I recently spent three nights in Bali at this thing called Seacamp1. What is it? Well, I found it kind of difficult to explain whenever family and acquaintances asked about my travel plans.

I’m going to Bali for, uh, an online friend gathering.

I used to attend various maths and computer science ‘camps’ when I was younger. There the purpose was clear: teenagers with aptitude get a couple days to learn and practice together beyond what would have been available in their respective local schools. So, okay, I nominally went to those to get better at maths, computer science, or something else, and made friends as a side effect.

Did Seacamp have a purpose then? Let’s peek at the list of activities:

• ‘community norms you wish for, social life you wish for, intentions’
• Capoeira
• ‘TWIRL (Twitter In Real Life)’
• Karaoke
• ‘circling’
• ‘Meet your Online Tulpa’
• ‘Ways to Make A Lot of Money workshop’
• ‘Hotseat’

This is slightly puzzling. It alternates between generic to cryptic to seemingly unhinged. Is this what Maya has flown2 to Bali for? Is she in a weird cult?

Am I in a weird cult?

The weird cult venue.

Interlude on Bali

I should state upfront that I have not actually visited Bali much; what I did visit was the airport, a hotel near the airport, the Seacamp venue, and the bit of Sanur beach in front of a shopping centre.

The weather was more pleasant than I had expected from the tropics; maybe you wouldn’t quite work outside in that temperature, but the cosy warmth subdued by a gentle breeze felt rather well-suited for living a leisurely life. The flora was pleasing and vibrantly lush.

I used to be a bit puzzled about why Bali specifically keeps coming up and not any other Indonesian islands; now I understood that the point of Bali is that it’s specifically a cultural hub for people to do fun and interesting things in3.

In spite of all the foreigners constructing their nice retreats, resorts and shopping centres the infrastructure reminds you that you’re not in the first world; the roads are congested with no alternative means of transport, and the motorbikes do make a Westerner worried about their drivers’ (and passengers’) safety. But at least Grab can get you anywhere inexpensively.

Seacamp introductions

The venue was a small hotel kind of thing, with a pool, a garden, and various communal areas. The participants numbered near-twenty, mostly from Southeast Asia, a couple Australians, and a couple Westerners from a bit more distant parts of the world (me!). The initial round of introductions followed name, how one ended up in TPOT, reason for coming, and a commentary on the tarot card drawn from the bottom of the swimming pool.

TPOT? Let’s expand: ‘This Part of Twitter’. But more on that still later.

The participants’ backgrounds sometimes mentioned Effective Altruism and AI safety, and sometimes a bit more meditatory, maybe kind of spiritual. But that didn’t cover everyone; the one truly shared trait was having or having had an active Twitter account4.

‘TPOT’ definition

‘This Part of Twitter’. It refers to a variety of Twitter-based communities, with some but few shared traits. The term used to be more cohesive but, omitting some historiography better found elsewhere, by now covers multiple overlapping scenes, so this paragraph aims to clarify in case, by any chance, you come from what you think is This Part of Twitter but is actually a Different Part of Twitter to me. The part of Twitter Seacamp refers to is the same one that spawns other ‘TPOT camps’, namely Vibecamp, Jesscamp, Caulicamp, etc.

So, at the very least it is a bunch of Twitter users who like to meet each other in an organised way.

Seacamp in practice

I had been somewhat uncertain about what awaits me there. I was not looking to meditate in pursuit of jhana, and not looking to find embodiment, or whatever else. What convinced me to come instead was an endorsement from Maz ultimately. Fortunately I wasn’t completely alone when I arrived as I had met tutor vals earlier.

I ended up easing into the group rather quickly. The venue was conducive to small groups of people chatting forming here and there, and I soon became friends with one other unnamed person. The camp was really rather chill, and the unstructured conversations were as much a part of it as the loosely scheduled activities.

Activities! What about them?

Twirl

‘Twitter in Real Life’; it is intended to loosen the inhibitions people have around posting. The activity worked as follows: we sat in a circle, then we socialised for 5 minutes, then spent another 5 minutes posting at least one tweet and replying to at least one other tweet produced by someone else in the circle. Repeat. The idea is that it’s a lot easier to tweet something when one is socially expected to, and observing the circle react to tweets directly is a lot more encouraging than the uncertainty of posting something into the void while unsure if anyone would see it or like it.

In the final round people swapped5 phones to tweet from each others’ accounts, completing the merge into the hivemind.

Meet your online Tulpa

In a group, scroll through each others’ Twitter accounts, and comment on what you think of it, noting any differences between the online persona6 and the flesh-made human in front of you.

Circling

The Seacamp edition was about sitting in a circle, relaxing, observing each other, and commenting on what we notice about ourselves and each other in the moment, whether small actions, moods, behaviours, thoughts.

Hotseat

In the group, take turns sitting in the hotseat; the hotseat occupant gets questions thrown at them for a couple minutes each, in a sort of real-life AMA. Before others start asking your questions you get to set a spiciness level, to set an expectation as to how invasive questions others can ask you.

Others

‘community norms [...] intentions’ was a general discussion in a circle that tried to get participants to clarify what their wishes7 for Seacamp were.

‘Ways to make a lot of money’ introduced career-oriented discussion and reflection, focused mainly on freelancing.

Capoeira and Karaoke were what it says.

Seacamp throughout

Three days of various activities and interesting conversations went by fast.

As I packed my stuff in the final day I realised how much I came to like this bunch actually. I performed each goodbye affectionately, as I would do for a dear friend, even though I hadn’t known almost anyone just a couple days earlier.

I do not have enough capacity in me to write a full appreciation thread for everyone here, but my special thanks go to @wafflerrol for explaining the tropical garden flora to me in detail. I was very glad to find at least one other flower appreciator!8

Ixora and Lantana say hello!

One thing I noticed is that Circling and Hotseat worked very well at tightening the connections quickly, in part by setting up an environment where it’s expected for people to be open and sincere. I don’t think it’s quite an universal hack for making friends yet, but it does work for this sort of community.

The camp strongly benefitted from participants taking their initiative in building it too, so in that regard I’m thankful not just to the direct organisers (@baoteching, @lazymaplekoi, @zrkrlc), but to others too, and in particular to tutor vals!

‘TPOT’, you and me

I kind of struggle to characterise what this community is about in short, as there isn’t a singular interest unifying it. But I can think of some meta-interests: It’s open. It’s curious. It’s into posting online. It’s introspective. It supports any other interest if approached in this open, curious, inquisitive, introspective way. It’s pragmatic. It prizes living a good life. It wants to build scenes.

The lineage partially derives from rationalist and effective-altruist communities, but is not limited to it, and if anything it often stands in critique to them; ‘postrationality’ and ‘metarationality’ are sometimes the words to use. But those are far from prerequisites; you don’t have to have had involved with either to feel welcome.

What distinguishes it from any other well-functioning extended friend group is the commitment to online visibility. Far from the ‘log off, touch grass’ advice, these circles espouse something more like

touch grass, tweet about it, let your friends reply to you, start INSIGHTS FROM TOUCHING GRASS discourse, and never ever stop tweeting

Microblogging platforms are not vices to reactionarily shut away from, but to instead embrace in their best possible form for the new era. The offline feeds into the online, and then the online feeds back into the offline.

And further, by posting publicly, the community is open and fluid. If you find the people you see online cool and interesting, you too can join them! Just start writing your thoughts too, chiming in replying to others’ thoughts, and if the interactions go well, you’re in! And that’s how it’s worked out for me. I cannot emphasise how much I value this quality of always being open and visible to newcomers enough.

So what else does posting online get you? Many things: it lets you make friends anywhere, as there’s hardly a better way of determining compatibility than by liking each others’ tweets; it lets you refine your thoughts and intention over time; it lets your presence leave a mark. And so at Twirl you get to practice being online from the safety of being together offline, rapidly writing whatever comes to mind, loosening one’s inhibitions.

That being said, I struggle with the ‘TPOT’ label a bit. I don’t like the name; I’m not a central member with post-/meta-rationalist insights. Furthermore, while I had a great time at Seacamp and I would like to go again, the top example of a ‘TPOT camp’, Vibecamp, has rather incompatible aesthetics9 with mine from what I can gather, and it would take some convincing for me to consider coming there.

The final day me, Maz, and Jati spent a couple hours between check-out from venue and our respective flights chatting in a beach bar, mostly in the areas of history, economics, and the direction the world is going in. I do not remember the full context anymore in which Maz stated that now is the time for numerous weird online cults to spread, likening the situation to early Christianity; and that we’re one of them, though benign, gathering from all around the world in a secret venue in Bali to do our rituals. That the memetic evolution is undergoing, that more potent cults will be borne out from our lineage.

In that sense one can already see the speciations start. The fluid community has its corners, that will then spawn more corners. Though sharing ancestors and foundation, the myriads of communities will each produce its own thing, reflecting all kinds of human preferences.

And in this exciting time Seacamp could be one of the various seeds for communities for me.

---

or SEAcamp, SEA standing for Southeast Asia. Rendering it as ‘Seacamp’ looks nicer to me ↩ 1.

Though I was already planning to be in the region around that time. ↩ 1.

At first I wrote this whole speculative mini-essay that is not really relevant otherwise, so I’m stuffing it in a footnote: My guess: Bali is an agglomeration for extraeconomic activities, or something like that. What stereotypes does Bali invoke in you? If you asked me recently, I would have listed something like "woo healers", "beach life enjoyers", and "matcha pilates labubu ravers". None of those sounded to me like a compelling reason to visit Bali. Nevertheless, Bali was the venue picked for the gathering, and most participants stayed around for longer than the camp itself. Those various groups don’t have that much in common in each other. But what brings them all to Bali is that Bali is the designated place for hanging around doing those things that are not quite motivated by money, and where you can meet others doing your thing, similar thing, or a different thing but interesting to talk to anyway. Economists talk about how cities exist for their economic agglomeration effects. To use an example from the modern services-oriented world, companies place their offices in cities as this is where they can find employees, and people live in cities as this is where they can find employment opportunities. Those effects in cities go far beyond this example employer-employee relationship, and together make cities the main economic units of the world. Bali does not have that much of economic agglomeration effects in comparison. For one, Denpasar is not very recognisable as a city, making the impression of a big village blob instead. And while its economy is thriving, it seems to exist as a byproduct of people choosing to spend their time in Bali for other reasons, similar to how City of London contains various commercial businesses within its boundaries but ultimately they just play a support role in what is a financial hub otherwise. And Bali is a cultural hub. Maybe most similar example I can think of is post-industrial cities that have lost their initial reasons to exist and where the cultural hub role overtakes the economic hub role as artists move in to live next to each other while rent is cheap. And thus in Bali you can meet spiritual healers in Ubud, yoga practitioners in Uluwatu, and digital nomads in Canggu, similar to how a city has several neighbourhoods each specialised for its own role. ↩ 1.

Assuming that the audience of this post is not necessarily Twitter-bound, I should assure you that the love for Twitter-the-social-hub has nothing to do with the current owners of X the company, and many in the community would gladly migrate over if a viable alternative arose. Unfortunately, Bluesky can’t quite durably win people over yet, for multiple reasons that are far beyond the scope of this post. ↩ 1.

There were two distinct philosophies for what to do once you get someone else’s phone: you can either use their presence as an inspiration for what to tweet, or you can treat it as a silly game of undermining each other by tweeting absurd things. I much preferred the former, and while initially I swapped my phone with people who I trusted to approach this collaboratively, another corner preferred the latter, and eventually my phone ended up there too. My one big piece of feedback is that I would have preferred the activity to clarify which mode it is, and perhaps split into the collaborative group and the combative group. Partly because it would make participants more comfortable, and partly because other part of the group was making more vulgar tweets that are less in my taste. ↩ 1.

My account was appreciated for ‘cute whimsy mixed with deeper knowledge’ apparently. ↩ 1.

Mine: ‘I want to learn’. ↩ 1.

Thanks to this development I also introduced everyone to my homemade plushies on the last day, but I’m not quite sure how to weave them well into this post yet, so they shall remain a matter for another post for now. ↩ 1.

For example, I find it difficult to resonate with the very direct ‘hyping up’. (This might be related to why I find myself having aesthetic affinity with Britain, but more on that another time). ↩