Seize the Means of Community

The Scouting Trap: How DSA Trains Without Transforming

The Democratic Socialists of America, especially in major urban chapters like NYC-DSA, has become a formidable presence. It has helped elect socialist-aligned candidates, mobilized around labor and tenant struggles, and consistently shown up at pivotal demonstrations. Its members are often among the most principled, capable, and hardworking organizers in left-wing spaces today. And yet, despite all this activity, DSA remains more formative than transformative.

To put it provocatively: DSA functions less like a revolutionary political organization and more like an adult, socialist scouting movement. It fosters solidarity, builds competencies, and cultivates a kind of ethical-political citizenship. But its structure and strategic habits suggest that it prepares its members for a world that never arrives. It produces scouts without a campaign, comrades without a horizon.

This isn't a dismissal. The scouting analogy is not meant as a slight. Scouting organizations are, in many ways, admirable: they emphasize practical skills, moral development, mutual support, and local leadership. But they do so within a largely unchallenged framework. They teach people to navigate a world, not to remake it. And DSA, at its best, has excelled at helping people navigate a hostile, alienating, and unjust society—building moral stamina and organizing competence. But the question remains: toward what end?

The organization’s activities—electoral campaigns, tenant organizing, strike support, protest mobilization—are laudable in themselves. DSA also pursues concrete policy goals that, at first glance, seem to edge closer to the kind of envisioning we claim is lacking—for example, the BPRA proposal for public renewable energy. But these efforts, too, are often carried out in parallel rather than in integration. Mutual aid efforts do not necessarily feed into electoral education. Campaign infrastructure is rarely redeployed for building durable communal life. Even DSA’s most successful chapters seem to lack a unifying strategic theory beyond the moral imperative to act. The result is a vast, talented body of organizers whose efforts rarely cohere into cumulative, systemic counter-power.

This fragmentation is not simply a matter of strategy. It is also a matter of political psychology. DSA, like many left movements, has grown rapidly by gathering together people disillusioned with capitalism but not necessarily aligned around a shared vision of what comes next. In this way, DSA is structurally incentivized to keep its future blurry. Too much specificity could prompt rupture. A detailed vision might cause as many members to leave as it inspires to stay. So the organization remains safely capacious, organized around shared grievances and ethical sensibilities more than strategic clarity.

But vagueness comes at a cost. Without a shared horizon, it's nearly impossible to accumulate power across time and scale. The competencies DSA cultivates do not feed into a post-capitalist infrastructure—they circulate within the organization, forming a kind of ethical holding pattern. The result is a paradox: a movement that builds capacity but not trajectory. It gathers strength but doesn't translate that strength into a transformative counter-system.

This is the scouting trap. DSA builds up the best of us, but does not yet build beyond us. It creates refuge, not rupture. Formation, not transition. Without a different kind of vision—a riskier, more integrative one—it may keep developing socialist scouts long after the campfire of capitalism has burned through the forest.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity #CommunitariumProject

For centuries, academia—especially its most prestigious institutions—has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of intelligence, merit, and social value. It has operated as an enclosure, defining who counts as “intelligent,” who deserves access to status and opportunity, and who holds the authority to shape public knowledge. Degrees and credentials have been treated as markers of moral and intellectual worth, justifying access to influence, power, and higher social standing.

But this system is facing a profound crisis, one born not from a single cause but from a series of betrayals, contradictions, and systemic failures. AI is just one factor accelerating a collapse that has been long in the making.

Academia as Enclosure

For generations, academic institutions have served as enclosures that control access to social power. By determining who earns credentials, who produces knowledge, and who gains entry to the “inner circle” of expertise, they have shaped the very meaning of merit and intelligence. But this enclosure has always been artificial. Intelligence, as academia has defined it, has been deeply shaped by cultural biases, class structures, and historical exclusions.

This is not just about who is accepted into prestigious programs, but about which forms of knowledge are legitimized, who gets to be heard, and what counts as “real” scholarship. It’s about who gets to produce narratives that shape society and who is excluded from the conversation.

The Betrayal of Ideals

The crisis facing academia is not merely about external technological pressures but about its betrayal of its own proclaimed ideals. Recent examples lay bare the extent of this failure:

• Suppression of Free Speech and Democratic Values: Columbia University's suspension, expulsion, and revocation of degrees for 22 students who protested in support of Palestinian peoples is a stark example of how academic institutions have betrayed their professed commitment to democratic discourse and free expression. Rather than fostering critical engagement, academia is actively silencing dissent to maintain institutional alignment with dominant power structures.

• The Replication Crisis: The “publish or perish” culture has fueled a replication crisis across numerous academic disciplines. Under pressure to meet narrow, reductive criteria of “merit” and “success,” researchers have produced work that is increasingly unreliable, driven by the need for quantifiable outputs rather than meaningful insight. The system values quantity over quality, compliance over criticality.

• Exploitation of Academic Labor: Academia has also proven to be an exploitative employer. The adjunct professor system, where highly educated individuals are paid poverty wages without benefits or job security, exemplifies how the institution values profit and efficiency over fairness and intellectual integrity. This is not an aberration but a structural feature of the modern university.

• AI as a Disruptive Force: AI further challenges the legitimacy of academic systems. If AI can replicate many forms of academic output—from research summaries to essays—then the value of credentialed labor as a marker of merit erodes. AI is not the cause of academia's crisis but a harsh light exposing its long-standing weaknesses.

Academia's Defensive Response

Rather than confronting these crises, academia often responds by reinforcing its enclosures:

• Gatekeeping Discourse: Institutions suppress controversial discourse and punish dissent under the guise of maintaining “order” or “academic standards,” betraying their proclaimed commitment to open inquiry.

• Valorizing Process Over Insight: Institutions elevate methodologies and procedural rigor as shields against critique, even as these processes produce unreliable, redundant, and exclusionary work.

• Defending Institutional Prestige: The prestige of traditional academic institutions is presented as self-evident proof of their value, despite the ways that prestige reflects historical exclusion, economic privilege, and complicity with power.

These defenses are not about protecting intellectual rigor but about preserving authority and the structures of power that depend on academic enclosure.

Reclaiming the Purpose of Knowledge

The crisis facing academia is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge and how we structure learning communities. The intelligence-merit link is already broken, and academia must now confront hard questions:

• What is the Purpose of Higher Education? If education is no longer about credentialing intelligence, what should it be about? Should it be about cultivating mutual learning, collective problem-solving, and social engagement?

• What Counts as Valuable Knowledge? If academic knowledge is no longer privileged by virtue of its institutional enclosure, how can we elevate more diverse, emergent, and community-grounded ways of knowing?

• Who Gets to Create and Share Knowledge? Should academic institutions continue to gatekeep knowledge production, or should we prioritize more open, participatory, and collective models of inquiry?

• What Becomes of Expertise? If expertise is less about individual credentials and more about collective interpretive capacity, how should authority and knowledge be shared and cultivated in community?

The Communitarium as Counter-Enclosure

The Communitarium can be an experimental alternative to traditional academia—a site that rejects the intelligence-merit narrative and the sacralization of academic prestige. It offers a model for mutual, emergent, and relational knowledge-making that is free from the hierarchies of traditional institutions.

• Mutual Learning Spaces: The Communitarium is not about certifying intelligence. It’s about cultivating spaces where people learn from each other, hold complexity together, and deliberate in mutual, open-ended ways.

• Resisting Knowledge Gatekeeping: It resists the tendency to define legitimate knowledge through rigid methodologies or institutional conventions. Instead, it values diverse insights, practical experiences, and emergent collective reasoning.

• Valuing Process Over Prestige: The Communitarium doesn't measure value by outcomes, credentials, or institutional status. It values the process of inquiry, mutual care, and shared meaning-making.

• Democratizing Expertise: It treats expertise as a communal capacity, developed through deliberation and mutual understanding, rather than as a scarce resource controlled by credentialed authorities.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

AI didn’t break academia. Neither did any single scandal or betrayal. Academia’s collapse is the result of a long history of complicity, exploitation, and enclosure—a system that has betrayed its own ideals and reduced intelligence and merit to narrow, exclusionary categories.

The collapse of this fiction is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge, how we share it, and how we create spaces for collective learning and understanding.

The choice is clear. We can double down on the illusions that have protected exclusion, hierarchy, and prestige, or we can begin constructing new, mutual counter-enclosures that prioritize openness, deliberation, and collective emergence.

The Communitarium is an experiment in the latter. It is an invitation to imagine learning and knowledge differently—not as markers of merit, but as practices of mutual engagement and shared becoming.

Intelligence, Merit, and AI: The Collapse of a Cultural Illusion

For centuries, societies have relied on the presumption that “intelligence” is a natural marker of “merit”—a justification for status, wealth, authority, and influence. Intelligence has been coded as a scarce resource, a sacred trait that legitimizes power and hierarchy. The smarter you are, the more you deserve. The greater your intelligence, the greater your right to influence and reward.

This logic has been particularly influential in justifying the special status of the managerial and executive class. These roles have been elevated on the assumption that they require rare and exceptional intelligence—the capacity to “see the big picture,” to “strategize,” and to “lead.” Managerial power is portrayed as an inevitable outcome of superior cognitive ability, strategic insight, and the ability to manage complexity. This framing is central to how hierarchy justifies itself.

But this foundational myth is collapsing, and AI is accelerating its demise.

The rise of advanced AI systems threatens to expose a long-standing cultural illusion: that intelligence, as traditionally defined, is inherently tied to moral worth, social merit, or deservingness. As AI grows capable of performing tasks historically reserved for the “intelligent”—writing, coding, composing, analyzing, and even strategic planning—it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that these abilities are signs of virtue or deep human value.

The uncomfortable truth is that much of what society has valorized as “intelligence” is reducible to processes of pattern recognition, task execution, and repetition—things AI can now do at scale, without consciousness, morality, or merit. The emergence of AI forces a reckoning: if machines can perform these tasks without deserving status or reward, why have humans—especially the managerial class—been so richly rewarded for doing the same?

Intelligence as Narrative Enclosure

The presumed connection between intelligence and merit has been one of the dominant narrative enclosures of modernity. It is a crypto-theological belief—one that sacralizes intelligence as a marker of human worth, progress, and inevitability. It underwrites the mythology of meritocracy: the belief that those who succeed in society do so because they “deserve” it, because they are smarter, better, more capable.

The executive and managerial class has been the ultimate beneficiary of this mythology. The ability to “lead,” “decide,” and “envision” has been framed as the highest form of intelligence, deserving of the highest rewards. But AI disrupts this story. It reveals that intelligence, at least as measured by performance in certain tasks, is not a marker of moral virtue or social contribution. Intelligence is mechanical, procedural, replicable. Strategic analysis, predictive modeling, and decision optimization—all traits that have been used to justify managerial supremacy—are tasks AI can perform without merit, meaning, or consciousness.

The System’s Defensive Response

Rather than accepting this collapse, we can expect systems of power to respond with narrative defense mechanisms. They will attempt to salvage the illusion of merit by doubling down on new forms of enclosure:

• Redefining Merit: Human intelligence will be reframed as more “authentic,” “moral,” or “creative” than machine intelligence. Managerial roles will be mythologized as uniquely dependent on “vision,” “judgment,” or “character” even as these traits become indistinguishable from algorithmic processing.

• Moralizing AI: The narrative will shift to portray AI as dangerous, lacking in humanity, and morally suspect. The system will suggest that humans, by virtue of their inherent moral character, deserve continued power and reward, even as AI performs the labor they once did.

• Elevating Control Over Merit: As the illusion of intelligence collapses, systems will seek legitimacy not by claiming moral merit but by emphasizing control. The right to wield AI will become the new ground of social privilege. Those who “control the risk” will claim the right to control the rewards.

• Gatekeeping Creativity and Leadership: There will be a renewed effort to protect traditional markers of human leadership and vision, not by expanding access but by reinforcing institutional control. Only certain decisions, strategies, or insights will be deemed “authentic,” while AI-generated plans will be dismissed as imitation—even though much of managerial decision-making is already patterned, procedural, and derivative.

The Deeper Threat: Revealing Merit as Fiction

But the real threat is not that AI will outcompete humans in the labor market. The deeper threat is that AI will reveal how hollow the merit system has been all along.

If AI can write, code, strategize, or analyze without consciousness or moral character, then why have these capacities been treated as indicators of worth in human societies? Why have they justified higher pay, greater status, or disproportionate power? Why has the managerial class been positioned as inherently deserving of control and reward, when their role has often been to aggregate, process, and replicate information?

The answer is uncomfortable: because intelligence, as it's been socially constructed, has always served as an enclosure. It has been a way to justify and reproduce inequality. It has been a tool to gatekeep who has access to value, reward, and recognition. And AI exposes this mechanism by replicating “intelligent” outputs without any claim to deservingness.

Toward a Post-Merit Framework

This moment demands a radical reframing of how we think about value and worth. If AI shows us that intelligence does not equate to merit, then we must rethink what truly matters in human systems.

• Mutuality Over Merit: Value must be rooted in mutual contribution, care, and collective engagement—not in isolated outputs or competitive status. Mutual aid, not performance metrics, becomes the basis for collective thriving.

• Plasticity Over Intelligence: The capacity for mutual interpretation, deliberation, and collective problem-solving becomes more important than cognitive speed or technical proficiency. Value emerges from how we hold complexity together, not from how quickly we produce answers.

• Collective Emergence Over Individual Genius: Rather than valorizing individual achievement, we can focus on how value emerges through collective processes—how knowledge, care, and meaning are co-constructed in community.

• Decentralizing Control: Systems must resist the tendency to reinforce elite control over AI and knowledge production. Instead, they should prioritize shared access, transparency, and collective governance over technological capacities.

The Role of the Communitarium

The Communitarium can be a space where these new frameworks are cultivated. It can be a site where value is defined by mutuality, deliberation, and emergent collective intelligence—not by hierarchical measures of performance or output. It can resist the urge to sacralize “intelligence” as a measure of merit and instead foster spaces where relationality, care, and shared sense-making are the highest forms of contribution.

In the Communitarium, AI is not a threat but an exposer—a force that helps dismantle the myths we have relied on to justify exclusion, inequality, and hierarchy. The challenge is not to preserve the illusion of human merit but to build systems where value is rooted in collective reciprocity and mutual recognition.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

The collapse of the intelligence-merit link is an opportunity. It allows us to break with old enclosures and ask deeper questions about what we value, why we value it, and how we might build new systems that reflect mutual care, collective deliberation, and shared flourishing.

AI didn’t break the merit system. It just exposed the fractures that were already there. Now, we face a choice: to double down on the illusions that have sustained inequality, or to begin constructing new, collective counter-enclosures that make space for a genuinely mutual, post-merit future.

Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking DEI and the Structures of Power

In recent years, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have gained significant traction across public and private institutions. DEI was envisioned as a means to correct systemic injustices, expand opportunities for marginalized groups, and foster more equitable workplaces and communities. Yet, despite its aspirational goals, DEI has proven surprisingly brittle—vulnerable to political backlash and institutional reversal.

The recent efforts to dismantle DEI, particularly in political and corporate spheres, have been met with concern and resistance. But this moment also invites deeper reflection. Why has DEI been so easily rolled back? Why have its gains been vulnerable, and in some cases, superficial? And most importantly, did DEI ever have the transformative capacity to challenge the structures of power it sought to reform?

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The Promise and Limits of DEI

DEI initiatives undoubtedly achieved some meaningful victories. They increased representation in workplaces, brought attention to systemic discrimination, and opened doors for many who had long been excluded. However, DEI's very design limited its potential for deep, structural change.

Most DEI efforts focused on tweaking the processes of inclusion—altering hiring practices, broadening admissions criteria, or expanding representation in leadership. But these efforts rarely interrogated the deeper structures of power that determine what “merit,” “success,” or “achievement” mean in the first place. Marginalized individuals were offered access to existing systems but were expected to conform to the values and norms of those systems. The structures remained largely intact, and “inclusion” often meant being assimilated into processes shaped by dominant (and often exclusionary) logics.

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The Hegemony of Merit and Success

At its core, DEI operated within the frameworks of capitalist, Western, and often residual theological ideas about merit and success. These frameworks prioritized:

• Productivity and Profit: Value was measured by individual contributions to economic outcomes.
• Competition and Individualism: Success was framed as a personal achievement, often at the expense of others.
• Moral Worthiness: Effort and sacrifice were seen as indicators of who “deserved” success, often echoing deep cultural narratives of salvation and redemption.

In this context, DEI provided access without rethinking these values. It tweaked the gates but left the castle standing. The result was a brittle structure that could be easily dismantled once political winds shifted—because it never fundamentally questioned the architecture of power that determined who belonged and why.

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The Problem of Elite Capture

This dynamic reflects a broader phenomenon that philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò terms elite capture: when movements for justice and equity are co-opted by those in power, who reshape them to serve their own interests. DEI, in many institutions, became precisely this—a way to give the appearance of progress without altering deeper structures of exploitation and hierarchy.

By accepting the terms of dominant systems, DEI initiatives inadvertently reinforced the very hierarchies they aimed to challenge. They provided marginalized individuals with a seat at the table but rarely questioned who set the table, who chose the menu, or who reaped the profits. In this sense, DEI became more about managing diversity than transforming systems.

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Why DEI Was Easily Reversible

Because DEI operated on the terms of existing systems, it lacked true structural resilience. When political pressures mounted, DEI could be framed as an “extra”—a bonus or concession rather than a foundational rethinking of how institutions function. Institutions could simply remove DEI initiatives without fundamentally disrupting their operations. The deeper structures remained intact, and the cycle of exclusion resumed.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: What kind of inclusion are we fighting for? If inclusion only offers access to systems that continue to exploit, extract, and marginalize, is it truly progress? Or does it merely extend the reach of those systems by incorporating new participants into old frameworks of domination?

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Moving Beyond Inclusion: Toward Structural Transformation

If DEI has failed to produce deep change, it is not because inclusion is a flawed goal but because inclusion without transformation is insufficient. True justice requires more than access—it requires questioning the terms of participation, the definitions of value, and the structures that shape who benefits and who loses.

This means asking harder questions:

• What counts as “merit,” and who defines it?
• Who benefits from existing structures of success, and who is excluded?
• What would it mean to create systems where inclusion doesn't require assimilation to dominant values?
• How do we build structures that prioritize collective well-being over individual competition?

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Building Counter-Infrastructures

One path forward is to focus on building counter-infrastructures—systems and spaces that don't just replicate dominant structures but offer real alternatives. These might include:

• Community-owned platforms that resist data extraction and surveillance.
• Cooperative enterprises that prioritize mutual benefit over profit maximization.
• Decentralized networks that empower marginalized voices without requiring assimilation to corporate or state agendas.
• Alternative systems of value that emphasize care, reciprocity, and communal thriving over individual success.

Such counter-infrastructures don't just seek to diversify who participates in existing systems; they aim to reshape the very terms of participation and belonging. They recognize that justice is not just about who gets in but about what kind of system they're entering.

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The Challenge and the Possibility

The dismantling of DEI initiatives is a loss, but it is also an opportunity—to rethink the foundations of inclusion and to ask what kind of world we are working to build. If we can move beyond the surface-level inclusion that DEI often represented, we can begin the harder, deeper work of creating systems where justice, dignity, and flourishing are not privileges granted by existing power but fundamental conditions of collective life.

This requires patience, creativity, and solidarity. But it also requires a refusal to be satisfied with representation alone. Instead, we must commit to building structures where inclusion is not an act of charity or assimilation but the natural result of systems designed for shared thriving.

That is the deeper challenge—and the greater hope—beyond DEI.

A Socialist Life Needs Socialist Spaces

When I first joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), I was searching for something beyond the meetings, the organizing drives, and even the occasional victories. Most of the members I encountered, however, seemed committed either to participating in those ways or to sequestering themselves in various “study groups” or “reading groups,” collectively pursuing individual education or enlightenment without actually doing much with respect to the larger world or the broader, more active organization they had joined. But the question that lingered for me was this: where do we live our socialism?

For most of us, socialism is a belief, a set of values, a lens through which we critique the world as it is and dream about what it could be. But how often do we get to practice it? How often do we get to step into a space where socialist principles shape the ways we work, play, learn, care, and make decisions together? In the grind of daily life—under capitalism, with its isolations and exploitations—it’s easy to feel that our socialism is just an overlay on the same old structures, rather than a lived alternative.

This is where the Communitarium Project comes in. It’s an experiment—a tentative, provisional attempt to carve out spaces (starting online) where we can build the kinds of relationships, practices, and habits that sustain a socialist life. Not just moments of activism, not just communities of interest, but environments where we can engage in the full scope of daily relations and conviviality.

What would such a space look like? For one thing, it would foster mutual support and respect. This isn’t about imposing a rigid code of conduct or performing solidarity as a ritual. It’s about building relationships that are robust enough to hold the weight of honest conflict, disagreement, and growth. It’s about ensuring that everyone in the community has what they need to participate fully, whether that means material resources, emotional support, or simply the sense of being genuinely welcomed.

It would also be a place for communal deliberation and education. Too often, socialist groups replicate the structures of the wider world, with a small cadre of the knowledgeable or charismatic setting the agenda while the rest of us follow along. To live socialism is to treat education as a mutual process, where everyone has something to teach and something to learn. And it means making decisions collectively, not just through formal votes but through the ongoing work of understanding each other’s perspectives and finding common ground.

Perhaps most importantly, it would be a space for collective action that doesn’t just happen in bursts—a protest here, a campaign there—but as a continuous way of relating to the world. This doesn’t mean doing everything together, all the time. It means gradually coming to constitute an “us” about which it is reasonable to ask, “What can we do?” instead of the daunting default most of us face when confronted with problems in the world: “What can I do?” It means knowing that you’re part of a collective effort to improve the world, and that your individual actions are woven into a larger fabric of solidarity.

And while the project might begin in the digital realm, it can’t remain there. Connectedness to other communities and to the physical world is essential. A truly socialist life doesn’t see the online and offline as separate domains but as interconnected spaces where relationships and actions flow seamlessly.

This is the vision I’m working toward with the Communitarium Project. It’s speculative, contingent, and full of unanswered questions. How do we design spaces that encourage rather than constrain? How do we make them open to new people while ensuring they feel genuinely supported? How do we make sure they’re fun, nourishing, and life-giving—not just another obligation on the to-do list?

At the moment, the Communitarium Project is just me talking about these ideas and a “ghost town” of a self-hosted, online website cobbled together from available open source applications. Bearing in mind that, in many ways, I don't really know what I'm doing, I believe that users who would like to discuss the Communitarium Project with me may join the Matrix room I've set up for that purpose at https://matrix.to/#/#Introduction:communitarium.org. It won’t actually exist until a community coalesces around the mission of bringing it into existence. But I believe that if we’re serious about socialism as a way of life, not just a political program, we have to start trying. The Communitarium Project is one small step in that direction. If you’re reading this, maybe it’s a step you’d like to take, too.

In previous posts I have tried to explain why I think new forms of online communities are necessary, some of the history that has brought us to this point, some of the principles and theories which I think can inform our decisions, and some of the goals which I think we should adopt.

I have begun trying to build one instance of such an online community but I am old and somewhat creaky, underskilled for the task, and insufficiently disciplined to persist without substantive feedback.

I understand that it's a long shot but I'm hoping to find people interested in rolling up their sleeves and building, bottom-up, robust and enduring online collaborative communities of broad, egalitarian purpose. This will, I think, require the development of a new kind of organizing, digital community organizing, which borrows from the traditions of voter organizing, civil rights organizing, community organizing and labor organizing that precede it.

If we are going to build for an uncertain future we cannot specify in detail what our community will eventually look like; we're just going to have to work that out as we go along. Which means that, in order to conduct all-inclusive discussions, the community will have to be of a humanly-manageable size, small enough that everyone stands a chance of getting to know and to trust each other.

We'll all have to be engaged participants (no lurkers!). We'll need to cover a wide range of interests and abilities: concerned citizens, activists, academics, techies, designers, content creators, coders, enthusiasts, writers, organizers, etc.

As multiple communities of this sort form we will need to find ways to forge robust and mutually supportive relations among them.

Even though I cannot (and don't want to) dictate the final form of these communities I can describe some initial hopes, wishes, and thoughts about what might emerge from this effort:

I hope it will be possible to build a community which will serve as a model for a network of online, general-purpose, communities-for-community's-sake that are:

• small (members numbering no more than the population of, say, a NY neighborhood);
• intentional (which is to say, elective and with some degree of mutually agreed common purpose);
• cooperative;
• commons-oriented;
• self-formed, self-supporting and self-maintaining;
  • members (who are able) should collectively pay for its hosting; and
  • develop the technical capacity to keep it running (either within their ranks or by recruiting those who can); and
  • regularly participate in the “chores” that must be done to administer the site;
• committed to mutual aid;
  • actively greeting and educating new members;
  • actively monitoring the ability of members to negotiate the environment and keeping an eye out for those who may need help;
  • actively working to maintain the site as a safe and hospitable environment for as broad a range of people as possible;
  • seeking to find other ways members can assist and collaborate with each other, both online and in the real world;
• built exclusively out of software that is freely shareable and whose code is openly readable;
  • with clear, democratically-developed and communally-enforced rules of conduct, standards of participation and guidelines for constructive criticism/engagement which are regularly collectively reviewed and periodically revised;

• engaged in active, robust efforts at inter-community relations (not just individual cross-community relationships);

• which is to say, a community whose members understand their membership to entail constantly collectively negotiating the character and identity of that community;

  • transparent (in terms of finance, governance, technical design and maintenance, inter-community relations, etc.);
  • dedicated to the repair and improvement of the world.

This is an enormously ambitious project, hard to imagine on first reading. But, for now, I hope I've given you enough to start thinking about it.

The following, first posted in May of 2022 to a now abandoned blog, was originally intended to be a thread on Mastodon. But, since I didn't yet fully understand how posting to Mastodon worked, I managed to screw up the sequence by deleting and re-drafting one of the posts. This article is where I first started writing about what I now call the Communitarium Project. Here is the sequence as it was originally intended:

• Since the late 19th century the world has seen several threats to the continued existence of global civilization. Two of these were world wars, which took terrible tolls but did not end global civilization. The crypto-theologically inclined, believing in inexorable historical progress, have tended to conclude that the world, overall and despite some glitches, is in most ways better than it was. This tends to be the belief of economists and the privileged. Others have doubts.

• Another big threat to the continued existence of global civilization has been nuclear conflict. It has been (indefinitely) avertable and (so far) averted because a relatively small number of people have managed to exercise enough restraint. The crypto-theologically inclined have concluded (emotionally, if not propositionally) that nuclear catastrophe is no longer a significant prospect.

• The current most urgent threat is the one that is most directly enmeshed with physical, chemical and biological processes. It will be resolved not just with changes in laws and attitudes but will require massive, rapid changes in the way all of us interact with the physical world we inhabit.

• If we try to meet this threat simply as individuals we will fail. Global civilization will end in the lifetimes of our children, our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren.

• If we do not urgently address this threat we will not have the time to reap the benefits of any other economic, social or moral improvements we manage to achieve.

• We need a 21st-century form of revolution... not the 19th-century sort of violent confrontation with power in the streets so much as the organized, mutual, collective undertaking of rapidly examining and altering the values and assumptions that have been inculcated in us, progressively, over centuries, and have rendered us so individualistic that we have lost most of our ability to act communally with solidarity.

• We need to collectively, deliberately develop forms of community

  • small enough that each member can know and care about each other,
  • purposive enough that its members are motivated to inform themselves and each other about what needs to be done and then organize to do it
  • inter-connected enough that perspectives are not merely local, fit within larger understandings and efforts
    

This approach doesn't guarantee success but it is our only hope.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity

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Here are the original posts as they each appear on Mastodon (but presented in their intended sequence)

I am a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). I follow its activities, read its publications, and support its efforts for a more equitable and just society. However, I remain a “paper member,” abstaining from direct involvement in the campaigns and organizing work that define so much of DSA’s current activity. My wife, in contrast, is deeply involved with NYDSA, contributing to the ecosocialists working group, advocating for the NY Build Public Renewables Act, and serving on organizing committees. Her commitment, and that of her comrades, is extraordinary, and I deeply respect their efforts. Yet I choose not to join them, and this essay aims to explain why.

The issue is not a lack of belief in DSA's values or its goals. I fully support the fight for economic justice, public ownership, ecological sustainability, and the radical transformation of our social and political systems. Rather, my reluctance to engage stems from a broader critique of contemporary activism and the limitations of focusing on isolated policy victories and candidates. I worry that these efforts, however commendable, operate within a sociopolitical context that makes them inherently fragile, reversible, and limited in their potential to inspire deep, systemic change.

The Limits of “Meeting People Where They Live”

In my blog post Breaking Free: Why 21st Century Activism Can't Just Meet People Where They Live I argued that contemporary activism often falls into the trap of meeting people on the terms set by the current system, thereby reinforcing the very frameworks it seeks to challenge. This is the crux of my concern with many of DSA’s campaigns: they operate within a political, cultural, and economic environment dominated by possessive individualism, market logic, and neoliberal ideology. By pursuing victories within this context, we end up playing by the rules of a game designed to confine us to small, incremental changes that the system can easily absorb, co-opt, or roll back.

DSA’s approach, while strategically savvy, often seeks to appeal to voters, legislators, and other power structures “where they are” rather than seeking to radically transform the broader interpretive frameworks that shape our understanding of society and economics. For instance, the campaign to pass the NY Build Public Renewables Act is laudable in its pursuit of expanding public ownership in the energy sector. However, the success of such campaigns is contingent on framing them in terms that are palatable within the current market-centric, growth-oriented paradigm. This framing risks reinforcing the idea that public ownership is merely a pragmatic, market-compatible option rather than an expression of a fundamentally different way of organizing our social and economic life.

In this way, activism that focuses primarily on policy wins operates in a fragmented fashion, addressing symptoms without transforming the underlying “soil” from which these symptoms arise. The result is a continuous game of Whac-a-Mole, where victories are celebrated, but their effects are limited by the cultural and ideological terrain that remains largely unchallenged. The broader social consciousness continues to be shaped by a market-oriented, individualistic framework that constrains the potential for these policy gains to grow into a truly transformative movement.

The Need for a New Sociopolitical Soil

The series of posts introducing the Communitarium Project (Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV) outlines the necessity of cultivating new interpretive frameworks—ones that foreground cooperation, mutual aid, and communal responsibility while rejecting the reductive individualism and commodification that define our current era. The problem with much of today’s activism, including the work of groups like DSA, is that it too often focuses on advocating for changes within the existing system without sufficiently challenging the interpretive frameworks that sustain it. It’s not that these policy victories are unimportant; it’s that they are unlikely to foster the kind of radical transformation we need unless they are part of a broader cultural shift.

The Communitarium Project proposes that what we lack is not just new policies but new ways of understanding and engaging with the world—what I have referred to as the creation of a new “sociopolitical soil.” This soil involves reshaping how people conceive of themselves, their communities, and their relationship to the broader world. It entails moving beyond meeting people “where they live” in their existing frameworks and instead inviting them to participate in the development of alternative ways of living, thinking, and interacting.

Without this deeper cultural groundwork, efforts like those of DSA, while important, risk being diluted or absorbed by the prevailing systems of power. They remain isolated patches of resistance in a landscape that continues to prioritize market logic, individual competition, and private ownership. The focus on securing individual policy victories, while necessary in the short term, lacks the capacity to nourish the emergence of a new collective consciousness capable of sustaining more profound, lasting change.

Why I Remain a Paper Member

I remain a paper member of DSA not out of apathy, but because I believe that my contributions might be better directed toward cultivating the interpretive frameworks that can make deeper, systemic change possible. The real challenge lies not just in winning policy battles, but in fostering a cultural transformation that shifts the focus from individual advancement to collective well-being, from market transactions to communal deliberation, and from isolated policy interventions to systemic reorganization.

The Communitarium Project represents one attempt to engage with this deeper work. It seeks to explore new forms of community, new modes of knowledge-sharing, and new ways of thinking about value that transcend the reductive frameworks of possessive individualism and commodification. It aims to create spaces where schmooze-level interactions—those everyday processes of negotiation, meaning-making, and community-building—can flourish outside the confines of market logic.

My wife and her comrades within the DSA are doing crucial work, and I have immense respect for their dedication and accomplishments. Yet, I fear that without a broader cultural movement that challenges the interpretive frameworks of our society, these efforts will remain precarious and easily reversed. This is why I choose to remain on the sidelines of direct activism, focusing instead on what I see as the foundational task: building the sociopolitical soil in which true transformative change can take root.

The Path Forward

This is not to say that policy advocacy is pointless. It is to argue that, in the absence of a broader cultural shift, policy victories will struggle to endure and multiply. We need both: immediate, tangible wins that improve lives and a long-term project of reshaping the interpretive frameworks that govern our collective existence. I support DSA in its efforts, but I believe the time has come to expand our focus, to build spaces where new ideas can take hold, and to encourage the development of a collective consciousness that values cooperation, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship over market-driven competition. We need to invent new forms of organizing to meet the unique challenges we face in the rapidly transforming landscape of the 21st century.

My paper membership, then, is not a rejection of activism but a call for a deeper engagement—a call to break free from the game of Whac-a-Mole and to cultivate the cultural and ideological conditions that can support a more profound transformation of our society. This is the work I believe must be done if we are to move beyond the isolated, temporary victories of the present and build a future where communal values can truly flourish

In this series, we’ve explored Richard Rorty’s key concepts—contingency, solidarity, and final vocabularies—and how the Communitarium Project builds upon them. In this final post, we will synthesize these ideas into a Rortyan statement of the Communitarium Project.

Contingency as the Basis for Solidarity

Like Rorty, the Communitarium Project embraces contingency but turns it into a creative force. Instead of treating it as a philosophical challenge, the Communitarium harnesses contingency to foster adaptive, evolving communities capable of nurturing solidarity over time.

Contingency in the Communitarium | The Communitarium Wiki

Institutionalizing Solidarity

Rorty’s solidarity is contingent and fragile, based on empathy and shared vocabularies. The Communitarium, however, seeks to institutionalize solidarity, creating a medium in which it can be nurtured, maintained, and cultivated through structured interaction.

Rortyan Communitarium | The Communitarium Wiki

Conversation Stoppers and Deflectors

By recognizing both conversation stoppers and conversation deflectors, the Communitarium creates an environment where final vocabularies can be challenged and renegotiated in productive ways, ensuring that solidarity remains dynamic and responsive to the community’s evolving needs.

Conversation Stoppers and Conversation Deflectors | The Communitarium Wiki

The Communitarium Project represents an evolution of Rorty’s philosophy, taking his ideas on contingency and solidarity and using them as the foundation for a new kind of community—one that is flexible, inclusive, and capable of adapting to the changing world.

In previous posts, we explored Richard Rorty’s concepts of final vocabularies and how they shape our beliefs and identities. In this post, we will delve into conversation stoppers and introduce conversation deflectors. We will also provide specific examples that Rorty offers for how certain terms can function as stoppers in public discourse, as well as examples of how conversation deflectors subtly redirect dialogue.

Final Vocabularies in Rorty’s Philosophy

A final vocabulary is the set of words and descriptions that an individual uses to make sense of the world. These words are “final” in the sense that they are the bedrock of that person’s worldview, and questioning them can lead to deep existential discomfort. Final vocabularies are contingent, meaning that they are shaped by historical and cultural circumstances, and can change, but they are often held deeply by individuals.

Rorty’s famous examples of final vocabulary terms include words like “justice,” “truth,” “freedom,” and “rationality”—terms that, for many people, carry a sense of ultimate meaning or authority.

Final Vocabularies in Rorty | The Communitarium Wiki

Conversation Stoppers: Specific Examples from Rorty

Conversation stoppers occur when certain terms from a final vocabulary are invoked to halt further discussion. These terms carry such weight for the speaker that they shut down further questioning or challenge. Rorty provides examples of these stoppers, including:

• “Human rights”: In many contexts, invoking “human rights” can serve as a conversation stopper. Once this term is invoked, it often closes off further debate because questioning it can seem immoral or unreasonable.
• “Objectivity”: When someone claims that their perspective is “objective,” it can act as a conversation stopper because it suggests that the viewpoint is impartial and beyond subjective critique.
• “Freedom”: The word “freedom” can also function as a stopper, particularly in political discourse. Invoking freedom as a justification for a policy or action often ends the conversation, as opposing it seems to imply support for oppression or authoritarianism.

These terms are difficult to challenge without appearing to reject the fundamental principles they represent, which is why they effectively stop further debate.

Conversation Deflectors: Shifting the Tone

While conversation stoppers halt dialogue, conversation deflectors work more subtly by redirecting the tone or focus of the discussion. Deflectors may not shut down the conversation completely, but they reduce its seriousness or shift its trajectory in a way that prevents deeper engagement.

Examples of deflectors include:

• Humor or mockery: When someone raises a controversial or challenging issue, others might respond with humor, subtly suggesting that the topic isn’t to be taken seriously. This deflects the conversation from serious discussion to something more trivial.
  • For example, in debates about climate change, skeptics might use humor to mock scientific models or predictions, which can lead to the issue being framed as speculative or overly dramatic.
• Disgust or moral sensationalism: Topics deemed disgusting or taboo may enter conversation but are often met with sensationalized reactions that prevent sober discussion. For instance, discussions about certain medical procedures or human rights abuses might be deflected by expressions of disgust, making the topic harder to engage with rationally.

By employing deflectors, participants can divert the conversation from a potentially meaningful exchange to something less productive, without appearing to shut it down outright.

Conclusion

Both conversation stoppers and deflectors are important to understand when discussing final vocabularies. They show how deeply held terms and emotional reactions can limit meaningful discourse. In the Communitarium Project, understanding and managing these mechanisms can help foster more open and reflective dialogues, where final vocabularies are engaged rather than used to shut down or deflect conversations.

In the next post, we will synthesize these ideas into a Rortyan statement of the Communitarium Project.