vibecamp

Select Ingredients of the Cultural Soup

"Why twitter??" you might ask. "Isn't twitter just a cesspool of ragebait and pornbots?" For most people, it is! (and increasingly is the case with recent algo changes but that's another topic)

Many things led to the conditions where something like Vibecamp could happen — all of them partial, all of them wrong in one way or another. One thread: people interested in the kinds of ideas discussed on LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten (ACX) were hanging out on Twitter, bringing with them rationalist discourse norms such as: debate the idea instead of insulting the person, be truthful, be charitable and many more that encouraged the development of a small slice of Twitter that felt like a secret oasis hidden amidst the outrage.

"Once upon a time there were a bunch of nerds arguing about decision theory and cognitive biases. In ages past, some of them began hanging out on twitter, shitposting and making memes." - Skyler (ACX Meetup Czar)

Post-rationality added earnestness & sincerity as a pushback against rampant irony-poisoning, plus an interest in illegibility and nontraditional psychological, therapeutic and contemplative practices.

If you're interested in a very deep dive on the various kinds of rationalists, this video is worth a watch!

Visakan Veerasamy

Visa deserves his own call-out: he had spent years writing about things like viewing Twitter as an RPG, how to have good reply game, why you should focus on what you want to see more of, the power of scenius, the compounding benefits of practice (do 100 things), and put memes in the water like this one:

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(There were, of course, many other influences, and plenty may disagree with this outline. Also, point of clarification: Brooke wrote this page in third person and Brooke hasn't done any of the readings, really. Brooke just thinks rationalists are cool and likes to hang out with them socially.)

TPOT

Rationalists, post-rationalists, Visa, and others were hanging out on Twitter in a relatively small social scene, building out these concepts (and putting them into practice), when the pandemic hit, which sent thousands of suddenly-stuck-at-home nerds to Twitter, seeking connection. This new wave adopted many of the discourse norms, but often took things less seriously, and brought a meme-heavy shitposter vibe to the scenes.

One way (again, among many) to mark the beginning of "tpot" (This Part of Twitter) is that it formed as the pandemic began to wind down, and as this new wave of people collectively realized "hey, I like your vibes on the TL. Maybe I'd like them in person too" and started gathering in person more and more.

As these gatherings picked up in pace and scope, there was a stunning flourishing of IRL projects. Deepfates started a local bar hang called Office Hours that has since spread to cities around the world. Andrew and Priya Rose founded Fractal NYC, a sprawling collective of co-housing, DIY university classes, and a wildly successful coding boot camp that has inspired similar community initiatives in several other cities. There have been Twitter camps around the world. Vibecamp partially inspired Manifest, a Bay Area festival organized around prediction markets, which was itself upstream of LessOnline and Slutcon. This list is nowhere near exhaustive, and leaves us wondering - what's next?

The Why

The internet & social media allows us to Find The Others in a way that was impossible before, bright spots of kindred minds visible across the globe like floating fireflies in the ether. We can share our thoughts, and draw folks to us that resonate with them. One of the founding principles of Vibecamp is that we've barely begun to scratch the surface of what kind of coordination is possible when you find the others and build real lives in the real world with them.

You don't need to be on Twitter to enjoy Vibecamp; we have attendees who found us through coworkers, the small web, or friends and family. We're sharing this history so you can come in with the context, and not be left scratching your head when people start talking about "rats" and "teapots." If the concepts pointed at above speak to you, we encourage you to join us! Vibecamp is evolving into something beyond its roots as a gathering for people who met on Twitter, and we'd love to have you help us build what it will become:

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