A small online room, three nights, three old stories held up to the machine age. We read one founding paper together — Soma, the Oracle, Proteus — and talk about what it shows us. Not a webinar. Not a pitch. A salon — the oldest format there is for thinking out loud, in good company.
Everyone is arguing about what AI can do. Almost no one is asking what it's quietly teaching us to feel.
That's the conversation Soma Salons exists for. The founding papers read today's machines through old myths — because the questions aren't new, only the mirror is. The Salon is where we look into it together — writers, builders, the curious — and leave thinking differently than we arrived.
Ninety minutes, cameras on, kept deliberately small so everyone can speak. You don't have to prepare — the paper is the pre-read, and curiosity is the only ticket.
I open with the paper — the myth, the machine it mirrors, and the question underneath. Fifteen minutes, no slides to sit through.
We talk. Real conversation, not Q&A — your readings, your objections, the places it touches your own work and life.
Everyone leaves with the paper itself, beautifully set — and an open door to the next evening in the season.
Each evening takes one figure from the old world and asks what it knows about this one. Read in order, they tell a single story — about truth, memory, and appetite.
Proteus changed shape to slip away from the truth. From Stalin's edited photographs to the airbrushed cover to the deepfake — who has been drawing our reality all along, and do we still trust our own eyes?
Reserve your seat on Luma →An oracle let a god speak through the living. Now AI lets the dead speak through their data — a voice cloned, a chatbot of someone gone. Where is the line between keeping a memory and becoming its prisoner?
Reserve your seat on Luma →Soma was the drink of the gods — and the name this whole world is built on. AI is sold to us the same way: consume it, and transcend. But an elixir is only ever as pure as what it's brewed from. What exactly are we drinking?
Reserve your seat on Luma →Season One is small by design. Leave your email and I'll send you the dates, the first paper, and an invitation to the room. No cost to attend Season One — just bring your attention.