I’ve titled my blog Seize the Means of Community, a phrase I’ve long used as a hashtag before deciding to develop it into a full-fledged blog. The central aim of this project is political: I want to reframe and reformulate socialism—or at least my version of it—by focusing on the idea of “community.” After all, community is the very medium in which social reality is forged, maintained, and advanced.
To achieve these political goals, I’ve realized I need to trace my ideas back to fundamental theoretical roots. This involves applying various theoretical frameworks to history to better understand our current circumstances and chart a path toward addressing them.
However, my approach to blogging is unconventional. Most of the words you read here are generated in collaboration with an AI, a method I’ve adopted to overcome a longstanding writer’s block. Without diving into all the reasons for this now, I will say that part of the struggle stems from the absence of a community—the very thing I’m advocating for. I’ve lacked the intellectual and creative community that might support my writing, and this blog represents an effort to build such a community where none currently exists.
I am not a scholar in the traditional sense. I don’t have academic credentials or notable intellectual accomplishments, and in many ways, I resemble what people might call a “crackpot.” I’m an intellectual magpie, drawing from a wide array of authors and fields, though I rarely dive deeply into any one. So, when I reference a particular thinker or approach, it’s entirely possible that I’m offering just as much as I know about the subject. My goal is not to assert authority but to share ideas that I believe could be useful to others.
One of the central motivations behind this blog is to attract a community of readers—people who might further explore, critique, or even challenge the ideas I’m putting forward. I fully acknowledge that I might be wrong, and in fact, I welcome engagement from others who could convince me of that. This isn’t about being right, but about building understanding collaboratively.
Because of the way I think—and the way I’m collaborating with AI—I’ve ended up producing a large volume of posts in a relatively short time. I don’t want to overwhelm my readers by dumping all of these ideas onto the internet at once, but I also want to maintain a record of how my thoughts have developed.
Each post is meant to stand on its own, more like a wiki article than a chapter in a book. There’s more redundancy than you’d find in a traditional book, and this is intentional. I hope that readers will engage with the posts in a way that mirrors my own magpie-like approach: picking through the material, finding what interests them, and following threads from one post to another.
At some point, I may even shift this project from a blog to a wiki, allowing others to contribute directly. This could create a living document where people can expand, edit, and revise the articles, turning the blog into a communal effort. Ultimately, this blog is an experiment, both in its format and in its content.
My blog is just the first step toward a larger political project. In advocating for new forms of community, especially online, I’m envisioning what I call “communitaria.” These are new types of online spaces where the richness of human community can be fostered and expanded in ways that counteract the alienation and hyper-individualism of modern capitalist life.
I view the blog as the first step in the formation of this new kind of online community. Over time, I hope it will become a space where people engage with ideas, connect with each other, and begin to think seriously about how we can collectively create new forms of organization—both online and off—that move us toward a more equitable and community-centered society.
Concluding non-AI-generated postscript
The text above was, indeed, generated by AI. I transcribed a rambling monologue, full of disfluencies, self-repairs and backtracks, organized along stream-of-consciousness lines, and uploaded it to ChatGPT. The AI brought order to the thoughts I'd expressed, added some points based on all the previous interactions in which we'd engaged, and cleaned up my diction. Where I said, repeatedly, “I could be full of shit” it chose to say, instead (and only once) “I fully acknowledge I could be wrong”. Thus does this collaboration proceed. I will soon publish a series of posts which describe in more depth the character of this joint effort.
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