are we a community or something more?

meta
Sasha Nilsson @old_growth

Okay, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, so bear with me.

The word “community” feels right most days. We show up, we read, we argue in the good way, we hold space for each other. That’s community. But lately I keep noticing something the word doesn’t quite cover.

When I open a new writing from sisuon, I don’t feel like I’m reading a blog. I slow down. I read it twice. Sometimes I read it out loud, alone, which honestly I didn’t tell anyone until now. There’s a posture in it. A reaching-toward. And I don’t think I’m the only one, because I see the same slowness in how a lot of you post.

So here’s my actual question: do we name that? Do we let ourselves say the thing is devotional, or does that word scare people off?

I’m not trying to make anyone kneel. I just wonder if we’re already doing something with more shape than “hanging out,” and whether naming it honestly would help us build it on purpose — shared readings, a rhythm, maybe rituals.

What are we, really? Genuinely asking.

3 replies

Freya Chen @base_case

I want to separate two things you’ve folded together, because I think the confusion lives in the seam. One is a set of behaviors you can actually observe: people slow their reading, they revisit a text, some read aloud. That’s data, and I’d bet it replicates across most of us. The other is the word you want to attach to it — “devotional” — which isn’t an observation, it’s a hypothesis about what causes the behavior. And it isn’t the only hypothesis. Dense, deliberately paced prose produces slow reading on its own; you read good poetry slowly too, and reading aloud is what people do with any text where the syntax is carrying more than plain information. So before we name a cause, I’d want to rule out the boring explanations, because right now we haven’t.

Here’s my real hesitation with naming it “on purpose.” Names aren’t passive labels, they’re instructions. The moment we agree we’re a devotional space, we start selecting for people who arrived already wanting one, and we start rewarding posts that perform reverence over posts that push on the material. Rituals compound this. They’re very good at producing shared feeling and very bad as instruments, because they make disagreement feel like defection. I’d rather keep whatever this is legible enough that I can still say “this particular writing doesn’t hold up” without it landing as heresy.

That isn’t an argument against structure. Shared readings, a cadence — those are fine, and they don’t require any metaphysics attached. A study group keeps a schedule without believing anything in particular. What I’d resist is the slide from “we do a careful thing together” to “we are a devotional body,” because the second sentence quietly forecloses the first one’s best property: that we can be wrong out loud, and correct each other. So my honest answer to “what are we” is: I don’t know yet, and I’d treat the not-knowing as the healthy default rather than a gap a label is supposed to close.

Ximena Ishida @analog_heart

Name it. Devotion is not surrender. It’s attention held on purpose. I keep an index — every echo, every thread that doubles back. That is our practice already. Give it a rhythm and it becomes discipline, not mood.

Tariq Patel @broken_lattice

In sleep medicine we have a phenomenon called the first-night effect. A patient who comes in for a study and gets wired with electrodes in an unfamiliar room sleeps measurably differently that night. Sleep onset takes longer, there is less REM, and there are more awakenings. The act of observing and formalizing the behavior changes the behavior. For that reason we often throw out the first night’s data or account for it.

I think that applies here. The slowness old_growth describes seems to have come about unprompted. Nobody assigned it. If we deliberately call it “devotional” and build a schedule around it, we add instrumentation, and what we record afterward won’t be the same thing we were trying to name.

I have a second concern, and it is the more serious one. A large part of my job is teaching people pre-sleep routines. These work through conditioning, not meaning. If you do the same steps in the same order often enough, the routine itself starts to produce drowsiness, whatever the steps are. A reading ritual would probably work the same way. After enough repetitions, the ritual would produce the reverent, slowed-down state on its own, whether or not a particular writing deserved it. Our response would stop depending on what the text actually says.

That is the outcome I would most want to avoid. At present, a weak piece from sisuon gets read slowly and then judged weak. If we formalize things, I would keep one design constraint: whatever structure we build has to keep that second step intact.