Fluidity Forum
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Detroit, Michigan September 17–20, 2026 Applications open

Fluidity Forum 2026

An intimate, participatory gathering for bloggers and readers interested in how humans make sense of things.

We take over a giant Airbnb, where slide presentations and somatic workshops are equally at home.

Should I attend? Apply for 2026
An intricate, iridescent arrangement of interlocking organic and mechanical forms.

Fluidity Forum brings together people interested in metamodernity, sense-making, rationalism, metarationality, and thinking-about-thinking.

The program includes formal talks, open discussions, workshops, performances, and whatever cool, useful, playful, or intellectual things attendees decide to contribute.

Present something

Bring a developed argument, an unfinished question, a demonstration, or a panel conversation.

Try a practice

Join embodied, interpersonal, and reflective workshops alongside analytic inquiry.

Live together briefly

Share meals, common rooms, chores, late conversations, and the unscheduled life between sessions.

Decision-making facts

How many four-day trips have you taken and spent this little for on-site lodging and all your meals?

Dates
September 17–20, 2026
Location
Detroit, Michigan
Registration
$400 with lodging
$275 without lodging
Show assistance pricing Hide assistance pricing

$260 with lodging
$55 without lodging

Meals
Included with either option

Prices increase September 1.

Fluidity Forum is an all-volunteer not-for-profit production of Scaladox Street, LLC. Any surplus goes into next year's budget.

Full logistics Apply for 2026
Attendees seated around a living room while two people sing karaoke in front of the room's TV.
Presentations happen in the same rooms where conversations continue afterward. This is our late-night karaoke.
A participant stands on a chair while leading an interactive workshop for people seated in a circle.
Interactive workshops make participants part of the material.
Two participants give a musical presentation at an electric keyboard.
Demonstrations and performances sit comfortably beside talks.
Six wooden dice engraved with symbols representing textures of the complete stance.
Each year, attendees receive a handmade gift. This shows dice with symbols representing the six textures of the Complete Stance, central to Fluidity Forum: Wonder, Curiosity, Humor, Play, Enjoyment, and Creation.
Black and white stones arranged in a Go-Moku game on Fluidity Forum's wooden Go board.
Between sessions, we play Go-Moku on Fluidity Forum’s own Go board.
The Ideology Altar arranged across a couch, with objects representing ideologies and a labeled tent sign in front of each one.

The Ideology Altar

Each year, participants may bring an ideology as their “plus one”: an object representing a memetic system they want to bring into the gathering as though it were another guest.

Together, the objects form the Ideology Altar. Giving each ideology a body and a name makes our frameworks visible—present in the conversation, but distinct from the people carrying them.

We don’t just talk about the flexibility of frameworks; we find ways to run the event consistent with that.

The 2025 Ideology Altar, with many participant-contributed objects and handwritten tent signs arranged together on a long table.
An object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Metarationality.
A wide view of ideology objects and their labeled tent signs arranged across the altar.
A target-shaped object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Representational Skepticism.
An object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Skepticism.
A prism-shaped object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Pluralism.
An orange object and its labeled tent sign on the Ideology Altar.
A bagged glitter object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Glitterism.
An object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Libertarianism.
Pens presented as an ideology object beside a labeled tent sign on the Ideology Altar.
A transparent object and its labeled tent sign on the Ideology Altar.
The Ideology Altar showing all of the objects and labeled tent signs together.
A blue folder on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Machine Learning.
The 2024 Ideology Altar, with participant-contributed objects arranged across a long table.

From past forums

Selected sessions from 2025

Browse the complete 2025 program
Illustration of imagined Fluidity Forum attendees posing for a group portrait in a residential common room. These do not depict real people.

Fluidity takes place in a large shared house, not a hotel conference center. Q&A of a talk can continue over dinner. Workshops can turn into late-night conversations. An idea can be revisited after everybody slept on it.

A few dozen attendees create a temporary household with unusually high conversational density.

“A multidisciplinary, multithreaded, multiperspectival symposium with a few dozen of the coolest humans ever.”

— @puheenix

“Heart and head both filled to overflowing.”

— @puheenix

“Looking forward to watching the recordings of all the other excellent presenters.”

— Anna Riedl
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