“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.”
“Like you want to eat them?” I ask.
“Yes, like you want to eat them.”
It’s 3 p.m. on Friday, June 19, Day Two on the grounds of Camp Ramblewood, in Northern Maryland, a few minutes’ drive from the Susquehanna River. The event is Vibecamp, a weekend gathering for “internet homies,” “disagreeable misfits,” and “five-year-olds of all ages” — at least that was what the website said when I signed up a few weeks ago, shelling out the $470 dollars for an experience that sounded, more or less, like a personal nightmare: three nights of tent camping with the true children of the internet.
But, all the same, I was interested. In a time when everyone is increasingly “online,” or “very online,” or “too-online,” who were these people who seemed to be the most online — who were willingly, gleefully, balefully online? What was it, other than that condition, that connected them? What did they believe in? And what did their community look like when it finally left the Twittersphere and touched down on solid earth?
Before arriving, I could attain only a foggy picture of the event, the fifth iteration of Vibecamp since it started in March 2022, but there were some big promises. 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,” in order to “plant the seeds of the next golden age.” There was the account a past attendee had posted on Medium, mentioning “the release of a kind of tension that I had been carrying for close to a decade.”
There was also the fact that Curtis Yarvin — the right-wing blogger who advocates, among other things, “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law” — had attended in 2023. (It was at Vibecamp that Yarvin met Stevie Miller, then a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, whom he later enlisted to launch his own party in 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 an adult play camp for self-proclaimed memelords, or a wellness retreat for neuron-blitzed coders. Whatever it was, it would be strange — strange, at the least. That much I know as I arrive Thursday evening, turning onto the dirt road that runs through a patchwork of cornfields, past a tumbledown clapboard house, and onto the grounds.
I GET MY BADGE from the admission stand, set up my tent among a scattering of others, and go down to the dining hall for the “Newcomer Hangout.” There, I meet Max and Thomas — both, like me, in their early twenties. (All participants’ names have been changed here to protect their privacy.) Max, tanktopped and friendly, works in investment banking and lives in Pennsylvania. Thomas, wiry and direct, has dropped out of college and lives in Maryland. Like most of the people I’ll meet over the next three days, they caught wind of Vibecamp through “Twitter friends.”
At dinner, we’re joined by a guy who says he’s here for the weekend to “lemur” — the first of the Twitter terms I won’t understand, and still don’t, buried as it is too deep in the strata of the internet to secure any common definition. (Later, I’ll learn about “cuddle puddles” and the “slutcloud,” neither of which you probably want explained.) As the lemurer shows us his lemur necklace, a guy wearing a shirt displaying his video game handle sits down. Why’s he here? Because he’s “interested in manifesting the offline,” he says, as if “the offline” — the real, physical world — were somehow unavailable to him in his daily life. Then comes a third guy, who heard about Vibecamp through some of his “more teapotty” Twitter accounts. This, I’ll come to understand, is one of the terms that actually matters.
I follow a man in a floral skirt to the opening ceremony, where one of the organizers — a woman with a bleached, mohawk-like cut and the open, assured stance of a yoga instructor — is addressing the gathering crowd. (The total attendee count for Vibecamp 2026 is approximated at 400, I hear from someone who says they asked the organizers. Judging from the crowd, the largest demographic appears to be thirtysomething guys.) “The great thing about Vibecamp,” the organizer says, “is that it’s a container, a frame, a canvas.” And you, she tells us, will paint that canvas with “previously unnamed colors.” Next to me, a woman with colorful tattoo sleeves and a tasseled leather satchel nods coolly behind her sunglasses. Hanging from the satchel, I now see, is some kind of animal tail.
Moving on to the housekeeping items, the organizer informs us of the presence of a documentary film crew on the grounds. They will want to interview people over the course of the weekend, but not, she says pointedly, about murder cults. A cheer goes up from the crowd.
I’ll later understand this as a reference to the Zizians, members of the online Rationalist community who allegedly carried out a series of recent killings across the country. Through the years, Vibecamp has played host to a number of nonviolent Rationalists, post-Rationalists, and other adjacent dabblers in internet forum-based philosophy. For the most part, these are people interested less in cult worship than in arcane brain food — things like Bayesian reasoning (a mathematical framework for assigning probabilities to possible outcomes), or the Paperclip Problem (the proposition that a superhuman AI, after being assigned a simple task like “maximize paper clip production,” will spin out and end the world).
While many of the Vibecampers I’ll meet have toyed with this kind of fodder at one point or another, Rationalism doesn’t get a lot of air time in general conversation, nor in the outlines of the dozens of pre-planned events listed on the website. Most of those are more in the woo-woo realm, a lá the Protein Circle.
After the ceremony, I run into Thomas. We get to talking about the prospect of making friends here, and the difference between doing so online and offline. He tells me about being homeschooled through high school, feeling socially isolated and spending a lot of time on Twitter. Then Covid hit, and — “Oof,” he says. “My brain is like a ship, and once it’s steered a certain way…” He trails off, shaking his head with a kind of resigned bemusement at the thought of all the blue-lit hours.
But then again, all those hours are what get you to Vibecamp, fellowshipping “irl” with the likeminded. You steer your way into the backwaters of Twitter; the algorithmic tides carry you this way and that; and, with the right push from the wind, you wind up hitting the shore at Camp Ramblewood. You’re likely a loner, or a techie, or a self-styled knight errant spurning the world of the “normies.” Back in your home life, you may have too many friends whom you know only as avatars and not enough whom you know as real people. But here at Vibecamp, the avatars become real people — people who know the same memes and get the same jokes and chat on the same forums as you, and who may even have some acid or shrooms to deal out. People with whom you can vibe.
Later that night, Thomas and I both end up at the poker night Max is hosting at the dining hall. Max sorts out the chip stacks using Claude (“outsource all your thinking,” someone jokes), and we play past midnight. By the time we’re done, many of us have drunk enough of Max’s gin that we give up on the task of Venmoing each other the payouts. I sign off and climb the hill to my tent, where, to the sweet strains of some kind of EDM pumping out of someone’s portable speaker, I fall asleep.
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 (attendees are welcome to use pseudonyms, and many do). 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.” A few ironic groans bubble up behind me.
Not having a Twitter account myself, and not being able to create one in time for the first conversation, I end up doing more listening than talking. That probably would have been the case anyway, because what I’m getting from my partner is an airtight soliloquy tracking Hegel to Heidegger and Heidegger to Aristotle and back again. My attention drifts as someone approaches the group next to us to ask what we’re all doing. “It’s like microdosing Twitter,” they tell him. “Oh, I’m on a macrodose,” he says. “I don’t even know if that would work.” He floats off down the hill, toward the singalong circle being led by someone with a clarion voice. (Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last, wake me up when September ends…)
My next partner is a guy in from London (“heard about it from Twitter friends”), who used to work for Bitcoin. I tell him I’m in school, an English major. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he says, kindly. 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. Something about the giddiness in his voice strikes a note of concern in me; in a sudden vision, I see word of my status traveling from group to group with increasing speed until, in some kind of beat-down, I’m forced into the admission that I’m a larper in the larger sense — not just at Twitter in Real Life, but at Vibecamp. Thankfully, the woman doesn’t seem bothered by the news. She looks me over with a furrowed brow: “Hi, larper,” is all she says.
My next event is “Cyborg Visual Novels and the Art of the Future,” a live demonstration of a “visual novel about life in a post-ASI dark utopia!” While I don’t really know what that means, it sounds like one of the more substantive events of the day, so I make my way past the song circle (by now, they’ve traded out Green Day for “Bohemian Rhapsody”) to the Barn Theater, where a tall man with a friendly beard is standing by a makeshift projector screen in front of an audience of around 20 people.
He introduces himself as Jeff, the creator of the novel, acknowledging upfront the irony of a guy with self-proclaimed “Claude psychosis” using Claude to make a novel about Claude taking over the world. But nonetheless. We proceed to “do” the “novel,” calling out what the protagonist should do at various inflection points in the narrative, while Jeff clicks our decisions into his computer. In the universe of the novel, AI has surpassed human intelligence in every cognitive domain. In the next novel Joe is working on, the universe will be generated from your activity on Twitter: “AI will scrape all your posts and make a world out of it.” Interestingly, neither of these imagined futures are presented as particularly “dark” — or, at least, the quick-to-laugh audience doesn’t receive them that way. There’s a collective draw toward the general aesthetic vision on offer here — cold, computerized, humanity-drained — and the frictionless insularity of the characters’ lives. If that’s the future, then this audience is probably better suited for it than most.
After an hour in the barn, we emerge into the sunlight of the Vibecamp afternoon. I drift around the grounds for a while, stopping to watch a woman in a sequined leotard facilitate the dangling and wrapping of various volunteers in two strands of silk hanging from a 20-foot quad pod. Over at “Sex Magic for Beginners,” nothing very sexual or magical seems to be happening — just a quiet group being led in some kind of drawing exercise, lo and behold, by the woman with the animal-tail satchel.
Following dinner, I join a scraggly crew on the basketball court for an event called “Solve Metaethics.” There, I hear things like “AI is wiser and kinder than us,” and “flowers are moral progress,” and “ethics is all engineering.” I talk to a guy in a “Claude Squad” shirt, who tells me that morality is “an intellectual artifact,” a “convenient fiction similar to money.”
“Intersubjective entities exist,” he says, pausing to formulate the next clause, “and morality is one of them.” When I ask how he might apply this framework to something like politics, he answers simply: “Hang ’em all.” After a few minutes, he says he figures we’ve solved metaethics and takes off. I enter a new conversation, in which someone with an armband that reads “NOT HUMAN PLEASE HUG” is positing that “instead of trying to minimize human suffering, we should try to increase the diversity of the manifold space.”
By this point, it’s all starting to feel pretty vacant out here. Few conversations coalesce into anything meaningful, let alone cogent. The subtext is usually some murky mixture of “post-”s: “post-ideological,” “post-political,” “post-Rational,” “post-ironic,” post-whatever — and the result is a lot of apathy and only a little wit. Eyes glaze over when the subject strays too far from Memeworld. As I leave the basketball court, I realize that the “Bohemian Rhapsody” lines from earlier have been stuck in my head all afternoon, echoing with darkening overtones. Nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters to me…
That night at the poker table, the mood is low. The guy across from me mulls the recent activity in the “Intrusive Thoughts” Signal group the organizers created for us. “When I’m tired, I can’t decipher the esoteric jokes,” he mumbles. Someone suggests he could get the blood pumping over at the naked pool party. He shrugs, scrolling onward.
DAY THREE LOOKS a lot like Day Two: I get my tarot read by a devotee of Aleister Crowley; watch a group down by the pond scare the frogs off the rocks during a “primal scream” exercise; and sit in on a workshop on “Agency’s Principal Problem,” led by a guy in a cream cardigan and cream drawstring pants and even a cream phone case who says things like “the outlet does not ask the plug to plug itself into it.”
So it’s good to meet up with a group Max has gathered and load into his car, with the destination set for Chick-Fil-A, a place where people are less likely to wonder what the outlet asks. In tow with Max are Thomas and two other guys, one from Georgia, the other from San Francisco — both around the same age as us, both enjoying their time here. As we turn past the clapboard house, we see a lone Vibecamper on a unicycle tottering down the road towards us. Max leans out the window as we pass: “I enjoy your work,” he says.
I like Max and his considerateness. He tells us he wanted to create a situation where people could really get to know each other, and that’s why he asked us along. When he takes a turn a little too sharp, he says we should let him know if any part of his driving is making us crazy.
Out onto a smooth two-laner now, we roll down the rest of the windows and John cranks the Steely Dan. For a moment, as the golden-hour hills unfurl around us, you could almost believe in the great, benevolent dream of the Internet. There we were, five people from different places who didn’t know each other before now, connected ineffably by the world wide web: proof of Silicon Valley’s promises in the form of a tightly-packed Chevy Volt.
But what exactly was connecting us — that was still hard to say. Earlier in the day, I had heard that word again: “teapot.” Thinking that it might be the missing piece — the jib door that would open to the secret room of Vibecamp’s meaning — I’d asked for a definition. “Well, it doesn’t really mean anything,” I was told. “That’s the point. It’s like, ‘Everyone has their teapot.’”
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, stripmining 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.
Later that night, at a circle-round-the-campfire discussion on the essence of Vibecamp, people will try to put their finger on the elusive magic of the scene. After a few false starts, the moderator acknowledges that “it’s a challenge, trying to answer ‘What is the essence?’ I think part of why I asked it is that there’s so many different kinds of events that go on — it seems almost impossible to try to compress.”
“But I think heterogeny can be an essence,” someone says. The moderator turns to him, making a “go on” kind of noise. There’s a pause, as we wait for him to continue, but he seems to want to cede the floor now. So someone else jumps in: “It’s just totally random,” he says. “Like, it’s just” — another pause, another running of steam — “yeah.” The fire pops; the moderator nods meaningfully. “Yeah,” he says.
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