Grokkist Newsletter #90

Hey friends,

Lately, life has felt very full in the most human kind of way.

There’s been the ongoing process of adjusting to living with my new boyfriend, which has meant a lot more time spent actually living life instead of merely administrating it. New rhythms and routines. More quality time and emotional presence. More moments where the day disappears into conversation and laughter and the everyday intimacy of slowly building a shared life with someone.

It has also made me realise just how relationally dense Grokkist has become over the years.

Grokkist has always involved a huge amount of keeping tabs. Patiently tending relationships and holding context between people while following threads. Responding to introductions and opportunities and moments of emergence. A lot of invisible relational gardening.

And lately I’ve been feeling the limits of trying to hold too much of that personally.

So part of this season has involved beginning to ask for more help from within the community as I slowly adjust my own role and focus for the next stage of Grokkist.

I feel clearer now than I have in a long time about where we’re actually going. Some of that was explored in the previous newsletter around Grokkist v3, but clarity has a funny way of creating new tensions alongside new energy. Once you can see the shape of what wants to emerge, you also start noticing which parts of your current way of operating no longer quite fit, and there’s both a kind of grief and relief in that.

At the same time, something else entirely has been demanding my attention.

Over the past little while I’ve been deep inside a creative project that has ended up becoming a full album. There's a write-up about it in Grokkist Press this week.

What’s been interesting is that despite the long list of things I probably should have been doing, the album simply refused to be ignored. It kept insisting on being finished before anything else could seriously move forward.

I wear a lot of hats these days. Social entrepreneur. Systems builder. Facilitator. Relational gardener. Educational designer. Community weaver.

But the artist hat is one I’ve spent the least time inhabiting over the years, even though it has always been stubbornly present in the background.

And lately it feels like that part of me has been asking for more space as an actual mode of being. A way of metabolising experience and making inner worlds more legible.

The process of making the album also left me thinking a lot about the still-wild territory of AI-assisted creativity.

Most conversations about AI-assisted creative expression right now seem to swing between breathless hype, defensive apology, or sterile technical explanation. But seldom does anyone really capture what the process actually feels like when you get deep into it.

What interests me isn’t whether the tools are “good” or “bad”, or the endless discourse around AI slop and creative purity.

It’s more like this:

Here’s how a real person made a real thing, with real history inside it, using strange new tools imperfectly and intentionally.

The AI part is almost secondary to the emotional archaeology of it.

So the write-ups I’ll be sharing in our Press over the coming weeks are less about abstract debates and more like: Here’s what happened while I was making this strange little thing.

What fascinated me most while making the album was the experience of collaborating with something strange and imperfect while trying to excavate emotional material from different versions of myself.

Sometimes the machine would do something unexpected, and then I would respond to it as an artist.

At moments it almost felt like collaborating across time with younger versions of myself. Using strange new tools to reinterpret old emotional landscapes. A kind of temporal dialogue between selves.

That feels philosophically fascinating to me in a very grokkist kind of way, because tools change what kinds of inner conversations become possible. It also feels far more interesting than talking about AI and creativity purely in the abstract.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there are also some fairly significant visual changes coming across Grokkist over the coming weeks.

So don’t be too alarmed if the newsletter starts looking a little different, or if parts of the website and community space begin shifting around.

A lot has been brewing for a while now.

I probably won’t say too much about where things are heading yet because I still try to follow a personal sharing rule of “no plans, only prototypes”.

I’ve increasingly found that talking too much about future visions too early can create the illusion of movement instead of the reality of it. Sometimes all the dopamine gets mined from telling people about the thing instead of actually building it.

So I’d rather build things, test things, let people feel them, and then talk from direct experience afterwards.

That said, regular community members already got a glimpse into a few of the directions during the recent town hall call, which turned into a really rich conversation. You can catch the recording here.

Grokkist at the moment feels less like a social startup trying to scale and more like an ecosystem slowly becoming more itself. More textured and alive. More willing to let different parts emerge in their own timing.

And perhaps that’s part of what this season has been teaching me personally too.

That sometimes growth doesn’t always look like optimisation. Sometimes it looks like becoming a little more human again.

A little less like a numinous facilitator hovering somewhere in the background of Grokkist, and a little more like an actual flesh-and-blood person inside it.

Someone making art. Falling in love. Experimenting. Getting things wrong. Rearranging priorities. Trying to build meaningful things while also properly inhabiting a life.

I think Grokkist will probably feel healthier for that too.

Allowing in greater personality and texture. More signs of the actual humans inside the ecosystem.

And for better or worse, one of those personalities is me.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

Fresh and Featured Pressings

The Lighthouse Never Sleeps

By Danu Poyner (7 min read)

A hypervigilant lullaby written across twenty-five years.

Read the article ↗

To be seen with the Eyes of Love | Letter 7: Dance of Lead+Follow

By Margarita Steinberg (9 min read)

What kind of life would love lavish on you?

Read the article ↗

Balancing Perspectives

By Larry Jordan (5 min read)

Sometimes the path between naivete and nihilism can feel razor thin, but a rich world awaits in the tension between ignorance and imagination.

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• Dance of Attraction | Letter 8: Dance of Lead+Follow (Margarita Steinberg, 13 min read) Attraction can feel almost magical in its power and ineffability, but even the most arcane magics can be mastered with enough practice.
• Surveillance and control (Rodney King, 4 min read) – It is often argued that privacy is a small price to pay for progress, but is this truly a necessary sacrifice or more of a Faustian bargain?

Upcoming Events

Featured Gatherings

🟢 Shoes-On Studio: The Ethics of Persuasion

🗓️ Tue 12 May | 2pm–4pm ET (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.

Use it to:

• Talk through a talk (or a spark of one)
• Get help shaping your story, structure, or message
• Practice speaking off the cuff, just to see what comes out
• Ask for input or feedback on something you’re working on
• Learn something new — from practical tips to the psychology and rhetoric behind why great speaking works the way it does

Event Details and RSVP ↗

🟢 Reimagine Education Workshop Series #1

🗓️ Sun 24 May | 5pm – 6.30pm CEST (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Richard Bennet and Emily Jane Dewoolfson

What if the foundation of good education isn’t productivity or knowledge but love?

Love as attention. Love as curiosity and care to explore ideas that are different to our own. Love as the belief that another person is capable of becoming more than they currently imagine.

The Reimagining Education Workshop series is a space for curious minds, skeptics, dreamers, and practitioners to step into conversation about what learning could feel like if it were more human, more intentional, and more alive.

Our first inquiry is both simple and unsettling:

Can education transmit values without indoctrination? If so, how?

Together, we’ll explore questions that sit beneath the surface of most learning spaces but rarely get named:

• What does it mean to consent to learn?
• Where is the line between guidance and imposition?
• Can love act as a unifying force in education beyond ideology?
• How might we design learning spaces where values are encountered, questioned, and lived rather than spoonfed?

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Gatherings

• 14 May | 🟣 Creative Space
• 21 May | 🟢 PhilosophyGym @ Grokkist
• 27 May | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge
• 1 Jun | 🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon

#1 - The myth of the informed citizen

The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Communication and confusion.

New CartographiesNicholas Carr

The author traces a recurring fantasy of modernity: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would create wiser citizens and more democratic societies. Instead, we're shown how every expansion of information has also produced new forms of confusion, distraction, propaganda, and overload.

At the centre of the piece is Walter Lippmann’s idea of the “pseudo-environment”: the simplified mental world people construct from fragments, headlines, stereotypes, and second-hand information. Carr follows this thread through the rise of mass media, wartime propaganda, cognitive psychology, and social media, arguing that more information has never guaranteed greater understanding.

It also echoes Evgeny Morozov’s critique in The Net Delusion: the persistent belief that more connectivity naturally produces more freedom, wisdom, or democratic flourishing. Again and again, technologies marketed as tools of liberation become instruments for distraction, manipulation, tribalism, and spectacle.

“We live in its ruins, overwhelmed by the information that was meant to enlighten us, imprisoned by the data that describe us.”

#2 - Sculpting with tree sap and time

15-min documentary following Kyoto-based artist Mine Tanigawa through the painstaking process of creating sculptural works from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for more than 7,000 years. Less a “making of” than a portrait of attention: watercolour sketches becoming digital forms, raw tree sap transformed through layers of colour, polishing, curing, and time.

The piece also visits a traditional lacquer workshop where urushi is still refined using inherited techniques and machinery. Each finished sculpture takes months to complete, carrying traces of flowing water, clouds, and the landscapes surrounding Kyoto.

#3 - Iris Murdoch and love as a way of seeing

This essay revisits Iris Murdoch not just as a novelist but as a philosopher pushing back against the thin, hyper-rational models of human life that came to dominate 20th century thought. Matthew Crawford traces Murdoch’s argument that morality isn’t primarily about abstract reasoning or isolated acts of will, but about attention: the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people, and oneself more clearly.

What makes Murdoch feel unexpectedly contemporary is her insistence that love is not just an emotion but an epistemic capacity. To love something, in her account, is to attend to it without immediately reducing it to usefulness, projection, or self-interest. Crawford follows this thread through art, ethics, beauty, and religion, asking whether “the good” might be something real rather than merely subjective preference.

#4 - The longest-serving understudy in theatre history

A conversation with Clive Marlowe, the longest-serving understudy in theatre history. After 15 years covering the same roles in The Mousetrap, Marlowe reflects on the strange psychology of always waiting in the wings: living with uncertainty, stepping suddenly into the spotlight, and learning how to let go once the moment passes.

Alongside stories of missed cues, show-stopping disasters, and performing through COVID, the episode opens into candid reflections on addiction, isolation, recovery, and the difficulty of building stability inside a profession built on instability.

#5 - Hanging by a thread

A cow tips the scales at the edge of society. (6 mins)

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)

Parting thoughts...

“My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones” 
— Elena Ferrante

“Elegance is the only beauty that never fades”
– Audrey Hepburn