Liminal Web
= "'Liminal' means ‘to occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’." [1]
Description
1. SecondRenaissance.net:
"In 2021, Joe Lightfoot published a blog post attempting to map “an emergent subculture of sensemakers, meta-theorists & systems poets”, which he termed the “Liminal Web”:
- ”a collection of thinkers, writers, theorists, podcasters, videographers and community builders who all share a high crossover in their collection of perspectives on the world. It not only includes creators of content but also the people and communities who resonate with the constellation of ideas such creators put forward.”
'Liminal' means ‘to occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’. The choice of this word reflects the idea that "everyone in the space is in their own unique way attempting to mid-wife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst simultaneously hospicing the old".2 'The Liminal Web' has since become a popular term for referring to the emerging ecosystem."
(https://secondrenaissance.net/publications/overview-ecosystem-names)
2. Joe Lightfoot:
"I settled on the name Liminal because one definition of the word is ‘to occupy a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’ which for me speaks perfectly to the idea that everyone in the space is in their own unique way attempting to mid-wife a new kind of regenerative culture whilst simultaneously hospicing the old. Jeremy Johnson offers a beautiful interpretation of why the word Liminal is so fitting for our times in this piece from his magazine of the same name. I use the term here lightly with the expectation that the scene will of course continue to evolve, shift and change over time along with the names we use to describe it. That’s what scenes do after all, run one after another in a much larger play."
Timeline
Joe Lightfoot, From Whence The Liminal Web Emerged:
"I propose The Liminal Web began to crystallise in the wake of a number of podcasts and youtube channels which emerged between 2015 and 2020. Each of these platforms explored a very similar array of topics and platformed a similar collection of guests and in doing so created a distinct network of thinkers and ideas. Here is a brief overview of that period:
2015 - Some of the early pioneers in this regard were Mike Gilliland and Euvie Ivanova who launched The Future Thinkers podcast just before the Brexit vote and election of Donald trump would foreshadow a global wave of right wing nationalist populism.
2018 - A few years later Daniel Thorson launched the Emerge podcast which served to further delineate this diverse and yet somehow deeply interrelated constellation of thinkers. At around the same time David Fuller and Alexander Beiner started Rebel Wisdom taking this same field of ideas to a broader audience through high quality video production on Youtube.
2019 - Next up the Both/And Podcast and The Jim Rutt show both launched covering a similar array topics but each doing so with their own particular flavour and style. It was around this time that it became almost impossible to keep up with all of the content being produced in the space.
2020 - And then just after the pandemic arrived in 2020 Peter Limberg started The Stoa and pioneered a popular new format of group Zoom calls with shorter guest presentations followed by a wider collective Q&A.
While there are a number of other platforms and content creators who were also active and influential during this time I’m naming these six in particular due to the very high crossover in guests they all share. I’ve come to view each of them as critical layers of paint that would come to colour the canvas that has become The Liminal Web. Also formative to the space during this period was Jonathon Rowson and Tomas Bjorkman launching Perspectiva in 2016 and Metamoderna publishing The Listening Society in 2017."
Directory
Joe Lightfoot:
"Thinkers In The Space & What Connects Them
If I was given the task of inviting five people to come and speak at an event in the hope of attracting and thrilling as wide a cross section of The Liminal Web community as possible I’d probably suggest (not in any particular order):
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Nora Bateson
Tyson Yunkaporta
John Vervaeke
Hanzi Frienacht
Like all festival line ups this will no doubt cause some degree of contention and will hopefully be fun to argue with your Liminal friends about. However each of these luminaries have all appeared as guests on at least four of the six podcasts that I believe helped to form The Liminal Web in the first place, so there is some level of objectivity informing the selection.
To get a fuller sense of the range of thinkers in the space I've included a list of some of the other folks who have also appeared as guests on a number of podcasts and media platforms within the scene. Some of them include:
Richard Bartlett
Joe Brewer
Zak Stein
Jeremy Johnson
James Erlich
Jamie Wheal
Douglas Rushkoff
Tomas Bjorkman
Ria Baeck
Johnathan Rowson
Layman Pascal
Bonnita Roy
Jordan Hall
Charles Eisenstein
Indra Adnan
Miriam Mason Martineau
Bayo Akomolafe
Alex Ebert
Alexander Bard
Stephen Jenkinson
Jeremy Lent
Samo Burja
Erik Davis
Guy Sengstock
Forrest Landry
Michael Taft ."
The Liminal Web Intellectual Lineage
Joe Lightfoot:
"I’d suggest the whole space has been heavily influenced by a number of systems thinkers and synthesisers such as Alfred Korzybski, Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Octavia Butler, Joseph Campbell, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Gebser, Ken Wilber, Joanna Macy, Ursula Le Guin, E.F Schumacher, James Baldwin and Donella Meadows.
Obviously there is a much broader array of philosophers, psychologists, scientists, sociologists, economists and political theorists that have also had formative influences on the scene but I’ve chosen to highlight this more integral stream of influence in recognition of the fact that they have generally attempted to adopt as wide a perspective as possible. They also tend to blend together elements of the exoteric (or systems change) and esoteric (or sense of interiority) within their work which is a way of thinking typical to many in The Liminal Web. But this isn't to suggest that everyone in the space would subscribe to all of the ideas espoused by the names I’ve mentioned, it’s quite a disparate list after all.
A few additional names that I believe are also widely respected within the scene include that of Terrence Mckenna, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and Alan Watts. All of whom also specialised in playfully integrating and synthesising vast bodies of knowledge within their work. And finally I feel the book Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse deserves a special mention as it is often widely cited as being formative for thinkers in the space."
A More Comprehensive List Of Liminal Projects & Platforms
Joe Lightfoot:
"Here’s a longer list of some of the other platforms and projects either within The Liminal Web or at least positioned close by. Again this is not a complete representation as I’m sure there are many other projects I’m yet to encounter.
Ari In The Air
Both/And
Buddhist Geeks
Deep Transformation Network
Denizen
Discomfortable
Doomer Optimism
Eclectic Spacewalk
Emergent Commons
Emerge Gathering
Emerge Podcast
Enlightened Worldview Project
Future Fossils
Future Thinkers
Global Bildung Network
Growing Down
HELLAMETAMODERNISM
Integral Life
Life Itself
Monastic Academy For The Preservation Of Life On Earth
Meta-Ideological Politics
Metamoderna
Metamodern Spirituality
Nordic Bildung
Parallax
P2P Foundation
Rebel Wisdom
Rizoma Field School
Sloww
State Of Emergence
Perspectiva
Team Human
Tea With Tada
The Abs-Tract Organisation
The Alternative UK
The Bento Society
The Consilience Project
The Context Institute
The Daily Evolver
The Golden Shadow
The Infinite Lunchbox
The Jim Rutt Show
The Side View
The Stoa
The Warm Integral Conference
The Widemind Podcast
Theory Of Knowledge
Willow Academy (MAPLE)
Voicecraft Network . "
2023 Platform Update
Joe Lightfoot:
"A number of the projects shown in the new graphic already have links presented above in the original article. Here is the list of links to the new ones:
Arch Disciplinary Research Centre (ARC)
Art Of Emergence
Constructing Consciousness
Earth Mother
Fine Line Full Circle
The Oscillators Stone
Pop Up School
Respond Network
Unified Theory Of Knowledge (UTOK)
And here is a small and diverse tasting platter of other potent projects from across the wider Liminal Web. Some of these I’d deem as more central to the web and others as more periphery but I believe they all represent high quality Integrative thinking:
Aletheia
Black Metamodernism
Bobby Azarian
Collective Soulmaking (link coming soon)
Cosmo-Erotic Humanism
Damien Walter
Deep Transformation Podcast
Doomer Optimism
Integral European Conference
The Intentional Society
Inqwire
Jared Morningstar
Liv Boeree
Lunmu
Nura Learning
Philosophy Portal
Pascals Integral Batcave
Psychotechnologies Live
The Radical Emergence Podcast
Rebuilding Meaning
Rosa Lewis
The Reconstitution Project
Samhadi Integral
STAGES
Turquoise Sound
The Weave Magazine
Unified Theory Of Human Behaviour & Consciousness
Weco . "
Discussion
From Progressive - Romantic-Liberalism - to New Right Meaning-Web formations
Erik Haines maps the field in 2026, and maps it politically, from a slightly Canadian angle:
"The wider liminal web — and the closely overlapping Meaning-Making Web that crystallized around the meaning-crisis discourse — as it has stabilized since Joe Lightfoot named it in 2021, organizes itself across four overlapping clusters with distinct national and institutional bases.
- The British anchor cluster runs through Perspectiva, through Rebel Wisdom while it operated, through the Realisation Festival at St. Giles House, through the Wheal-Hall-Schmachtenberger meaning-crisis network and the Stoa platform Peter Limberg organized, and through the wider Bildung-and-metamodernism conversation around Brendan Graham Dempsey, Layman Pascal, and the Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds anthology Rowson and Pascal edited for Perspectiva Press.
- The Canadian cluster operates in two distinct strands. One strand—Peterson and Vervaeke, joined since 2017 by Jonathan Pageau—operates at mass-cultural scale and is the loudest single voice in the contemporary meaning-crisis conversation. This strand is supported by the Daily Wire programming infrastructure, by Vervaeke’s massive YouTube reach through the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series, by Pageau’s Symbolic World podcast, courses, and Symbolic World Press, and by the broader Toronto-centric network of psychologists, philosophers, and public intellectuals who have positioned themselves around the meaning-crisis discourse. The other Canadian strand—the critical-theological and speculative-philosophical resources operating against the formation from within Canadian intellectual life (Grant, Taylor, Armour, Davis, Lalonde, Sweet, McGrath, Trott, Saul) — is the position from which I write, and the position this essay advances.
- The American cluster runs through Wilber’s Integral Life, through CIIS and the process-relational tradition, through the older meaning-crisis figures (Vervaeke’s and Hall’s American audiences), and through the IDW infrastructure that originated in 2016–2017 and has since fragmented and reformed across multiple podcast and Substack platforms.
- Finally, three genuinely distinct left-of-centre clusters operate outside the liminal web ecosystem proper, to the left of it, with their own digital media ecosystem. The continental-Marxist cluster—Cadell Last and the Philosophy Portal, David McKerracher’s Theory Underground, the broader Žižekian-Lacanian-Marxist current that carries forward post-Brooks—works in continental-philosophical idiom. The analytical-Marxist cluster—Ben Burgis’s Give Them An Argument show, the Burgis-McManus collaboration that has formed around their joint book and podcast work, and the wider analytical-Marxist network in the tradition of G.A. Cohen extending through Matt McManus’s writing on postmodern conservatism and liberal socialism—works in analytical-philosophical idiom. The psychoanalytic-Marxist cluster anchored on Daniel Tutt and his Emancipations podcast and study collective, the Torsion Groups study-group infrastructure he has built, and his collaborators including Gabriel Tupinambá, Conrad Hamilton, and C. Derick Varn (Varn Vlog) —works in a register distinct from both continental and analytical clusters: psychoanalytic theory and Marxism in dialogue at the level of philosophy of praxis, with sustained attention to worldview-criticism and the irrationalist genealogy Lukács named. Tutt’s recovery of The Destruction of Reason is precisely what Section V draws on for the diagnostic apparatus this essay deploys. The three clusters are genuinely distinct in method and lineage. All three inform the political-theoretical formation I came to inhabit through Brooks, McManus, and Tutt’s Lukács recovery, which is part of why this essay exists.
- Beyond the liminal web ecosystem proper, but operating in continuous traffic with its right-leaning strands, sits the New Right intellectual lineage anchored in Aleksandr Dugin’s fourth political theory. Dugin’s project is the explicit articulation of what the Peterson-Pageau-Vervaeke convergence has been gesturing at without naming: that the existing political-theoretical positions—liberalism, communism, fascism—are exhausted, and that what is needed is a fourth theoretical articulation operating from different ground than the three twentieth-century positions. Dugin’s specific articulation goes through the Guénon-Evola Traditionalist-esoteric lineage that Habermas was already diagnosing in the 1980s and that Matthew McManus has tracked with increasing precision in his work on postmodern conservatism: ethnos as fundamental subject, civilizational geopolitics, traditionalist metaphysics, postliberal-illiberal political orientation. The figure who has carried Dugin’s project from Russian into Anglophone political philosophy with the most sustained intellectual seriousness is Michael Millerman , whose Heideggerian reading of Dugin emerged from his University of Toronto PhD dissertation on Heidegger and was published as Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (Arktos Media), followed by Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin (2022). Millerman has translated seven of Dugin’s books into English—including The Fourth Political Theory (as co-translator), The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory, Political Platonism, Ethnos and Society, and Theory of a Multipolar World—and Benjamin Teitelbaum has called him “the leading English-language interpreter of Dugin’s thought.” His digital infrastructure—the Millerman School, the Substack, the YouTube channel with over 36,000 subscribers—does for the New Right cluster what Perspectiva and the Daily Wire podcast network do for romantic-liberalism and its right-pole convergence: it is the Anglophone institutional carrier through which the philosophical project travels into the educated readership the formation orients toward. That Millerman writes from Toronto, from the same Canadian academic infrastructure that produced Peterson and Vervaeke, registers something the Canadian intellectual situation Section II identified makes legible: the Canadian tradition contains both the Lament for a Nation lineage from which I write and the Heidegger-Dugin lineage Millerman channels, with no shared ground between them. The convergence with the Peterson-Pageau material runs through the symbolic-religious register, the appeal to traditional civilizational forms, and the rejection of liberal proceduralism as the final horizon of political life. The New Right cluster operates to the right of romantic-liberalism and names the political-theoretical destination toward which romantic-liberalism’s structural ambivalences keep pointing without ever explicitly arriving.
What Watts’s Spiritual Turn names, and what Selling Spirituality named seventeen years earlier, is the philosophical-anthropological formation running through all four clusters as their common centre of gravity. The formation is romantic-liberal in the precise technical sense Watts develops at length: it draws on the post-1960s spiritual turn toward deinstitutionalized, individualized, experientially grounded religiosity; it operates within the broader liberal political framework of the educated middle class across the Anglophone world; it valorizes authenticity, depth, expressive individualism, and self-actualization as the core human goods; and it treats the recovery of meaning, spirituality, and purpose as the central cultural task of late modernity. Watts is careful to distinguish romantic liberalism from progressive liberalism—they are politically and culturally distinct, often opposed—but he demonstrates they share the underlying liberal moral framework, and that the differences between them are inflections within a single broader formation rather than fundamental disagreements about what human life is for. This formation is genuinely culturally generative. It has produced the wellness industry, the contemplative-revival publishing arc, the integral-spiritual conference circuit, the meaning-crisis podcast economy, and a substantial portion of contemporary popular religion in its non-institutional forms. On Watts’s analysis, it is the single most influential moral-metaphysical position in the contemporary educated-Anglophone world. The philosophical-anthropological work of figures like McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Dempsey, and Segall serves as the highbrow articulation of what the formation believes about itself.
What Selling Spirituality had already named in 2005 was the political-economic substrate of the formation. Carrette and King traced with considerable empirical detail the way the discourse of spirituality had been progressively privatized, commodified, and metabolized by neoliberal capitalism—turned into a market product, instrumentalized for managerial and corporate ends, and severed from the socially transformative dimensions of the historical religious traditions it claimed to draw from. Under neoliberalism, right-hemispheric modalities like mindfulness and flow states are stripped of their ethical demands and repurposed as corporate productivity hacks, stress-reduction techniques for burnt-out managers, or personal-brand enhancers for the creative class. Carrette and King’s diagnosis is sharper than Watts’s precisely because it foregrounds this political-economic mechanism: the formation is not merely a moral-metaphysical position with systematic blind spots, but a culturally productive arrangement of religious and spiritual resources serving specific political and economic functions in late capitalism. It is spirituality defanged of its capacity to challenge structural economic realities. Watts adds the ethnographic and theoretical depth that Selling Spirituality did not have time to develop. Taken together, the two books constitute the empirical substrate from which this essay’s diagnostic proceeds. The formation has its political-economic substrate (Carrette and King), its philosophical-anthropological articulation (Watts), and its highbrow-philosophical apparatus (McGilchrist, Taylor, Segall, McGrath, Vervaeke, Dempsey). It has its institutional carriers (Perspectiva, Rebel Wisdom, CIIS, Integral Life, the Daily Wire in its meaning-crisis register, the Liminal-Meaning web more broadly). And it has—though few of its participants would recognize this—its political downstream: the post-2016 cultural-political wave mobilizing romantic-liberal philosophical resources for an explicit political project that romantic liberalism itself, as a moral-metaphysical position, would not endorse but cannot recognize itself as enabling.
The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves (December 2024), written as the first sustained public deployment of the diagnostic this essay extends, took up Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart category of the lifestyle enclave and applied it specifically to the American integral community organized around Wilber’s Integral Life platform. The argument was that what began as an integral movement aspiring to civic, intellectual, and spiritual transformation had progressively become a lifestyle enclave in Bellah’s precise sense: a community organized around shared private leisure consumption, internally cohesive but politically disengaged, religiously serious in form but entirely unable to translate its commitments into the public-sphere institutions through which democratic life is actually sustained. A lifestyle enclave retreats from the friction of structural politics into the comfort of shared aesthetic and spiritual consumption. The present essay extends that diagnostic at scale. What was true of the American integral case is true, in different inflections, of the British Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom cluster, of the CIIS-process-relational tradition, of the Vervaeke-Peterson mass-cultural strand, and of the broader Liminal-Meaning web ecosystem taken as a whole. The institutional infrastructure across all four clusters produces lifestyle enclaves at increasing scale, anchored philosophically by the romantic-liberalism Watts diagnoses, served philosophical-anthropologically by figures like McGilchrist, and completely unable to recognize themselves as such because the categories of analysis available within the formation cannot reach the structural-political level at which the diagnostic operates. That diagnostic is what Section V now lays out."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)
More information
- The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets - Joe Lightfoot [2]
- Metamodern Spirituality | The Liminal Web and Communitas (w/ Joe Lightfoot) [3]
- "The 'Sensemaking Web' (or 'Sensemaking Scene') is a largely synonymous term for the Liminal Web. It highlights the shared goal of those within the space to 'make sense' of the world." [4]
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKDAXqyab5KRApfvE/the-sense-making-web
- https://twitter.com/GameBInsights/status/1275770634581270529
- The Holomovement