That part of Twitter

Allegra Rosenberg on her months spent trying to fit in at a Brooklyn “techno-commune.”

My friend Sai had been tweeting differently. I wasn’t really paying attention except to notice, in passing, that her usual cheeky musings on romance and urban life had started to get a lot more attention. I thought it had been something to do with Elon’s algorithm change, which at that time was quite recent, but she told me it was because she had linked up with an intelligent and earnest Twitter community who had begun to support and inspire her.

“It’s called TPOT,” she said. “That part of Twitter.”

This was around the time she brought me to brunch to meet Priya, a friend of hers from the Twitter scene whose Substack article on the benefits of living near your friends had recently gone semi-viral. Practicing what she preached, Priya and her husband had set up a co-living space in the McKibbin Lofts, and it was now chock-full of the sort of intelligent and earnest people that Sai had been befriending online. Dinner parties strengthened the analog bonds between these residents and likeminded folks in the vicinity, and Sai planned on moving in herself.

“You know, I need a place to live this summer after my lease is up,” I said. Quickly it was decided: I, too, would move into Fractal.

The McKibbin Lofts were legendary in Brooklyn history, the locus of a 2000s indie rock scene, where bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played $5 concerts on the roof. The buildings had been the subject of a Curbed oral history which nobody I spoke to, at the first Fractal party I attended there, had read. Instead there was a sense of building something from the ground up, sequestered and independent from the counterculture that came before, remnants of which still resided in the halls.

That party was a few months before I moved in. It ranged amongst multiple rooms, laughter and music emanating from a few doors on each floor. In one room I had a long conversation with a guy living there who agreed with me that this scene needed a chronicler of some kind. Someone with their foot half-in and half-out, a dedicated documentarian like Crumps who could interpolate themselves and sacrifice their dignity in order to construct a big picture for an external audience.

But it wasn’t going to be him, or any other resident. Stuff was definitely happening here, but nobody wanted to take the time to step away from said stuff in order to see it and capture it. Besides, the Fractalites were not by occupation or interest writers qua writers: they were a different kind of urban weirdo, imported (ideologically if not physically) from the foreign shores of the Bay. But it could be me. It probably would have to be.

THAT PART OF DIRT