This is an event outline for “Acrimonious Circling”, run at Manifest 2026 and billed the following way:
Last week my friends ran an “extreme violent circling” event. They told people to be aggro and tell each other what they really thought and felt about each other. The group promptly fell into acrimony and warfare, which I and some others enjoyed. I wish to repeat this event. (I do not promise I can recreate this because facilitator intent has surprisingly little effect on what a circle is like, though.) Come if you enjoy a medium amount of acrimony and warfare on purpose.
P(you have a bad time | you haven’t circled before) is high. At the start I will ask people to leave if they have not circled before or read my intro to circling. At 30m and 60m I am going to kick lurkers and people whom I perceive to not be following the rules of circling as I see them.
Absolutely no physical escalation.
The original Extreme Violent Circling event description:
Circling, but aggro.
Tell people what you think of them. What you really think. And feel.
Take as much risk as you can handle; drop the formalities; stop pulling punches; go ahead and make assumptions about people or project your stuff on them. See what happens if you break the rules. Poke at people. If things get boring, stir it up. Call out fakeness if you see it.
We have never done this before and we have no idea where the night will take us. YOLO!
Before opening talk:
- Kick people who have not circled before or read my blog post intro to circling.
- Ask people who are blog post only to sit near the door. (They are likely candidates for kicking soon, and also, putting them in a group will make them self-conscious and put them in reading the room / lurk moar mode, which is really valuable for circling.)
- Re-explain that lurkers and people who seem like they aren’t circling-as-I-understand-it will be kicked at 30m and 60m marks.
Opening talk
I want to say some context about what I want to achieve here. Last week my friends ran an event billed as “extreme violent circling”. The attendees at that event really went at each other. They called each other phony, boring, and irritating. They told each other they hated each other’s vibe. One person got kicked and lowkey refused to leave. People got pretty stressed.
I think some people left feeling genuinely bad, especially people who had not circled before. And some people, like me, left feeling great.
Why did I like it so much? Well, playing with real pain is a thing humans do physically but rarely emotionally, so that’s fascinating. I like novelty, and this was novel. I like drama, I like being stressed, and I like hearing what people think. Some people got feedback they had never gotten before which seems positive EV in the long run. Also, I’m a little bit of a bad and hostile person and it was really cool to have a meetup of bad and hostile people and enter a war of all against all.
When that circle ended, the spontaneous discussion afterwards was also really interesting and released tension in a way I’ve never seen before. Even the one guy I thought I disliked in real life after he annoyed the shit out of me I felt fine with after a brief talk in the after-circle. Circling is super not a consequence free zone, people will remember what you said afterwards and possibly talk about it, but my perception was also that there was a lot of mending and catharsis in the after-circle.
When the event wraps up at midnight, I encourage people who were kicked at the 30 and 60 minute mark and want closure about something to come back and seek it in a more normal environment.
How it went
Consider stopping for a few seconds to form specific predictions on how this went before reading on. I was trepidatious of running this and tried pretty hard to simulate how this would go before running it, and I was still surprised about what was good and what was bad.
My run of this event went poorly in that almost no one had beef. We tried so hard to drum up some real animosity and it didn’t work. We were bored, confused, frustrated, but I think not more than the baseline for circling. Rarely did we feel anger or social fear, it seemed to me.
Kicking people at the 30m and 60m marks was a good decision. After seeing the strong interest the first one had gotten, I planned for and got overattendance. ~30 people came to an event that is best done with 12 and feels strained at 20. People really want to do this!
The first 30m were chaotic and hostile as everyone magnified their small negative emotions so they wouldn’t get kicked for lurking. But it was high signal, and I was able to pretty easily pick ten people to boot.
Some left voluntarily before that because they didn’t like that I asked them to move seats. One moved to sit in the center which I thought messed with the feng shui, the other was right next to me and distracted me by muttering a lot. The second one said this violated the rules of classic circling, which is pretty fair. I should have picked a fight with him but I was struggling to manage a 30 person circle and didn’t feel like I had slack for it.
Two people struck up a private conversation during the large chaotic phase. They were reasonably good at acrimony and I decided to keep them, but I now regret this. I should have booted both at the 30m mark.
It was much harder to pick people boot at the 60m mark. I needed the group to get even smaller, but everyone left felt all right to me, so I picked somewhat haphazardly. I regret my choices. I evicted the two most unmanageable-feeling participants, but this meant the remaining group was too reasonable and struggled to fight. I kept a few bored people because I had seen them being great at other circles (including the first hostile one) and thought they might liven up, but this was a mistake. They remained bored, and had a chilling effect on my facilitation.
I think I lost social standing running this due to the chaos of the first 30 minutes. This was my first impression on a bunch of people who had never met me before and I agree it was not a good one.
I think I gained standing among the people who were left at the end. The after-circle was still very good – someone passed around little cups of a nice liquor, and we analyzed the whole thing and debated who should have been kept. One experienced circler liked it so much (he said it brought out more honesty) that he hosted a third session the following night, cohosting with another attendee.
Interesting phenomenon: In the chaotic 30 minutes, I asked everyone who was okay being targeted and piled on to sit on one side of the room, and everyone else to go on the other. The people who were booted were disproportionately from that side of the room. In the after-circle someone commented on the weirdness of this, and although in the stress of things I had not consciously noted this, I immediately knew why: that half of the room was disproportionately “fight subby” in that they wanted other people to inflame their own emotions, and such people tend not to help this event move along.