Why Vibecamp?
Inside a moment of new beginnings.
I was telling my brother about Vibeclipse, the Vibecamp event commemorating the 2024 total solar eclipse over North America, and mentioned the late-night clothing-optional dance party. Asked he: “Oh, is this like a sex camp?” I cringed. “If I sell it like that, you will be disappointed.”
But how would I sell a thing like this? It’s true that there was a late-night clothing-optional dance party, with a few women, and a lot of sweaty early-30 males like me who’d opted out of only their shirts. It’s also true that earlier that day many of us had casted votes in a healing modality tournament—one healing modality to rule them all, decided through gruelling rounds of bracket elimination. (The winner? “Lifestyle changes.” Not even MDMA therapy stood a chance.) There were grappling classes. Late night vaguely neo-pagan rituals. Facilitated discussions about the existential risk of AI. A craft station.
A sex camp? No. It’s more of a Something camp. A camp of TBD.
To talk about Vibe Camp well, one must at first ignore the content, the tightly wrapped onion-liked layers of related but distinct vibes. Instead we ask: what is the impact? What do the attendees leave with that they didn’t necessarily have when they arrived?
Vibe Camp emerged first as a hyperstition. The year was 2021, the great online-ifying force known as the Pandemic in full swing. A loose constellation of refugees from the world of grass had assembled on the website formerly known as Twitter. The name of this constellation was variously “ingroup” or “TPOT” (This Part of Twitter).
What was this group about? Remember: onions. Layers. We’re deferring that part.
What was common to all or most of this online constellation was a dissatisfaction. A yearning. A sense that something was rotten. That the world had slipped into a premature senescence. That all of us were, despite our best aspirations, corralled by the same fear and psychological fragmentation that had trapped our whole enclosing social matrix in an incessant present, eternal yet incomplete, ever re-litigating itself with no hope of a final verdict.
Wouldn’t it be funny if something happened?
Wouldn’t it be funny if we meme’d something, and it became real?
I personally became aware of Vibe Camp around December 2021. Memes were floating around of the form “This is how I imagine vibecamp” combined with some ridiculous/evocative image. It took me until a week or two before the ticketing deadline before I realized that this was, in fact, an Event you could buy tickets for.
“Hyperstition” is the act of making something real by referring to it as if it already is. The meme, which preceded the reality, was the idea of a physical festival where this whole loose online constellation, diverse in viewpoints but united around common norms of behaviour, could assemble. It is equally true, however, that real hyperstition takes a lot of work. The core members of the Vibecamp team, what would be called Vibecamp LLC, were the nucleation point. With no foreknowledge of what the camp would become, they worked to secure the physical frame of that becoming. That would be Camp Champions, a summer camp site two hours out of Austin, Texas.
As of now there have been three events with a fourth coming up in June 2024. The first and third took place at Camp Champions; the second and fourth are at Camp Ramblewood in Maryland. The dynamics of the event itself are shaped somewhat by the space: Camp Champions has helpful facility staff hosting events like archery and axe throwing, while Camp Ramblewood is a more hands-free experience with latitude for the community to build its own installations. (Hands-free also in that, in contrast with the beautiful, inviting lake that abuts Camp Champions, Camp Ramblewood hosts a murky pond that is haunted/plagued/guarded by de-digitizing snapping turtles.)
For the first event, buying a ticket felt like jumping into an updraft with wax wings. Hang out with a few hundred near-strangers at a summer camp? No common interest except posting online in a similar way?
The event schedule was just a loose framework: some games, some dance parties, some facilitated discussions. Mostly the spirit was “this is whatever you want it to be”. Well—what was that? And what if “what I want it to be” failed to align with what others wanted? What if I, arriving alone, were to bump uselessly against pre-existing cliques, only to leave alone?
For some campers in 2022, this is indeed what happened. Some of them showed up, tried to catch the wave, and ended up leaving disappointed. But for others, including me, that initial confusion and tentative loneliness metamorphosed into simple, pure mutual curiosity. I milled about like the other aimless wanderers, and when we met we asked each other something that meant: “Are you aware also of the unbearably strange miracle of our lives”? It was like a market day in a village at the cusp of the dawn of time.
One theme emerged. At every event, when I met someone new, they would with freakish consistency describe themselves as an “outsider” to TPOT. They were not core TPOT; they were on the edge, on the periphery, adjacent but not within. This is also how I would have described myself: I was surprised (and treasured it forever) when someone at a Vibe Camp 1 after-party described me as a “medium big” figure on the scene.
This self-image of outsider-ness extended also to the core team, I think. Few would describe themselves as leading figures in the scene, even the ones who clearly were. Instead of outright claiming their own reach, the most influential members are more likely to see themselves as “drifting away”. Maybe they used to be core TPOT, but now they are seeking something more specific to their interests.
Or—and this is my favourite framing—they say it is meaningless to be central to TPOT. TPOT is this part. It’s the part where you are. The centre is everywhere.
The more I am involved with Vibe Camp, the more I believe the centre is indeed everywhere. Each time somebody shows up with their own weird, freakish little vibe, they are asking: is this the right place for me? And we, their neighbours, their comrades on-scene, are there to answer: yes.
The law is not bullet-proof. There are exceptions. We like to think that TPOT is a way of being, and therefore definitionally cannot exclude anyone. But if that fiction is sometimes difficult to maintain online, it is impossible to maintain with an in-person event such as Vibe Camp. Vibe Camp has, out of necessity, sometimes made moves to exclude or eject people for present or past actions. It has also taken heat for failing to exclude people, as when it failed to exclude noted arch-conservative monarchist dark elf Curtis Yarvin from Vibe Camp 2. (In the end, after a single night at Ramblewood, Curtis ejected himself.)
Yet more often than Vibe Camp has been forced to exclude or eject someone, or taken heat for failing to do so, observers have wrongly predicted that the question of exclusion would spell Vibe Camp’s demise.
The controversies around safety have not kept newcomers away. The scene has not fractured. Numbers fluctuate from year to year but the event’s visibility continues to grow. Why?
Here are two reasons I think are most important.
The in-person community is held together by a backbone of committed, sincere, conscientious, high-integrity people.
The “no-centre” ethos of the online community applies also to the in-person events. Everybody can help build the event. When there are problems, the solutions can come from anywhere.
Remember the remark earlier about central figures of TPOT seeing themselves as drifting away. Our universe has no centre. Our universe is expanding. The background radiation is a call to come alive, come awake, speak your heart, reach out to the Other. What holds the scene together is not where it comes from, nor where it is going, but the common value that we can become more ourselves together than we can apart.
At Vibeclipse last April, late one evening, an event was on the calendar. The idea was an AMA for Brooke, covering the story of Vibe Camp and the story of Brooke’s own life. Brooke’s story is worth listening to: post-college, she fell for some time into drug addiction, homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. Her journey getting clean brought her online, which brought her to Twitter, and the rest is history.
As Brooke tells it, TPOT brought her closer than she’d been before to what she wanted from college.
Unlike (the bulk of) college students, here were people with real, bared curiosity unwilling to be satisfied with easy answers. Earnest seekers, roused by a deep need. A need to share our incomplete selves. A need for the search for—whatever you want to call it, coherence, completeness, resonance, truth—for that search itself to be our act of communion.
At Camp Champions, after dark, attendees gathered at the Forum, a Greek-style installation featuring a round, terraced stone bench of the perfect dimensions for lively, boisterous discussion. We weren’t on the benches, though. We were arrayed in a ring on the hard ground, illuminated by lamps and the warm light of the campfire pit.
Ticket sales had been relatively low for this April event, so it was natural that conversation lingered on the topic of the future of Vibe Camp: how to make it sustainable, what other forms and modes of social scene-building would mesh well with it, what alterations to the business model might bring in cash without compromising on the core tenets. The first person to grow tired of that discussion, however, was Brooke herself. We have runway, she said. We will be fine.
Instead, what lingered in Brooke’s mind was the picture of her own path: from ennui, through desperation and despair and self-destruction, to a flicker of hope growing warmly and steadily. The past four years, she said, have been the happiest of her life.
I know there are people out there who are where I was
Who just need the bump that comes from feeling like they aren’t alone anymore to start spiraling up instead of down
And I want vibecamp to be there waiting for them to find it
Was the same true for me?
Over the past three years my problems, which had seemed so unique and impenetrable, lost their alienated character.
I was influenced by this community, online and offline, to:
Treat my health issues as problems that could be solved;
Think of exercise as a holistic/spiritual goal and not merely a sterile medical bromide prescribed to fend off the grave;
Put in effort to share my thoughts and make them more digestible;
Detach myself from ego and the need to be right;
Cultivate a deeper foundation of awareness in the face of pain, dread, and uncertainty.
Compared to four years ago, I feel capable of so much more. And more than that, life itself seems like a vaster, more manifold thing than I had formerly permitted myself to see.
No centre means no cult. No ladder to climb. No gods, no masters.
The impact comes from a series of little shocks. Allowing teachers to come and go. Allowing the experience as a whole to teach you. And even, perhaps, allowing you to teach yourself: take what is already written on the walls of your soul, cast it out into the night, and hear it back as a song, as a chorus that reverberates, suffuses, lingers.
The pieces of a fuller, brighter life are here. It's up to you to put them together.
Vibe Camp 3 starts June 13, 2024. Ticket sales close June 6, 2024.