The following is copy from Season Two of Internet Real Life (IRL), now live on Metalabel, which I am hosting with
throughout April:A dialectic has shaped our collective relationship with the internet:
Internet-Optimism – The internet will save us! (1990s – Early 2000s)
Internet-Pessimism – The internet will destroy us! (Mid-2010s – Early 2020s)
Internet-Realism – ??? (Now)
Nobody is an internet optimist anymore. And everyone is aware of the internet’s awfulness—digital dependence, mass surveillance, online harassment, cancel culture, culture warring, and a spectacle of cringe. It was once cool to be a pessimist, but now it’s boring, if not cringe itself.
In Season One of IRL, which took place last November, we explored the above dialectic, sensing together what an “internet realism” position could be. Here is the opening presentation outlining the dialectic and the individuals representing each position:
The participants of the first cohort were amazing, and I left the collective inquiries feeling socially nourished. The guests were great: Jreg, Ruby Justice Thelot, Honor Levy, and Reggie James. We’ll be releasing their presentations throughout the month, and I’ll be sharing my thoughts on each.
For round two, we have a stellar lineup:
📅 April 4 → Molly Soda – Internet performance artist
📅 April 11 → Günseli Yalcinkaya – Internet folklorist
📅 April 18 → Sean Monahan – Trend forecaster and announcer of the vibe shift
📅 April 25 → August Lamm – Anti-tech activist
While each session can be treated as a standalone, we will approach this series more like a course, with a provided syllabus, living questions, and Collective Prescencing-style conversations—a conversational modality that draws upon the group's collective intelligence.
Given these qualities, I see this experience more as an “inverse course” rather than a traditional one.
The Inverse Course
I am influenced by philosopher Jacques Rancière’s book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, which tells the tale of Joseph Jacotot, a 19th-century French educator who discovered a revolutionary way to teach.
When Jacotot was exiled in Belgium, he was tasked with teaching French to Flemish students, but he did not know how to speak Flemish. He provided the students with a bilingual edition of a novel called Télémaque and trusted them to understand it on their own. They did. This led Jacotot to believe that traditional teacher-student roles could be radically transformed, where teachers guide instead of dictate—possessing a similar ignorance as the students at the start of the course, and thus becoming an "ignorant schoolmaster."
Rancière argues that traditional schooling stultifies students, creating intellectual servitude. This stultification happens when students believe they must rely on an authority figure for knowledge, reinforcing an intellectual hierarchy and instilling distrust in their own ability to learn independently.
Instead, Rancière claims that Jacotot discovered an emancipatory approach to education that sidesteps the effects of stultification. The "ignorant schoolmaster" is not needed to explain but rather to create the conditions in which students learn to trust their innate wisdom and discover truth on their own. This unlocks what practical philosopher
calls "natural intelligence"—the kind of intelligence that emerges from an embodied relationship with the world, where the relevance of what is being learned is clear and meaningful.We can say, then, that a traditional course has a teacher with epistemic authority, imparting knowledge or skills they possess to a class that lacks them—a process that stultifies students and fosters dependence on the teacher and the schooling system more broadly.
On the other hand, an “inverse course”1 has a teacher who does not know more than the students but instead stewards the group, unlocking their natural intelligence in a way that draws upon collective intelligence, allowing the participants to “teach the teacher.” This process ultimately leads to the intellectual emancipation of everyone involved.
I believe these inverse courses, which reverse the role between teacher and student—with the latter now holding the wisdom to be uncovered—are essential for discovering the new knowledge and skills needed to navigate the complexity of our time. Lone autodidacts toiling away to discover and master the new will not be enough. We’ll need to do this together.
With this framing in mind, we can say that the entire experience of The Stoa was an “inverse school,” and I was its “ignorant steward.” I learned more from the participants than they did from me. It was definitely a personal wisdom upgrade, and many Stoans reported the same.
It was only last summer that I started narrowing the scope and engaging in themed explorations with a dedicated cohort. The first inverse course-like experiment was The Entity Pill series, which aimed to discover how to understand (theoria) and respond (praxis) to “discarante entities”—non-physical beings that have the ontological status of “real” and interact with us in unseen ways.
The series was incredible, with a stacked lineup of therapists, psychiatrists, monks, occultists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists as guests. Personally, it taught me many key practices, verified across traditions. It also led me directly into the loving arms of tradition.
The second experiment was the first season of IRL, which, upon conclusion, made me realize that no internet realism position would be possible if we collectively possess an unconscious relationship with our screens—being pulled into them without conscious choice. This led me to personally overcome what I called “The Pull,” which I recently detailed in a series on Less Foolish.
Given the significant shifts in my personal learning, this teaching model has been validated for me. It is now time to experiment further, tinkering with each experience to improve it for everyone involved—and perhaps leaving behind physical artifacts (antimeme zines?) for non-participants.
is proving to be a great platform to host these kinds of experiences.I am excited to discover what we will learn in Season Two of IRL.
Join Internet Real Life, and let us rediscover how to do the internet together.
📅 Fridays @ 12 PM Eastern, April 4–25
💰 Recommended ticket price: $100 USD
If you want to attend just one session or are in financial need, you can choose the $40 USD option. You can also donate (even if you're not attending) more than the recommended amount as a gesture of support for these inverse courses. All proceeds are divided among the hosts and guest speakers.
If you have a better phrase for this, feel free to let me know!