycinate – 100-200mg

- Green tea extract – 400mg

- Vitamin C - 500-1000mg

- Water - 250ml

- Electrolytes - 250ml

WHEN FINISHED

- Magnesium Glycinate – 100mg - 200mg

- Alpha Lipoic Acid ("ALA") - 100mg

- Vitamin C – 500 - 100mg

- Acetyl L-Carnitine - 500mg

- Water - 250ml - 500ml

- Electrolytes - 250ml

- CoQ10 - 100–200mg (optional)

- Vitamin E - 200–400 IU (optional)

BEFORE SLEEPING ON THE 3RD, 4TH, 5TH, 6TH, & 7TH DAYS AFTER

- 5-HTP – 100mg before bed

- Green Tea Extract – 400mg with 5-HTP before bed

- N-AcetylCysteine ("NAC") – 600-1000mg (optional)

Wait at least 48 hours before taking that last step in the above list. It's phrased in a confusing way by some other guides on the web, so that you might think you need to take it for three following days. No, you start taking it on the 3rd day. Before that would be counterproductive.

The following are quotes from a novel, "I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom". I highly recommend it.

For 25 years, the author, humorist Jason Pargin, has written articles (notably on Cracked dot com) to help the overly-online avoid getting radicalized. I respect him as one of the foremost people doing that. And his novels are fantastic.

In most of the following passages, Ether is talking to the character Abbot, who is clinging to fatalism, isolation, shame, and suspicion. Want the novel's central thesis, free of spoilers? Here it is.

Emphases in blockquotes are mine.

The Parts About Fatalism

"You're not going to want to hear this," Ether began, cautiously. "But I think some of what you're feeling right now is just sleep deprivation. It makes anxiety worse, and in people like us, that makes the catastrophizing worse. And when you get scared, you get angry. It's not just you, either — as a country, we're in a national sleep deprivation crisis, blue light from our phones ruining our natural cycles. We're a whole society of tired, cranky, anxious people. No wonder we all think the world is ending."

"We think the world is ending because the world is ending," snapped Abbott.

...

"My grandfather," continued Ether, "who I basically never talk to anymore, one hundred percent believes Christ is going to return to earth at any minute to bring about the apocalypse, due to mankind’s sinfulness. He believes everything he watches on the news is a sign: encroaching Communism, the Satanic conspiracy to allow gays to marry, race-mixing, debauchery, pornography, drag queens, the QAnon child sex cult, the climate change ‘hoax’ he says has fooled the world. He has a TV on every minute he’s awake, tuned to these ultra-right-wing news outlets ranting about depravity."

"I know old guys like that," said Abbott. "My dad works with a couple. They’re nuts. You can’t even talk to them."

"So we can agree that, purely via the carefully filtered media a person consumes, they can come to fully believe in an apocalypse that is not, in fact, occurring?"

"I mean, the world is on fire, just not in the way your grandpa thinks."

"Are you one hundred percent sure, Abbott, that you haven’t fallen into the exact same trap, just from the other side?"

"Ah, you’re about to tell me climate change isn’t real."

"I am not. I’ve seen the melting ice with my own two eyes. But let me ask you this: When I met you, I asked if you felt like you were cursed to be born when you were, if you felt like you had arrived just in time to see the world end."

...

"Okay, and in my corner of the internet, the harbingers of doom were the opposite: savage patriarchal governments crushing women’s rights, taking us back to the dark ages while overpopulation destroys the environment. So that’s two groups who both believe the world is ending, but for totally opposite reasons. Some say runaway capitalism, some say runaway socialism. Some say it’ll be chaotic lawlessness, some say iron-fisted authoritarianism. It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong."

"That wouldn’t make them both wrong."

Ether groaned and put her head in her hands.

"Okay," she said, trying again. "How about this: What do you think the world will look like in the future, post-collapse?"

Abbott thought for a moment as if picturing it. "Uh, terrified people scrounging for food and running from bandits. Rampant disease, infrastructure breakdown. All the stuff from the movies, I guess."

"No internet?"

"I wouldn't think so."

"No electricity? No running water, no sewage? No hospitals?"

"Probably not."

"Got it. So, what I'm about to say isn't an opinion, it's not a matter of personal philosophy or politics. It is an objective fact that what you're describing is how virtually all humans have lived through all of history. Until, that is, about thirty years ago. Just in the time I've been alive, somewhere between two and a half and three billion people got their first access to clean water and toilets. That's billion, with a B. About that same number got electricity in their homes for the first time in their lives. Worldwide, infant mortality has been cut in half, illiteracy has dropped almost as much. Suicides are going up here in the US, but worldwide, they've dropped by a third—again, that's all just in my lifetime. Basically, every positive category has skyrocketed: access to communication, paved roads, motorized transportation, international travel, climate control, medicine..."

"Okay, it sounds like you're talking about a bunch of good stuff that happened in China and India and—I don't know. A bunch of poor countries I'll never visit."

"I'm talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I'm talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human's chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they've ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It's been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks.

And people like you and me and others in our demographic describe that state of affairs as the world being 'on fire.'

I think that's a bizarre mass delusion and that there's a very specific reason for it: we've been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that

we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people.

When I spent those months doing hallucinogens, I didn't suddenly see the beauty and harmony of nature; I saw that humans everywhere were working really hard to make life better for other humans and that almost none of us appreciate it. I'm not crediting this miracle to capitalism or socialism or any other kind of ism but to the fact that it's what humans do, because humans are amazing. And it's all invisible to us because the progress occurs behind these dark walls of cynicism, outside the black box of doom."

"That's nice. And again, nothing you said means anything considering the world's scientists have agreed that climate change will wipe out civilization."

"If we don't fix it, yeah. Climate change is a huge deal; it's terrifying. And also, it is objectively true that if we do fix it, the media will only report it as bad news.

All the headlines will be about the oil and coal workers who lost their jobs, birds dying to windmills — they'll only focus on the negative side effects. And don't tell me we never clean up our messes. There used to be oil slicks on our rivers that would literally catch fire. Sulfur dioxide used to choke the air—when's the last time you've heard about acid rain? Or the hole in the ozone layer? Go read about how previous generations all had lead poisoning or how food contamination used to be a nightmare. I'm not saying everything will be fine; I can't predict the future. I'm saying that it is a one hundred percent certifiable guaranteed fact that it can be fine. But people like us have decided that we're never allowed to even acknowledge the possibility."

"Or maybe it's hard for people to care about toilets in India when another maniac is shooting up a school every week."

"You think that happens every week?"

"I bet you have a whole bunch of stats to dump on me about that, too. I'm sure the parents of those dead kids would love to hear them."

"And there's the anger. People hate it when you threaten their nihilism! That's the black box, drawing you back in. Can't you see that it wants you to be afraid to do anything but cower in front of your screens? It only has one trick, one card to play, which is this idea that bad news is the only news you can trust. I'm telling you, if you just allow yourself to step outside of it, you'll see it for what it is: a prison where the walls are made of nightmares."

"And this is an ... alien worm?" asked Abbott. "Is that what's in the box?"

"No, they're from Earth. They've been infecting people for millennia. They're called Guinea worms. In the 1980s, more than three million people a year were infested with them. Last year, it was fifteen."

"Fifteen million?"

"No. Fifteen."

"I don't get it."

"What happened is that just in the time you and I have been alive, a whole bunch of heroes coordinated across a whole bunch of countries in Africa and Asia and elsewhere and wiped out the Guinea worm. Countless millions have lived and often died with horrible, three-foot-long worms in their bodies, including lots of children. But no more. While your news feeds were bludgeoning you with stories of school shootings, pathological politicians, and nonstop outrage, this war against the worms was quietly won thanks to relentless, selfless effort by thousands of strangers."

The Parts About Isolation

"No, listen. I think you find it draining to deal with anyone face-to-face. And I think it's specifically because you can't control it. Online, you can duck out of any conversation, you can say anything you want, you can calibrate how you come across. Not here."

"The ability to block people yelling death threats and making racist jokes is a net positive, in my mind."

"Sure, but I think our interactions could be totally great the whole time and you'd find it just as exhausting because the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived. We're social animals; that's the equivalent of making a fish afraid of water! We evolved in tribes where everybody could see everybody else, all the time; we didn't even have separate rooms or beds. Just by evolution, you should find personal contact comforting, and the fact that they've burned that out of so many of us is apocalyptic."

"You know what we're missing," said Ether, "is gathering places. All those people killing themselves by various means fast and slow, I'm telling you, part of that is that we just don't gather anymore. We've stopped going to church, we've built suburbs where people don't have that third place that isn't work or home, where everybody can go hang out. You can't do that at a chain restaurant; they want you out of there so they can seat the next customer. Young people don't go to bars or clubs like they used to. But in general, there's just no profit in providing a public place where we can all just go and be together. All the money is in, I don't know, getting us addicted to some piece of software. You talked about people gambling on their phones; think how sad that is—going broke from blackjack from your sofa without even a cheap casino buffet to cushion the blow."

...

"I heard that the average number of close friends has dropped over the last thirty years ... It used to be that the number of loners who literally had no friends was tiny, like three percent of the population. That's quadrupled since then; now twelve percent of us have nobody. Today, you're almost as likely to be totally alone as you are to have a big squad of friends like teenagers have in the movies. I'm telling you, it's a crisis. Humans need friends every bit as much as we need food. But because this kind of starvation is invisible, and because we're all physically really fat, nobody sees it. Then, every ten minutes or so, somebody sticks a gun in their mouth."

"And if you should find yourself in a group of friends who are all united under a cause that makes them miserable, then losing those friends wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone."

The Parts About Shame

"What's the worst that can happen, you'll do it wrong and it'll be awkward? It's weird how scared people are of that these days, the kids call it cringe, like that's the worst thing that can happen, messing up a real-life interaction. Nobody has people skills, because they stay home all the time, so they're scared to do anything but stay at home because they're afraid of being weird in public or getting caught on camera and mocked by millions of strangers. It's an isolation vortex."

"I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now. I may have just blown up my whole life here."

"It's important, it ties into our whole mission, this atomization cloud that's swallowing up everybody. Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we're constantly told that's dangerous. Ask yourself, who benefits from that? Who wants a society where there are no strong bonds between individuals?"

"[AmIHotOrNot dot com] was just a silly idea somebody had. It took them a week to code it, but it was objectively the most important and influential website ever created. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to be a HotOrNot ripoff, YouTube was launched to be a video version of it—that’s a trillion dollars’ worth of market cap right there. That’s because they’d stumbled across a world-changing concept: applying a numerical value to human behavior that had never before been quantifiable. Up until then, for all human history, any individual could lie to themselves, could secretly believe they were more attractive than they are, or smarter, or more creative, or nicer, or richer. Or, and this is the big one, that their beliefs were popular. ... your true spot on the social hierarchy is revealed for all to see, in the form of likes and followers. It doesn’t matter how comfortable or well-fed somebody is; if you humiliate them in front of their peers, they’ll want to burn the system to the ground. Well, social media algorithms are a twenty-four-seven humiliation machine. That ... is how a population is primed for authoritarian rule. And that’s just one example; we’re essentially teaching machines how to hack human insecurity."

...

“If you relentlessly attack people’s self-image, they’ll scramble for something, anything to preserve it. Every cultural faction has their own scapegoats—the government, their childhood trauma, their mental illness, the evil billionaires, immigrants — and it doesn’t matter the degree to which any of them are valid, because all the system cares about is that you surrender your own agency. ‘I cannot be blamed for the state of my life because I am at the mercy of this other, more powerful thing.’ ... people want that powerful thing to exist, to take over their lives. At that point, we will have finally surrendered the entire concept of free will, the one thing that makes us human. ... What the people want is a cruel, all-powerful being that they can simultaneously obey and also endlessly complain about.”

...

"Look around you. How many people out there are addicted to internet gambling, or games, or porn, or outrage headlines they compulsively click and share? See, the [process works] on the back end, too, dialing in on exactly what pixels on a screen will subdue the human animal. And we go along willingly because we want to be subdued. The whole appeal of being in a media-induced flow state is that you block everything else out. We want to be zombies. Puppets. So, we’re growing our own puppeteer.”

... “Yeah, I think he’s convinced me that we should find this thing and destroy it.”

“No! There’s nothing to destroy! That’s just another lie the system tells us, that the only solutions worth considering are the ones that are exciting to think about. Spectacle..."

The Parts About Suspicion

"...the two of us, as individuals, in this car, were doing fine. We've gone through danger together, we've trusted each other, we've cooperated on a common cause. But you just talked yourself into a seething rage because you've abruptly decided we're on opposite sides of some culture war. You and I aren't at war! We want the same thing, to get this stupid box to its destination."

...

"I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what's happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It's like a filter that only shows you others' bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn't exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it's designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort. A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom."

"And nationwide, the average life span has gone up ten years since 1960. We've gained an entire extra decade of life just in that time, and nobody cares, because apparently progress doesn't count. ... Now, what was supposed to hold all this together was religion, that we'd put aside our differences because we're all children of God and so on. But half of us don't go to church anymore, so now that's your biggest fault line. Abortion, gay marriage, trans rights, the War on Christmas—it all boils down to old-school religion versus new-school secularism, and both sides secretly believe that, eventually, the other will have to go. Now add to that the fact that we're all just bored. Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. There's an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I'd update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle."

"You know those postapocalyptic zombie shows where they have to cross the wastelands and they're like, 'We can't trust anybody out here! We're on our own!' Well, that's a geek fantasy for indoor kids. Out here, in the real world, in the actual desert, this is when you have to be willing to trust people. You don't have a chance otherwise. Trust is the only advantage humans have as a species, that millions of us can all get together and trust one another.

"I'm not going to say that those friendships aren't real," said Ether. "I'm not an asshole. But any friend who abandons you over a baseless internet rumor wasn't your real friend. Whether you knew them in person or on a screen."

"You say so much that sounds like it came off some housewife's inspirational Facebook meme."

"That's another game the cynics play. 'Because this objectively true thing has been said too many times by unoriginal thinkers, we have to reject it and make ourselves miserable just to spite them.'"

"It was the first time I realized there was something truly dangerous about this, the devices, the algorithms. It's like it reduced us to our limbic systems, turned us into mindless zealots in warring tribes. I watch my videos from back then and - I don't know. It's like watching a stranger. And what I couldn't get over is that this technology was supposed to broaden everybody's horizons, you can communicate with people all over the world now, at any time. But for me, the world got smaller. I neglected everything else in my life — my family, my business, my health, everything else just went away in the name of arguing with these total strangers about the lives of other total strangers. I felt like living my life through screens had trapped me in this dark little cell, my own black box of doom."

I made a new personal website, matt-arnold.com. I have now completely migrated 21 years of blog posts from here to the blog section of that site, with improved full-text search and filtering. Let me know if you find formatting issues from the migration process!

I've set up a commenting system, although comments here won't transfer over to comments there and vice-versa. I'd appreciate if you'd test it! I know I can count on Sarah Elkins to do so. :)

For several years, every site I've built has used a static site generator, and this one is no exception. It's all focused on Javascript, Markdown files, and YAML flat files, which means I don't set up my own server or database. Instead I use Netlify for the back end (contact page, blog comments, forms, automatically-triggered events, and so on). For this site, I used Github Copilot AI to radically accelerate the development process.

The site also has some galleries of my projects and illustrations, as well as a page of my podcasts, and one collecting my talks and other videos, and links to external websites about board games I've made and events I run.

Expect much more content as time goes on. The Updates page will automatically build a changelog of all content updates, so that you don't have to wonder if you missed some.

The process of testing the blog migration has re-exposed me to an enormous amount of my own past, so I've been quite contemplative about it lately. I might blog about that soon.

I've customized my instructions for ChatGPT pretty heavily, to the point where it understands my preferences. Here's a very good conversation I had with it this week:

I have a very broad question about existential therapy. Consider the following three passages. The first is a paragraph from a book with an approach I find quite frustrating, "Unlearning Shame" by Devon Price. The subjectivity of Price's existentialism seems, to me, to leave them in constant despair, because there is no way to acknowledge that there is not only subjectivity, found in one's own head, there's also a pattern to things, and it's found in the whole situation. Here is the passage:

“I’m a big fan of existential therapy, particularly the work of Martin Adams.[41] In existential therapy, the therapist isn’t supposed to act as an authority figure. They shouldn’t push any specific goals onto their patient. Instead, they present themselves honestly, as a person who has struggled with meaninglessness and lostness in their own lives, too. From there, they can provide exercises and tools to help their client determine what matters most in their own life. It’s meant to be a very flexible and empowering therapeutic approach, inspired by the work of philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre (who believed our lives have no innate meaning, and so we have to create meaning for ourselves), and Viktor Frankl (who wrote that meaning already exists all around us, and we simply need to find it).”

Next is a chapter from one of my favorite books, "The Scene That Became Cities: What Organizations Can Learn From Burning Man Philosophy" by Caveat Magister. This passage also addresses existentialism. The two books are not on the same topic, but I can't help but think that in a deeper sense, they both attempt to directly address how we have meaning in life. I uploaded the chapter as a file, "Sisyphus.txt".

[Note: Caveat also wrote this article about it and posted it online.]

And third is a page from another of my favorite books, "Meaningness" by David Chapman. It's the page "Sartre's Ghost And The Corpse Of God", about the problems with existentialism. According to Chapman, while meaning is not objective, neither is it subjective. I have uploaded it as a file.

Devon Price is tormented by constant guilt and shame. If they don't take on an overwhelming responsibility for all of the world's problems as a source of meaning, they feel a sense of meaninglessness. But Caveat demonstrates in his book how we find meaningfulness right in front of us in the situation, and the situation is not just a subjective thing in our own head. Those who are tormented in that way are often important to me, and it seems that the conjunction of these three passages gets at something important to that. Existential therapy can help by acknowledging that meaning is not objective-- not entirely in the situation, but also in one's own subjective relation to it-- but I'm guessing existential therapy won't help Devon Price see that meaning is also in the situation. What do I need to know about existential therapy in relation to the ideas of these other thinkers (and thinkers like them)?

ChatGPT said:

Your question cuts to the core of a decades-old philosophical conflict—and possibly a critical limitation of existential therapy as commonly practiced. Let’s sketch the map:

1. Devon Price and Existential Therapy

Price embraces existential therapy grounded in subjective meaning. The therapist provides no direction—only empathetic co-experiencing—and invites clients to define values for themselves. This is rooted in a Sartrean existentialism where the world lacks inherent meaning, so we must freely choose our own.

But as Chapman argues—and as you observed—this radical freedom tends to collapse into despair. If the world offers no "hooks" to which meaning can attach, then attempts to create meaning can feel arbitrary, performative, or hollow. You’re stuck performing for yourself. That’s a tight loop, and it often feeds guilt, shame, and depressive inertia. You can see that in Price’s own affect.

Existential therapy can, in practice, encourage this collapse by refusing to provide any orientation beyond “what do you want to value?” When the answer is “nothing, yet I feel I must,” the therapeutic stance offers no counterweight.

2. Chapman: The Failure of Existentialism

Chapman’s critique is decisive: meaning is not objective, but it is also not subjective. It emerges situationally, socially, and interactively. It is a real property of engagement—not inside the head, not in the cosmos, but in participation.

Existentialism’s failure, he argues, lies in its metaphysical individualism. It imagines a subject abstracted from culture, society, and history, making free choices about what to value. That is impossible—and this is why, if you pursue existentialism to its logical conclusion, you land in nihilism.

That’s the condition you’re detecting in Price.

3. Caveat Magister: Meaning Is in the Situation

This is where Caveat comes in like a wrecking ball—and a builder. The chapter from The Scene That Became Cities rejects Camus’s atomized absurdism. It doesn’t say Camus was wrong—just that his image of Sisyphus is insufficient.

Camus tells us to find happiness in struggle. But Caveat says: why not change the game entirely? Don’t just accept the boulder and the hill. Find collaborators. Paint the boulder. Make it into a game. Use it to build castles. Meaning comes from doing things you care about in relation to others, in a situation.

This is Chapman's view in action: meaning as neither subjective nor objective, but emergent from participation.

And unlike Price’s existential therapy, this philosophy does offer direction: engage with what’s around you. Find collaborators. Try things. Meaning will emerge from the doing.

What You Need to Know About Existential Therapy (in this light)

Classic existential therapy (à la Yalom, Adams, Sartre-derived) often leans heavily into individual meaning-making without acknowledging its structural limits. It assumes that self-defined meaning is viable, sustainable, and authentic, without needing societal grounding.

It works best when clients are already capable of engaging with the world meaningfully but feel alienated. The therapist's task is then to remind them that they can still choose.

It fails when clients are already disconnected from context and can't find meaning. Telling them “choose your own” is like tossing car keys to someone buried under rubble.

Chapman’s criticism (which tracks with Magister’s) is that existential therapy doesn't go far enough. It dismantles eternalism but fails to understand that meaning isn't created alone. Meaning lives in the world, in our doing, our caring, our interacting.

A richer therapeutic stance would help clients re-engage the world not just as a blank canvas for their projections, but as a dynamic field of potential meaning—not imposed, not fabricated, but co-discovered.

Why This Matters

You care about people like Price. You want them to feel less tormented—and you sense that existential therapy, as practiced, may keep them in a loop of despair because it won't challenge their assumption that meaning must come only from within. You're right.

The correction isn’t to revert to objective meaning (eternalism), but to show—like Caveat does—that we build meaning through situated, collaborative, creative action. This is more than a philosophical refinement. It’s a way out of the loop.

If you're building frameworks for meaning, healing, or transformation—at events, in culture, or in therapy—you’re probably already pointing in this direction: away from solipsistic freedom and toward entangled agency, co-construction, and play.

That’s the road out of the desert.

I had ChatGPT summarize a guest post on Jonathan Haidt's Substack, written by Yascha Mounk. The four-paragraph summary communicates more clearly than the original. First, here's a three-paragraph summary of the introduction by Jonathan Haidt:

A major societal shift began around 2014, marked by increased political polarization, rising youth mental health issues, and a dramatic transformation in the behavior and goals of many institutions. Rather than being a simple generational change, this shift is attributed to deeper forces—especially changes in communication technologies that reshaped how people relate to one another.

One key factor behind this transformation is the rise of a set of academic ideas about power and identity that, while once confined to the humanities, gained broader influence in the 2010s in a distorted, simplified, and populist form. The original ideas were often difficult to understand or logically inconsistent, yet they spread rapidly through institutions, reshaping their missions and norms. As these ideas took hold, organizations that adopted them began to experience confusion and internal conflict, losing coherence and straying from their original purposes.

While these ideas may appeal to people who want to address injustice, their practical effects often undermine the individuals and institutions that adopt them. Instead of empowering people or solving problems, they lead to dysfunction, misalignment, and division. Understanding where these ideas came from, why they appeal to people, and how they operate helps clarify what went wrong—and points toward more constructive ways to engage with today’s cultural and institutional challenges.

Here's the summary of Yascha Mounk's article:

A popular idea in today’s politics and culture says that people from different identity groups—especially those divided by race, gender, or sexuality—can’t really understand each other. According to this view, people who face oppression gain a kind of special knowledge from their experiences, and people who are more privileged can't truly grasp it, no matter how hard they try. Because of this, the “right” thing for privileged people to do is to stay quiet, agree, and follow the lead of the oppressed.

But this way of thinking doesn’t hold up. First, it assumes that all members of a group have the same experiences, which simply isn’t true—no group is that uniform. Second, it suggests that only people who experience injustice can understand it, even though people from all walks of life can gain insight into how unfair systems work. Third, it claims that the experiences of the oppressed can’t really be explained to outsiders, which confuses "hard to explain" with "impossible to understand."

This mindset also creates serious political problems. It discourages genuine conversation and cooperation between groups. It gives power to a small number of activists or spokespeople—often those who already hold influence—to speak on behalf of entire communities, even when many in those communities may disagree. Instead of encouraging unity and shared goals, it divides people into separate camps and makes it harder to work together.

There’s a better way. While it’s true that people’s backgrounds affect how they see the world, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from one another. Real political progress comes from building trust and understanding—through conversation, listening, and shared effort—not from blindly following whoever claims to speak for a group. If we want a fairer society, we need to believe that understanding across differences is possible, and then work toward it.

My own commentary: Suppose I wish to find out your own view, and you tell me that I shouldn't ask you to educate me. You are presuming that there is exactly one view that's shared by everyone in your marginalized group-- as if they all agree with you. Over the past fifteen years or so, I've educated myself in more views than I can count, so I know there isn't just one of them where I can just find out that one and be done.

The only durable solution is to build a relationship between you and me specifically. No education can substitute for you in that process. If I just obey, instead of understand, it would accomplish nothing.

All larger change starts with two people at a time building interpersonal trust and understanding. That's the opposite of you just telling me what to do and I do it, which would require no trust and no understanding. Identitarianism assumes earning trust and building understanding is permanently impossible, but that assumption would make it impossible to build local solidarity, which builds larger systems.

This is a big part of why I've centered my life around things like maker spaces, science fiction conventions, Fluidity Forum, local Burning Man events, open source software projects, Mastodon or Discord servers, authentic relating and circling, board game and role playing groups, and so on. I've learned that what's happening now can destroy small local groups (not just nerdy stuff, but including bicycling groups, druid groves, moms groups, etc) but will never tear down The System which is the actual target.

Here's another summary, this time of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, and the recent Netflix documentary about his work, "Join Or Die":

Bowling Alone and Join or Die both examine the decline of social connectedness in the United States and the consequences for American democracy, health, and wellbeing.

Bowling Alone documents the long-term collapse of civic engagement—from voter turnout and public meetings to church attendance and participation in clubs and leagues. Americans are doing fewer things together. Though people still bowl, for example, they're less likely to do so in leagues. The book attributes this trend to several causes, including suburbanization, television, generational change, and the pressures of modern work life. The result is a weakening of what’s called “social capital”—the networks of trust and reciprocity that bind communities together and make democratic institutions function.

Join or Die is a documentary that explores similar themes through a more personal and urgent lens. It argues that the erosion of civic life isn’t just a political issue but a public health crisis. When people are disconnected from one another, communities become more polarized, individuals become more isolated, and rates of anxiety, addiction, and early death rise. The film presents social participation—not just voting, but joining groups, building local trust, and showing up—as a vital solution to America’s fragmentation and decline.

Together, the two works make the case that rebuilding social bonds is essential to restoring both the health of democracy and the wellbeing of individuals. The message is simple: if people don’t join together, everything else falls apart.

Two years ago, I started an Authentic Relating and Circling group in my living room. I threw it together without much experience, to be honest. I've been strongly considering renaming what we do. We've been considering "I Can't Believe It's Not Circling." "Intentional Relating" might get across the idea better than the word "Authentic", which carries some misleading connotations.

Think of it like speed dating, except it's "speed friending". We get in some practice at listening, noticing, curiosity, and checking assumptions. I and the other participants have formed some truly amazing friendships in the past two years in this group. Sometimes we also try out meditation, or improv, or yoga nidra, and so on and so forth. It's eclectic. But mainly, we do Authentic Relating and Circling as described in detail at the end of this post.

We meet every alternate Sunday. We usually get ten or fewer people at a time. At this point, we have thirteen members. Over the past two years there have been at least fifteen others who have attended, some semi-regularly, some only once.

A few months ago, I attended another local Authentic Relating group, where I didn't have a good experience. Ours is private and invitation-only, and the other one was for the public, so in this post I'll refer to it as the public AR group. I don't want to be hard on the organizers of that group, though. They took my feedback really well and will discuss it more. It's not a knock on them. My hope in this post is to lay out the things you would need to consider if you want to start something of this nature.

This post is in three parts: First I'll describe the logistical structure. Second, I'll describe the distinctive differences in what we're trying to achieve, with a digression on how this relates to "eternalism, nihilism, and the complete stance". Third, I'll copy and paste the handout that we use for our activities when we gather.

1. Founding.

You can't have a group where it might be just two people who show up, just me and you. To ensure that doesn't happen, I found two people who I trusted a lot, and asked them to commit with me to attending X times (we settled on 10), with an option to re-up. If you keep meeting forever instead of a limited commitment with an option to re-up, people will just drift away. (I got this idea from a tweet by Rich Bartlett of the Microsolidarity Network, which I would link to here, except I can't find it again.)

2. Invites.

You might assume you want to open a group to a pile of random strangers. Give some thought to that. They'll make it into the same things you were trying to build an alternative to. To hold a container is to be intentional. Too many strangers too quickly, & you're not holding anything.

Our AR/Circling group is invitation-only. We try to be thoughtful and intentional in our decisions about what an effective mix of people looks like. Later in this post, I'll go into what that is.

3. Staying in touch.

We meet approximately every two weeks.

Instead of asking for money, we ask each other to stay in touch. Either fill out the every-two-months form (with which we determine which 4 days most of us are available in the upcoming 2 months), or tell the group when you're going to skip a session by replying to our mailing list (which we use only for scheduling/RSVPs, not discussion, so it's not high-traffic). Just telling me personally when you're skipping sessions, doesn't count. The attendees need to act like it's not just my group, it's our group. I'll say "please tell the group, not just me, so you're still in their life because they have all heard from you lately."

Skip as many sessions as you want, as long as you tell us you're doing so. If you go radio silent, I eventually reach out, and if I don't hear back, I remove you from the emails.

4. Money.

The public authentic relating group gathers strangers and asks for 20 bucks. It's what Joe Edelman calls the "pile of strangers" model. In our group, money doesn't change hands. I buy pizza or tacos and you can Venmo me for it or not.

We can say what's really going on for us, without being concerned that we are preventing other participants from getting the experience they think they paid for. If someone needs to step out of the room and cool off their emotions, or they need to leave the session early for the day, they don't feel like they've lost twenty bucks, because we didn't take your money.

It's not that I'm against money or I think it's bad; it's that when money changes hands, it creates a feeling of sunk cost, which tempts us to play along with things that are not alive for us.

5. Handout.

Instead of having to guess what a pile of strangers wants, we share a simple double-sided handout electronically to every invitee, that spells out what we are doing. Listening, noticing, curiosity, checking assumptions. Those who don't want what's on the handout shouldn't be here.

Most importantly, attendees have a say in what goes on the handout. We've changed it multiple times. It's not Matt's handout, it's our handout. If you don't like it, you are expected to ask for what you want. Then we change it, and now that's what we do.

Here's the complete the handout we use, as a Google Doc. And also, like I said at the top, I've copied and pasted the entire Google Doc at the end of this post.

In "The Art of Gathering", in the chapter "Let Purpose Be Your Bouncer", Priya Parker makes it clear why the most transformative gatherings involve actively curating who is at a gathering, toward a clear purpose.

Okay, that was a lot of logistical structure. But speaking of letting purpose be your bouncer: here are the distinctive differences in what we're trying to achieve. If you want these things, then it's for you.

1. This is not therapy.

The public group has participants who need (and expect) to receive highly-skilled care work from professional therapy experts. Our group is for amateurs. We're not qualified to avoid hurting those who are extremely hurtable.

Many of the extremely-hurtable, exhibit what looks like high woundedness and low willingness. ("High/low woundedness and high/low willingness" is a frame from "Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities" by Diana Leaf Christian.)

(Brief aside, that book has a great section on getting clarity in a group on what they mean by words, so it doesn't surprise them later when they've already invested in each other. "Wait a minute, THAT isn't community!" "Wait, THAT'S not connection!")

We know those who are present are mostly in basic working order, so we don't have to act like caretakers. We attempt to vividly encounter what's alive for us, good or bad, without living inside the limits of extremely hurtable people. Let them go to the group that's for them.

2. A bare minimum of assertiveness.

Our group asks its participants to agree to ask for what we want, and we should not expect to get it unless we ask for it. The public group attempts to assume what people need emotionally, and proactively provide it. I find it alienating when you assume I want something I don't. That's not what I meant by connection.

3. Try not to pretend.

In our group we say, and practice, that the opposite of authenticity and connection is pretending. Malcolm Ocean and I discussed this more on YouTube.

If you have unwanted feelings, you don't have to pretend to have warm and affirming feelings. Allow awareness of them. In addition to connecting to all the pleasant stuff, I want to connect to your mistrust and to mine, if any. To your anger toward me and mine toward you, if any. Connecting to our conflicts, constructively. The real you, the real me, whether we like what we see or not.

"Wait, THAT'S not what I meant by connection!"

It's what I meant by it.

"I just wanted to pretend all the pleasant stuff and feel the warm fuzzies!"

Without pretending, you can get to that stuff too, most of the time. Enough of the time.

In the spirit of a scout mindset, we try to focus on allowing awareness of both the good and the bad about each other, both trust and mistrust, in the hope of getting to know more, so that we can gradually and safely earn each other's trust. Sometimes we only trust partially, or for certain things, as appropriate. You can't get to trust without allowing the mistrust to take as long as it takes. (More from Malcolm Ocean about the Non-Naive Trust Dance.)

Our group focuses on listening, noticing, curiosity, and checking assumptions. This is connecting to the real person, not the person we want them to be.

In the pubic group, they say, and practice, that the opposite of authenticity is not pretending, but guardedness. They encourage participants to skip over the time-consuming steps of earning trust, and instead, offer trust unconditionally.

Personally, if someone asks for my trust but doesn't want to earn it, it's a sign they're probably not trustworthy.

At the public group, there were no authentic relating games of curiosity, noticing, listening so you can repeat it back, and checking assumptions. Instead, they talked AT each other, by projecting a lot of goodness and trustworthiness toward someone they don't even know. Giving a stranger unconditional affirmation erases them and paints over them, by seeing only that which one wants to see.

They don't practice listening, noticing, curiosity, and checking assumptions, because if they did, they might find out a more complex picture, both the things they want to see and the things that are disappointing.

One might say that I need to give people the benefit of the doubt. But ... that's what I'm already doing, when I show up, and I allow that I might find out things I really like about other people. You can't live in denial about the doubt. Then there's no doubt to give the benefit of.

Eternalism, Nihilism, And The Complete Stance

Long-time readers of my blog have probably seen some of my posts about concepts from David Chapman. What I have been describing above is an example of the difference between eternalism and the complete stance as described by Chapman. Eternalism has to fixate a pattern (ex: all participants must like everything about each other and there is nothing to be in conflict about). Eternalism refuses to see nebulosity.

The complete stance allows both pattern and nebulosity. When eternalism sees the complete stance, it assumes it's nihilism, which fixates nebulosity and refuses to see pattern. So eternalism assumes I have made up my mind in advance to be enemies with the people in authentic relating and circling, because I failed to make up my mind in advance to unconditionally support and admire them. Making up one's mind in advance is a tendency shared by eternalism and nihilism.

The complete stance doesn't know yet who's a friend or enemy, or how much, or in what sense, until after there's enough information gathered in a scout mindset to find out.

As a result of this difference of approaches, our AR/Circling group surfaces conflict, attempting to approach it gradually, in a constructive way. Some of our participants only wanted unconditional positivity, and a denial of conflict. In those cases, our invitation filtering system didn't work. Over time, they stopped attending, often saying that exposure to unwanted emotion activated their traumas and made the rest of their week emotionally difficult. The public AR group would suit their preferences better.

Suppose someone can't tolerate interfacing with themselves and with the world. Perhaps what they need is not to open awareness, but to close it, and only open it a tiny crack. I don't know. But if so, in that case, they might benefit from an AR group that's more like health care. I would not thrive in that environment. What I am getting at is that not all things need to be for all people. This is why one single public container can't be held for all people, all needs, all purposes.

( Read more... )

Last week I participated in the Midwest's local regional Burning Man, called Lakes Of Fire, for the seventh time. For those who don't know, Burning Man is a week-long annual art festival with more than eighty thousand people. Lakes Of Fire is 5 days long and gets 2,300. At both of them, near the end, a giant wooden artwork (the Effigy) is burned to the ground along with a show of fire spinners, fire breathers, and fireworks. But it's so much more than that. It's a worldwide movement with branches in 36 US States and 32 countries, as a social experiment based mostly around ten principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy.

I encourage you to read the 10 principles in full. They are not a list of rules that make you superior. Not at all. They're things that tend to happen more at burns than outside them (what Burning Man participants, or "burners", call "the default world"). The principles are practical advice for getting people to be able to build bonds, and learn to rely on each other and trust themselves more, creating a massive amount of value for themselves and each other. Sometimes quick bonding is good and sometimes it's bad. But now I've come to recognize that I've seen these ideas at work in every volunteer organization I've ever been a part of, even when they were not expressed in these ten concise ideas.

The above is the sign at the entrance to Lakes Of Fire 2024: Imaginarium Aquarium. I submitted my own concept for the entrance sign, although the one above was chosen, and rightfully so because it looks great. Here's my concept art, which you can click on to see it enlarged:

The previous five or six weeks had been very hard for me in a lot of my friendships and volunteer-organized groups, so I was counting on the trip to replenish my stress level and rejuvenate my enthusiasm. I'm happy to say it did so.

Last year, I and a team of friends at i3Detroit maker space built a giant parade puppet of a life-size brontosaurus, with materials paid for by the Lakes Of Fire art grant program.

We happened to camp next to a theme camp named Frequencia. They liked us so much, they asked us to officially join their camp this year! It's great to be part of a theme camp. We were able to charge our batteries from the camp generator, and use the camp kitchen. Best of all, we made new friends.

I didn't create another puppet this year because I joined the Art Grant Facilitators team. As someone giving out art grants, I couldn't receive one. I was assigned several artists, but they didn't need much help from me, and I got info from them smoothly. On the one hand, I brought value in that they knew if they emailed me, I would respond promptly. There's value in that. On the other hand, I didn't have much to do, and I wanted to be put to work to support this organization that exemplifies my priorities in life.

It occurred to me it would feel more natural to move up into positions of greater responsibility within the subculture if I had a burn name. That's a nickname that burners give each other. You're supposed to be given one through circumstances that occur at a burn. This year, not having a burn name began to be bothersome. Years ago I already knew what would be the perfect burn name for me, but I was attending with people from Penguicon and i3Detroit, to whom I'll always be Matt, so my suggested name just never took. I related that to my new campmates, who didn't know me from any other social context. They enjoyed making it their mission to call me by that name in front of everyone.

My burn name is "Epcot".

I went to Walt Disney World in Florida every year of my life until I was twenty, and Epcot was my favorite place in the world. In 2008, I invited some people who made giant musical Tesla coils to Penguicon. I sat on the front lawn of the hotel in an audience of more than a thousand people, while a pair of giant singing Tesla coils made music with lightning. I thought ... "I'm creating something like Epcot. It's really possible." It was a dream come true. I try to bring some of that to my maker space as well. And what we make at our maker space, often, is art specifically to bring to Lakes Of Fire. That spirit that I felt is alive at burns. I wanted a burn name that reflects the animating spirit that drives me when I'm there.

The contrasts, and the similarities, between Lakes Of Fire and Epcot are meaningful to me personally. Here are a few of the similarities.

The style of parade puppets I create was inspired by the puppets in Epcot's Millenium Parade.
Both places are known for geodesic domes.
Like the pavilions of World Showcase in Epcot, the pavilions of Lakes Of Fire surround a lake. In both places, they light up beautifully around the lakeshore each night, filling the surroundings with a laser light show that reflects off the glistening water.
Epcot is the only other place I've seen a fireworks show accompanied by dramatic music and inspirational speeches and performances over the PA system.
So much walking.
It's not commonly known that EPCOT is an acronym that stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, which sounds like a great description of Burning Man. Lakes Of Fire is run by GLEA, which stands for Great Lakes Experimental Arts.

Now for the contrasts. The approaches to an experimental prototype community of tomorrow are very different. Before it was a theme park in Florida, Walt Disney intended Epcot to be a utopian city where residents actually lived and worked. It was an exercise in total centralized planning. The eventual theme park was conceived as a World's Fair. Black Rock City, created during Burning Man in the Nevada desert each year, takes the opposite approach. An experimental prototype community of tomorrow, as decentralized as possible. And it's working.

People at Epcot are divided into the guests, and the staff, called the "cast" (cast members have been consistently wonderful people, in my experience). Whereas at a Burn, it's co-created together by unpaid volunteers, with the "no bystanders" principle of Participation. When you attend a burn, you are creating it. There's no one who you can turn to and say "I paid for you to give me an experience, now where is it?" We're all responsible.

At burns there are people wearing khaki called Rangers who are walking around as our collective eyes and ears, for anyone to go to if they need help. They're not staff, they are from among us.

Burns are for amateurs, so even if you're a professional, you collaborate with amateurs in the principle of Communal Effort.

The staff of Epcot have prepared things for guests to do. Those are the things you are supposed to do there, and if you do something else, it's out of place. You are not supposed to:

read poetry at a cooking class.
play basketball in an art gallery.
sell handmade crafts at a tech conference. (Unless it's my convention Penguicon.)

Each of those things has a point. But a burn is beautifully pointless! There's nothing you are supposed to do! It gives you an intimidating level of choice which confronts you with having to ask yourself questions about what you want, that maybe you normally avoid asking. I can just watch new people as they go through disorientation, wondering what to do, slowly changing as something amazing opens up and they get more in touch with what they do and do not want.

We're getting free chocolate chip cookies hot out of the oven while standing in line for free ice cream out of an ice cream truck mounted on a bicycle. The ice cream truck is made to look like a giant shark. When suddenly a stranger standing in line dressed half in ninja-gear and half in scuba-gear asks if we want to hear him recite a poem, and we say we want him to, and he recites it, and it's perfect! How did that moment happen?

While both Disney World and Burning Man have sophisticated systems for on-site emergency medical care, Epcot is tailor-made to remove as much danger as possible. And burns are not benign. But do not misunderstand that as recklessness. We are at Lakes Of Fire to get better at danger. Not to avoid it. We are as safe as necessary. But not as safe as possible! What would be the point? There are physical risks, such as setting the art on fire. Most commonly, there are emotional risks. (Remember how I said forming quick bonds with other people can be either good or bad?)

We burn not to be as safe as possible, which would mean staying home and doing nothing, but to get better at danger.

There are real stakes at a burn! That's why every weird choice you make is so potent! You are outside your comfort zone. The stakes are usually sane ones, but they are real.

World's Fairs were a celebration of progress. Here's an article by historian and novelist Ada Palmer about how Francis Bacon invented the concept of progress, discussing in what senses progress is good, and in what senses it's bad, and how progress actually works.

(By the way, this year's theme was Imaginarium Aquarium, which put me in mind of Ada Palmer's progress metaphor of fish tanks in the above article.)

There are so many ways Burning Man's decentralized and empowered societal changes can thrive where the centralized societal changes of World Fairs and Walt Disney can't keep up. But both of them want a future that's different and better. In the late 20th Century, and in this century, many people have given up on the idea that the future can be different and better. At Burning Man events, there is no requirement that participants want progress. It's not one of the ten principles. But when you're participating in the principles, you're burning, and you're doing what progress is.

And you're doing it whether or not you care about it. What you believe is not my foremost concern, and what I believe about progress need not be my fellow burner's foremost concern. "Action, not language, is the fundamental unit of meaning at Burning Man." That's from "The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us about Building Better Communities", by Caveat Magister, from whom I have cribbed several points here. If people can be in love with a book like they can be in love with a person, I'm in love with that book.

The Burning Man movement shows how the future can be different and better, through a method that I've devoted the past 20 years of my life to, in every organization I've been a part of. Instead of forcing people to contribute out of fear, get out of their way, and encourage them to make the contributions they want to make, that they see right in front of them, because they are the eyes and ears on the ground who know what needs doing. We get satisfaction from contributing to things we're intrinsically motivated to do, when it directly provides meaningfulness to us and those who are doing it with us. This is the realization of the dream of an experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

How to define autism and why it matters

I've centered my life around nerds for decades. Many of them sit in a room full of other awkward nerds, feeling secretly out of place like they don't belong, & somehow assume they're the only one who is secretly uncomfortable.

The term "neurotypical" experienced meaning-drift, until it became worse than useless, just like the word "planet". It needs ontological remodeling.

There's a lot of equivocation on this. So let's define terms. "Neurotypical" means "not neurodivergent".

One way to find out what neurodivergent means is to ask the coiner of the term. PSA From The Actual Coiner Of Neurodivergent

Don't tell me "but neurotypical only means the opposite of my condition". Neurotypical is defined as not neurodivergent, and neurodivergent is a thousand ways to diverge. So, neurotypical means people who have no differences, no conditions. Somehow identical brains? Not diverse? As if that's possible???

"But that's an absurd definition. Sophisticated people don't use neurotypical to mean identical clones who are all perfect." At this point you're acting as the motte in the two-party motte-and-bailey, a bait-and-switch rhetorical tactic. Sometimes it's not one person switching between Motte and Bailey. Sometimes it's at least two; one as the Motte (the bait), and the other as the Bailey (the switch).

1. Bailey people will start off saying "Santa is literally real".

2. Next, I disagree.

3. Motte people say "But Santa is real in our hearts". This creates a taboo in the group against denying Santa.

4. The Bailey people start back on their shit about Santa being literal.

5. Now there's a norm in the group, of literal Santa.

Another way to find out what "neurotypical" has come to mean is to look at the top of the search results. The bailey is a fantasy of a world full of brains which, supposedly, are naturally healthy and effortlessly effective.
The first definition of "neurotypical" in Google search results.

The first definition of "neurotypical" in Google search results.

A graphic about the definition of "neurotypical". Perceived Traits of a Neurotypical Personality. 1. Strong social and communication skills. 2. Navigates socially complex situations with ease. 3. Makes friends and establishes romantic relationships with ease. 4. Ability to participate in loud, crowded, or visually overwhelming settings with ease.

Look at this Venn diagram (also from the top of Google search results) which may as well be a one-dimensional spectrum. The reality is multi-dimensional.
A Venn Diagram labeled "Neurodiversity-neurotypicality map".

A Venn Diagram labeled "Neurodiversity-neurotypicality map".

In all the most predominant examples of definitions of "neurodivergent", that concept is defined against something. While your attention is focused on someone being different, an unspoken assumption sneaks in behind your back. The assumption goes like this: "there is a vast majority of humans who are not different, not struggling, & life comes easy to them." "Neurotypicals".

Early in life we often think we're going through unique problems. When we "fake it to make it", we aware that we're doing that, because we have an inside view of ourselves. We can't read others' minds, so we have a fantasy of their advantages. (And by the way, if you can't read minds, that doesn't make you autistic. No one else can read minds either, even though they think they can and they tell you that you should.)

We don't realize until later in life that everyone else was faking it too. It's like horoscopes; a description that applies to everybody which is mistaken for a unique description of one's specialness. Scott Alexander has a blog post explaining that in detail, as it applies to self-diagnosis.

So we get this myth, "social success comes easily to other people without working on themselves. My dissatisfaction with myself is intrinsic, permanent, unchangeable." And now, there are paid professionals to help you keep that attitude throughout adulthood.

I made these graphics (populations not to scale) to show the ontology of a supposed "neurotypical majority" gradually collapsing into incoherence.

An infographic of 20 icons representing people. Two of them are labeled "Dyslexia" and one is labeled "Schizophrenia".

The same graphic, but this time, four are labeled with "Literalism" and six with "Stimulus Sensitivity".

The same graphic, but this time, eight people are labeled with "Distractedness".

The same graphic, but several people are labeled "Rejection sensitivity", "Obsessive thoughts", "Fidgeting" etc.

Now notice there's only one person left with no labels. Is this the only person in the world who's in the majority?

Of course if you divide up that graphic according to one condition at a time, everyone is in at least one majority. But in a world where everyone's brain diverges, "those whose brains diverge" is not a minority.

I agree, you are different! Because we're all different. You're different but not special. If everyone's special, no one is. Not everything you feel makes you special.

The word "neurotypical" doesn't work as a term of art, even as a professional definition. The best way around the problems I've described is to specify a condition and attach "non" to the front of it to indicate those who don't have that condition. Say "non-autists", "non-schizophrenics", "non-ADHD", or whatever the scientific or medical paper you're writing is about. Be specific.

What's At Stake

Duncan Sabien has an article titled Social Dark Matter, in which he makes the point that there are many more people with autism than you think; and indeed, many more of everything than you think.

Let me rephrase that: there are many more people with the label "autism" than you think. Take any given label. You and I define it narrowly enough for it to be useful, and as we narrow the definition, fewer people fit it. But for any such given label, it can be defined so broadly as to be useless or even counterproductive. And then there are many, many more than you thought.

Duncan Sabien, coming from the rationalist community, prioritizes epistemology (how to evaluate truth claims, such as through research) and sometimes misses ontology ("counting as"). Within a primarily-or-only-epistemological frame, there are not multiple definitions for words, and so there is one simple clear-cut question, "is this person autistic or not?" Then you just do poorly-designed studies, and count how many people self-diagnosed or got their doctor to give them a diagnosis, and get a number. That approach doesn't ask ontological questions, like

in what sense
to what degree
by what diagnostic criteria
for what purposes

And so, Duncan assumes your lower number was wrong. But you weren't wrong. Words are tools. You were defining a word narrowly enough to be useful for something. I need to know whether you are asking me to keep the noise down around you. Whether a weighted blanket is an appropriate gift for me to give you. How much to use non-literal figures of speech. Not all symptoms are the same! Don't treat neurodivergence like it's all the same and comes as a package deal!

This misunderstanding is at its most painful in his section IV: The Law Of Extremity. He identifies many different extents to which one can "be autistic", but never says what those at all the different extents have in common. If they have something in common other than a label, he doesn't mention it. But that's skipping a crucial ontological step!

Does it include self-diagnosis?
Does it include doctors giving out diagnoses because the patient asked them to persistently enough?
Does it include diagnostic criteria getting broader by the year?
Is it a list of traits that are just ... near-universals of the human condition?
Do you just check off the majority of a list of diagnostic criteria, like "takes things too literally", "cuts the tags off their shirts because they can't ignore them", "fidgets a lot", "needs a weighted blanket to sleep", "feels socially awkward sometimes", and assume they share an underlying etiology?

Maybe, maybe not, but it seems like a crux! The thing they all have in common could have something to do with predictive processing: "an unusually high reliance on bottom-up rather than top-down information, leading to weak central coherence and constant surprisal as the sensory data fails to fall within pathologically narrow confidence intervals." That would be great! That's what I'm asking for. But I've only ever read that in one article, despite it being needed in hundreds of articles that equivocate about autism!

You might wonder why it matters if we switch between a broad definition and one of several narrow definitions without noticing. Writer Freddie DeBoer lists some problems:

Normalizing disability inevitably centers the most normal and sidelines the most severely afflicted.
Once disability becomes identity, treating disability as something bad becomes forbidden.
Disability is trivialized by these social practices.
Refusing to frame disability as something negative makes the concept of reasonable accommodation incoherent.

I once lived in a group house with a problem roommate. On the one hand, she has invisible mental and emotional disabilities, so we should pay her bills and do her chores while she smokes weed and plays World Of Warcraft. But on the other hand, when making decisions as a house, we should consider that her thinking and emotions are disabled, and her perceptions and decisions are going to be poorer for it. This is especially true when we consider how strongly to take the bursts of anger she releases at all of us on a regular basis. We need to give her a pass because she's impaired and not functioning well. But that doesn't work for her, because it's important to her that she be taken seriously. So, all of a sudden, she no longer considers autism, ADHD, trauma, and other diagnoses to be impairments. She considers them a beautiful harmless quirky identity, which gives her a better perspective than neurotypicals, a word she employs like a slur. In both cases, she gets what she wants, and her housemates don't. But these two definitions are contradictory. This was a case of one person playing both sides of a motte-and-bailey.

My home was not the only big thing in my life, that I cared about deeply, that was sunk by this pattern. Not even close.

Duncan Sabien is capable of speaking, reading, dressing himself, and using restrooms without assistance, and does not suddenly screech for no perceptible reason. He is ambitious, capable, in the upper echelons, describing himself with the label "autism". Does he use it to heavily imply he should get a pass on our social expectations of him, whenever our reasonable expectations are inconvenient? Should he not need to grow as a person, on the idea that the ways he lets other people down are intrinsic and permanent? Only those in his life can say, I suppose. All you and I can see from our vantage point is that it improves his social positioning. Freddie DeBoer has another article on this: The Gentrification of Disability.

Words are tools, and in ontological remodeling, whether a word is good or ruined depends on how it can be used. Someone I know and love has children in their teens, who will never, ever, ever, move out or provide for themselves, because of autism. You know how people complain about being exhausted in the first year or two of parenting? That is her life, caring for her teenagers moment-to-moment, into their adulthood, forever. I need a word that keeps that meaning. I need to say that word and have people jump to attention and provide care as if I cried "wolf" and there was an actual wolf.

You are not autistic. We need a different word for "feels socially awkward sometimes".

At this week's board meeting of my hackerspace, we finally were able to take a vote on the ventilation safety dispute between the baby boomer craft show ladies in Jewelry and the Gen-Z craft show ladies in Ceramics, who had been engaged in an escalating cycle of passive-aggressive backstabbing for weeks. None of which they engaged in when I was personally present, so they tended to call me in to mediate. They drew up a new floor plan map and it resolved very well.

At the Board meeting, suddenly a dark horse! The glass kiln, homeless and championless, suddenly had enthusiasts who were emotionally invested???????? One of them, Lauren, volunteered to champion it but agreed we could proceed with the overall kiln ventilation vote and deal with it afterward. Others of them tried to complicate matters of kiln ventilation. As always, the meeting threatened to bog down in the dreaded BOREDOM. This went on for a long time. I insisted on tabling it until after resolving the actual concrete actionable measure on the actual agenda.

After the Board finally voted on that proposal, the following is not exactly what I said to conclude the Board meeting, and finalize weeks of hard work from jewelry and ceramics. It's not exactly what I said, but it didn't need to be said. Something about the moment was very ceremonial.

...unless there are any further plot twists, such as a Pirate curse placed on the jewelry zone's gold,

then by the power vested in gathering in this building, the place that all of this is about,

and the power vested in the bylaws, so it is written, and the standing rules, so it is written,

and the power vested in me as President,

and the power vested in our norms, which are more like guidelines really,

then we have an accord,

and I declare the baby-boomer/Gen-Z dispute of 2023 is ... RESOLVED!

Next order of business! Before we vote. Lauren [------]. Two questions for you. First. Do you agree to be symbolically connected to all saints which may or may not be associated with glass and/or glass-working, if any? Do you agree to champion the homeless glass kiln, secure in the trust that others here will provide for it by sacrificing from their floor plan? Who on the board votes to designate Lauren as the symbolic representative of all working and sciences of substances that are glass? of its fusing? and of its slumping? Any opposed? The motion passes unanimously.

Lauren, please take this cowbell. I want you to be the one to ring it. This exact cowbell has been rung to close every meeting since this organization was founded in 2009. It is a symbol. When we offer to ring it, what that means is that those who do not yet feel heard, speak now, or agree to feel heard next time. And when it rings what it means is, may there be a next time! To there being a next time!

We live in cities you never see on screen

not very pretty but we sure know how to run things

living in ruins of a palace within my dreams

and you know we're on each other's team

-Lorde, "Team"

This series changed me.

It's customary to begin by indicating whether there will be spoilers. In one sense, no. This blog post will reveal no specific details about anything in the Terra Ignota series of novels by Ada Palmer. On the other hand, I'm creating a generic spoiler about the way plot-twists condition our minds when we read most fiction. I recently met someone who had not read this series because everyone who raved about it would not say why, because they didn't want to give spoilers. That's too bad. I think it would be better to get one gigantic over-arching meta-spoiler and therefore decide to read it.

There are different ways that different genres of fiction invite you to read them. I have never cared for fantasy very much, and I enjoy hard science fiction the most; the convention within the genre is that the author will give you more and more clues about how the world of the future works, and the readers pieces it together like a mystery. Terra Ignota starts out similarly, in the process of figuring out a knowable world. But starting on page two of chapter one, there's magic. Ada Palmer introduces this immediately so it won't be spoiler to tell you about it. This is shortly after telling you the narrator is an insane hallucinating murderer who cannot be trusted. I was trying to figure out how all the miracles had been illusions all along, created by holograms, lifelike androids, smelltracks, and so on.

Just so you understand something about how I read fiction: Fifteen years ago I couldn't make sense of Cory Doctorow's fantasy novel "Someone Goes To Town, Someone Leaves Town", so I wrote several additional chapters which could explain what happened in that novel. It's the only novel by Doctorow that was not intended for someone who reads like I do. But I was committed to making it explicable, and if I had to do so through fan fiction, so be it.

There gradually comes a point for each reader of the Terra Ignota series where they stop treating it like that, and start to treat its world as one in which inexplicable miracles have genuinely injected themselves into the science fiction setting. For those who enjoy fantasy, that moment probably happens a couple of pages into the first chapter. I was far more resistant, because the drive to understand makes it rewarding to see through deception.

For me, the moment finally came late in the fourth and final novel. There was a murder, and a seemingly-obvious suspect who was known to have already committed countless other murders. I immediately suspected a different character. The text never tells you the answer one way or another, and indeed it never explicitly directed suspicion at him to begin with, but it becomes clear when one thinks about means, motive, opportunity, previously-established precedent for this suspect... As I pondered the long list of clues for and against, I came to the conclusion that the character was as dutiful, loyal, and obedient as he seemed.

After that, I gave up expecting the Scooby-Doo unmasking moments to arrive in the final few chapters. Not only does the novel have real magic and real theology in it, but occasionally an obviously-unreliable narrator turns out to be reliable after all about some things, and characters in the novels who seem to be honest and upright sometimes actually are honest and upright.

There comes a point for each reader to set aside the concept of an unreliable narrator as no longer fruitful. To set aside looking for clues that all is not as it seems. To stop looking for clues that perhaps everyone is, after all, "as dirty as the rest of us." This setting aside of suspicion is all the more interesting an experience, when the unreliability of the narrator, and an overwhelming list of reasons to throw suspicion in so many directions, has been laid in so hard by previous books in this series.

Terra Ignota met me where I was, and then took my hand, and taught me broader forms of appreciation. Even after reading the series five times, and taking a lot of notes, and writing scripts with regular expressions that search through the text to look for clues, from which I write lengthy analyses in the Terra Ignota subreddit, I still can't make sense of the theological and mythopoeic aspects. But that's OK! I like make books explicable; and, I might still do that again. But I'm more complicated now. The world has so many potentially relevant considerations going into every situation, that the considerations are unenumerable. The world's more full of fractally-unenumerable factors than I can understand.

The following is a transcript of an hour-long retrospective episode from the UNSONG Audiobook Podcast. (Here are links to the first episode, to the complete text of the novel, and to a summary of what the novel is about.)

I recently realized I never posted the text version of this retrospective anywhere.

I think you will get something out of it even if you have not read the novel.

It includes recommendations for further reading or listening, my reflections on the themes of the novel, the ability to change the world, finding patterns where none exist, propaganda, random acts of violence, and resisting despair.

It also includes a very personally vulnerable account of how the novel makes me feel about the historical development of this century so far, the position of my life within that, and the place of you and I and each other in the world.

If you have not read the novel UNSONG, be advised of spoilers, and of discussion about violence and mental illness.

Question timestamps:

1. The theme of your blog - 01:07

2. Softening opposition to the antagonists - 01:47

3. Planning in a serial format - 05:56

4. Justifying the unjustifiable - 11:09

5. Placebomancy and propaganda - 20:18

6. Worldbuilding premise - 26:44

7. Comedic style - 30:53

8. Psychological distance - 38:02

9. Did anyone ever make it to Wall Drug - 46:50

10. After the interview - 52:39

The UNSONG Audiobook is now complete. It has been tremendously fulfilling for me. This episode will include my recommendations for other books and media which UNSONG readers are likely to enjoy, and I'll provide links in the show notes. First, an interview with the author of UNSONG, Scott Alexander. We corresponded over email, so in order to distinguish our voices, you'll hear my questions in your left earphone,

and his responses in your right earphone,

separated by this sound effect. [wind]

I sent him nine questions. Here's the first one.

1. The theme of your blog - 01:07

If I had to try to summarize your viewpoint on the world from reading your blog, Slate Star Codex, over the years, I might summarize it as: "fixing big problems is complicated". Is that close to how you see it? Does this novel present your viewpoint on the world? To illustrate that even when we are tempted by promises of straightforward fixes and over-simplified solutions, it ends up complicated anyway.

He replied:

I wrote an answer to this but in retrospect my answer to question 4 answers this one better than my answer to this one did.

My second question was:

2. Softening opposition to the antagonists - 01:47

Was your goal to emotionally invest readers in opposing the antagonists, then softening that? Like, the resolution of the conflicts against Thamiel, the Other King, and Malia Ngo, is that they got everything they wanted, up until the moment Albion reset the universe, and, with it, their conflicts. So they won, and got away with it. The freeing of Hell, and the new world that results from Albion rebooting the universe, happen off-stage. All the conflicts on-stage end with "the readers don't get what they want." Then in the final paragraphs, the antagonists seemed to be presented sympathetically.

Do you see that literary device as a perspective-seeking technique, like an attempt to approach Kegan stage 5 meta-systematicity?

He responded,

The plot of Unsong begins as a pretty simple conflict under the protagonists' control, and then they gradually end up more and more out of their depth until they're stuck as pawns in the plans of entities they can barely begin to comprehend - all of which turn out okay in the end since this is fiction. There's something that appeals to me historically about this - the analogy that comes to mind are all of those police chiefs and politicians frantically passing tough-on-crime bills and coming up with more and more desperate ways to enforce the law during the 90s, and then everything works out fine because the problem was actually leaded gasoline and once that was banned crime plummeted on its own. Or thousands of years of saints trying to support lepers and remove stigma against them, all ending in the invention of antibiotics that cure leprosy. But I also can't take it completely seriously - there are a lot of bad things in the world that won't end through deus ex machina or turn out to be fine all along. Many of the protagonists' actions turned out to be useless, but there were some that made important differences, and some enemies who really needed vanquishing.

This answer put me in mind of something from the science fiction author Ada Palmer, a historian at the University of Chicago, where she studies the history of progress, atheism, and free thought. I'm currently reading her nonfiction history book "Reading Lucretius In The Renaissance", and the point she drives home in that book is, here we are in a time where I can be an atheist and I'm pretty much OK. I'm not being persecuted for it, but no one historically responsible for that actually intended it as the outcome of their life's work. Lucretius planted a lot of the seeds that led to the concept of natural science, and he had no idea he was doing so, and no interest in it. Most of those copying and spreading his manuscript did so only because they were trying to learn and teach Latin by doing so!

Dr Palmer wrote a four-novel series Terra Ignota, which begins with Too Like The Lightning. Link in the show notes.

It's political science fiction depicting the collapse of a post-scarcity Utopia. She said the central question of Terra Ignota is, if you're working for a better future, and these saints supporting lepers, these police chiefs and politicians in the nineties are working for a better future, but you get this future, is it still worth it? You get this 25th-century unintended set of social customs and institutions, which 21st-century social justice sensibilities find simultaneously victorious and off-putting, freeing but also limiting... this is the future depicted in the novel, that results from your life's work... is it still worth it?

On to question 3.

3. Planning in a serial format - 05:56

Writing in serial format, how much did you write by the seat of your pants, or carefully outline everything in advance? What parts of the ending were always in the plan from the beginning? You wrote a blog post about editing UNSONG, in which you said that you're considering removing Chapter 1, because it leads readers to expect the novel to be about open-source Unitarian Universalists versus theonomic tech giants that abuse intellectual property law. That conflict was mostly dropped after Book 1.

When writing chapter one, did you have some sense that you were appealing to your typical blog readers? I'm thinking of two ways. First off, chapter one invested me in the novel because my life revolves around intellectual property conflicts and resisting Big Tech, as you know from Penguicon. I even live in a house like Ithaca. Secondly, I'm an atheist who graduated from Bible college, so I know what it's like to scrape the bottom of the hermeneutical barrel to make it look like one's own opinions are scriptural. The book made it clear early on that we were going to have some laughs at the expense of wrongheaded thinking like numerology and theodicy. I was there for it! Aaron Smith-Teller has enough raw cognitive horsepower in the service of self-deluding rationalization, that he can get super creative with even the thinnest correspondences. To put it bluntly, all of this appealed to my resentments and grievances. From your surveys of Slate Star Codex readership, does all this seem typical of them?

Midway through the novel, after the intellectual property plot conflict was dropped, it started to become clear you were going to treat theodicy with non-ironic earnestness. I started to take the novel less personally, and appreciate it more like Uriel appreciates a balanced tower of hyper-dimensional shapes. Did you start one way, and end another way, in order to induce that shift in your readers? Did you write the first few chapters before you clarified to yourself which conflicts you wanted to be central? Or did you have a goal from the beginning of the writing process to make this transition?

His response to question three was:

Everything about writing this was a mess, a congealing of several unrelated plotlines that I'd started thinking about and then dropped over the space of decades. I started with the end - the very first Unsong-like idea I had was "what if somebody committed terrible crimes as a plot to get into Hell so he could destroy it?" The book I originally sketched out around that was nothing like Unsong - it took place on a planet that wasn't quite Earth, or might have been a postapocalyptic Earth, or something - but it never really clicked. The second idea I had was "what if wizards had IP battles over their spells?" - this was back years ago when Napster vs. the RIAA was central to Internet culture wars. I actually wrote a first draft along these lines that barely involved kabbalah at all, except as a half-joking name for the spells since they were all just spoken words. Then I read some LiveJournal post about the Talmud - I wish I could find it, the only part I remember was that it was in a dialogue format and involved Rabbi Eliezer having near-superpowers by knowing hundreds of laws about cucumbers or something - that really drove home how the Talmud had a lot of elements we would consider fantastic and magical, but in a totally different way to the Tolkien-derived ideas of modern fantasy - and I really wanted to write a fantasy book capturing that. I don't think Unsong ever did that, but it got me thinking along those lines and reading enough Jewish folklore to get it where it actually ended up. I only started posting episodes once I had a second draft done, and it still changed a lot week by week as I posted it. Parts that people liked (Uriel and Sohu, which was just one chapter in earlier drafts!) got more airtime, and parts that people didn't like shriveled away. But I couldn't figure out how to rewrite from square one, so it ended up being a lot of things jammed together.

Time for another book recommendation as a follow up to question 3. If you were fascinated by the early chapters of UNSONG, I recommend The Laundry Files novel series by Charles Stross, which is a favorite of mine. A spy agency performs espionage with computational demonology and recruits an office cubicle drone from their I.T. department. I think UNSONG readers would enjoy it. Start reading The Laundry Files with The Atrocity Archive. Link in the show notes.

So here's question 4.

4. Justifying the unjustifiable - 11:09

It's risky to try to invent justifications for the unjustifiable, to excuse the inexcusable. A strong argument could be made that some atrocities were necessary and correct, at certain points in history, such as Sherman's march to the sea, or dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan. But inventing reasons why a universe with so much evil is compatible with a good and powerful God feels, to me, equivalent to QAnon justifying committing massacres in nightclubs and mosques by inventing a story that our public servants run a child sex ring to extract adrenachrome from infants. Do you worry at all, that if UNSONG finds a readership outside your blog readership, it might encourage some of its readers into a theodicy pattern of thought, in which they invent reasons to let authority figures off the hook for their misconduct?

His answer to 4 is the one that he referred to in his answer to question 1.

As far as I know our public servants aren't involved in a child sex ring, other than the Epstein one we already know about. But they do frequently start wars that kill tens of thousands of people. They do run an economic system that leaves hundreds of thousands destitute on the streets. They do lock up millions of people in horrifying prisons and kill some number of them in execution chambers. At that point, who cares whether they're running a child sex ring on the side? If there was a certain amount of evil by public servants that would justify committing a massacre in a nightclub, we've already barreled past it at a hundred miles an hour.

I think this is the basic theme of Unsong - the world contains so much evil that it's impossible to tolerate. So do you shoot up a nightclub? Dylan Alvarez would. If you wouldn't, why not? And what do you do next?

For me, the answer is something like that the systems that run our world - democracy, capitalism, the world order - are complicated compromises that try to hold things together for the greater good. They're UNSONG. They're Malia Ngo, keeping things working while we build the armamentarium we need to fight demons beyond our comprehension. They're half-demon and half-saint and that is the only combination that makes them strong enough that they might possibly work. Do you try to kill Malia Ngo? Again, Dylan Alvarez would. Is he right?

Everyone is engaged to some degree in the sordid project of justifying evil for the greater good. How far do we take this project? Probably not infinitely far? But probably we also don't abandon it completely? They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin. But also, the Comet King said that the only compromise with sin was doing anything that didn't - when all is said and done - ultimately maximize the total amount of goodness in the universe. I don't have any more insights to give about this question here, but luckily I already wrote a book about it.

That's an interesting question: you're not going to lash out destructively, so what do you do next? Well, here's not one book recommendation, but two, based on whether you are looking for emotional catharsis at the injustice of it all, or looking to roll up your sleeves and get to work fixing it.

According to Malia Ngo and Simeon Azore, if humanity had free access to all the names of God, supposedly fewer names would have been discovered. We're told, but not shown, so we'll have to take their word for it. If you were shown what would have happened, that could be considered a spin off novel to UNSONG. If that gets you curious, I recommend Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow. Link in the show notes.

Right now, in the real world, we have artificial scarcity. Unnecessary artificial scarcity, which rather than supporting the economy, holds back the economic potential of billions. We could eradicate all poverty just by deciding to. Walkaway begins in a very near future extrapolation where we just didn't decide to, to the point where a few people own everything and own everyone. It depicts in great detail how artificial scarcity collapses in a transition to a post-scarcity Utopia from the present day, through unbearable sacrifice, hard work, intelligence, imagination, design, and pro-sociality. The most interesting and complex capacities of human beings. It's relatively easy for a science fiction author to depict a Utopia that already arrived. It's far more challenging and rare, to chart a path from here. Walkaway is an incredibly ambitious book. Cory Doctorow's work in legal and economic activism puts him in a great position to really get into the weeds with it. He gave me a crate of the hardcover at Penguicon and I pushed it into the hands of every group organizer I could find-- our science fiction conventions, my hacker space, co-housings, you name it. It changed my life. And by the way, Wil Wheaton's audiobook reading of Walkaway is top-notch.

On the other hand, maybe what you need right now is not to strap in and get to work, but to take a while to give yourself some compassion. A bucket of ice cream, a good ugly cry, maybe a nap, but -- and I hasten to stress this -- definitely not pointlessly murdering a crowd of random people. If you find yourself sinking into a nihilistic rage, and if what you are looking for is catharsis for your feelings, you might appreciate the Canadian science fiction author Peter Watts, a marine-mammal biologist when he's not writing science fiction. I dare say he is inconsolably angry at the injustice of the human species on every page. I recommend you start with his 2007 novel Blindsight, about a spacecraft captained by a vampire. Well, a hard-science-fiction equivalent of a vampire-- it's hard science fiction. Every character in the novel is, in various ways, incapable of sociality and humanizing sentiment. The upshot of the novel is that conscious self-awareness is rubbish. I really can't do it justice here. It's that imaginative.

Peter Watts is also known for sassing American border security in 2009, for which the border guards punched him in the face, pepper-sprayed him, threw him in jail for the night, and made him walk back across the bridge to Canada without his coat in the freezing wind, and then a court banned him from the United States. For sass. His blog posts were exactly as acidic as his readers expected.

The border guards who did that to Peter Watts are acting just like the power-mad bureaucratic authoritarian villains from a Cory Doctorow novel, but one of these authors writes novels about meticulously detailed ways to circumvent control technologies, that work if you apply them in the real world. The other one writes novels about the human species being bullshit compared to marine mammals. Both of them are a lot of fun. Neither of them is actually wrong about the injustice, or wrong about their feelings. And neither of them pulls any punches to reassure you of anything. Except, maybe, on the question of whether our ancestors crawling out of the ocean was the right thing to do. For me, that's just a settled issue. I don't actually care why the world was created and humanity exists, it was and we do, it doesn't help us move forward, and I'm over it. Moving on.

And speaking of moving on, on to question 5.

5. Placebomancy and propaganda - 20:18

The way placebomancy works is that the universe can be persuaded to go along with a compelling narrative. This seems to offer a lot of explanations for ways the UNSONG universe differs from ours. Here's an example. In the book, the devil's army of demons conquers the nations of Russia and Canada, and changes their national policies and physical and economic conditions, such as giving them all lead poisoning. The purpose was to degrade their trust in each other, motivate them to use violence, and damn their souls to hell. I am put in mind of the 1954 science fiction short story Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. It was intended to illustrate an incident in which it was justified to kill an innocent person. But Cory Doctorow pointed out in an article in Locus (again, link in the show notes) that it does not establish that. At all.

It's contrived. The circumstances of Cold Equations were unrealistically intricate in the number of systems that failed simultaneously, and the number of institutions that were criminally negligent, just like in Russia and Canada, where Thamiel artificially screws with the game-theoretical incentive landscape. The author of Cold Equations, Tom Godwin, cherry-picked improbable circumstances from his imagination into a strained rationalization for killing, set up his world that way, played a slight-of-hand distraction trick to deceive his readers, and then claimed it had ramifications for real-life moral reasoning.

In UNSONG, placebomancy appears to make the universe itself susceptible to propaganda, and therefore the metaphysics of the UNSONG universe brings narratively-compelling Cold Equations-style situations into existence. On the TV show 24, Keifer Sutherland's vigilante torture is justified by imminent terror threats. Similarly, theonomic corporations and UNSONG are justified in order to resist an invasion of demons and the Other King's genocide; the Other King's genocide is justified because Hell exists; and Hell is justified by God's explanation for theodicy. Did you set this up to illustrate what it's like to live in a universe with placebomantic metaphysics?

On the other hand, should we not even look at the novel at the level of diagetic explanations like that? Would you prefer the novel to be analyzed on an entirely metaphorical level?

Here is the author's response to question 5.

Is the chain of rationalizations justifying property rights, or taxation, or any other concept that our entire social system relies on, really interestingly more morally complex than the chain that justifies UNSONG? At least it's more fun when it bottoms out in the literal Devil instead of something boring like incentive landscapes or whatever.

Ha ha, yes, it is funnier!

So this response contained another question, which it seems like it's worth saying something about. Are taxes, property rights, and all the concepts our society relies on, more morally complex than monopoly-seeking, genocide, and torture?

Yes.

Interestingly more complex? Yeah, my interest is piqued. Our cooperative social systems are designed, built, and degrade, and then are maintained and improved. They provide enough fascinating complexity for a lifetime. Monopoly-seeking, genocide, and torture don't sustain our systems; nothing depends on them; they are parasitic, and lead to their own downfall. They require only getting lucky, turning off the most complex and interesting capacities in one's self, and the most sophisticated capacities in one's groups, and then coasting.

Take the afore-mentioned novel Too Like The Lightning from the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. Many of you at this point find your interest piqued in being shown, not told, exactly how Simeon Azore and Malia Ngo were responsible for holding together humanity's armamentarium against Thamiel's forces. That could make an interesting spin-off novel. Ada Palmer's novels, drawing from her knowledge of political machinations throughout history, show you how the sausage is made, and how ugly the injustice gets. Then it shows you how it gets less unjust, but also a little more unjust in other ways, and it shows you how the less-unjust sausage gets made too. The tension in the collapse of the 25th-century post-scarcity Utopia has tragedy and tension that you can cut with a knife, but I never feel like I'm just watching the water slowly rise over my head, in a state of hopeless passivity, because of the sheer scope of the social and political innovations in that world. The interestingly-complex design of it all.

By the way, she runs a multi-day Live Action Role Play or LARP for her history students at the University of Chicago, in which they roleplay officials in the Renaissance period who are meeting to elect a Pope. It goes incredibly differently every time, and illustrates how little of a difference our choices make in history, and how much of a difference our choices make. You and I, listeners, we are in over our heads. And yet, we have agency. The Terra Ignota series, 2016's Too Like The Lightning and its sequels, has become my favorite book for how thought-provoking it is. I recommend the audiobook. It is fantastically-well narrated and produced.

Here's question 6.

6. Worldbuilding premise - 26:44

Did you have the idea for the novel by musing about its worldbuilding? Would you characterize its central worldbuilding premise as "anything which serves to delude one's self or manipulate the credulous is literally true in the novel's universe?" The influence of John Dee on Enochian is the clearest example, but even Wall Drug signs are a form of marketing.

Here's the answer to question six.

I think one of the central premises is pattern-matching. All the patterns are real. There are no false leads. Somebody once described conspiracy theorizing as coming from a natural aesthetic preference for big events to have big causes. JFK's death changed everything. For it to come from some lone loony with a rifle is *inelegant*. It's not narratively satisfying.

In the early 1600s, one of the most learned and impressive alchemists in history gazed into a stone and received the language of angels. Have you read the Enochian Calls? They are blood-chilling. They do not sound human. For all of that to just be one guy deluding himself with the help of a random con man is inelegant. I don't like it. In a world where the patterns all matched and everything was aesthetically correct, the Enochian calls would be real.

Likewise, if you've ever driven through the Midwest, you've seen the Wall Drug signs. You know the mounting sense of anticipation they create, the idea of getting closer and closer to this mysterious but important place, this center of the South Dakotan universe. Then you get there and it's just a strip mall. Inelegant! I demand Wall Drug be the asymptote of existence, the distant Eden that can be approached but never reached. Anything less would feel wasteful.

OK, that makes so much sense now. The website Meaningness.com by David Chapman has a lot to say about nihilism, and its opposite extreme, eternalism. Nihilism is an extreme stance in which nothing means anything, while eternalism smears a singular meaning indiscriminately all over everything. This sounds a lot like religion, but it also emerges in romantic fixation, the fervor of Soviet Communism, and a lot of other things. Eternalism involves the idea that nothing is a coincidence.

My book recommendation this time is Blankets, by Craig Thompson, a graphic novel autobiography about leaving behind Christian fundamentalism, and leaving behind his infatuation with his first girlfriend. In the novel, whenever the world is covered in blankets of snow, the titular blankets, it looks to the young Craig Thompson like the world is made of all one thing. A world of snow. Nothing is a coincidence because the whole world and everything in it is about Jesus. Or nothing is a coincidence because the whole world and everything that happens in it is about his girlfriend.

What David Chapman of Meaningness.com would probably say about Blankets is that it's kind of typical of someone in the grip of eternalism to wildly oscillate back and forth between eternalism and nihilism and into a new eternalism, like the young Craig Thompson does. Over time, Craig gets to the point where some occurrences are full of meaningfulness, and others are just a coincidence, and he starts to be able to tell the difference. Since it's a graphic novel, there is no audio adaptation.

Speaking of nihilism! Question 7.

7. Comedic style - 30:53

The comedic style of UNSONG seems to differ from that of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, or Rick And Morty by Dan Harmon, in that it seems like you wanted to invest the reader in conflicts and emotional throughlines. Is that right? Did either of their comedic styles influence yours?

Hitchhiker's seems to set up very few conflicts for the reader to invest in, as if there is no question to answer. "42." Rick And Morty invests the viewer in order to deliberately undermine their investment, over and over and over. UNSONG, Hitchhiker's, and Rick And Morty seem to draw their comedic style from the humorous defeat of the audience's expectations to have emotional investment in their conflicts, or their expectation that there would be a payoff.

But another word for "emotional investment in conflict" is "morality". By humorously playing with emotional investment, the comedic style of all three works seems amoral, morally nonsensical, or actively "anti-sensical". Unlike Adams and Harmon, do you remain hopeful that perhaps after all the order and chaos, and balance and excess, and meta-balance and excessive meta-balance, readers will stabilize at an emotional and moral equilibrium in how they relate to the novel?

Here's how the author answered question 7.

I plead innocent of your charge. I tried as hard as I could to make your emotional investment pay dividends. Arthur Dent sought the meaning of the universe and got 42. Ana looked for the meaning of the universe and got...what I hope is a pretty good stab at it, at least within the bounds set by the book. Aaron learned the Explicit Name. Dylan and Erika got to go out in a blaze of glory. Malia overcame her heritage and proved that, whether or not she could be good, she could at least do good. Uriel made a friend and figured out how to tell knock-knock jokes. Sarah earned Aaron's love and then united with him forever. The Cometspawn fulfilled their prophecy. Robin and the Comet King did what they set out to do. Sohu didn't curse her father's name, even with her last breath. And everyone had a part to play in the end. I have no idea how Albion will remake the world. But all of that will go into it. Everything they learned and became over the course of the book. Sure, they all died, which is *kind of* like not having emotional payoff. But it's the apocalypse! Everybody dies! That's just how apocalypses are!

A very informative response. I'm just saying play to the strengths inherent in the worldbuilding, which is dark comedy.

I found it compelling when Uriel, in his backstory, defeated Thamiel and Gabriel. That was gripping. He just can't tell knock-knock jokes, and that's fine, I don't feel plot tension in wondering whether he will, because I don't see why he would need to. Then he suddenly can, which is super easy, barely an inconvenience. That's funny! It's funny to care about that!

Most of the time, I don't sympathize with most of the characters and I don't want them to succeed, which is exactly how it's supposed to work in balls-to-the-wall gallows humor. It's tragic that Sohu failed to curse her father's name. She should have cursed him. Play it for laughs. I want Sarah and Aaron as far apart as possible, but Aaron made his bed and he's gonna sleep in it, and if Sarah's in his head, she can't get the distance she needs to grow out of it. Play it for laughs. In the case of Malia Ngo, the idea that good or evil is something you are caused to be by who your parents were, is again pattern-matching. It's not how morality works. Good is always something you do, never something you are. But Malia thinks she has a nature to be overcome, and that's tragically funny. I'd like to see it leaned-into more!

The pattern-matching worldbuilding premise is eternalism, the polyanna practice of smearing one eternal ordering principle all over everything, like Adam Kadmon. That stance is always an emotional see-saw. When an eternal ordering principle like God is shown to be unworkable and starts wobbling towards nihilism, theodicy is one of the self-delusion practices employed to strengthen the polyanna stance. It's healthier to accept that there is no God. Plenty enough things are meaningful, without everything having to be part of a divine plan. But in the UNSONG universe, there is no such escape. It illustrates that a world where nothing is ever a coincidence can be nothing but this see-saw between nihilism about high stakes which are doomed to fail, and heartwarming wholesome polyanna about low-stakes that are within reach. One of the reasons it's funny is this contrast.

Stakes around systems, such as governments, policy regimes, and celestial machinery, are consequential. Trivial stakes are, as the Comet King put it, tweeting I'm-better-than-you and how-dare-you-say-that, infatuations or self-image or going out in a blaze of glory. UNSONG presents an upside-down world in which, that which is consequential is futile and that which is trivial succeeds, which is hilarious.

In the real world, we are not inevitably doomed to futility at either level of stakes. They work out sometimes and fail sometimes. How often? Often enough. How much is "enough"? That depends on whether you're suffering from depression.

So, what is an example of a comedy style that's not fatalistic? The Good Place. And that's what Question 8 is about.

8. Psychological distance - 38:02

UNSONG was just as funny as I expected. But it was funny without being light. The sitcom The Good Place also deals with the afterlife. The only torture that show depicts is psychological torture for comedic effect. Physical tortures are occasionally described, but not shown. If the show had taken seriously the sufferings of The Bad Place, or lingered on it, its optimistic comedic style wouldn't have worked. The audience was allowed plenty of psychological distance, so that the show can center on ethics, not worldbuilding. UNSONG maximized our discomfort about the conjunction of ethical philosophy and worldbuilding, making it as hard as possible to get psychological distance. Is that because you are writing to an audience that probably expects the genre of rationalist fiction, where the readers care a lot about detailed and explicit rules-based systems, and their implications when carried to logical extremes?

Here's the author's answer to question 8.

Again, I refer you to Interlude Yud. Ana's on one of her rants about theodicy, and finally Aaron just says “The Universe sucks. Deal with it.” Then Ana forces him to watch the Broadcast, a TV documentary about the tortures of Hell, as a way of viscerally cramming into his head that you cannot possibly deal with it, that if your answer to the problem of evil is "well, there's a little evil, but whatever", your answer is wrong. There is more evil than you can bear.

Everybody has to square this circle, where the world is full of evil but we don't go full Dylan Alvarez anyway. A lot of people square the circle by minimizing the evil of the world. I wanted this book to be about this hard problem and how it is hard, so I tried to decrease the psychological distance as much as possible in order to prevent people from doing that. The tortures of Hell (hopefully) aren't real, but most of the other stuff isn't that different to things that happen every day. Even some of the hell stuff was loosely based on factory farming. All these characters' weird obsessions and decisions don't make sense outside showing you that circle and preventing you from squinting until it looks kind of square.

Since the author has posed this question so directly, fully up front instead of subtext, and this is the one episode in which I talk about my own impressions of the book, I would be dishonest if I pretended not to have my own way of resolving this. I've spent a few years reading this novel to you without comment, but I will simply make a full disclosure of my position. If you're not satisfied with what I'm about to say, that's fair. If it were easy to get right, it probably wouldn't have taken a whole novel to present us with this challenge.

Ada Palmer's next fiction project will also involve theodicy, but with a twist. It'll be about Vikings. Dr Palmer says in the warm and fruitful Mediterranean climate, they wondered why a world which was clearly made to nurture them had evil in it. But in the hostile Viking climate, the world was ice and fire, and they reasoned the gods must be evil. So their mythos tried to find an explanation for why it had good in it. It's about perspective. So which perspective are we seeing here?

Well, in the last chapter of UNSONG, the people said to Rabbi Meir, "you're the expert here, and I'm not, but..." The author is a psychiatrist, so he knows infinitely more than I do about catastrophizing, personalizing, and universalizing, but ... doesn't this, at least outwardly, resemble that? Or at least, that's what I as a layman thought those terms meant.

Look, I have not been a patient or staff in a mental ward, but my loved ones have, and I've supported them and spent time there to visit them, and they have described at length, in tears, how inpatient mental health care was a bureaucratic hellscape of counter-productive futility, and they are never, ever, going back. So if I spent all of my employed hours surrounded by that environment, it might develop into an emotional set-point which would incline me to think the entire world is typified by torture porn such as Interlude Yud. Finding more than zero torture in the world, such as factory farming, does not typify existence as torture porn.

In the real world, making a problem worse, as Dylan does, is in no way a coherent reaction to that which is intolerable. And obviously I know and the listenership knows that the author does not support mass murder, from reading the blog. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the current listener base is on the fence about mass murder and that I need to talk you down. But on the other hand, this podcast is going up on Spotify and iTunes, where a lot of depressed and aimless true believers, desperate to leave their nihilism, and longing for an eternal ordering principle, might enter the type of search terms they search for, and find this podcast, completely out of context. And they like it when going out in a blaze of glory is glorified.

But I want them to know it's the butt of a joke.

They are not known for picking up on context or subtext, so I'm making things more explicit than most listeners might think is necessary. By recording and publishing this podcast, I'm partially responsible for what they read into it. So I'd like an alternative perspective to be present.

The cover of Godel Escher Bach: the Eternal Golden Braid depicts a geometric object that casts a shadow of G, E, or B from different light sources. Like the planet earth viewed from the sunny mediterranean or the hostile north. Neither form of pattern-seeking has the full picture of the real planet. Squaring the circle is like that. It looks like a square from every perspective except one where it's a circle. Like a mental health facility, or a factory farm. And they're not wrong. That's moral nuance. The sheer depths of harm infliction we see illustrated in UNSONG, how it's everywhere, how motivated and non-accidental it is, is the opposite of nuance. Which is fine, because it's fiction.

Fiction is an interesting place for these feelings, because I think that when we catastrophize, and personalize, and universalize, the reason we do very little about ... sweeping hand gesture taking in The Universe ... is that the only course for personal heroism on that scale exists in fiction. You know suspension of belief? We don't just suspend belief about facts. We suspend belief in our real-life principles and ideas. We practice perspective-seeking. We try on other selves.

And in that spirit, in my final question, I'll return from discussing the real world to discussing a work of fiction as an entertainment product. And I will feel a lot of feelings. So here it is. Question 9.

9. Did anyone ever make it to Wall Drug - 46:50

The biggest lesson I learned from UNSONG was to not impose my own meanings on it. As the ending loomed, I was filled with a growing realization that the central plot tension was theodicy. Actually resolving it. I was filled with a growing anxiety, which was the opposite of Ana's. I didn't want her to get an answer. It was just too much for me to ask that a fiction novel contain the first and only answer that satisfies me in two millennia of work on the subject. I long for God to say to her, "Look, I'm a paperclip-maximizing algorithm, OK? I'm half Satan. My idea of "designing" a universe is to ham-fistedly jam in a preference-frustration-maximizer: Hell. I should have waited to talk to Job until he had burned in Hell along with everyone else, and asked him again if he still thought this seed was a good seed. I hope for your sake you stop looking for a reason to let me off the hook. But here-- at least you have arrived at Wall Drug."

Fixing big problems is hard, but going to a drug store is not. I expect, any chapter now, one of the characters will arrive at Wall Drug. But no, it's like a t-shirt reading "I IMMANENTIZED THE ESCHATON AND THERE WASN'T EVEN A WALL DRUG." I can accept that Simeon Azore says the profit motive was necessary, this is never shown, so I have to take his word for it, all the bad guys win, Sohu killed Thamiel on Pike's Peak but he regenerates, Jala and Malia Ngo died but there's an afterlife, they all get away with it, Earth completes its slow collapse, the Albion hive-mind puts the boardgame of the universe back in the box so it can be played again, God gets off the hook for bad boardgame design, Ana doesn't accept it and he immediately kills her, and then by merging in kabbalistic marriage, the characters get pie in the sky when they die.

That was the point where, on the first read-through, I imposed my meanings, and it got bleak. I emotionally invested in the stakes of the novel to resolve positively without first re-inventing the universe. I was inappropriately assigning tons of symbolic importance based on the emotional stakes of my real life. This was equivalent to Aaron imposing his own meanings on Ana. He is not wrong to be her dear friend, but the romantic framing rings false. He places her in a frame of a perfect romantic partner for him, but that frame would only apply to a romantic interest who wants it. Aaron erased Ana and painted over her with his own interpretation, just like he painted over American Pie. She didn't do that to their relationship. He did. This novel meant something other than what I originally wanted it to mean. If I fixate on my interpretation, I would miss out on the meaning the book is trying to have.

I can learn that lesson with grace. But it would be nice to have at least one small win. I can let myself care about something as earthly and mortal as South Dakota. Compared to intellectual property law, genocide, and the collapse of the cosmic machinery, a billboard seems like safe plot-stakes to emotionally invest in and ask for it to pay off. In my head-canon, the novel ends like this:

"My voice only wavering a little, I spoke the Explicit Name of God. I received a Sign. It read: WALL DRUG STORE ~ SINCE 1931 ~ GLAD YOU MADE IT. Thank you for reading Unsong."

After two-hundred and forty-four thousand, one hundred and forty words, thirty-two hours of audio, you have to tell me, please, at the end of everything... did somebody, anybody, ever make it to Wall Drug?

The author's answer to Question 9.

It is written (Lovecraft, Sonnet XIII):

"Dreams bring us close, but ancient lore repeats

That human tread has never soiled those streets."

10. After the interview - 52:39

So there you have it. All nine questions, and nine answers, interspersed with book recommendations. Of which, here are some more.

I love cleverness in novels. And UNSONG is probably the cleverest I've ever read. God's answer to Ana Thurmond was incredibly imaginative. The last time a novel presented me with an explanation for the creation of the universe that was even nearly this clever, was the science fiction novel Distress, by Greg Egan, who is unsurpassed at providing a crunchy technological coating with a chewy philosophical center. I won't spoil it for anyone, but every chapter of Distress blew my mind in a completely different way. I think fans of UNSONG would love it.

Three times now I've mentioned Dr Ada Palmer, who wrote the Terra Ignota series about the political collapse of a post-scarcity Utopia; but I left the best of it for last. It will interest UNSONG readers because-- this is not a spoiler because it's introduced in chapter one of Too Like The Lightning-- there's an inexplicable supernatural phenomenon in what is otherwise hard science fiction. Also, the characters are obsessed with reviving 18th-century theological concepts, and the plot tension eventually hinges on wondering why the creator of our universe made the universe so badly. The fourth and final book of Terra Ignota will be released in June 2021.

My last book recommendation is UNSONG itself. If you're hearing this episode at the time of its recording, but you haven't read or listened to UNSONG since it's publication, there are reasons to read it afresh. In the real world, I feel like the sky kind of cracked in the late twentieth century. If I had to place the moment the world changed, for me, it was the release of Netscape Navigator in 1996, because all the weirdos started to find each other through the internet. I don't know if you had the same experience of reading UNSONG, but I loved parts like hacking the Vanishing Name through the arrangements of beanie babies, for its resemblance to hacker culture. Kabbalah was a way to pry loose power, and distribute it. Surely kabbalistic hackers will give the world innovations in political and social organization! I had bright dreams of innovative forms of social organization and moral meaning in the two-thousand-aughts, forming a combination of a science fiction convention and an open-source software conference. Forming our local hackerspace. But by the end of the two-thousand-teens, I couldn't escape noticing the complicity of weirdos finding each other on the internet. The events of this decade, both personally and globally, completely changed my view of hacker culture. At the beginning of this century, when I left fundamentalist Christianity, was it from a traditionalist eternalism to a futuristic techno-eternalism? Did I speak the Vanishing Name, only to find myself accosted by a different set of hooligans than the ones previously accosting me? What strikes me though, is how much better the second environment was than the first, as if the second situation had a bunch of dragon beanie babies, skewering sacred cows and traditions, in the hopes of hitting on a situation with a set of tradeoffs that are genuinely new and unique. Change can get worse, yes, or stay stubbornly equivalent, but change can also improve.

I'm recording this days before the United States presidential election of the year 2020, in a pandemic. UNSONG is a book about a relentless collapse. The world and its systems collapse, and they don't stop collapsing until the last sentence of the novel. I'll quote the film critic YouTuber Dan Olson from his video "I Can't Stop Watching Contagion". Link in the show notes. He says:

"Rather than practicing intense emotional states before they happen, this instinct of exposing ourselves to what we're already experiencing, amplifying existing emotional states, it works as form of emotional inoculation. I am scared and anxious and uncertain, and so I will make myself more scared and more anxious and more uncertain, because it's still fiction. It's still safe. It still has an end. It is bounded. Things will get bad, things will then get worse, people will die, the world is unfair, it is unbalanced, it is unjust, and catastrophe will bring out both the best and worst of all of us. And then it will end. Is there looting, arson, and murder? Yeah, but it is ultimately out of the ordinary. People get paranoid, people get desperate, they riot under stress, but even when food supply lines break down, the world isn't summarily turned over to those with the bullets and the willingness to use them. There is no Mad Max dystopia, no Fallout post-apocalypse, because at the end of the day, humans are pro-social. The cooperative survive.

...

There is an escapism to a story about horrible things, because that story is complete. It is bounded. It provides a framework to horror that doesn't exist in the real present. Our future is uncertain, beset on all sides by devils, and we can come out better, or we can come out worse, or we can die, and none of us knows which it will be, and we're all screaming at those in power to make the moral choice, to choose better.

...

Disease does not have a narrative meaning. It does not have an eye for poetry, or twists, or closure. The only meaning is in how we respond. So I watch Contagion over and over and over again. Because I need to practice emotions, and I need to live in a bounded world, and I need to believe we can choose better."

End quote. If you don't mind me stretching a scientific metaphor, fiction is a like a thought experiment, and we need to publish negative experimental results. Terra Ignota and Walkaway are like thought experiments that present a hypothesis and show us those formulations bring mixed efficacy, but there is some efficacy. UNSONG shows us collapse. We need positive and negative experimental results.

But what do you think of the concepts we've talked about in this episode? Leave comments in the Patreon. How do you square the circle? What I would most like to know is, are you building civic strength in your local communities through organization work? Or what other approach to collapse do you take? Do you enjoy speculating about in-universe explanations for events in the novel, based on how you imagine systems like placebomancy would work? Or is that missing the point and you think it should be thought about on an entirely metaphorical level? What further reading and listening do you recommend? And what would you like to hear next?

The episodes of this podcast, not counting this one, have been an actual audiobook. You put the files in a folder, or if you're oldschool, burn them to CD, and leave out this one, and what you have is an audiobook. That's why there have been no intros, no outros, no announcements or commentary. It's not going to be a collection of podcast episodes. It's going to be a finished audiobook. I'll go back and re-record a few episodes if my Patrons tell me they really need it. I'll fix up all the metadata. Then I'll offer that version as a single downloadable folder, and there it will rest.

However, frankly, I don't want to stop. So with the gracious permission of Scott Alexander, I'll be reading my favorite works of his short fiction in the upcoming episodes. Eventually, I'll run out and need to narrate something else, and it will probably be confusing if it stayed in the same podcast feed and the same Patreon, but we're set for episodes for this feed and this Patreon at least until early 2021. I'm in talks with various authors, some of whom already have publishers, so we'll need to work out audio rights, but when I can let you know, I will.

UNSONG matters to me a lot. What a trip it's been! As you can tell, I went on quite a journey. Glad I went on it with you. It has been a great pleasure to perform it for you. I would just like to say to each of you how much I appreciate your listenership. Until the next episode, have a great day.

Music is Living Voyage by Kevin McCloud of Incompetech.com. This podcast is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0 license.

Mild spoilers for season 1 of the 2019 TV show "The Mandalorian", but no big plot twists are spoiled. And if you still haven't watched it, maybe you are only pretending to believe you're going to watch it? In which case, you should read this anyway.

The Mandalorian reminds me of what David Chapman and I talked about in a recent bonus episode of my podcast, an interview about "Pretending To Believe".

There's an old joke that goes, "Protestants don't recognize the Pope, Calvinists don't recognize the Sinner's Prayer, and Baptists don't recognize other Baptists in a liquor store."

When the main character, Din Djarin, says he never removes his helmet in front of another living thing, he is completely sincere. He also believes the fellow extremists in his covert of Mandalorians never remove their helmets. But they don't know each other's faces. So how would he know if they took off the armor and walked around Navarro right in front of him? The whole point of that tradition is that they don't know each other's faces. That's the active ingredient, don't you see? I think most of them probably blow off some steam from time to time so they don't go out of their minds. It's what makes the whole thing work.

When they intone THIS IS THE WAY, and project so much confidence to each other, they cooperate in a tacit deal. "I'll pretend in front of you that I never take off my helmet, to bolster your resolve. In return, you'll pretend in front of me, to bolster mine. If we pretend HARD ENOUGH that THIS IS THE WAY, we'll be bolstered despite the fact that we both know it's probably pretend." And it works. They need each other for this. Such is the group dynamics of extremism.

This is sometimes called "preference falsification." Your preference is to take off your helmet, but you falsify that to say you don't want to take off your helmet ever, because everybody's doing it. Unfortunately, when one has been bolstered in the firm resolve of falsifying one's own preferences, one starts accusing everyone outside of one's own faction of being the real extremists. For example, it has become common on the internet to put on a big show of performative cruelty toward the oppressed. They mis-use the phrase "virtue signaling" to describe others who fail to abandon all compassion. That's a waste; they ruined the phrase "virtue signaling". As anthropological concepts in their original context, virtue signaling and preference falsification are some of the most important insights of the past few decades. It's tough to make sense of culture without them.

The old-timer Mandalorians, like the Forgemaster, know perfectly well they take their own helmets off around somebody somewhere, and they are pretty sure the others probably do, too. They are 100-percent sincere in the sense of 100 percent committed, but also zero-percent sincere in that they know it's not true. Din Djarin is 100-percent sincere in both ways, more's the pity. Woe unto Din Djarin, for only when one is that literalistic can one become disillusioned. The Forgemaster understands this; you can hear her voice dripping with it when Din turned down a sigil because he sincerely thought he was supposed to earn it, and she said "ooooohhh kaaaaay..." This kid is making it hard to play along. Rude. The Forgemaster is first-generation, so she's in on the wink-and-nod. It's only the second-generation like Din who are not in on it. Those are the true believers. They will eventually go down the path of disillusionment which Luke Skywalker displayed in The Last Jedi.

After the covert was raided, there was pile of helmets, but no bodies. From that, I concluded that when the Empire caught wind of the covert, half of the Mandalorians put their helmet on the pile when no one was looking, and snuck out the back door. No one knows what they look like, so none of their fellow Mandalorians were any the wiser, even if they boarded the same spacecraft off of Navarro the next day.

Baptists don't recognize other Baptists in a liquor store.

"They can never put the helmet on again." Of course they do. What's to stop them? The only way an extreme movement like that could persist is to design its beliefs in such a way that, if it's not true, no one can tell. I am totally sold on the plausibility of this creed; it checks out with my understanding of group dynamics.

I've been reading "Ritual And Its Consequences: An Essay On The Limits Of Sincerity", a work of ethnomethodology and anthropology, which has a lot more to say about different modes of "belief" that can be said to be held "sincerely". I am used to assuming complete and total sincerity from myself and others, inward and outward being the same. That just got me confused for my entire life. According to the authors, not only does this assumption not hold up under scrutiny, it's far from common. According to this essay, pure authenticity is a very specifically weird trait of the culture I've been raised in. And also, they say the contradictions are potentially debilitating. Sometimes you just do things to do things; these helmets and prayers and other rituals are like music or dance. They are not "belief". We only mistake them for belief. You just do it. There is a mode of sincerity, common to the rest of the human race, in which one can try on different selves like putting on a helmet. There is no one true self which is consistent at all times.

They did not title their book "Ritual And Its Benefits", so there's definitely a light side and a dark side to it. This is ... A way.

I recommend the book "The Art Of Gathering" by Priya Parker, about organizing parties, book clubs, conferences, dinners, festivals, or any other gathering. Here are some highlights. Any mischaracterizations are my own over-simplification. For the sake of concision, my summary may convey the impression she does not argue these points. But she does so, convincingly.

If you have a clear idea of a special purpose for coming together, you can create a separate world with temporary rules that serve that purpose. The best thing you can do to help each bit of planning is to choose a purpose that is specific enough.

If you find you're not willing to change any decisions to fit that purpose, it was not your real purpose; the organizers were just trying to flatter each other. Which is nice, but whatever won out is your real purpose, so cross off the first one and write down that one. Example: An annual book festival said their purpose was "bring together the community." "Okay, before each panel, have the authors read a prompt to the audience about the topic. Each audience member will talk to the person sitting next to them about the prompt for five minutes." "No, the authors wouldn't like that." "Okay, then the authors are your real purpose. Which is enough; no need to inflate it with pomposity."

Another clue that your purpose is not specific enough, is when everyone is equally suited to attend it. Only include people who are needed for the specific thing the gathering will accomplish. It's crucial to keep people out who sap the energy from the specific plan. You can design plenty of other gatherings suitable to invite them to, for which they would not be a third wheel. Example: Some college friends in the seventies had an annual trip to the bay. One of them asked if he could invite a plus-one. Then a few of them said, "hey, you don't know this, but this is the only time of the year we can be out and gay, because we developed trust with these specific people. Is it okay if we keep it to the existing group?" The person who wanted to bring a plus-one stopped attending, but if they had opened up the trip to anyone, most attendees would have dropped out, and it would have been the last time they did the trip. So it was good they had the conversation. They discovered something unique they got out of the gathering, whereas if all they wanted was any old trip with anyone, they could do that any time. Their connection was enhanced.

Do some prep work by designing a unique event with its own plan. When you invite people, tell them the plan and see if they're interested in attending this cool new type of gathering. If not, no problem, you'll still invite them to the next thing, but this special event is not a random hangout. We're spicing things up.

Exercising too little authority during a gathering is just as bad as the overuse of authority. A laissez-faire attitude of just letting anything happen is selfish. If your guests are bored, or wracked with social anxiety because of aimlessness, it's because there is no structure. Take responsibility for your guests having a good time. Again, structure should be within reason; it should never be because you can't take risks.

If it's a party, do some prep work to find out commonalities among party guests so you can help make connections between them. Example: Ask each guest in advance if they wish to voluntarily submit a trivia fact about themselves. Print them on slips of paper without identifying details, and hand them at random to guests during the party as a conversation starter, with instructions to ask around until they match the trivia fact to a person.

Create some kind of threshold, literal or metaphorical, ushering attendees into the event, that feels like leaving behind the day-to-day world, into the temporary world.

Don't open or close with things like parking announcements and thanking corporate sponsors and the like. Only open with something suitably ceremonious. It should make the guests feel like you are all honoring each other by being there because of how awesome they are, and, paradoxically, that they are all lucky to be there.

Well then, if you don't do it as opening or closing, when do you do it? Second to last, before the closing moment. If it's possible to put that info into the invitation, do that instead.

The closing sendoff moment should be satisfying and ceremonious too-- a moment of emotional reflection, or tying together the whole experience, or whatever relates to the mood and purpose of the event. Design that to give a sense that once more you cross a threshold, back into the world, taking something with you.

If this sounded interesting to you, I strongly recommend you read the book for more details.

A week ago, I attended Vibecamp in Austin, Texas, as I said in my last journal entry, "Vibeology, Vibeography, Vibeonomy". I made new friends, ran some events, and was really impressed with the operational execution of the organizers. I hoped to come back with some insights about scenes and groups, and I think I did.

I would have been more directly involved with running Vibecamp, were it not for an unexpected interruption in my income which made it uncertain during January whether I could attend. A wonderful friend helped me out with airfare, and deserves all my thanks. Unfortunately, my main form of enjoyment these days tends to be less in direct sensory experiences, and more in the satisfaction of a job well done. Vibecamp was an important opportunity for me to change as a person, as you will see, and get in touch with direct sensory enjoyment. Currently, there is nowhere more promising for that personal growth to occur.

Thursday
Friday
Friday Night
Saturday
Sunday

THURSDAY BEFORE VIBECAMP

On Thursday morning, the Vibecamp organizers emailed us with their Community Values, containing the rules, and the vision and mission statement. Yes, the day before the event.

No one who I talked to at Vibecamp knew about that page.

Then I made a mistake and said the following openly on the Vibecamp Discord:

The new rules and vision document is great, but it will not be realized because it's too little, too late. There are already 400 people attending, many of whom are absolutely not in alignment, they didn't read this document first, and there was no screening process to agree to it before registering, and now they are the organization and this document is not.

My heart is breaking because over the past twenty years, I've watched this happen over and over. The founders are almost guaranteed to be unhappy with the flame wars and conflicts and having to police other people's boundary violations-- not to mention the lack of shared values. All founders leave heartbroken and disillusioned in a few years when it diverges from their dream, just like they did at the previous organizations I've been involved with. 😢

This was poorly received, because it was an inappropriate time and place. The run-up to Vibecamp is one of those special occasions when mandatory positivity is a reasonable expectation. For another example, I would reserve my critiques of the institution of marriage for times other than wedding receptions. (Whereas, if an org has mandatory negativity, you get Left Forum.)

My vibe was that of a long beard and sackcloth and ashes, "Woe, woe unto the children of Vibecamp, harken unto the lamentation of my prophecy!"

I thought about that too late; somebody had already tried to get into it with me in the Discord. In an effort to reduce the awkwardness for others, I invited him to take the conversation to DMs, which he accepted. Here is my part of our conversation; his half is omitted for privacy:

Imagine you're talking to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Bill Murray predicts what's going to happen, and you say "just have faith", and a reasonable response from Bill Murray would be "What is different this time?"

Maybe you don't know. But perhaps years from now I'll figure it out and send you a message "Okay, here was the seed of destruction which was the common denominator in all the things I've been involved with previously."

But... what if it was luck?

"These people are good", "those people are bad", this seems to have more to do with scolding and shame/blame than it has to do with a systematic, legible, reproducible set of policies and rational procedures that can exert control to cause an outcome to be more likely. Such as "grow slowly".

Me, over & over on loop for decades: "If we want to stop having to ban so many members for leaving messes, slurs, & touching women inappropriately, maybe we shouldn't let just anybody join this hacker space who happens to have $50 in their pocket & a free Tuesday night"

Every community I've been a part of had founders and a team who were just as amazing as the organizers of Vibecamp. I'm saying that's not what makes the difference; the overall community does. And unless it's controlled, that's luck. And so, faith in the organizers is not really relevant, if they can't control the outcome. Perhaps it's just faith in whichever community shows up. i.e. the blind faith in laissez-faire which turned fun early Twitter into toxic late Twitter.

Perhaps the difference has been that my science fiction conventions and hacker spaces attracted Kegan Stage 3 conflict-averse personalities who fall victim to Geek Social Fallacy number one...

He held up DEFCON as an example of a satisfactory event that had no structure and no rules. The problems I was discussing involved excessively high openness and weak boundaries, which is not characteristic of a convention about security intrusion.

DEFCON is an interesting example of what Vibecamp calls "legibility"! So let's talk about the Vibecamp mission and vision principle of Staying Illegible. Here's an article by @natural_hazard and one by Jamie Ryan.

Legibility means being stereotyped in the public eye; the public has a clear idea of the Type of person who goes to DEFCON because it's a computer security event, so we expect a DEFCON attendee to be the "Am I Being Detained" Type Of Guy. "I just asked you how you take your coffee, so unless your password is creamandsugar you don't have to plead the Fifth." A laissez-faire unstructured environment holds together because the participants are armed with rootkits, rainbow tables, concealed firearms, and legal defense funds, if that can be called a group at all. Mutual respect based on an armed standoff is not a group in the way that Vibecamp wants to be.

So you want Vibecamp to have a principle of illegibility. Okay, I'm all in favor, but how do the event organizers prevent the community making them legible. But how. How though.

Larry Harvey founded Burning Man and he hates Burning Man now. The founders of Penguicon don't like Penguicon. The founders of i3Detroit hacker space left. The founder of Universism turned off the Universism forum and renounced the whole movement. The founders of my board game publisher want nothing to do with board games any more.

The dream of the founders always gets popularized and bastardized; that's the version that catches on with the world. Like a sand castle washed away by a vast ocean, that's what the world does if you let it.

I have enjoyed the company of many members of Twitter TPOT when we met; and I'm distressed at the thought of them leaving with a sense of the community having betrayed them.

In the runup to Vibecamp, someone I know said: "That whole scene is Kegan stage 3 people who think they are Kegan stage 5." (Here's a link to my talk on the Kegan stages.)

I suspect that person is talking about the organizers, and that might be true, but a large fraction of the surrounding community doesn't know what a Kegan stage is and just want to dance. All five stages were there in proportions similar to that of the population at large.

FRIDAY OF VIBECAMP

I went to Vibecamp in a terrible funk, waking up at 2 in the morning to catch my flight, not doing well on sleep or food in air travel all day. I was already making friends at the airport and on the bus to Vibecamp from the airport. One person responded with excitement when I mentioned having gone to regional Burning Man. When we told some of them about Burning Man, they didn't know what that was, but when I mentioned the music festival adjacent to Michigan's regional Burning Man, they had heard of it.

My friend ran registration, and I had signed up to help, but when I got there I was not actually needed for that. My normal way of integrating is to volunteer and meet other volunteers, but that wasn't in the cards for me. Reg went smoothly; I was impressed.

I rushed to set up the board game room and my track of talks. I discovered many of the problems that I had tried to warn the guy about when we planned events. We had all done the best that could realistically be done for this year without actually flying to Texas with a tape measure. It was no one's fault. But still, I was dreading what Saturday would be like; would I be desperately rushing to stay ahead of schedule?

On Friday night after running tech support for the slate of talks, I finally got to my cabin. My roommates were already asleep, so I left the lights off. There was a frigid wind off the lake on my face, but I had never seen the interior of the room in order to know how to close the windows without turning on the lights and waking thirteen strangers whose faces I had never seen.

FRIDAY NIGHT OF VIBECAMP

All night, in my imagination, I was arguing with a romantic positivity hippie with poor listening skills who just hated me bringing down his vibe. Let's call him the Egregore.

"You should have gotten to know your cabin-mates online in advance!" said the Egregore. "That's the theme of the whole event!" I don't get to know people well online, I said. "Then I guess you're not a Viber, are you?"

Egregore was also confused about why I would organize a slate of talks and a board game room, since those activities are all up in one's head. "The point of Vibecamp", said Egregore, "is to be embodied!" I said I wanted there to be a gradual slope into the swimming pool of embodiment rather than just a high-dive. "And why do you think that's your job or your problem?" It's my problem because, if it's just a high-dive, then, only people who are already embodied would attend future Vibecamps, and I wouldn't want to attend any more. And then I would not break out of my rigid self-image, into the kind of person who enjoys dancing. And if I won't help contribute to the future I want to see, who will? To which Egregore responded that I "shouldn't try to change things, just experience them. Stop bringing a controlling intention."

I paced up and down on the docks until the sun came up. As David Chapman pointed out in "The puzzle of meaningness", the meaning of my relationship to this Vibecamp and all future Vibecamps will be colored retroactively by how its vibe deteriorates over time, just like other organizations I've gotten emotionally-invested in. What is different about this, which would cause it to be different this time? The first year or two is crucial to set a group identity and purpose. All the books I've read about groups confirm two things that happen when participants have vague romanticized expectations:

1. Expectations will collide with each other. Unresolvable acrimony and recriminations result from failing to establish clear shared expectations early. This is solved by growing slowly enough to confirm shared expectations, not by inviting 400 people all at once.

2. Over the years as disappointed people leave, the not-disappointed people remain. They are easier to satisfy, but that also means they're comfortable with the culture outside the group, and more and more similar to it over the years as membership turns over. Lacking any distinction between inside and outside, the group loses its reason to exist and dissolves.

No amount of "just vibe, man" will solve that, and I don't know how much I can go through that again. Am I lighting a powder keg that will go off a few years from now? What is different about this, which will cause it to be different this time?

SATURDAY OF VIBECAMP

In the light of day I discovered my cabin was co-ed. Someone on Twitter estimated attendance as "1/4 men with long hair, 1/4 men with short hair, 1/4 men with buns, 1/4 women". That tracks.

My cabin was the Coffee And No Cigarettes Cabin, so I rushed to help set up coffee. It was in the tea house, a small single-room building with mattresses all over the floor for cuddle piles. There was a huge traffic jam because more people wanted to be in that room than could fit in it, so I set up my coffee machine by leaning in through the door, amid a constant flow of coffee/tea seekers hovering at the door and giving up.

My convention-organizer brain switched on, and I observed aloud that this was a traffic-flow problem and we needed a drink-service table outside the room. But no one was interested, and it would have required people to clear out and re-organize. Too late.

I knew that I needed to take better care of my physical needs than the day before, so I got breakfast and was in a better headspace with which to conduct my inquiries for which I attended the event.

I attended the Poetry Open Mic and recited my favorite poem, which I have memorized. It's in iambic pentameter and it's about smart glasses. I have an intense memory of someone smiling at me from the audience. The rest of the poetry was how modern slam poetry usually is.

The one event I wanted the most to see was an in-person salon by Interintellect, which normally hosts online salons. This was to be on the topic of online communities materializing physically. It was directly applicable to what was weighing on my mind. I was a few minutes late and they were not in the scheduled location. I later found out they were too close to karaoke and couldn't hear each other, so they moved and didn't post about it to the Discord.

Instead, I went to Circling and Authentic Relating exercises, and had intense interactions that I greatly appreciated. Somebody there described it as "group meditation", which I don't understand but would like to understand.

In the first Authentic Relating exercise, I got to silently stare into someone's eyes for two minutes-- a highlight of the weekend for me! I'd like to do that more.

Then I did an exercise with one guy where we were supposed to take turns just listening for three minutes, and repeat back what they said as close to verbatim as possible. I described much of what I wrote in this blog post so far. The guy repeated me almost verbatim, then said he wished I weren't carrying my burden. He didn't understand that my enjoyment works best through active contribution, not passive consumption. But I appreciated his gesture.

The next guy who I did this exercise with was clearly an Authentic Relating expert! Rarely have I ever met someone who got directly to what I was talking about! I was impressed. I can only hope I reflected back to my authentic relating partners as well as they reflected back to me.

Then we formed two Circles because there were so many people. My Authentic Relating partners were all in the other circle. There was a moment where somebody in my circle said he subscribed to my Patreon. That was gratifying. The Circle talked about how we felt about Vibecamp, then complained about us doing that, then got meta to figure out what they want us to do instead, then complained about going meta, then got meta to ask what they want us to do instead of talking about Vibecamp or going meta, and then our time was up.

Then I attended the last half of a session on Alexander Technique, which is about awareness of one's surroundings, but also a lot of other things, and cannot be done justice here with any summary.

I saw someone walking around with board games & immediately befriended him. I stocked the board game room with a whole suitcase full of games; he and another guy did likewise. That successfully attracted the people who wanted to play games. The most-played game was Zendo, a game of deduction/induction. I made a lot of friends there.

One of them asked me if I wanted an NFT. I started formulating an explanation of the severely vulnerable connection which the Metamask extension forms between a bank account and scammers (trying to avoid sounding like the "Am I Being Detained" Type Of Guy). But before I could say any of that, suddenly he handed me a physical game token on which was printed "New Friend Token"! I treasure this! A highlight of the weekend.

As we asked each other how our weekend had gone, my fellow board game players were very interested in hearing what was on my mind. I wanted to know more about illegibility, and what Vibing is.

They told me earlier that day, there was an event in which someone asked the room "True/False? You support Hitler more than the median person in this room." Somebody got angry and started pushing somebody (this is hearsay). The consensus at Vibecamp seemed to be that the person asking that question was Vibing, and pushing people about it was Not Vibing.

"Illegibility" is understood to mean that you can walk into a bunch of different rooms at Vibecamp and become a different kind of person who is comfortable fitting into that vibe. And if anybody can say "That's the Vibecamp type", based on common knowledge, then Vibecamp has become too legible. My guess is that the pushing person thought Vibecamp was legible as being an event for a Hippie Type Of Person.

"Vibing" comes from the idea of a post on Twitter or Instagram, that creates a momentary sensory impression which evokes a mood.

As a result, "Vibing with other people" is commonly understood to mean "synchronizing with the majority of other people present, or quietly noping-out of the interaction and leaving them to it."

Is Vibing about "popularity with cool trendsetters" -- a framing which would let me dismiss it as superficial -- or is it about friendship skill?

I got some decent sleep on Saturday night.

SUNDAY OF VIBECAMP

Sunday morning I put on my Coffee Pope costume. I arrived at the tea-house to find a coffee service table outside the door. My cabin-mate took my advice about traffic control to heart!

I performed an abridged version of my Coffee Ritual, dispensing the sacrament to two congregants who seemed amused by the concept. We raised our cups to the east and said "God, I needed that!" I then went back and took the costume off. I was the only person in costume during the weekend, that I saw.

Things like costumes, or my giant parade puppet, are some of my normal social success crutches. But they are Projects, and require Planning, which seems to be almost the opposite of Vibing.

I had breakfast with a friend of mine and his friend who were curious to share opinions about Vibecamp, what all this might be, and where it might go. They both made several observations which I found remarkable:

They observed many people in This Part Of Twitter are well-practiced at curating their timeline and might be comfortable enforcing some kind of minimal standard of conduct. Whereas, I'm used to nerd scenes with a cycle of people-pleasing and exploding, where conflicts & differences are never resolved.

At Burning Man, you get an alternate persona, your "burn name". But that means you have just two identities, the "default" world, and your burn name. This seems to imply that the Burning Man principle of Radical Self-Expression encourages burners to express one True Self, and there is one false self in the default world. By contrast, many people in This Part Of Twitter have multiple alts. These might habituate them to constructing a different way of being, so they might walk into different rooms at Vibecamp and do code-switching. Perhaps this will make allowance for a greater amount of heterodoxy. Is this part of the atomized mode or fluid mode of social organization?

At the very least, these might be partial answers to "If Vibecamp is going to go differently, then what is different this time which would cause that to happen?"

It's very likely that the most rewarding thing about Vibecamp will be staying in an AirBnB before and after the weekend. I predict that's where most of the friendship magic will happen. Think of it as a cultural archipelago of small groups of friends who know each other, but it will become normal for Vibers to hop back and forth to visit different AirBnBs with different norms and activities.

At the closing ceremony, bubbles floated through the air as the Vibecamp choir sang "I Will Be In Love". There was a lot of intense abstract meaningfulness about having big feelings. I consider this, on the whole, a good thing. There is a risk of mandatory positivity. There are many in TPOT who say that they hate their self for no reason, and some of the discourse around Vibecamp on Twitter since the event has reminded me of what's called "love bombing". Someone who hates themselves, being love-bombed, is a dangerous combination to look out for. But look at it this way. There was a talk on drug harm reduction at Vibecamp on Friday night. Think of what I am bringing as Narcan for meaningfulness. You don't think a drug harm reduction person is against drugs, right?

If we don't analyze, understand, evaluate, and judge the underlying process taking place in Circling, or on a dance floor, or in a church, or an activist group, or any other social dynamic, then it's something being done to us. And being done by us to others. I am aware that we are lighting a fuse. If guided wisely, it can be fireworks.

On March 4 - 6 I'm going to be attending the first Vibecamp, in a summer camp cabin facility outside Austin, Texas. It's for a loose collection of Twitter users who refer to themselves tongue-in-cheek as Ingroup, with a vibe that feels to me to be ha-ha-only-serious. They're associated with a movement called post-rationalism, which emerged from a Silicon-Valley based movement of internet bloggers called rationalism, primarily centered around a website called LessWrong. (This is not the same as rationalisms as they have existed in most civilizations since ancient Greece, reaching its peak in the early 20th century. I heard this 21st-century rationalist scene referred to as "rationalpunk", which seems apt.)

David Chapman, whose books I have been narrating on my podcast, uses the term "stance" to mean a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Most stances (One True Life Purpose, Materialism, All Is One, True Self, etc) get in the way of us seeing complexity and nuance. A stance is not a worked-out ideology, but is simpler and more foundational, like an attitude. He also has a term "emotional texture" which a stance has; it is a collection of emotions found together when in a stance, such as wonderment, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation being typical of the complete stance.

Maybe a third category is "vibe". For a long time I was confused by what the word "vibe" means as it is being used on Twitter. I have come to understand the following:

Vibes are somewhat akin to stances plus emotional textures, but for scenes.
Stances and emotional textures are not the same thing, but some combination of them is a vibe, but more complex.
Postrationalism, as it is now, is probably less a coherent "ism" than a scene.
To the degree that there is an "ism" in 2022 postrationalism, it is recognizing that the explicit content of a scene's texts or platform does not explain the phenomenon of what's causing the scene to cohere, and that mostly the vibe of that scene's exemplars does explain it.
The Crystal Palace had a Queen Victoria vibe, the Merry Band Of Pranksters bus in the 60's had Ken Kesey's vibe, 90's subcultures especially had vibes like punk rock musicians, but vibes in our internet-atomized mode of social organization are more fleeting and combinatorial.
A shared vibe, if it coheres, plays a role in what Chapman calls the bridge to stage 5 meta-systematicity-- a bridge must "challenge", "support", "confirm". Challenge the old stage, support while only partially in the new stage, and confirm expressions of the new stage.
Vibes involve norms, and norms cannot be adequate to be all of "challenge, support, confirm", but is a not-insignificant part; other things like new markets, laws, and tech must be part of it (hat tip to Lawrence Lessig for the norms/markets/laws/tech schema).

A blog post by Rival Voices (@nosilverv on Twitter) caused postrationalism vibes to finally snap into focus for me.

Here's Chapman's post, "The Psychological Anatomy Of A Stance". I wonder if there could be an article "The Psychological Anatomy Of A Vibe"? Vibes seem less anatomically simple than stances.

I'm excited about Vibecamp. I think there is an unprecedented level of openness in Ingroup Twitter to meta-systematicity (I'm in the "meta-rationalist" camp I guess), which I have been narrating in my podcast. There was effectively no screening process; the closest thing to asking if we are a post-rationalist was just asking us what our favorite egregore was. And so I believe something will probably happen which happened at the Critical Rationalism Weekend I attended in Philadelphia in November: the social scene is going to be mostly rationalists with no prefix "critical", "post", "meta", or anything else. At both these events, the website, the communications channels, and the name of the event send a clear message: be a good guest and don't act like The Critical Rationalism Weekend is not for critical rationalists or Vibecamp isn't for post-rationalists. But there are 400 attendees at Vibecamp, so post-rationalists will be so rare that I will only occasionally encounter their vibe.

And yeah, there will be some pre-systematic Romantics and woo people at Vibecamp, but there almost always has been in every vibrant and interesting scene, and there always will be. They will be so poorly-systematic that they will have no effective screening process (because that would be systematic) so they will get outnumbered instantly and their dysfunction won't be reflected in decision-making and norms. It's going to be mostly rationalist dysfunctions instead.

So let's go back to the essay I mentioned about "A Bridge To Meta-Rationality Vs Civilizational Collapse". In it, Chapman said that bridge must be an intellectual and social framework, and its institutions must challenge previous-stage thinking feeling and acting, support its members while they are having trouble getting to the next stage, and confirm next-stage functioning with praise and rewards. What gets confirmed is systematicity in those for whom it's developmentally appropriate, and meta-systematicity in those for whom that is developmentally appropriate. I think Vibecamp, as part of the social framework, mostly will be compatible with that.

Chapman's Bridge essay ends with: "It will take collaborative construction by many contributors, though". I'm giving thought to the interplay of two different forms of contribution: vibes, and content. Let's take for example, the content of meta-systematicity. For examples, I would think of Chapman, Robert Kegan, Brian Cantwell Smith, and several other living figures on Chapman's Further Reading list. Obviously such work is crucial.

And yet the Bridge article emphasized how the bridge must facilitate emotional acceptability in order to identify one's self with a higher stage, and social networks to support meta-systematicity. I think Vibecamp will play a role in that.

tldr: Maintaining dissatisfaction on the long-term is a skill. If you are constantly forced to pretend to want things, you risk acclimating, so you need to remain attuned to your real feelings. This essay considers whether I inappropriately discount the meaningfulness of things, or correctly identify meaningfulness only where it really exists. How to have serenity without complacency.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

- "Harlem", by Langston Hughes

1. Eternalism vs Nihilism

For the last several months, David Chapman has been working on writing the nihilism section of the audiobook I have been narrating, Meaningness. He invented the verb "nihilizing" because in his thorough review of the literature, it turns out there is no coherent ideology or "ism". Nihilizing is not a philosophy; it's something you do when you discount the meaningfulness of patterns. In his framework, the word "eternalism" is the opposite tendency. To "eternalize" is to deny the nebulosity of things and imbue everything with far more pattern (more meaningfulness) than it actually has. Nihilism fixates nebulosity and denies pattern; eternalism fixates pattern and denies nebulosity. What he calls the complete stance does neither of those things.

The question readers need to ask themselves in the Nihilism section is not "am I a Nihilist", because it's a thing you do, not a thing you are. Instead the question is "in any given specific situation, does there exist meaningfulness which I am inappropriately discounting?" That's the most common way in which I try to apply what I learned from the book.

Nihilism is often defined by eternalists as denying the meaning of their pet eternalism. In day-to-day life, without reference to anything written in a philosophy department, the most common way for nihilism to come to mind is to disagree about meaning and be suspected of nihilism by others. So, in each such disagreement, I ask myself two questions:

Is this a situation where eternalists see straw-nihilists whenever someone denies whatever meaning the eternalists fixated?

Is this a situation where nihilists look at something that someone cares about, and dismiss it by fixating the nebulosity in it, without asking the antidote question "is there actually some pattern of meaningfulness here?"

Sometimes it could be both simultaneously.

2. The Mainstream Escalator

The solo-polyamory blogger Aggie Sez invented the metaphor of the "relationship escalator", a series of milestones that are considered a metric of relationship success, but which solo-polyamorists (such as I) do not practice. To extend Aggie's metaphor, there are many escalators in different domains of life, such as career or spiritual practice. It's hard not to turn these milestones into fixed meanings, hence the automated staircase-- an escalator. While milestones do have their own patterns of meaningfulness, I deny their fixed meaningfulness, and I'm not on an escalator. Therefore, I appear nihilistic.

"But Matt, non-conformists are never really non-conformist, because they conform to each other." Yes, if mainstream-vs-indie is a pattern, you just identified the nebulosity in it, granted. But the pattern is real too. Each time you make a life decision, it's mainstream if you maximize how many people in your society will understand your decision without you explaining it. If explaining your decisions is uncomfortable to you, you're a mainstream person.

My communities are very indie. A lot of participants in, let's say, polyamorous communities (having mentioned soly poly, let's stick with polyamory as an example) are still deeply socially-embedded with those in the monogamous mainstream-- particularly their families of origin. And so one of the main topics of discussion in polyamory groups is complaining about having the same conversation over and over with people in their life. "Have you reached this escalator milestone yet?" the mainstream asks the indie. "No? How about this other milestone, or this one, or that one?"

No one asks me those questions, because I've set up my life to almost never have to field those questions. A big part of how I did that, was rejecting more-or-less-all meaningfulness, in career, workplace friendships, spirituality, marriage, monogamy, family, pets, and parenting, among many other things. And now nobody expresses confusion any more, because either they get me, or they don't expect to understand.

I base most life choices on a criteria: "An association only has meaning to the degree that participants can walk away from it at any time without much in the way of consequences-- outside of losing the direct benefit of the association itself." If walking away means they would suffer severe consequences, that changes the meaning of the association-- the meaning of staying changes into "to avoid consequences."

I call it "landing the plane": you don't just grab a parachute and bail out to leave me holding the bag to honor the commitments we made together, but. But. You can land the plane and get off. External entanglements seem, to me, to act as a poison to meaningfulness.

Decide for yourself whether that's nihilizing. I'm open to feedback in the comments.

Employment is one of the world's biggest eternalisms, in my view. It is the place where I experience the most pain about this, because I've mostly escaped the other eternalisms and comfortably accepted the limits that placed on me. I've gotten enormous fulfillment from work I've done voluntarily, and by comparison, how I pay the bills has very little to do with my identity. That has come with a great deal of sacrifice. But, if I completely turn my back on having a career, that decision would destroy all my relationships through poverty, and I would end up homeless. That would be a bridge too far, even for me. And so employment is the last foothold of the mainstream in my life.

I describe employment as a hostage situation, marriage as a mexican standoff, and parenting as serving as an incubation husk from which my future enemy will emerge, like an Alien bursting from my chest cavity and complaining to its therapist that I never took an interest in it. Am I nihilizing? Am I fixating nebulosity? Before I read Chapman's work I never thought about it that way.

I'm careful when to burst out into one of my lectures about these topics. This life strategy places a lot of social limits on me, as I'm sure you can imagine. For example, I go through conversations with my chosen loved ones, pretending to care about things they are telling me about, that I have already told them I find meaningless. (Of course I say it's meaningless "for me", not "for them", Sartre Kierkegaard Camus argle bargle.) My lover's children. My friend's career ambitions. My ex-wife's Buddhism. My partner's marriage. My roommate's dogs. I tell them my policy: my policy is that I let it be established what I think about things, once. And then I don't belabor it further, unless they want to talk about my views again. To be in their lives, the price of admission which I accept that I must pay is to quietly listen to them talk about things I find boring or (occasionally) actively harmful, and I am agreeable and congenial about it. And of course, the price of admission they must pay to me, is that they never ask me "Have you reached this escalator milestone yet?"

If you know me, you're familiar with me embracing things very enthusiastically. I'm known for how much passion shines through when you talk to me, and that's the main way I see myself. The bigger picture is all the "NO". No kids, marriage, pets, church. All of this is, in my view, the "no" that allows space for my "yes" to be a big "yes".

One thing I feel very excited about is the topic of "How To Become Interested In Things You Are Not Interested In". For years, I have wanted to give that talk at Penguicon, a convention which is a ground zero for becoming interested in things. But I have never found adequate conclusions about it. Studying how to get out of nihilism into the complete stance seems like just the thing.

3. Stoicism vs Miserabilism

I wrote this blog post last year, although I haven't posted it until now. I was driving home from a bullshit workplace team socializing activity at a bar, where I stood up and walked out at 5:30 on the dot, in front of everybody. In the car, I used speech-to-text to dictate this entire blog post, more or less. It's not just about eternalism vs nihilism, but also about stoicism vs miserabilism. Where nihilism denies all meaningfulness, miserabilism assigns meaningfulness to everything, but the meaning is that it's bad.

Stoicism: Stay at the bar and pretend to socialize with co-workers because *that's your job*.

Miserabilism: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because everything is bullshit.

Nihilism: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because everything is meaningless. Or stay because everything is meaningless.

Dissatisfaction practice: Stand up and walk out at precisely 5:30 because my podcast needs my attention, and I deem it to have meaningfulness.

Stoicism vs miserabilism might be a dimension of meaningness, similiar to reasonable respectability vs romanticized rebellion. (But of course, because dimensions of meaningness are a pattern, they are as nebulous as everything else.)

There is something on which I'm not in alignment with stoicism. The stoic philosopher Zeno used the thought experiment of a dog tied to a cart. Zeno said that the dog would be happier to relax and follow the cart, than to resist and suffer. After all, if the dog broke free and ran off, it would die of exposure and starvation. Personally, I have a lot of respect for pets who insist on running away and die in the wild.

Stoics might mistake this for something akin to miserabilism, but I draw a distinction between serenity and complacency. Complacency prevents disappointed feelings. I'd rather keep the disappointed feelings but get rid of disappointed expectations.

In order to improve my situation on the long term, it's necessary to remain dissatisfied. Long-term dissatisfaction is a skill. The problem is that we sometimes become the person who we are pretending to be. In the workplace, we are required to pretend for decades. In order to keep focused on what brings us joy and fulfillment on evenings and weekends, then we need to counter the process of acclimation, with something which is the opposite of a gratitude practice. Gratitude practice is great. I love gratitude practice! But I also don't want toxic positivity. Toward this end, I maintain a practice to try to keep myself uncomfortable on a regular basis, constantly searching for solutions which might not exist, even if it takes years, or decades, or never. Stoics would probably not approve of what I'm doing to myself, and ask me what on earth I think my dissatisfaction practice is good for.

It's important not to numb oneself to negative emotions, and stay attuned to one's feelings. The last thing I want would be to spend decades losing touch with what I actually want, and have a mid-life crisis. I have to ask certain questions: When should I feel unhappy or angry or humiliated? Sometimes it's right to feel those things. I don't just decide in advance which feelings I want to feel. That's what feelings are good for. When you are socialized to erase your own dissatisfactions and just conform to want the same things that everyone around you want, you are left mainly with two emotions: shame and social anxiety. At that point, the main issue is that you are not on your own side. When you are exploited, you'll respond in a way that makes you complicit. I have a good relationship with myself, and my partnership with myself comes, if not exactly first, then at least equal to my partnerships with others. My dissatisfaction practice is just as much a form of personal maintenance as gratitude practice is.

4. Self-Pity/Resentment vs Dissatisfaction

We probably can all think of people whose self-pity and resentment are intractable and unhelpful. There's an emotional bad habit where you resist solutions to your problems in order to feel self-pity and nurse a grievance, because it feels better than resolving a grievance. Dissatisfaction practice is different from this, in that there's far more mindfulness to it, and it's combined with gratitude practice. Dissatisfaction practice is about constantly looking for solutions. If you're in a frying pan, sometimes the only way out is into the fire, because the fire surrounds the pan on all sides-- but beyond that is the range top. Or, in other situations, there are only frying pans and fires as far as the eye can see. It's okay for it to be out of the fire into another, cooler, frying pan. The person drowning in self-pity and resentment will just sit there and fry.

Sometimes the some of the things I'm dissatisfied with are unlikely to ever change, or if they do change, it won't be much. I understand the concept of having the serenity with which to accept the things that you cannot change, but I'm careful to define how to distinguish serenity from complacency. Serenity gets rid of destructive expectations. Complacency gets rid of negative feelings. But you need your negative feelings.

And so my approach to employment is to remind myself constantly to be unhappy. Will I someday support myself entirely with Kickstarters and my Patreon and Buymeacoffee and be happy with how I earn an income? Maybe. But even if I never do, I I will gradually get out of each frying pan into a less-hot frying pan. At no point will I tell myself it's not a frying pan in order to feel good. Instead of having a goal which is "feeling good", I want to have goals to feel good about, and I don't want to feel good about them until I achieve them. Even if I never achieve them.

5. Pre-Defined Emotional Goals

What I have pointed out here is a problem inherent in evaluating based on a pre-defined emotional goal: you have to feel positive feelings and avoid feeling negative feelings. On this basis, someone in the grip of nihilism can object to the arguments David Chapman made on the 190 proof nihilism page in Meaningness, because they can seem, at first glance, to have a pre-defined emotional goal. What Chapman is pointing out in the Nihilism section is that the person experiencing hardcore nihilism is also pursuing a pre-defined emotional goal.

The Creation Museum in Kentucky is a Christian museum of evolution denial, one of the pinnacles of contemporary eternalism. It displays pseudoscientific evidence for the creation of the earth in seven days, and against evolution, interspersed with displays containing arguments about societal breakdown due to turning away from biblical literalism. What struck me most was the first room after the lobby, which has a diorama of a paleontologist working in the dirt. The signage, video, and audio in this room explains the concept of presuppositions. Before entering the rest of the museum, here we are told that each museum guest has already made up their mind that evolution is real, or already made up their mind that the earth was created in six literal days. "The evolutionist in this diorama", the signage tell us, "interprets all the evidence he sees through the presupposition that God does not exist, so that he does not have to obey God."

That's a bad room with bad arguments which undermine the very possibility of due process in evaluating anything. Because of the residue of my resistance and fear toward those bad arguments, part of me reacts negatively to the list at the end of the page about 190 proof nihilism. The emotional goal underlying the presuppositions of some nihilists, as I understand it, is probably a resistance to complacency-- a resistance to presuppositions driven by emotional goals. A resistance, ironically, which undermines itself. One can never claim that somehow, 190 proof nihilism has not had its due process in being evaluated.

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I formed the following list of technical skills in front-end web development, helping to develop a career progression track for front-end devs at our company. When do you ask for a title change and a pay raise as a front-end web developer? And which skills do you talk about to justify it? At the higher levels your qualifications will mostly be leadership skills, not just the technical skills. But for the sake of length, I'm going to focus on technical skills here.

There's a lot to learn in front-end web development. So much that you will never need most of it at any given employer you are likely to work for (they'll all require different parts to a greater or lesser degree for different projects). Once you reach the level of a senior front-end developer, or close to it, there are plenty of high-dive boards in the "deep end of the swimming pool". Fortunately, the "pool" has a shallow end which gets deeper on a gradual slope. That's helpful for learning when you're starting out!

Some experienced devs might wonder why some things are not in an earlier level; like why does Local Storage and Web Sockets come so late? That's because the placement of a skill reflects the number of companies and projects likely to need it, more than it reflects its difficulty. And an employer might assign anything on this list to Junior Developers even if it's asking too much of them. That's based on the business need and whether a company can attract enough Senior Developers. So you just never know.

A lot of people will probably be upset that testing didn't come earlier, and by "earlier", I mean "first". Most companies will make lip service to testing, and then absolutely not allot the time in which to do so. Or they will do so on the back end, and not allot time for tests of the Javascript. On the one hand, every workplace is a better place to work if it has good test coverage. On the other hand, you won't be using it unless the company you work for is amazing. I'm tailoring this list of skills not to the creme de la creme who work for a Silicon Valley startup, but to non-technical people who are considering a career change and just want income security.

I like to divide technical skills into four major categories, each with a large number of skills: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a smattering of miscellaneous things you're expected to do (version control, task runners, configuring DNS).

I also like to divide technical skills in those four categories into five levels: Associate, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, and Senior Developer. Most companies have no level 3, but there's a lot to learn which should be rewarded with a change of title and a pay raise. With only three or four levels, if you tried to divide technical skills into a schema like the one I'm about to describe, skills within one level would be of such disparate difficulty that the schema would be incoherent. My point is, you're almost certainly underpaid compared to the amount of money you're making for your employer and the job market as it stands. Consider these levels accordingly.

Even within each level, there is a gradual slope. Each time you want a raise and promotion, you should get conversant enough to hold a conversation about most the things you need to know at the level you're aiming for, and be solid on a few of them, and passingly familiar with the rest. Also, make sure you're really solid on most of the things in the level you're looking to leave, and passingly familiar with the rest in your current level. And make very sure you've have mastered everything in the level behind you.

Level 1: Associate Developer

This is the stuff to teach yourself when you are just starting out. This is pre-Junior, mostly jobs placed through temp agencies working in content management systems.

For the HTML category, learn the following in this order:

- Gain the ability to use any HTML at all.

- Make an HTML form.

- Become passably familiar with conventions, best practices, and/or semantic markup.

- The top like five or six things about accessibility. Get the browser extension called Axe, run it on your page, and do what it says. This puts you ahead of a lot of professionals in accessibility. Learn the top like five things and it'll get you most of the way.

For the styling category, learn the following in this order:

- Gain the able to use any CSS at all.

- The Box Model.

- Floats and/or Positioning.

- Responsive design & media queries.

The scripting and miscellaneous categories have no skills in this level. You can get a job in which you never even use version control; you just click Publish in a content management system. You're not a Junior Developer yet.

Level 2: Junior Developer

For HTML, learn the following in this order:

- Rudimentary SEO (search engine optimization). Mostly just put <meta> tags in your page <head>. There is not much that can be done to improve SEO, and if someone says otherwise, it's a scam or dubious at best.

- At least 1 templating language (Razor, Jinja, Mustache, etc).

For CSS learn the following in this order:

- Grid.

- Flexbox.

- At least 1 preprocessor (Sass, Less, PostCSS, etc).

- At least 1 CSS-1st framework (Bootstrap, Materialize, etc).

For Javascript, learn the following in this order:

- Basic Javascript syntax (loops, functions, types, etc).

- DOM manipulation.

Miscellaneous:

- Learn any version control system (you should choose Git if you're given the choice) well enough to clone, pull, merge, & push.

Level 3: Intermediate Developer

HTML:

- At least 1 thing about security (HTTPS, CORS, CSP, etc).

CSS:

- Animations.

- At least 1 architecture (BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, etc).

Javascript:

- Use breakpoints in browser developer tools.

- Fetch API/Ajax (XHR).

JS + CSS:

- At least 1 of Styled Components, CSS Modules, Styled JSX, etc.

- At least 1 of Reactstrap, MaterialUI, Tailwind, Chakra, etc.

Miscellaneous:

- Basic usage of any version control repo host (Github, TFS, etc).

- Put static files on a hosting service, buy/use a domain name, set up basic DNS for it.

Level 3: Still an Intermediate Developer

Javascript:

- Javascript version 6 features (AKA: "EcmaScript 6") including its modular JS features.

- Linters and formatters (Prettier, Eslint, etc).

- At least 1 framework (React, Angular, Vue, ect).

- Scope, hoisting, event bubbling.
- The Prototype concept in Javascript.

Miscellaneous:

- At least 1 task runner (npm scripts, Gulp, etc).
- At least 1 module builder (Webpack, Rollup, Parcel, etc).

- Stash/reset/squash (etc) with any version control system.

Level 4

Javascript:

- Local Storage.

- At least 1 state manager (Redux, RxJS, Vuex, etc).

- Web Sockets.

- At least 1 testing framework (Jest, Cypress, Enzyme, etc).

- At least 1 type checker (Typescript, Flow, etc).

- Shadow DOM and/or Web Components.

- Service Workers.

- Server Side Rendering (SSR) in any framework.

- GraphQL (Apollo or Relay Modern, etc).

Dev Ops:

- Measuring/improving performance (PRPL, RAIL, devtools, etc).

What do you think?

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March 2026

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Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error

Recent Entries

The Parts About Fatalism

The Parts About Isolation

The Parts About Shame

The Parts About Suspicion

What's At Stake

THURSDAY BEFORE VIBECAMP

FRIDAY OF VIBECAMP

FRIDAY NIGHT OF VIBECAMP

SATURDAY OF VIBECAMP

SUNDAY OF VIBECAMP

1. Eternalism vs Nihilism

2. The Mainstream Escalator

3. Stoicism vs Miserabilism

4. Self-Pity/Resentment vs Dissatisfaction

5. Pre-Defined Emotional Goals

Page Summary

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