The Vibes at Vibecamp

The art of spectacle and making of an American myth

“Welcome to the Dating Show to Save the World” the announcer proclaimed.

The performance on stage was just kicking off. A mix of hallucinogens and euphorics in my bloodstream had me white-knuckle gripped to my chair, bracing against 3 gravities of acceleration - these drugs accelerating the mind like rocket fuel, the steel barn filled with 600 twitter aficionados, a combustion chambers starting its firing sequence. Like all good trips, it was going to be a journey through metaphysical meanings, double entendres, and simple hilarity. The vibes would be out of this world - if I could keep it together.

But for every bit of heightened awareness and hilarious appreciation I gained on the way up, there opened up beneath me the potential pit of A Bad Trip. The dual nature of psychedelics - it can be a rocket to the stars, it can be a Temple-of-Doom uncontrolled train car ride through underground mines of latent childhood trauma. Was I on the way up? Or into the pits of a waking nightmare?

Hold Fast, I thought. This is going to be good. I just have to withstand the voices of insanity babbling into the periphery of my conscious awareness. See the walking shadows? The players who strut their hour upon the stage? Jesters, not demons. Yes, jesters. Ignore their melting faces and protruding horns. Jesters.

These were professionals, I thought. These were consummate performers who knew exactly how to guide their audience through an ironic extended bit lampooning modern society through the eyes of technology. More than just performers, these were micro-internet-celebrities. 

In that echoing barn, air thick with equal parts perspiration and anticipation, I strapped myself in for the opening act of the final show. The beginning of the end of VibeCamp.

Setting the Stage: The Autism Olympics

VibeCamp’s setting was idyllic, a pastoral painting brought to life; green rolling hills, quiet ponds of snapping turtles, cackling fire pits, rows of cabins nestled against the forest’s edge, and here and there, colorful tent villages in the corners of fields, like pavilions of a medieval jousting tournament. The melody of conversations against a reassuring background soundscape of outdoor deck construction. This place felt entirely our own.

This was “TPOT”. Top Posters On Twitter. That Place On Twitter. Those People On Twitter.

Introductions were by twitter handles, usually anonymous absurd portmanteaus, cartoon profile pictures; contact info could be exchanged by NFC chips embedded into Magic the Gathering cards, each with it’s owners profile-photo, with stats generated by an algorithm measuring social network connectivity among campers. A social score produced like most of the friendships themselves: by an algorithm. 

This crowd was interesting, and people were jubilant at meeting one another. Behind their anonymous internet personalities people had built up witty repartee over years, and each introduction was a potentially dramatic unmasking of someone’s real-life identity. 

Despite that many people were shy - stuck to their cliques, their mutuals - still others poured into a free-for-all social milieu that was almost entirely male dominated (estimates of gender ratios range from 5:1 to 10:1 men to women). The days were punctuated with playful and entertaining classes run by fellow campers - lectures on qualia, dancing, speed-friend-making, Q&A with storytellers, and dialogues on sex and dating. 

The novelty of online social dynamics was made all the more apparent by how awkward it often felt having those dynamics play out in person. A few people talking animatedly, with a larger number of people simply observing the conversation. The posters and the lurkers met face to face, and it was disconcerting. 

This East Coast campground had become like a Renaissance fair for the terminally online, everyone partly in costume as their online avatars, partly revealing their true selves. Every subgroup had their place in the spectacle: The lurkers: the spectators; the posters: the contenders in the tournaments - the jesters, bards and actors. And of course, the lords and ladies: the micro-celebrities.

Deconstructing the Latent Space of Social Power

The miracle of the weekend was witnessing the physical incarnation of an entirely online community brought together from wildly disparate corners of the geographic globe and social world. People could at long last claim credit for their contributions to an ever-rolling, ever-evolving conveyor belt internet discourse that is at times ironic, acerbic, witty, and which also commands the attention of a surprising fraction of the world’s rich and famous.

The means of celebrity production had become democratized by Twitter, giving every person a voice, and the previously unheard-of could gain a unique kind of anonymous fame. Some capitalized on that fame in the real world through speaking engagements, book-writing, and selling their embryos, converting clout to cash. Others remained enigmatic, gathering influence and reach, never revealing their true identity. Regardless, the production of celebrities by en-mass voting leveled the playing field by eliminating the usual correlates of celebrityhood - charisma, good looks, height, mannerisms. It removed gravitas from the equation entirely. Each tweet, a double-blind taste-test of prevailing social appetites. 

The declarative egalitarian nature of VibeCamp - there are no special treatments or VIP sections - is in some ways an attempt to do away with an externally imposed social order that attendee’s found stifling in the rest of their lives, where popularity depends so much on those things the internet obfuscates - looks, voice, charm. In some eyes the community had formed in response to a perceived rejection by mainstream styles of thinking and doing - the self-described “twitter schizo’s,” whose ADHD and cynical perspective clashes with the usual  implicit rhythm and flow of social conversations, of how to introduce oneself, make light hearted small talk, be ‘appropriate.’

Many looked forward to a social environment where we could be their online selves, dive deep into niche topic areas of interests - their eccentric, off-beat, off-kilter conversation style would no longer be met with pariah-hood, but would be the norm. More than anything, they looked forward to an in-person social milieu where they felt they belonged.

By and large, this is what happened - people found genuinely interesting humans to talk to about genuinely interesting topics, in a way that promotes openness, camaraderie, and new connections both in the real world and online.

But you cannot escape the facts of society in-person - some people have charisma - rizz - and others simply don’t.

The naturally gregarious, confident, ‘cool kids’ from our collective ancestral genetic memories of high school stole the show at VibeCamp. They led the majority of events, they drove the majority of group activities, and, like the only person with a working tongue in the leper colony, they monopolized the social spotlight where-ever they went. They were the people on stage, literally, in the final performance - the rest of us, the audience, sitting in darkened anonymity providing our adulation and approval.

In the absence of any well-defined social structure, we primates reverted back to the omni-present latent social structure that so frustrated many attendees IRL - the very thing that drove them online in the first place - who is outgoing, attractive, confident, witty, charming, popular, gets the attention. And, as the large love language model LoveBot3000 would tell us, when it comes to feeling wanted, accepted, like a valid member of the community, attention is all you need.

Predicting Token Signs of Acceptance

While some who sought community found it, still many others felt themselves once again relegated to the sidelines of the party, seething at the lack of recognition for their obscure talents and accomplishments. Many also sought a romantic connection - more than just a hookup, people wanted to find someone compatible, and struggled with the makeup of 5 - 10 men for every woman, half of whom were trans women.  

Gender in all its forms was on full display. For the men that were men, they stripped half-naked and formed spontaneous fight circles. No, actually, this happened. For the men that had become women, they wore sun-dresses and minced gingerly about in an environment that didn’t question their broad shoulders nor hairy arms. But for a large contingent of men, who perhaps struggled with dating culture outside of VibeCamp, and saw this as a potential to find a mate - “one like me” - they instead felt thrown back several paces - back to high-school, back to social exclusion, back to women giving them weird looks and finding excuses to leave the conversation, to be with other women or else men who were women or else men who could get women, and so were not projecting an insistent neediness on every interaction.

At VibeCamp, there were a number of gorgeous, graceful, and intelligent women, but they were far outnumbered by men of equal caliber, alongside the unwashed multitudes - and so attention was one-sided entirely.

The Importance of Being Earnest, and Hygienic

Attention was certainly commanded by one individual at VibeCamp, but not by their natural grace, presence, or charm, but rather like a tax extracted by a false promise - of intimacy, belongingness, inclusion in a radical sex culture. She drew a crowd like a mosquito draws blood, a soul-sucking, self-centered, transference of vitality, that if it were to end in a penetrating exchange of fluids would no doubt also leave behind itchiness and inflammation. I’m talking, of course, about the twitter escort.

The twitter escort is a spectacle personality - posting statistics about the frequency of her defecations, her cryings, her showers (once every 10 days or so). Her main activity is creating polls that seek to astound, in shock value, by offending our sensibilities and prudish attitudes around bodies, sex, and attraction. 

But the town crier of whoredom doesn’t cry loudly to raise interest in humanity, to speak to the masses. Without a unique substantive message in sight, beyond the typical platitudes of self-love wrapped in actions of self-abasement, twitter-escort has gained mind-share through a time-honored tradition of attention seekers everywhere - to mix the sacred with the profane, skirting the borderlines of conservative outrage of radical acceptance without committing to any one position on any one thing, generating a veneer of false mystique pulled over a genuine lack of meaning and identity. It became clear from her presence, both on-stage and off, her primary goal is to gather attention to herself. 

Nowhere did this become more apparent in her ‘dance session’ - which was controlling, conceited, overtly artificial and entirely weird. For a camp so focused on vibes, myself and anyone else around me could not help but comment - the vibes were off, man, whenever twitter escort was around. Whatever the situation was, whatever the discourse, it was entirely clear it was not about the scene being created, nor the vibes, nor the exploration of bodies and consciousness and cosmic love and justice - or anything else put forward as a banner to fly - but about her, and her creation of a kind of toxic femininity - base, un-mannered, built up by gate-keeping, exclusion, dangling an angler-fish false-charm of sexuality to the sexless, like hawking powdered water in the desert.

For someone who no doubt views themselves as a celebrity, twitter escort stood in stark contrast to the person who actually deserved our adulation, our fame, our undying attention and love - Brooke. The twin binary star system of Brooke and twitter escort was a classic duality of empath and narcissist: Brooke the giver, who injected so much wholesome love and energy into the event as to call it forth from the primordial latent desires of all TPOT-kind; and twitter-escort, who fed upon the crowds energy, attention, and vibes, in a vain attempt to quench her insatiable thirst for attention, her longing for meaning, her inability to claim and retain some permanent internal identity.

Like a black hole stripping the hot gasses from its twin star in a binary system, the twitter-escort was only able to shine in any capacity by the excess of warmth, energy, and vibes generated by Brooke’s sincere positive-sum actions and investments. Brooke, who brought together the event. Brooke, who created the crowd. Brooke, who drove away the storm-clouds. It was the contrast of a person who does nothing but talk, and one who does everything but doesn’t talk about it. It was a tale of two vibes, Brooke’s vibe authentic, genuine, giving, nurturing, and inclusive; unpretentious, graceful, grounded, enthusiastic - and the twitter-escort , illusory, conceited, self-serving, needy, attention-seeking; vain, base, haughty, pretentious, gate-keeping, and predatory upon the audiences good intentions. A creator, and a taker; one who sets the stage, and one who struts their hour upon it, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A Tale of Two Vibes

I managed to hold tightly onto my chair, not falling off as the rocket, or rollercoaster, began its ponderous climb skyward. The murmuring in the hall began to die down, spotlights blazed, music sang, and The Dating Show to Save the World was off to a rolling start. Dating is hell, they said, so let’s make it a game. I was five substances deep, not including ones that are legal, and the mixture of pure elation and joy as the scene unrolled before me was unparalleled. My grip on the metal chair relaxed, the room stopped spinning, and I became utterly transfixed - this was the art of the spectacle, perfected. 

Let’s get one thing straight: the entirety of VibeCamp is exploding with the kind of raw talent, genius, and enthusiastic irony and humor that can build empires and topple tyrants. It is Oscar Wilde at the bar, Jim Carrey on the stage, and Werner von Braun in the lab all at once. A combination of lyrical witticisms, transmutation of the human condition, and technical ability writ large.

The final show of the weekend was beyond all reasonable expectations in quality and profundity. The music, the lyrics, the method acting (especially by the proto-caveman who underwent transformation through the tree of knowledge), were absolutely dripping with creativity and double meanings - a psychedelicists delight - that was far grander than the setting demanded. A barely contained bosom of genius popping buttons off a too-small shirt of a venue.

The show was biblical in its depth of allegory, and triggering for its brutal sense of reality. The sociological undercurrents of the long weekend had become manifest in this display of showmanship - in-group / out-group distinctions, the difficulty of dating for most men present, the seemingly arbitrary gate-keeping and condescending reserve of a toxic brand of femininity.

The words, “it was the best of vibes, it was the worst of vibes” became manifest in the two intermissions, the ‘message from our sponsors’ - the first, an insidiously catchy tune about LoveBot3000 (“Large Love Language Models, sexy as a service, genie in a bottle”) that lampooned modern dating culture through the eyes of avante-garde technology - a perfect bullseye among the crowd. The lyrics, music, lead-in, aftermath, on-stage dancers, every single thing was incredible. I was ecstatic. The Rocketdyne engines had burned cleanly, and purely - I was traveling at 7 kilometers a second through the upper wisps of the stratosphere, on my way to the allegorical space station of the Great American Myth until I reached enlightenment, or, when the receptors in my brain burned out - whichever came first. 

The second ‘sponsor’ performance was a satanic ritual originally concocted by Aleister Crowley, performed in 100% absolute seriousness on-stage, the culmination of a weekend-long series of rituals that selected from the crowd of vibe-campers seemingly at random. People showing up to these select events were turned away, despite the ethos of VibeCamp being inclusivity and acceptance. These aspiring acolytes were unaligned souls, vulnerable for the harvest, and it seemed in that context - a satanic ritual unknowingly and unconsentingly performed on an assembled congregation of partygoers -  the entirety of VibeCamp was a carefully orchestrated scheme to concentrate in one single location a mass of humans all rapt in revelatory ecstasy yet completely without moral nor spiritual mooring - a ripe harvest offering to a dark lord, a satanic reaping of the vibes. 

Slaaneshi Cultists Smoke American Spirits

The Satanic Ritual deserves some discussion. 

It began with a video projected onto a screen. A young woman, nay, waifish nymph, sits slumped in an alleyway: pale skin and blonde hair, clad in rags, alone and forgotten in a Brooklyn alleyway. People pass by and ignore her. She is staring at a cell phone, swiping right on person after person as the words “Not a Match” repeat themselves. For a moment she fantasizes about one match in particular, coming to her, perhaps as a mother, perhaps as an older lesbian mentor, until this salvation is brutally stripped away - “Not a Match.”

She is rescued by an alien-like being, decidedly female, the child perhaps re-incarnated in a future Dyson Sphere of computronium, to live in eternal metaverse-bliss; or else resurrected from the buried ashes of New York, like Anakin Skywalker at the ending of the Spielberg movie A.I. The words flash on the screen - “Omega Mystery School.”

Then the ritual begins. A procession of cloaked figures files towards the front of the stage. The room lighting is entirely in purple. Some ritualistic incantations of various Angelic-like names that today would get you beaten up in the schoolyard (“Suck it, Gabriel”), along with some well-practiced sword movements. Then, a call - Omega Rise! In one section of the great hall some 50-ish people all stood up at once, all in the same seating area, and called back with a chant of their own. 

The Vibes had Shifted, man. 

My grip once again went white-knuckle tight on the seat of my folding metal chair. We weren’t in orbit anymore, rather, the rollercoaster train car was plunging at 666 miles per hour straight towards an ever widening abyss of demonic possession and eternal damnation. The overwhelming feeling in my body and mind was, “I reject this, I reject this, I reject this.” The purple lighting became more and more intense, the sword movements of the head priest more precise, the climax a prolonged Cloverfield horn that likely signified the transference of my soul energy, my midichlorians, to those standing, or else the chaos god they stood in servitude to. 

I saw visions of the near future from my psychedelic trauma-triggered train car, hurtling headlong into the heart of darkness. Is this when the soul-reaping begins? When horrors beyond comprehension emerge from the Warp and manifest as gargling Cronenberg monsters tearing through the chest cavity of the friends around me? Tentacled many-eyed beasts ready to perform the kali-rah, kali-mah moment of cardiac extraction? Some foul shoggoth comes slouching towards Vibe-le-hem? Where is Ketamine Jesus to grant me salvation from this den of putrid filth, this evil, this corpulent mass of demonic thralls whose aspiration is to be chewed like skittles by great Cthonian horrors summoned from our gestalt subconscious nightmares?

It was incredibly emotionally manipulative upon the audience - first, showing the trembling girl, alone in an alley, unloved, to a room full of internet-warrior white-knights with twitter handles like “KenTheSimp”, who at once both share her plight of romantic rejection and would see themselves as her would-be rescuer; then again, another feminine figure as salvation from this abyssal pit of modern emptiness. And it was at the same time, a sincerely legitimate psychic and spiritual assault on the people assembled. It was completely without warning - we were uninformed, and most importantly of all among the voluntarily governed, entirely unconsenting. 

I need to make this point clear in complete honesty: this was not theatrics, this was real to the people performing it - as overhead in the cafeteria a day or two before - “You’re actually doing this? Performing a Satanic Ritual” - “Yes. I summoned a demon and trapped it in my body. Now I’m performing this ritual.” Theatrics to some, but to others, a heartfelt and malevolent attempt at feasting off the bodily energies of others to their own benefit. Wrapped in a masterfully manipulative promise of belonging and exclusive community membership as escape from a cruel and uncaring modern world, the need to belong driven home by the social milieu of chads and lemurs, the gender ratio, the in-jokes and out-groups. A pagan spiritual incarnation of self-abasement, financed by the same soul-sucking modus operandi of twitter-escort - obey as simps, and you might taste a whiff of the feminine divine. 

The Vibes Really Tied the Room Together

Was this pagan ritual the Faustian bargain of VibeCamp, driven home by the abysmal gender ratio, by the in-your-face exaltation of the in-group influencers, by the reminder of who is cool and who is not, and presenting our genuine traumatic suffering - of loneliness, of rejection, of isolation and pariah-hood - wrapped up in the brilliant packaging of theater kids with access to adult money? Come, embrace the tenderness of future-alien female Lucifer who will rescue you from all this pain and suffering and loneliness, it only costs your soul. 

The play wore on, as plays often do, progressing further and further into improv, and my own sense of reality slipped further and further down the long muddy slope of hallucinogenic fantasy. 

By the end of the play, twitter escort was spitting into the open mouths of two dead men on-stage, reviving them with her oral effluent. An apt metaphor for the toxic goo she dispenses as a placeholder for access to genuine warmth, mistaken by the crowd for nourishment in the long twilight of their now-fading, now-stolen masculine souls. This act of filth passed off as nourishment, of takers using a stage provided by creators, to debase and abuse the givers of attention, itself a synecdoche of the Pagan ritual - a religious order intent on sucking good energy from others in a nihilistic view that modernity has failed us, and along with it, surrendered the mandate to shepherd the human spirit. Make room in your inner sanctum for someone else's inner demon. 

Exacerbating a groups collective trauma, flaying it on-stage, then filling the pulsing wound with salt in the name of stage-craft engenders that most natural defense of unaware sadists everywhere: oh, it was a joke, a performance, meant to amuse and entertain. Don’t take it so seriously, bro.

Yet among the crowd, in the aftermath, as I wandered the crowds and cliques in a Hunter S Thompson-like haze, as I reeled from the psychic poison poured into my soul by the foul Omega ritual, I found many campers deeply disturbed - troubled, triggered, traumatized. Grown men crying, having brought up feelings of isolation and rejection, reminded of the arbitrary gate-keeping of the dating world, the inaccessibility of women, the sarcastic push towards nihilism as an escape from perils of modernity. A theatrical performance put on by the cool kids, making fun of lemur-hood, with an overt interlude intended to steal the souls of the unaligned. Come on man, it was a joke, get over it, laugh. 

But like so many things on Twitter, not least of all TPOT, there was indeed a joke being played, but not everyone was in on it. 

This was the one and only shortcoming at its core - that the democratization of celebrityhood on Twitter involves people taking turns on stage - promoting one another, re-tweeting, debating, liking. That every performer can also take their turn in the audience, and the most unlikely of characters can - and deserve to - command center stage.

It Was Still Better Than VibeConf

For all the religious allegories, metaphysical implications, and spiritual or financial extractions collected by Slaaneshi cultists and twitter-escorts alike, VibeCamp was a genuine and sincere meeting of minds and spirits pulled from across North America, and indeed the world. It was a deep dive into the condition of the modern American Man - wandering, frustrated with the winner-take-all dating dynamics promulgated by apps and internet culture, seeking genuine belonging and fulfillment in a chaotic and impersonal world, yet introspective, intent on self-improvement, aware of his plight with an ironic and humble sense of self; dispelling the agents of satan with an acerbic, cavalier humor. 

VibeCamp as a whole was a bold stand against the forces of darkness, be they sucking souls or more corporeal appendages, a genuine port in a storm, a beacon of community in a demon-haunted world; if not demons of pagan myth, then demons of anxiety, loneliness, depression; isolation from one another and separation from a sense of purpose. The people were real, the relationships fomented were real, the vibes were real. 

As the night wore on, and the dance parties began, I too began to see the light of Ketamine Jesus, one that lives on in your heart, mind, and soul, leaving flakes of crumbly white stuck in your nose the morning after. And it left me thirsty, for communion, for science as a candle in the dark, for ice-cold blue gatorade; it left me hopeful and optimistic for community builders of this new American Age - a golden age indeed, and one that would begin not with a whimper, nor a bang, but with the clean frustrated celibacy and confidently-wrongness of men on the internet, debating the issues of our time. A new day ushered in by song, a melodious tune that sang away the dark with the light, the morning lark issuing its solemn tweet.