I Was Sexually Assaulted At Vibecamp

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on being sexually assaulted in 2022 at the first Vibecamp, and how that experience impacted me.

Content warnings for depictions of sexual assault and PTSD.

Background information that may be helpful is Erik Torenberg’s post on the ideals of Gray Tribe. A large amount of people in the Vibecamp community / The Network State movement identify as belonging to this social group:

I was sexually assaulted at Vibecamp 1 in 2022.

I was waiting at a bar, my left hand holding my pixelwhip. I wished I had gone to get a drink earlier, given how big the crowd was.

That’s when he touched my chest. It lasted for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds. The rest of the night is a series of places I cried.

I went out by the lake, because I wanted to be away from everyone. I laid my pixelwhip down, still activated. I saw some ants crawl across it. For a second I wondered what it must feel like to have the ground shake and a gargantuan halo of splintered light appear, out of nowhere.

I very much wanted to be one of those ants, so I could cry and not have to be judged or otherwise have to answer for my state of emotion. I envied their imperceptibility to all the humans around them.

I cried. I eventually stumbled back to my cabin, praying no one would be there. I desperately wanted to never see another human being again. Thank god it’s fucking empty, I thought.

I cried myself to sleep.

After Vibecamp ended, there was one central AirBnB party back in Austin which I decided to go to before flying back to Vancouver.

I got there early, and I felt weird. Weird as in something I hadn’t felt before. I was diagnosed with social anxiety roughly 15 years ago, and it’s extremely well managed. I was feeling something new, which I would later come to understand was the first manifestations of PTSD around what happened to me.

I feel anxiety as a background hum of unwanted electrical energy. Mostly annoying, but still there. That new feeling was like a hand closing around my chest and squeezing over and over again. It was slight at the time, but it was there.

I muddled through until the end of that party. I didn’t want to leave early and make a bad impression, but I also wasn’t able to fake having a good time when I wasn’t. A nice little life conversation with Sonya got me through the worst of it.

I didn’t tell the organizers what happened that weekend because I really didn’t see the point: I had some vague picture of some beardo in my mind and the only thing I really remembered well was his voice. It already happened, and trying to barrel through feelings that women have after men touch them without consent was not something I was ready to do.

This was my first experience with a male touching me in a sexual way without consent and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I only knew that I wanted to stop feeling bad. I wrote something about my overall experience and described what happened to me as ‘nonconsensual touch’. I felt better.

I decided to go to Vibecamp 2 in spite of what happened at the first one. I was deep into my social entrepreneur arc, nearing the end of my first 2-year term as a director for The New Forms Media Society which hosts yearly events in Vancouver. Emergent events were still fun and exciting to me.

Most men who engaged in conversation during the week/end approached me respectfully. There were two exceptions. One was a man trying to mislead me into consuming GHB. (From what I’ve observed on Twitter: GHB was allegedly a problem, again, at Vibecamp 3).

Two was someone who approached me in the dark corner of a music venue.

I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and needed to sit for a bit. I’ve been recently reminded what the reality is for women, and clockable trans women at events. I didn’t explicitly write about one other thing that happened to me during the Boiler Room event in Vancouver:

Men appearing around a woman the moment she looks vulnerable. It’s a sad fact of life for women at public events, and an occurrence I’ve learned to watch for. Two was one of those men.

I had an extremely bad feeling as soon as I felt his presence. It seemed like they moved towards me unreasonably quickly, and my body instantly sent up alarm bells.

My brain said If a consent monitor was here, they would stop this. I ignored it, and realized that a dark corner of a venue was better than walking a darker path back to my cabin alone.

I remember him standing next to me, and giving him my best ice queen stare. Then I remember him sitting down next to me and sliding closer. I froze. I flashed back to the guy at Vibegala 2 who touched the girl I was cuddling with without asking, and to the man who touched me at Vibecamp 1. I remembered the stories of sexual misconduct in the rationalist community.

I thought about the story a close friend told me as we were on the way to Bass Coast in 2019: What a guy did to her in a club, and how much it fucked her up for a long time. Something in me unfroze.

I will not let this happen to me. NOT AGAIN.

I wanted to scream, but something held me back. I managed a low-key yell instead:

Can you fuck off please? You’re making me uncomfortable.

He did.

I went on with my business for the rest of the Vibecamp 2 weekend. At one point, a woman remarked that she felt like prey, which led to an impromptu women’s circle. A decompression session was organized in a park after the event.

The important points are: I raised my concern, and was later interrupted while speaking by another attendee. The romantic plight of autistic men was raised. I was also asked in what seemed like an accusatory tone whether I had told the guy who creeped on me ‘no’ or not.

From personal experience sitting in the seats the Vibecamp organizers occupy, I know what proper handling of someone reporting a safety-related incident looks like.

This was not normal.

I would never have let things devolve into a discussion on gender. I probably would have stopped past-me and redirected it to a private conversation elsewhere. I might have said something about sensitive things in the circle should not be repeated elsewhere.

I went with the organizers back to their AirBnB to hang out before I left for Vancouver. I checked Twitter and saw a thread from a Vibecamp programming contributor and well-known person in the community with a sizable Twitter presence.

Did you hit on a girl without being pushy or trying to conceal your intentions, only for her to be upset about men being 'creepy'? If so, know you're not creepy! She's outsourcing her own agency at you, expects u to anticipate her needs and blames you for her lack of boundaries

(this does not apply if you socially punish her for being turned down, even if it's slight coldness that wouldn't be there otherwise, or if you're in a situation where she has reasonable fear of punishment, e.g. if you have power over her like being her boss or teacher)

Also, there's the unfortunate fact that by expressing distress about men's interest in her, she's signaling that she's sexually attractive and sufficiently feminine to warrant male interest, but also high status enough that she can perform rejections. U might be fodder for this.

I couldn’t believe it. I felt incredibly violated. The individual in question has since confirmed someone had told them what I had said, in an anonymized fashion.

If I found out someone in my community had been made to feel unsafe by a man, I would not have taken it as an opportunity to commence gender discourse on Twitter dot com. I felt like placing trust in that community had been met with almost instant ridicule.

It seemed to me that a message was being sent. I’ve been in a leadership position in the Vancouver music scene for 3 years now. A friend of mine, D, was the woman who eventually got media to talk about the ‘Prince of Pot’ Marc Emery being a sex pest at Cannabis Culture HQ.

I know what happens to women that bring up these issues publicly, or even privately. Victims of sexual violence are often disbelieved and humiliated when they tell their story. The Globe and Mail’s Unfounded story is a good example. The questioning I received in that circle was minor in comparison, but it still made me feel like I had done something wrong.

I felt a clear message was being sent about what happens to women who raise safety concerns in the community. I would like to think it would not have happened if I had raised it with the Vibecamp org team directly.

After I published an account of the above in December of 2023, I was told by the org team that the safety team would be in touch with me, which never happened.

I do think that it’s easy to tell others they’re doing something wrong without providing solutions. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has run a music festival for 3 years: This starts with policy. From Vibecamp’s website:

This is not policy that creates accountability. The only thing that seems to have changed since I attended Vibecamp 2 and wrote about it in December is the release of a memes-based manifesto.

This is Bass Coast’s safety policy. It is lengthy, and Vibecamp isn’t comparable to a long-running EDM music festival. I’m including it for some baseline, and because part of my expertise comes from working with a consultant who has worked with Bass Coast on their policies.

The New Forms code of conduct is here. For the record: In this and any other posts related to my experiences at Vibecamp, I am speaking for myself, and not on behalf of The New Forms Media Society. The relevant section on safety is below:

This is policy. Specifically, this tells attendees:

• They are in control of what happens once they decide to report an incident.

• The specific sequence of specific steps that will happen.

• Anonymous reporting is an option.

Accountability is created by posting these steps publicly between events and attendees. An event is saying that these steps will be followed every time, regardless of who you are.

Speaking from personal experience: Having your boundaries violated turns your world upside down. In that moment: you feel guilt, shame, and just want someone to listen to you and maybe hold your hand.

Being that vulnerable with relative strangers is terrifying. It was still terrifying to me, and I knew most of the org team.

New Forms also utilizes the REES reporting tool. Allowing attendees to anonymously report incidents is crucial. If Vibecamp had something similar, I would have used it instead of bringing what happened to me up at the decompression session.

It goes without saying that I would also not have ignored someone bringing up an incident publicly, and I would certainly not have promised them something that I never delivered on.

The final thing I would have done differently is making a public statement from the organization’s Twitter account. It sidesteps the kind of victim blaming that often goes on when news of an incident spreads. I felt like the lack of it added a little wink at the end of the zero tolerance statement.

I think that if you want to make safe assumptions about how much events are going to support you, you should regard their safety teams as HR: They have incentives to protect the event and do the least amount possible. That’s not what all of them do, but attendees should level their expectations accordingly.

I spoke publicly about being physically assaulted via a violent shove at FWBFest in 2023 for the same reason I wrote about Vibecamp: By their codes of conduct, I didn’t have confidence that the events would handle things well. I wanted other people to know, especially other trans people, about what my experience was like.

Friends With Benefits handled what happened far better than Vibecamp did. They followed up with me the next day, told me what their limitations in investigation were, and listened to my story.

Even if you don’t believe an attendee, there is a bare minimum of effort if you want to run an event responsibly. Regardless of when, or how you find out that something happen, there is something you owe attendees. I would have felt a lot better over the past year if I had received a timely ‘we don’t believe you and we’re not going to change anything’.

The community that surrounds Vibecamp has popularized the You Can Just Do Things mantra. There is a dark side to that saying that I’ve lived over the past few years.

The consequences for events not doing the bare minimum can be severe, and life-long for victims. I’ve seen friends that have dealt with cPTSD for years upon years and are still prevented from engaging in a lot of life activities the rest of us take for granted. It has certainly had a life-changing impact on me.

Rewinding: I left the web2 startup I was working at a few months after Vibecamp 2 in October of 2023, partially because I wanted to be back in web3. The other reason that I didn’t talk about was how bad my PTSD had become.

I started to hate talking to other people. I became jumpy and hyper-vigilant, especially when an unknown shadow crossed my line of vision. I’m still jumpy when I run into someone unexpectedly in my apartment building. In large groups of people, the first thing I did was scan for threats. Especially if there were a lot of men around.

Things are better now. I’m around 12 appointments into trauma therapy, and I’m mostly okay with being in public and interacting with strangers if still having some vigilance around men I don’t know. I’m lucky; a lot of people who suddenly find themselves in my position aren’t able to get the help they need or get back to functioning so quickly.

A lot of what was traumatic for me was the lack of response from the event and the low-key humiliation from the surrounding community. That community uses Twitter as its mycelial network, and on reflection I really couldn’t think of a worse medium for occurrences of sexual violence to be litigated.

No one actually speaks directly to you, and everything is delivered in subtext. It felt like some awful combination of being pointed and laughed at and being regarded as a piece of conversational furniture.

In some ways, things are still bad. I spent about 20 minutes writing part of this post on a recent plane flight, and was almost shaking in the back of the Uber on the way home. That’s the really insidious thing about PTSD, even after taking steps to treat it you never know what might trigger it or how bad it might get.

I sat there, feeling all that guilt and shame I thought I had left behind coming back. I thought about a friend in that community who had told me once that a reason people largely didn’t care about what happened to me might be that they consider a grope as the ante to womanhood.

I also can’t separate my experience of going through gender transition from what happened to me. There are so many things, like unspoken codes of silence that cis women learn as they go through adolescence at a young age. Trans women go through this really terrifying process of trial and error.

I hate using that word, error. I hate that it’s broadly frowned upon to talk about these things publicly. A few women have cautioned me about speaking publicly: There has never been any reason why. Only the reason that what women who talk about it go through is horrific and not something that they wanted to happen to me.

People at the Farcaster conference Farcon earlier this year said I looked like I was hunting. This means my hyper-vigilance is very noticeable. I don’t know whether that’s ever going to go away fully, and it makes me really sad. It’s a kind of re-violation in that your unconscious behaviour is permanently altered by the actions of others.

There’s a really awful catch 22 to the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault. I’ve found out, via personal experience, the many good reasons women don’t report it. This, in turn, allows people who need it to be a rare occurrence, claim that it seldom happens.

Then there’s the perception of false accusations. They are rare. Duke Lacrosse happened; that does not mean that women wield accusations of sexual violence as some kind of weapon. That perception often operates unchallenged in ‘niche’ communities. No woman wants to go through the trial via public opinion that results in telling their story publicly.

What happened after I talked about reminded me of what happened to D. I wasn’t out as a trans woman at the time, so I got to hear the worst of what people said about her. What men say when they think they hold sway. It scared me at the time and I realize now it should have also served as a bit of insight for what would happen to me.

Gatekeeping vis a vis the Perfect Victim is real. Every time some errant Tweet would come into my view from one of the life coaches in that community about the evils of dishonest feminists and how punishing them was good, actually, I felt sick. Telling your story should empower you; instead it often makes you vulnerable to being deconstructed by people who don’t know you.

I don’t know why it took a year for things to get really bad, but they did. I had some of the most incredible professional opportunities land in my lap in 2023 and 2024 and had to shoulder them operating at maybe 30% primarily due to the physical actions of 2 men.

If there’s one thing I’ve taken away, and I’d like you to take away from my experience is that you should always trust in what people are willing, or unwilling to put down on paper.

With Network States, that starts with its manifesto and the person behind it. Balaji Srinivasan has been vocal about woke-captured institutions and the need to exit from them. Policy I consider responsible and a bare minimum is considered too ‘woke’ in some circles. Vibecamp explicitly said they don’t like rules governing behaviour, and I wasn’t really listening.

With traditional festivals, there are often funding sources like arts councils that take into effect how events handle safety issues in doling out funding. That’s not a thing in the land of network states, and instead it’s largely the whims of community leaders.

Should I have ‘known better’, or at least been a little less surprised about what happened? Probably. I saw it happen to a friend. D is one of the bravest women I’ve ever known, and I think in retrospect I should have known I wasn’t brave enough to weather everything and just let it go instead.

This is where ChatGPT says I need a strong conclusion, but being honest I don’t really have one. Just today, a crypto VC was revealed to have tried to drug a woman. It took video evidence of it to make news.

A man tried to kiss a woman without consent at an event in Dubai some time ago, and the industry was largely indifferent. This stuff is normalized. You can only say something makes you sick so many times before you realize it’s not changing.

So, my strong conclusion is that women should be neurotic, paranoid, over-sensitive, and every other word that’s been flung in my direction over the past year. You do not want the kind of permanent scars that a million I’m sorry that happened to you’s won’t fix.

I don’t think this is changing in my lifetime, and I’m really starting to think it’s never going to change. I need more than two hands to count all the women who have told me of some instance of sexual harassment or sexual assault that’s happened to them, often in professional settings.

It is far, far better to be labelled a shrieking feminist harpie than to be able to fully empathize with my story because something similar has happened to you. I live with both of these things: I really hope you never know either of them.