Chaos

December 30th 2025

I've observed this thing from afar since i was a child. In the liminal nights between christmas and new year's, i watched the talks and scrolled through social media feeds. I marveled at the art, and all these effortlessly cool, edgy, free people, and the weird, beautiful things they seemed to be up to.
And now I'm here. And in a way, it's everything I thought it would be.
I hitch a ride around a dark, packed hall on a scooter made of Mate-crates. I stumble upon a performance of two women wordlessly vocalizing to the sounds of running water. Two strangers share their tea with me. I climb into a hollowed-out Bus and am blasted with a surreal supercut of glitched, flesh-melting AI pornography. I give a talk to a packed room of some one thousand people and they're eating it up. Someone buys me a drink and we talk about bookbinding, storytelling, and the feminine rage in the computer. It's exhilarating.

I have all the components to tell you the story of an amazing experience, of stepping through the screen, of this vicariously lived experience becoming reality. And yet, something feels off.
This is a space that's built on community. It has its own culture, its own deities (Cory Doctorow, Constanze Kurz, the concept of the RGB LED), demons (Amazon, The Government, AI?), and status symbols (3d printed cat ears, LED nametags).

People come here with their local clubs and form clusters in dark exhibition halls, sitting around hacking things, programming, making art or just hanging out.

At times it feels like everyone I ever thought was cool is here (Cory Doctorow, Ian from Project Zero, Mona from Princeton, et cetera).

Do they know something I don't? Because even with all these cool experiences, I feel unmoored here. I don't have people to sit with, and I don't speak the language that everyone seems so fluent in here. I'm not sure if I want to, either.

I tell myself that this is all lacking style, of a certain sophistication. Yeah your LEDs can be every colour, but that doesn't mean they should be. And plastic cat ears certainly are cheap and easy to print these days, but aren't there other factors to consider?

It all reminds me of a John Waters quote from an image I saved years ago:

"When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you're a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin' down MasterCard. But there's no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I'm mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the govermment, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that."

But maybe this is just the disorienting experience of staring into a funhouse mirror: Seeing so many people who are uncannily close to me, but somehow crucially different in ways I can't quite make out. Finding myself in a space where so many of the things that make me interesting or a little edgy are suddenly so radically normal that it's almost boring.