on Lighthaven and creating fourth places

If you've spent a nominal amount of time online in the past five years and have ever felt even momentarily alone, you're certainly familiar with the concept of a third place. Countless thinkpieces have been written about them as we debate how to best treat digitally-induced loneliness, mostly lamenting their loss to time and snarkily commenting on their commodification in the hands of companies like Starbucks. Ray Oldenburg's original definition in The Great Good Place describes them as "the core settings of informal public life": the venue for civil society outside of home and the workplace, reduced from Greco-Roman agorae to places like local woodlands and laundromats. Since then the situation has perhaps grown even more dire, as many of his examples slowly peter out of existence, and as their replacements, like coffee shops, meld into workplaces of their own. No one questions that we need more third places for the healthy development of a neighborhood, let alone a society at large. But what if we dreamt bigger?

on Lighthavenⁱ

A little over a month ago, I visited Lighthaven for Solstice. I had had no prior interaction with a dedicated rationalist community, having merely lurked LessWrong and talked with some self-professed post-rats. I was also fortunate enough to speak to several attendees of the Foresight Institute's Vision Weekend, which had booked the venue for the following day. These are disparate events with their own unique individual crowds, but I will describe attendees of both in aggregate here.

It was a completely novel experience. Not all of Solstice itself resonated for me - I got the impression that the format spoke most to those who grew up in the Anglo-American culture of singing in Christmas caroling groups and in church chorales. Meanwhile, I can honestly say that the closest thing that my family sung growing up was a Soviet-era holiday song parody about masquerading an ICBM as a Christmas tree. But to hear a theater of people all sing in ode of taking collective responsibility for the machines we put out into the world (Hymn of Breaking Strain)ⁱⁱ was one of the most beautiful moments I've had all year. So rare and so precious is this sense of techno-optimism, relatively unskewed by Silicon Valley profit incentives or the threat of losing international dominance. Instilling more of this energy into the world is hard - people, for understandable reasons, have strong attachments and fiercely positive and negative associations with tech baked in by nearly three decades of marketing campaigns and striking against an online world. So I savored it. All weekend I heard about the human brain under microgravity and gene therapy for longevity and Mars terraforming and people's greatest hopes and fears for the future - and how they themselves were actively working to get there.

The thing about a venue and a community that thinks very long and hard about existential risk and cares deeply about the future is that they... get a little weird! A minority but significant part of the crowd was genuinely concerned for the imminent end of the world. No longer did people find it a fun thought exercise to exchange X-risk/S-risk/P(doom) estimates; several seemed resigned to merely being able to form contingency plans for them and their loved ones. This specific flavor of doomerism is not known whatsoever outside of the 20 mile radius around San Francisco. Another memorable note: one guy got on his literal knees for me once I mentioned what I do for work these days. Mixed feelings there!

In many ways, Lighthaven feels like the direct successor to projects like the Whole Earth Catalog: uniquely Bay Area hybrid offspring of concentrated technical talent and high-openness new age philosophy, often taking the form of regrettably short-lived institutions that later nevertheless go on to shape public thought for decades to come. Places like this are special. I cherish them and would like to see more of them in the world.

on fourth places

Third places have a fundamental baked in limitation. They bind a community, but ultimately it can only ever serve that one local group. Your neighborhood bar invites regulars who live within walking distance. Your hackerspace attracts the same rotating thirty people who can make from 6-8 pm Wednesday nights. These are good and necessary; they build trust, they calcify inside jokes into culture, but they are also geographically bounded.

Consider the hypothetical fourth place: an institution that services many groups filtering in and out, all sharing some lofty, grandiose goals and similar attributes but different motivations: to increase their personal intellectual curiosity, to find like-minded friends who have similar nerdy hobbies, to find VC funding, to teach others about better ways of filtering the world. The ideal company or university operates this way; however, bootstrapping one outside of such a legible wrapper is incredibly rare. Past posts have warned about this effect - the risk of mistaking love of place for love of community, and of transient populations failing to build deep roots. But I think that this transience is a boon when structured correctly.

A good fourth place acts as an accretion disk. Matter spirals inward, heats up, radiates energy, and some of it gets flung back out at velocity. Fourth places function similarly: people form unstable orbits around them, glance off them having absorbed new matter - ideas, connections, ontologies - and return to where they came from with renewed optimism and a fire under their ass for continuing their own projects. The value isn't in everyoneⁱⁱⁱ staying in one place; it's in the collision and ejection.

LW itself is one instance of this, and a very effective one at that. But even better is a physical space that can host groups of any size, a curatorship that sets the broad theme of events that take place within in, financial runway to experiment and fail, and an explicit orientation towards the future and towards building many big and weird and beautiful things. What made Lighthaven work for me wasn't the (admittedly very well thought out) interior design or the location. It was that everyone there implicitly agreed to take long-term thinking seriously; you could talk about Mars colonies or cryonics or civilizational resilience without first having to justify why these topics were worth discussing. The activation energy for interesting conversations was near zero.

I don't know what it takes to build more of these places. I personally favor proliferation over replication, venues suited to their own home cities that are more satellites than forks. But despite the dark tone Solstice generally centered around, visiting Lighthaven made me far more optimistic for the near future and appreciative of the meetups that do occur where I'm based out of. I hope to be able to work towards seeding anything remotely similar someday soon.

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