My Opening Speech At The Event I'm Going To Host Next Vibecamp

It’s wonderful to make appropriate, intermittent eye contact with so many of you here today. We all know how much our shared identity can alienate us in a place like this, so it’s incredibly validating to look around this circle and see so many folks who look like me.

You’ve come from Manhattan, Minneapolis, and Miami to be here with us today. Many of you have stepped out of your comfort zones to dive headfirst into the world of qigong, catgirls, wojaks, LARPing, acroyoga, and mandatory emotional intimacy. We celebrate that with you. But we also recognize how meaningful it is to make space within this larger gathering to center our unique experience. In that spirit, I’m pleased to welcome you to the Neurotypical Cultural Heritage Meetup, or as many of us have taken to calling it, NormieHang.

Please take a moment to greet your neighbor and make a few moments of pleasant, fluent small talk.

Great. Feel free also to help yourselves to the Modelos in the cooler. But before we set up the spikeball net and dig out the frisbee, I’d like to share with you my personal story, in the hopes that some of you will see yourselves reflected in it.

Although from the outside I may appear Internet-weirdo-passing, I’m ethnically half-normie. When I got tested out of curiosity, normie came back as my largest cultural group, at 50% – they don’t provide a more granular breakdown because we’re historically underrepresented in the data pool – along with 20% ingroup, 15% tech bro, 10% cypherpunk, and trace levels of quirked up egirl and schizo anon. Often, because of my visual ambiguity, people will assume I’m a rationalist, effective altruist, ex-mathcamper, or burner, but I actually don’t have any of those in my blood.

For years, I felt alienated from my roots. Although I flitted from authentic relating session to hackathon to intentional third space, I never felt fully seen. Nerd-centric deviation standards put immense pressure on me to overstate my perplexity and openness to experience and to downplay my large motor skills and appreciation for Seinfeld.

But recently, I’ve been trying to reconnect with this other side of myself by making an effort to spend time in explicitly normie spaces. I've embraced my heritage at WeWork happy hours, pool parties, and minor league baseball games. And over the course of this journey, I've come to appreciate our rich legacy so much more.

You wouldn’t know it from walking around an unconference or a Berkeley house party, but people like us are actually the global majority. Our famed "warm culture" and "guess culture" have flourished around the world. Even the postrationalist literature has begun to take steps toward honoring our culture's distinct ways of knowing.

Those who would gatekeep us out of vibecamp forget that this very space we inhabit was built in no small part by folks like us. Normies constructed the cabins we're sleeping in. They designed the clothes we're wearing. They invented this Bud Light Seltzer I'm holding right now. And though it may be hard to detect at times, normies are still present. Whenever I catch a whiff of cologne, an object-level exchange, the distant sound of an 808, I am reminded: we are here. We will not be erased.

Many have tried. As with so many cultures, we have no name for ourselves. All the descriptors imposed on us are labels invented by outsiders that serve to other us: normies, neurotypicals, allistics, wambs, Chads, Stacys. That's not to mention more overt slurs like sheeple and NPCs. To so many people, we are the subject of anthropology, rather than friends, neighbors, and co-shitposters. We're shoehorned into two-by-twos that don't match our lived experience; we are written off as low-decouplers and low-variance. We're seen as naïve and out-of-touch. We're painted with stereotypes that would have you believe every normie is a Buzzfeed culture editor, a CDC official, or a Target branding director.

Let's do a quick exercise. I want you to raise your hand if any of the following things have happened to you.

Who's heard someone casually use "us" to refer exclusively to nerds, autists, or nonconformists, assuming no normies were present in the group?

Who's been told "You don't seem like a normie", or "You can't be that much of a normie if you're here," or "You're probably just a wordcel"?

Who's been in a conversation where someone accused normies of watering down the culture, while you were standing right there?

Who's had someone say to them, "I'm great with normies, I have a super offline friend"?

Thank you all for sharing these experiences. It's an immensely valuable affirmation that we are not in this alone.

All of you out there who might feel invisible or oversocialized or underquirked. Who have to learn to move through two worlds, feeling like you aren't normal enough for the normies or weird enough for the nerds. Who have to code-switch from greentext to subtext. Who have to remember when to say “maximally” and “nonzero” and “legible” and when to say “dip powder” and “courtside” and “deadass”. I see you. You are welcome here. You are valid.

I’m so excited to join you on this shared journey to explore what the hell we’re all doing on this part of Twitter.