The jhanas are a series of eight (or nine) altered mental states, which progress from euphoria, to calm, to dissolution of reality – culminating in cessation, or loss of consciousness. They are induced via sustained concentration, without any external stimuli or substances. This is a practical guide on how to do them yourself. Table of Contents Jhanas are learned by doing, not reading What the jhanas feel like Why learn the jhanas? Hours practiced Retreat I (March 2024) Retreat II (June 2024) Practice between retreats General tips for practice Experiment with different techniques Flow state » relaxation A jhana is like a sneeze Pace yourself and listen to your body Instructions for accessing the jhanas How I entered J1<>J4 How I entered J5<>J7 How I entered J7<>J9 What’s going on under the hood? Impact of the jhanas In conclusion: try it! Notes Jhanas are learned by doing, not reading The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. The Buddha experienced jhanas spontaneously as a child, and likely is not the first or only person to have experienced them. I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator. I’m just a curious person who wanted to try a new thing, and was gobsmacked by what I experienced. Prior to attempting the jhanas, I’d guess that I had maybe 30 hours of lifetime meditation experience, scattered over a decade or more: in other words, not much. But with just over 20 hours of practice, I progressed through all nine jhanic states. I would still say that I do not like “meditation” for its own sake, though I enjoy meditative activities (such as exercise, a deep 1:1 conversation, writing, or other creative work). But I don’t think jhanas are a form of meditation. Rather, they are a rare technology whose instructions are encoded in our bodies. Jhanas are an algorithm in the oldest sense of the word: a set of instructions that, if executed correctly, solve for a problem that you may not have even realized you’ve been trying to unravel. They are an Easter egg hiding in the game of life. [1] If jhanas are a technology that exists a priori to Buddhism, then I find it strange how they are discussed and taught by most practitioners today, which is pretty much only through a Buddhist lens. The actual, mechanical instructions are buried in what I’d say is akin to computer science: a lot of complex language and spiritual theory, which - it is often implied - are inseparable from practice. I understand the purpose of the ornate cultural context that is chained – albeit beautifully – around the jhanas. Powerful technology should be embedded in a community of norms and protocols that help people make sense of them and integrate them safely into their lives. And jhana practitioners have done this part a bit too well. It is no wonder that jhanas have quietly passed through civilization for centuries, protected like a rare jewel inside a cave of wonders, with little attention from the outside world. It’s just that, well. If you had recently figured out how to code, and realized it was really quite simple and teachable to others – then looked around, and all you saw were computer scientists warning off would-be developers from making software, claiming that they needed to understand all the underlying theory before attempting to write a line of code – wouldn’t that make you want to open up a text editor and type out your own version of things? This post is not intended as a reckless act. Rather, it reflects my personal belief that some types of knowledge are best acquired implicitly, not explicitly. You probably have little interest in reading about grief, or parenting, for example, unless you’re imminently facing these experiences. To return to the software analogy: these days, most developers don’t learn how to write software by studying computer science first. They learn by tinkering around. They print “hello world.” Maybe they have a problem they want to solve for, so they make a simple app. As they become more experienced and run into more sophisticated problems, they might then revisit the theory to understand why things work the way they do. This has been my experience with the jhanas. I read little about them beforehand, instead receiving minimal instruction and letting my intuition guide the experience. When I experienced things that were confusing or beyond what I could explain, I went back and read about the underlying philosophy to understand what was going on. (As a concrete example: I tried listening to Rob Burbea’s talks on the jhanas before I’d ever tried them myself, and found myself rather lost and bored. Later, however, I went back and consumed his talks voraciously; they had taken on new meaning. I now find them very valuable.) So that’s what I’m going to attempt here. Instead of bogging you down with theory, I’ll share the basic instructions that helped me access the jhanas, going from first jhana to cessation in just over 20 cumulative hours. More than anything, I want to instill confidence in anyone reading this post that you can absolutely do this, regardless of how much you meditate. The most important advice I can give is to relax, have fun, maintain a playful and curious mindset, and don’t overthink it. Just follow the instructions as best you can. But first, just a bit more information and background, so that you know what to aim for. What the jhanas feel like Jhanas are like swirling the paintbrush of your consciousness across a palette of altered sensations. These states vary in intensity; some are comparable to psychedelics, MDMA, or dissociatives. Here’s how each state feels to me. I’ve kept my descriptions vague, because I think it’s more fun to discover them yourself. I’ve included their short descriptions in parentheses from this wiki. J1 (Pleasant Sensations): euphoric, bright, sunny, yellow J2 (Joy): gratitude, beaming, radiating, hot pink J3 (Contentment): content, reasoned, soft, wide, robin’s egg blue J4 (Utter Peacefulness): dissociative, stillness, bathtub, cashmere, felt, muted lavender J5 (Infinity of Space): disembodied, infinite, outer space, grayscale J6 (Infinity of Consciousness): beauty, benevolence, grace, psychedelic, rose petal pink J7 (No-thingness): —— (nothing in nothingness) J8 (Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception): surreal, dissolution, black velvet studded with colorful ’80s rhinestones and gold that wink in and out of existence J9 (Cessation): [cannot be described; no direct experience; consciousness is switched off] (Edit: I also adore this video visualization of the jhanas from Roger Thisdell, which maps closely to my experiences.) Why learn the jhanas? Why bother trying the jhanas? Are they just a weird party trick? I’ll talk about this more later, but in short: jhanas are a good way to cultivate your attention. When you can skillfully control, deepen, and direct your attention, you may discover that life is easier and more malleable than it seemed. It may sound hyperbolic, but jhanas are the closest thing to magic that I’ve experienced in my adult life. J1-J4 are especially useful for altering your moods and states of reality. I especially find jhanas to be an important skill in a modern context, where everyone is perpetually distracted. Mastering proactive control over one’s attention is an increasingly rare superpower. (Spoiler alert: this isn’t the whole story of the jhanas. In fact, practicing the jhanas isn’t really the point of the jhanas at all. But I’ll cover that towards the end of this post. Let’s try to get to “hello world,” first.) Hours practiced I primarily learned the jhanas on two Jhourney retreats in 2024. Jhourney is a company that takes a pragmatic, fun, and accessible approach to teaching the jhanas to beginners. They are markedly different from a typical meditation retreat, and I’m grateful they exist, because I don’t think I would’ve learned the jhanas otherwise. Retreat I (March 2024) On the first retreat, I experienced jhanas 1 through 7 over the span of four days, at which point I left the retreat early to process what I’d learned. (You can read an account of my experience in Asterisk magazine.) Here’s an approximation of how many hours I practiced per day; cumulative hours practiced on a given retreat, (t); and when I experienced each jhana for the first time. Each session lasted from 30-60 minutes, and I never meditated solo (not counting group sits) more than three times per day. Aim for quality, not quantity. Note: (t) includes walking meditation time + group sits (where the goal wasn’t always to practice the jhanas). Dedicated jhana practice time is probably ~80% of this number. Day 1: 3 hours total J1, possibly J2, t <1 hour J2 for sure, t = 2.25 hrs Day 2: 4.75 hours total J3, t = 4.5 hrs J4, t = 5.5 hrs Day 3: 5 hours total J5, t = 10.75 hrs Day 4: 2 hours total J6 and J7, t = 14.25 hrs Total hours meditated on Retreat I: 14.75 Retreat II (June 2024) On the second retreat, I additionally experienced jhanas 8 and 9 (meaning, cessation) over the span of two and a half days, at which point I left the retreat early to process what I’d learned. Day 1: 1.5 hours total Possibly J8 and J9, t <1.25 hrs Day 2: 3 hours total J8 and J9 for sure, t = 3 hrs Day 3: 2.25 hours total Total hours meditated on Retreat II: 6.75 Practice between retreats In the three months between retreats, I only did 2-3 dedicated practice sessions, and not very seriously (maybe 15-30 min apiece?). But I did “practice” the jhanas all the time, in the sense of being aware of my body and mind, how I was reacting to things, and guiding myself towards different mental states. I popped into J1 all the time throughout the day, almost reflexively, and I’d sometimes tap into J2-J4 when I wanted to deepen certain sensations. This felt more like wielding a skill, though, versus dedicated practice. General tips for practice To access the jhanas, you basically induce the “opposite of a panic attack,” as I’ve heard others describe it. Before getting into my specific method (see next section), here are a few general recommendations. Remember, again, that the number one most important thing is to relax, have fun, and don’t overthink it. Experiment with different techniques It really does seem that everyone is different, so my method may not work for you. It’s your brain; go with what feels right. For example, to invoke a positive sensation, some people tap into feelings of gratitude, forgiveness, or altruism. I preferred a fairly mechanical, detached approach where I just thought of my brain as a machine, and which levers I needed to pull to induce various sensations. Flow state » relaxation For me, at least, the trick to jhanas was not “relaxation,” but something closer to “flow state.” Relaxing, to me, is like being at ease, where no new thoughts come to mind. Flow state, on the other hand, means I’m highly engaged with a task for a sustained period of time, and that one task is all that matters. IME this is at odds with how I’ve been told to practice mindfulness meditation. So if you’re struggling to “relax,” maybe try tapping into flow state instead. A jhana is like a sneeze You’ll hear meditators talk about not “grasping” onto sensations or trying too hard with the jhanas. This can be frustrating: what does it mean to both try, and not try too hard? I think of it like sneezing. Sneezing requires some degree of intentionality, but it’s a physical reflex that only happens if you don’t think too hard about it. Like sneezing, jhanas are more like a release than a force of will. Pace yourself and listen to your body For me, the jhanas came hard and fast. I struggled at one point between wanting to slow down, versus feeling like I was “supposed” to practice more. And I didn’t trust what I was experiencing at first, which led me to push myself more than I ideally would’ve. Jhanas are weird because they’re considered a form of meditation, so there are a lot of meditation-like protocols around them (put in lots of hours! no phones or devices! avoid talking to people!). But I think these recommendations are just meant to help you cultivate the attention required to invoke jhanic states: they don’t help you process the experience itself. If you’re going through a transformative experience, locking yourself in a room without friends, family, or outside support might not be such a good idea. So, make sure you listen to your needs. If things get overwhelming, it’s okay to stop, process, and ground yourself. Spend time with your friends. Go outside. Hug your pets. Write about it. You can always come back when you’re ready. The biggest milestones for me, which prompted seeking outside input to make sense of my experience, were: J5, J6 and J7 (experienced together), and J9 (cessation). At these points, I made sure to slooowww down and process what was going on. If you get to any point in your practice where you’re feeling WTF about it, I’d highly recommend Rob Burbea’s talks, which are thoughtful, philosophical lectures on each jhana. Instructions for accessing the jhanas Here’s the method I used. If it doesn’t feel right to you, I suggest experimenting with different techniques. In particular, try switching what you use as your “object of joy,” and see if that helps. (Note, of course, that you will likely progress through these stages over multiple sessions, spread out over days or weeks or months. Feel free to just read the first set of instructions, then continue only once you’ve mastered each stage. Pace yourself!) How I entered J1<>J4 Relax your body deeply, clearing your mind of any distractions. (My personal hack: try falling asleep, but stop before you actually do.) Think about someone, something, or a memory that sparks a pure, uncomplicated feeling of joy. I thought about my child. Don’t focus on the thing itself, but on the joy that arises as a result of thinking about it. Allow that joy to grow, then loop upon itself, as you feel more and more joyful. If the joy begins to dissipate, “pulse” more joy by thinking about the person/thing/memory. Don’t think too much about what you’re doing. Your hands and chest might tingle; that’s a good sign. Eventually, the euphoria will hit. Now you’re in J1. To progress to J2, don’t do anything. Just stay in the moment and enjoy the sensation. If it doesn’t dissipate, it will begin to evolve on its own. Notice how it’s changing, until you find yourself in a qualitatively different state. Repeat the previous step to get to the next jhana. Stay with that state, be in the moment, don’t try to change or interact with it. It will evolve into the next state, and so on. As you get familiar with each state and what they feel like, you’ll be able to locate them in your body and move between states using muscle memory. So to get from J1 → J4, I just move the focus of my energy from my head (J1), to heart (J2), to stomach/groin (J3), to flowing out through my legs and all around me (I call this one, J4, “bathtub”). To move from J4 → J1, reverse the order. As I became more comfortable with the jhanas, I dropped the first relaxation step. Then I dropped my meditation object, or “trigger.” With a bit more practice, I found that I could pop into J1 instantly and progress through my “jhana flow” from there. How I entered J5<>J7 J5-J7 work a little differently. Because they are dissociative, you no longer have your body for reference. The technique that worked for me was thinking about expansion (or “softening”) and contraction. J4 → J5: Expand and soften my awareness, as if the walls of the “bathtub” were falling away. Imagine you’re sitting in the pitch dark and trying to sense what’s around you, or you’re in a room and you sense someone behind you. You’re not focusing on anything specific, just trying to be more aware. J5 → J6: You’re staring at an infinite space; now become the infinite space. For me, this feels like floating “forward,” as if my consciousness is merging with the space before me. J6 → J7: I just stay in J6, keeping the sensations soft, until it fades into J7. Sometimes I can accelerate this process by reminding myself that the J6 experience is finite, and it has to end sometime. But I find that J6 tends to dissolve on its own. To get back down from J7 → J4, I contract my awareness. I remember that I have a consciousness (J6). I remember that there is space (J5). I remember that I have a body (J4). Then it collapses down, like closing a book. As you get more comfortable with J5-J7, you can move between states deterministically by directing your “gaze” (I think this is actually my attention, but I think of it as my gaze): To get from J4 -> J5: I gaze sort of out and slightly down J6: I glide forward into the space J7: I sort of gaze inwards, into my center. This feels like a “flattening” of self, collapsing into a line or a horizon. How I entered J7<>J9 Jhanas are typically separated into two buckets of “light” (J1-J4) and “deep” (J5-J8), but in my view, J7-J8-J9 form their own special trio, because J8 is a tricky state to navigate. J9 can’t be directly experienced, because you’re unconscious – just as how you can’t experience being under general anesthesia. And J8 is a fleeting, unstable state, because noticing you’re in it, beyond the faintest bit of awareness, will send you back to J7. But J7 is stable! So we can use that as our anchor. Think of it as your base camp before attempting to summit Everest. The helpful advice I received was to focus on getting very comfortable with J7, deepening and maintaining that state, and then - when you’re ready - “shooting the gap,” or catapulting yourself across J8 to land in J9. I think of it like skipping rocks. A light touch will get you to the other side (J9), but if you’re too heavy-handed, you’ll sink into the pond (end up back in J7) and start over. (I’m sure there is a way to train yourself to linger in J8, and I’d be curious to cultivate this skill, but so far, this method works for me.) The best way I can describe J7-J9 is to compare it to lucid dreaming, where you’re dreaming, but strangely alert. J7-J9 is like that, but for the act of falling asleep. First, the heaviness of your body sets in (J7). Then, nonsensical sounds and thoughts begin to arise, also known as hypnagogic hallucinations (J8). And then you’re asleep (J9). If you want to cultivate your J7-J9 skills, I’d suggest paying attention to what it feels like to fall asleep at night, noticing the progression from wake to sleep. The difference is you’ll be highly aware – not drowsy – while in the jhanas. So, to get from J7 to J8: relax more deeply into J7, be patient, and notice where reality is breaking down. There are likely fleeting, nonsensical thoughts floating through your mind; try to ever-so gently notice them. Notice that they’re nonsensical. But don’t react to them. It’s hard to describe how this works. In J8, you have to get comfortable with the fact that they may be thoughts or non-thoughts, you might be noticing or not-noticing, things could be happening or not-happening…and just let it be. The image that comes to mind for me is some cartoon I watched once (maybe Adventuretime, or Rick and Morty?), where the characters end up in a bizarro world where their lines and shapes and colors are drawn in strange ways, and the background is now white and empty, but they’re still talking to each other. Kinda like Picasso’s bulls: [Source] Everything is surreal and breaking apart, but you have to be cool with it. You might flit between J7<>J8 a few times before landing in J9. J9 is equally bizarre, because you’ll only know you experienced it after you come back. You know how if you’re given general anesthesia, and the doctor tells you to count down from 10 to 1, and you’re counting, totally awake, feeling so confident that you’ll make it to 1…and next thing you know, you’ve woken up again, and the whole thing is over? That’s what J9 feels like. You’re alert, you’re alert, you’re alert…annnnd, you’re back. Hey, where were you? It feels like you winked out of existence for a bit. I found that I almost always regained consciousness in J7 – usually in a very deep and delicious state of absorption. You can also play with inducing multiple cessations within one session – going from J7-J8-J9-J7, and looping that a few times – before voluntarily ending the session. What’s going on under the hood? I said I wouldn’t spend too much time on theory, but if at this point you’re still wondering how it’s possible that we can think our way into psychedelic experiences and loss of consciousness, congratulations: I know about as much as you do. Jhanas are still understudied in academia, though interest is growing, and there are a few papers that use EEG and fMRI data to demonstrate that something is actually happening inside people’s brains when they are in jhana that’s comparable to other altered states, like psychedelics or being in a coma. [2] The explanation that follows has nothing to do with such literature. It’s just me theorizing, based on my own experience and what I’ve read from others so far, on what I think is happening. But I really have no clue! So, don’t read this as an authoritative take; just a peer-to-peer musing out loud as how I would explain these phenomena. (Please note that these aren’t solely my original thoughts, but a composite of things I’ve read and mashed together from all over the place. I’m not sure what I’ve learned where anymore, so proper attribution feels impossible, but I am not claiming these as my views and shouldn’t be credited as such.) The key ingredient of the jhanas seems to be attention. If you’ve ever tried to make the best of a bad situation, you’re already familiar with this concept. How, and where, you direct your attention, can heighten and intensify an experience. If you get stuck in an anxiety loop, you can make the experience worse. Everything that happens, no matter how objectively “good” it is, will be re-coded as “bad.” But if you try to relax and look on the bright side, you’ll find that your experience actually improves: things that seem “bad” will be re-coded as “good.” To some degree, then, our perception of reality is influenced by where we direct our attention. Now imagine that we’ve plotted all emotions along an x-y axis, where x = valence (positive/negative) of emotion, and y = intensity of emotion. Negative emotions (x<0) might include things like anger, anxiety, and fear. Positive emotions (x>0) are things like euphoria, gratitude, and pride. Attention is the thrust, or force, that you can exert to move your state along the y-axis (i.e. intensify any emotion), regardless of its x-position. [3] This is why the metaphor of jhanas as “inducing the opposite of a panic attack” is so helpful. It’s the same y-value, just with a positive rather than negative x-value. But how do we know the x-positions of our positive emotions? Why are J1-J4 organized the way they are? It’s often said that the jhanas aren’t any different from the positive emotions that we feel in the “real world.” For example, if you start dating someone new, you might progress from the giddy honeymoon phase (J1); to being so joyful and grateful to know this person (J2); to feeling content with, and proud of, the relationship you’ve built (J3); to viewing the relationship as your anchor in the storm of life (J4). I don’t know why positive emotions follow this progression (though I’m sure someone else does), but the point is that jhanas aren’t doing something weird and unusual here. They’re exactly how good feelings evolve in any other circumstance, just with the extra “amplifier” of attention (higher y-value). If our emotions are typically capable of lifting us into the sky and back down to Earth, highly concentrated attention enables us to shoot them into outer space (more thrust!). But if your attention is scattered, you won’t go very far. So, learning how to cultivate and sustain attention is critical to practicing the jhanas. [4] What about J5-J9, which aren’t associated with magnifying any specific emotion, but rather the deconstruction of reality itself? Well…you got me there. I’ve been told (though haven’t read about this myself, so I may be spouting ideas incorrectly here) that J5-J9 are all actually part of J4: so, once you’re anchored in this state of deep calm and equanimity, your brain starts dismantling your consciousness, piece by piece, until there is nothing left. Perhaps it’s akin to how, when you’re very relaxed and calm, it’s easy to fall asleep? But I’m especially baffled by J6, which is an intensely beautiful and psychedelic experience that’s oddly sandwiched between two very dissociative ones (J5 and J7). I wish I had answers here, but I’m still not sure how to explain J5-J9. Impact of the jhanas Now that I’ve taken you all the way through this post, I’ll give you the plot twist: jhanas are cool, but they’re not actually the point. The valuable part is the insight gained along the way. Jhanas, breathwork, psychedelics, MDMA, etc are all tools for inducing altered states, from which new insights can arise. None of the actual methods matter, so much as putting your brain into what I think of as “developer mode,” from which you can write new rules that govern your thoughts and behavior, then close things up and operate anew. (Some people call this “neural annealing.”) After I published my account of the first retreat, many people have asked me how the jhanas improved my life. My answers were fairly straightforward. Having better control of my attention helped me navigate challenging moments more easily than before. Things just didn’t bother me as much, even if a moment was genuinely sad or disappointing or hard. I could experience difficult emotions, and sit with them, without letting it all fall apart. I was also prompted to reexamine aspects of my personality, such as a tendency towards grumpiness, and whether I wanted them to be part of my identity. I don’t think the jhanas made me happy, but their biggest impact was enabling me to realize how happy I already was: I just had to direct my attention towards this fact, then update how I thought of myself. Now I embrace and see the joy in life’s moments, big and small, much more easily than before. I think we could be on the precipice of a modern wave of “natural psychedelics” – like jhanas and breathwork – that are accessible without the red tape (see also: the FDA’s recent rejection of MDMA therapy) and have great potential for therapeutic use. [5] If more people gain access to “developer mode,” they can debug their minds without the use of chemical interventions. One day, we might look back on psychedelics as an early, coarse attempt to do this sort of thing that came with all sorts of weird side effects, like dentists using cocaine in the late 1800s, versus the comparatively “smoother” methods that something like the jhanas might offer. This sort of future is where the bulk of conversation is centered regarding the jhanas’ benefits, and they are very good benefits indeed. …But. Even that isn’t the point of the jhanas! Cessation, or J9, was a completely different experience from the other jhanas. Whereas J1-J7 (I’m not sure where to put J8 because it’s so fleeting and instrumental) were more about being able to improve myself, my mind, and my reality, J9 prompted more philosophical and spiritual reflections on the nature of consciousness itself. Now I see the jhanas like this: they are an algorithm for understanding some fundamental truths about the world. These truths are not specific to the jhanas – they are visible across many different spiritual traditions and lived experiences – but the jhanas are an extremely straightforward way of getting to them. And once I had those insights, I didn’t feel the need to practice the jhanas anymore. After cessation, my practice of the jhanas felt complete. Not only do I not have a desire for dedicated jhana practice anymore, but so far (admittedly, it’s still fresh) I haven’t even felt the need to invoke them in my day-to-day life anymore, like I did after the first retreat. I find this sense of closure to be a really beautiful thing. How often does mastery of an activity end with true fulfillment, rather than boredom, distraction, or disinterest? There’s something about the innate completeness of the jhanas that speaks to their elegant design, like finding a perfectly round sphere in nature. I would love to describe the truths I discovered, but something tells me this isn’t the right format. I think some insights – really, most forms of wisdom – can only be learned by experiencing them yourself. It would be hubris to think that I could convey this sort of knowledge using words, in the same way that no one can teach you about love, or loss, or the feeling of pride that comes from accomplishment, besides yourself. You just need to go do the thing. That’s why I’ve explicitly taken the approach of trying to share instructions that are as clear and straightforward as possible, and emphatically encouraging you to give the jhanas a try. I guess I’ll wrap here by saying that the jhanas are useful for tinkering with the mind, but after cessation, I realized that neither body nor mind is really all that important. I imagine if my brain gets re-muddled somehow, I could use the jhanas to light up the path again. But right now, I see no additional purpose to practicing them. To try on one last metaphor before we part ways: it feels like finishing a video game. I might play through the game again if I’m feeling nostalgic, or to uncover new ways of “beating” it, or find any hidden quests or parts of the map I might’ve missed along the way. But that would just be for fun. I know that all those paths will lead to the same ending, and I already know what the ending is. My intrinsic desire to finish the game has been satisfied. [6] In conclusion: try it! I hope this post has inspired you to want to try the jhanas for yourself. I came into them rather skeptical, thinking they must be overhyped, and came out of it permanently changed. I do think some aspects of the jhanas are overhyped (not in terms of sensory experience, but in terms of their significance), but it’s still an entertaining – and at times, enlightening – experience along the way, with at least 20+ hours of gameplay. And I encourage you to try to “finish the game,” because the ending is a real humdinger. Good luck! Notes I’m not thinking about the Three Body Problem game, you are. ↩ Oshan Jarow’s Vox piece is a helpful introduction to the jhanas that references the research we have so far. ↩ I’ve been tempted, for research’s sake, to try inducing and intensifying an actual panic attack to see if a distinct set of states emerge, similarly to the jhanas. But I’ve had panic attacks before, and I don’t wish them on anyone. I do also wonder: is valence purely bidirectional? That is, can you only induce and heighten a “positive” or “negative” emotion, or are there any other directions we could send our consciousness down? The jhanas encompass what I believe to be every type of positive emotion, including joy, contentment, and peacefulness (and their associated variations). Can we line up all the negative emotions – such as anxiety, fear, and doubt – along the valence axis in the opposite direction? And together, does that neatly organize every possible human emotion along a single -1/1 axis, or are we still missing others? If so, what happens if we try to intensify and loop on those emotions? ↩ I suspect this is partly why I was able to learn the jhanas quickly. Even though I don’t meditate, I’m lucky to spend most of my days deeply immersed in focused, creative work. If you want to get good at the jhanas: stop scrolling on your phone, pick up a book or a hobby or some activity, and just do that one thing for hours. Learn to be alone with your thoughts. Go on a long walk. Eat dinner alone, without watching TV or being on your phone. You get the idea. ↩ After having tried breathwork a couple of times, I personally prefer the jhanas, because they enable you to have a much more precise and controlled experience, without the distraction of external stimuli. (I also couldn’t get comfortable with the idea that I was essentially hyperventilating my way into these states.) On the flip side, breathwork might be a more deterministic way to induce an altered state. ↩ Of course: never say never. There’s always the possibility that this sequel turns into a trilogy! ↩

I participated in the Summer of Protocols research program this summer as a Core Researcher. It was an 18-week program, funded by the Ethereum Foundation, that aimed to catalyze a wider exploration of protocols and their social implications. I decided to focus on protocols as systems of social control, and whether they help or hinder human agency. Protocols have a very technical meaning for the internet (HTTP, TCP/IP, IP, etc), but are also used in a variety of other sectors in nontechnical ways (diplomacy, healthcare, emergency response, etc). I want to develop a unified history of protocols, through this lens of control, that shows how these different types are interrelated – then use that to better predict the role that protocols will play in our near future. I thought it might be useful to share my working notes from this process, especially since Summer of Protocols is an interesting meta-experiment in funding a cohort of independent researchers. I tried to keep these summaries fairly condensed, with major themes and challenges that I worked through. Read the final essay here: “Dangerous Protocols” Weeks 17-18 (Aug 21 - Sep 1) What did it all mean? Finished revisions and turned in final draft. It sounds a bit silly to say, but only once I finished the draft was I able to zoom out and think about “What did this all mean?,” why this piece evolved in the direction it did, and how it ties to other ideas that have been rattling around in my head I’ve noticed that “agency” has been a recurring theme for me. It’s been implicit in my work for a very long time from the perspective of funding, creators, and the tension between open source maintainers <> community expectations. In recent years, I’ve thought about agency as an essential part of tech culture and what makes it special; as a distinctly American value (America as an idea, not the literal nation state); and as an underlying conflict between worldviews today (I wrote about this a bit wrt a widespread fear of the future and having kids). I’ve also thought about when technology enables greater levels of agency (as I think a lot of tools do), and when it hinders or engenders a lack of agency (the worst effects of social media and smartphones, which are very good at hijacking the mind) Although I didn’t go into this research program with an explicit focus on agency, I can see it clearly in my final output (funny how that works), and this project has definitely helped me clarify my own feelings on the topic I think my hesitation around embracing protocols as a unilaterally positive future development comes from this ambiguity about whether “protocolized mindsets” increase or decrease human agency, which I find particularly concerning because it seems like there’s a lack of consistency in how we describe the benefits of protocols. In a modern, technological context, they’re seen as a way to enable more customization and interoperability. But in a historical and theoretical context, they’ve always been a way of standardizing and reducing decision making. That makes me feel more hesitant about accepting the utopian view of protocols. Do we really understand what protocols are for, or is this just hopeful rhetoric that distracts us from engaging with more serious problems around the decline of agency today, and its root causes? Weeks 15-16 (Aug 7-18) We’re in the final stretch! My updates are fairly boring from this period; I’ve been heads down revising a semi-final draft of my SoP essay, which I shared with a few other researchers for feedback Hardest thing to pin down has been how to describe the evolution, and increased entrenchment, of protocols over time. The first iteration was “material layers” (how protocols exist on everything from e.g. physical infrastructure -> social -> identity layers), second iteration gave it more directionality to suggest that protocols don’t just exist on these layers, but move from explicit to implicit over time But Eric gave the feedback - and I agree - that I’m being too prescriptive with that directionality; that protocols don’t always perfectly move in one direction from e.g. hard infrastructure to social institutions, but that they might iterate and loop recursively. So I revised it for a third time to reflect that multi-directionality, while also remaining somewhat opinionated that protocols, as they become more deeply entrenched, ultimately become indistinguishable from our identities. I think I’m happy with this final version now Weeks 13-14 (July 24 - Aug 4) In-person time is good We had our SoP retreat in Seattle. Face-to-face time was so important and long overdue. I wish we’d done this at the beginning of the program! Getting together in person helped me see what the common themes / agenda were among our work. I think this is especially important when a field is very nascent or undefined. You need some common language and experience to ground everyone’s work, otherwise people are working in silos Talking about bad protocols (see below) also evolved into the “Kafka Index” (Rafa’s term), a list of evaluative criteria, which I’m going to try to refine as a companion artifact for my essay. Definitely the kind of thing that would’ve only come out of having in-person collaboration time for a few days Tricks for defining hard-to-define concepts Turns out, talking about protocol dystopia (i.e. bad protocols) is way more generative than trying to describe “what is a protocol” from scratch. It’s a lot easier to identify the bad vs. the good (because when something is good, you don’t notice it as much), which you can then invert to get an idea of what a good protocol looks like We also did a session on “protocol humor,” which helped us define protocols in a more roundabout way, because humor is easy and intuitive to identify (something makes you laugh, or it doesn’t), and thinking about why it is/isn’t humorous exposes all the fault lines of a concept Do protocols control or liberate us? In our “imagined protocol futures” session, I noticed that many people seemed to imagine protocolized futures as having a lot of customization and interoperability. This seems in line with how protocols are typically discussed in a software / social benefit context, but doesn’t match the definition of protocols in the abstract. Protocols historically seem to exist to simplify decisionmaking To me, a protocolized future is almost certainly highly controlling and constraining - not one where we have a ton of choice. I don’t think it necessarily has to be dystopian, but at the very least, it seems like the opposite of a highly customizable future. (This is the rhetorical disconnect I keep noticing about protocols, which is what I’ve been trying to explore this summer!) Weeks 11-12 (July 10 - 21) Revising my draft based on feedback, and making difficult cuts Threw out my “material layers” diagram, which I realize doesn’t really make sense anymore, given what I’ve learned. It’s now turning into evolutionary “stages of protocolization,” but I’m still testing the connection between theory and application (i.e. does this model work for all the examples I’ve been working with?) The major examples I was previously hoping to center this piece around now feel like they don’t fit my definition of protocols anymore, as I’ve gained a better understanding. Think I’m gonna have to cut most of them, which is painful (especially given how much time I spent trying to understand them!) but necessary Cut out a lot of my 3rd-party references, which felt good. Need a word for the research equivalent of “legalese,” where it’s tempting to add lots of citations to “show your work,” but ends up making the paper too convoluted and inaccessible and uninteresting. I feel especially vulnerable to it in a cohort setting where I’m getting a lot more feedback/suggestions from others than usual A lot of people seemed to resonate with my concept of “weakly vs. strongly expressed” protocols, so I’m going to lean into that more, though Eric pointed out that these terms don’t seem to quite convey my intent, given that “weakly” expressed protocols are more powerful. I’m going to call them “implicit vs. explicit” protocols instead Weeks 9-10 (June 26 - July 7) The not-fun parts of the writing process Slogging through first draft of essay. I’m writing it piece-by-piece before synthesizing it into a whole, which isn’t my usual style. Usually, after the research phase, I can sense what “the whole thing” should look like before I start editing, but this time I feel like I can’t see the whole thing yet, which is frustrating Finding myself in a familiar place where I kinda hate my current draft because it’s too reliant on others’ authority vs. on my own. I notice this is a tempting crutch when writing about a topic I’m new to or unsure about. I think it’s a subconscious attempt to establish credibility (by “showing one’s work”) I need to fight that temptation, so…that means throwing out a lot of my original essay! Which is painful, but I think it’s a good practice. I still think all that background work was useful in a lit review-sort of way, I just don’t need to include it all in the final piece The Affiliate Researchers joined the SoP cohort, which served as a sort of midway checkpoint. We were asked to share rough first drafts to get feedback from others, as well as “pitching” our topics to affiliates in speed dating format. This was a difficult exercise for me to do midway through my synthesis process. I did get some helpful feedback, but it was overwhelming to parse through others’ thoughts, and defend or explain certain ideas, while also trying to grapple with them myself. Kinda felt like being woken up while in the middle of a deep dream SoP has been a very different process from how I typically work. I don’t think I prefer it, but from a personal development standpoint, it’s probably good mental cross-training to try working in a different style from how I’m used to, if only to help me figure out what I do/don’t like Exploring my aversions to postmodern thinking Revisited some postmodern work because I’m writing about control, but found myself regretting it as usual. I don’t know why postmodernism gets under my skin so much, it’s like a very reflexive allergy Mused about this with Venkat in our Discord a bit, his reaction was that they “squat on all topics regardless of how well or poorly they grok it;” “good to have in a big discourse, but bad as stewards of the discourse for everybody.” This feels right to me Relatedly, I do worry about my output from this summer being too theoretical; I really don’t like to live at this level of abstraction. But because protocols are such a poorly-defined topic, it felt necessary to zoom out a bit and try to understand them from a more fundamental place. If I’d had a narrower focus, I think I’d feel stuck on what conclusions to draw, because there are no “schools of thought” or shared prior thinking about protocols in the world already. So, I think I know how I got here…but I still feel a bit out of my element A shared theme among Core Researchers seems to be that the notion of protocols is just…so broad (or as Dorian put it, “shotgun-blasted across the internet”) that it’s been hard to build a coherent discourse around it. I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s been feeling this way! The role of humor in research Venkat and I also talked about the importance of humor in research. I think this is especially true when dabbling in abstract thinkwork (and again, part of my aversion to postmodern thinking, which I find too serious and humorless) But even for research more generally, I think humor is helpful as a way of keeping one’s mind open, which helps form unexpected connections between ideas. I find The Discourse to be far too literal and lacking playfulness today; ex. “cringe” is IMO a dangerous concept that stifles creativity Weeks 7-8 (June 12-23) Did philosophy die with the early internet? It’s weird that there’s this whole string of philosophers that wrote about control and protocols and technology up til, like, the 1990s or early 2000s, and then…what? I had this same feeling while researching open source, too (which is why I wrote Working in Public!) It’s like, people had so much to say about the internet in its early days, and then (IMO) the internet got REALLY weird in the 2010s, and suddenly no one has anything to say about it? The 1990s/2000s era looks nothing like the 2010s/2020s era, but I feel like our current era is woefully undertheorized. The only people who write about it now are much more grounded and political, like those who study misinformation or mental health effects from a social science perspective, or chronicle weird internet subcultures from a more journalistic perspective. Those people existed in the early internet days too, but that’s not what I’m looking for. (There’s also plenty of theorizing on random blogs and corners of the internet, of course, but why don’t those conversations live on a bigger stage? Are those conversations enduring? Will anyone remember them, 50 years from now?) My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to each other. I’m not trying to be regressive in wishing for a rosier time where cyberpunk philosophy was a thing, because that’s not even what I want today, I just find myself wanting…something, some deeper level of dialogue, that seemed to exist throughout the entire 20th century and then mysteriously disappeared in the 21st The inevitable panic stage of research Starting to panic a bit about needing to have something to show Affiliate Researchers by the July 5th kickoff. I don’t like sharing half-finished drafts until it’s really polished and done, but this program is structured to have a “checkpoint” of sorts, so I need to figure out how to create something that’s shareable, while also not disturbing my own messy process. It feels like having to clean up my metaphorical desk in the middle of a creative project to show visitors around. I like having my papers all strewn about! Decided to take a step back and reassess my research direction. My current strategy was going through each material layer and doing a deep dive on “case studies” for each one, in hopes that a common understanding of protocols would emerge. But it’s honestly turned into a bit of a slog, and I’m not sure I’ll get much more benefit from continuing down this path, vs. zooming out and starting to try to pull all this into a draft In the end, I think the material layers are gonna be just one snippet of this essay, and I’ve learned enough so far. More important to try to synthesize what I’m saying overall. So that’s what I’m gonna do instead I like this line from Galloway about how protocols aren’t good or bad, they’re just “dangerous,” so I’m gonna try to use that as my framing (and title!) I have this notion of “strongly” vs “weakly” expressed protocols that still feels important to include, too. Protocols that we know are governing us, vs. being unaware of their control Weeks 5-6 (May 29-June 9) Protocols as an industrial phenomenon and beyond Read The Control Revolution, which a few people recommended to me (thank you!). Beniger’s thesis is that the “control revolution” (information processing society) was a direct outcome of the Industrial Revolution, and the loss of control that resulted from the rapid increase in production/distribution/consumption I imagine we could say a similar thing about “cultural protocols” today emerging as a direct result of the Social Age in the 2010s (which feels distinct to me from the onset of digitization / i.e. birth of the internet…we need a better name for this that’s not Web 2.0) and the loss of social control that came from context collapse? Which I think sparked a new era of protocols (“weakly expressed” / harder to pin down) Not sure exactly how to describe this newer set of protocols yet, or why those differences exist. I think it has something to do with exerting control in digital / nontangible spaces vs. physical ones, but I’m not sure yet I feel like I’ve been dancing around this topic for awhile now though, from multiple angles! Antimimetics, proprioception as the primary sense for moving through nonphysical spaces today, etc. It’s all related…somehow… Also, this seems obvious now in retrospect, but I’m realizing that protocols kinda just…weren’t a thing, pre-industrialization? Surely there were still some informal social protocols, and the word existed (in a different context), but I can’t imagine that protocols, as we understand them today, were really relevant or even identifiable as a social construct? Researching material layers (May 15-26) I expected to be more interested in the Freud/Jung era of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but I ended up getting sucked more into the personality test frameworks that were first developed after WWI and rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, and how they are used to sort people, especially in hiring contexts I’ve been rabbitholing on corporate towns as heavily “protocolized” physical environments. Drew made a great point in distinguishing company towns as more like platforms, vs. e.g. bottoms-up Jacobs-esque urban neighborhoods as more like protocols, which could probably be a whole research topic in itself! I think the notion of company towns as platforms (vs. bottoms-up planning as protocols) is correct, based on the common definitions of protocols vs. platforms. But now, from the perspective of my more generalized definition of protocols as systems of social control, I think platforms are really not that different from protocols? Or maybe they’re a sub-category of protocols? And maybe we’ve been making this false distinction between them for political reasons. Platforms are certainly a more “all-in-one” solution, but they still serve the same fundamental purpose as a protocol I think the notion that protocols are customizable or extensible at all is itself an illusion of control. We like protocols (in the political, anti-platform sense) because we think they give us more control, but protocols are actually always in control. (“Greatest trick the devil ever played,” etc) Looking at how protocols are intertwined with promises for social reform. “Give up a bit of control / enter into this social contract, and you will experience XYZ social benefits” Running our research meeting Angela and I ran our research meeting for the group on our shared theme, “unconscious protocols” One takeaway from our exercise + discussion was that even when we think we’re subverting a protocol, we’re often just redirecting the energy (but still complying with the rules). If you break out of the protocol entirely, you’d also need to exit the ecosystem that supports it. TLDR protocols are very difficult to actually escape, if at all! Angela’s musings of “are we just talking about culture, not protocols?” and what the difference is between them, were also useful Synchronicity is hard to manage against deep work A month+ into this program, I’m definitely struggling with the synchronicity of the SoP schedule. Because so many of the meetings are in the middle of my morning work block (time zones are hard to synchronize when everyone lives across the US and Europe), it makes it harder to for me get into a deep workflow. It’s been fun discussing with people and finding new ideas to tug on, but I feel like I haven’t made progress nearly as quickly on the actual research part as I would have liked. I need my quiet time in order to synthesize and make connections I don’t know what it is about morning work blocks, but I’ve noticed nearly every person I know who does creative work (especially research / writing) is very protective of their morning time, and I’m no different. I can’t have scheduled meetings before noon; it just blows up my whole day. So that’s been a challenge to manage this summer Weeks 3-4 (May 1-12) Looking for protocol literature Having a hard time finding any literature about protocols that isn’t purely technical, which I guess is unsurprising. I think I need to use my own definition of protocols to figure out what isn’t necessarily coded as protocols right now, then weave that story together myself I did re-read a old book I remembered I had about protocols and control, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. I remember thinking it was way too postmodern for my taste when I first read it, but it’s actually been quite useful to return to (though I still skimmed through a lot of the Foucault talk). It’s funny to consider where our common understanding of protocol governance was when I first read it in 2018, right after the first big crypto boom but well before the web3 era, and how much more relevant this book feels now. I think I wasn’t really able to place this book into modern context when I first read it, but I got a lot more out of it now. Starting to flesh out my “material layers” of protocols Aka psychological, physical, social, technological, cultural layers. After reading Galloway’s book (see above), I’m sort of thinking about these as the various “corporeal” forms that protocols take Starting to work through each of these sub-themes as practical applications of my thesis, and hopefully come out with a more refined intuition for what “protocols” are vs. everything else (culture, norms, rituals, etc) I realized that each of these layers had a “golden era” of development in post-industrial history (I think?), which I’ve started to outline. I’m gonna try to do a deeper dive into each of those periods on their own, and also see if they string together into any sort of interesting chronology Had a useful convo with Angela about our shared interest in protocols that exist on the psychological layer (psychoanalysis, internal narratives, etc). We all have unconscious protocols (i.e. patterns of behavior) that dictate our reactions in any given situation, and these protocols are often hidden even to ourselves. We also often don’t know how we acquired these protocols, but can still be “trapped” (aka controlled) by them nonetheless. Weeks 1-2 Struggling to define what protocols are I’m surprised how much of a blocker this has been for me. It feels difficult to proceed with my current project scope until I understand where the boundaries are. I don’t normally like to get this meta, but I think it’s important, given that this is a nascent field of study without existing precedents. Not addressing this question up front will make everything feel loose and disconnected later on Challenges to field building when a research topic is too broadly defined We don’t want to broaden the definition of protocols so much that it becomes meaningless, which is a real danger when evaluating protocols in a non-purely-technical sense Bernadette shared this paper with me about how the lack of definition around “culture” has caused challenges in academia for those studying organizational culture. I like this excerpt about how to build a field that doesn’t just attract grifters: “In 1996, Ed Schein, perhaps the seminal figure in the field, called for researchers to meet four conditions to make progress in understanding organizational culture. First, the culture research needed to be anchored in concrete observations of real behavior in organizations. Second, these observations needed to be consistent or “hang together.” Third, there needed to be a consistent definition of culture that permitted researchers to study the phenomenon. And, fourth, this approach needed to make sense to the concerns of practitioners confronted with real problems, an edict that likely contributed to the consulting emphasis that we discussed above. Without consistency in definition and measurement, he argued, studies of culture will simply fail to aggregate, with different researchers studying different constructs even as they label them “culture.” Unfortunately, we believe that this lack of unity describes the current state of the field. While there have been voluminous studies on the subject, it is difficult to see with any clarity what we really understand about culture.” Dorian also drew parallels to the UX field, which apparently has become similarly populated with grifters due to lack of clear definitions + industry’s interests overshadowing academia Venkat shared a paper about low-paradigm vs. high-paradigm fields, which helped me think about where the study of protocols should fall. He also clarified that we don’t need a proper research field (i.e. “protocol studies”) to emerge from SoP, and maybe that’s part of the experiment in itself. I still think it’s important to feel like this body of work is cohesive and practically useful to “protocol practitioners,” even if it doesn’t turn into a field, and I want that to guide my work Core researchers come up with their own definitions of protocols The aforementioned paper on organizational culture defines culture as “the norms and values that guide behavior within organizations and act as a social control system.” I like this term “social control system,” and think this is more precisely relevant to protocols vs. culture as a whole Toby’s definition Rafa’s definition Dorian’s definition Venkat reminds us that we are unlikely to all settle on a single, shared definition of protocols, and that’s perfectly fine - but that if we end up with several competing schools of thought, that would be a good thing! I settled on a working definition of protocols for myself: “Systems of social control that dictate the procedural steps to resolve a coordination problem” I don’t want to spend more brain cycles on definitions than I have to. I want to keep things intentionally simple; I just need a heuristic that helps me guide my work, and I trust that I’ll improve on it as I get deeper into research. But I know I’m not going to get to the right answer just by thinking about it in a vacuum I’m also realizing that core researchers are approaching protocols from many different angles, beyond what I had even considered on my own. I think I can understand “protocols as systems of social control” by looking at how they exist across many different layers: psychological / self, physical / built environment, social, technological, cultural. I’m gonna try to workshop this into a more coherent framework, but will use this initial hypothesis to guide my plan of attack (i.e. try to dive deep into each layer and see if this is true) Guiding questions I’ve collected to scope my project + focus What is not considered a protocol? (via Rafa) What problem/s do we see among current practitioners / users of protocols in the wild that we would like to address? (via Kei) What do we currently all believe about protocols? What may or may not be true about that? 30 years from now, if someone were to write a history of protocols, what would they say about this era, and how it evolved into the next era? How would someone describe our collective history of prior thinking about protocols, even up til this day? In light of all this definitional work, I’ve decided to adjust my project scope. Originally, I wanted to look at how protocols spread and are transmitted (especially since I’ve had a tangled body of thought around antimimetics that I think would complement this work nicely). But writing about antimimetic protocols feels like Protocols 201. As fun as it would be, given the nascency of the field, I think I need to stick to a Protocols 101 project first. Otherwise it will just be confusing and not stick in the heads of anyone reading it. Updated my project description here.

In the summer of 2022, with support from Schmidt Futures, I took a closer look at several emerging science funding mechanisms – rapid grants, scout programs, and focused research organizations (FROs) – to understand how they serve the needs of early stage science. I also conducted interviews with funders, program administrators, and grantees to understand their goals, operations, and intended impact, and how their work fits into the existing science funding landscape. About this report Changes in science philanthropy in the past decade – a significant growth in capital spend, changing career interests from science and engineering PhD graduates, and increased urgency since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – have converged to create the beginnings of a “seed stage” market for science, which addresses a critical funding gap for early stage discovery and prototyping. Early stage funding is a growing category in science philanthropy that benefits both basic and applied research. “Early stage” refers to high-risk, high-reward projects that are not yet well-funded. Early stage funders share common interests, including a desire for reduced administrative burden, faster application cycles, and a higher tolerance for risk and failure. They favor qualitative, rather than quantitative, heuristics to evaluate opportunities and measure impact. Funders have also begun to develop new grant vehicles that better suit their needs, including: Rapid grants: Grants that are designed for a faster turnaround, usually a few months. Often suited for early stage or proof-of-concept research, or for situations that require an emergency response. Scout programs: A method of grantmaking where funds are distributed through a network of scouts, or “regrantors.” Scouts are chosen by the grantmaking organization and are typically well-networked or embedded in the organization’s intended field of impact. Focused research organizations (FROs): A special purpose organization that is time-bounded (e.g., 5-10 years) and focused on accomplishing a scientific or technical goal that isn’t adequately addressed by academia or industry – for example, the development of a new platform technology, or publishing a large dataset. The growth of early stage funding has made it possible to fund more types of research, including proofs-of-concept and prototyping, groundwork for new research fields, interdisciplinary research, and “public infrastructure” for science (such as open-access tooling and datasets). Early-career scientists, in particular, benefit from having more funding available for their work. All of this has been accomplished with fewer administrative costs than is typically required, which suggests there are operational learnings that other funders may want to emulate. While progress is encouraging so far, early stage funders are not a panacea for all of science funding’s problems. Grant sizes are still small (typically <$1 million), and the long-term impact of these programs is still unknown. Further work is needed to attract more funders and capital; to increase awareness of these opportunities among early-career scientists; and to demonstrate to federal government agencies what’s working well and identify what can be adapted for larger-scale programs. You can read the full report here.

Climate is a gravity well for talent, but why don’t other, equally impactful topics attract talent in the same way? Why isn’t everyone dropping everything to work on homelessness, or global poverty, or curing cancer? With many peers in tech now working on climate issues, I tried to understand why this topic holds such purchase for so many people – and its incredible staying power over the decades. Initially, I started with the idea that climate was an attractive industry for “doomer” types, and I painted their motivations monolithically. I was searching for the one weird reason that was causing hordes of people to drop what they were doing and march, hypnotically, towards the same problem space. What I found instead is that while the media still portrays climate as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?” Pass through the asteroid belt of climate doomerism, and the universe expands into a rich panoply of different climate tribes. People who work in and around climate don’t all believe the same things. Instead, they inhabit a parallel, mirror world that looks a lot like the non-climate world. Just like in the regular world, there are factions, politics, and competing belief systems. For example, I did not find that people who are interested in climate fall cleanly along a certain political line of thinking, or even a shared set of values or goals. Climate is frequently coded as a left-leaning issue, but there are also centrist and right-leaning people who operate in different factions. Nor do climate people all agree on the right solutions to pursue. In some cases, they believe other tribes are actively harmful to their cause. The enemy, in their minds, aren’t climate deniers, as we might have seen a decade or two ago – they’re other people working in climate. For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold. To understand climate better, I slurped up hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of blog posts, podcasts, interviews, articles, and tweets (my notes alone are over 80,000 words) – paying less attention to object-level discussions, and more to the rhetoric being used to describe one’s goals and motivations. I looked for cleavages between values, language and narratives. I then followed up this research with a handful of conversations with those who work in climate, across different tribes, to further refine and “stress test” my characterizations. Ultimately, I landed upon seven climate tribes, which I’ll expand on in a bit: Images generated with DALL-E. Climate is a huge topic, and there are, of course, many more subcultures that are not fully captured above. (I’ll also add a requisite note that this analysis is heavily centered on American climate trends.) But if you’re a stranger in a strange land who’s trying to figure out what’s going on in climate, I found that grokking these seven groups gave me the conversational fluency to understand most of the climate discourse. If you just want to read about these climate tribes, you can skip ahead to that section. But if you want to suffer through my process with me, I’ll unpack how I got from an outsider’s view of perceiving climate as a doomer topic, to instead understanding it as a pluralistic landscape of tribes that largely mirrors the non-climate universe in its richness and diversity. We’ll start with the outside layers and work our way in. Licking the Tootsie Pop, so to speak. Here we go. Table of Contents Climate change isn’t about evangelism anymore People who work in doomer industries aren’t doomers! The climate tribes of today Energy maximalism Climate urbanism Climate tech Eco-globalism Environmentalism Neopastoralism Doomerism Okay, but really - which is the best climate tribe? Addendum: ‘Doomer industries’ and the search for meaningful work Shared belief in a disaster scenario Adjacent to a business opportunity Fertile environment for idea generation and exchange Doomer industries as a way of allocating talent Notes Climate change isn’t about evangelism anymore Over the last four decades, climate has crossed an arc from science to evangelism to tribalism, with each of today’s tribes focused on pushing forward their own solutions. In the 1980s, climate change (then referred to as global warming) received little attention outside of scientific communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations working group that publishes its widely-read reports, was established in 1988 to track and summarize research on the risks and impacts of climate change. By the 1990s and early 2000s, climate change began to escape from scientific communities into the public domain, though with some bemusement and skepticism. The former vice president Al Gore memorably embarked upon an evangelist’s journey to educate the public about global warming, giving his presentation about climate risk – captured in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth – over 1,000 times. The documentary had a profound impact on John Doerr, who, along with his venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, became the face of the cleantech movement in the early 2000s. Doerr gave a TED talk in 2007 titled “Salvation (and profit) in greentech”, where he advocated for reducing energy consumption and regulating emissions through policy. Al Gore transformed from laughingstock (“ManBearPig”, 2006) to hero (“Time to Get Cereal”, 2018) on South Park, reflecting a change in public sentiment. (Images: IMDB and Fandom) At the time, the messages from climate evangelists like Gore and Doerr were less sophisticated about solutions and more about getting people to care about global warming in the first place. This was a sensible approach at the time, given that climate advocates were in “recruitment” mode, and public sentiment was still fairly neutral and disengaged. Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communications (YPCCC), which has tracked public attitudes towards climate change for more than a decade, found that roughly 30% of those surveyed in 2008 were “Concerned” about climate change. By 2011, after the cleantech bubble burst, that figure dropped to about 25%, with a larger cohort saying they felt “Cautious” (meaning: undecided) about climate change. Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Today, however, it’s safe to say that climate change has won the battle for mindshare. Slip on a pair of augmented reality glasses, and you’ll see the climate universe appear before your eyes. As of 2021, climate tech accounts for 14 cents of every venture capital dollar. ESG assets were worth $37.8 trillion at the end of 2020, and are projected to account for more than one-third of global AUM by 2025. Climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” is an emerging genre of fiction that is focused on climate change. Climate is one of the most popular categories among Substack writers. “Eco-therapy” is a field of therapy that helps patients work through their feelings of anxiety and depression about climate change. One in four childless American adults say that climate change has influenced whether they will have children or not. 2018 seems to have been the magical year that the climate narrative flipped, driven in part by an IPCC special report that described the impacts of 1.5°C global warming to the public. According to YPCCC, the most concerned category (“Alarmed”) grew sharply starting in 2018, nearly doubling from 18% in 2017 to 33% of American adults surveyed in 2021. The term “doomer” also became popular starting in 2018, thanks to a popular 4chan meme. Source: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Most of this change in public sentiment appears to come from converting the “Concerned” and “Cautious” groups to “Alarmed”, rather than the disinterested groups, which remained roughly unchanged. In other words, people who were already somewhat concerned about climate in previous years became more extreme in their views. [1] Climate change has now progressed beyond an early evangelism phase and into the solutions phase. Despite this development, however, media coverage about climate lags behind, continuing to shoehorn climate into a sensationalized, binary question of beliefs, rather than focusing on the more nuanced set of attitudes that drive climate action. In the early 2000s, “climate critics” were those who questioned whether global warming was real at all. The late author Michael Crichton delivered a series of eloquent talks about environmentalism and religion. Crichton, who studied anthropology in college, argued that environmentalism had become a personal source of meaning for people, which prevented them from being able to objectively evaluate climate risk according to science. But today, even self-proclaimed environmentalists openly criticize the climate doomer narrative. Michael Shellenberger, who co-founded environmental research center Breakthrough Institute, published a book in 2020 called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, where he questioned the value of climate doomerism and the psychological toll it takes on us. In response, The Guardian – one of the most prominent mainstream outlets covering climate change – called Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg (who wrote a book with a similar thesis) “lukewarmers,” claiming that they “take climate science denial to another level.” Similarly, Heated writer Emily Atkin called the recent “anti-ESG” movement a “climate denial movement,” rather than an objection to the specific strategy of portfolio management as an effective means of addressing climate change. To be fair, the critics willingly play into this narrative, too. Like Crichton, Shellenberger stubbornly advocates that we “separate science from fiction” when discussing climate and focus on the facts. I share the sentiments of both Crichton and Shellenberger regarding the value of doomer narratives, but I also wonder whether the “science versus religion” narrative is still relevant in today’s landscape. [2] Crichton himself stated that he thinks “you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form.” If religious tendencies cannot be repressed from our collective psyches, why not start with the premise that climate is a religion, then try to understand it on those terms? Instead of insisting that we “stick to science” or only focus on technology, we can instead evaluate climate opportunities through the lens of tribal values. People who work in doomer industries aren’t doomers! It’d be nice and tidy for us (and a much shorter blog post) if we could simply declare the post-2018 rise of doomerism to be the cause of people suddenly leaving their jobs to work in climate. Unfortunately, this oversimplified narrative starts to break down once we actually evaluate people’s motivations for working in climate, versus general public sentiment. Doomerism only takes us to the edge of the climate universe. Once inside, I noticed that there was very little doomer talk amongst people who actually work in climate. If anything, they seemed quite optimistic. This makes sense if you think about it: why would you work in a doomer industry if you thought there was no hope? We can validate this mindset by comparing climate to a parallel doomer industry. Anders Sandberg, who researches global catastrophic risk, once remarked that: Yesterday, when a friend heard I worked on the end of the world I was asked what I thought about the imminent social collapse. I was confused: “why do you think there is one?” He added, thoughtfully: The funny thing with the conversation yesterday was that the two of us working on xrisk were pretty optimistic (but thinking that the risks were real and worth working hard on), while the non-xrisk people were gloomy. In climate, Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at Our World in Data, makes a similar observation to Anders: “In reality, it is possible to solve our environmental problems. Climate scientists certainly think so. They are often less pessimistic than the general public, which is a new and odd disconnect.” If people who work in climate aren’t doomers, I tried to figure out how they ended up there instead. What were their career backgrounds, skills, interests? I drew upon a combination of public interviews [3], as well as private conversations, to understand this question. When it comes to working in climate, I noticed two major personas: Incumbents: People with specialized skills who have been working in relevant industries for awhile (ex. scientists, policy researchers, or those who work in e.g. energy, utilities, manufacturing, agriculture) Switchers: People with generalized skills who switched into climate (frequently those with a background in tech, finance, management consulting, or corporate executives) Climate incumbents are more likely to be driven by personal curiosity. They have specialized skills and interests that just so happen to coincide with a very big trend. This group is more or less disinterested in the mainstream climate discourse, although they’re glad it means there is more funding and talent available. They rarely allude to the climate crisis at all (with the exception of, e.g. climate scientists turned public advocates), instead focusing on their personal excitement at being able to solve a specific problem. For example, Gaurab Chakrabarti, co-founder of Solugen, a company that produces chemicals from plant-based alternatives, explained, “It wasn’t supposed to be a company…we were just passionate about the science…and what we decided at that point was well, if this is working at…a scientific level, is there relevance to society for this?” John Dees, an analyst at Carbon Direct with a background in GIS who now focuses on lifecycle assessments for carbon emissions, only became aware of the broader climate crisis later on: I would say the anxiety is more nascent. I think for me initially, just because the way my brain works, it seemed like a challenge and a problem to be solved….I was looking at individual technologies that potentially have an impact, but it took a while to situate that into larger conversations about energy systems and think about the big picture. Climate switchers, on the other hand, usually don’t have backgrounds in anything climate-related (a fact that many are comfortable with, and sometimes even poke fun at themselves about). They’re “problem solving” types who are deeply bought into a certain worldview that made them successful in the first act of their careers, and they’re now pursuing climate as a second act. Many explicitly state that climate is a way to do something “more impactful” with their careers, which provides them with deeper meaning than, say, managing employees at a Fortune 500 company or selling SaaS products. For example, Jason Jacobs, who founded Runkeeper and sold it to Asics, initially “talked [himself] into trying to build another consumer company,” but quickly realized that “the purpose element was really lacking for me.”​​ Caroline Klatt, who previously worked at Fab and co-founded and sold Headliner Labs, an enterprise solution for retail companies, said that, “We had a really rewarding experience with our first company and certainly felt like…if we did this again…it should be something with…real world impact that was measurable and that we can look back and feel really proud about the impact we had on the world.” Climate switchers are attracted to problems they know how to fix: they will often apply their existing skills, such as data engineering or compliance, towards climate, rather than acquire new skills. Rachel Delacour, for example, who sold her business intelligence startup to Zendesk before starting carbon accounting company Sweep, said that despite being concerned about climate, she realized she “couldn’t go back [to] university, spend time to ramp up, become a scientific chemist.” Instead, she and her co-founders asked themselves, “How can we do our part?…What were our skill sets?”, ultimately repurposing their business intelligence and entrepreneurial skills towards climate. The strategies pursued by climate switchers are informed by their professional backgrounds and what they’ve seen work in their careers, which ultimately leads to the formation of different climate tribes. Climate tech types, for example, might look for unexplored technology gaps to commercialize, whereas eco-globalist types will focus more on regulation and measuring risk. Here are some of the major motivating factors that were self-reported by climate switchers: Self-reported motivations for switching into climate work from a different industry. Returning to my Tootsie pop metaphor, we can see that a superficial “doomer” narrative only refers to the hard candy exterior, but there’s actually a lot more going on under the surface. If we were to organize the climate industry, based on motivations and interests, it might look something like this: Mr. Owl does not endorse this diagram. Bright, sugary exterior: Climate doomerism, largely driven by media, the doomer climate tribe, and outsiders who don’t work in climate. Surprisingly substantive, dense interior: This is where much of the climate work gets done, driven by different tribes. Each tribe has its own values and strategies, but all are generally preoccupied with realizing a vision of the future outside of themselves. Hard stick in the very center: Not very tasty, but a necessary and oft-unappreciated foundation. This group would work in climate regardless of its trendiness: those with science backgrounds, or in relevant industries like energy or manufacturing. They’re motivated by personal curiosity and desire to solve an (often technical) problem. Like any talent ecosystem, these groups are symbiotically connected. Doomerism serves a general PR purpose, even if it’s annoying. It keeps what might otherwise be a niche academic or business endeavor in the public’s top of mind. Without doomerism, growing artificial meat or building an algae farm to capture carbon might be just another scientist’s crazy pet project, struggling for funding. Similarly, climate tribes need scientists to balance their business and policy skills, while science types need people who are willing and able to commercialize technology and communicate with the general public. Now that we’ve covered the general motivations of people who work in climate, let’s take a closer look at the climate tribes. What do different tribes care about, and what sorts of agendas do they pursue? The climate tribes of today Here are seven tribes that are influencing climate work today. They are very loosely organized from the center (or “lollipop stick,” if you will), radiating outwards towards doomerism, but I wouldn’t focus too much on the ranking. Also note that the people, orgs, and keywords mentioned here are non-comprehensive lists – think of them more as assorted ephemera, meant to evoke the aesthetic of that tribe. If you have ideas for other names to include for any of these tribes, or think something has been miscategorized, please drop me a line or DM me on Twitter, I’d love to hear it! Energy maximalism Instead of trying to limit consumption, energy maximalists envision a world in which energy is no longer a limiting resource. Their goal is to develop technology and policy that makes it possible to have endless energy. (It is notable that this group uses the term “energy” and seems to avoid the term “climate.”) This summer, Eli Dourado and Austin Vernon published a paper called “Energy Superabundance: How Cheap, Abundant Energy Will Shape Our Future,” where they argue that energy abundance is directly correlated to economic growth, and that industry and policy have been overly focused on limiting rather than unlocking more energy. Many people in this tribe are affiliated with ecomodernism, an umbrella philosophy that takes an anthropocentric view of the environment. (Several other tribes on this list would also be considered ecomodernist.) Breakthrough Institute, which was founded in 2007, is an organization affiliated with both ecomodernism and energy maximalism. While many energy maximalists support nuclear as part of a broader energy portfolio, a subset could be called nuclear maximalists: those who believe that nuclear is the best, and ideally primary, form of energy (ex. Michael Shellenberger, Isabelle Boemeke). Snapshot Pro-economic growth Techno-optimist Individualist Optimistic about the future Abundance mindset Related movements: Ecomodernism Areas of interest: Nuclear, geothermal, pro-energy policy Relevant people and orgs: Eli Dourado, Austin Vernon, Mark Nelson, Breakthrough Institute, Tim Latimer, Michael Shellenberger, Isabelle Boemeke Keywords: energy, abundance, growth, nuclear Climate urbanism Climate urbanists envision a densely populated world that’s harmoniously networked, industrious, and resilient to climate threats. Cities are the primary leverage point for their solutions, reflecting both a global trend towards urbanization, as well as providing the best “bang for your buck” of being able to experiment with climate solutions that can impact millions. Cities can also operate somewhat independently from state and federal governance, which can make it easier to enact changes. It’s hard to know where exactly “urbanism” stops and “climate urbanism” begins, and I debated whether this should be its own tribe at all, as urbanism is motivated by much more than just climate. Nevertheless, many urbanist initiatives are also climate initiatives, and some urbanists explicitly invoke climate motivations when discussing their work. Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss, who previously co-founded SoundCloud and now started Dance, an e-bike subscription startup, explains his mission as “accelerating the transformation of cities and just making cities more livable and shifting the mix of cars in cities…and I think if many cities transform like that, it’s a very meaningful impact on climate.” Lyn Stoler and Sonam Velani recently introduced the term “climate industrialism”, which they describe as an “optimistic, action-oriented response.” Like energy maximalists, they believe climate solutions are directly correlated with economic growth and “[reject] the idea that climate solutions have to be rooted in scarcity and sacrifice. Instead, it’s a bet that climate solutions rooted in abundance and progress can and will create value for people in their daily lives, homes, communities, and cities.” Unlike energy maximalists, climate urbanists are more collective- than individual-oriented – hence the focus on urban environments. Snapshot Pro-economic growth Techno-optimist Collectivist Optimistic about the future Abundance mindset Related movements: Urbanism, solarpunk Areas of interest: Infrastructure, transportation, construction, energy transmission, climate adaptation, renewable energy Relevant people and orgs: Ezra Klein, Jesse Jenkins, Lyn Stoler, YIMBY, 2150.vc Keywords: cities, progress, infrastructure, optimism, housing, resilience Climate tech Those in climate tech bring a “disruptor’s mindset” to climate. They can be characterized as mildly reactionary to the eco-globalists, believing that the last two decades of global negotiations have little to show for, and that we can instead move faster and more efficiently through the early-stage private sector – primarily, startups. Some in climate tech still have battle scars from the early 2000s cleantech bubble, but enough time has passed that a new generation is willing to learn from previous lessons and experiment with new opportunities. Those in climate tech see policy as a means of unlocking innovation, rather than as a primary tool for change. The goal is to remove policy roadblocks, not add more (see, for example, the Institute for Progress’s paper on National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reform, which argues that the environmental review process is “slowing down the clean energy transition”). Instead, they focus on innovating through commercial markets. Chris Sacca, for example, is not unlike John Doerr in some ways: they are both charismatic venture capitalists who believe in investing in the future of climate technology. But whereas Doerr still believes policy and regulation are a key part of that strategy, Sacca states that: “The reality is, I hate politics….For a startup person, all those layers are maddening. We are used to seeing a problem, building something we think helps, and then giving it directly to users and buyers….Counting on our leaders to really make the scale of changes we need is an exercise in futility.” While energy maximalists skew more towards the R&D side of technology, climate tech operates more on the commercial side of the pipeline: bringing existing technologies to market. Those in climate tech are always looking for low-hanging fruit, overlooked gaps and points of leverage. The carbon removal initiative Frontier, for example, released a “carbon removal (CDR) gap database”, highlighting major knowledge and innovation barriers to carbon removal. Climate technologists are also less opinionated about climate’s influence on culture or lifestyle (beyond startups-as-an-ideology); to them, climate is more of an operational and commercialization issue. Snapshot Pro-economic growth Techno-optimist Individualist Abundance mindset Neutral to optimistic about the future (this group tends to be more anxious and focused on downsides, but they generally believe we can solve these problems) Areas of interest: Carbon removal, energy storage, renewables, policy reform, nuclear, geoengineering Relevant people and orgs: Stripe Climate, Frontier, Nan Ransohoff, Shayle Kann, Lowercarbon Capital, Chris Sacca, Ryan Orbuch, Jason Jacobs, Climate Tech VC Keywords: scale, decarbonization, removing roadblocks, progress, building, innovation Eco-globalism This group is focused on regulation as the primary vehicle of change, with the goal of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Unlike the aforementioned tribes, eco-globalists take a scarcity approach to climate. As they see it, we only have a finite set of resources, and the major task is to figure out how to allocate them efficiently. This mindset naturally puts the focus on regulation – whether literally (ex. policymaking) or figuratively (ex. tracking and measurement). Whereas climate technologists see regulation as a way to remove roadblocks, eco-globalists see regulation as a way to enforce behavior. While those in climate tech are more likely to have a background in startups, eco-globalists are more likely to have a background in finance or management consulting. But there are exceptions: John Doerr favors investing in and developing new technology, but his thinking is unmistakably eco-globalist. Doerr’s most recent book, Speed and Scale, proposes an action plan modeled after the OKR accountability system. Each section of the scorecard identifies a target to meet, such as “Remove 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere.” Similarly, climate solutions like Watershed and Patch could be classified as eco-globalist, despite being startups, because they are enterprise platforms focused on climate accounting. Eco-globalists are comfortable with the business sector; they believe climate solutions don’t have to come at the expense of financial returns. However, they’re more focused on making an impact via public corporations (ex. ESG investing), whereas climate technologists focus on startups. Snapshot Pro-economic growth Tech-neutral Collectivist Scarcity mindset Neutral about the future (they still think it’s possible to fix climate change, but are much more alarmed) Interests: carbon offsets and credits; carbon pricing; carbon tax; setting and enforcing emission targets; energy efficiency; reducing consumption; Green New Deal; ESG investing; global climate impact; renewables Relevant people and orgs: World Economic Forum, UN Climate Change Conference (COPx), Bloomberg Green, Tom Steyer, John Doerr Keywords: sustainability, reporting, targets, efficiency, supply chain, climate crisis, climate action Environmentalism The environmentalists are the anti-corporate counterpart to the eco-globalists, and the modern descendants of “classic” environmentalism that dominated the second half of the 20th century (more on that in a bit). Like eco-globalists, environmentalists focus on sustainability as the ideal outcome, but they’re more concerned with the impact of individual (rather than collective) actions, whether that’s holding Exxon accountable or reducing personal energy consumption. They blame the fossil fuel industry for our climate problems, and believe that corporate lobbying efforts are hindering progress today. Within environmentalism, there are two further sub-groupings: Those focused on climate justice, namely holding others accountable through anti-corporate and political advocacy; and Degrowth, which is concerned with finding meaning and impact in focusing on local communities, like towns, neighborhoods, and their own homes. After much deliberation, I decided these groups belong to the same tribe because they share similar visions, even if their tactics differ. Michael E. Mann, for example, blames fossil fuel companies for the climate crisis in his book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, while degrowth advocate Samuel Alexander calls for “simple living” as a “desirable alternative to consumer culture,” which he believes will “save our planet from the environmental catastrophe towards which we are so enthusiastically marching.” But both share the premise that a better world is one in which corporate interests take a backseat to sustainable living. I think of climate justice as a more defensive position (protecting the planet from bad actors), whereas degrowth is a more offensive position (advocating for a new way of thinking about the economy). Despite its branding, degrowthers are not really regressive, from a tactical perspective: they’re actively trying to transition us to a new way of doing things, rather than arguing within the boundaries of our existing paradigm. Snapshot Anti-economic growth Techno-pessimist Collectivist Scarcity mindset Pessimistic about the future Related movements: classic environmentalism (1960s-1990s), peak oil, environmental justice, climate justice, degrowth Interests: political advocacy, anti-corporate lobbying, anti-nuclear, recycling, overpopulation, renewable energy, Green New Deal Relevant people and orgs: Sierra Club, Mother Jones, Grist, The Guardian, Hot Take, Assaad Razzouk, Leah Stokes, Mark Ruffalo, HEATED, Jason Hickel, Earthjustice Keywords: degrowth, environment, fossil fuels, sustainability, consumerism, carbon footprint, reduce, extractivism Neopastoralism Neopastoralists believe that technology has corrupted our natural environment and that society is unraveling, followed by a rewriting of our political and social systems. Like doomers, they feel that the world is changing for the worse, but unlike doomers, they are in the “acceptance” rather than “anger” stage of grief. As the Doomer Optimists put it, it is “an orientation that says: we see the world as it is, and we move forward with a practical, positive vision despite the challenges.” Neopastoralists believe we need to prepare for the coming transition, but life will go on regardless. They are focused on climate adaptation, but from a self-preservation standpoint. They believe self-reliance is more important than coordinating with others, and prioritize protecting themselves and their loved ones. (Edit: Jason Snyder, a cofounder of Doomer Optimism, feels this categorization doesn’t adequately capture the nuance of their work. I’ve slightly edited my opening description where I agree my language could be more precise, but otherwise stand by my analysis; however, I’m linking to his response on Twitter here to provide additional color on how Doomer Optimists view themselves.) Snapshot Anti-economic growth Techno-pessimist Individualist Scarcity mindset Pessimistic about the future Related movements: anarcho-primitivism, retvrn, accelerationism, preppers, Pine Tree gang Interests: personal preparedness, farming, homeschooling, regenerative finance, New Urbanism Relevant people and orgs: Doomer Optimism, Willow Liana, Anarcho-Contrarian, Industrial Society and Its Future Keywords: homesteading, prepping, resilience, adaptation Doomerism Doomers believe there is no hope for the future. Like the environmentalists, they are frequently in tension with eco-globalists, whom they perceive as the only tribe capable of saving our planet, and whom they blame for allowing us to fall into a climate crisis from which we can no longer return. Doomers are largely disconnected from positive-sum climate efforts; their actions are centered around managing their subjective experience of the world. Within this tribe, there are two major sub-types: Introspective: focused on managing their emotions amidst external turmoil – Britt Wray, for example, states that activism is “unhelpful” for combatting eco-anxiety Externalized: channeling their anger into performative “shock” activism, such as Greta Thunberg, who scolded UN Climate Action Summit attendees in 2019, or Just Stop Oil activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, who threw cans of soup on a Van Gogh painting Doomers see themselves as victims of a climate crisis, and do not feel empowered to stop or otherwise influence the inevitable apocalypse. Snapshot Anti-economic growth Techno-pessimist Individualist Scarcity mindset Pessimistic about the future Interests: activism, protests, eco-therapy, self-care Relevant people and orgs: Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Gen Dread Keywords: (climate, eco-) anxiety, trauma, grief; climate crisis; climate denial; extinction For a snapshot view, here are all the tribes, plotted along a few key parameters: Finally, just to round out our landscape, here are a few other groups I considered including, but I think aren’t (yet?) quite full-fledged tribes: Climate escapists: People who want to get off the planet and explore new frontiers (ex. Musk, Bezos) Regenerative finance (“ReFi”): Those who want to rethink our financial system from the ground up, designing money in a way that regenerates, rather than depletes, our capital assets, using tokenomics and blockchain technology Bobrossians: A gentler strain of doomers who believe the world is unsalvageable, but are focused on finding the small wins and joys in life (aka “happy little trees”) – see, for example, the All We Can Save Project Okay, but really - which is the best climate tribe? In contrast to 20th-century environmentalism – a largely monolithic social cause – today’s climate world is more like a pluralistic landscape of tribes. Implicit in this reframing is a belief that there is no single “best climate solution” that needs to win out. There is no shortage of talent, funding, and resources flowing towards climate. Lots of people want to work in climate, and lots of people want to fund it (for now, anyway). If climate is a parallel universe rather than a niche cause area, we ought to lean into the marketplace of ideas and encourage everyone to go work on the solution that speaks to them. Tribalism is often depicted as a bad thing, especially in the context of climate. Some people claim that such divisiveness politicized climate science; that it brought us to a global stalemate; that climate solutions require us to set aside our differences and work together to resolve an existential threat. I find this framing to be totally unrealistic. There is no unified “we” in climate, any more than there is in the normal world, and pretending otherwise is exactly what keeps us trapped in these failed coordination games. The idea that we are headed towards an inevitable disaster, or that we must focus our efforts on global negotiations between state actors, are perspectives that belong to specific climate tribes. They don’t speak for everyone, and dissenters should feel free to reject or reshape that language. By the end of this research, I was surprised to find that I actually do have more of a stance on climate than I realized; I just needed to find a tribe that spoke to me. Why do climate tribes matter? Tribes can help people find each other more quickly by communicating values instead of agendas. “Let’s switch to nuclear energy” doesn’t sound very intriguing to someone who’s not interested in climate at all. “Let’s stop talking about scarcity and instead talk about abundance, starting with our energy needs,” however, might make them perk up their ears. (This rhymes with my conception of idea machines: a modern approach to turning ideas into outcomes by starting with a community, which only develops an agenda downstream of its values.) Secondly, tribes are a better way of forecasting what the future looks like. By understanding climate efforts as distinct, dynamic networks of talent and funding, driven by a shared set of values, we can better understand the potential of the ideas they advocate for, as well as their risks and shortcomings. To use a simple example, the funding for climate tech versus eco-globalism comes from two very different places. In analyzing the long-term viability of climate work, we ought to consider not just macro conditions that might affect all tribes (such as the price of specific technologies), but also the risks associated with specific funding sources, which might lead one tribe to falter, while another one thrives. Finally, the most important thing about climate tribes is that they shift the conversation from passive, “true-believer” narratives towards active, action-oriented ones. I couldn’t help but notice that the aforementioned YPCCC climate typology is inherently passive. [4] “How worried are you about climate change?” is a very different question from “What do you believe is the right approach?” Again, this was a reasonable way to categorize public sentiment in 2008, when the goal really was about getting people to care about this topic, but today, we’ve moved past the evangelism phase and into the building phase. One can be “alarmed” about climate change, as a third of American adults apparently are, and not do anything about it. But you can’t be in a climate tribe without having an opinion about solutions. Addendum: ‘Doomer industries’ and the search for meaningful work Part of why I was inspired to research and write this piece is because I saw this tweet from Nabeel Qureshi: …which made me consider climate as part of a bigger category of what I’ve been calling “doomer industries” in my head. A doomer industry is the talent ecosystem that forms around a perceived civilizational threat that demands us to prioritize it, for the sake of humanity, over whatever else we might want to do instead. Doomer industries like climate and AI safety have a sort of wheedling, persistent mind-virus quality to them that other important topics – say, global poverty or education – do not. Besides climate, a few other examples of doomer industries might include: AI safety, biosecurity, global catastrophic risk, misinformation, and population decline (and its counterpart from a previous generation, overpopulation). And while the human attraction to religious apocalypticism is pervasive (there’s even a name for it: eschatology), doomer industries – as a way of finding meaning in one’s primary work – appear to be a fairly recent development. In this final section, I thought I’d take a moment to zoom out of climate and ask: is climate’s transformation from “social cause” to “doomer industry” indicative of some broader trend? Will we see speciation of doomer industries? Is there a generalizable shape to these industries, and if so, can other cause areas replicate it to attract more talent and funding? [5] Let’s start by taking a look at when climate switched from social cause to doomer industry, and why that switch happened. The nuclear advocate and environmentalist Michael Shellenberger posits that climate only took on an apocalyptic pall following two world wars and a Cold War, when we ran out of “real” doomer scenarios to be afraid of: [T]his whole apocalyptic climate discussion really gained in importance when the apocalyptic nuclear weapons discussion came to an end at the end of the Cold War and so secular fears of apocalypse had to find something else to attach to. Even nuclear weapons was a substitute for earlier apocalypse presentations, including fascism and communism. The Cold War era does, curiously, coincide with the birth of modern environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, which I’ll try to do justice to with just a few paragraphs’ summary: Prior to the Cold War, environmentalism was seen more as a distinct social movement that one might opt into, rather than as a totalizing force. In the early 20th century, “caring about the environment” was narrowly focused on stewardship of natural resources, culminating in two major, but related, schools of thought – conservationists (such as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot) and preservationists (such as John Muir) – that reigned for at least half a century. The establishment of the National Park Service in 1916, along with organizations like the Sierra Club, National Geographic Society, and National Audubon Society, reflected the formalization of these early environmental movements. By the 1960s, however, environmentalism took on a much more urgent, alarmist tone, with conservationists questioning the effects of a post-WWII society that was newly enamored with mass production. In 1962, the biologist Rachel Carson published her manifesto Silent Spring, which stoked public fear about the harmful effects of pesticides and kicked off a new, advocacy-oriented “Greenpeace generation” of environmentalism that was primarily concerned with the harmful effects of human consumption and economic growth. As a result of these efforts, the EPA was established, along with the first Earth Day, in 1970. The activist era of environmentalism continued for several more decades, becoming more anti-corporate- than regulation-focused over time, including more extreme branches of so-called “radical environmentalism” (such as ecoterrorist organizations ELF and ELA). Finally, the late 1990s marked a third era of environmentalism, converging on a shared “apocalyptic scenario” with the rising threat of global warming – which brings us to today, where we now see environmentalism decomposing into climate tribes. From a historical perspective, then, someone like Shellenberger might say that the reason we have doomer industries is because, in a secularized world of comparative peace and prosperity, it fills the role of some primal human need for community. Preventing a doomsday scenario is a way to feel connected to millions of other people, all working towards the same purpose, just as previous generations once felt in rallying around war efforts, or the race to beat the Soviets. Environmentalism is a rare natural fit for this topic compared to other cause areas, because the environment affects everyone – reaching across geographies, socioeconomic class, and demographics. Still, even in the post-Cold War version of environmentalism, climate didn’t become a widespread doomer topic until 2018, as previously discussed. From, let’s say, the 1960s through the early 2000s, “being an environmentalist” was an identity label that most people did not affiliate with. It was certainly not considered to be part of one’s day job, outside of activists and nonprofit workers. Unsurprisingly, 2018 coincides with a lot of other trends around political polarization and social media, which we might speculate caused doomer industries to make the leap from being niche cause areas to high-status types of work. I will attempt no further analysis here, as that seems beyond the scope of this (already very long) post, beyond pointing out that the widespread adoption of social media seems to coincide with a growing shift in how we define meaningful work. [6] So what does a doomer industry look like, exactly? Inspired by Nabeel’s tweet, I tried to model the shape of a doomer industry by looking at the “digital fingerprints” – forums, blog posts, institutional work – of both AI safety and climate in parallel. Here are a few common qualities I noticed: Shared belief in a disaster scenario Most obviously, doomer industries require a shared belief in a disaster scenario, which lacks specificity and has no clear date for the “day of reckoning”, but is understood to have a totalizing effect across all aspects of life. (This mentality is what usually attracts pejorative comparisons between doomer industries and religion.) In the vein of “No one ever fired someone for buying IBM,” the presence of such a scenario makes it easy to justify working on this type of cause area, because “No one can blame me for wanting to save the world from destruction.” For both climate and AI safety, I was surprised by the lack of consensus as to what, exactly, was going to happen and when, despite popular media portrayals of climate as an extinction-level event (see, for example, the movie Don’t Look Up [7]). The novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in a widely-shared 2019 essay: Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it. Meanwhile, Hannah Ritchie, the Our World in Data researcher, regards such pronouncements with puzzlement: [One protestor] told a journalist that the hunger was “nothing compared to what we can expect when the climate crisis unleashes a famine here in Europe in 20 years.” I couldn’t work out where this claim was coming from. Not from scientists. No credible ones have made this claim. Climate change will affect agriculture…but famine across temperate Europe? Within 20 years? Similarly, in AI safety, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who co-founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which studies artificial general intelligence (AGI), published a cheeky “April Fool’s, but not really” post earlier this year about how MIRI had lost all hope and was pivoting to a “death with dignity” strategy: It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem…Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with slightly more dignity. But then there are others on LessWrong who believe AGI is a threat, but not at the level of certainty and precision with which it is discussed. As LW user mukashi explains: I think that extinction by AI is definitely a possibility….what I most disagree about is their estimate of the likelihood of such an event: most of the discussions I have read are about how doom is just a fait accompli: it is not so much a question of will it take place? but, when? And they are…making a set of predictions that seem bizarrely precise, trying to say how things will happen step by step. It’s also interesting that both the climate and AGI apocalypses – two cause areas that should be completely unrelated – are thought to be roughly 30 years away. While I don’t think anyone is deliberately fabricating such a scenario, it does seem to reveal something about our underlying collective psychology. Ten years would be too soon; it would arouse doubts as to the veracity of such a claim, and require immediate action (i.e. calling the hand). Fifty years feels too far away to be relevant. Thirty years, however, is just distant enough that our prediction abilities get fuzzy, but close enough to theoretically impact the lives of every working adult today. Adjacent to a business opportunity Most cause areas struggle to attract talent, because there is no money to be made. They are usually funded with philanthropic capital from a finite set of funders, and those working in such industries must often accept below-market rate salaries. Doomer industries, on the other hand, can attract high-quality talent because they are adjacent to some underlying commercial opportunity that either makes it possible to get paid well, or attracts the overflow from workers who already made money in the adjacent field and are now in the “second act” of their careers. Climate, AI safety, and misinformation all have this quality. Semi-relatedly, this was also the explanation I heard as to why life sciences are attractive to philanthropic funders, especially in tech – because there is an opportunity for commercialization. Fertile environment for idea generation and exchange Just like a warm, moist environment is perfect for bacteria to breed, a rich philosophical environment is perfect for ideas to breed in people’s minds. Doomer industries attract ongoing media attention and speculation, moreso than “everyday disasters” like poverty, for the two reasons stated above: 1) lack of specificity or verifiability around the actual doomsday scenario, which blurs the lines between fact and fiction; and 2) adjacency to a business sector, where the presence of funding, as well as potential extreme wealth outcomes, makes these topics more exciting to write about. This attention creates a positive feedback loop for talent and funding. Additionally, an academic or R&D component to the industry lends itself to more philosophical and ideological conversations than a pure business sector. Climate, for example, draws from not just the actual field of climatology, but adjacent industries like agriculture, manufacturing, material science, environmental science, and data. AI safety has the online forum LessWrong, as well as the para-academic Google Brain (now part of Google AI) and OpenAI for its intellectual fodder. Misinformation has the social sciences; population decline has biology, economics, genetics, and public policy. Doomer industries as a way of allocating talent If doomerism is the new normal, it’s unsurprising that we’d start to see “doomer industries” become a normalized way of finding meaning in one’s work. AI safety, biosecurity, misinformation, and population decline all carry the same urgency of climate, but – as Nabeel noted – appeal to different subcultures within tech. In a world with highly polarized narratives, it’s no longer enough to work on “helping the world” or “improving the world” – people need to save the world, in order to get the same high of doing meaningful work. Applying the learnings from above, we can also imagine how doomer industries could outcompete non-doomer industries. For example, I’d guess that population decline could successfully divert talent and funding from longevity, because it has 1) an apocalyptic sense of urgency attached to it, 2) more commercial opportunities around reproductive technology, and 3) more opportunities for thought-leadering and philosophizing. If we were to interpret doomer industries literally, it seems that they should be zero-sum: how can there be two different apocalypse scenarios happening at the same time? But, as Michael Crichton previously noted, religion is an inseparable part of human nature. If talent and funding pools don’t overlap very much [8], we ought to take a figurative interpretation of doomer industries, and simply imagine people co-existing in separate, parallel doomer universes. It is a striking example of the general sociological trend towards fragmented cultural narratives – even the end of humanity, it turns out, is a subjective experience. Special thanks to Lyn Stoler and Anson Yu, whose feedback was indispensable. Notes Interestingly, American public opinion on whether climate change is real appears roughly unchanged since 2015, hovering around 70% of respondents who believe it is real – which is a separate question from whether people are concerned about climate change. ↩ A topic for another time: the correlation between New Atheism as an early 2000s movement (as well as a powerful religious right), which strongly advocated for secularism, and the portrayal of environmentalism as a secular topic. Today, I think militant secularism is less en vogue – people once again like religion and find it comforting, even if by another name – which requires discussing “religious” topics like climate differently. ↩ Note: My Climate Journey was a goldmine for climate career conversations, and a great resource overall. ↩ It’s worth noting that YPCCC did further attempt to segment its “Alarmed” group in 2021, based on levels of activity. However, the climate actions they asked about are heavily weighted towards politics and activism, which doesn’t fully encompass the range of approaches out there today. ↩ I toyed with the idea of whether doomer industries have anything in common with another category of work – advertising, trading, and playing (not making) video games – the first of which inspired the famous Jeff Hammerbacher quote: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” I don’t know how exactly to connect the dots, except that all these industries seem to have that same sort of gravity well effect, but for a different crowd. ↩ I am not anti-social media in an ideological or politicized sense, but over time my view has only strengthened that mind-viruses are becoming more prevalent and quietly modifying our behavior, and that outside of mental health, their influence is still extremely underdiscussed. I see this as more of a scientific phenomenon (“are ideas alive?”) than an ethics question, and think it deserves more attention. ↩ To be fair to the popular media, Don’t Look Up was widely critiqued for its heavy-handed portrayal of climate as an extinction event, including by Eric Levitz in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, who called it a “transparent product of its authors’ immersion in social-media echo chambers” and Kate Cohen in The Washington Post, who said that “Contrary to the movie’s implication, most Americans already believe the science on climate change. The ones who don’t…aren’t really the core problem.” ↩ When talent and funding do overlap between doomer industries, we see some competitiveness come out. For example, it’s probably no accident that the EA community consistently undervalues climate as a cause area, given the level of resources that are already devoted to AI safety. ↩