My Year in San Francisco’s $2M Secret Society Startup

What an interesting article. To me, it illuminates two things: the desire for that child-like sense of depth and mystery that many of us still look for in our everyday lives, and the tendency for Silicon Valley money to turn everything it touches into a slide-deck-laden commercial enterprise.

Sadly, as much as I love the idea, I see the same thing happening with venture-funded cooperative living arrangements.

When I was studying in Berkeley, I lived in a student-run co-op house. We were the wardens of our creaky 1920s manor: we did all the cleaning, made repairs, painted (and mural-ed) the walls, did some remodeling, picked out the furniture. Even membership was decided collectively. As a result, the community we had was an emergent property of our environment, and it created friendships that have lasted for the past decade. Sitting in the overgrown backyard garden or watching the glimmering city lights from the roof, I felt immersed in a world of beauty and mystery for the first time in many years.

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of co-living/"nomad house" startups being posted to HN. You see photos of beautiful houses all around the world; fancy toys in full-size entertainment dungeons; attractive young people all working on their latest business venture. But I can't escape the feeling that all of this exists in that same corporate Neverland described in the article. Venture capital runs through the blood of these communities. They exist to make money. They don't own the houses. They don't get to decide their own fate. It's all a petri dish carefully designed from an office building somewhere in the Financial District.

As a result, when a true community does manage to take hold in this sort of artificial ether, it becomes all the more agonizing when corporate decides to pull the plug on you. If only the incentives were aligned; if only corporate didn't "really needed to monetize" the venture...

Maybe these sorts of spiritually-significant projects (and I do include the Latitude Society in this) simply don't work when run as a conventional business. And yet, there's clearly a deep desire for them to exist.

Ahoy! I just stumbled on this. I was the Director of Technology for this set of local bizareness for its last two years. I won't say "I'm happy to answer any questions" because I may avoid some. If you want to ask, maybe hit me up, Especially the tech, especially if you got to play and have a good idea of what we were doing.

Also! I think I'm signed up to give a talk in May at ADG. If you're interested in this sort of world-building, and the hacker side of it; maybe come to that? My talk isn't on the shedule yet, but it's penciled in (and Definitely go to Catherine Herdlick's if you can!) http://www.meetup.com/Adventure-Design-Group/

You mean the experience of running tech for a "secret society" or of my going through the immersive/interactive experiences?

I never got an invite to this. I started working in the city two weeks before the shut down, so perhaps this is for the best.

But I have gone to:

A game of space ships on the frontier and brown coats, using Nerf Guns, run in a Dungeon.

A game of cosmopolitan monsters with a 20+ year history of play in countries around the world.

A private performance space, where I've met amazing friends: amazing people, magicians, performers, stars of world renowned shows, artists, gamers, cyber security wizards, and more.

Community organized get togethers for Metafilter users.

Secret Meetups for Ingress Users.

I'm sure there are more things that nobody has invited me to, I mean there is underground, and there is the center of the earth, but I would imagine that Latitude is only the tip of the iceberg, a single cavern in a vast but hidden space.

Over/Under 1 orgy while in Latitude?