Being Unseen in a Scene
Hey beautiful people,
The Stoa will be having a party this Sunday called “RIP Liminal Web: A Death Ritual” @ 6:00 PM ET. If you plan on coming in person, bring a pen, a piece of paper, a lighter, and an expectation you’d like to burn. Hopefully, we will be creating some “life art” together. From Jonathan Harris …
By “Life Art,” I mean a creative process that embraces life itself as the primary medium — choosing an actual life situation as the frame for the work, and then working with people, places, tools, materials, stories, and dilemmas that exist in that chosen frame of experience, as a way of helping it evolve.
If you are planning to attend Friday’s “Life Art” session with Jonathan Harris, please take some time to watch his beautiful “In Fragments” series …
Tomorrow’s event:
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Newly posted events:
Metamodern Magick w/ Scoutleader Wiley. March 29th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Living from Eros w/ Pamela von Sabljar. March 30th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Anti-Social Credit System w/ Harry Bergeron. March 31st @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Metamodern Spirituality w/ Brendan Graham Dempsey. April 4th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
***
March 15th, 2022
I seem to belong to something, a scene perhaps. After releasing the memetic tribe white paper in September 2018, I began to see, and perhaps help cohere, a scene. The white paper seems to have become a part of the canon of this scene, which is interesting because the paper was basically a mapping of online scenes that are shaping culture by warring with other scenes. The paper was designed to be psychoactive, aimed to shake people out of whatever scene they were in, serving as a precaution not to rush into creating a new one without care.
This scene I seem to be in has been hesitant and resistant to settle on a name: The Sensemaking Web, The Emergentsia, The Metatribe, and now The Liminal Web. Each of these terms seems to be pointing towards a similar thing. It might be helpful to share how I have seen this thing from being inside the scene, and how I see how the scene sees itself. And perhaps the desire to be “seen” is one of its defining features.
The first name the scene became self-aware of was the term The Sensemaking Web. I coined this term on Twitter on July 15th, 2019, in the following tweet…
The Sensemaking Web. Future Thinkers, Rebel Wisdom, Emerge w/ Daniel Thorson, Both And w/ Jason Snyder and Jared Janes, Voiceclub [now Voicecraft] w/ Tim Adalin, etc. Chieftains: Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, John Vervaeke, etc.
The Sensemaking Web started off as a bunch of pre-COVID podcasts, along with the guests those podcasts were featuring. This was before the “podcast 2.0” / “communal podcast” model started. The throughline with all these podcasts: they avoided culture warrior mode, they wanted to get better at conversation, they were concerned with the ecology of existential risks (now what is referred to as the “meta-crisis”), they were interested in doing “inner work” to respond to the “meaning crisis,” and they were all aware and touched by Ken Wilber’s work somehow.
This term had some energy, and was adopted by all the podcasters mentioned above. Someone from the rationalist scene wrote a piece about the scene on LessWrong. I find it helpful when a scene sees another scene. The author was describing aspects of The Sensemaking Web, and I think he nailed it with this one...
The first word I'll pick is "openness". People who are low on openness tend to react strongly to ideas that are incompatible with their world view or which are too "weird", whilst people who are high in openness are much more likely to search for aspects of what is being said that resonate with them regardless. The sensemaking scene is highly open in that participants often discourse with those who hold completely different political views than them and in their embrace of spirituality or spirituality-adjacent practises. Much emphasis is put on being able to hold tension or uncomfortableness, which I think is almost definitionally necessary to explore new intellectual territory.
I totally feel seen.
The energy left The Sensemaking Web for me when Jason Snyder dunked on it via Twitter, conveying it was too masturbatory and more talk than action. This is shortly after COVID came online, and before he helped cohere his own scene with care: Doomer Optimism. I think he was right. The Sensemaking Web - at least for me - finished its job by sensing into the three big “hyperobjects” that felt like the highest-leverage things to be responding to: the meta-crisis, the meaning crisis, and culture war 2.0.
The two other terms vying to describe this scene: The Emergenstia and The Metatribe. The former described the ecology of thinkers responding to the meta-crisis while recognizing they are in a “time between worlds.” The latter was pointing to people with “meta” proclivities who were attracted to and at the intersection of three other online intellectual scenes: Game B, metamodernism, and postrationality. I would pattern-match these three scenes as being in or reaching towards the “Kegan 5” stage.
These two terms never really stuck, and besides - to paraphrase Colin Morris - the favorite Kegan stage in this scene is the one where you stop giving a shit about Kegan stages. Given that the energy faded away from The Sensemaking Web, and the other terms never really stuck, a new term was waiting to arrive, and that is where Joe Lightfoot’s The Liminal Web came in.
I like the term, along with Joe’s article and presentation at The Stoa. I was kind of bummed about having another term emerge though. I was enjoying being a part of a scene that was not identifying with any term. I did feel temporarily seen by the term, as Joe nailed many of its characteristics. I felt special as well, as he used The Stoa’s guests as a heuristic to identify the memetic scope of the scene: But if I had to choose just one metric for identifying the memetic scope of The Liminal Web it would be the breadth of guest selection on The Stoa.
I also felt uncomfortable with the term. It subtly felt energetically constricting. Basically, it does not feel liminal enough. I need maximal daemonic breathing room to be creative, and identifying with things often constricts me. This is why I suggested to Joe we engage in a death ritual on the term. It is going to be a playful ritual, and we are inviting liminal players to let go of any expectations they have towards the scene or any adjacent scene they are in. We are doing it on the spring equinox, a good time to let go of things.
If the term lives on after the session, cool. If people stop using it after the session, also cool. I do not care either way. I also do not care if people want to identify The Stoa as a part of a scene. I only have control over my choice, and I am choosing not to identify with anything at the moment.
Maybe this is too ambitious of a thing to want to have on the internet, but I want to feel seen. I also want The Stoa to be seen. I do not know if we can really be seen while staying in a scene. Besides, I feel most seen when I stop identifying with things. I start feeling like a mystery then, one in the process of being discovered.
***
Support The Stoa @ patreon.com/the_stoa
Apply to Beyond Self-Discipline @ maven.com/thewisdomgym/beyond-self-discipline