A Landscape Begins to Form

Hey friends,

The first of the visual and structural changes I mentioned last time are now beginning to land.

Most notably, this newsletter has officially moved over from our Press platform (Ghost) onto the Grokkist Network itself (Circle). On the practical side, this means fewer duplicated mailing lists, easier discussion integration, and generally less awkwardness behind the scenes. But it also opens up something more interesting architecturally.

It means the Press can increasingly become fully itself as a publishing space, while the Network becomes ever-more relational, exploratory, and community-shaped in its design.

There may still be a few teething troubles while everything settles into its new configuration. If something arrives twice, appears somewhere odd, or behaves unexpectedly, thanks for your patience while we smooth things out. These changes are laying foundations for a much richer ecosystem over time.

And speaking of richer ecosystems…

Grokkist Realms are back — and now there’s a map

One of the more delightful things we’ve released recently is the new interactive Grokkist Realms Map.

Some of you will remember the original Realms experiment from last year. The core idea always felt right to us: not organising Grokkist around rigid categories or silos, but around different atmospheres of engagement. Different terrains for different modes of curiosity, creativity, inquiry, embodiment, changemaking, and connection.

The implementation, however, never quite landed. So we quietly took it back apart for a while. Now it’s back — this time as an explorable illustrated world map.

Explore the Grokkist Realms interactive map

You can zoom around the landscape, click into the different Realms, explore associated spaces and projects, and generally wander the ecosystem in a way that feels much more like discovering a world than navigating a platform.

Underneath it all sits a whole new layer of experimentation involving Circle’s evolving API ecosystem, MCP integrations, and agentic coding workflows that are suddenly making tiny-team worldbuilding possible in ways that would have been wildly unrealistic not long ago. Learn more here.

More than anything though, the map feels like the first visible sign of a direction we’ve wanted for a very long time: making Grokkist feel increasingly inhabitable rather than merely usable. Less like a website to navigate and more like a landscape to explore.

If you haven’t opened it yet, genuinely give yourself a few minutes to poke around.

PhilosophyGym pauses for the summer

The current PhilosophyGym series recently wrapped up with a reflective session looking back on what’s emerged through the experiment so far. It’s now heading into a northern hemisphere summer hiatus before returning refreshed in a few months’ time.

One of the things I’ve appreciated most about PhilosophyGym has been the way it creates room for inquiry without demanding premature certainty. It’s become less about “having positions” and more about building a shared capacity to sit with complexity together without immediately flattening it into conclusions. That feels increasingly valuable these days.

Reimagining education as an act of love

Today also marks the beginning of the first Reimagine Education Lab workshop series led by Richard Bennet and Jane.

What I appreciate about this project is that it refuses to treat education primarily as a technical optimisation problem. The underlying premise is much more relational than that. The series keeps circling around the possibility that good education may fundamentally be rooted in forms of attention, curiosity, care, consent, and belief in one another’s unfolding capacities.

The workshops themselves are intentionally exploratory rather than lecture-driven. Participants map ideas together, form affinity groups around shared tensions and questions, and collaboratively imagine what more alive forms of learning might actually look like in practice.

Very grokkist territory.

Reimagining music, too

And staying with the education thread: Jane is also launching a brand new five-week live course beginning July 5 called Reimagine Music.

This one feels especially aligned with the broader spirit of what we’re trying to cultivate around here.

Partly because it’s about music. But more deeply because it’s about reclaiming relationship from behind systems of authority, expertise, and gatekeeping.

Jane writes very candidly about her own complicated relationship with formal music education and the ways musical knowledge often becomes entangled with hierarchy, exclusion, and the performance of mastery. The course emerges from several years of trying to translate those insights into something more alive, accessible, and human.

What she’s building isn’t “music appreciation” in the conventional sense. It’s an invitation to recover music as something participatory rather than distant. Something embodied rather than abstract. Something we belong to rather than something we audition for permission to understand.

The course explores music as philosophy, culture, embodiment, and creative practice. It looks at how musical canons get constructed, how meaning moves through sound and bodies, and what it might mean to create or listen without needing institutional legitimacy first.

One line from Jane’s announcement has stayed with me ever since reading it:

“Music is ours. Music is human.” That feels like the heart of it.

The course will run across five live weekly sessions from July 5 through August 2, with optional creative projects and a typically grokkist teaching style that treats participants less as students receiving expertise and more as co-explorers figuring things out together.

Meanwhile, a UK coddiwomple…

I’ll also be heading off to the UK during June and July for a bit of a wandering grokkist tour — visiting various UK-based grokkists, sharing conversations and meals, and seeing what emerges when internet people become geographically real.

Looking forward to sending dispatches from the road next time around.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

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