I walk in and Julia Casablancas is baring her entire soul for a nearly empty room of three people. The space looks like a haunted classroom, the walls stacked with ladders, containers full of video cables and picture frames, folded-up cardboard, a clock with the wrong time. Wires and circuitry snake around and droop from the ceiling like they’re reaching out to tickle you; a cage redolent of an elaborate torture tool wobbles in the air. And in the middle of the room is Julia, not the Strokes frontman, howling into the mic as her rainbow necklace and furry tail flap against a green bikini top and skirt. The music’s somewhere between experimental rave-pop and vulnerable exorcism, delicate odes that mutate into thwomping electronic drops. The visuals push it to next-level nutty, with a projector that engulfs Julia in flames and clips from festivals of massive crowds. Julia finishes the set leading “FUCK ICE!” and “FREE PALESTINE!” chants, then collapses on the ground. By the end, the room was packed.

This was my intro to Swaggotfest, the anarcho-pride parody of a music festival that went for 12 hours nonstop from 7 p.m. on Friday to 7 the next morning. It was held at NYC Resistor, a shared space run by a hacker collective in Boerum Hill. Just a few blocks from Barclays Center, some of the best and worst dressed people in New York were jumpstyle-dancing all night to a molten gumbo of rave music and pop edits.

I’d never been to NYC Resistor before, and I couldn’t tell what was naturally in the space versus the show decorations. The staircase up was littered with DERP faces like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. Inside, the main hang area was maximal to the maddest. Paper lanterns and cotton clouds radiated from the rafters; the walls were festooned with bionic fans, gridded street networks, sewing materials, lightsabers. There were drinks for sale—red and blue Jell-O shots, Sapporo—along with a row of vendors: trans literature zines, shiny tchotchkes, a tattoo artist. A refrigerator glimmered with magnets in support of a slew of causes: Data privacy, ACAB, queer youth, mask-wearing, sex work, library funding. A giant TV screen interspersed clips of the beloved monster DOMO with an Impact font greeting: “YOU ARE NOW AT SWAGGOTFEST.”

I first saw the term “swaggot” earlier this year on TikTok, via semi-ironic videos about “performative twinkism” and Lil B acolyte Captain Swag, whose song “Swaggot” (“I go crazy for the swag/I’m a swaggot”) infested my feed. A similar thing happened for Julia, who co-created Swaggotfest with Jock, a DJ known as nonbinaryjakepaul. “I started seeing swaggot memes a few months ago, like it entered my algorithm—or what, my brain—and I started calling my friends swaggots,” Julia told me. The idea of a festival appeared in her mind like a vision. She started posting parody flyers of lineups that featured Frank Ocean, Nettspend, Lana Del Rey, but also her and DIY scene friends. “People couldn’t tell if it was a meme or if it was real,” she said. It started as a joke, until they actually decided to do it, spending months wrangling everything together. “Once you’re there it’s like oh shit, this is actually a very legit event.”