Vibecamp 2023

I’m writing this at Blog Club, which has convened poolside at vibecamp. What the hell is vibecamp? Yeah that's exactly what I've come here to figure out, but nobody seems to be able to give me a simple answer. The best one I’ve heard so far is that it’s like “Burning Man for autists,” although this falls short both because the vibe is quite different from Burning Man and because many attendees might not officially be on the autism spectrum. Maybe there is no simple way to sum it up. To understand vibecamp, I think you first need to know something about the subculture it came out of, which is variously called “tpot” (an acronym for This Part Of Twitter) or “ingroup” (this is an in-joke) or “postrationalism,” (defining it in relation to an overlapping subculture), but like many emerging cultural phenomena it's still too nebulous and fluid to fully define. On top of that, tpot explicitly values being “illegible,” which means that it actively resists being pinned down to a definition. But it’s safe to say that tpot contains a wild mixture of high tech, "woo stuff", and futurism. At this point I've been embedded on Twitter for nine months, learning the language and customs of the natives, and now I've finally arrived here at this summer camp by the Susquehana River to practice my particular brand of soulful gonzo journalism. Wish me luck,

One thing I do here is listen to many conversations, and sometimes join them. They range from economics to the Eucharist, video games to the vagus nerve, polyamory, meditation techniques, psychedelics and the nature of consciousness, astrology and tarot, why and how we should have more children, and even how our artificial descendants might fight it out with our human descendants like Cain and Abel. What I don't hear is many debates about the hot-button political issues of our day. If a conversation touches on politics it's to speculate about how we might govern ourselves with temporarily transferable voting rights, or prediction markets, or the so-far-mostly-theoretical virtual nations called network states. There's a more or less explicit truce on what’s known as the culture war, and a group norm against attacking people for their ideas, and it seems like this peaceful refuge is both a big part of what draws people here and also what makes it possible for them to coex—

Sorry, a woman just stopped by with a bag of 12-flavor gummy bears, offering bespoke combinations to evoke any experience. The guy blogging next to me opts to challenge her by asking for the flavor of cunnilingus, which she says is the best prompt she’s heard all day. I ask for a fresh mountain spring on a windy day under the trees, and BLAP, the leader of Blog Club, throws her a softball and asks for something like a lemon bar. Each of us gets a custom combination of gummy bears. It reminds me of the first day I got here, when a guy was going around with the “scent of the day,” offering spritzes from a bottle of vintage perfume.¹ People here like to talk about being “agentic,” which is a more concise way to say "taking the initiative," and a lot of people really do take the initiative. As I sat playing my guitar this morning, a guy with colorful flowing clothes and tape over his mouth silently handed me a sticker saying “just DO stuff,” which I have just now used to cover up the logo on my laptop.

But to get back to my subject, the norm against discussing divisive topics and against being mean allows this gathering to host a group of people from so many different subcultures, with so many body types and neurotypes, that I've given up on trying to put them into categories, and yet everyone I see seems to be coexisting more or less happily. Some eight hundred people have come out from behind eight hundred screens, into the light and air of a summer camp in Maryland, and the total effect is unlike anything I've—

Uh sorry, a guy just passed by dressed in tight black clothing and a Darth Vader mask, with a bottle of whiskey in his left hand and bottle of vodka in his right. As he circles the pool, he encounters a small boy, goes down on one knee, and stays there perfectly still. The boy moves forward to investigate and then retreats to a safe distance, crying with terror. The standoff goes on for a little while before a big bearded man arrives with a pair of squirt guns, calmly loads them, hands one to the boy, and together they mount a ferocious attack on Drink Vader, who runs away out of the pool area before I can figure out what game he was playing. The boy beams with triumph, his fear conquered.

Um, but to get back to the story, there is a lot of non-normality on display here. Capes, robes, and feathered head-dresses, full-bearded people in booty shorts and crop tops, tattoos and piercings, fluffy tails, cat ears, microchip implants, tie-die, black leather with metal spikes, furry animal heads, fabulous coats and gowns, and enough ordinary-looking people to form a backdrop for the pageantry.² But clearly there's something that ties all these people together, something in their minds or their hearts that unites them. One story, the one the name “postrationalism” comes from, is that people involved in the rationalist community³ began to see that it wasn't making its adherents happy, and maybe a little experimentation with psychedelics shook their faith in their ability to fully explain reality with reason, and they started to explore artistic, emotional, therapeutic, and spiritual practices without waiting for scientific evidence. That's how some people got here, certainly, but I don't think it's the whole story.

me dressed in the colorful garb of the natives, photo courtesy Vibecamp Street Style, all rights reversed

In fact, I think that a cultural niche was already there waiting for the right moment, like a sturdy taproot, and that this subculture is simply its freshest flowering. I say this because I was lucky enough to be born just in time for the tail end of the last one, and it shaped my childhood and my whole life. I don't know quite what to call it, but just as Twitter is the nexus for the tpot culture that birthed vibecamp, the nexus for the previous one was a cluster of publications launched by Stewart Brand: the Whole Earth Catalog, the CoEvolution Quarterly, and the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), an early online forum. I ordered a couple of these old black and white magazines online and brought them to Philadelphia to show the friends I was staying with for a few days before vibecamp. They pored over them and kept exclaiming at how familiar it all felt; was there really nothing new under the sun? Someone suggested half-seriously that one of us could start posting blurbs from the magazines on Twitter today and it would take a long time for people to figure out that the quotes were forty years old. There are clear parallels: both cultures are interested in engineering a better future by selective and thoughtful use of technology, while at the same time exploring the role of traditional spirituality and return to nature, and both make space for unconventional political opinions that don't fit into the mainstream discussion.

My own parents have in some sense lived out the Whole Earth dream. In the ‘70s they bought a piece of mostly wooded land in rural North Carolina and lived there in a broken-down school bus while they built a house with their own hands and the help of friends. They kept everything simple, heating with a wood-stove, cooling with shade and open windows, pulling water up hand over hand from a well, showering from a five-gallon bucket, and pooping in an outhouse back in the woods. They grew a garden, made beautiful furniture with hand tools, made clothes with an old treadle-powered sewing machine. And yet it was not quite a return to the past, because they paid their way by creating software. My dad wrote down code on paper by the light of a kerosene lantern while I snuggled against his chest in a sling, perhaps already absorbing his craft through my skin.⁴ My mom wrote the documentation, forcing my dad to explain technical details to her over and over until she could translate them into crystal clear prose.⁵ And at night I would often fall asleep to the comforting sound of my mom playing the piano and singing downstairs, at once composing the music and putting it straight into my heart to balance out the code in my head.

But it was only in the past few months that I started to put all this into context. Growing up that way felt normal to me, and being a child, I wasn't aware of how it might fit into a larger cultural movement. So I was delighted to stumble across a paper by Fred Turner titled “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy.” The paper talks about two distinct cultural branches of the progressive movement: the “New Left” which grew around political struggles like civil rights and feminism, and “the counterculture” which grew from more artistic and spiritual pursuits like beat poetry, psychedelics, and Zen Buddhism. Both aimed to change society, but in different ways:

The New Left … pursued these goals as insurgent political movements always have: they wrote statements, formed parties, chose leaders, held news conferences. Many members of the counterculture however, stepped away from agonistic politics and sought instead to change the world by establishing new, exemplary communities from which a corrupt mainstream might draw inspiration.

It seems to me that the New Left's niche was inherited by Social Justice culture,⁶ and I think tpot is inheriting the niche of the counterculture. Both of these cultural branches have had profound impacts, although the counterculture's influence might be less obvious. I would say that outside of art, it shows up in the form of environmental protections, infrastructure like solar power technology, research into psychedelics and consciousness, and the development of personal computing through interface designs, internet platforms, and the smartphone.

I think there might be something in this association of culture and technology. A long time ago, the ancestor of all the Indo-European languages rose to dominance because it was attached to powerful new technologies like the wagon, and later the expansion of English language and culture followed the expansion of Victorian-style fossil-fuel-powered industry. I think this is often the story of why some cultures spread and others don't: the most dominant ones tend to be tied to new ways to survive and prosper. In the case of the Whole Earth culture, the movement was perfectly timed to become influential along with the integrated circuits that enabled the personal computer revolution. The people with the greatest urge to play around with the new technology and see what it could do were the same kind of people who'd already been playing around with their own minds and their own alternative lifestyles. These were the ones who steered how the technology was used, and who left their mark on it.

The people that took a systematic approach toward the development of computer software missed the boat. It was the trial-and-error people working illegally in the underground who made most of the advances.

—Doug Carlston, founder of Broderbund Software in Hackers - Wizards of the Electronic Age

This was said at the first Hacker's Conference, organized by Stewart Brand in 1985, and the ethos is echoed in a more earthy, tweet-ready form by one of tpot's more popular mantras: “fuck around and find out.” In a strange parallel, my dad attended the second Hacker's Conference in 1986 to report on it for a Whole Earth publication, and I attended the second vibecamp to report on it for this blog.⁷ Coincidentally, the theme of this year's vibecamp was “retro,” meaning the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the last day of vibecamp was on Father's Day. At the Hacker’s Conference, my dad met folks like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Richard Stallman, people who have since become household names, and at vibecamp I met many people who very well might become household names in the future. Of course there's no way to know, but I'm guessing this subculture has a good chance of becoming influential because it's so closely tied to today's hottest emerging technology: artificial intelligence.

In 1982, my dad wrote:

Actually computer technology has the pace of an avalanche — any given technology will be buried alive by new technologies in about five years.

—Ken Crossen, from “Whole Earth Suckered by Personal Computer Hype” in CoEvolution Quarterly No. 33 (Spring 1982)

Prophetic words that seem obvious in retrospect, but they weren't at the time. Reading his own article again after forty years, my dad remarked that he ought to have closed with that line instead of breezing by it in the first paragraph, but it's only in retrospect that it takes on such significance. And although the personal computer revolution seems to be slowing down, the statement above could equally well be applied to AI today. In fact, at vibecamp there were many more or less serious mentions of “p(doom),” meaning one’s estimate of the probability that AI will advance so much like an avalanche that it buries the whole human race. For better or worse, the culture of tpot stands to have an influence on the future of a powerful new information technology that will change all of our lives.

I'm finishing this essay from the train back to North Carolina, thinking back over the two full days and two half-days of vibecamp, and all I can tell you is that I met some truly amazing people who I laughed with, cried with, sang with, played with, hugged and consoled, and I feel pretty sure that the future is in good hands. Or at least that there are many young people who have what it takes to be the conscience of a new leap forward, and to pull back against its worst excesses. There are many stories I can’t tell you without violating the privacy of my friends, but I’d like to warm your heart and close with one I can tell that really moved and inspired me.

I met a young couple named Joseph and Mel on the first day. As I was exploring the camp, I found them playing on an unusual platform swing hanging from a steel cable in the woods. Of course I jumped on the swing right away, and together we explored what could be done with it. At one time there were four people on the platform, and it was fascinating to feel every person's minute shifts of body weight through the platform. After a while we split up, but I kept seeing Joseph and Mel here and there, smiling and waving at me, and the next day I got the chance to sit down with Joseph for a proper conversation. It turned out that among other things, he's an entrepreneur who invented a wonderful card game called Parents Are Human. The game consists of a deck of cards with a series of increasingly deep questions and actions for a family to explore together, and it arose out of Joseph's healing journey with his own parents. When he told me the story of how he started rebuilding his relationship with them after years of not being able to talk and drifting away, it was so beautiful that we both started crying. In the process of developing the card game, he strengthened his relationship with his parents so much that they now not only live together but run the business together, shipping literal tons of inventory to all over the world from a tiny apartment in San Francisco. At first, Joseph wasn't sure if his parents would be able to do the work, but he patiently taught them to use computers and now he can't imagine letting anyone else do it. When he told me about the ways his mother's love was folded into the meticulous packing of every order, I started crying again. The card game is only the packaging; what this family is really sending all over the world is their own love and healing.

And because Joseph is a child of immigrants, the game is made to bridge not only generational divides, but cultural ones. It comes in an English-only edition, but also in 14 other editions where one side of the card is in English and the other side says the same thing in another language. Each of these translations was painstakingly made by a group of bilingual families working together in video calls to get the nuances of the phrasing just right. It seems perfectly in the spirit of the game for these families to share their own love and attention with thousands of other families who need more of that in their life. The game's website says: “We believe with our hearts that bringing families closer together will bring the world closer together.” This rings true to me, and it inspires me to see that profound change doesn't need to look like a flashy new AI, or yet another online social network, or an election won or lost, or a war, or a law made or repealed. It can begin with a few simple heartfelt words, a conversation, laughter, tears, a hug, a deeper connection, a community, a movement, a civilization healing itself through the unstoppable power of love. Vibe on, my friends, I love you all so much.

Joseph and Mel on the platform swing at vibecamp

1. I later found out that he’s the Director of Research at Qualia Research Institute, which is busy making a map of human consciousness. Studying scent is a way to get people engaged and interested in the strange ways consciousness can behave, and on the last night of vibecamp he gave a talk about QRI’s work and handed out samples of a scent he created specifically to lock in our memories of vibecamp 2023.

2. Notice I said ordinary-looking people. Nobody here would be considered ordinary in most other contexts. But there is a popular meme in tpot culture which expresses the idea that the ultimate goal of the hero’s journey is to become a “normie” except wiser for having gone on a quest through the lands of strangeness.

3. This is a whole other thing which I don’t have room here to explain. Take a look at LessWrong to get a taste of that flavor.

4. They also had an office in town where the code could be entered into a computer. At some point my dad began to code on a laptop connected to a car battery that they charged in town, and then after realizing that the fumes from the kerosene lamps might be bad for our lungs, they built a solar power system which is what they still use today.

5. Sometimes while going through this process, they decided together that a feature should be changed to make it easier to explain. This was UX design before they called it that.

6. I’ve written about my thoughts on the Social Justice culture here.

7. Well okay, I attended mostly to hang out with friends and meet new ones, but I’m trying to commit to the bit here.