~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~

Lou Reed

K-6000

Elija Minelli

Neu!

Seefeel

Londonbeat

Cube

Sheriff Lindo and the Hammer

Onsy

Chris Morris

K Wata

Cube

feardorian & quinn (instr)

Chris Morris

Crescent

Che (instr - prod. syck)

Chino Amobi

~~~

1. CA Quintet

2. Thick Pigeon

3. Dopplereffekt

4. Chateau Flight la Folie Studio

5. Tristan Arp

6. Butthole Surfers

7. Vladislav Delay Quintet

8. Terry Riley

9. 4Batz

10. Nearly God

11. Lolina

12. Serokolo 7

13. ANSIEDAD1000

14. Delroy Edwards

15. Art Linkletter

16. Ultimate Spinach

Read more

~~~~

~~~~

~~~~

Buttechno

Damos Room

Grim Lusk

Axine M

Utah Data Center

Alva Noto

Hypotherm Associates

Andy Fairley

Autechre

Hoavi

Masta Artisan

Lucite Spine

Organ of Corti

Cities Aviv

Daniel Avery ft. Yunè Pinku

Babyfather / Vegyn / TYSON

Paperclip Minimiser

zayok

Cube

Damos Room

Pool

~~~~

1. Earth Wind & Fire

2. Idea Fire Company

3. Kyle Hall

4. Gatekeeper

5. Elizabeth Davis

6. DJ Gonz

7. Kropskännendom

8. DJ Fufoxo & DJ Nervoso

9. Cube

10. Xaviersobased

11. Sakevi Yokoyama / Dub Babylon

12. Sword ii

13. LXV

14. Televangelist

15. Greyhound

16. Televangelist

17. Microcorps ft. Phew

18. Spacemen 3

19. WAR

1. ZNR

2. Dean Blunt ft. Joanne Robertson, Vegyn

3. Plastic Bag

4. Zoviet France

5. DJ Rashad

6. Kapotte Muziek

7. Digital

8. Georgia Florida Line

9. Rat Henry

10. Pharoah Chromium

11. araabMUZIK

12. Gordon Mumma

13. kitchen radio, cdmx, 2/2/26

14. The Leather Nun

15. Yasuo Sugibayashi

16. Big Hands

17. Choir Boy

18. Rat Henry

19. Ripatti

20. Zoviet France

21. Cube

22. Cube

23. Cube

~~~~~~~

1. Blawan

2. Mondo Vanilli

3. Jonnie Prey

4. Germ Lattice

5. Ace Ventura

6. The Fall

7. Christoph De Babalon

8. Eddie Noack

9. Bobby Would

10. Basic Unit

11. Longmont Potion Castle

12. Yung Lean

13. ?

14. FearDorian

15. Primal Scream

16. Bobby Would

17. Laibach + Silence

18. Coil

19. Cube

20. Gucci Mane

21. Jammin Sam Miller

22. John Frusciante

23. Metal Preyers

24. Paul McCartney

~~~~~~

LAZER DIM 700

D4L

Seekersinternational

Coil

Danny Brown (instr)

Dick El Demasiado

KAY NIVE$

Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock

Morgan Wallen

Carrier

Nicolette

Coil

Ruff Sqwad

Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock

Agazer0

Nboj Tespo

Authentically Plastic

Turbo Sonidero

Full interview text appears in Baited Area #9. Full episode for paid subscribers.

music by:

America

S. Glass

Brandon Juhans

Beau Wanzer

Thought Broadcast

Severed Heads

Moses Brown

Halim El-Dabh

Tackhead

Delta Kane

Was (Not Was)

Lyrii

Janete

George Harrison

Autechre

Mark Leyner

Chino Amobi

Moses Brown

p cain

Shorter Hill

Muslimgauze

phone memo

Ladder Buffet

DJ DIE SOON

Dredd OST

Hey 19

Boards of Canada

Slit Lamp

Knife Mall

Moin

Vanligt Folk

Griff Spex

Susumu Yokota

Muslimgauze

Mauthausen Orchestra

Major Sosa

African American Sound Recordings

p cain ft. Mel P and Sami Benign

Cherrystones x Demdike Stare

Brian Wilson

Rat Section - hardcore theremin

DJ Manny - champion

Yves De May - reentry

CHBB - irriter les espirits

System X - feel it

Purity Filter - headlock

Jacob Winans - locust motel

Spirit of the Beehive - i suck the devil’s cock

(Liv).e - $

James bong - mr. kiss kiss bong bong (big brother’s dubbing you)

Lady Anne - freeze (Tim Reaper remix)

Hesaitix - subdermal

Griff Spex - sudden savior

Cube - untitled

リズムヴォックス

Cube - untitled

Whatever the Weather - 12 degrees C

The Silver Fox - the dawndest thing

Rezzett - sexzzy creep

1. Group Soñador

2. Saint Abdullah & Eomac

3. Underground Resistance

4. St. Agnis

5. Sister Marion

6. Dove & Mr Soon

7. Hair Stylistics

8. plot from Bloodfreak

9. Mala Fama ft. Luis Singüenza

10. Broadcast

11. Cube

12. Joan Rivers’ final joke

13. Ricardo Suntaxi Chivirdo

14. Chuquimamani Condori

15. 3 teens kill 4

16. Bug Bus Piano

17. Drumploop & The Rita

18. Cluster

19. Michael Nyman

20. Sword II

2020 mix for Threads Radio and Club Mutante, unearthed from old computer.

The linked version also features music by VISIO aka Nicola Tirabasso.

tracklist:

1. 1995 epilepsy

2. W00dy

3. Hexmorb

4. ICE

5. ONO

6. I-LP-O

7. SPF

8. Scuba

9. Sean Kingston

10. Network Glass

11. Thomas Köner

12. Johnny Greenwood

13. Alberich

14. E/I

15. Nancy & Lee

16. Smoke Access

17. Wetware

18. Hexmorb

19. Onscreen Actor

20. Cube

21. Velvet Underground

22. Blind CC

23. Muslimgauze (unknown remix)

24. Glochids

25. Sean Kingston

I developed some film recently and was a little dismayed to find some photos of Ephemerisle that I didn’t recall taking. Maybe more puzzling, almost all of them were the same shot, seemingly captured at the same time and using similar settings, before sundown and well before the onset of any substances. There were no photographs of boats, dancers, performers, pets, outfits, lazers, or sunsets. The evidence suggests I just stared into the gallows-selfie-kiosk and fired away. Did the camera malfunction? Was a film roll disappeared by an inconspicuous furry raver?

These images didn’t make publication because I didn’t know they existed, but they’re included here for your consideration.

Below: Cockpit of the military crane barge. From left to right: electric fan, UPOURIA cookies and cream shakable topping, apple flavored PHOCUS energy drink, DAWN dish detergent, piss, cat food.

Below that: Deck of the crane barge.

And below that: Several more images of the selfie kiosk.

You can read my firsthand account of Ephemerisle, the annual seasteading gathering, here or here.

1. Alex Tominsky- still missing

2. my Dinner w Andre

3. Les Sons du Cosmos - laundry

4. Macross Plus OST

5. Tyla - push 2 start

6. pyramid from darkside

7. RNA Organism - matrix

8. The Fugs - virgin forest

9. Macross Plus OST

10. I forget

11. Kim Fowley - sunset boulevard

12. Jawnino - redstripe interlude

13. Kaitlin Simotics - i’m listening

14. Leonard Cohen - iodine

15. Keith family radio nostalgia

16. FM church service, xmas eve

17. Rafael Toral - spectral evolution (excerpt)

18. DJ Nigga Fox - 4 fantasias

19. Bobby Hebb & Ron Carter - sunny (live)

Opportunity Lives Here

The pink-haired cashier at the Grocery Outlet just outside of Antioch, California says she hasn’t seen the latest version of the New York EBT card. She tells me it used to be colorful. I wonder if she’s seen the Oregon card, The Oregon Trail, presumably named after the 90s side scrolling computer game, or the Louisiana card, the Louisiana Purchase, but I don’t ask. The cashier asks if I live in New York and I say yes, sort of. We’re spending the weekend on a boat nearby, Roxann clarifies. More specifically, we’re plotting our way to Ephemerisle, the annual seasteading gathering that assembles in the Delta region where the Sacramento River and San Joaquin rivers meet. Each year a couple hundred people arrive by boat and build temporary structures, or “islands,” connecting their various watercraft, then they live and host events there for up to ten days. The only way to Ephemerisle is by water. The only rule is “don’t die.” But I’ve learned to take proclamations about no rules with a grain of salt.

The cashier’s stepdad lives on a boat. “It sounds nice for a week or maybe a month,” she says, but no longer than that. “Maybe in the Netherlands, where the infrastructure exists, and the attitude toward living on the water is different, but not here, not yet.”

She’s confident that the attitude will change, though—that it will have to, due to rising sea levels and housing costs. I ask to use the restroom, but there isn’t one open to the public. “The 7/11 up the road has been cool lately,” the cashier says, and, mistaking us for homeless, offers a few other local resources before handing us our bags.

Heading back to the highway, the 7/11 is one of the few buildings not boarded up. Whole strip malls have been left behind. The city of Antioch’s motto used to be The Gateway to the Delta; in 2020 it was changed to Opportunity Lives Here as part of a municipal rebranding campaign. We’re about 20 miles from the coordinates where Ephemerisle is set to take place and less than five from the river, but it’s hard to imagine water anywhere nearby. Much of California is characterized by this contrast between wet and dry. We’re looking at rolling golden hills, dusty skeletons of strip malls. With any luck we will soon be floating on the San Joaquin.

The Institute

Ephemerisle was started in 2009 by The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit founded a year earlier by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman, grandson of influential economist Milton Friedman. The organization proposes floating polities on the high seas, start-up cities working outside the influence of existing governments and tax codes. In theory, these communities would operate competitively, like corporations. If a city’s inhabitants are unhappy with the way things are going, they can detach their modular floating homesteads and find a competing cluster to join. Peter Thiel gave the Institute half a million in seed money when it began.

Ephemerisle was one of the Seasteading Institute’s early experiments. The gathering borrowed a few basic premises from Burning Man and combined them with the libertarian ideas of the Friedman dynasty. The first year about a hundred people attended. The Institute officially detached its name from the gathering after this first year, but Patri Friedman remains involved. His name continues to appear on our various transmissions, which are scattered in classic decentralized form across Whats App, Signal, Facebook, GitHub, an official website, and more.

Unlike Burning Man, Ephemerisle hasn’t grown much since it began. Attendance there continues to hover around two or three hundred. And while Patri still visits, his formal business dealings have moved back to land. In 2019 he founded Pronomos Capital, a firm that uses VC money (Thiel is, again, a notable investor) to build experimental startup cities in the third world. Actually, it’s in Prospera, one such city off the coast of Honduras, that Patri had all of his mouth bacteria replaced with other bacteria. He can also open his Tesla or give you his business card using a small implant in his palm, and he’s made arrangements for the cryogenic preservation of his body after death.

Waiting

The location of this year’s party isn’t far from where Roxann and I are loitering, but getting there is proving difficult. The river’s current can be strong enough to necessitate a decent motor, which we don’t have. We spent the morning combing through instructional YouTube videos about DIY drill-powered propellers, watching men dip long drill attachments into the water, aim, and push themselves across lakes in their canoes. It looks fun, but we’ve run out of time to build. Tonight is Ephemerisle’s last night, and sometime tomorrow the islands disassemble into their constituent parts for another year.

Luckily, the gathering offers informal ferries to and from the site. Having no idea what sort of makeshift watercraft passes for a ferry in this context, we’ve condensed food, water, and sleeping gear into a couple of backpacks and an overstuffed IKEA bag. We’ve also brought Poison, an ill-tempered 13-pound chihuahua who, by endangering all potential pet sitters, has earned an indefinite spot as my plus-one.

The ferry schedule and pick-up site have yet to be disclosed, so we sit in the car, stare at our phones, and wait.

Room for two more

I can tell by the outfits on the dock at King’s Island Marina that we’re in the right place: sequins, neon animal prints, eclectic headwear. We take a seat next to someone wearing a foam hat shaped like an oversized taco. He gives me a knowing glance, then reveals that he’s harboring a small chihuahua in his coat.

“I’m from not far from here, in the Nevada City area,” he tells us. “I didn’t realize there were all these weird little islands and waterways and stuff [here.] It’s a totally different vibe...”

The taco guy drove here in his parents’ car with a paddle board and vague plans of paddling out to the island, but his friends discouraged it. Judging by the river current and the distance from the dock, this was good advice.

“I feel way more at peace in the woods,” he says. “When I was living in SF in my 20s around a lot of concrete and cars and stuff like that, I’d go to the park and feel a noticeable change.” During pauses in conversation he cranes his neck down discretely and sniffs ketamine. “There might be something to it, the more plants you’re around—maybe even just because of the way that they’re shaped, as opposed to the way that city structures are shaped. The way there’s all these hard angles and flat surfaces, and the way that everything bounces off of them in a certain way, as opposed to leaves and dirt where everything gets diffused. Like, there’s not as much reverberating vibes...”

An arriving boat interrupts our conversation. People stand up, gather their things, and move toward it. As it docks it becomes clear that not all of us will fit. The glittery crowd presses aggressively forward in no particular order. Roxann and I move with hesitation, and so does the taco. The boat is filling up rapidly.

The captain yells, “I only have room for one or two more!”

“You should take the spot, there’s two of you,” taco insists. “I’ll catch the next one.”

We stand paralyzed for a moment. It’s kind of him to offer, but the mob on the boat has cast a serious shadow of doubt on our whole plan.

The captain yells again: This is the last boat ferrying passengers for the evening, there is no next one.

“Go for it, it’s all you,” taco insists again.

Before we can plead any further, he’s gone. We climb timidly aboard. The boat pushes off, and I follow his cartoonish silhouette as it moves toward a group of European party animals on the second dock. People on our boat are telling us where and how to sit. A guy in an unbuttoned silk shirt is already dropping the names of billionaires he knows. A small sinking feeling introduces itself.

Omens not heeded

The magnetic pull of the Delta should not be understated. It’s a region of stunning, often surprising contrasts. There are countless canals and channels snaking through over 50 small islands. Navigating them by boat feels like being inside of a video game. Sometimes the place looks like Louisiana or Texas, sometimes like Vietnam. Miles of narrow levees cut through the water, and the distant sky is dotted with countless alien wind turbines.

Ever since my first visit to the region I’ve thought of it often. On several occasions friends and I pooled our money and rented a boat there. One year we rented a pontoon from a marina on Bethel Island and took a wrong turn while everyone was high on psilocybin. The propeller on the boat was designed to shatter into a million pieces when it hit something, which it did when we inadvertently turned onto a shallow channel and ran aground. The staff at the marina had gone home for the night, the physical map was useless, and the emergency supplies consisted of a pack of expired flares and half an oar. We sat for hours on the still boat. It began to get dark and cold. When a good samaritan eventually pulled up in his boat to give us a tow, he bottomed out, too.

Eventually, someone from the marina figured out we’d missed our return time by many hours. They sent the coast guard to pull us back to safety. As it turns out, an emergency coast guard tow is not a cheap procedure. I had to impersonate a litigious web programmer for a month to avoid paying the fees.

The next year we did it again. Being unwelcome at the previous Bethel Island marina, we chose a different one located in Stockton, about 30 miles away on the Delta region’s eastern edge. At the time I had a small cut on my foot stemming from a shoe that didn’t fit correctly. We drove the rental boat to a tiki-themed marina and RV park, camped there for the night, and returned it the next day.

The boat was unscathed, but I was not. When we were swimming some bacteria had made its way from farm waste runoff into my bloodstream via the small cut on my foot. A week later I woke up in the middle of the night vomiting and unable to walk. The infection caused my leg to swell drastically. I was hospitalized for five days. During this time I managed to develop a minor morphine dependency followed by extreme insomnia. The insomnia led to vivid, violent hallucinations. By day four, any time I closed my eyes I’d see an endless tapestry of 10th century gore.

I couldn’t sleep, and I knew there was no chance of recuperating on a hospital diet without rest or sunlight. I wasn’t sure what floor I was on, and I wasn’t mobile enough to make an escape. I called a friend and tried convincing him to break me out of the place. He sounded concerned.

“I think you’re being paranoid,” he said. “When you’re well enough to go, they’ll let you go.” But I knew I was stuck in a feedback loop. On my final night in the place I sat sleeplessly, repeating a mantra: I was well, I was recuperating, there was color in my face, I was on the road to recovery. I was not seeing gore behind my eyelids. Etc.

Somehow, it worked. I managed to pull myself together just before my morning doctor’s evaluation. I projected health and good humor. “You look a lot better,” the doctor said, his mouth resembling a rotting stigmata wound covered in flies. “You can go home.”

All of this is to say, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has a unique and powerful pull, one that persists stubbornly despite many bad omens.

Promises, Resistance

Our ferry captain is a middle-aged man with a small gap in his smile. He has one of those big chests like guys used to have in the 1950s. His name is Captain Zack. We’re seated next to a tech employee in his 40s and his elderly parents. Opposite us are his wife and their two twin boys. The couple moved from the Bay Area to Sacramento during lockdown.

“With the billionaires eyeing [the region], it might not be the way it is for long,” the mom says. The twins take turns performatively eating a Snickers bar, looking around for reactions. “They’re trying to start a walkable city, in Solano County mostly. Parts of Solano County butt up against the Delta. There are a lot of promises, but there’s a lot of resistance from farmers, too.”

I wonder if one of the billionaires might be Balaji Srinivasan, the VC who wrote The Network State: How To Start a New Country, and who has reportedly been buying up lots of acreage somewhere in Northern California.

The man with the silk shirt is telling the captain about a nearby marina, Stars and Moon Art Park. Not long ago it was River’s Edge, a blue collar marina and RV park with a local reputation for meth and crime. Recently, it’s undergone a transformation. The new owner is Chicken John, an early Burner and head builder at the very first Ephemerisle in 2009. (In 2007, Chicken ran a gag SF mayoral campaign on the Green Party ticket. Campaign PR involved public performances, puppets, and fake blood. He lost to Gavin Newsom.)

“It’s more operational now,” the silk shirt says. “They’ve sunk a bunch of money into it.” He quietly does a bump of coke and sips his beer. “But they have a tenant that’s violent,” he continues, “so I think it’s a little bit...”

“Can they kick them out?” Captain Zack interrupts.

“They’re looking into it,” says the silk shirt. “[The tenant] is on a lot of drugs.”

Our commute is about 45 minutes, dock-to-dock. At times the wind throws big sheets of water over the side of the boat, misting everyone on board. I laugh imagining the two of us in a rickety canoe, fighting the current by pointing a power drill in front of our path like a divining rod.

We pass an incongruous mansion, which Zack says is owned by the Hiltons.

“They do a big fireworks display every July 4th, a million dollar thing,” he says. “Apparently Paris Hilton used to visit Ephemerisle incognito, but I don’t believe it.”

The Hiltons bought the estate during Covid. In addition to the fireworks display, part of their bargain with the locals involved a large donation toward saving the Delta from looming tunnel projects. The water system we’re navigating, like much of rural California, is threatened with the Sisyphean task of hydrating the greater Los Angeles area nearly 400 miles away.

Vague dance music pulses as we near our destination. The grandparents take pictures with a long lens. Small boats and ramshackle structures are tethered to a giant barge. On top of the barge someone dressed as a frog is gyrating.

Sea legs

We exit the boat and plop our bags onto a wobbly dock. Nearby there’s a dance floor that connects the main structure to other walkways. One path leads to a huge repurposed military crane barge with a tall tower and an American flag on top. The other connects a glowing yacht to a big trawler filled with bunks and sprinkled with half-drunk Europeans. On the barge nearest us the pink LED glow of a selfie kiosk stands out against a beautiful reddish sunset.

We climb up and have a drink while taking in the scene. A familiar face appears and says, “you’ve made it.” The face belongs to Jake, a one-legged hacker who once lived at the squat around the corner from me in Oakland. He’s arrived on a pointy rowboat outfitted with some sort of improvised long-tail propeller and a lawnmower engine. Jake is our only real contact at Ephemerisle and he doesn’t remember me, but it’s good to see him. I mention the curious juxtaposition of the selfie station and something resembling a gallows. “Oh, you mean the guillotine,” he says, unphased.

From the height of the barge we survey the crowd below. The looks are unambiguously Bay Area—think pirates, polyamory, glowsticks, the occasional dreadlock—but the vernacular is a little different than expected: less hacker nerd, more theater kid. People call loudly to one another in stage voices and curious accents. Their speech is peppered with punny names for the vessels and landmarks surrounding us: Bargey, Electric Avenue, Magic Island, Flamingo Island. Big Booty Island is the name of the one we’re currently inhabiting. It’s the biggest island this year, and the only one with a central structure connecting the individual boats. We’re relieved to see the shape of a taco appear on a dock in the distance.

The sun is low in the sky and the temperature is dropping. Jake asks where we plan on sleeping and says someone named Heidi is renting bunks. He points to a cabin boat a couple hundred feet away and says to go find her there.

The jetpack

Heidi is a den mother type with a raspy smoker’s voice who holds court on her porch, surrounded by 20-something diesel mechanics. We join her at the table and she doesn’t seem to notice.

“I prefer to settle business matters in person,” she’s telling the others seated there. Legal troubles, business deals, they’re all solved at the local bar. Somehow Heidi made the arrangements to retrieve the enormous military barge to our left using this method. I’m not surprised—her presence is instantly reassuring. She’s like an evolved form of the permissive high school mom who lets kids drink at her house as a type of harm reduction. In this advanced version, however, the beer is accompanied by LSD, psilocybin, 2CB, nitrous, and ketamine, and the borrowed Hondas are jerry-rigged jon boats or rented pontoons.

Permissive as she may be, it isn’t long before Heidi has to lay down the law and confiscate a backpack full of nitrous from two giggling drunk boys. One guy is lanky and more somber. The other, huskier one holds the backpack close to his chest with both arms. He insists on referring to it as the jetpack.

“Ok, that’s it,” Heidi says, sternly but not without empathy. “You aren’t being responsible with it anymore. Privileges revoked. Hand it over.”

“But waaait, waaait,” the husky one protests in textbook nitrous drawl, still clinging to the bag. His face goes serious. “Caan I aask yoou oone faavor? I neeed you to pleease...pleease... Caan you caall it thhe jettpaack?”

Slow motion laughter.

A group on the floating gazebo to our right is testing some microphones. Apparently they’re a touring performance art collective from Joshua Tree called Stagefright. I need to pee, so I do a lap around the island with Poison, down the wobbly dock, past the dance floor where EDM is thumping away, to the barge, up the ladder and past the guillotine, down the opposite ladder to the yacht, whose deck is situated appropriately behind the DJ booth, creating an exclusive, backstage effect, then past the yacht, to the island’s corner, by the big trawler where Heidi’s rental bunks are located, and then to big crane barge with the tall tower. The thing is unoccupied, and I take the opportunity to piss there, off the island’s west edge. I can see at least one other island in the distance, five or six boats tethered together in the vague shape of a star.

When I reach the gazebo again Stagefright has begun. To my disappointment, it’s not a performance art group at all, just costumed people playing circusy B-52’s-inspired pop songs about subjects like catnip. In between numbers they hold a mock election for the Mayor of Ephemerisle. One of the candidates is a chicken.

Praxis

Last year in New York a startup called the Praxis Society organized a week of parties and seminars to promote their own vision of an autonomous crypto city on the Mediterranean coast. Venues ranged from Dimes Square dive bars to the exclusive Yale Club in Midtown.

Around that same time the group released a YouTube video entitled EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING. In it, a British voice quotes Nietzsche over moody ambient music, archival footage, and images of ancient statuary. The 20 minute video depicts modern day alienation in an editorial style lifted directly from films like Hypernormalisation, but the antidote it hints at diverges significantly from any Adam Curtis might propose. “The great cut a path through the cobwebs of mediocrity,” the British voice says as Napoléon appears in black-and-white, women and children clinging to his sides. “Those are the men and women who build new worlds.”

I didn’t catch any Praxis Week events, but I have been to Sovereign House, a salon space in New York’s Chinatown where some of the events took place. The typical crowd there is a mix of turtlenecked intellectuals, downtown skater types, and overdressed, underfed party girls. It’s the kind of place you might hear some “transgressive” poetry, sniff drugs, or pick up a book about phrenology. While there, I leaned on what appeared to be a Greek column but turned out to be made of foam. It toppled over.

Praxis is based in New York, but there’s more than a little Silicon Valley in its DNA. Co-founder Dryden Brown is a wealthy Californian surfer who moved to New York to attend NYU, then dropped out. He and former Boston College wide receiver Charlie Callinan started Bluebook Cities, which gave way to Praxis Society, in 2019. In 2021, Patri Friedman’s Pronomos Capital gave the group $4 million. Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research both invested as well. Praxis managed to raise $20 million, but at the time of this writing their utopian city remains online. The group’s website claims there are over 14,000 “Praxians.” Several former employees have outed Brown as a con and a grifter.

If Praxis Week represents the cosmopolitan recruitment arm of some crypto-libertarian’s wet dream, Ephemerisle is the next morning’s dried residue. The place has a rickety bake-sale feel to it. Ambitious as the whole effort may be, the state of the port-a-potties would give any savvy investor pause.

Confidence hack

Stagefright is done and they’re tearing down their gear. We’re near the gazebo, eating handfuls of french fries.*

[*There is no bar or commissary on the island, which challenges a few of the assumptions I’d made about the gathering’s economic leanings. There is a central kitchen, however, and it stays busy. You don’t order food from it, and there don’t appear to be any distinct feeding times. Instead, there are random periodic deliveries of french fries.]

“I guess it’s the idea of economy,” taco is saying, “You’re self-contained, you can take care of yourself. If everyone else around you managed, you could probably survive and be OK. And when there’s a bunch of people together doing that, it creates a sort of special atmosphere that allows for all sorts of weird magic to happen.”

He’s talking about Mutant Fest, another autonomous gathering that happens each summer in varying locations along the west coast.

“It’s a place where the most destitute and mentally fucked people are welcome, to an extent, as long as they aren’t hurting other people,” he says.

I’m wondering, where are the Silicon Valley inventors and investors? Do they still make the pilgrimage to Ephemerisle? It’s hard to picture them slumming it here with the rest of us, sharing french fries, but maybe they’ve been camoflauged among us all evening. Or maybe they’re hiding on one of the other islands, away from the cacophony of the festival’s final night.

“I was in a really depressed state before Mutant Fest,” taco says, “and I took it upon myself to make a welcoming committee, so that anyone who arrived would be greeted with a cheer and a smile. I was having a hard time though. It’s kind of ironic, because I was captaining the welcoming committee and I didn’t wanna talk to anybody. I was faking it for three days, doing lots of ketamine and drinking. Just doing a lot of fake smiling and cheering, with moderate use of drugs to get by.”

“Did the fake smile ever become real?” I ask him.

“It did,” he says. “That’s a thing I’ve learned in the past, just privately. Sometimes I’d try doing a fake smile, and after 20 or 30 seconds it tricked my brain into feeling uplifted. That was kinda my mantra for three days—fake it to make it.”

“I had something similar,” a guy nearby chimes in. His name is Asa. “I guess it was just a confidence hack. My dad died when I was 16. And I really was like, I need to be normal. Pretend you’ve got it all together. And that’s how it was for like eight years: Just hold it all together. I think it actually worked. But I don’t know if it’s a life-long strategy...”

Everyone laughs.

A nearby girl says, “Confidence: half the battle.”

“Most of it, actually,” Asa adds.

“Actually, all of it,” the girl says. “Words are magic.”

The tower

Shadows of hippie culture are clearly visible at Ephemerisle, but I haven’t noticed much free love. Actually, I haven’t seen any exchanges of affection at all. On the dance floor, a woman is writhing topless on her back as the music pounds away. Those around her press against the DJ’s table as they have for hours, but nobody joins her.

Poison is staring at us, shivering. The temperature has dropped considerably. We decide to test out the no-rules policy and explore the military crane barge. People have been crossing over its deck all night, but we still haven’t seen signs of anybody inside. We climb the tower’s winding staircase and find the door at the top unlocked. The cockpit area is very small—just enough room for a teetering captain’s chair (repurposed car seat), a three-foot bench, and a dizzying grid of levers and dials cluttered with a week’s worth of junk food garbage. This is the highest point on the island, a reminder that the whole operation is really quite small, maybe no longer than a football field. The window provides a bird’s eye view of the party’s proceedings. Bedazzled bodies groove to psy-trance as a laser projection of a bird dances across the boat’s main sail.

The bench isn’t long enough to stretch out completely, but it will have to work. Roxann piles up some found objects to extend its length so that our legs won’t have to dangle. We make Poison a small bed, too, and set him up with some food and water, then leave him to guard the fort.

The nail that sticks up

“I’ve seen this boat at other parties,” Captain Zack says under his breath.

We’re on the deck of the yacht, just behind the DJ.

“The owner was there, but along with him were four or five women, all tens, which is pretty unusual in this environment,” Zack says. “Thin, beautiful, maybe Eastern European, maybe Russian... I made a bad joke about them being hired prostitutes, and they did not get angry!”

He lets loose a wide grin.

“Anyone who wasn’t a prostitute would have gotten really angry,” he says and, after a thoughtful pause, “Maybe it’s not a bad gig.”

“Everything is a transaction for some people,” I say.

Captain Zack spent years teaching in mainland China, but he didn’t pick up much Chinese. When he tried to learn, nobody wanted to help.

“They were all very head-down,” he says. “I’d ask why a word meant something, and everyone would say ‘I don’t know.’ It was always I don’t know about everything.”

This frustrated the Captain. He was somebody prone to asking why, and used to getting answers. After thinking it over, he decided the whole thing was a condition of the CCP’s repressive regime.

“The nail that sticks up gets hammered back down,” he says.

Merge or purge

Access to drugs, courtesy of two Frenchmen. Thoughts consolidate, appear as words, become conversation, disappear just as quickly. Manifestation, vitality, autonomy, optimization, immortality, etc. The buoyancy of shared experience meets the problem of joining. The small death of being absorbed. Salt water versus fresh water.

A sense of loathing is seeping up through the cracks. Maybe it’s all the smiling, a lack of negativity anywhere in sight, that has me seeking some balance. Or it could be the guillotine selfie kiosk glowing brightly in my periphery. I walk over to it and fumble with various settings on the screen. Eventually my haphazard strokes minimize the app, revealing its skeleton, a normal computer desktop.

Dryden of Praxis Society: “Our purpose is to pursue immortality.”

I change the default language of the computer to one I’ve never heard of and pull up a looping video of underage workers in a deadly cobalt mine.

“...It’s about solving the existential single point-of-failure problem that Elon’s working on by getting to Mars, and getting out into the stars and persisting into eternity.”

I can’t seem to wrap my head around another twelve hours on the island, let alone eternity. Now would be the time to retire to our private boat, if we had one. Instead we climb the winding stairs to the tower, where we invent a heated argument out of thin air. Maybe it’s a combination of exhaustion, neurotransmitters, hormones—all things that could plausibly be optimized out of existence with the correct mindset. We yell and cry, and Roxann threatens to leave, as if leaving were an option.

When we finally collapse diagonally on the crooked bench, nothing resolved but too exhausted to continue, there is a familiar feeling behind my eyelids. Creeping absence, infinite, vague, and shapeless. An alienation as deep and vast as the ocean.

Morning

My phone is severely cracked and the cockpit appears to have shrunk. The sky is too close. What remains of the snack array on the dash has begun to cook. Our tower’s sense of withdrawn security has given way to nude vulnerability. We’re surrounded, and we’ve got to come out sometime. Out of the tower, onto the ferry, back to dry land, on the enemy’s terms.

At sea level there are remnants of some breakfast spoiling rapidly on a teetering piece of particle board. A guy with a doo rag and spandex animal print pants swigs from a sunned bottle of Jagermeister. The selfie kiosk has been removed, and the dance floor is littered with bottles, cans, and loose fur.

My cracked iPhone has some life left in it. “It looks like a ferry must be coming soon,” I tell Roxann while squinting at a series of Whats App messages. “Maybe one of us should stay here while the other grabs our things.”

We take turns retrieving the bags and bedding. On my way to the tower I face off with a mostly nude European guy strutting the narrow dock. On the stairs to the cockpit a woman I’ve never seen pops her head out of the lower door. “Where are you going?” she asks pointedly. The implication is clear, but that ship has sailed, so to speak. “I’m getting the rest of my things,” I tell her. “I’ll be out in just a second.”

When I return to the dock there’s a boat pulling up, but it isn’t a ferry.

“LINE!” an older woman onboard yells. She’s wearing a sun visor and holding an inflatable flamingo.

People rush to help pull the boat toward the dock. The woman makes an announcement, something like: “ATTENTION! If you would like to help your community, if you’ve enjoyed the party and the breakfast, line up here and I will give you something to carry! Everything on this boat needs to be offloaded.”

People line up dutifully. Each receives an item and a destination. “This goes to Bargey,” the flamingo lady says “this goes to Electric Avenue.” The names have taken on the feeling of a belittling restaurant menu. Roxann and I take turns carrying items—inflatables, cookware, gas canisters—and sitting with the bags and the dog. When the boat is unloaded the flamingo lady waits at the dock. She makes it clear she’ll be getting on the next ferry. By this time a sizable group has formed, believing the same.

Meet the Wizard

It’s about an hour later when the ferry finally pulls up and people start crowding around. There are probably 20 of us in the frenzy. The boat’s captain is Patri Friedman.

“I can take 12! Only 12!” he shouts nasally.

The flamingo lady and her friend push forcefully to the front. Roxann and I lock hands and do the same. It is not a time for timidity.

“I need a body here, and one here,” Patri shouts. “I can take two more.”

There are at least four people who haven’t given up, and they continue to push forward, but all the spots are taken.

“Ok, we’re full, I can’t take any more!” Patri shouts.

A guy is standing, clinging, with one leg on the ferry and another on the dock as the boat begins to push off. It’s like Kabul airport.

“YOU,” the flamingo lady yells, pointing. “OFF!”

Behind him there are others, still trying, insisting they can fit.

“We’ve been waiting all day,” an Italian woman protests.

“Everyone’s been waiting,” another passenger says.

“Grab the stern,” the flamingo lady says.

The boat moves. The pouting faces of those left behind shrink and fade from view. “Bossy women are the only way to get anything done,” she says with satisfaction.

We sit in a wet corner behind the driver’s seat. Moments later we’re navigating the Delta’s waterways.

It isn’t long before Patri starts telling his origin story. He turns 90 degrees from the steering wheel to shout over the engine hum between sips of orange hard seltzer: “Don’t say economists aren’t great investors. My Dad made four investments early on, at like 10K each. It was a health club, Apple when the Mac came out, Microsoft when Windows came out, and AOL. And he held that Apple. He did 10K to 10 Mil in the public markets. And that’s in the 80s. He saw the GUI and was like, this is it.”

Someone to my right asks a question, but I can’t hear it. I’m stuck in a tantric position facing the water. One leg has fallen asleep.

Patri continues: “I grew up in the BBS world. There were these two Yahoo group mailing lists: nation-builders and floating-cities. I started on floating-cities. I started on Yahoo mailing lists and now I’m negotiating with heads of state. Fuck yeah, 21st century!”

“Wow,” one of the passengers says sincerely.

“I have connections to all of Portuguese Africa, like, the governments,” he says. “The armpit [of Africa] exports some of the highest quality coffee in the world. The Portuguese treated them as indentured servants, to the point where in 1969 when Jimi Hendrix was playing onstage at Woodstock, the Portuguese were putting down a slave rebellion. They lost the colonies in 1975, and they left one of the best places in the world to grow coffee, without any management or business experience. So for like 50 years it depended on the IMF...”

I close my eyes and let his voice sink beneath the motor’s hum.

Bumfights

It’s unnerving being at the whim of someone whose basic sense of empathy veers toward exploitation. Years ago I was living and working on a weed farm in Humboldt County when the manager of the operation revealed the owner’s identity.

“You know Bumfights?” he asked as he tossed a full jug of gasoline onto a raging trash fire. Whoever ran the place had been feeding us boiled hot dogs as both lunch and dinner for nearly a week, and morale was low.

“The DVDs?” I asked.

For the unfamiliar, Bumfights is a DVD series produced in the early 2000s in which homeless people fight one another on camera in exchange for meager bribes, $20 or a forty ounce beer. Two guys depicted in the series successfully sued its producers in 2002.

“Yea, the DVDs!” the manager said. “This whole place is Bumfights!”

The Bumfights name was later sold to a couple of Vegas millionaires. One of them, Ty Beeson, was invited to appear on Dr. Phil, which he did, dressed as Dr. Phil. He was ejected.

“I’m not surprised at my success,” Beeson told the show in a pre-taped segment. “It’s a sick world.”

Land

About 40 minutes later the engine downshifts and I can tell we must be nearing the dock. Patri needs everyone onboard to cough up the $20, but I can’t reach my wallet in my contorted position. We’re pulling up to the dock at King’s Island when he turns around in his captain’s chair, looks me directly in the eyes, and provides his Venmo handle.

Once on land, everyone gathers up their coolers, water jugs, and sleeping bags. Some say brief goodbyes. Others, eager to detach from the group, beeline for the dusty parking strip where their cars await. The boat empty, Patri makes a slow u-turn and takes off. He’s not a captain now, just a guy driving a boat.

Dazed, we walk Poison around in small circles. The return to near-solipsism feels like a relief. Moments later the phone vibrates; there are a few messages from one of Ephemerisle’s many group chats. One is from Patri:

“Next group, please fight amongst yourselves to determine the next dozen to load around 2:20-2:35. Otherwise I’m gonna do it by auction. Highest bid gets on.”

___________________________________

ephemerisle.org

Featured: Stewart Uoo, COINCELLPRO, Aryan Kaganof, Ariel M, Ephemerisle, Jogja Noise Bombing.

Contributors: Sam Karugu, Mimi Luse, Rain Pickell, Junwoo Park, Meg McCarville, Yoshi Yubai, Sarah Ferrara, Sarah Cavalieri, Will Isenogle.

Discussed: Buddhism, DeviantArt, South Africa, Silicon Valley, cognitive warfare, animism, privacy, Merzbow, Mortal Kombat, Coin Celleil (2023), Sans Solleil (1983), New Beat, shitposting, corecore, seasteading, harassment, bodies, mannequins, institutionalization, Tokyo Elegy (1999), SMS Sugar Man (2008), Beyond Ultraviolence (1998), Girl, Interrupted (1999), decolonization, possession, corruption, cruelty, frames, labor, etc.

Full color, 112 pages.

Order here.

1. DJ Lycox

2. Ironing

3. Amnesisa Scanner & Freeka Tet

4. The Idealist

5. Ennio Morricone

6. LUCKI

7. Diemajin

8. DJ Znobia

9. Diemajin (cont)

10. public visitation (reject)

11. Bogdan Raczynski

12. public visitation (reject)

13. Muscle Beach 

14. Shelter Music Group

15. Cube

16. Miranda Rain

17. 4am Kru

18. Zomby ft Rezzett

19. Janus

20. Cube

21. Morricone (reprise)

22. Chino Amobi

23. Croniamantal