The definition of a club is being part of the club “Are you a participant or are you a visitor? … If you are not part of the club, why should you be able to enter?” I loved the 2-part season finale of Search Engine Podcast, about the legendary Berghain club in Berlin. The podcast touches on powerful nuances related to community, access, exclusivity, partying, and “clubs”. I’ve long geeked out on how becoming “cool” can shift your event into something completely different (and potentially uncool). When you become cool, your event brings in people who want to be associated with “coolness”, which in turn changes your event (because your population mix has shifted now that the new people joined). Spark: A Burning Man Movie touches on some of these shifts in relation to the Burn. I’ve seen the same thing happen in corporations. A company becomes “hot” because of it’s success (driven by it’s unique culture and ways of doing business) → the cool-seeking professionals join the company (usually people from big corporations who land executive roles because they “know how to scale the business”) → the new talent changes the culture and bring in new ways of doing business → the company loses it’s culture and potentially it’s business edge. In his book, Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh tells the story on how this happened in his first startup. “The only lasting truth is Change.” - Octavia E. Butler Want to continue geeking out about party culture? Rachel Lark is hosting a workshop on Plura on how to party-plan as an artistic and healing practice. You'll learn practical tips like how to be realistic about what's possible, how to throw parties with no money, the key elements of the physical space that matter most, how to write a GREAT info e-mail, and how to turn asking for help into a call for collaborators. | 
paywalled)
