July 13, 2026
Bad vibes, bright beams
Manifest Man
Conference of Chaos: penis-beam flirting has commenters asking if tech culture is cooked
TLDR: Manifest, a Berkeley conference tied to rationalist and tech circles, drew attention after a bizarre flirting exercise had a man told to imagine shooting light from his penis. Commenters turned savage, mocking the scene and arguing it shows a wider tech-world obsession with treating relationships like something to game.
A supposedly brainy Berkeley gathering about forecasting and big future ideas has gone viral for a much more immediate experiment: one man being coached to imagine a beam of light shooting from his crotch to impress a woman onstage. Yes, really. The event, called Manifest, is tied to the rationalist world around LessWrong and prediction-betting site Manifold, but readers were far less interested in market theory than in the now-infamous flirting workshop run by Aella, a camgirl and self-described sex researcher. In the court of public opinion, this was less "conference" and more social-life Hunger Games.
The comments came in hot, and the mood was somewhere between horrified fascination and gallows humor. One reader dropped the instantly memeable line, "Silicon Valley's not alright," which pretty much became the unofficial review. Another went deeper, arguing that all this hyper-optimization of dating feels bleakly transactional, like people are treating human connection as a game someone has to win and someone else has to lose. That sparked the real drama: is this just awkward adult self-help taken to absurd extremes, or a symptom of a culture so obsessed with hacking life that it forgets how to live it?
And that's the delicious mess here. While attendees bounced between talks on replacing democracy, screening embryos for IQ, and advanced math, the internet locked onto the penis-light moment as the perfect symbol of a scene many already view with suspicion. The jokes wrote themselves, but beneath the laughter was a real shiver of discomfort: what happens when "improving yourself" starts looking this weird?
Key Points
- •The article reports from Manifest, a yearly Berkeley conference associated with the rationalist community and attended by about 800 people.
- •Manifest is officially centered on prediction markets through its connection to Manifold, but the article says attendees discuss a much broader range of topics.
- •Aella led a session called “Get Hotter With Aella (Reinforcement Learning: Hot Girl Feedback),” featuring live audience-participation exercises about attraction.
- •The conference allows any attendee to propose sessions, resulting in several hundred talks and discussions over three days.
- •Examples of sessions described in the article include futarchy, IQ-screening of unborn children, and a mathematician’s thesis on three-dimensional topology.