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Are you all really “getting something” out of these “gatherings”? Why can’t it just be normal socialization and partying? Why does it have to be a business model? Why does it have to be framed like these goddesses are deigning to rent you their attention?
and yes, let's normalize paying for these gatherings in proportion to what we're getting out of them.
— brent (@_brentbaum) August 27, 2022
👀 @frideswyth you better be banking some stacks after jesscamp 2 :) https://t.co/C52v442iwH
No. A good party is worth spending a lot of money on. Collectively, voluntarily. From each as much as they can pay, to each as much as they can drink. It builds a social bond that is non-transactional. You’re valuable just for showing up.
a really great party is also worth paying a lot for 🤷♂️
— brent (@_brentbaum) August 27, 2022
Parties as a place where you pay for attention from girls is bad, actually.
4 out of 4 tpot gatherings that I've done interviews with were explicitly or implicitly women lead
— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) August 26, 2022
dudes I think you have struck gold and you should demand to pay them more so they keep coming back
I generally agree with the observation that a bunch of unsocialized nerds are growing as an outcome of partying together. That’s absolutely the point and should continue. But for a party to do this, it has to be a Temporary Autonomous Zone. The club is not a party.
Vibecamp was fine, but honestly not that impressive. If you’ve never been to summer camp for rich kids (I hadn’t), it’s fun to do climbing, kayaking, archery etc. And it’s fun to meet people that you know from the timeline. But the experienced partiers there will tell you it was tame.
What was really cool was the two weeks of self-organizing meetups and parties and activities in Austin before and after. People got Airbnbs together and threw parties in them one night after the next, and a Twitter swarm would start to gather anytime you sat still for too long.
That gathering and others like it are “organized fun” events. They have a clear in/out boundary, people are working to feed you and clean up after you (The things I saw in the Vibe Camp bathrooms… 🫢🤢🫠). It’s FOMO on purpose to make you buy.
And this is good! Some people don’t have the time and energy to cook a meal and clean it up collectively. You just want to party for a couple days and see people from the internet. That is good. The people that can pay to all be in one place together create the Schelling point.
Several people happened to be in Austin that week anyway, or lived in Austin, but didn’t want to go sleep in a bunk with strangers. And we were able to meet up afterward, and that was great. But that has to happen in a milieu. And that’s where the personal growth happens too.
It’s not something you can pay for. It’s not something you can advertise. If you say “There are these women at this place called X Camp and they will feed you MDMA and they will let you be awkward until you feel better and it’s only $600”… I mean, what does that sound like?
Unfortunately for my beloved nerds, social dynamics are a dark forest. Things are implicit because they have to be. There are more layers of motivation than any of us can be aware of. If you say the quiet part loud, you change the meta. A new quiet part immediately spawns.
I’m not saying not to have festivals! It’s fine. People who are party planners get to do what they enjoy and other people get to pay them to be good at it. But the parties should not be the end in themselves. All that personal healing and magic is only good if it’s For Something.
And you can’t be for something with people who aren’t for what you’re for. See, the community is not a single organism. It’s an ecology. All the people who are trying to put a self-reflexive name like TPOT or ingroup have it backwards. They should be naming the internal factions.
The milieu has opposing forces within it, groups that have different values and different customs. It’s not obvious on Twitter because of the structure of the social graph, but in person it’s clear. And it’s good to have so much diversity! The milieu should be liberal and open.
A lot of people get confused when they find these parts of Twitter, because people refer to the milieu as a single group with an obscure name and they think “Oh, I can’t join this.” But you can! It’s just a crowd. Anyone can join a crowd. You get sorted into your faction later.
(Remembering that I started this thread by disagreeing with Brent, but this is not personal. Just finally saying some stuff I have obviously thought for a while, no hard feelings 😬)
The “illegibility” trope is good for making friends in the milieu, because compared to the rest of Twitter, a place where you don’t talk about object level politics and religion is a relief. But ultimately it would be better if people could admit that they are in factions.
It’s much more cognitive dissonance to say “I am part of an ingroup that includes HATED_ENEMY” than it is to say “Me and HATED_ENEMY go to the same big gathering every summer, and our whole friend groups avoid each other, and I wish they would stop going, but it’s a public event.”
At Rainbow Gathering there are two Christian camps: Jesus Camp and Jesus Kitchen. One of them will fix your sandals, and one of them has the best shitter in the woods. They split 20 years ago over a messy divorce and each claims to be the true successor.
But they’re okay to both come to the gathering and be a part of the conversation. And because Rainbow Family is self-organizing, no one can seize the reins of power and kick someone else out. And no one can charge you money to get in.
And because it’s a milieu, I don’t feel responsible for the internal factional politics, or the interpersonal cycles of interpersonal drama. That shit happens in any society, no matter how utopian we might try to make it. Do we want to be a society?
Personally, I love the idea of creating a pattern where Twitter friend individuals swarm on a new location every year around the same time. I think I would continue to help create that milieu. I’m not going to help build an entertainment corporation to serve HATED_ENEMY.
If we want to be a society, a meta group of globally coordinated individuals and cells, we need a coordination method that allows us to tolerate each other’s differences but protect each other’s safety, and make high level decisions like where to all meet next year.
…proof is left as an exercise to the reader.
