Vibecamp Report - The Narcan Of Meaningfulness

[nemorathwald]

 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.