Last Day of School
Or is it the Last Day of Summer Vacation?
What to write for my last day? Fiction, philosophy, startup ideas…
Oh who am I kidding, obviously I’m going to write an Inkhaven retrospective.
But what do I want to say? Some stuff I’m still embarrassed to share in public. Some I’m still too emotional to really analyze. Some is just nonsense that won’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t here. I don’t even think the staff and alumni really get it, I’m not sure I’ll get it after a few months. These things only make sense in the moment.
So I guess that’s the point, I need to write down these feelings and emotions while I still have them. The facts don’t really matter, and the analysis can come later. So this is pure stream of consciousness.
Until now blogging for me, or any kind of internet writing, was always a “when you feel like it” hobby. Which has its advantages; there’s a bit of quality control that comes from only writing when you have a strong idea. But also disadvantages—I had a ton of half-finished drafts that I never posted anywhere, and a fair bit of low-effort/trollish posts that I wrote because… well, it didn’t seem like anyone was ever going to read them, so why not? Writing on the internet in a disorganized way is like putting graffiti on a random wall.
Inkhaven was the exact opposite: a strong pressure to write something every day, under my real name, and people would read it (whether or not I wanted them to!) There were no rules at all about what you write, so we could in theory write complete nonsense, but in practice I (and most others) felt a strong psychological pressure to put in real effort. People seemed to feel shame on the days when they posted half-finished posts or anything less-than-brilliant.
But what I quickly realized was that the writing is not the most important part of Inkhaven, at least not for most of us. One could, in principle, come here just to get away from the world, hole up, and write the great novel that you’re too distracted to write in real life. But Inkhaven presents an endless series of distractions to prevent you from doing that sort of thing. The people who produced the best/most writing tended to be the people who didn’t live on campus and didn’t socialize much. I think for a true “writing” experience, you’d be much better off at something like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or just renting a cabin somewhere remote and doing it solo.
Is it a good thing to have distractions? Some might say yes. There’s a good reason that most universities don’t allow their professors to focus only on research, but also require them to teach classes, mentor grad students, and do various other professional tasks. Richard Feynman wrote in his book1 that the Institute for Advanced Study often had issues where they sequestered all the most brilliant minds with nothing to do but pure research, and they quickly ran out of ideas. The human mind just isn’t designed to focus purely on one task with no “distractions.”
But there’s a balance. Too many distractions makes it literally impossible to write anything at all, or at least not anything serious. It’s like heat in a chemical reaction: you need enough to start the process, but not so much that it all explodes.
In many ways it reminded me of my freshman year of college, living in a dormitory. The actual classes were easy; the hard part was finding the time to do homework and sleep when you’re surrounded by crazy people having very intense conversations and starting insane activities that run all night. In normal adult life, I rarely (if ever!) have people nearby arguing loudly about, say, “should we bring back human sacrifice,” “what’s the correct dose of GHB and Ketamine to replace the social effects of alcohol without drinking,” or “who has more complex interiority, Dora the Explorer or Light Yagami?"
In the end it’s more like a tech incubator than a writing workshop. People work on their own stuff, but it’s also expressly designed for networking and building professional connections. Some people do that better than others. The people who need it the most are the people who are the worst at it, which presents a paradox. The hope is that, by cramming them together in close proximity to the boozers and schmoozers, it will randomly generate some connections between the tech bros who sell the tech and the nerds who actually make it. I think it did that better than any other environment I’ve ever seen.
All of this leads to the question of what exactly Inkhaven is meant to accomplish? A normal writing workshop is supposed to develop writers and help them finish a great work. Inkhaven is almost the opposite, it feels like it’s designed to take bloggers and get them to stop writing and launch a tech startup together. Or maybe the hope is to find someone tech-friendly and develop their literary talent, so that they can provide a high-brow sophisticated defense of the tech community? The idea is that, similar to how Ross Douthat provides a sort of intellectual air support to Christian conservatives, the tech blogosphere could use someone with more literary prestige to give it a certain gravitas in the public mind.
In that sense I think it didn’t work. There’s something about the Bay Area aesthetic that simply resists any attempt at gravitas. People dress casually, they sit on the floor, they eat out of disposable boxes, they openly share their sexuality and odd habits. Nobody wears suits:
But where it did succeed brilliantly was in an absolute explosion of creative expression. People felt free to live, say, and write whatever they wanted. We all pushed each other to write ever more difficult and expressive pieces, or at least to shout more loudly at each other. People didn’t just write blogs; they made poems, webapps, theater, music, games, social experiments, and almost everything else imaginable as long as it was abnormal and impractical. I wrote, talked, and shared more in a month at Inkhaven than I probably had in the previous year combined.
Now back to regular life! But let’s all find the balance between normal, disciplined work and free creative expression. Sometimes we need to experience the extremes of both.
He didn’t write it, and he tended to stretch the truth a lot, so take it all with a huge grain of salt.