Venkat's Airport

Overdue Reflections on an analogy from Refactor Camp 2019

The last Refactor Camp happened in June 2019. The theme was quantum weirdness escaped realities or some such. It was my first and last Refactor Camp.

Refactor Camp is organized by Venkatesh Rao. Or rather was organized by Venkat; the 2019 event was the last one. It’s like he called the top on in person before we even knew “calling the top” was something that in person events were subject to.

The reason Venkat gave for ending the event was that he was worried it was losing its “airport” feeling. He didn’t want Refactor Camp to become a destination, he wanted it to be a place where you could pass through, where ideas were exchanged on your way to somewhere else. The conference wasn’t to be a destination in and of itself.

What does it mean for a club to become a destination? I think Venkat was trying to avoid the tendency humans have to self-identify with their belongingness to a group, specifically a group he was responsible for creating. Venkat doesn’t strike me as someone who particularly craves responsibility; building an in-group brings with it a vast amount of responsibility with regards to cohesion of the group and the bounds of interaction.

Airports require no such affordances. There’s no setting up a self in a place that isn’t a destination. The actions involved in an airport residency usually involve a pre-assignment of gate, a bit of an adventure in navigating the space, maybe the opportunity to get drunk at the bar at midday next to someone headed, notably, elsewhere.

An airport isn’t a marketplace. There’s no stalls, there’s no regulars. No one’s vying for market dominance at an airport. It’s pretty quiet. People mostly tend to their own business. Everyone gets equally scalped by the monopoly hold the food and beverage vendors have on snacks and water bottles.

I guess if you want to talk status, in the airport there’s an implicit, quiet deciding of who gets to leave (board the airplane) first. Though everyone who’s going the same place leaves at approximately the same time, regardless. You’re all on the same plane anyway.

Airport spaces-like are rare in the discourse. I think you could argue that Twitter *sort of* provides an airport like existence, but it takes some careful cultivating to avoid becoming too attached to any particular ideology or in-group.*

You can see the various in-groups interact in an airport though — it’s one if the few open spaces of uncategorized posting, where you can pass by the thoughts and musings of others without interacting or having to opt-in to a particular topic or theme. You dont have to join a particular federation; it used to be you’d only see what you “followed”, but the modern “algorithm” works to cross pollinate your viewing experience with low involvement information. You can see whatever’s on the algo’s mind with no commitment; you don’t have to *be* anyone to be on Twitter. You don’t even have to participate, you can just watch where others planes are going, what the destinations of others is.

Airports aren’t necessarily comfortable spaces. They’re expensive to visit, they’re rarely mentioned in the arc of a trip. Delays or disturbances are more memorable than a smooth situation.

Their unremarkable-ness is the point though, the point of analogy that Venkat wants to replicate in his curation of social spaces. No one brags about having passed through JFK; few people make pilgrimages to get to O’Hare. They’re useful portals and an important part of a larger trip or adventure but they’re a utility function.

Airports are gateways to the real adventure, which I think Venkat wants to be your own ambitions. You should want more than “airport”. You should be headed somewhere else.

Refactor Camp is defunct. Its passengers have necessarily moved on to whatever came next, but I cant help but feel like we all remember passing through.

*There’s a sort of obvious anti-airport situation that popped up after Refactor Camp ended: the tpot/vibecamp cohort of post-rationalist meets woo meets vibing subgroup of internet connectedness. David Graeber pointed out in The Utopia of Rules that the best way to really understand a point is to find its antithesis. Graeber’s example in the … subchapter of Utopia is James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. I lowkey think of Venkat as the Sherlock in this situation.