i was half myself without you, now i feel so complete

My experience with The Knowledge Society (TKS)

This one time, a TKS director is on a late-night Zoom call with 12 of us. He monologues about how TKS is completely non-judgmental—his goal is simply to help us better understand ourselves and achieve what we value. Then, he talks about one student he had, whose goal was to get better at piano.

“He plays the piano for an hour or two every day after school—think about how much time that is. His mom wants him to, so he could get this piano certificate and always have the backup option to be a piano teacher. Now, isn’t that so silly! Working on his backup option when he could be doing so much more. If he spent that hour every day on his AI focus instead, he’d make so much progress. His parents are confining his potential by worrying about worst-case scenarios. I told him that he is allowed to tell his mom no and pursue what he cares about, but he insists he wants to play the piano.”

A student asks, “So… how do you talk to students like that?”

“Well, he’s probably confused, as many kids are with parental pressure. He just needs a little push. Anyway, I can’t force him to do anything he doesn’t want to. All I can do is show him more stuff, and hope he sees there are much more interesting and impactful things he can do with his life.”

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Oh, TKS. Some love her, some hate her, and I’ve been both. I was that worked-up kid with big dreams and no direction, and TKS was the first place that gave me an outlet for my drive. It was what I needed at the time—reasons to work hard, mentors to encourage my ambition, and social systems to support my self-driven projects, unrestricted by my age. TKS was the first time I was so effectively convinced that each and every day of my life was meaningful, to the point of supposed self-actualization. I would not be who I am today without TKS.

However, TKS also left me with a load of psychological issues that I am still learning to heal from. Over that year, I maniacally obsessed over a doctrine of faux self-improvement. I treated every aspect of my life as a lever to be optimized. I became elitist and judgmental, shunning anyone who was not deemed “interesting” and “unconventional.”¹ TKS was the first time I was so effectively convinced to live each and every day in part by someone else’s idea of meaningfulness, to the point of destructive self-deception. I would not be who I am today without TKS.

I’ve read plenty of TKS criticism and praise, but I haven’t seen a post that covers this nuanced interplay between its benefits and harms. Such is the motivation of this piece.

Disclaimer: Dialogues are not accurate to the word and are reconstructed from memory, but they represent themes that were prevalent in my TKS experience. I have not engaged with TKS substantially for the last two years—TKS may have changed, and I do not know. I do not represent what TKS is for every student—many reported substantial harms, while others emerged brilliantly transformed. I aim only to share my own journey. Many names have been altered.

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I was 14 when I heard about TKS. It was April 2020, and my high school had just shut down for COVID. On screen, Sigil says he’s a 16-year-old innovator breaking the status quo, building a world-class skillset at TKS. He screenshares photos of him speaking at conferences. A video about a computer vision AI he programmed. Comments saying “this is the best video I’ve seen on YOLO.” He’s been in TKS for only half a year, and he already has all these achievements? I would die to have 900 views and my own machine learning projects!

So I type up an application. I spend 12 hours making a personal website using Wix, copying Sigil’s style. A photo of me I clumsily photoshopped. A list of my high school clubs. My three YouTube videos. I’m so excited to join TKS, I write. Yes, I am. I’d love to eventually impact the world. I just read a sixty-thousand word article on SpaceX, they’re trying to make humanity multiplanetary and everything, that’s so cool, yes, I’d love to found something like that one day, and TKS is the best training ground for that.

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TKS starts in September 2020. For my first weekly session, I pull up my little black chair next to my little black desk and hop on a Zoom call. Thomas, the Toronto director, dives into a lecture. “Traditionally, there is a success pyramid in society like this:

“Jobs at the top of this pyramid are more prestigious, more financially lucrative. They’re seen as more successful. Most people in your life will push you to achieve something higher in the pyramid.”

Yes, yes, yes! My parents definitely see success as this pyramid. I sit higher in my chair. 

“However, in TKS, we’d like to give you a different idea of success.

“On the bottom, we have a cool job that is high-paying but just another engineer out of thousands of engineers at Snapchat and hence not super impactful. As we go higher, we get people who make a bigger impact in their lives. Someone at the very top, such as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, will impact billions of people in their lives and be solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

“At TKS, we want to train you to be at the top 1% of the second pyramid.”

Wow. No one ever told me that before. My parents want me to have a high-paying stable job. I want something more risky. More fun. More meaningful than just making money.

“In startups, a unicorn company is a startup that achieves a $1 billion valuation. In TKS, we will call someone who has impacted a billion people a ‘unicorn.’ Our goal is to become unicorn people.

“Now, we cannot be at the top 1% if we do the same thing that everyone else is doing. Traditionally, in life, there is this path to climb that is pushed onto you by society:

“You get good grades in high school to get into a good college, which you then use to get a good job and rise the ranks. This is the traditional path that everyone around you pushes you to—your parents, your teachers, your swimming coach from third grade. Most people in your life believe that this is the only path to success.”

I lean forward. Ninth-grade math barely challenged me—and now, here was something more than the school path. But I didn’t know how to… That’s what I’m here for! For the first time, I feel seen.

“But in TKS, we believe extraordinary results require extraordinary paths. Instead of following the standard road, we think success depends on these four things:

1. Character

2. Mindset

3. Network

4. Skills & knowledge

And we will train these things directly.

“Your parents and teachers may not like what TKS is doing or telling you to do because it pushes you away from the safe, conventional path. But you must resist the temptation to go to the conventional path or else you will never be extraordinary.

“Our first mindset of the week is Unconventional Thinking.

“Of course, we don’t want you to be unconventional just for the sake of being unconventional. Make sure to think it through and be unconventional because it makes sense.”

At TKS, I would be able to directly work on goals I care about! I leave my room skipping. I’m going to be unconventional, at last.

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Thomas said that TKS is not like school: they will never force us to do anything we don’t want to do. Instead, you get out what you put in. However, you should not expect to get much out of TKS if you don’t put in the work—if you don’t engage on Slack, if you don’t go on frequent braindates,² and if you don’t complete projects and write articles. 

So I whiz through the HTML and CSS Codecademy courses in 3 days. I braindate a dozen students in one week. I code a personal website from scratch, put it in the Slack #feedback channel, and receive 39 fire emojis.

Nathan replies and I giggle, having been noticed by our revered founder.

I publish my first blog post about Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. I draw diagrams on Photoshop showing Euclidean and hyperbolic space. I spend 12 hours on my first monthly newsletter, determined to stand out in the sea of first-year TKSer newsletters. I open it with this comic strip:

I stare at it admiringly. I scroll through it ten-thousand times, soaking up the perfect gradual gradient and clean crisp lines. I send it to my mother and my Instagram story. I paste all their compliments in a Google doc.

For the first time, I am making stuff. Wow. I can just do that. I love TKS.

Two months in, they introduce Velocity: a “special program” for those who want “to grow 10x by focusing in a specific area and relentlessly pursuing excellence.” They write that Velocity is only for students who want to make TKS their number one priority, so I sign up immediately.

As part of Velocity, we must complete weekly tasks and record them in a spreadsheet. We must listen to four podcasts a week. We must have a diet plan and an exercise plan. We must write five cold emails a week and get one External Meeting—a call with a professional in our field—and spreadsheet our takeaways.

I write Daily Updates—daily reports and reflections on plans and progress—and send them to my Velocity growth squad. I organize my Notion meticulously, daily pages nested in weekly pages nested in monthly pages. I tape sticky notes of various mindsets on my wall.

In week two, I get kicked out of Velocity for not getting an External Meeting. I hadn’t sent any cold emails—it didn’t feel right to write phony professional emails with embellished achievements so I could spend 30 minutes with someone I wasn’t qualified to talk to. Everyone else insists networking is important, so I commit to it anyway. I write a blog post about all my mistakes, so I can prove to directors and other students that I am growing. I lay my guts out on the table, ripe for criticism.

…who was I?

To get back into Velocity, I send Thomas a long doc of uncomfortable things I’ll do to prove that I am committed to my growth. I email my teachers about what I’m working on in TKS and ask them to subscribe to my newsletter, then send Thomas screenshots of the emails. I write Daily Updates every day, detailing how well I’m upholding the mindset of the week. 

One mindset of the week is Be Intentional. Be intentional about how you spend your time: make the most out of every moment. Be intentional about every goal: will good grades lead to unconventional success? Be intentional about who you spend your time with: remove anyone who’s not “adding value” from your life. I stop talking to friends who do not understand the importance of my unconventional path—they will only distract me from what matters.

The next mindset of the week is Do the Hard Things First. The Velocity weekly guide says to brainstorm “hard things” you plan on tackling this week. “You have the tools and power to change your circumstances,” it reads, “you just need to decide if you want to.” Think of something that’s keeping you from being the best version of yourself. And send that in Slack.

Would anyone do one of the hardest things in their life, just because of this exercise? I don’t know, but in any case, we were egged on by mentors and peers alike, congratulated each time we announced our growth. My experience became packaged into nuggets of wisdom to be analyzed and dissected. My thoughts weren’t mine anymore, but were being sold for the promise of growing rapidly and someday becoming a Sigil Wen or Isabella Grandic. This left me feeling, as John Green writes, “like I didn’t belong to me anymore.”³

The thing about TKS is that they never forced us to do anything. We did it all to ourselves. They told us, this is what you have to do to grow, that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs must have the tippy top mindsets and be comfortable with discomfort, so we recited their mindsets like the gospel. They told us that you are the average of the five people around you, so we cut out our friends who weren’t reaching for the stars. They told us that our families want to keep us on the conventional path, so we stopped talking to them. We were confused, insecure teens, entranced by the novelty of TKS, excited to finally be seen as special. We hadn’t explored much beyond our bubble before. We were unsure whether we’d ever get another chance.

Nathan, I did it all. I overanalyzed your writing and followed it like a doll. You told me that doing schoolwork will only put me on the conventional path, and I plastered that front and center on my bedroom wall. 

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It’s 2021.

I chop all my hair off. I work out with Grace, a fellow TKSer, every day after school. Twenty minutes. I make many faux-deep friendships, go on calls where we talk at each other in an unspoken contest to say the most insightful thing. I attend late night Zoom sessions where we dissect AI news, successful entrepreneurs, and self-improvement strategies. I get inspired by Sigil to set extreme crazy 2021 goals and publicize them. I make a video about my failures and get more clapping emojis.

I publicly shame myself for spending too much time obsessing over little details in video editing and design, like I always do after making artwork. One mindset of the week is done is better than perfect. I can hear their voices—you have to think about the value that each additional unit of time would provide… 

I love video editing, though. I love the rebound when you animate movement. I love dragging the pen tool arcs to perfectly mask out the background, frame by frame by frame. I love the cinematic color grades that make the world come alive, the shadows pushed towards teal and the highlights towards orange. I didn’t get to make many videos before TKS—my dad told me it was a waste of time, and yeah, if it takes 40 hours, then yeah, probably it is. But here, I can post it and get told I’m growing! TKS is a rare safe haven for passion projects.

But still, I wonder if I’m really growing. Video editing is too fun, too comfortable.

The next mindset of the week is Seek Discomfort. The Velocity weekly guide says that comfort is the enemy of progress. “Being comfortable is a zone that most people spend their entire lives fortifying and staying within,” it reads, “a safe haven away from the pain of growth.” Sleep on the floor, talk to strangers, and videotape yourself dancing in public. And send that in Slack. 

I go on one external meeting every week, crawling deeper into my cave with every cold email I send. I write my “action items” from each call in the shared spreadsheet. We were so obsessed with manufacturing takeaways from every conversation.

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I meet Benjamin. I learn React and JavaScript as I contribute to his projects. It’s my first time feeling like I am coding something real.

Programming becomes my new obsession. At my peak, I pore over my computer 14 hours a day. I work at Zapata because TKS sends them my portfolio and they like it. That summer, I get better at software engineering in bigger codebases.

A classmate posts a video about how he is using cutting edge AI to detect breast cancer (it was an intro CNN tutorial he followed) so I embellish the marketing of my quantum computing projects.

I love coding. I love that the only things stopping me from making anything real are skill and creativity. I build so many projects start to finish: Beta Testing Manager, HOSA Tinder, wacky scrolly site, the sellout’s dilemma. The last one still gets me praise today. Today, my programming skills are probably my most valuable legible skill, I guess, and I would not know how to code if not for TKS.

TKS was my exposure to the fact that there are more things out there than school. That you can just learn to code on your own through the internet. You can just start projects. You can just write. Before TKS, my life was waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting till I’m old enough to do anything real.

Many teens get this exposure elsewhere. Hack Club, SPARC, FABRIC camps, Emergent Ventures, Buildspace, 1517, Discord servers. Once you’re in one of these communities, you’re in all of them.⁴

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It’s two years after I finished TKS, and I’m walking home with Grace. “Do you want to make an impact with your life?” She asks.

“Hmm… I don’t know. I guess so? Tech will change the world a lot and maybe I want to be part of that. I don’t know.”

“I don’t. The way that TKS pushes impact onto people, I think it’s kinda inhumane.”

Inhumane. Hm…

One thing I struggled with TKS is that… their argument just makes… sense. It goes like this: The world is changing exponentially. There are so many emerging technologies—AI, quantum computing, gene editing, nanotech, and 10 more—that will revolutionize the world in the next decade or two. We’re born at the perfect time to leverage them to solve the world’s biggest problems. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that? Every time I saw one of these pictures…

…I would feel a rush of vertigo, a feeling that yes yes yes this is happening and I should want to capitalize and … wow they are colonizing Mars this century, I can be part of that … the world is exciting…

But inhumane… I see… that’s the reason. That’s what felt off. 

People in TKS will try to push ideas onto you. They are so forcefully persuasive that you don’t even notice your entire worldview shifting, because it’s all for your own growth. They will tell you that this is what you should want (impacting the world) and this is how you should do it (going hard into these mindsets and grinding emerging technologies). They will praise you when you follow this path and tell you that you’re doing something wrong when you don’t. You’re in this environment where everyone around you sings the same gospel, so when you’d rather obsess over animation frames, you must be doing something wrong. You must abandon that if it doesn’t align with this absolute notion of “getting better.”

The world became a black and white landscape: unconventional versus conventional. It all made sense in the moment. That Thomas speech at the beginning, it makes sense. Unconventional success requires an unconventional path. It is logically sound. They say they are open-minded and open to criticism, so when you tell them that something feels off, they ask you to point to it, to justify it, but you can’t quite, so you shut your mouth and convince yourself that nothing is wrong. (You’re just a teenager!) Everyone else seems to get it, and besides, how can you even argue against that? 

Say you feel like you’d rather play the piano well? Well, that’s just conventional success your parents want you to pursue, and it doesn’t lead to greatness. Say you think it’s meaningful to perfect your videos? Well, you can get more reach from spending a quarter of the time on four videos, remember the 80/20 rule? 

Say you feel like you can’t find an action item because it’s a problem that can’t be solved instantly? Well, how are you going to grow if you aren’t intentional? Just think of an action item and iterate. Say you don’t want to share your daily updates because they are too private? Well, authenticity is a virtue—it attracts people who think like you, leading to real, deep connections. Say the advice feels bad? Well, you have to do uncomfortable things in order to grow: do you think Elon got to where he is from a path of comfort?

Well… no. Feeling uncomfortable is enough. It is inhumane. Humans weren’t built to be this intentional about everything, I swear. Humans weren’t built to live like this. But when you are 14 and gullible you don’t know that, you don’t know how to resist the dogma. Besides, they say they are not being dogmatic, in fact they are the most anti-dogmatic, it is the rest of the conventional world that is dogmatic. By opposing that, we are being first-principles independent thinkers.

A lot of conversations with TKS directors went something similar to this:⁵

I told Jack, a director, that I don’t want to embarrass myself in public. I don’t want to send cold emails. I’m not sure whether done is better than perfect.

He responded, “These things are uncomfortable and that’s what helps you grow! You cannot grow if you stay in the comfort zone. Most people spend their entire life in the comfort zone, and that’s what traps them.”

“Hmm... I definitely see your perspective on this. However, I’m not sure... This helps other people but I’m not sure if it’s the right path for me. I’m not even sure if these things will even help me grow—I’ve sent some cold emails and gotten meetings but who knows if it has helped me.”

“Laura, why are you reacting so defensively? Your response should’ve been ‘got it, will implement.’ You’re not going to get value out of TKS if you don’t put in the work.”

“Hmm.... I thought TKS wouldn’t want me to blindly follow things without understanding. You guys said to not be unconventional just for the sake of it. I don’t know if it’s right to push through everything uncomfortable with ‘I’m not going to get value out of TKS otherwise.’ If you care about my growth, wouldn’t you want to hear what my struggles are?”

“My comments are to help you. I don’t need to talk to you. If you get triggered by them, that’s your choice. Seek understanding and ask yourself, ‘why are Jack and Thomas saying this so adamantly? What might I be missing?’ We do support you, that’s why we allow you to have these meetings, that’s why we’re talking at all. This isn’t school: we care about you.”

“Seek discomfort,” by itself, is an innocuous phrase. However, when you insist people do it over and over again, when you repeatedly convince them to do it against their will, it starts to become coercive. They forced us to be uncomfortable, and when we didn’t want to, they’d say we don’t care about growth. They made us feel guilty for doing normal things.

Sustained over time, coercion makes you feel pinned-down and powerless. It makes you feel isolated and insane.

TKS insisted they never want to push their values onto us, that they are just here to help us. But they did push. They pushed powerfully. They pushed, perhaps without realizing, and insisted over and over again that they weren’t.

Chanel Miller writes that denial “tinker[s] with your sanity.”⁶ My feelings became so murky that I could barely see them myself. I questioned myself so, so much every time I disagreed with one of the directors. I was made to feel insane and invisible. Like I was a little rascal who couldn’t just do the right thing that’d help me grow. I needed friends to tell me these feelings were valid: it was the only thread keeping me sane.

This form of subtle gaslighting makes you doubt your own truth. It isolates you from the outside world. In the long term, it chips away at your self-esteem. It leaves you hyper-anxious and paranoid, alert for any sign something will go wrong. As Olivia Rodrigo sings, “You built a castle with walls so high I couldn’t see.”⁷ When you step into TKS, you step into a reality distortion field.

“Oh, we care so much about you,” they’d say. Guilt-tripping was disguised as mentorship.⁸ That trapped me for ages.

This is not normal. It’s not right to leave kids with guilt, self-doubt, and reality-distorting fear like that, whether you intend to or not: many people are manipulative without intending to be. But good intentions don’t make the scars less real.

People often ask me for TKS advice. So here it is. As Andrew sums up: You will encounter some powerful memes. People will tell you that you have to do interesting, innovative, and impactful things, and this is the way you have to do that. It is not true. There are many paths to God.

Stay loyal to your own values and feelings. Introspect, for real, in private. Notice discomfort and learn to distinguish pain that’s effort and pain that’s damage. If it feels wrong, it’s often for a reason. As Janet said, people are not entitled to your thoughts.

Nuance. The world is woven from webs of nuance. If something feels clean-cut, black-and-white, it is probably missing a crucial piece. Growth is messy and illogical and full of contradictions. Growth often doesn’t feel like growth. I don’t know how to teach you to be nuanced, because it is tricky by definition, and because I am barely learning to be nuanced, but please, this is so so important. The best thing I can say is to identify people in your life who embrace nuance, and speak to them more? (For me, it’s Yan and David and tranquil wisdom insight meditation.⁹) 

Be skeptical of those who talk in binaries. You will encounter many such people in TKS. Don’t be so quick to implement any advice and make it your entire worldview. Don’t implement advice solely because you cannot refute it. If it feels wrong, it is often for a reason. Sit with your feelings; let them mellow. You cannot speedrun growth. Nuance.

Do. Not. Cut your parents and non-TKS friends out of your life. You will probably regret it.

Go hard into what you want. Explore a lot. Fail a lot. Don’t be so uptight about spending your time in the most efficient way. Who cares, you’re 16. Work hard and you’ll get things out of TKS. There are many gems to be uncovered.

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I have full faith that TKS staff didn’t have bad intentions. They truly wanted to see us grow. They repeatedly said that we don’t have to listen to anything they say if we don’t want to. They were doing all this for us. They’ve spent countless hours coaching me.

But there was only so much lip service could do, when the entire environment encouraged us to do otherwise.

At the end of SPARC each year, Yan teaches a class called “Why everything we teach you at SPARC is wrong.” One salient point is that students interpret and remember teachings incorrectly when social status is in the mix. “Deep conversations are valuable” becomes “people who have shallow conversations are superficial.” The TKS directors may have not told anyone to push away their feelings, not explicitly anyway, but that’s what many students did. It’s what got you praise, from both other students and directors. In January 2021, I quit a bunch of school clubs, and I got countless cheers. I just had to say I quit to focus on what matters more to me, which was quantum computing and video editing and other TKS things. When I announced I’m not listening to parents to listen to TKS, I also got praise. Praise, praise, all this praise for shallow, legible “growth,” neatly packaged into nuggets of faux-wisdom.¹⁰

Deep growth is hard. You can’t have deep growth every week. That’s not possible.

It is not enough to simply tell people not to do this. It is not enough to say, “I do not intend to pressure you into doing anything.” It is not enough to tell people to “stick to your own values” when TKS is forcefully pushing their vision of an ideal student, labelling piano and math contests as conventional and unworthwhile. 

TKS may not have intended to cause negative outcomes, but they delivered their teachings unskillfully. When TKS discounts the conventional as less interesting just for being conventional, it becomes totalizing; it becomes the only ideology. Empirically, many students operated under massive pressure, all while under the delusion of massive growth.

There is value in TKS’ teachings. TKS is a rare place that allows students to step outside the conventional sphere. I’d just like to gently encourage a mindset of moderation. TKS ideas can be tools to add to your worldview instead of replacing it outright. 

Grace said TKS would’ve been much better for her if they focused solely on projects, learning, and work, and stayed away from dictating how we should think and live. I kind of like that.

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It’s three years after TKS. As Finn and I drive around our neighborhood, he says, “I went into tech to escape this Toronto suburb. Now that I have, I don’t really feel compelled to go further anymore. I realized that what I want in life is whimsy.”

Hm… me too… kinda…

He continues, “A lot of young people I met go into tech for the community, and they convince themselves that they are passionate.”

Yan said a lot of people go into cults because it’s the first place that accepts who they are. And they fall head over heels into it, wanting to stay in the community…

Whimsy.

Now, a few years later, I see that I was always more drawn to the “work hard” aspect of TKS than the “make impact” aspect. Sure, I was entranced by emerging tech, but it was the only thing I had that felt “real” and meaningful. I idealized San Francisco because it was where I could be a nerd and work hard, and I just ate up the “impact” dogma that came…

Whimsy! I wanted meaning. I wanted a project to lose myself in. I wanted to strive for something other than schoolwork.

Now, a few years later, I can somewhat answer the confusion I had back then. I’d love to spend forty, eighty, two-hundred fifty seven hours on editing videos. How much “value” is derived from the time you put in? is only a valid question relative to a value system, and I value artistry and attentiveness more than innovation or impact. I want to be an artist. I don’t necessarily want to constantly push myself. I don’t want unconventional success.

Or maybe I do? Maybe I don’t know, and that’s okay too. I’m not too averse to impact and emerging tech, but I don’t want it to be totalizing. Maybe I’ll go back to it in the future, I don’t know. Both are okay!

Now, I see that TKS leaders were projecting their values onto the rest of us, all while in denial. It’s ironic, isn’t it, how much they said they just want to help us achieve our own goals, followed up right away with a formula for what the right goals are. 

Maybe that kid actually did just want to play the piano, and that was how he felt most fulfilled.

Or maybe not!

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A few months ago, I was on the phone with my mom. It turned into one of those oversharing conversations so I told her that actually, TKS was kind of bad for me. It made me so obsessed with optimizing every aspect of my life. It made me so judgmental and I lost relationships I am still trying to repair today…

“Wow, I didn’t know all of that,” she said. “When you were in TKS, you loved it. I remember you’d send me your writing and your artwork and I thought you were so impressive!”

“Aw, thanks…” I guess I was pretty excited then…

“Well, TKS gave you a lot of things. And it was there in your life when you needed it, right?”

“Yeah…” That’s true. It did give me valuable skills and self-discovery. I do not wish to have never gone through TKS.

“So think about it that way. It was one chapter of your life, and you took from it what you needed. Now, you can move on. You can be free.”

✨

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Epilogue

I would like to reiterate that TKS has possibly changed since I went through it four years ago—I cannot speak for what it is now. In addition, this memoir represents only my (and many of my peers’) journey.

TKS has immense value! Some walk away with earth-shattering, life-changing benefits.

These Tweets were taken from this thread

If you’re a prospective student, I hope this post alone does not discourage you from attending TKS or exploring outlets for your ambition. Many students and alumni did not face negative impacts. I hope you also consult other alumni’s perspectives before making a decision:

• Honest Review of The Knowledge Society (TKS) by Isabella Grandic

• A Brutally Honest Review of The Knowledge Society (TKS) by Minh Anh Đồng Nguyễn

• A Review of The Knowledge Society (TKS) by Dickson Wu

• TKS Mafia by Davide Radaelli

In addition, here are some student perspectives.

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Thank you Andrew for being my de facto editor. Thank you Amy, CJ, Espen, Lucy, Manasi, Michał, Rishi, Uli, Vincent, and Yan for reading drafts of this piece. Thank you Mom for being my constant supporter.

1. To be fair, I was a bit predisposed to this sort of black-and-white thinking—but TKS was an environment that encouraged and accelerated it greatly.

2. Braindate: what TKS calls one-on-one conversations between students

3. The Anthropocene Reviewed, Reviewed by John Green, 6:14

4. These communities have substantial overlap—once you’re in one, your network will likely encompass people from all. You’ll have access to people from all.

5. Many conversations with directors felt like this. However, this exact conversation did not happen exactly as it is written—some of Jack’s lines are lifted from other conversations I saw.

Nonetheless, these are real words that TKS directors have said to students in these contexts.

6. Know My Name by Chanel Miller, pg. 52

7. This is from her song logical

8. To be clear: unintentional guilt-tripping. I don’t think TKS staff planned to use guilt as a tactic to get us to comply with their ideals. However, that was the outcome.

9. Director and assistant director of SPARC

10. Honestly, this is a general issue I take with tech startup circles.