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 also 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] 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 to 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 straightfoward 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 straightfoward 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. And that’s why I don’t really feel the need to practice the jhanas anymore. 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’m participating in the Summer of Protocols research program this summer as a Core Researcher. It’s an 18-week program, funded by the Ethereum Foundation, that aims to catalyze a wider exploration of protocols and their social implications. I plan to focus on protocols as systems of social control. My brain has struggled to reconcile how 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 history of protocols, through the lens of control, that shows how all these different types are interrelated – then use that to understand what the next generation of protocols might look like. I thought it might be useful to share my working notes as I dive into this process, especially since Summer of Protocols is an interesting meta-experiment in funding a cohort of independent researchers. I’ll update this page every few weeks with major themes and challenges I’m working through. I’ll try to keep these summaries fairly condensed, so as not to overwhelm. Enjoy! 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 settle 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. Weeks 3-4 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’m realizing that each of these layers had a “golden era” of development in post-industrial history (I think?), which I started outlining for myself. 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.

I gave a talk at The Stoa in February about “Mapping digital worlds to understand our present and future.” You can watch the video here; the following is a transcript of that talk. Peter Limberg asked me to talk about an analysis I did late last year, where I mapped out all the different tribes that are influencing the climate conversation today. But since Peter also did a great analysis of mimetic tribes back in 2018 that I enjoyed, I thought it’d be fun to zoom out and talk about this meta-practice of mapping digital worlds more broadly: both why it matters, and how I and others go about doing it. Table of Contents Maps legitimized our physical world The digital world is still largely unmapped Digital maps are more subjective than physical ones My process for mapping digital worlds Figure out what to show “See” the space Record your landmarks Add detail Draw the map Let’s look at some maps! Skeumorphic maps “Type of Guy” maps Schematic maps “Chinese menu” maps Matrix maps World cloud maps Maps create power (good and bad) Maps legitimized our physical world In the physical world, universal access to maps is still a fairly recent thing. I still remember my dad teaching me how to read a map when I was little; we’d get these big foldout travel maps from AAA and stash them in the car in case we got lost. Then things got a little more technologically advanced, and we’d type our destination into MapQuest and print out the directions. Today, Google Maps (and Apple Maps) have made maps so ubiquitous that we take it for granted that everyone can have an instant magical bird’s eye view of any physical location in the world. For the layperson, this represents a completion of the cartographic quest of mapping our physical world, that really took centuries to get to. No one thinks about it now because it seems so mundane, but to me, this is a huge feat that didn’t happen until during our lifetimes. For most of modern history, having access to maps was a form of power, like books or any other form of information. If you had a map, you could see the world in a way that others couldn’t. Maps were a way to extend political power and influence. If you knew where certain natural resources were located, or where to build roads and trade routes, you knew how extract value from the world around you. If you knew where all the towns and farms were in your kingdom, you knew whose doors to knock on to make them pay taxes. If you didn’t have maps, you didn’t know anything about the world, beyond what you could see with your own naked eye, which was…not very much. During the sixteenth century of exploration, European governments would sometimes keep their maps hidden or unpublished so that competing countries couldn’t benefit from them. So there were a lot of scary implications associated with mapmaking, because it made all these previously unknowable things visible to outsiders, and to potential enemies and oppressors. You had townspeople and farmers and people in neighboring lands, some of whom deliberately tried to stay off of the maps, and fought being drawn and measured and cataloged, because they didn’t want anyone to know they existed. On the other hand, I would argue that mapmaking can also empower us to define ourselves in relation to others. The concept of a nation state is meaningless without a map that proves where its boundaries are, and that we have shared consensus on. And so I kinda take a more neutral stance: maps created a playing field for power. While it’s nice to imagine a peaceful world in which everyone lived in their own little towns and didn’t interact with each other, I also think maps were inevitable to create a world where people could fight for bigger rewards and play higher-stakes games with each other. The digital world is still largely unmapped That’s what happened in the physical world. But in the digital world, there’s still no equivalent of Google Maps to understand all the different online communities and spaces that many of us interact with. You can try to Google them, but Google isn’t very helpful. We are still in this sort of uncharted, “natives only,” IYKYK stage of cartography in the digital world. You have to know what you’re looking for. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that people who are deep in a particular world often underestimate the value of their own tacit knowledge. They take for granted that these spaces are easily findable or understandable to others, and they forget how much context you actually need. The other reason, just as with physical territories, is that some of this is deliberate hiding by the “natives” themselves. A lot of online communities don’t want to be found. You’ll sometimes come across popular blog posts that with a disclaimer that says, “Please stop posting this to Hacker News” or whatever, because they’re tired of being flooded by randos. On the other hand, some of these online communities are having a growing influence on “real world politics,” and this is where we see conflicts arise. Because when outsiders do stumble across your digital land, and they don’t have a map, they start trying to fit it into the frameworks they do have, and things get very confusing quickly. And if they perceive your territory is powerful enough, they will try to conquer it. For example, I’ve found it somewhat painful to watch effective altruism and rationalists in the media spotlight this past year, because you have people on the left claiming it’s filled with a bunch of “tech bro libertarians,” and people on the right equally claiming it’s a bunch of “woke commie Marxists.” In reality, neither is correct. But you can’t necessarily blame people for it, either; they’re just using the maps they do have to try to interpret all this unknown territory. And in fact, this is something that Peter and Conor predicted in their mimetic tribes piece: that as EA became more popular and influential and discovered, that they would start being subjected to these outsider values. “Incubated on Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, [the rationalist diaspora] is an observer tribe in the culture war….Watch for a popularity boost to Effective Altruism, a struggle with the downsides of increased attention, and possible pressure from the SJAs for the Rationalists to commit to progressive values.” —Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes, “The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0” I get why digital territories don’t always want to be mapped, and I’d even say that most probably don’t need to be. A lot of online communities function better as quiet incubators of ideas. But when ideas start to escape from those communities and find themselves landing into mainstream conversations, I think maps can be helpful to reduce misunderstandings and help newcomers find their way around the topic. In particular, mapping digital worlds can help us take these big, unwieldy, fast-changing topics - like what Peter and Conor did in mapping the shift in political conversations in 2018, or what I recently tried to do in mapping out the shift in climate conversations - and distill things down to their most important elements. Digital maps are more subjective than physical ones One thing that I think people consistently misunderstand is that the world is much smaller than it seems. The number of people who influence a given topic is never really that big. But for some reason, people often try to map out hot topics by looking at the outputs. So in the case of climate, it’s like, “Let’s try to make a big list of all the different technologies that are being developed today.” Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, carbon removal, whatever. And then let’s list all the companies that are working on those things. I find this approach to be confusing and overwhelming, because outputs change very quickly. It’s not always obvious, by looking at them without context, how they’re all connected or what’s driving their development. By the time you’ve locked down the current position, it’s already moved again. Whereas looking at these topics on the tribal level – meaning, the people who are driving these changes – is more like “playing the man, not the cards” in poker. It tells you why certain outputs are moving in the direction they are, and helps you predict where they might go next. If there are, say, a million points of output you could be looking at, the number of people creating them is more like a hundred data points. And that’s a much easier universe to wrap our heads around. One thing that’s kinda tricky about mapping digital worlds, though, is that they are way more subjective than mapping physical territories. It can be hard to know when you’ve hit on an objective truth, because community lore can go really deep, and there’s also plenty of misdirection; one of the more recent examples is a fake interview given by two Twitter alts. If you talk to the wrong people, or read the wrong forums or blog posts, you can get a completely different picture of what a space looks like. This is why there are a lot of misunderstandings from journalists who try to report on digital spaces, because they’re just training themselves on all the wrong inputs. The other thing, of course, is that even if you do manage to map the space out accurately, digital territories are just more ephemeral. Communities are always changing, and central figures or gathering spots can grow or die very quickly. And that means the maps of these territories also go out of date quickly. I do think mapping digital spaces is different from mapping a physical space, where you can see with your own eyes – okay, there’s a river here, and a mountain there. Mapping digital territories is more like echolocation, where you’re standing in a dark space, totally blind, and you need to “ping” the space around you and see what you get back. Eventually, with enough data from those pings, you can start to “see” the world around you. But you’re not really using your eyes to map it: it’s more like another proprioceptive sense that emerges, or a vague sense of your position in space. And learning how to map digital territories requires training that sense. My process for mapping digital worlds I’m gonna talk about how I approach mapping digital worlds. This was kind of a fun exercise for me, because I hadn’t really thought about my methodology before preparing for this talk. So we’re gonna talk about that, and then we’re gonna look at a bunch of other digital maps to see how other people do it. This is my general process for mapmaking. It starts with figuring out what I’m trying to show, “seeing” the space with that proprioceptive sense I talked about, recording your landmarks, going back and adding detail, and then finally drawing the map. Figure out what you’re trying to show “See” the space Record your landmarks Add detail Draw the map Figure out what to show “Figuring out what to show” is about figuring out the general theme of the map. You can have a map that’s more unopinionated – where you’re just trying to draw the entire landscape – or you can have a more thematic approach that’s trying to highlight a certain aspect of that world. Just getting to the right question itself can take awhile. With my climate tribes work for example, I started out thinking I was trying to model what these so-called “doomer industries” look like, which are industries that are oriented around some apocalyptic vision of the world. My first attempt at that did lead to the creation of a map, where I was trying to show what the general anatomy was of a doomer industry, using a Tootsie Pop as an analogy. But the more interesting thing I stumbled upon was realizing that the climate discourse has changed a lot from the early 2000s. Even though people still talk about climate deniers, I think we’ve implicitly moved from being divided on “Is climate change real, or not” to these more actionable, tribal divisions around the right solutions to pursue. I decided to make that the focus of my map, and develop language to identify what all the different climate tribes were, some of which don’t even use the term “climate” or try to distance themselves from it, but are still part of that conversation anyway: “See” the space Once I have a goal, I start trying to “see” or traverse the space, using that echolocation I talked about. I think this happens interchangeably with the first step. You start with a question, and then you look at the space a bit, and then that helps you refine your question, and you iterate your way towards a framework. It’s kinda hard for me to describe how “seeing” a space works, but a lot of it is paying attention to what’s happening between the lines, and where the boundaries are. You might look for conflicts between two groups, and then you say, “Okay, what type of language are they using? What’s different about their goals? Where do they disagree?” One example that I looked at with climate are what I called the energy maximalists, and they stand out because they don’t really talk about climate change, but they do like to talk about “energy.” For example: Via Twitter. Then you ask yourself, well, why do they use that term, and it’s because they don’t want to talk about the scarcity of environmental resources. They want to focus on abundance, like how do we create more energy. So that already gives me some motivations and key vocabulary to start recording. You can use that to go deeper into the group and say, “Who do they keep referencing? Which blog posts do they cite? Where do they gather online?” Record your landmarks As I go through that process, I start recording key landmarks that I notice along the way. Landmarks, just like rivers or mountains, can be people, organizations, keywords, canonical reading, events, where they gather online, things like that. Just sticking with the climate examples for a bit, I noticed at least there was some cluster of people who would reference Michael Shellenberger’s book Apocalypse Never, or the Breakthrough Institute, or the Eco-Modernist manifesto. Those are some examples of landmarks I used to “draw” a picture of that tribe and their territory. The idea being that if someone had a collection of all these items, they too might be able to “see” the same space that I see. Add detail At this point, I have a general schematic of the space, and that’s when I go in and start trying to add detail: stress-testing my theories, and making sure that my assumptions hold. This is the equivalent of adding fine lines or shading in a drawing. Some of this work I can do on my own. I’ll do things like go through and read people’s Twitter feeds, or blogs, with my “picture” of the space in my mind, and see if anything breaks the model. If so, then I go back and refine my model to reflect those changes. But I think it’s also kinda necessary to just talk to as many people as you can, or just find ways to be around the activities they’re doing in their natural environment, so you can observe what’s going on. Draw the map Finally, there’s the actual drawing or visualizing of the map in a way that makes it understandable to your audience. Writing out my process for this talk has made me realize that I’m pretty bad at visualizations. I’m a text-heavy person. I’m very into the “back-end” part of map work, like actually figuring out what does the territory even look like, but I’m less into the “front-end” part of it – meaning, how to communicate it effectively to my desired audience. So I don’t know that I have great advice here – or rather, whatever my advice is, you probably shouldn’t listen to me, because I just like text-based everything. I was proud of myself with the climate tribes piece, though, because I used DALL-E to generate images for each tribe, which was actually really helpful. So I guess if you’re very text-centric like I am, this is one way to get out of your comfort zone. I also remembered at the last minute before publishing to put all the images and tribes and descriptions into a little table, which I think was helpful for people to see it all in one place, instead of in one long blog post, and it made it more shareable as a summary. So that was one way to visualize it. Let’s look at some maps! That’s my process for mapmaking. As our last activity, I thought it’d be fun to look at some different examples of digital maps, and try to unpack the methodologies they used. There’s no order to these examples, I just collected a few that I thought were interesting for different reasons. Shoutout to Rival Voices for publishing a collection of maps on his Substack, that was very helpful for me. Skeumorphic maps To start with the obvious, I’ll show a few examples of what I call “skeumorphic” maps, which use physical territories as a literal metaphor for digital ones. Via Ribbonfarm. This Ribbonfarm one is a classic that’s stuck in my mind over the years, and you can see how different geographic landmarks, like mist or islands, or giant crystals, are used to convey something about the character of each community. Via Slate Star Codex. Via Slate Star Codex. Scott Alexander has also made a map for effective altruism, as well as for the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent blogosphere, using this skeumorphic approach. Via xkcd. This one is from xkcd. It’s a “map of online communities” in 2010, back when the world of online communities was small enough to fit on a map. These skeumorphic maps can be useful, because they borrow from an existing framework that readers already understand. For example, in the xkcd map, Facebook is enormous in terms of its influence, but also kinda isolated as this behemoth, whereas YouTube and Twitter, just below it, are comparatively smaller, but are more like biodiverse islands that give way to other little communities. But skeumorphic maps can also be limited, in that, we can see a picture of the entire, broad landscape here, but it’s a very shallow set of information. I would call this a relational map – it tells us how these different territories compare to each other, but doesn’t tell us a whole lot about any one specific community. The other issue is that accessing the digital world isn’t the same as the physical world. Going back to that need for echolocation or proprioception, I think we need to rely more on those senses to make our way around digital worlds. A physical map doesn’t really tell me how to find the interesting stuff on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, beyond going to the literal websites of course. I have very few landmarks here to help me generate a picture of any one community. These maps are always fun to look at, but I think digital-native maps actually look quite different. “Type of Guy” maps Doomers Virgins vs. chads These are on the other end of the information scale, and they feel much more digital-native. I call these “type of guy” maps. You might say they’re more like memes than maps, because they don’t necessarily look like what we think of as a map, but they actually contain a lot of condensed information that helps us generate a picture of a digital world more quickly. These maps tell you how to conjure an image of a certain type of person, or community, in your mind, based on landmarks that might have otherwise been invisible to you. They are less useful at conveying relational information as the skeumorphic maps – the virgin-chad meme, for example, would break if we added too many more personas – but they are good for helping you find your way to at least one or two places. Schematic maps Memetic tribes Idea machines Staying with the more detailed or thematic map examples, schematic maps are also more about depth over breadth. They’re also more opinionated and explicit about the underlying framework being used, versus the other two types we looked at. We’ve got Peter and Conor’s memetic tribes 2.0 above, which gives each memetic tribe a set of characteristics - sacred values, existential threats, campfires - which is a term I love for “gathering places.” Below that is a diagram I made for a post I wrote last year about what I called “idea machines,” or these amorphous organisms, like effective altruism or progress studies, that can turn ideas into outcomes. In both cases here, the concept of a “mimetic tribe,” or the concept of an “idea machine,” is just as important about these maps as what’s actually being mapped inside it. “Chinese menu” maps via Food+Tech Connect. via Sequoia (source). I personally love schematic maps, because as I’ve said, I’m very text-heavy, and it’s kinda all the visual I need. But on the more visual side, this “Chinese menu”-style map is a very popular landscape mapping technique, but I think it’s a deceptive one. It doesn’t really help you find your way around a space, because it generally only uses one type of landmark, like companies or organizations, and groups them into themes. To me, this is kinda like handing someone a list of every river in the United States – just rivers, nothing else – and asking someone to draw a map of America based on that. I think you just need more than one type of landmark to paint that picture. So I don’t find this type of map to be particularly actionable. Perhaps it’s more like an infographic than a map, but it is very popular. Matrix maps Political compass Alignment map A more information-rich way of showing a digital landscape is the matrix map, which is also very popular, and gives the reader more relational context. Above, I have the political compass, as well as an example of “alignment” charts, which map certain landscapes based on a good-evil and lawful-chaotic framework. It still only gives you one type of landmark, such as political parties, or game companies in the examples here, but it at least “draws” the space by putting those landmarks into a more contextual landscape. World cloud maps via Twitter. This is the last type of map I’ll show, just to bring our analogy back to the physical world again. The mapping methodology I described earlier, which I use, is kinda like me drawing maps by hand. It’s like I went and surveyed the land with my own eyes and then figured out how to draw all that out. This type of map, on the other hand, is more algorithmically generated. It’s like using satellite imagery to generate a map – very Google Maps-esque. I call it the “word cloud” technique. This example is from a set of maps that someone published a few years ago, where they clustered different groups of people on Twitter together based on their public interactions, and used that to visualize all these digital spaces. They labeled the blue circles as “accelerationism and esoteric philosophy”, orange as “weird rationalists?,” and purple as “4channish, ironic humor.” And then they didn’t know what pink was. If what I do is more like “echolocation” of flooding my brain with a ton of input and seeing what emerges in my mind, I think this approach is more like a typically “scientific” approach, which can probably uncover connections that we might not be aware of otherwise, and also just helps remove the doubt of “Am I training my brain on the wrong inputs,” or “Am I stuck in the wrong corner of the web,” because you can see it all. On the other hand, I think this techique highlights what is so difficult about mapping digital versus physical territories, because digital spaces are so subjective and hard to discern just with cold hard data. For example, there are plenty of people who talk to each other a lot in DMs or group chats, but don’t interact much in public, and you wouldn’t know that if you were just looking at public data. There are prominent people in certain communities who aren’t on Twitter, but have very active blogs or newsletters. So I think there’s still a lot of tacit knowledge that’s hard to capture with this approach. It’d be cool to see some of these mapping tools developed as the “satellite imagery” equivalent for digital maps, but I also think their usefulness is more limited in the digital world. But that might just be my bias. Maps create power (good and bad) I hope this gave you some ideas about both why digital maps are useful, why we should take this practice more seriously, and how you might go about creating your own. I’d love to see more maps of digital worlds, so if you make any, please send them to me! To wrap up, I think a lot of people want to think of digital territories as these idyllic tribes, like a safe space or escape from the real world. But even the short history of online communities thus far suggests that they are evolving and changing. We can’t be stuck in the ’90s forever. The 2010 xkcd map of online communities, for example, paints a very different world from the map we’d draw today. Things are changing. So if we view the history of digital worlds as linear or progressive or on a forward trajectory in any way, rather than a static state, I think mapmaking could help us take our digital worlds more seriously, and even legitimize them. Balaji Srinivasan published a book last year called The Network State, which basically introduces his idea of what comes after the nation state. While nation states are defined by geographic borders and physical territories, network states are a digital-first version that start out as online communities, but can eventually acquire land and diplomatic power, which would make them as powerful as nation states. Maybe digital spaces are still in this ephemeral, nomadic tribe state because we artificially keep them there by refusing to map them. Opening these spaces up to the outside world can make them into targets, but it also creates new pathways for transactions to flow between worlds, and that can make the digital world more powerful. If we want to take our digital worlds more seriously, part of that starts with finding ways to legitimize them, instead of leaving them undefined. And in the physical world, at least, the way that started was with mapmaking.

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.