When old friends ask what I’ve been up to lately, I usually start by saying “Well, I joined a cult.” Which is a satisfying thing to utter in the moment because, objectively, it’s a more interesting answer than an asker of this mundane question has a right to expect. There is an additional layer of surprise involved for those who know me well, since I’m an inveterate non-joiner. But as a secret admirer of actual weird cults, it is on some level what I have longed to be able to say since I was audited with an actual e-meter in a Scientology tent.

In truth, the radically-structured corporation that I recently left after nearly three decades* may deserve the c-label more than Merveilles, a group I now find myself a part of. Merveilles is really just a group of cool artists. To use Aleph’s more complete definition:

Both descriptions match my own impressions. The group is definitely comprised mostly of people who are adept at computers. They (we) don’t necessarily love using those machines all the time, and some even have a fraught love/hate relationship with deep technology, especially in the current corporate-hellscape era of the Internet and AI, but that makes the group no less technically talented. More importantly, though, they are all, on the whole, creative.

The specific kinds of art, technology, and craft that Merveilles members celebrate and foster are human. Meaning: things that are crafted by people in a way that involves actual care. Craft that involves investment. This often means projects that sacrifice scale or reach in favor of higher fidelity and an unusually deep understanding. For example it’s typical for people in the group to create and use their own tools, rather than relying on ones that are created by corporations or ones that don’t exactly suit their needs.

It doesn’t really look like other collections of tech people. Because it’s a group that puts artistic thinking first. It’s also a group that likes to do things the hard way. Building large-format film cameras for use with alternative films and chemical processes. Inventing programming languages. Roasting their own coffee and grinding it by hand and brewing it with arcane, obsolete equipment. Visualizing a serialized post-apocalyptic world populated by heroic, nomadic Plan 9 users. Living on a sailboat and sailing across the world while creating some of the most creative software and art in the world. Reverse engineering obscure old LCDs in obsessive detail and accurately emulating them in modern displays. Creating a whole new category of machines for making music. And on and on.

Although it’s a geographically distributed group, people in Merveilles don’t use existing corporate-controlled social media to get to know each other. There is a deep reliance on other, simpler tools that are more independent and malleable. Original and founding members met in a bespoke game they had created, which drifted outward to related chat servers. Some now chat with each other through an extremely no-frills program that runs on a tiny virtual machine. Others hang out on IRC, which is basically ancient but still gets the job done plenty well. The current central meeting place is on a customized Mastodon server. But they consider that home temporary - they’re just used to moving from place to place with each other as new options present themselves or old options deteriorate.

People in Merveilles also encourage each other to have individual homes on the web. It no doubt seems old fashioned now to anyone who has been very online in the latter days of the internet, but Merveilles people generally have a personal website of their own, that they have built themselves and which discusses their own creative work, their technical accomplishments, passtimes, professional connections, and maybe their hopes and dreams. As a medium of expression, there are far fewer constraints involved in these sites compared to the methods offered on corporate platforms, so the variety is huge and the choices all matter. As a digital introduction, a website beats a Twitter bio every time.

The politics of Merveilles are not secondary. It is made of people who can see the systems of power that surround us and are aware of their motives and machinations. It is also significantly made of people who are marginalized for various reasons, and who live lives that are not easy. Their creative work is something that they have learned will not be reliably supported by our capital-driven modern society. Many have been through jobs or whole careers inside large corporations, and have come out the other side - sometimes radicalized into underground artists and/or activists. On the whole, they know first hand that their labor is valuable, their creative vision is sacred, and they are devoted to care, craft, and helping each other rather than sacrificing themselves to extractive commercial forces.

They want to protect each other against any interests who would deny them (or others) their humanity or dignity for reasons having to do with gender or sexuality or neural diversity or race or any other such trait. They know the power of mutual aid and see the obvious need for community assistance to play a role in our lives. They believe in the inherent rights of non-human living beings. They know that people are innately multidisciplinary, so they foster that rather than narrow specialization. They are only interested in a pluralistic society, and would like anyone who isn’t to fuck right off.

So, they are punk, anarchist-leaning, pro-human, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist activists, and they are unapologetic.

The group’s aesthetics are in part an expression of all of the above, so they aren’t secondary either. Merveilles people have a design sense which causes their visual choices to take on meaning, whether they manifest as clothing or user-interface design or music or something else. Visually the vocabulary holds a mix of strongly graphic minimalism with warm, human, handmade craft -- themes that might seem incompatible but which in this group are by design working in concert with each other. (This might be a topic worth writing about separately.)

In my experience, they also happen to be people who “suck the marrow out of life”. This is obviously not a political attribute, but it is an trait which helps the political energy manifest itself. And the culture of the group, cultivated by its founders, is generally extremely supportive, positive, encouraging, curious, giving, and just generally lovely.

The reason that Merveilles is a persistent and interesting group is largely because its founders embody the same traits, serving as influential examples. Two of the founding members of Merveilles were Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bellum of Hundred Rabbits. Their story is fairly well known outside that community - their travels are inspiring, as is their work. And their willingness to plunge themselves into realms that they don’t yet know much about in order to change their lives for the better.

It wasn’t long after Hundred Rabbits began reporting from their sailboat adventures that I started tuning in. Orca was the thing that snared me. My friend and co-worker Matt brought it to my attention and I couldn’t look away for a long time. I had already been very into the work of another maker, who it turned out was also a member of Merveilles: tehn, the creator of monome. Years later, I met many members at a small (star-crossed) tech conference in Seattle.

It was at that same conference that I met June, the founder of Nouveau. That sparked a journey of deep learning - about programming languages, education, and community building of a different-but-similar kind. There’s far too much to say about her and that group, so I’ll write a dedicated story about them all soon. Anyway, between the two groups, I seem to have replaced one community: corporate, in-person, creative co-workers - with another: disparate, far-flung, non-commercial makers.

Compared to many people in Merveilles, I am less technically skilled in that I don’t (yet) write low-level machine code or create tiny virtual machines. But as a visually and verbally creative person who has spent a lifetime finding technological methods of artistic expression, often involving computers as they are traditionally defined, I feel very at home.

Since being invited to join the group, I have of course learned more about it from the inside. I’ve had a chance to see the positive supportive energy that Merveillans show each other, first hand. I’ve gotten to know a few of the individual people quite well, and have come to understand that the whole project is, at least on one level, an act of people-curation. That seems familiar to me as someone who worked for years at trying to hire well.

I didn’t really know until spending time watching Devine interact with others that they are someone who thrives on connecting and empowering others -- rather than the kind of organizer who aims to spotlight their own (significant) individual accomplishments or to build their own influence. Although they are not a leader in a traditional sense, i see that mode of being as a rare and valuable leadership trait.

Given the deep talent pool, it has been surprising to see how infrequently the group really collaborates with each other. The culture seems to be strongly about being among a collective of individual creative people who each produce their own interesting work alone, and then sharing it with each other**. Even the occasional music collaborations are compilations of work done independently by individuals rather than music that really combines talents. My guess is that this is probably because the people who started the community set the culture in a direction that’s about each person being their own creative island. There are some exceptions**.

From my perspective, coming from a professional life where everything we made was an extremely collaborative endeavour, and learning as I did the multiplicative effect that ultra-talented peers can bring, it does feel like we are “leaving value on the table”, as they say in business, by operating so independently. So I would like to see more people in Merveilles working together on creative pursuits, because I think the results would be amazing. I actually think that the cultural influence of Merveilles could be pretty significant if this shift happened, which... is nobody’s stated goal, but given all of the things I’ve said above about the group I think that a greater amount of Merv culture in the world could only be a very good thing. Regardless, it’s a compelling place, and in my opinion a model for community-building worth emulating. ⁂