Community building with Brooke Bowman
Also Vibecamp, co-living, and creating agency in life
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I recently attended Vibecamp, a 4 day summer camp for people who are terminally online and carry their weirdness with pride. Despite folks only knowing each other from online and despite there being no formal programming, the culture was strong as hell and 400 people showed up. It was an “oh shit this is interesting” moment for me.
I think Vibecamp is some of the most interesting community building going on in the modern age, and talking to its chief organizer, Brooke Bowman (we checked – we’re not related), it ain’t by accident. I interview Brooke about different forms of building community and creating agency in life.
Wtf is Vibecamp
Johnny: Can you describe what Vibecamp is?
Brooke: I mean, that is the question. I think Vibecamp is still figuring out what Vibecamp is. But to give a little context, there is a bubble on Twitter. People get lumped together. They assume clusters and interests. And this one has happened to be fairly nerdy. People talk philosophy and science and things like that, but also shit posting. There are a lot of people who just like to be trolls and silly. It's a pretty densely connected group of people.
And it's not secret, but it feels like a secret layer of Twitter where everything isn't awful. There are conversational norms and etiquette around treating people. So hyping people up instead of tearing them down, friendly reply game, things like that. I joined Twitter in 2020, thought these people were really cool, wanted to hang out with more of them and ended up getting a crew together. The first Vibecamp was in 2022. It ended up being 400 people.
I joke sometimes that it feels like we're the one weird kid from our hometown who all happen to find each other online. As far as the event itself, it's got some similarities to Burning Man in that all the content is brought by attendees. We don't bring in keynote speakers. We don't bring in headline musicians, anything like that. If people want to DJ, they can DJ. We pretty much provide the infrastructure for the attendees, build a container for the attendees to create an event.
Johnny: How’d you get the confidence where you're new in the community in 2020, and two years later, you're organizing a 400-person camp?
Brooke: What gave me the confidence, I think, was probably that I spent around two and a half years homeless just prior to all of this happening. And it turns out that's the big bogey man for a lot of people - no ties, no social support network, just cast out. And it turns out when you do that and come out the other side, there's very little left to be afraid of on the scale of things. We made sure that there was food and shelter and the basic things were covered. So worst case scenario, I do a thing and people don't like it. And that is a very low risk compared to some of the other risks I faced.
How to build community
Johnny: And why community building?
Brooke: I think that was one of the things that I came out of the street realizing was that having friends is incredibly important. I'd always had a toxic independence and I had trouble relying on other people. And I also realized I didn't have friends for a lot of my life. I thought it was just hard to make friends. I wasn't doing anything to make friends. I wasn't hosting meetups. I wasn't finding people who like things that I like. I wasn't asking random people I run into whose vibes are good if they want to come hang out. I wasn't doing any of the things. And I think the best way to teach other people is to model the behavior. So I do those things both for myself and also to model it in public so other people can see, oh, this might be possible for me, too.
Johnny: What are your thoughts for community building in the age of Twitter?
Brooke: I think that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what the Internet can do in terms of enhancing our lives. I think that it offers us an unprecedented opportunity to find the others, to find the people out there, whether they're on the other side of the world or not, that we're going to really click with and be able to do cool things with.
You can just do things. If people don’t like the way we do Vibecamp, or they want one where they are, you can do it. I make myself available to hop on calls. Vibecamp is at a different scale, but I'll hop on a call with somebody who's trying to do 30 people. Everyone that I know who's hosted these kinds of things are very available to give advice to other people who are trying to do it.
A Man’s Work medicine cabinet
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Alternative community building
Johnny: You’re involved in Network Societies and alternative forms of community building. Can you describe how you see community building evolving?
Brooke: I was looking at groups like Fractal in New York City and thirdspace in SF. Friendships are being made, and they're making group houses, and then they're making companies. And there are a few hubs like this around the world. I was imagining, in some amount of years, there are going to be a bunch of hubs, and they're all going to be sharing people. They're all going to be sharing knowledge.
You find the people you have commonalities with, then you want to live near them, or maybe you hang out with them, and that makes you want to live near them, and then you figure that out. And you start with group houses, and then maybe you buy a plot of land or something. I don't know exactly how it'll go, but I think there's going to be more.
And really, your life could massively change by living within walking distance of friends. I don't know that it's possible to overstate the effect that that can have. You just run into people and suddenly you're starting a company together or you meet their friend and now you've got a husband or a wife, and it's just a massive improvement in quality of life.
Building agency in life
Johnny: Agency is something that a lot of people are struggling with and want more of in their life. What advice would you have for folks who want more agency in their life?
Brooke: One big lesson that helped me in my transition from who I was then to who I am now was realizing that I was not only my worst enemy, I was pretty much my only enemy. There are a small number of cases where things just happened and there was absolutely nothing I could have done to stop it. But in the vast majority of times when I have been hurt or bad things have happened in my life, it has been a direct result of the choices I've made.
People talk about limiting beliefs and all that. That's a real thing. And I think that a mindset towards experimentation helps a lot because there are a lot of things that I ended up doing, even things to try to improve myself or whatever, where I was like, this isn't going to work. And I know this isn't for me.
I also think one of the most powerful things has just been following what's fun. There were so many things in my life where I would have this disembodied awareness that I like when other people do that thing, and then I would just never do it myself. And I think that probably just was most of my life. I was like, oh, I can just do those things.
Host the things that you want to go to. People tend to just be like, oh, well, if I want to hang out with my friends and have fun, I have to do it this way. And you don't. And it turns out that if you're not happy with a thing, there are going to be other people who also aren't happy with a thing. And the world is vast. And if you like inviting people over to read out loud with them, do that and people will like it.
Where to find Brooke
Find Brooke on Twitter
Brooke is also building Network Society Camp: Three days of connection, coherence, and fun at a classic American summer camp for founders, builders, and leaders of the network society ecosystem. Check it out here.
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