Office Hours
Fall updates for Toronto and beyond...
Hey everyone,
I haven’t written much the last few months as I’ve been busy with work-related stuff, but I thought I’d give some updates on some community initiatives that I have been involved in.
Gathering
As the title indicates, I have been organizing my own event called Office Hours, which is an in-person meetup for This Part of Twitter that takes place every Thursday at Bampot Tea House. This Part of Twitter (or TPOT for short) is semi hard to explain, but not impossible. Rich Bartlett has a summary tweet that helps narrow it down:
Another part of the origin story was that TPOT was a product of the For You algorithm in 2020 where users were making sincere threads on emotional intelligence, therapeutic practices, and spiritual traditions (among many things) and a snowball effect of sincere posting and replying soon followed. A feature of the For You algorithm in the past included indicating certain users that you followed liking certain posts. So if you were following the right people, you could get recommended posts from similar users, thus creating a positive feedback loop and the conditions to form prosocial clusters.
The desire to meet people IRL culminated in an event called VibeCamp, which took place in 2022 and has been going on every year ever since. Simultaneously, there’s been regional meetups taking place around the world in places like NYC, SF, Austin, Philadelphia, Berlin, Porto just to name a few. So you can add Toronto to the list now that I am organizing it.
Opening up a TPOT meetup in Toronto has been important priority for me in integrating content and experiences from TPOT in which I would never otherwise would have a group to ground with. I am careful about being too exclusive about being a “TPOT meetup” because it would mean leaving out anyone else who has high openness and great active listening skills who would otherwise be left out for not knowing such a label exists.
Something I will be on the look out for when I run these meetups are the chemistry and the interpersonal dynamics between guests. I am inviting a lot of people from a lot of different communities and subcultures in the city and a lot of them are meeting each other for the first time. My desire is to bring in different configurations of people together to explore and catalyze new combinations of collaborations and personal connections. In essence, attendees at Office Hours can expect to meet “new” people but are not strangers because of the hidden connections with mutual friends and communities they partake in.
You are already connected, let me show you how.
Vibe School
A few weekends ago, I attended my first in-person TPOT event out in Berkeley, California hosted by Twitter superconnector Brooke Bowman and I found the experience to be quite stimulating. I haven’t been to a VibeCamp before, but I’ve been following TPOT for years and desired to have a in-person TPOT experience. Now that I was able to get time off, there was no more excuses. Right off the bat, I noticed that there were a handful of people who haven’t heard of TPOT and that may have had to do with how the event was locally promoted. Fliers, Instagram, and word of mouth within certain social hubs reached a whole new set of people. With the influx of new people, I had less to be worried about. More of us were in a similar boat and Brooke and her team were more than happy to figure out ways to welcome new people into the fold. I came in with the image of a mystical clique of TPOT event attending regulars and that became more and more of a myth as the weekend went on.
The event took place at Lighthaven, which I’d describe as a group housing complex that serves as a campus and has a futurist village vibe to it. I appreciated that there were plenty of open space and unique furniture to unwind and have conversations in. You could tell right away that it had a “futurist” aesthetic to it. Baige and green were the most dominant colors of the location, which does not surprise me as they are the most prominent colors in our conceptions of the future as depicted in our media. The venue tends to attract a hyperintellectual crowd but the experience I had wasn’t too intellectually intimidating. I think a main contributor of my ease was how dressed down people were. Heck, there was even one person wearing a lemur costume the whole time.
The opening exercise was tender and sincere and tailor made to make fast friends. I shared my life story in 5 minutes and stated my intentions at the beginning of the event. I’m proud to say that I was successful in what sought out to do that weekend: to network with other community builders and to make each of my attended workshops the best one possible. There were two main groups of workshops I found myself in: The first group of workshops were hosted by my friends so I attended them out of support and got to learn a little about their philosophy, values, and engagement style in the process. Then there was the second group of workshops, which I felt had engaging topics and I wanted to play my role in making these workshops the most potent experiences possible.
A lot of the events were about social skills, but at the same time felt like inner work in disguise. Improv, bantering, giving compliments and flirting are ways of diverting anxious and neurotic preoccupation of the self to attentiveness towards the other person or role or character, etc. Some of the norms and principles that emerged over the weekend included being genuine, lifting people up (or as the kids would say “gassing each other up”), and attentiveness for the other.
I experienced a handful of side conversations where people were riffing on ideas that could be their own standalone events. For instance, I found myself in a conversation with another Chris about frame control and the Defence Against the Social Dark Arts. So my takeaway from this inviting social environment was that I can take this environment with me, embody the TPOT slogan “You can just do stuff” and convert side conversations into very interesting events and collaborations in the future. With all of these highly curious and enthusiastic educators running amok, TED should be sweating right about now!
Now you’re probably asking “Chris, why TPOT and where do they fit in with regards to systems change, liminal communities, and the meta-crisis that I keep harping on about?”:
The main value I see in TPOT is in its potent ephemeral culture building. You will experience moments of “finding your people”. But if you go to TPOT in search of some legible vision for the world, consider being disappointed for it may not be the one that you like or want. Particularly, you may not like the Bay Area contrarian futurism and you may think it’s problematic for the world. But if there’s a set of values that you stand for, you could lead with good faith, curiosity and attentiveness and develop a potent subculture of your own. Most people want community and how we navigate differences in values vary from community to community, but I think the ability to co-exist with people of various levels of conformity within a community and between communities is a skill worth developing. A kind of diplomacy but the ability to set boundaries is key in building a more beautiful future with the utmost humility.
Fun story: The weekend at Berkeley almost didn’t happen because I almost missed my flight due to long wait times at US border services. When I ended up seeing the border officer, it was time to board and as you could probably tell, I was flustered and on edge. He asked me why I was flying to SF and I reflexively blurted out “AI Symposium” instead of “social skills workshops”. I was very fortunate to say something remotely coherent in a moment of stress rather than be a rambling mess and be subject to more questioning to the point where I would have missed my flight. But it worked out seeing as I’m writing all of this to you.
A Map for Toronto appears
My friend Naryan has been developing a network map for what is colloquially known as “The Toronto Meta Scene”
As he and his co-organizer describe it,
“In the Toronto region, we sense a constantly evolving mix of communities, groups and events that seem to have something to do with inner growth/healing, it's connection to collective growth/healing, and its connection to local/global systems. Maybe with different language, different focus, or different practices - yet there are threads that connect.”
I’ve been featuring events from these communities and subcultures on my calendar and I can’t wait to “connect the dots” with others on Nov 15.
But as much as I’m curious about “what is emerging” or “what’s next”, I’m also curious to know from others “how is this important?” and “how can we maintain this?”
Toronto Event Calendar
My event calendar that I am known for can be found here
Events I’m really looking forward to:
Nov 15 @ 7pm: Toronto Emerging Scene Party
I posted some of the details as well as my hopes for the event already, but there’s also an interesting gimmick this event possesses: Head, Heart, and Soul. It will experiment with different ways of showing up whether it’s intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, etc. I’m curious to see who will be min-maxxing and who will lean into an edge…
Being and Becoming Philosophy Festival (Week of Nov 19)
Toronto’s hottest philosophy club is set to have a week long festival starting on the 19th of November featuring such topics as disagreement, virtuosity, phenomenology, race and culture. I always appreciate seeing a festival or symposium of ideas in my city and especially appreciate that B&B is taking more ambitious steps in their pursuit of elevating public philosophy.
Thanks for reading and stay pretty y’all. Till next time!
Chris, is the Toronto map in the public domain?