Authenticity: Interintellect Salon Notes

A good thing: I’ve started wandering into more and stranger corners of the internet in the past year. Weird legacy sites documenting English heirloom potatoes. Minimalist archives of Japanese woodworking techniques. A blog in the form of a text-based game. So it doesn’t surprise me that much (except it kind of does) to have stumbled onto The Interintellect (often rendered as “ii”) via something Brendan shared in relation to Hyperlink Academy a couple weeks ago.

I attended my first Salon of theirs this past weekend—a three-hour freeform discussion called “Just Be Yourself: Questioning the Value of Authenticity” facilitated by Linus Lu. Twenty-odd folks called in from around the globe to share perspectives on authenticity, vulnerability, compassion, and selfhood. I didn’t intend to share these notes, but by the time we’d finished talking I thought “What the hell, this could be blog fodder,” so here we are!

(A note on alt text: the gallery plugin I’m running on this site is behaving abominably, so for now I’ve just linked the alt text for all these images here.)

As always, I’m increasingly hung up on who has the privilege—time and money, mostly—to engage in these kinds of discussions. High-level overviews of culture and selfhood absolutely get me going, but I also know that I don’t have the bandwidth for them when I’m scrambling to put food on the table or make sure I can pay my rent.

How can we make more room for folks outside academia and well-paid industries (and the odd self-employed interloper like myself) to interrogate this stuff?

XOXO Livesketches

 

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This past weekend I had the exceptional pleasure of being hired by Medium to live sketch all the speakers at XOXO, an annual arts and technology festival run by my pals Andy Baio and Andy McMillan here in Portland. I’d heard great things about XOXO in the past, but this was my first opportunity to check it out in person—and BOY HOWDY IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT. Yes, I felt like my arms were going to fall off after each day’s sketching (20 minutes per speaker, with seven to ten people each day of the conference), but I met so many fascinating folks and got to hear some really wonderful presentations. Here’s a truncated image of all the speaker portraits from Saturday and Sunday (not including the pull quotes from each talk, which you can see over on Medium):

TotalLineupCrazy.

And now it’s time to gear up for Rose City Comic Con this weekend, where I’ve got a new comic making its print debut! Expect a post about that in the next couple days.

I’m also planning to collect some more complex thoughts about what XOXO meant to me once I stop being socially hungover from non-stop connections and late nights over the weekend, but that’s a story for another time. In the meantime, check out the full post on Medium!