The Protein Circle and the Digital Frontier
“This is Protein,” says the woman in all black sitting cross-legged in a hammock. Ten yards away, a middle-aged man is taking off his shirt in the center of a circle of 30 or so people sitting in the grass. We watch on as he extends his arms, closes his eyes, and then — slowly, as if on a display platform — begins to rotate. The sitters stare up at him, smiling and murmuring. Receiving their energy, he smiles back.
I’ve come to the woman in the hammock to ask what this is about; from her perch, she had exuded an air of knowingness. “Each person gets 30 seconds,” she explains. “You stare at them like they’re protein.” It’s 3 p.m. on Friday, June 19, Day Two on the grounds of Camp Ramblewood, in northern Maryland. The event is Vibecamp, a weekend gathering for “internet homies,” “disagreeable misfits,” and “five-year-olds of all ages.”
What Defines the ‘Extremely Online’?
In a time when everyone is increasingly “online,” who were these people who seemed to be the most online? What was it, other than that condition, that connected them? Before arriving, I could attain only a foggy picture of the event, the fifth iteration of Vibecamp since it started in March 2022. There were the website’s vague insinuations about the “wickedly wholesome reality-bending memes” that would be transplanted over the course of the weekend “from our heads into our hearts, from our screens into our souls.”
There was also the fact that Curtis Yarvin — the right-wing blogger who advocates for the liquidation of traditional democratic structures — had attended in 2023. It was at Vibecamp that Yarvin met Stevie Miller, whom he later enlisted to launch his own party in Washington, D.C., known as Vibekampf. So it was unclear what, exactly, I would find in this heart-of-darkness trip into the internet jungle. Maybe a bootleg Burning Man for shitposters, or a wellness retreat for neuron-blitzed coders.
Twitter in Real Life
The first event I attend the next morning is “Twitter in Real Life.” A few dozen of us gather on the front field to meet our leader, a guy who goes by Lysander. Here’s how this works, he says: For a few minutes, you tweet stuff; then, you partner up with someone and talk about what you’ve tweeted. The tweets will facilitate the connection, is the idea. “Pretend you’re a normal person with a normal social life,” Lysander says. “Look people in the eyes, if you’re capable.”
My next partner is a guy in from London who used to work for Bitcoin. When he asks what I’ve been tweeting about, I reveal that I don’t have the app. “Oh, you’re a larper,” he says. That word I do know: someone pretending to be something they’re not. He turns to a woman in the group next to us. “This guy is a larper,” he says. Thankfully, the woman doesn’t seem bothered by the news. She looks me over with a furrowed brow: “Hi, larper,” is all she says.
The Essence of the Internet
As it turns out, “Teapot” comes from the acronym form, TPOT: This Part of Twitter. TPOTers emerged from the Post-Rationalists, calling themselves “in-group” in the early stages. The imprecision of the definitions is intentional. As the YouTuber Etymology Nerd explains: “The point is that it can’t be captured because nobody’s exactly sure where the boundary is. Instead, the definition is self-contained. The only way to understand TPOT is by playfully acknowledging its own impreciseness.”
So there was one way to understand it, whether it was TPOTers or Vibecampers in general: a community that can’t say what exactly it is, or what exactly it believes in — a community for whom that’s the kick. Pundits talk about the algorithm pushing people toward extremism, but what about it pushing people in the opposite direction, toward this kind of self-satisfied entropy, strip-mining them of any sense of broader social conviction? Perhaps that’s what you get at the very last stop on the Twitter river, once you’ve passed all the zealots rage-baiting from the banks: an Inner Station with no real Colonel Kurtz, just the invisible dominion of Elon Musk and his code.