 I didn't know that picture was going to be up there. Ah, hello, everybody. My name is Brooke, and I'm here to talk about a project called ViveCamp, and share a little bit about what we've done to nurture physical manifestations of digital connections. So at present, ViveCamp is a gathering. It's somewhere between a festival, an unconference, and a retreat. But the reason I'm up on the stage right now is because ViveCamp and the scene that we built it for have already been doing a lot of the things that I hear people and organizations working in the network society sphere talk about wanting to do, but often struggle to achieve. However, 10 minutes is not a very long time, so I'm mostly just going to give a high-level overview on what ViveCamp is, and if some of this speaks to you, I'm happy to go into more detail later about how we've achieved some of the things we have. So I joined Twitter in 2020, and the algorithm kind of lumped me together with the kinds of people I felt like I had been searching for my whole life but had struggled to find. You're gonna see the term teapot in a couple of these slides in short of this part of Twitter. This bubble is sometimes called that, although that name and how to define the scene is very hotly contested, so I'm also not gonna talk about that too much, except to say that the aspects that speak to me most are the kinds of people who are maybe very smart, very kind, and kind of weirdos, people who struggled to fit in with mainstream institutions. So Twitter algorithm lumps together like many people. Then ViveCamp unleashed an avalanche of gatherings around the globe of increasing size and duration. ViveCamp is an event built for and by people who met each other on Twitter. So about a year after I joined, someone tweeted that they wanted to see a multi-day gathering. I quoted it, and I pulled together the early team from people who responded to that tweet. And so many lives have changed as a result of that moment. We started meeting weekly, and we kept building in public. Even the name ViveCamp itself was chosen by a Twitter poll. And just a note about this event, despite being comprised largely of people who spend all day on Twitter, at ViveCamp, people unplug, and they connect face to face. So in this presentation, you're gonna see a lot of tweets and not as many photos. But what is it? So I just wanted to hang out with my Twitter friends, but it turned out that I had a lot of Twitter friends, and they had a lot of Twitter friends, and we just kind of hit a cultural chord. The first ViveCamp was over 400 people. The second one took place this year, and it was around 700. It's multi-day, there are cabins, we provide food, and the content is all co-created. We don't hire speakers, we don't bring in hired acts, anything like that. And a lot of it's even just built on Twitter. People will tweet, maybe I should do this at ViveCamp, or what do you guys think about that? And this is just a nice tweet. If you're wondering what ViveCamp was, it was an eager war coming online, the local organizational principle of which is not just love, but boundless curiosity and play. And we had a big impact on people. There were a lot of people who went into ViveCamp also feeling like I had, like they didn't, they hadn't been able to find their tribe, and a lot of them found it there. I'm just gonna do a couple of quick slides to give you an example of the kinds of things that happened at ViveCamp. This one was somebody set up a typewriter and wrote poems, they found prompts. This prompt was the first sentient AI's love letter to humanity. This one was a collaborative tarot deck. Somebody got a bunch of attendees together, they all drew their own cards, and then that was available for purchase after. And at this last one, there was a theater production called The Dating Show to Save the World, which was actually super impressive, it was really, really well done. One Twitter user called it part of the long tradition of alchemical, mythopoetic storytelling, which has its roots in the ancients and its branches in our future. But it wasn't without controversy. Some people found some of the themes upsetting or dark, which leads me to one of the things that I think is the most unique about ViveCamp, which is that ViveCamp doesn't end when people leave the site. ViveCamp ends a week or two later after people are done posting long, introspective threads on Twitter about their experiences there, which is one of the really unique aspects of this hybrid on and offline thing. This person says, it's funny to have a gathering of Twitter addicts because it's like we all have the same big diary. So everybody's reflecting on how things went, but also seeing each other's reflections and reflecting on those. It's like a virtual decomp, but it also kind of extends the experience into the wired, fascinating and completely novel, he thinks. So what he's referring to there are like the Burning Man decompression events, which take place in person, they're ephemeral, they're fleeting, there's no real record of them. But with the sense-making that happens on Twitter for ViveCamp, there's a record. You can look back and see like, oh, this is something people struggled with at this event, have we learned from it? And also changes the nature of the experience of the event for everybody, because you get access to perspectives you never would have had insight into. And so it's kind of like this whole journey that everybody goes on together. It's really interesting. We also do the people from the crypto scenes will be familiar with this. There's like kind of the side event things. So ViveCamp itself is three to four days, but the whole thing is more like two weeks. People just sort of, we roughly use our Discord server for infrastructure, but everything's very decentralized. People just get together and do things. One of our attendees looked in that and thought, well, what would happen if you take out the ViveCamp? So he just did a thing in SF in August. He managed to manifest around 80 people. It was side events with no main event. They just got Airbnb's together. They had gatherings. They had meetups. But that's just kind of scratching the surface of the kinds of things that have been inspired by ViveCamp. Manifest took place this year. And that was one of the co-founders of Manifold Markets, which is an online prediction market platform, went to ViveCamp and thought, what happens if you combine ViveCamp with something like EAG, which is a conference for EAs? And it turns out it was phenomenally successful. People loved it. It was featured in the New York Times. And that was particularly meaningful for me because one of the things that really motivated me to create ViveCamp was the belief that when you get smart, driven people together in a room, they're gonna work on hard problems. They're gonna have interesting conversations because that's just what they love to do. But most of the containers built for those kind of people, things like conferences, tend to be very draining. So the idea is like, be able to have these conversations then go kayaking or go dancing, join a wrestling match. I think it's rejuvenating. It can be even more generative. But it doesn't stop there. The combined impact of ViveCamp and something called JestCamp that took place around the same time in Europe has led to this wave of camps happening throughout the world. And it's really cool because if somebody can't make it to the ViveCamp in the U.S. instead of being bitter or jealous, they say, well, how do I make that happen where I am? And then they go and do it. There's so many of these. They tend to be named after the person hosting them. So this one was formed by a person named Kai. But there are so many of them that this person asked, what would a U.C.amp look like? And the MeCamp industry seems promising. So it's become like a whole meme. And I think part of that has to do with what this person called an agency explosion. And I don't really have clear answers on how this happened. But I think it's related to the fact that we were building in public. We had basically little to no events experience when we started out. And whenever people come to us and ask, is this happening at ViveCamp? Or what kind of vibe will be there? We ask them, like, how can we help you create the kind of event you want? And we're a tribe. Everyone genuinely cares so much that the world rearranged to bring us together. Brooke just channeled lightning to make this happen in six months because it was clear to her how important it was we meet ASAP. And the thing is we can do it. We are capable of great change. We own the memes of production. We have loads of crypto money floating around. This was in March of 2022. And we have some of the best minds of our generation in all this without explicit coordination. So that's kind of what we're asking next, is, like, what can we do with explicit coordination? So again, the algorithm brought together like-minded people. We unleashed an avalanche of gatherings around the globe of increasing size and duration. And now it's time to build something lasting. I really like this map that Richard Bartlett tweeted. He talks about how we figured out how to go from temporary to permanent online relationships. And with this wave of camps, it shows that we can do temporary local community. So what's next is to try and figure out how to do permanent local community. So that's sort of the angle that we're investigating next. And yeah, so ViveCamp, it's run mostly by volunteers. We've gotten one Raketa's grant, but other than that we survive off of ticket sales. We do this because we believe in the vast potential of humanity and we believe in working together towards a future where we're all flourishing. So if you'd like to support us in some way, if you'd like to collaborate with us on events, or if you'd like to consult with us on how to bring your digital community into the real world, please reach out. Thank you.