What a delightful read. I enjoyed the weekend immensely and reading this reminded me of many of the things that felt special and rare about being in the group you brought together. I sincerely hope to see your coffee ritual one day!
Why do people gather together? Just off the top of my head, I can think of 3 distinct types of groups:
- A group with a purpose, e.g., Effective Altruism. Such groups will probably need to exclude many viewpoints in order to have a shared purpose and plan. That's okay, at least if it doesn't go so far as to exclude people who have valid critiques of the group's plans.
- A group with a common interest, e.g., science fiction fandom. Such groups don't need to exclude any viewpoints other than "science fiction is stupid", because your views outside of the fandom don't need to cause arguments, and your views inside of the fandom are the things you're gathering together to argue about. But they can develop exclusionary views because interests correlate with viewpoints. E.g., science fiction conventions are attended mainly by white people over age 40, while anime conventions are attended mainly by people under 30.
- A geographic or political community, e.g., your county. Democracy means the idea that everyone's viewpoint is important, so if you think democracy is morally superior to, say, a totalitarian theocracy, you have a moral obligation be maximally inclusive. But /this only has moral force if membership in the community is not quite voluntary/, e.g., it's very costly to move to another community, or there are no communities available for certain people.
I don't know which kind of group you're trying to create. I sense from your blog post that you feel a moral imperative to be as inclusive as a geographically-based community should be, but I don't think that's the kind of thing Fluidity should be. Don't beat yourself up for building a group of a particular kind rather than The One Perfect Group. I suspect Fluidity is in more danger of being too open-ended and under-specified than too exclusive.
All my adult life, I've been involved with all-volunteer not-for-profit groups in a fourth category, organizations that are focal points for scenes. They are focused around creative collaboration and voluntary work. These orgs might superficially be placed in the category you called groups with a common interest, but it's so diffuse that you never know all the new interests your attendance will cause you to become interested in.
What they have in common is doing productive work through intrinsic motivation, in place of extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is like when you're doing something for money but don't really want to perform the task for its own sake. These scenes create a space in which to do your own thing, without assigning you a thing to do, and bring together others who want to bring their own thing.
To tie together what they have in common, I'll give examples from three: Penguicon, i3Detroit, and Lakes of Fire.
Penguicon was formed in 2003 to be both a science fiction convention and an open-source software conference at the same time. I devoted 20 years of my life to running it. Science fiction conventions, as you know, are often all-volunteer not-for-profit orgs, and the same could be said of many open source software projects. So it was two great tastes that taste great together. We allowed anyone to give a talk on any subject, providing we hadn't banned them for misconduct and provided they weren't known as a blowhard who talks over the panelists on panel discussions-- but they need not present on science fiction or open source software. Next thing you know we had ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, giant tesla coils that made music with lighting, comedy music concerts, board games-- a dizzying profusion, a geek Woodstock, and true Nerdvana. It turned into kind of an "anything convention" and grew to 1,500 attendees at its peak before the lockdowns.
i3Detroit is one of the best maker spaces in the country, 12,000 square feet, with 201 members, where I'm president. It's an all-volunteer not-for-profit community workshop with welding, wood shop, metal shop, classroom, leatherworking, laser cutters, kilns, 3D printers, plastic injection molding, sewing, vacuum forming, crafts, paint booth, electronics lab, large-format printers, and much more. But members can use it as a sort of community center for their other organizations to gather in, like aerial silks and authentic relating-- so, really, the only commonality is "things you do in a flexible multi-function building", so it's really general.
Lakes Of Fire is Michigan's regional Burning Man, with two and a half thousand attendees. You've heard of Burning Man, but I recommend you read "The Scene That Became Cities" by Caveat Magister to unpack how intrinsic motivation plays into it. I told Lakes Of Fire I wanted to make a life-size dinosaur puppet, and they gave me an art grant. But nobody assigned me with a job of making that puppet. They needed it to be my idea.
In all three of these orgs, the boundary between organizer and attendee is porous. Burning Man even has a "no bystanders" principle, Participation. People do things because they see it and decide it needs doing (directly apprehending meaningfulness). Next thing you know they're allowed to be in charge of it.
I put wonder, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation in the agreements of Fluidity Forum. What David Chapman calls the six textures of the complete stance. A sign with which to know that you're mostly being neither eternalistic nor nihilistic. They are usually intrinsic motivations. They emerge when we're staying directly in touch with meaningfulness as it emerges in situations.
I didn't put end goals, although end goals are great. Inclusivity, wisdom, philanthropy, compassion, justice, community. Those are all great end goals, but an org that has those as its north star can turn them into fixed meaningfulness, lose sight of meaningfulness as it changes in nebulosity, and those orgs get gradually captured by the iron law of institutions. It becomes performative. A cargo cult. Cargo cults lose sight of wonder, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. They lose track of whether what they're doing is actually meaningful. They do things that once made sense but don't any more.
I'm not saying it's impossible to fake things like enjoyment, too. To turn them into a performative grind for ulterior motives. But it's harder to do, and rarer. And faking something like enjoyment is less destructive to group dynamics than faking being a big shot better-than-thou. There needs to be slack. There needs to be no fixation, no singular group expectation with which we can point fingers at each other and say "why aren't you more wise/philanthropic/compassionate/inclusive/driven to bring justice against the oppressors" or whatever end goal we picked. If we focus on the six textures of the complete stance, that's how we know we're keeping it real, we have a vibrant scene. Then, any end goals some of us wish to pursue are more likely to happen.
That notion of a "scene" makes sense. When I wrote my comment, I tried to figure out what kind of group Burning Man is, and I couldn't. It's obviously a scene.
Furrydom is both a special-interest group, and a scene: there's much more emphasis on teaching skills about how to make stuff than in most fandoms, probably because there is no canonical source material to obsess about. /Everything/ is fan-made. In filk music fandom, the source material is always at a distance; you never discuss it. Everything performed is fan-made. Altho in both furrydom & filkdom, creation is nearly always by individuals.
(I missed another kind of group: the excessively-exclusive community, which gets much of its value from being hard to get into or stay in. Conservative churches, Mensa, fraternities, the Marine Corps. But that's surely not Fluidity. Some of them are almost the opposite: they're for people who want to be told what to do.)
I can't figure out why Burning Man works, though. I mean, what makes it a scene, & determines what kind of scene it is? It is extremely creative, and yet, it sure has a lot of massive fantasy creatures built out of steel which throw flames. That's a hyper-specific interest. The harsh desert environment is somehow a part of that. I'm curious how the art of local burns varies with the local environment.
I don't think I can give any advice on how to structure Fluidity as a scene, when I don't understand how scenes work.
In "The Scene That Became Cities", Caveat Magister explores in depth why Burning Man and its regional Burns get the results they get. You might be interested in it due to your interest in how art expresses subtext from the assumptions of its culture. Caveat's book is not just a bare description of what Burn culture is like-- he stakes out positions on why those norms get those outcomes.
It emerged from, but is distinct from, the radical experiential-art scene of San Francisco. They were concerned with what Jodorowsky calls "psychomagic", a combination of art and psychology to create experiences that change people. Art that works more like a garden, and less like a machine. He says psychomagic connects each person what he calls their "daemon", which goes away if the experience is too controlled. As near as I can tell, a daemon is a lot like a very personal form of narrative self-actualization. There are conditions that allow that to thrive.
Just one such condition, described in the book, is going with other people to a strange place. The salt flats are full of naturally-occurring optical illusions in the heat. The complete emptiness is like being on the moon. It feels like being separated from the day-to-day world. It actively filters out a lot of people. The inherent risk of the environment matters too.
And then, there are the ten principles. They aren't just some pretty words like you see in a corporate mission statement. They are active ingredients in the connecting people to the direct apprehension of meaning.
The next obvious question in this line of conversation is, should Fluidity Forum be similar to, or different from, Burning Man in various ways? One point in common is this: One of the things that happens with Burning is that instead of keeping ourselves as safe as possible until we have made our world into a padded cell, we get more skilled with proximity to danger. Now you might ask how Fluidity could ever be "dangerous". But proximity to woo is dangerous, in some sense, for groups. There's a lot of excitement right now about psychotechnologies (meditation, psychedelics, authentic relating, Alexander Technique, and so on). Groups forming around psychotechnologies often break down into pretty serious problems. One of my main desiderata for Fluidity Forum is to have an event full of skeptics and critics keeping us accountable and grounded and sane, and yet simultaneously, keep the event supportive of our enthusiasms about psychotechnologies and new social ways of being. To not get absorbed by an egregore who isn't good for us. To be choosy about our egregores, but still welcome them.
What a delightful read. I enjoyed the weekend immensely and reading this reminded me of many of the things that felt special and rare about being in the group you brought together. I sincerely hope to see your coffee ritual one day!
-Evelyn
I'm so glad! We'll make that happen. We're probably going to have enough volunteering for tasks during the event that I'll have time to do it.
Why do people gather together? Just off the top of my head, I can think of 3 distinct types of groups:
- A group with a purpose, e.g., Effective Altruism. Such groups will probably need to exclude many viewpoints in order to have a shared purpose and plan. That's okay, at least if it doesn't go so far as to exclude people who have valid critiques of the group's plans.
- A group with a common interest, e.g., science fiction fandom. Such groups don't need to exclude any viewpoints other than "science fiction is stupid", because your views outside of the fandom don't need to cause arguments, and your views inside of the fandom are the things you're gathering together to argue about. But they can develop exclusionary views because interests correlate with viewpoints. E.g., science fiction conventions are attended mainly by white people over age 40, while anime conventions are attended mainly by people under 30.
- A geographic or political community, e.g., your county. Democracy means the idea that everyone's viewpoint is important, so if you think democracy is morally superior to, say, a totalitarian theocracy, you have a moral obligation be maximally inclusive. But /this only has moral force if membership in the community is not quite voluntary/, e.g., it's very costly to move to another community, or there are no communities available for certain people.
I don't know which kind of group you're trying to create. I sense from your blog post that you feel a moral imperative to be as inclusive as a geographically-based community should be, but I don't think that's the kind of thing Fluidity should be. Don't beat yourself up for building a group of a particular kind rather than The One Perfect Group. I suspect Fluidity is in more danger of being too open-ended and under-specified than too exclusive.
All my adult life, I've been involved with all-volunteer not-for-profit groups in a fourth category, organizations that are focal points for scenes. They are focused around creative collaboration and voluntary work. These orgs might superficially be placed in the category you called groups with a common interest, but it's so diffuse that you never know all the new interests your attendance will cause you to become interested in.
What they have in common is doing productive work through intrinsic motivation, in place of extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is like when you're doing something for money but don't really want to perform the task for its own sake. These scenes create a space in which to do your own thing, without assigning you a thing to do, and bring together others who want to bring their own thing.
To tie together what they have in common, I'll give examples from three: Penguicon, i3Detroit, and Lakes of Fire.
Penguicon was formed in 2003 to be both a science fiction convention and an open-source software conference at the same time. I devoted 20 years of my life to running it. Science fiction conventions, as you know, are often all-volunteer not-for-profit orgs, and the same could be said of many open source software projects. So it was two great tastes that taste great together. We allowed anyone to give a talk on any subject, providing we hadn't banned them for misconduct and provided they weren't known as a blowhard who talks over the panelists on panel discussions-- but they need not present on science fiction or open source software. Next thing you know we had ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, giant tesla coils that made music with lighting, comedy music concerts, board games-- a dizzying profusion, a geek Woodstock, and true Nerdvana. It turned into kind of an "anything convention" and grew to 1,500 attendees at its peak before the lockdowns.
i3Detroit is one of the best maker spaces in the country, 12,000 square feet, with 201 members, where I'm president. It's an all-volunteer not-for-profit community workshop with welding, wood shop, metal shop, classroom, leatherworking, laser cutters, kilns, 3D printers, plastic injection molding, sewing, vacuum forming, crafts, paint booth, electronics lab, large-format printers, and much more. But members can use it as a sort of community center for their other organizations to gather in, like aerial silks and authentic relating-- so, really, the only commonality is "things you do in a flexible multi-function building", so it's really general.
Lakes Of Fire is Michigan's regional Burning Man, with two and a half thousand attendees. You've heard of Burning Man, but I recommend you read "The Scene That Became Cities" by Caveat Magister to unpack how intrinsic motivation plays into it. I told Lakes Of Fire I wanted to make a life-size dinosaur puppet, and they gave me an art grant. But nobody assigned me with a job of making that puppet. They needed it to be my idea.
In all three of these orgs, the boundary between organizer and attendee is porous. Burning Man even has a "no bystanders" principle, Participation. People do things because they see it and decide it needs doing (directly apprehending meaningfulness). Next thing you know they're allowed to be in charge of it.
I put wonder, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation in the agreements of Fluidity Forum. What David Chapman calls the six textures of the complete stance. A sign with which to know that you're mostly being neither eternalistic nor nihilistic. They are usually intrinsic motivations. They emerge when we're staying directly in touch with meaningfulness as it emerges in situations.
I didn't put end goals, although end goals are great. Inclusivity, wisdom, philanthropy, compassion, justice, community. Those are all great end goals, but an org that has those as its north star can turn them into fixed meaningfulness, lose sight of meaningfulness as it changes in nebulosity, and those orgs get gradually captured by the iron law of institutions. It becomes performative. A cargo cult. Cargo cults lose sight of wonder, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. They lose track of whether what they're doing is actually meaningful. They do things that once made sense but don't any more.
I'm not saying it's impossible to fake things like enjoyment, too. To turn them into a performative grind for ulterior motives. But it's harder to do, and rarer. And faking something like enjoyment is less destructive to group dynamics than faking being a big shot better-than-thou. There needs to be slack. There needs to be no fixation, no singular group expectation with which we can point fingers at each other and say "why aren't you more wise/philanthropic/compassionate/inclusive/driven to bring justice against the oppressors" or whatever end goal we picked. If we focus on the six textures of the complete stance, that's how we know we're keeping it real, we have a vibrant scene. Then, any end goals some of us wish to pursue are more likely to happen.
That notion of a "scene" makes sense. When I wrote my comment, I tried to figure out what kind of group Burning Man is, and I couldn't. It's obviously a scene.
Furrydom is both a special-interest group, and a scene: there's much more emphasis on teaching skills about how to make stuff than in most fandoms, probably because there is no canonical source material to obsess about. /Everything/ is fan-made. In filk music fandom, the source material is always at a distance; you never discuss it. Everything performed is fan-made. Altho in both furrydom & filkdom, creation is nearly always by individuals.
(I missed another kind of group: the excessively-exclusive community, which gets much of its value from being hard to get into or stay in. Conservative churches, Mensa, fraternities, the Marine Corps. But that's surely not Fluidity. Some of them are almost the opposite: they're for people who want to be told what to do.)
I can't figure out why Burning Man works, though. I mean, what makes it a scene, & determines what kind of scene it is? It is extremely creative, and yet, it sure has a lot of massive fantasy creatures built out of steel which throw flames. That's a hyper-specific interest. The harsh desert environment is somehow a part of that. I'm curious how the art of local burns varies with the local environment.
I don't think I can give any advice on how to structure Fluidity as a scene, when I don't understand how scenes work.
In "The Scene That Became Cities", Caveat Magister explores in depth why Burning Man and its regional Burns get the results they get. You might be interested in it due to your interest in how art expresses subtext from the assumptions of its culture. Caveat's book is not just a bare description of what Burn culture is like-- he stakes out positions on why those norms get those outcomes.
It emerged from, but is distinct from, the radical experiential-art scene of San Francisco. They were concerned with what Jodorowsky calls "psychomagic", a combination of art and psychology to create experiences that change people. Art that works more like a garden, and less like a machine. He says psychomagic connects each person what he calls their "daemon", which goes away if the experience is too controlled. As near as I can tell, a daemon is a lot like a very personal form of narrative self-actualization. There are conditions that allow that to thrive.
Just one such condition, described in the book, is going with other people to a strange place. The salt flats are full of naturally-occurring optical illusions in the heat. The complete emptiness is like being on the moon. It feels like being separated from the day-to-day world. It actively filters out a lot of people. The inherent risk of the environment matters too.
And then, there are the ten principles. They aren't just some pretty words like you see in a corporate mission statement. They are active ingredients in the connecting people to the direct apprehension of meaning.
The next obvious question in this line of conversation is, should Fluidity Forum be similar to, or different from, Burning Man in various ways? One point in common is this: One of the things that happens with Burning is that instead of keeping ourselves as safe as possible until we have made our world into a padded cell, we get more skilled with proximity to danger. Now you might ask how Fluidity could ever be "dangerous". But proximity to woo is dangerous, in some sense, for groups. There's a lot of excitement right now about psychotechnologies (meditation, psychedelics, authentic relating, Alexander Technique, and so on). Groups forming around psychotechnologies often break down into pretty serious problems. One of my main desiderata for Fluidity Forum is to have an event full of skeptics and critics keeping us accountable and grounded and sane, and yet simultaneously, keep the event supportive of our enthusiasms about psychotechnologies and new social ways of being. To not get absorbed by an egregore who isn't good for us. To be choosy about our egregores, but still welcome them.
I feel incredibly excited to reply to this. I've spent almost all day writing the reply, but it's not done yet. Just letting you know.
Phil, I've noticed whenever you say something it's like iron sharpening iron. You locate the crux.