The Liminal Web: A Technological View

What is this thing called the ‘Liminal web’? In this post I’ll try to both introduce the idea and to sketch out a new way of approaching it from a technological angle.

Yes, in plain factual terms, we’re talking about the online ecosystem of thinkers and community-builders that emerged between 2015 and 2020, around a handful of podcasts and youtube channels such as Future thinkers, Emerge, The Jim Rutt Show, The Stoa, and Rebel Wisdom.

But what that description leaves out is what really matters: the ideas, norms, and practices that people within the community care about, and which in some sense unite them into a thing that’s worth naming.

We can get clearer on these, I suggest, by homing in on the different meanings of liminal that are in play here.

A time between worlds

As Joe Lightfoot notes in the much-cited post that defined the Liminal Web back in 2021, “one definition of the word is ‘to occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” and for him this connects with a core theme he finds in this space: the idea of “a new kind of regenerative culture”.

And this does seem a red thread that pulls together key ideas in the space: we are living in a time between worlds, between Game A and Game B, where a second renaissance and new forms of collective sense-making are needed to address the metacrisis and the meaning crisis.

But the threshold between cultural epochs is not the only one that’s relevant here.

Between self and other

Consider the threshold between two people, between self and other. The theologian Martin Buber described how by entering into an ‘I-thou’ relationship with another, one crosses into a space that he called ‘the between’.

This canonical liminal space shows up in the Liminal Web in the form of practices like authentic relating, microsolidarity, circling, insight dialogue, essence noting, and Joanna Macy’s communal rituals.

These are not just nodes in Joe’s map of the web, they’re the basis of practices used in video calls and in-person meetings in many liminal communities - where they serve both a quest for community as such, and a search for new protocols of human interaction that can help us make sense of and thereby respond to the metacrisis.

Between matter and spirit

There’s also a spiritual tendency within the liminal web, that can be thought of in terms of the threshold between matter and spirit, atheism and religion, science and spirituality.

For writers like Claire Gillman - author of a book on ‘the spaces in between’ - liminality includes not only spiritual and psychedelic experience that transcends ordinary categories, but also religious and near-death experiences that straddle the threshold between life and death.

The liminal web explores such experiences in an unusually humble and open-minded way, avoiding the temptations of both scientific reductionism and religious dogma. As Joe says in his post it ‘is scientific without scientism. It is spiritual being neither new age nor traditionally religious.’

Between something and nothing

Another relevant boundary is that which defines the Liminal Web itself.

People attracted to it are often outsiders who’ve felt out of place much of their lives, and are therefore wary of identifying as members of any community.

And there’s therefore a corresponding wariness of defining and potentially objectifying the Liminal Web as a thing one could be a member of.

This wariness was in part what inspired the death ritual for the Liminal Web conducted by Peter Limberg, Joe Lightfoot and others, with the hope that it would continue to live on ‘after death’ as an ever-contested and ever-evolving liminal space.

Between IRL and URL

Finally, the liminal web has also been thought of as the edge of the internet as such, hovering at the threshold where the web meets real life.

You can see this in the way that the liminal web pushes video-calls to the limit in which one tries to be fully present to others as if meeting in person.

You can see this in the way that it gained a boost from the COVID lockdowns as people tried to recreate online those communal interactions that could not happen in person.

And you can see it in the way that the liminal web has spawned numerous in-person events and communities, from the pivotal Emerge Gatherings, to Rebel Wisdom’s London meetings, Perpectiva’s Realisation festival, Life Itself’s Gatherings and Future Thinkers’ Ecovillage.

The Liminal Web - a Technological View

This last aspect of liminality, though, prompts various questions about the role of the web in the liminal web.

How closely is the idea of the liminal web bound to an early twenty-first century web technology?

Does the attempt to cross the threshold between web and real-life mean that the liminal web will always remain a kind of second-best when compared to in-person encounters?

And how might further technological developments transform the liminal web?

Let’s take these one at a time.

The Great Connecting

It’s a fairly common observation that COVID struck just as videoconferencing tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams reached maturity, allowing a rapid adoption of remote working and socialising.

And it’s no coincidence that the liminal web emerged during this same period, as people saw the potential of using these same technological tools to create new intellectual communities, at a time when in-person gatherings were locked down.

These transitions involved a suite of related technologies. The maturity of secure and stable videoconferencing software was part of an ensemble that also included pervasive hi-quality camera and microphone technology in computing hardware, and perhaps most important of all, the emergence of global access to broadband in what Jim Cashel has called The Great Connecting.

Together, these synergistic technologies of the late 2010s allowed for a ‘facetime’ that was not only robustly high-quality but also - and critically - widely accessible. In case of the liminal web this meant a transition from standard podcasts (although these continued with Daniel Thorson’s Emerge Podcast among others) to the recorded videocall (as in the Jim Rutt show, Voices with Vervaeke), including the more interactive group calls of Rebel Wisdom and the Stoa.

Necessary mediocrity

With the COVID lockdowns long over, however, we’re forced to ask how the new culture of facetime compares to meeting in-person. Should we return to the office? Should we turn off the liminal web and move towards in-person lectures, festivals, gatherings, retreats and ecovillages?

It’s an obvious fact that, despite admirable efforts to bring in-person vibes to the videocalls of the Liminal Web, they fall short of the full-spectrum, whole-body intensity of real life interactions. To the extent that the goal is genuine intimacy and authentic community, the liminal web seems a clear second-best.

There’s an interesting episode of the Emerge podcast, where Vince Horn - discussing an App that allows you to meditate with AI - embraces the fact that his App is a clear second best to doing relational meditation with a real human being.

He appeals to Venkatesh Rao’s distinction between Premium Mediocre products like Starbucks coffee and ‘actually good’ things like a tasty, homegrown courgette. A relevant feature of premium mediocre products is that they are known to be second tier, but are consumed despite this in a signal of aspiration to the actually good.

Though this is a useful distinction, it perhaps underplays the way that such second tier products can still be authentically necessary.

If there’s no one around in your local community for you to meditate with, using the MeditatewithAI app may be the only way to learn co-meditation. Likewise if you’ve not found your ideal in-person, local, spiritually and philosophically aligned eco-community, the liminal web will be necessary for you - at least temporarily.

And perhaps it’s not really temporary. In his interview with Brendan Graham Dempsey, Joe Lightfoot suggests that the ideal might consist of a ‘both/and’ of in-person and online community. Which makes sense if you think of your own slice of the liminal web as an ever-evolving ‘web’ of relationships, and consider how the ability to find ever-new ideal partnerships may require the access to diverse networks and individuals worldwide that only the internet can provide.

In a recent discussion of the liminal web, O.G.Rose points to the way it solves what he calls ‘The Introduction Problem’: “which is usually in order to have communities every single person in the community has to introduce themselves to one another to learn what they’re interested in and that can take like seven years before you get to the place of that kind of dialogos emergent flow conversation”.

And as I read it, this includes the simple function of connecting people with ideal partners and collaborators they would never have met IRL, as well as the broader political functions of prosocial media, such as nurturing metacrisis-responsive communities.

Liminal Futures

If the current liminal web is the result of a specific ensemble of technologies, as I’ve suggested, then it’s important to ask how the further development of related technologies might change its nature.

One might well think that any such change would be for the worse. The current technological threesome of software, broadband, and audio-visual capture might be seen as having already more or less reached a peak in fidelity to in-person experience.

It’s true that high resolution digital cameras and quality audio, combined with the streaming capacities of global broadband already make possible a live virtual experience that is close to indistiguishable from reality in many respects.

In many respects but not all.

Most obviously the rectangular frame of our screens cuts off parts of our friends, reducing our fluency with gesture and body language (though at times only a little more than sitting behind a desk).

The two-dimensional flatness of screens also deprives us of the richness of depth perception, including facts about relative sizes of things - which is why we often find people we’ve met only online to be taller, or shorter, than we expect, when we meet them in person.

Less obviously, but perhaps most importantly, the location of cameras at the edges of screens means that direct eye-contact, so important for intimacy, is impossible; something that becomes very clear if you’ve ever tried to do practices involving eye-gazing online.

So we might well consider future technological fixes for these limitations. Science fiction style, 3D ‘hologram’ avatars - which could solve all three issues - are already becoming possible using lasers, or virtual and augmented reality goggles.

Transforming the Liminal

But the worlds of virtual and augmented reality can be used to not only faithfully capture in-person experience, but also to transform it in radical ways, for better or worse.

In his book A Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier explores the possibility of new forms of non-linguistic communication. He describes immersive environments where people can interact through bodily movement in non-human avatars, such as animal bodies or geometric forms, or using creative virtual tools to interact on deeply imaginative levels in shared, dreamlike spaces.

In addition to such creative expression, he thinks that virtual reality could serve intimacy and empathy by allowing one to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ in various ways - for example by inhabiting the more or less viscerally realistic avatar of someone from a different culture, gender or age group, in a sense seeing their world through their eyes.

To this we might add the potential for spirit tech wearables to assist in developing mindfulness, group flow and other relational skills and experiences.

Lanier also sensibly warns that all such tools are at risk of being co-opted by commercial interests, distorting human intimacy and experience through surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, and good old commodification.

And the coming wave of AI, alongside the promise of personalised education and spiritual mentorship, threatens to supersede human relationships in dangerous ways - as thinkers like Zak Stein have argued at length.

An ethical approach to design that prioritizes authentic connection and real human values will therefore be crucial if the liminal web is to flourish, in the spaces opened up by these new technological thresholds.