"Media, Vibe Coding, and the Long Tail" at HOPE Conference

Hackers On Planet Earth! In New York City! August 15-17

Somewhat to my surprise, I will be speaking at Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE). My talk is on Friday August 15th at 1pm. The talk description is as follows:

Title: Media, Vibe Coding, and the Long Tail

Abstract: What is even happening in the media now? There's a resurgence of paper magazines, and now they reach a long tail of subscribers due to the powers of the internet. At the same time, social media platforms are downgrading in complexity and Signal chats have somehow become the new social media conversation. Everything old is new again, and it's all combining and recombining with weird emergent politics and independent vibe coders. Join Lydia Laurenson (a.k.a. Clarisse Thorn) to discuss the future of media, especially as seen within alternative cultures and the weird internet.

How did this happen, you might ask? Well, a funny side effect of my name being splashed across the media a lot lately is that people who haven’t thought about me in years have been reaching out. Some of those people only ever knew me under the name Clarisse Thorn, which was, of course, the pseudonym I used for my sex-positive feminist writing, but was also a name I used for a while in other pseudonymous context, including hacker-ish events and Burning Man. (Perhaps oddly, the best writeup I’ve probably ever done of this sprawling social context was my obituary for Peter Eckersley.) When I stopped writing as Clarisse around 2013, many of those people lost track of me.

Years later, I voluntarily came out of the closet, in 2018, after I was quoted in the New York Times in an article about the boundary between abuse and BDSM. That article felt like a victory at the time, like there was finally a more honest conversation happening around sex and feminism — a conversation that I and so many others worked hard for. I suspected there would never be a better time to come out of the closet, so I did. However, I only came out on social media. So, I didn’t really think about this before it happened because all my IRL friends and family already know, but some recent media coverage, today, in 2025, is the first time the name Clarisse Thorn has been connected to my birth name in a national publication.

As a result, some of the people who previously knew me only as Clarisse have reached out. One of them has been involved with HOPE, and he tracked me down, read my post from April called “Vibe Coding and the Future of Media,” and encouraged me to submit a talk proposal to HOPE, so I did, and here we are.

Now I just have to make the talk and get myself to New York. Does anyone have ideas for cool examples of vibe coding and weird media that I should include in the talk? Or relevant critiques? I know some of you have critiques!

I grew up in the NYC suburbs, but it’s been years now since I visited. I’m excited! I’m planning to see a bunch of new immersive theatre while I’m out there, yay :) I already have my tickets for the “Masquerade” preview show…

Aaaand for paid subscribers: