Camp Dada

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1

We are gathered in Cedar Point County Park for Labor Day weekend, almost forty of us, anti-capitalist idealists of different stripes. We’re camping out in the ten tent sites that we’ve paid for, but like to say we occupy. We favor a General Strike, just and equitable healthcare, and immediate curtailment of greenhouse gas emissions. These are the big things on which we agree, and that’s good enough. We’re not trying to bog in the details of mission statements or manifestos. We’re here to hang out. For this weekend at least, let us replace online bickering with the forgotten magic of face-to- face. Our hope has brought us here and this is our hope.

This is Camp Dada. It’s like summer camp and Marcel Duchamp had a baby. Or, not really. Summer camp, yes. Duchamp, debatable. Camp Dada! Don’t the words sound good together? Call it a cross between a pop-up commune and an activist networking retreat, if you feel some need to pin this down. We’re out here on the northeast extremity of Long Island. Most of us took the train from JFK and sit packed in with frat boys headed for getaways at their friends’ parents’ summer cottages. We’re roasting tofu dogs over an open flame up the road from David Geffen’s house. Yes, there have been larger attempts to do activism in the Hamptons. You want to know what we’re doing? We’re brewing some bad kombucha, buddy. We’re fermenting our revolutionary spirochetes, so that we might be like deer ticks on the ankles of the rich. No one knows how to do this. No one knows what it will look like in this decade. We’re trying to teach each other how.

At Camp Dada, sisters Courtney and Keisha Banks are our lead camp counselors. Through their “This is Bullsh!t” YouTube show they raised more than $8,000 to procure campsites, camping equipment, and food for a four-day retreat, which they imagined as a chance for the extremely-online to bond in real life by sharing skills, swimming and taking hikes, holding campfire strategy sessions, and doing some Dada-inspired stunts designed to draw attention to wealth inequality and global warming. Keisha‘s logo—a tent and campfire—evokes the idea of doing something zany that turns out to be soul- renewing and important. The sisters volunteered themselves and recruited a few other like-minded podcasters to lead the activities. In Cedar Point campground, they stand beside the kitchen tent greeting newcomers with a hug, a Covid test, and a sheet of paper assigning them to a campsite, kitchen, and trash duty. There’s a guerilla gardening how-to session at five, a nature walk at six, and dinner at seven (or whenever the cooking team has it ready). When the retreat is over, the camping supplies will be donated to mutual aid groups.

Months before Camp Dada, when I met Courtney and Keisha over Zoom, they told me they mostly wanted to make sure I was real. This meant that by logging in and having my camera turned on, I had already cleared the first major test. But, beyond that, they wondered, why did I want to come? I seemed like a regular white guy and not a particularly active activist, they said. So what was my deal? At the risk of oversharing, I told them the truth. The truth was the Camp Dada logo, and my subsequent, if brief, research gave me hope of a purpose that might ameliorate my ongoing sense of purposelessness. It reminded me of an art project I’d done twenty years earlier, in which a former girlfriend and I transformed a junkyard Ford Pinto into a wagon to be pulled by her two donkeys through southwest Virginia. That project, I think, was about triggering a different imagination of the world as it could be. Back then—I was in my early twenties—I described the undertaking to head- shaking family members as “the most important thing I could do.”

In the Banks Sisters, I thought I recognized two people doing something that was the most important thing they could do. I’d gotten this idea by watching their YouTube channel which they started in the fall of 2020 after they lost their jobs in Los Angeles—Courtney worked as an actor and comedian, and Keisha as an interior designer—and moved into their parents’ basement in rural Stafford County, Virginia. On “This is Bullsh!t” they draw on a shared incredulity, one that they relate to their experience of employment precarity and their identities as rural, Black women. They use their adriot skepticism to skewer mainstream pundits from a point of view they like to call not left or right but “bottom center.” I watched them lampoon the TikTok influencers picked by the Biden administration to sell Gen-Z on supplying arms to Ukraine with a media savvy sharp enough to tease apart the often hidden ways consent is manufactured. It was also laugh-out- loud funny. The more I watched the more I enjoyed the pithiness of their insights and their endearing rapport. I sympathized with their frustration that their episodes only had several hundred views.

Over Zoom, the sisters explained that the idea for Camp Dada arose in the aftermath of a Medicare for All March on Washington that they’d helped plan but that ultimately fell apart due to what they perceived as the fickleness of other organizers. They were tired of encountering people happy to rail against empire online, but nowhere to be found in real life. “We wondered how much easier collaboration would be if people could see each other’s legs,” Keisha said. The experience led them to conclude that they didn’t need more YouTube subscribers. “We wanted to know: who would meet us for coffee on a Tuesday?” Courtney said. Eventually, “coffee on Tuesday” became a camping trip: a place to be offline with like-minded people who might begin to work together more effectively if they shared a real-life bonding experience.

I was convinced. I admired their embrace of the creative and the communal, ideals that I felt I’d strayed from in my pursuit of a career, marriage, and parenthood. I’d been thinking about some of these things already, especially through the spring when I read anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World. Subtitled “on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins,” the book focuses on the matsutake mushroom, one of the most expensive in the world. Tsing is interested in the lessons we might extrapolate both from the matsutake itself, which grows only in forests disturbed by humans, and the people who forage it. The book’s primary concern is “precarity,” which she considers the salient condition of our time. Precarity, she writes, requires us to relinquish “progress stories [that] have blinded us.” In place of progress, Tsing describes “open- ended assemblages” defined by indeterminacy and “patchy unpredictability.” Ultimately, Tsing hopes the “fungal attractions” of the matsutake “can catapult us into the curiosity that seems […] the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.”

It struck me that the Banks sisters were launching their own exploration of collaborative survival in precarious times. I felt connected to them in this pursuit. The fact that they’d grown up and were living again about fifty miles north of my hometown, Richmond, Virginia, made it seem almost as if we’d gone to high school together. As soon as our Zoom session ended, I bought a plane ticket. The Hamptons, one of the US’s most concentrated pockets of wealth, seemed like a fitting destination.

2

In cedar point park, the energy amongst the campers is tangible, amorphous, hodgepodge. This reflects, I think, the “patchy unpredictability” of our gathering, both its promise and its anxieties. We are a camping meetup with revolutionary ambitions—what that means is unclear. We’ve all been drawn here by the Banks Sisters, but otherwise, it’s hard to see what binds us and what we might accomplish. Unlike the Rainbow Gathering or Bread and Puppet, we have no shared history nor common purpose. Unlike Burning Man, there’s no joint art project to ignite at the end. I keep thinking we’re like the opposite of cryptocurrency gambits such as the Sapien Network and Urbit that are attempting, according to their adherents, to seize the emancipatory potential of virtual reality by bending social media into blockchain. In this line of thought, it seems clear we are trying to embrace the emancipatory potential of the face-to-face. But, what are we, really? We’re a fairly diverse group. My fellow campers are about half persons of color and half white people. There are about as many women as men. People have traveled predominantly from the northeast, but also from Florida, Kansas, Indiana, and elsewhere. Most have never met in person. The best I can say it is: We’re a locals retreat for people occupying the same corner of Twitter. A reaction against internet culture staged by the extremely online.

Our weekend agenda overflows with skill-shares on topics including foraging, herbal medicine, first aid, and knife-throwing. Beyond bonding, the Banks sisters hope Camp Dada becomes a foundation for building a new grammar for social change, one that recognizes that putting stock in virtual worlds—whether figuratively or literally— is unlikely to foster broad equality, and that tweets will not dismantle Elon Musk’s house. That no one knows what this new grammar might look like is kind of the point.

On site, Courtney and Keisha are tireless camp counselors, forever collecting firewood, checking in with the kitchen and trash teams, gathering people for nature walks and discussions. If we are here to create a new grammar, it will have incubated in their energy, and this is a wonderful thing to consider. Observing them brings forward the irony that Camp Dada wouldn’t be happening if they hadn’t lost their jobs early in the pandemic: their expulsion from the workforce is our collective gain. Just before dinner, when she has finished stringing lights above a picnic table, Courtney pauses, possibly for the first time all day. “Humpf,” she says. “And our parents think all we do is smoke weed on the porch.”

Courtney is thirty-four and Keisha is forty-two. They are the daughters of a drywall contractor. Both like to mention their mostly positive experiences working at Hooters. They’ve had countless other service industry jobs as well, their eclectic resumes illustrating their belief that you have to be willing to talk to anyone. In general, their politics align less with Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracism, (a set of practices towards greater equality and furtherance of the Civil Rights movement), and more with Adolf Reed’s Black Marxism, (which sees “antiracism” as a buzzword providing cover for inequalities created and exacerbated by capitalism). It doesn’t bother them, they say, that their local mechanic has a Confederate flag on the wall of his shop. They don’t love it, of course, but he treats them fairly and they think he would agree with them about redistributive policies, if they ever chanced to broach the topic. Within the overlapping emergencies created by the economy, carbon emissions, and the Covid-19 pandemic, what bothers them most is progressives’ need to agree on everything before attempting anything. They marvel at the difficulty other activists seem to have putting aside interpersonal conflict.

Then again, when people are working outside the infrastructure of institutions, the interpersonal is all there is, and, obviously, the Banks sisters’ dynamism is the reason any of us decided to participate in what is ultimately either a social experiment or a large-group improv game, or both. The goal is simple: to see what difference it makes if we are radically committed to getting along.

3

My campsite-mates are dragon and Dave, and we hit it off from the start. Dragon, a computer programmer, arrived from Fresno carrying a brand new sleeping bag. Like me, he wasn’t sure what Camp Dada was, but when he saw that logo he knew he wanted to go. Dave does carpentry in Maine, but his future is in his Toyota minivan, which he’s preparing to drive south instead of facing another New England winter. He shows us his modifications: a workbench in the back and a collapsible sleeping platform that runs along the driver’s side. The rest of the space overflows with power tools and lots of frisbees.

We stand for a while under the canopy that extends from the van’s sliding door. Dragon and Dave pass a bowl. By way of small talk, they wonder what to do about the rising specter of authoritarianism in the US. Dragon suggests we make like the Hungarians, explaining how after World War II the Hungarians collectively tuned out Soviet propaganda in order to preserve their own communities.

“Like, an authoritarian could be shouting at us, and we’d just keep smoking this bowl,” Dragon says.

“Right on,” says Dave.

While we’re talking, Louis, an accountant from Manhattan, pulls up a folding chair and tells us about how he joined a Black Republicans club after he found the Black Republicans more supportive of rent control and workers’ rights than local Democrats. Then, he produces an ocarina from his pocket and begins to play. The melody summons a guy in his thirties who introduces himself as Harsh Malarky, or just Harsh. Harsh has a penchant for vague and mystical musings. On a nature walk the next day, he’ll turn to me and say, apropos of nothing: “So, when does it become efficient to be inefficient?” Later, he’ll expound his idea for lightweight, pizza box-sized solar panels that could be mounted to e-bikes. For now, he tells us the story of how he “first recognized empire” in the interstate interchange near where he lives with his parents in Northern Virginia. He was sitting in an idling car, in the same stalled traffic that he sat in almost every afternoon, when a radio story came on about traffic deaths at that very interchange. In a flash he recognized the brutality of ordinary life. “Why do we put up with this?” he wondered.

That’s what we’re all wondering. Wondering and wondering, the conversations blending together and amounting, ultimately, to one conversation staged off and on all weekend. At the guerilla gardening skill-share, Brant, a LGBTQ+ organizer from Baltimore, will discuss opportunities for tending illicit crops near golf courses. This will prompt Dave to wonder why we don’t just descend en masse and take over the golf courses? Dave will wonder the same thing when we discuss abolition of prisons: “Why don’t we just show up and demand all prisoner’s unconditional release?” He will be, invariably, shirtless as he says these things, wearing shades and a bandana on his head, so that it becomes possible, briefly, to imagine a brigade of Daves plowing over golf greens. A platoon of Daves landing at Riker’s Island and throwing frisbees until everyone is freed.

Despite these whimsical what-ifs, it’s actually a sustained and serious conversation about what might be possible if our world were shuffled just a little differently. Sometimes, the conversation becomes earnest and heartrending, as when Aloni, a cheerleading coach from Miami, describes how losing her father to heart disease fuels her activism. And sometimes the conversation tips over into parody, as when Austin, a musician from New Jersey, describes his “jam-band theory of enlightenment,” which, as best I can tell, centers on the practice of staying up all night dancing to jam bands. The phrase I hear most often are versions of Lenin’s “chaos is always only three missed meals away,” and each time I hear it, I cringe a little at the blinkered idealism it suggests. The throughline of all this talk, however, is “possibility”: how easy it is to imagine a different social order, how tantalizingly close this can seem when we’re riffing on our collective energy.

After our first dinner, talk subsides as a group of us gathers at Dave’s workbench. Soon, Keisha arrives with sheets of plywood to make coffins. Or, rather, coffin-molds for coffin-shaped sandcastles that we’re planning to build on the beach near Billionaires Row in Southampton. These we’ll adorn with messages about the death-toll resulting from capitalist healthcare. Mostly, the coffins are just for fun. They put the dada in Camp Dada, and are a small way to put our talk into action. There were plans for more stunts like this—a funeral procession for the Covid dead, kites with corporate logos to fly over mansions—but the people in charge of those projects flaked.

Courtney and Keisha explained that as the event took shape, the artistic aspect faded, and Camp Dada became more of a networking retreat. But, in another way of looking, we are the art project. As a pop-up commune, we share a swatch of conceptual space with the Fluxists who, for nearly three months in the early 2000s, inhabited Queens Museum of Art and made a secret dwelling on its roof. At Camp Dada the possibilities available to us are different from those we perceive elsewhere in our lives. On the second evening, Aloni will lead us in ecstatic dance on the beach. That same afternoon, Jean, a stagehand from Gary, will demonstrate how to make homeopathic remedies on her camp stove and will gift me two vials of fresh-made garlic oil to treat my toddler’s ear infections. (She hasn’t had an ear infection since.) The radical underpinnings of our situation will become apparent when we attempt yoga in a field near the beach, only to have a park employee inform us the field is for the private use of the people staying in the “glamping” section of the park. We will walk away whispering, “See? See?” If yoga performed by registered guests of a county park is trespassing, then just about anything is protest.

4

Late on the first night, we walk to the rocky shore of Long Island Sound for an icebreaker. Each of us is handed a notecard with the name of a famous person written on it, which we then stick to our foreheads. The game is to decipher who we are by asking questions of one another. I’m Tony Hawk, which I see accidentally as I draw the card. Keisha is Cornel West. She guesses this after someone bellows, “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people.”

I don’t remember what card Jay got. He probably doesn’t either. Jay is from Northern New Jersey and has admitted he’s never been camping and also that he works in finance. That he works in finance brings him no ill will. Instead it induces a barrage of questions to the effect of: How do you start investing if you have almost no money? Jay’s answer: IRAs.

On the beach the game stops when he looks up at the network of stars overhead: “The Milky Way,” Jay says. He’s never seen it before. The rest of us tilt our heads skyward and are stunned by the brightness. There’s the Big Dipper, and there’s the Little Dipper. Notecards fall from foreheads as we look up. Is that cluster the Seven Sisters, or is it that one over there? Is that Orion’s bow? Is Orion visible this early in September? If so, those must be Taurus’s horns. If not, maybe they’re some constellation we’ve just invented. If you lean back enough it’s a giant ‘A’, a camping tent, a pine tree, an anarchist symbol. Is that too wacky? Several of us wade into the water to see better. There is the hugeness of the sky, and the small clusters of us, on the shore and in the shallows. There is our tininess and the enormity of the changes we believe are required for a just and sustainable future.

In advance of Camp Dada, and sometimes on this first day, I find myself questioning the Banks sisters’ refusal to join with already existing organizations like Socialist Alternative, which they explain as owing to a fear of the event “being co-opted.” With my bare feet on the slimy rocks, and with Jay’s hand on my shoulder pointing out what he sees, I feel certain the only option, the one that leads to unrealized creative possibility, is not to shirk from, but to embrace the asymmetry of our little gathering and our gargantuan desires. As if that embrace were a portal zipping up the distance between ourselves and the river of stars above us. As if that embrace were the single instruction for transcending our current possibilities. I don’t mean to get too hippy-dippy here. Nor do I intend to posit my own jam-band theory of enlightenment. I mean only that what seems actually to be required is a magic trick: some way to understand our predicament accurately while also imagining things differently; some way to see the cracks in capitalist reality and bear down on them more forcefully.

When we discuss actual issues the results are less inspiring. Each night we gather around the campfire for formal talks, and, while we manage to foster thoughtful conversation, we achieve nothing resembling consensus. To begin the Medicare for All session, Courtney asks, “Should we advocate for a national approach to demanding Medicare for All or a state-by-state approach, or both?” But, her pragmatic question is swamped by a contingent of campers—a group I nickname the burn-it-all- down bunch—who argue that Medicare for All is effectively a Band-Aid, a really large Band-Aid, on a broken healthcare system that has standardized obesity, heart disease, and other avoidable maladies as a fact of life in the US. A woman named Sunday, a community organizer from Kansas City by way of Mississippi, pointed to the work of Cooperation Jackson, a network of worker cooperatives geared toward Black and Latinx residents of Jackson, as a model that should be expanded group by group as opposed to more marches and sit-ins demanding Medicare for All. In Sunday’s estimation, the national health care system must be remade so as to become entirely localized and divorced from profit- seeking. She stated her case well. As a result, instead of making plans we remained for two hours in the philosophical weeds: Burn down the corrupt and bloated US healthcare system in hopes of something better, or try to make that imperfect system a better version of itself?

When I spoke with Courtney and Keisha after Camp Dada they acknowledged that this was a defeat, and a painful one given that the failed Medicare for All March on Washington had led them to creating Camp Dada. Here, they had brought everyone together, they had inspired goodwill and camaraderie, only to find a significant subset of participants unwilling even to brainstorm about advocating for Medicare for All, which the sisters viewed as an undeniable public good. The discussion, and the one the next night about a General Strike which went similarly, caused them to rethink their diagnosis of activists’ failures as a narcissism of small differences. They didn’t have a new diagnosis yet. Mostly, they were bummed to find things we agreed upon, i.e. the brokenness of the healthcare system, were not enough to unite us behind a singular solution. They were further bummed that the burn-it-all-down bunch didn’t even think a both-and approach, i.e. advocating for Medicare for All and creating localized healthcare infrastructure, was worth anyone’s time or energy.

My own reflection was one of surprise and dismay: surprise at how much I agreed with burning it all down, dismay at how fantastical the vision of rebuilding from the ashes seems to be. This reflection revealed a more existential dilemma as well, one that lurked under the surface the whole weekend: that is, in seeking social change, should activists target the more or less functional federal and state governments we’ve known our entire lives, or have those governments grown so decrepit and corrupt that they will be kicked over in another election cycle or two? As I sat by the fire and shifted uncomfortably in my camping chair, I found myself thinking of this in Dragon’s terms, which I hadn’t taken very seriously when he was toking up beside Dave’s van. By the campfire, however, it seemed clear to me that we are Hungarians already. More and more, we live in what is functionally an autocracy. Our democratic institutions are not under stress, but have already crumbled. Some of my fellow campers had accepted that, and some were resisting it, or slowly coming around to it.

I put myself in that last category. The weekend made me more clear-eyed about how a sustainable, just future will have to be fought for inside the increasing fragmentation of American decline. It brought me closer to accepting, not just conceptually, but in an embodied way, Tsing’s claim that precarity is the condition of our time. This, in turn, made me even more suspicious of the hope I have placed in political leaders such as Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I had to acknowledge how comfortable, but perhaps irrational, it is to support these people and their tacit promises to preserve the status quo and make things better. All they need from me are repeated small dollar donations to Act Blue. To step out from this comfort felt dangerous. At stake was not just a narrative about society’s progress, which even our most progressive mainstream politicians are at pains to uphold, but also a progress story I’ve told about my own life.

I thought about my sense of isolation, how I struggle to sustain a sense of community in Texas, where my partner and I moved in 2018 for jobs. I thought about how raising young children through the pandemic has further collapsed our social circles, reducing us even more to individualist consumers, caught in the fantasy that we might purchase our well-being. I think about the circumstances that led me to the outlandish desire to attend Camp Dada. Yes, one part of what I’m describing is my own reckoning with privilege—privilege that has allowed me to invest so much in pursuit of a career and the preservation of my own middle-class upbringing, both of which I experience as increasingly unstable and hollow. But, there is also my desire to participate in the actual world, to know and experience new ways of understanding it. The sense of connection I felt with the other campers, even as we argued around the campfire, made me more willing to embrace indeterminacy, attempting to see it not as limiting but as a catalyst for new possibility.

My hope is that the whole of Camp Dada—the shared cooking and cleaning, the hikes, the swims, the skill-shares, and maybe especially the rambling fireside chats—suggests a way of being and of collaborating that is not colonized by social media nor curtailed by consumer capitalism. I came looking for a different way to be, and ultimately I glimpsed it. I glimpsed it especially in Courtney’s and Keisha’s ethos, which arises from the ashes of gig work and finds purpose in charisma, connection, and joyful activity—an ethos that spread amongst the rest of the campers. For this reason, I want to see Camp Dada as a fungal body, one in which we accept that the world will not be saved, and so strive for new ways of sustaining life in the present. Tsing describes this as “living in our messes,” which itself is a form of resistance.

5

On the second morning, when we rise at 5:30 a.m., to build the sandcastle coffins, the situation is clear, bleak, and a bit silly: to make mischief on one of the US’s most exclusive public beaches, you have to wake up early. Gin Beach, which sits just east of Billionaires Row, is our destination, but, even on Sunday, there are only about five free parking spots. The rest cost $80 per day, or require a resident sticker.

We take two cars. I ride in the back of the Banks sisters’ rented truck, tying messages that say things like “Healthcare is a human right” to crucifixes made of branches. When the hedges are nearly two-stories tall we know we’re getting close. Soon, we’re lugging supplies over the dunes. The sky is like an unmade bed, the swells large but calm. We build in teams of bucket carriers, diggers, and mixers. The coffin-molds work well enough. Courtney positions her phone on a tripod to record the action. We’ve decided to say “TikTok” to anyone who asks what we’re doing. Each time this happens, the few curious beachcombers are immediately dispersed. But, we begin to draw a crowd when we plant the crosses. The fear is that we could be ticketed for littering and fined exorbitantly. Soon, a guy in salmon-colored shorts is trying to get our picture in front of the sandcastle coffins. He asks our names, and if we have permission to do this.

“Sir, no pictures please,” Courtney tells him sternly as we quick-step toward the truck.

We’d planned to circle back and document people’s reactions, but now that seems unwise. We won’t know how many people saw the installation, nor how long it remained. Days later, Courtney posts a time-lapse video of the project: six large coffin shapes with the ramshackle crosses and the waves behind them. The video is haunting. It gets about eighty views.

On the drive back, Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul,” comes on the radio. This is the pop star’s so-called anthem of the Great Resignation. Courtney sings a verse, then she sighs. “Oh Beyoncé,” she says, “we like it better when we can pretend to be you than when you pretend to be us.” She turns the radio off.

At the campground we high-five and congratulate ourselves. This is just the beginning, Courtney and Keisha hope. Already there are plans for future Camp Dada events in the Pacific Northwest and in Southern Appalachia. Even so, the outing feels like only a mediocre success, and the group of us is happy but subdued.

We’re headed to our tents in search of more sleep, and then we see it: a large, yellow chicken-of-the-woods mushroom has sprung up at the base of an oak in the center of the camp. It wasn’t there the day before. The lack of sleep makes us certain the mushroom has arisen in solidarity with us. The camper who led our previous, fruitless foraging expeditions plucks it up and sautés it vegan butter. When it’s ready, we each take a piece from the pan, and add its fungal body to ours.

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This essay appears in print in Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 01.