Syzygy

When I sit with the question of why a festival at all—why spend months on coordination, why convene a few hundred people in the forest when everything around us pushes toward screens, feeds, and algorithms—the answer always comes back to IRL as immune response.

We’re living through overlapping epidemics: loneliness, doomscrolling, ambient dread about AI and automation. The feeds promise connection but deliver fragmentation. Byung-Chul Han calls it the digital swarm: isolated individuals clicking in parallel but never forming a “we.” What a festival can still do is produce that “we”—a fragile but vital collective presence.

That’s what FEST is: a machine for collective effervescence. Durkheim described the electricity generated by bodies in proximity, the exaltation of shared time. We felt it. IRL is still the most ancient networked technology we have.

The four questions of SYZYGY—about trajectories, oracles, mythmakers, and memes—were less about answers than about staging paradox. Predictive models vs. unpredictable futures. The known vs. the unknowable. AI’s simulations vs. human serendipity. A syzygy isn’t harmony—it’s alignment under strain.

I think often about sustainability—financial, ecological, emotional. FEST is small by design. Hundreds, not thousands. It won’t scale like Coachella, and it shouldn’t. The intimacy is the point. A weekend that feels like a secret, not a spectacle.

IRL still matters. In fact, it might matter more than ever. Against the loneliness epidemic, against the fatigue of the feeds, against the flattening force of predictive models, we stage our own unpredictable futures. That’s why we gather in the forest.