What a great article! My head is buzzing, but to start:
1) You mention that some people never used the invitation or used it but didn't complete the initiation. "Why were some of us drawn in like moths to a flame, while others reacted zero?" You also mention some trepidation during your own initiation ritual. What made you go through with it? I'm a healthy young male, and I feel nontrivial trepidation at the thought of going somewhere unknown, alone, knowing I'm being watched, not knowing if I can get out, surrendering my phone and wallet, seeing the glass of who-knows-what...I imagine these fears would reasonably be stronger for many others. Is it reasonable for the society to ask such trust from people who haven't yet interacted with it? Presumably the danger and the fun are intertwined. Is that necessarily a good thing? Does it have negative filtering effects on society membership?
2) What happened if someone going through the initiation ritual didn't play along - didn't go down the slide or leave, didn't move on from the library at the appointed time, hid their phone then tried to record the Fable, etc?
1) Honestly, it never occurred to me to not go through with it, even when I was nervous. :) I guess I was just really pulled in by the beauty and drama of it. As I wrote in the article, there were many people who didn't go through with their first appointment, so the secretive appointment was certainly a filter. Whether it was a negative filter, I couldn't say.
2) My partner had a descendant who tried to steal one of the books from the library, hahahaha. He got chased down by one of the Nonchalance employees.
When you think about the governance of cults, do you think the latitude society could've worked if the authors had been upfront about their intentions from day 1?
That is to say, if the invitation had said "we are building a secret society for the elite", would that have sufficiently filtered the population such that monetization would've been possible? I'm thinking of this from the perspective of startups which have a false freemium narrative vs companies which monetize from day 1. User acquisition would've been harder, but each user would've crossed a wider moat to entry.
I think that if you're trying to build a product that you want to charge for, then it's worth signaling that aggressively from the beginning (building what they call the "ladder" in that article). That said, Latitude did send some signals (e.g. the Marketplace section on the website, etc). But of course, it was challenging to balance that with the whole invitation-only "you are special" mythos.
I think that it would also have been possible to announce the monetization plan differently, with more tiers of engagement, and more explicit levels of "earning" a free membership. There was only one paid membership option, which was hundreds of dollars.
The company could also have pursued a totally different plan -- like finding a fiscal sponsor and applying for grants. Nonprofits have a higher survival rate than startups, and their art was so unique and beautiful, I think it could have had potential for major grant support. This would have required a major shift in approach though (and probably staffing, too).
It may have been controversial, and I never investigated it thoroughly as a possibility, so I can't be sure. But the Latitude did a very good job of making members approach and think about the city of San Francisco differently, in an arguably artistic way. There are funders and orgs that are interested in that sort of thing (for instance, SFMOMA has a recent interest in games as art, and has placed immersive game designers as artists in residence).
That's a good question and I don't know the answer. Rebecca Power, CEO of Quixote Games, is currently an Artist in Residence at SFMOMA. I'll mention it to her (and I bet if you sent her fan mail asking her to write about what she's up to, that would be exciting for her).
