Nephila is a studio interested in adversarial play, shared fictions, and anomalous forms of cognition.

To be read in a preferably sloppy place:

We conducted this research in the summer of 2025, right after OpenAI published its sycophancy findings and right before Israel launched its attacks on Iran. This report is a series of case studies on selected fandoms, which we believe depict this incredibly disorienting and open-ended moment where societal notions of accountability, truth, and identity are dissolving from mainstream discourse and condensing in more intimate digital spaces. We describe ourselves as creative technologists, artists, engineers, and, most importantly, we're still learning—most of us haven't even finished college. We make music in our bedrooms, write code and build PCBs, navigate side hustles, try to decode a world that shifts faster than we can understand it. The world we inherited was broken by those who came before us, but we refuse to accept that inheritance as final. So we wrote this report to offer an unfiltered GenZ lens —because how we understand this moment will determine the future we're left to build.

~~

This report serves a dual purpose:

First, <as a lens> through which to observe and analyze the rapidly changing landscape of online identity, group dynamics, and collective play, at a time when our sense of individuality is being deformed, deep-fried, glazed, and hallucinated.

Second, <as a guidebook> for performing a digital LARP similar to that deployed in Nephila's live experiment. Each section is a recipe containing the ingredients to infiltrate real fandoms, evade detection, manipulate slop, and coordinate group actions. If you wish to gain access to Nephila's social operating system used during the workshop in August 2025, please feel free to contact us at: studio@nephila.world