#unnamed delegate you dropped this 👑

[ephemeral-winter]

Obsessed with this guy’s report to his funding body about an academic conference c. 1999:

Stimulated by Messrs Trautmann and Ekman, the delegates then undertook informal discussions in "break-out groups." You are probably familiar with this alarming term, "break-out groups." A break-out group is not a cohort of escaped prisoners, as one might think or even hope, but a random selection of folks, very often complete strangers to each other, who are presumed to form instant affinities thicker than blood in the simple act of breaking out, that is, in sitting together in a group of ten or a dozen. Break-out groups derive, I believe, from the world of church youth movements and self-help organizations; and they are probably pretty effective when the topic under discussion is one's spiritual quest or one's sexual addictions. Problems of intellectual property, alas, do not seem sufficiently magnetic to induce the spurious intimacy characteristic of the successful break-out group. One delegate—I shall not name him—broke out of the break-out group and sat in sullen, silent isolation a few yards away. He uttered but one sentence: "I do not break out."