I wasn't kidnapped, and there were no fanciful helicopters. But the day's adventure did end up taking me all across the Mission District, on foot, following enigmatic messages and hexagonal symbols. After the glowing fable in the book, I pulled other books down from the tiny library shelves. Each book was blank—and yet, beyond the blank pages, each book contained an identical index that started like this:A Ghost Train … AZURE 5305I had never seen a real-life social network puzzle before. I was already obsessed.
Abraxoids (or Abraxas Stones) … AZURE 4280
Absolute Discretion … INDIGO 1937
Absolute Zero … ONYX 4887
Abydos … OPAL 0121
Administration of Sympathetic Resonance … FERN 5457
Aerodamnation … ONYX 6062The minutes stretched on as I pored over the index, recognizing some names but not most. I'd heard of the Fibonacci Sequence and the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh. I knew the name of John Dee, the medieval scholar-magician who advised Queen Elizabeth I. Under W, there was an entry called We Are Being Observed.A disembodied voice came whispering softly into the library: "Lydia, you need to move on." I glanced up and saw another red-lit camera watching me, and smiled.
"Attendees were game and came focused," Anthony Rocco, who was part of the Affairs Guild and ran a lot of Praxis events, told me later. (Rocco is a co-founder of the experience design firm Foma Labs.) "People made showing up a priority, and they dove in right away. I felt like part of a vast and dynamic underground community."Greg Gioia, who tended bar at many Society events, said that "There was a feeling that by stepping into the lounge, you'd traveled in time to an underground world only slightly connected to the city above.""I felt like part of a vast and dynamic underground community."
No matter where I start a conversation about the Latitude Society, I end up talking about corporate responsibility. If there was a Terms of Service agreement, why did it not include a formal procedure for releasing yourself from it? I know the employees were monitoring us, but who was monitoring them?
Immersive experience design as commercial entertainment is in its infancy, and it doesn't have established legitimacy. If the Latitude came apart because of an incident caused by Nonchalance's lack of oversight, how would it affect the work of other artists like me? Scarier yet, what would it say to artists if the Latitude Society succeeded?
I received my invitation card from someone I knew. The day after my appointment, he messaged me privately on Facebook to say he'd been watching me on the video cameras. At the time, I brushed it off. It ruined my enjoyment of the theatrical experience, but there were plenty of other ways I could engage with the project without engaging with him. Then another employee gave my boyfriend a card and told him that I'd been playing for several weeks. That was not great for our romantic relationship. Finally, at my first and only Praxis, yet another employee told the group what I did for a living, effectively outing my actual identity.
I requested that they deactivate my membership. But when I left, I became a security risk. People I knew made vague threats that I would regret leaving or talking about it. A roommate of mine stopped telling me where he was going when he left the house. Friends whom I trusted contacted me and played stupid about their own involvement in order to suss out what I knew. I can't say with confidence that Nonchalance encouraged this behavior, but they should have been able to predict it. The fact that Nonchalance had no procedure in place to identify, address, and rectify the antagonistic behavior resulting from their product, and made no effort to put those procedures into place once that behavior became obvious, demonstrates a lack of concern for their consumers that, if applied to other industries, would result in fines or a class-action lawsuit.
I recognize that some people's lives were changed for the better because of their involvement in the Latitude Society. I have no desire to denigrate their experience, nor do I hold everyone who maintained membership in the Society responsible for the actions of a few. But my own experience—the one with paranoia and intimidation and inexperienced people abusing fabricated power—is equally real, equally a product of the architecture Nonchalance designed and built. How can I praise someone for the beauty they created, if they cannot also accept responsibility for the ugliness?
Yet within the Latitude Society, there were extra reasons members got upset by the paywall. Many of us poured hours of volunteer work into the Society, and we felt hurt at being asked to pay when we'd given so much already. Plus, many of us weren't rich. The new membership plan cost hundreds of dollars a year. The Society had its share of "tech gentry," but membership was expensive even for some techies, let alone artists and social workers. So the paywall felt out of touch with the community—and it created a hierarchy of wealth, where previously members had distinguished themselves via creativity and service. It was a new and unwelcome type of exclusivity.The announcement hurt especially for members who were struggling to hang on to their homes in a city that was fast-becoming the most expensive in the nation. Much like San Francisco itself, the Society hadn't felt like it was intended for people with money—until, suddenly, it did. Living in San Francisco, one often feels trapped in a playground for the carelessly rich, and it hurts to be treated like a toy.Much like San Francisco itself, the Society hadn't felt like it was intended for people with money—until, suddenly, it did.
As I wrote this article, I debated whether to publish the recording. So I asked three people, including Kat Meler and Jeff Hull. In Jeff's short email response, he wrote: "I don't think any of the released material needs to be a secret. It's out there already." And Kat—who narrated the Fable—wrote: "I'd love for your video of the Fable as told in the SF House Library to be public."The third person was Uriah Findley, the experience designer who originally created the Fable. "One of my proudest creations was that Fable," he told me. "I respect Society members' desire to treat our made-up tradition as a real thing, because it feels real to them and is important to them. But the Fable is one of the most beautiful portions and it's one that we made, and I'd love to see it out there.""I hope people realize we were trying to make something special," Uriah added. "There's this perception now that it was only about making money. But we were operating under the assumption that the Latitude could only survive if it could support itself. We always intended to start a real secret society that cared, and mattered, and treated people well."We believed the Latitude Society could give people something that was missing in the modern age, and we wanted them to give that to others."So, here you go. I wish I could offer you my invitation ritual, that I could grant you the fateful card, that you could have seen the Latitude Society yourself. But since I can't give you those things, this will have to do.Update: After the publication of this article, Jeff Hull reached out to clarify that he did not inherit his wealth, but earned it by working at the Hull Trading Company before it was sold to Goldman Sachs."We always intended to start a real secret society that cared, and mattered, and treated people well."