Vibecamp & Porcfest: An Ethnography of The Internet's Edge

I get the worst writers block when I haven’t written in a while, so I’m just going to blast this out.

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Over the past week and a half I’ve been on the road and camping out. And while I’ve gotten more than a few interesting stories and anecdotes driving through upstate New York and the haunted rumour shadowed mountains of Pennsylvania, the most interesting parts of the trip was certainly the destinations (not always the case).

There is a weird irony that I’ve been offline so long, yet having been offline attending two of the most terminally online events I’ve ever been to. Somehow I’ve been completely detached from the internet, politics, twitter, and everything else… Yet have discussed and thought about little else during that time.

These two festivals have been the most extremely INTERNET things I’ve ever been to, Yet for all their similarity in personalities and the hyper-online feel to them, at least on paper they’re maybe more different than each other than they are from normie-space, to the extent that still exists at all.

VibeCamp

is maybe the extreme intersection of Rationalist, Post-Rat, Effective Altruism, Silicon Valley, Quant Finance, and 5-10 other Cyber-Left, Grey-Tribe, autistic-centrist, techno-optimist blogging/twitter world.

The two names that were dropped the most both as subjects of conversation and acquaintances were Scott Alexander the famous writer/Psychologist of Slate Star Codex and

Astral Codex Ten

fame, and Aella the (in)famous Twitter personality/sex worker who writes

Knowingless

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Though neither were in attendendance, the people who were were very much their people, both in terms of ideology, lifestyle, and personal connection, I met several people who knew both.

Given that setup you could probably imagine the two overwhelming facts about vibecamp:

1. With rare exception everyone in attendance was shockingly intelligent. At random points throughout the festival I was having deep dive conversation on the geostrategic situation in Israel, the effects of Interest rate increases on venture capital, early 20th century Canadian poetry, and the fate of the petrodollar and the nature of Foreign Exchange markets.

2. With rare exception everyone in attendance was incredibly weird. Some in very obvious ways visible at 100 paces, some in little uncanny ways it might take you an hour to isolate and identify.

A friend of mine who’d recommended I attend Vibecamp had become persona non-grata at a previous vibecamp event when he drunkenly and too loudly described everyone in attendance as “Dysgenic” and probably several other things…. right as a music track stopped in a room full of people. (he may have also referred to himself by contrast as “gorgeous” and “A beautiful golden God”)

And while I certainly would not take it that far describing VibeCamp (Any event selecting for the quality of conversation I had is doing something VERY right) he was gesturing at something…

The shape of the people jumps out at you. There were an incredible number of normal and average looking people, and a much lower portion of obese and Amerifat body-types than almost anywhere else in the US… Perhaps owing to the extreme intelligence and incomes of those involved… But in about 30-45% of people in attendance there’s just some unusual distortion of body proportions that would be remarkable and memorable encountered in an individual, but when assembled together gave the White and Jewish attendees (a combined 90+% of the total) the look that they were all descended from some unusual gothic ethnicity you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Some strange isolated country bordering The Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Romania, and the Basque region of Spain… That they’d all come from whatever part of the old country the Adams Family comes from.

Of course in such an assemblage of autistic San Francisco adjacent Techno-optimists and progressives, about 10% of those in attendance were trans and an additional 10% gay…

But even amongst the biological females one found a remarkable proportion of shockingly tall women in the 5’10” to 6ft range, whilst others varied in the extreme opposite direction well under 5ft.

These unusual heights (or lack there-of) were exaggerated by recurring extremes of bodyfat percentage, with several of the attendees (male, female, and between) having a spider-like absence of body fat entirely denoting some unusual hormonal profile expressed in a true kaleidoscope of personalities and interests.

This was expressed most keenly in the faces in which latent autism, and the aforementioned hormonal oddities, were expressed in large eyes and other unusual features, resting positions, and expression creases. Which weren’t all necessarily unattractive, but gave most of the women (and a good percentage of the men) a rather spaced out looks which remained somehow unique in each instance… As if they were all on another planet, but each a very different one from the one each other was on.

Thankfully with psychedelics and other pharmaceuticals they seemed able to meet up on a few mutually agreeable worlds.

At the other extreme there was a subset of tall muscle-bound people of faces and types which seemed to have stepped right out of hollywood films 2000s Video Games (Hollywood now valuing mediocrity). A body-builder friend of mine who non-whites everywhere insist looks exactly like one of the most famous male heartthrobs in the world; a 6’5” German fellow with braided beard who looked less like a viking than like a huntsman riding out from valhalla itself; a tall space cadet girl who looked (and dressed) exactly as if she were a disney princess stepped out of 50s animation; a tall lanky and odd/charming tech entrepreneur who looked less like a founder, than a celebrity an inspired director might cast to play him in the subsequent cyber-thriller.

Vibecamp attracts a great deal of biohackers and supplements freaks. Men, women, and others of extreme nutritional theories… and while some of them look like their theories haven’t panned out (the vegans) some look like they’ve discovered the Holy Grail.

This extreme bifurcation and assemblage of extremes was expressed right down to their vehicles… Walking through the parking lot there were $100,000 CyberTrucks and sportscars, whereas 1-2 cars down the line from them there were vehicles practically ripped apart with the engine showing under bodywork that’d long ago been scattered across some guardrail, reassembled just enough to (somehow) get back on the road but with not a dime spent on restoring it’s appearance. This wasn’t 1 car, this was a TYPE of car at the festival. Denoting in the owners some combination of MacGyver resourcefulness, Chadlike indifference, autistic obliviousness, and Victorian Frugality that I can’t but admire…

(Or I suppose, possibly, extreme motor impairment. I don’t know that these accidents didn’t happen ON THE WAY to the festival)

Combine this with the fact that several of the attendees were able to drunkenly! explain oddities of Quantum physics to me, field theories on derivatives markets and geopolitics, and spontaneously recite the poetry of Samuel Coolidge, Robert Service and Stan Rogers from memory…

Combine all that and I’d have to disagree with my friend that there was anything “Dysgenic” about the group.

Indeed I enjoyed their company vastly more than I would have ever imagined.

Or at least I would have to disagree, except for the fact that none of them seem likely to breed.

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While there was a small collection of children attending in the family cottages adjacent, (as far as I can tell including family events and areas is actually very important for festivals that aren’t wholly Music and Drug festivals, or else they die out the second their main demographic hit’s 30) in the Case of Vibecamp this was a vanishingly small part of the festival compared to the few comparable festivals I’ve been to. out of 500-1000 attendees, there were maybe 1-2 dozen children under the age of 18. And indeed it was vanishingly rare someone would mention having children elsewhere.

Which indeed is what you’d expect from a festival of terminally online Twitter people from The Bay Area, New York, and DC who when not trans or otherwise queer disproportionately Identify with polyamory, kink, or other sexual proclivities which are actively anti-correlated with actual sexual reproduction.

So while I would strongly disagree with my friend that the human capital assembled was “dysgenic”, the actual culture of vibecamp, or atleast the baseline culture of the internet subsections and metro-areas VibeCamp summons people from certainly is.

It is quite literally dysgenic. it is taking all that human capital and failing to Gen-erate human capital in excess or even proportional to its inputs.

Indeed it’s imbibed a lot of progressive sexual norms that seem actively contrary to ever generating a new generation capable of replacing the old.

The first night there was a “speed-friending” event to help new people meet each-other who’s instructions specifically stated that it was NOT a “speed-dating” event and allegedly had some measure taken to prevent it from devolving into such… which would seem reasonable, if you want an event to be one thing you don’t want it to be another…

Except despite clearly demonstrating they were perfectly capable of holding a “speed-[meeting]” event, there was no subsequent “Speed-dating” or any romantically incline… ANYTHING. The entire rest of the festival.

There was a “makeout competition” in which, gay, trans, lesbians, straight girls pretending to be lesbians, and actual heterosexual couples competed for the best dramatic/funny kiss whilst being sprayed with an ice-cold garden hose… but there was nothing, no traditional dance, no mixer, no “truth or dare”, no “never have I ever”… nothing you might have experienced in a rural school or 80s film that used to be standard for Americans getting together to allow heterosexual romances to spark.

Admittedly part of the reason they didn’t might have been the gender ratio of the festival… even counting all the trans-women and non-binary in the female category, it didn’t even approach a 40-60 F-M ratio… Despite taking place in Maryland it was a Bay Area gender-mix…

But more than that, VibeCamp and the culture that surrounds it “leans in” to a post-MeToo sexual dynamic of formalism/neuroticism with regards to things far beyond “consent”. And not just in the official statements of the event’s conduct guide and event descriptions…

I’ve never been to dance parties so large where everyone was dancing like character models from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Preprogrammed to never get closer than a double arm’s length.

The broken heterosexual male-nerd anxiety and tentativeness around sex and other forms of human interaction and intimacy could be cut with a knife… And it wasn’t like everyone had all been corralled and lectured night one or anything of the sort, somehow this broken progressive Dysgenic (actively failing to generate) culture had infected the urban male technological elite, from Bay Area techfounders, to New York Medical Experts, to DC Military Industrial Complex people, to British Forex Traders, to Dutch and Australians visiting the US for the first time… All of them had had that instinctive flinch trained into them… Some of the Wealthiest, Oddest, Most intelligent, and a small handful of the most attractive men in the world… had all been broken like horses, to flinch and start moving the minute the riding crop is grabbed.

Heartbreaking.

There’s an irony that the places which most engage in therapy language and most proudly proclaim their “acceptance” are almost always the most unforgiving… My friend continued to crash VibeCamp events after they tried to kick him out, and he might have been one of the only people in VibeCamp history to start dating a girl at the festival…(not a man to receive a priestly censor), but the sensitive nerdy men I encountered, with well meaning hearts and souls for poetry, hopeless.

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So while I had a blast and enjoyed myself I certainly don’t expect it to be a culture that’s still there in 20-30 years, The people there will maybe produce 100-200 offspring in that time for every 500 that actually attended. If that.

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But “WAIT” you may be asking. “How did they react to you Kulak? Did you tell them who you were?”

It was interesting, for the first few days I wasn’t letting on who I was, just that I was controversial and big in RW twitter, and then would just discuss my interests. One a Veteran Reader of LessWrong and it’s follow-on forums, guessed who I was instantly.

Another, somehow guessed every single prominent and even less prominent twitter personality before they guessed me… And then growing bored with the charade, I slowly started introducing myself in my more infamous capacity.

I had a shocking number of fans and readers there, and even more that commented “That’s you!?” and reacted with mirth at my twitter antics…most however didn’t know who I was… or so they claimed.

It was only after the festival I heard from several friends of friends and readers “You were at vibecamp!? That’s hilarious! My progressive friend was horrified at your presence and complained about it to me.”

Which reminds me of a old Christopher Hitchens line about how walking down the street, people would come up and tell him they loved his book… But his mail was almost 75% hate mail… So he deduced that for everyone person who walked up to expressed admiration, there had to be 3 people he walked by who were seething “There goes that asshole”.

Which is a tangent, but I find it deeply funny.

I will be attending VibeCamp again.

Porcfest

is a New Hampshire Libertarian festival and outgrowth of the Free State Project, a long running project to get libertarians and liberty minded people to move to New Hampshire. At 20,000 already confirmed movers to a state with a population of only 1.4 million, this has been a wild success, already more than 1 in 100 people in New Hampshire are “Free Staters” and this is in a state that was already amongst the most rural, white, and libertarian minded in the country.

Depending on who you ask this is either a wonderful example of self-sorting, voting with your feet, and freedom of association… Or if you ask left wing critics it is a fanatical secessionist attempt at stealing a territory from the native (White New Englander) inhabitants, with prominent post-libertarian commentator (whom i greatly respect) Pete Quinones criticizing the entire project as “Autistic Zionism”, with similar conflict to follow when the US inevitably breaks apart and the fanatical core is locked between Boston and Quebec.

So it was an interesting project to see.

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Now PorcFest, or so I had been warned by one of my readers, is a marked step down on the IQ scale for anyone who attends Silicon Valley type events like VibeCamp.

While Libertarians are consistently the most intelligent, rational, autistic, weird, and W.E.I.R.D. of any political faction in American life, they are still a political faction drawing from and forming alliances across the socio-economic hierarchy.

While you certainly have a selection effect you don’t quite have the extreme selection effect where every 5th person you meet is a startup founder, or a poet, or a space alien, or trans… these people weren’t selected for sociological proximity to the Bay Area.

However with that came considerable more diversity… though admittedly not in ethnicity, 95+% of those at both events were White or Jewish.

However, Porcfest really does have every type of (white) person from every walk of life.

At the campfire every night you could find old festival veterans and bikers zoned out on whatever chatting and drinking and saying “ ya brother” behind gravelly voices and unusual beards; Preppers in camo promoted the latest survival kit; nudists frollicked in their backcorner out of sight; hippies (some of the few ethnically diverse attendees) sold homemade jewelry, and discussed crystals and homeopathy; various types of deeply earnest local activists discussed means to organize and effect county policy; obsessive mothers and young women discussed homeschooling, unschooling, and various “free range” theories of parenting; economists lectured and argued with each other about the minutest details of utility functions and econometrics; bitcoiners promoted and organized the latest privacy theories, altcoins and investment visions… and about a dozen more types. RVers and transcontinental travellers were an especially large subset and i attended a talk on tips and tricks from a couple that had variously motorcycled and RVed Mexico.

The neighbors to our campsite was an older working class family with more than a few big American beer guts. The mother could have come right out of central casting with her Appalachian accent and attitude, and the father shared many stories about driving bus around north America… They were selling Grilled Cheese and Watermelon from a little stand outside their RV, As indeed almost everyone at this free market festival was selling or hustling something…

This was one of the coolest parts of the festivals, on pre-arranged narrow walking paths through the campsites the more eager hustlers had set up tent OVER the walking paths and to walk from one end to the other, you were walking through pop up restaurants, bars, shops, political promotions, etc.

One prominent stop gave out free pancakes every morning, but then charged a markedly above market price for any drinks or other items that might go with it, a financial advisor/estate planner was giving out free hotdogs and more importantly lemonade (it was scorching) as he tried to draw in clients, and a whole host of other promotions and schemes dotted the landscape. Allegedly the nudists had some sort of meal in their section, but I never checked.

In one tent miniature raves of 20 people were going on every night, with the NuMetal/EmoNight being a particular hit amongst attendees (Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal” was playing when I showed up), while in another a guerilla bar and poker game was going where every player was amusedly complaining that a homeschooled 12 year old had just hustled them all; just down the path a dome tent cinema had been set up with Starship Troopers and Bladerunner double featuring ( i got a bargain on a late entry (these people haggle) to catch part of Starship Troopers right as Buenos Aires was wiped off the map…

There were thousands of little things like this, one stand was set up “ATF Alcohol Tobacco Firearms”… it was not however the US bureau, but a popup store. I nearly bought some 19th century style tobacco snuff there, before remembering that I’d have to bring it back through the border, this also dissuaded me from purchasing some cheap ammo and custom loads.

And I missed a good chunk of it, having to leave before the largest night when the festival reached it Zenith.

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Impressive as all of the above was however, and as refreshing as it was to find myself often in crowds of dozens of armed and open carrying people… The conversation at VibeCamp was considerably more intensive and refreshing, part of this was almost certainly the heat, everyone had been exhausted by camping out in a heat wave, and part of it was that I had been travelling so long, but by the time we had to leave for another engagement, one that would not involve camping, I was not really sad to go.

PorcFest and New Hampshire might be the coolest small town experiences you can have, all the kooks, weirdos, and obsessives from every part of rural America gathered in one place, but it still has a small town vibe, I never quite found the intensity of personalities you get from the real geniuses you encounter at some events and amongst groups in some cities… Mind you I probably wasn’t searching or speaking to the right people I was exhausted enough by the end.

The speakers varied from uninspired, to excellent. Anarcho-capitalist /rationalist legend and fellow Substacker

David Friedman

of Machinery of Freedom and Legal Systems Very different from Our Own fame (whose books I should really review) gave a talk on Islamic Law paying particular attention to it’s non or counter-state aspects, which was a real highlight.

One of The Worst Debates I’ve ever Been To

The talk on Islamic Law was the second David Friedman event I attended at the festival… the day before 80 year old Friedman had debated fellow octogenarian libertarian economist Gene Epstein (Gene highlighted their “160 years of economic knowledge” at the start, I’m not being cruel highlighting this) on what was maybe the worst conceived debate proposition I’ve ever heard:

The Austrian economics of Mises and Rothbard contains economic intuitions that are important, correct, and missing from Chicago School economics.

Which is such a specific claim… not that one or the other is the superior system or set of ideas or jumping of point for analysing economics… which might have had a partisan Audience at Porcfest (80% of the audience would have started preferring the austrians), but would have allowed for a lot of more generalist discussions to draw in and engage and advertise whatever specific ideas and thinkers the two debaters wanted to highlight… you know, promote and sell people on the schools of thought the two debaters were defending. But NO! It was specifically a defense of one school’s uniqueness or possession of some niche of economic insight against a presumed dominance of the other.

Ie. It was custom made to send the debaters into the weeds, and then force them to start digging into the roots.

David Friedman has his own PorcFest deep dive and debate post-mortem on it at his substack.

Within 20 minutes these two veteran economists had lit up and were animatedly firing back and forth at each other over the most niche minutest detail on the history and relative merits of Cardinal vs. Ordinal Utility calculations, that I was was well and truly lost, and I’ve taken econ courses and read many econ texts. Maybe such a debate would have been interesting to a grad-school specialist audience of veteran econ students, but it was well over my head, and I could not imagine what homeschooling moms, hungover festival bikers, and Survivalists in the Audience must have thought…

I was genuinely shocked at the size of the audience still there at the end of the hour long debate, and I was fairly ticked off… two brilliant and original economists got up to defend their favourite schools and thinkers, two that I’ve really enjoyed listening to on podcasts and other interviews before, and I can’t imagine one person in the audience had their curiosity sparked to order a book by an obscure thinker or research an interesting concept because of it.

I was almost laughing at the humour of it, that 100-200 cantankerous rural whites from across the country, half of them with holsters and sidearms on their hips, had just watched two 80 year old Jews animatedly and unintelligibly sperg out about the relative merits of the neoclassical theories of Irving Fisher for an hour straight…

Then I look over and two homeschooled 16 year old blonde girls are animatedly clapping and enraptured, seemingly having followed the entire thing.

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PorcFest promo photo

Libertarian Eugenics

This was the really remarkable thing about New Hampshire and Porcfest, sure the people weren’t as impressive or as connected as the crowd at VibeCamp… but the children were almost terrifying.

All of them were skinny, healthy, and they were all hustling and running little businesses more impressively than the adults. There was the 12 year old hustling poker, there were kids doing motorcycle repair on their minibikes, countless girls running food and lemonade stands doing very brisk businesses, and a whole host more doing all kinds of things…

Whereas the adults as they got older varied from RV boomers, to festival bikers, to town kooks, to aging economists… The kids seemed like they might carve out little empires.

Forget even the comparison to VibeCamp and its continuation of IQ Shredder urban culture from the Bay Area and the rest of the Anglo-progressive world, PorcFest and the New Hampshire Free State Project might be the only truly Eugenic instead of Dysgenic culture that I’ve seen… Anywhere.

Even subcultures like the Amish or Orthodox judaism that manage to have above replacement fertility have such perverse selection effects that you can almost visibly see them degrading generation to generation. The number of Unusual genetic diseases and evaporative cooling effects (all the interesting/promising people leaving and so they slowly evolve into dysfunctional parodies of themselves) you encounter in these groups is largely shocking.

PorcFest and the Free Staters by contrast seem to have somehow achieved the opposite effect, their children are consistently MORE impressive than a mere survey of the adult human inputs would suggest. It might be the mountain air, the lack of pollution, the paranoid hippy health consciousness, the “Free Range” parenting mentality, the town kooks actually having positive effects on local policy (I wish there were this many people obsessive about the quality local governance where I am), the homeschooling, or maybe it’s just this is how autistic white people are supposed to breed, in odd migratory fertility festivals and with the attendant selection effects…

But uniquely amongst ANY community or ethnic group that isn’t 40% convicted felon, these people seem to have a successful mating profile and maybe even something approaching replacement fertility.

That is crazy to see.

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New Hampshire might be less interesting than Bay Area events and the crowds assembled in IQ Shredder metro-area, but it won’t be for long… Indeed it might be one of the most important parts of the world in the not too distant future.

Which I mean it makes sense… If there was one group that would pass through the perverse incentives and society destroying effects of the internet and come to a new equilibrium fastest… You’d expect it to be the libertarians, since they were the people who were terminally online and adapted to an autistic post-community world first.

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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