A few days before my birthday this year, I wrote this retrospective about Autumn Confest 2026.
I’m a hippie. Or I was for the past four weeks of setup, Confest and packdown. We here make up the precariat – the precariously balanced social class spanning all wealth levels, demographics and strata of society who oscillate between stability and impermanence in every sense of the word. Home, location, relationships, sexuality, appearance, income, mental health, career, work, diet, religion, ideology, politics, to name a few.
I am more of a hacker most days. The builders of systems, engineer of technology and platforms. Some days I am a hipster who weaves words into stories into designs into worlds. I’ve used both in my volunteering, presence and workshops at Confest.
But for the past four weeks I was a hippie and living out those alternative lifestyles to explore and experiment for a better way forward. And all of us are some combination of this triple HHH – hippie, hipster and hacker.
What we are as individuals isn’t everything. We are a product of our environment, friends, community, a constantly shifting mirage across time and sociocultural context. Deleuze calls this concept the “dividual”, or the person who is broken down and differentiable across multiple lenses.
Where now Confest? It too is always shifting and changing over decades. As the people who make it up come and go. But we can’t forget that from the start it was explicitly political – and it’s an explicitly political statement to declare “We want a better world, and we’re not afraid to try out what it looks like.” There will be disagreements, no doubt, and conflict. But there is a word for what we seek: a future that is just a little better tomorrow as a result of our efforts today. An acknowledgement that we may never be perfect and nor will the world.
We seek protopia.
(happy birthday to me 🥳)