I miss events that were small enough to have a temperature.
Not “conference energy.” Not “community.” Not “vibes.” An actual temperature. A room where you could feel, within ten minutes, that people were there to think, not to perform thinking.
Foo Camp was one of the few places I’ve been where I could walk into a room and know, with relief, that I was not the most informed person about the things I care about. Not in some fake humility way. In a practical way. In the way that makes your shoulders drop because you can finally stop carrying the topic for everyone else.
Most rooms force an ugly choice.
Either you’re the most informed person in your area, and the whole day becomes compression. You take what you know, grind it down into safe chunks, and watch it evaporate into polite nods. You become a translator, then a babysitter. People want takeaways. They want frameworks. They want the illusion of uptake without the cost of actually changing what they do.
Or you’re obviously junior, and the whole day becomes signaling. You spend your time proving you belong instead of learning anything. You ask careful questions that demonstrate competence. You avoid real curiosity because curiosity looks like weakness. Everyone is playing defense.
Foo Camp, at its best, dodged both.
It wasn’t a place where people told each other how smart they were. That would have been embarrassing. It also would have been redundant. Selection did that work already. Nobody needed to declare it. Nobody needed to perform it. Competence was assumed, which is exactly why the conversations could be unguarded.
There’s a specific kind of relief that comes from that assumption.
You can speak in half-formed ideas without being punished for them. You can say, “I don’t know, but maybe,” without someone treating it like a confession. You can disagree without turning it into a status contest. You can be wrong in public without having it turned into a permanent identity.
That private register matters. The in-between mode of speech that is not a press release and not a conspiracy. The mode where you’re not “on the record,” but you’re also not hiding. You are simply among peers, thinking out loud, trusting that context will remain intact.
We’ve spent the last two decades burning that register down.
The internet trained everyone to treat private speech as either public performance or secret evidence. Anything candid becomes content. Anything awkward becomes a screenshot. Anything speculative becomes a quote. Anything human becomes a liability.
Then we act surprised when people stop talking like humans.
Foo Camp worked because it protected that middle space long enough for real exchange to happen. Not exchange as in networking. Exchange as in actual transfer of capability.
Here’s the part I miss most.
You could diffuse knowledge to people who would operationalize it.
Not someday. Not as a “great point.” Not as a note in a doc that dies in a shared drive. You could watch someone take what you said, connect it to their own domain, and start moving. The conversion rate from idea to experiment was unusually high, because the room was full of people who had real levers.
That is rare. It’s getting rarer.
Most gatherings are built for audience, not action. They optimize for scale and optics. They are designed to be legible to outsiders. They must justify themselves. They must prove their diversity, their inclusion, their impact, their virtue, their safety. They must never look like a private club, which means they must become a public spectacle.
And once a thing becomes a spectacle, it stops being useful.
A low-signal, high-trust room will always look suspicious to people who only understand performance. If you’re used to status being constantly asserted, a room where nobody asserts it feels like collusion. If you’re used to every idea being pitched, a room where ideas are thrown around casually feels elitist. If you’re used to everyone talking to the crowd, a room where people talk to each other feels like secrecy.
The irony is that the more we moralize about openness, the more real thinking goes dark.
That is not progress. That is institutional paranoia, internalized.
I also miss the fact that Foo Camp didn’t pretend it could scale. Selection was load-bearing. That will offend people who want every system to be universal. Fine. Reality doesn’t care. Some environments only function when you can assume shared context, baseline competence, and a capacity to act.
When you remove those assumptions in the name of fairness, you don’t get fairness. You get stagnation. You get performative inclusion and practical uselessness. You get panels. You get “community.” You get a hundred people listening to five people talk.
You lose the room where a random conversation can change what gets built next week.
I’m nostalgic for a social technology that actually worked. A temporary zone where the private register was tolerated, where weirdness was not evidence, where sincerity was not a trap, and where people could trade unfinished thoughts without fearing that someone would drag them into daylight and call them a conspiracy.
If you never experienced a room like that, it’s hard to describe what it’s like. You can read it as elitism. You can read it as cultishness. You can read it as self-congratulation.
Or you can read it as what it really is: a place where the conversation was allowed be real, between people who were allowed to be real.
I miss that.