Grokkist Newsletter #80

Hey friends,

Porousness keeps tapping me on the shoulder — something I keep noticing out of the corner of my eye while doing other things, and only later realising it’s been rearranging how I think about Grokkist.

It showed up unmistakably in this week's Coddiwomple Design session as part of the Online Facilitation Unconference.

We began by taking our time — longer than polite society recommends — to hear how people were arriving: sore bodies, crowded minds, tiny anxieties, quiet hopes. Before anyone named it, the room had already leaned toward honesty. And then something subtle happened. People changed what they were going to say mid-sentence because the moment asked something different of them. The invisible architecture of attention shifted. The room revealed its own intelligence.

That, to me, is porousness — the membrane between self and moment becoming more permeable, allowing the collective to do something no individual planned.

It’s the same quiet magic I see in some of the spaces emerging in the network.

The new Shoes-On Studio, for instance, with its invitation to show up barefoot and find your voice in public through practice rather than polish — its first session is coming up, and it’s worth being there at the beginning.

And in our PhilosophyGym, where we considered 'what is worth knowing' and that knowing is something we do with our whole body, our relationships, our entanglements — knowledge that changes us as much as we change it.

All of these hinge on a kind of permeability. Not looseness, not vagueness — just breathability.

And yet the broader world of “community building” tells you to do the opposite. Capture attention. Retain users. Tighten funnels. Optimise containers. Don’t let anything leak.

But Grokkist is full of people who move through our spaces like weather. Some stay close. Some drift for months, even years. Some are comets — brilliant, intense, unforgettable presences who blaze in for a season and then arc away into their own orbit, only to reappear unexpectedly, somehow exactly on time.

The more I pay attention, the more I realise: the porousness is the ecology. It’s not the flaw — it’s the design.

A community with membranes so tight nothing can enter or leave is a terrarium. It looks stable, but the air slowly goes stale.

A community with membranes that breathe — allowing people to arrive when they can and leave when they need to — is more like a tidepool: constantly refreshed, constantly surprising, constantly in conversation with the wider sea.

It’s a design challenge, building spaces where you can’t predict who will be in the room or what shape they’ll be in when they arrive. But it’s also what keeps the whole thing alive — the room changing us, us changing the room.

And in the middle of all this thinking about membranes and permeability, something else happened that feels like a very personal experiment in porousness.

I accidentally made an album with an AI.

It was a lot of fun — I’ve written about it in this week’s Pressings if you want the full story.

One minute I was testing a tool; the next I found myself in a creative partnership with a machine that was unsettlingly responsive. It didn’t imitate me — it met me. It handed back something that was undeniably mine and undeniably not mine, as if it had reached into the deeper archive I don’t usually bring into daylight.

I still don’t quite know what to call that experience — collaboration, ventriloquism, sorcery, cheating, a mirror. You might hate it. You might have many thoughts. It’s something worth being ambivalent about. I invite you to be curious with it — and with my reflections on it.

What I do know is this: it made me feel more porous than I’m used to. As though the membrane between my interior world and the wider one had thinned just enough for something unexpected to enter.

And it left me with the same quiet truth that keeps resurfacing across all these spaces:

Grokkist isn’t a club for people who already think alike. It’s an ecology for people who are willing to be met and be changed by what they meet.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

Fresh and Featured Pressings

🎧 Grokkistry in Motion

By Danu Poyner (34 min listen / 32 minute read)

A full-length album made with Suno, exploring curiosity, care, and the surprising aliveness of human–AI creativity.

Explore the project ↗

From Non-Places to relational depth: AI as a mirror for reflection

By Evelien Verschroeven (6 min read)

Can our awareness breathe life into even the most transactional spaces?

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• Just Shy (Peter Gilderdale, 3 min read) – Call it what you like, but not everyone grows towards the spotlight.
• Growing Trees (Peter Gilderdale, 5 min read) – How do we find the patience to tend to a future we may never see blossom?
• Euro Book Trek Part 3 (Alan Raw, 15 min read) – A literary and climate-themed journey through Europe, one bookshop at a time.

Upcoming Events

Featured Gatherings

🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon

🗓️ Mon 1 Dec | 7pm–9pm UK time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Alan Raw

A monthly gathering for creative companions on the writing path.

The Grokkist Writing Salon is a warm, gently-structured space for people who write—or want to—where words are welcome in all their messy, meaningful, unfinished glory. It’s for those who care about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it, and who don’t want to do it alone.

Whether you’re journaling your way through a life chapter, polishing a piece for publication, or just wanting to play with language and ideas, there’s room for you here.

What we’ll do

• Check in – arrive as you are, share what’s moving in your creative world
• Read aloud – bring something you’re working on (or don’t!) and receive reflective, resonant feedback
• Play together – create collaboratively through prompts or impromptu story games
• Try a tool – each session introduces a creative lens or framework you can use in your writing
• Circle of care – open space to ask for help, spark collaborations, or share what’s next

Event Details and RSVP ↗

🟢 "Shoes-On" Studio – a space for finding your voice in public

🗓️ Tue 9 Dec | 12pm–2pm New York time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Kendra Fee

Shoes-On Studio is an open space for anyone who wants to get more comfortable speaking in public—whether that means giving a talk, leading a session, joining a panel, raising your hand, or just saying what you mean when it matters.

You don’t need to be “a speaker” to belong here. You just need a voice—or a desire to find yours.

🗓 What happens in the monthly sessions?
Each live session blends discussion, exploration, and practice. Expect something like this:

• 👋 Settle In + Topic Chat
   A shared conversation around a speaking theme or challenge (like: “What makes an idea resonate?” or “What actually helps with nerves?”)
• 🟪 Grok-n-Go
   A short, off-the-cuff speaking game. Just you and your voice, in the moment.
• 🟩 Studio Space
   A few folks share something they’re working on and choose what kind of support they want —
  → Prep (talk it out — shape the idea before you really get started)
  → Practice (try it out — build comfort and flow)
  → Perspective (sharpen it up— refine message and delivery)
  → Play (mess around — experiment, exaggerate, or just have fun seeing what happens)
• 🪶 Reflect + Rhythm
   Space to debrief, celebrate, and help shape what we want for next time.

You can come to speak, to support, or to soak it in. Everyone’s voice matters — including the quiet ones.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Gatherings

• 2 Dec | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone B]
• 17 Dec | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone A]
• 18 Dec | 🟢 PhilosophyGym @ Grokkist

#1 - Simone Weil on the generosity of attention

Simone Weil Against Distraction

For Simone Weil, attention was akin to prayer.

THR Web Features

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Simone Weil writes about attention not as effortful focus, but as an emptying out—a waiting, a letting-go of expectation so something real can arise. “Our thought must be empty, waiting, not seeking anything.” For Weil, attention is a kind of prayer—not necessarily religious, but a full-bodied receptivity to whatever is. For those who already know that presence is the real work, this piece reads less like a provocation and more like a mirror. A quiet affirmation that what you’ve sensed all along is not only valid, but vital.

#2 - When we learn what we weren't ready to know

Not all knowledge nourishes. Three frogs face a dilemma: open the mysterious box, or leave it closed? They argue, hesitate, and eventually give in to curiosity. What they find is knowledge—but not the kind they can integrate. A short parable (4.5 mins) about the difference between information and wisdom and the cost of opening too soon, or without readiness. The question isn’t just ‘what do you know?’ but ‘what knows you?'

#3 - The scammer next door

The Scammer Next Door — The Dial

In India, an era of glaring inequality is also a golden age of graft.

The DialSnigdha Poonam

Scam culture, aspiration, and the economics of desperation. A sociological detective story about the lives that produce and are consumed by the mechanics of the scam economy. Journalist Snigdha Poonam traces the roots of these schemes not to individual greed but to a system that fails to provide dignified livelihoods while endlessly broadcasting the dream of upward mobility.

We meet young men who run call centre cons from their bedrooms, women offered better pay to push lottery lies than they’d ever earn in formal jobs, and an entire cultural script that treats ‘getting ahead’ as a matter of ingenuity over integrity. “Fraud flows freely: from top to bottom, yes, but also from bottom to top, side to side, underground to over, in endless loops of deceit.”

#4 - The traffic light and the choreography of control

How the traffic light changed the world

The traffic lights of today have come a long way from the mechanical, gas-powered device first unveiled in London almost 160 years ago. But will they survive in a world of driverless cars?

Engelsberg ideasKeith Lowe

A long-view essay exploring the traffic light as an evolving symbol of modernity’s attempts to choreograph chaos. What began as a towering, gas-lit semaphore in Victorian London (that promptly exploded) evolved into a universal system that now mediates motion, rhythm, and control across societies. Through vignettes of exploding prototypes, colour-coding debates, and AI-driven intersections, we’re reminded that even the smallest systems—like who gets to go and when—are full of historical contingency and cultural negotiation.

#5 - What can I make with an old traffic light?

Laura Kampf turns found objects into functional curiosities with a signature mix of wit, grit, and industrial poetry. In this video (12 mins), she drags an old traffic light out of the LA River and lets the object slowly reveal that it wants to become a toy for her daughter. It’s part build video, part philosophical sketchbook—where the process is the point, and purpose is what emerges from play. If you’ve just read the history of traffic lights as tools of order and control, this is a satisfying turn: the system reimagined as scrap, and scrap reimagined as story.

Grokkist is a living ecosystem — 🟢 free to enter, powered by members 🟣.

If you’d like to go deeper, you can join as a member, explore Signature Projects, or work with Danu.

Become a Grokkist Member ($99/yr or $27/qtr)

A pair of parting thoughts...

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.” ― Martin Buber

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” ― E.M. Forster