Let’s start with a thread I wrote earlier this week (re-written below for more legibility than my tweeting style):
I'll probably never go to something like Vibe Camp, but I would like to see events with a longer duration and a smaller group size. Ideally recurring gatherings where the ~same people keep meeting up, spending time together, working on things together, building social fabric the slow old-fashioned way, through shared space and shared endeavors.
To me (and the personality I’ve been furnished with), Vibe Camp’s model of spending 3 days sleep deprived with hundreds of people doing scheduled activities sounds nightmarish. But a couple/few weeks where 10-15 people share a neighborhood and workspace while bouncing ideas off each other and making plans with one another... much better.
Basically I look around me and see a scattered nation of shamans, visionaries, builders, artists, lovers, and seekers — and I see the possibility for that nation to cohere quite powerfully, but not on the scale of 3-5 jam-packed days a couple times a year.
I’ve been talking and thinking about smaller, longer-term, endeavor-focused gatherings for quite awhile, and I want to organize my thoughts around it, especially because it increasingly seems like there might be enough appetite to get such a thing off the ground.
I’m going to organize some thoughts below, in no particular order, aiming more for a brief starting scaffold than a comprehensive set of ideas on how to go about the thing.
Soul-Making Artist/Scholars
Important context to note is that my ideas on this are deeply tied in with my ideas on Soul-Making Scholarship, and thus also with my In•Star side project.
There have to be pathways to bringing the head, heart, body, and soul together in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. The impulse of the intellect is always to fly off on its own, and almost all social containers for intellect (from universities to reading groups to metacrisis conventions) tend to reinforce that impulse, sending intellect off into airy, abstract space.
Bringing people together more intentionally, reinforcing ways of anchoring intellect to what matters most — that seems like a rich vein, and something I’d love to get good at cultivating.
Slow-Cooked Mycelium
I’ve made good friends at parties and bars and festivals. But they were never good friends because of those heightened events, they were good friends because of the hours, days, months that we spent together after that, mostly just going for walks, making meals together, shooting the breeze, giving each other notes on short stories we wrote, crossing paths at a mutual friend’s picnic — all the slow, steady realities of physical, emotional, and active proximity to one another. All the little aimless hours that let mammal souls grow together.
It’s easier to find time in your schedule for a long weekend of partying, but I think it’s more rewarding — if at all possible — to build a mycelial network of friends and collaborators the slow way. Lazy afternoons in a bookstore, spirited late-night debates in the kitchen — a steady hum of human moments.
Cohering the Scattered Nation
Like I said, “I look around me and see a scattered nation of shamans, visionaries, builders, artists, lovers, and seekers.” There’s a crowd of people who are on similar wavelengths and working on related endeavors — but they’re mostly scattered across continents, countries, and cities. Really good work can come out of their interconnection when they get together, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities for them to get together and work together. That should change, one way or another.
We’re never going to get everyone gathered together of course, and that’s fine. But even small steps can do wonders to strengthen and complexify the social fabric.
Let’s say a group of 12 people come to a gathering for a couple weeks, where they work and hang out and cross-pollinate. Later that year, 5 of those people get together again in another city, along with another 3 invitees. The next year, 8 of the original people, plus 2 of those invitees, plus 2 new invitees get together at the next gathering…. the social groupings might start to look like:
Event 1: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L
Event 2: B, E, F, H, K — M, N, O
Event 3: A, C, D, E, G, I, J, L, N, O — P, Q
Event 4: A, E, H, M, O, P
On and on. Over time, it’s not just a single group coming together and learning to work together, but a shifting network of folks who are all getting to know one another, share ideas, learn from each other, and build trust to work on things that matter.
Time is the magic ingredient, not just in having longer events so people can spend more time together, but in finding ways for those personal and collaborative ties to play out over years, not just days or weeks.
We’ve Already Started, Really
This mission has already begun, in some ways. Back at the end of 2022, I was part of a residency program at Medley in Berlin. They invited 15 or so people to come to a shared workspace for 2 months, where we could work on our own projects while hanging out and cross-pollinating with one another. The residency was a first attempt, and it had its ups and downs, but by far the part that worked best was spending a lot of time with a handful of the people there. Staying up late to watch Mage pace the living room and explain an important point about embodied speech; Nibras popping her head in at the end of the day, casually dropping some wisdom on me on her way out the door ; absorbing the tone of Brent’s voice in the book shop when he implored me to read The Stormlight Archive.
Tons of little moments like these added up and stuck with me, shifting how I think about this or that, how seriously I take a certain idea or feeling. I got to know a bit about everyone, and about how I relate to them — and if I saw them again, my bet is that we’d all have a much smoother time making use of our time together.
The Medley residency wasn’t the only situation that’s already been in play — there are people living in the same cities, people who go to the same meditation centers or who traveled together for a couple weeks. These relationships already exist, here and there. The task right now isn’t to get started, it’s to keep going in a way that ups the ante.
Scattered Miscellany & Logistics
The most obvious hindrance is funding — both in getting an event space of some sort, and in individuals being able to take a chunk of time away from home to come participate. I have a few good ideas for raising funds and keeping prices under control (renting space in Albania is surprisingly cheap, for example), but no matter how you cut it, the logistic of getting the right people together at the same time can be a tough one.
That said, I do think there’s a hunger for this sort of thing, and that both the invitees and organizers (with no clear border between those two categories) would feel generally fairly motivated to find a way of matching their needs.
The first couple events would be the hardest, I think. Once there have been a couple already, and they’ve had a chance to prove their worth as far as tying the network together, producing worthwhile projects and artifacts, and generally propagating transformation through the larger network… by that point, I don’t think it’ll be a problem to find ways of continuing events like these. But those first couple ones will need a lot of help for funding, design, smoothing out all the squishy intersubjective human gunk… figuring out how to make the garden grow, basically.
The groups chosen would probably work best with some kind of working theme. Nothing too rigid, but if you pick, for example, 2 people who are working on interesting software problems, 3 people who are producing interesting narrative art, 2 people who are doing interesting things in business and marketing… they might not have as much to cross-pollinate about as you’d hope.
For me, I’d want to return to the point above, about Soul-Making Scholarship, and use that as a rough guide for inviting people aligned with the exploration.
I have some more stuff to say around all this, but I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll pray to the digital gods that someone better than me at logistics and so on will see this and get in touch. Or that some of you will start doing these on your own, and hopefully invite me to a couple. Whatever works.
I just think the soul-making scene needs to hand-weave some social fabric, and this is one way I’d love to do that.
absolutely love this pursuit to summon a soul-making scenius. have you heard of Somewhere Campus? they're creating the scaffolding for a version of the experience you're calling into the universe: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PXYfyyU0nAmPt4aDsKQ-IR_C_TpjuDus5NCzoLFy4Mg/edit