Isn't “The Communitarium Project” Just Another Name For Communitarianism?
Let’s get this out of the way: the name Communitarium does sound suspiciously like a boutique rebranding of communitarianism. Maybe something you’d hear at a TEDx talk or see on a flyer at a community co-op. Is it just another attempt to rescue society with warm vibes and nostalgic appeals to “shared values”?
Absolutely not.
The Communitarium Project is something else entirely. While it shares a concern for community, it does not share communitarianism’s assumptions, goals, or ideological anchors. In fact, it begins with a radical departure: what if the very idea of community has been enclosed, emptied out, or falsely idealized? What if building real alternatives requires more than reviving old forms—and instead demands new kinds of spaces, new logics of relation, and new semiotic and informational infrastructures?
What Is Communitarianism, Anyway?
Communitarianism emerged as a critique of liberal individualism. Its central thesis is that individuals don’t exist in a vacuum—they're shaped by communities, traditions, and moral frameworks. That sounds pretty reasonable, and it is. But in practice, communitarianism has often leaned toward:
A focus on shared values rooted in tradition or culture,
Emphasis on duties over rights,
A skeptical stance toward pluralism and radical change, and
A preference for social cohesion over social complexity.
Even in its more progressive variants, it tends to romanticize locality, moral consensus, and stable norms.
What’s Different About the Communitarium Project?
The Communitarium Project flips the script. Instead of assuming community as a given—something to return to—it treats it as a hard-won, living, ongoing creation. A communitarium is not a moral order. It’s a living platform: a space where people create shared meanings, solve shared problems, and negotiate shared realities.
Here’s what sets it apart:
1. Invention Over Inheritance
Community is not something we go back to—it’s something we build. Not from scratch, but from the ruins and fragments around us. The -arium suffix (as in laboratorium, aquarium, planetarium) implies an enclosed, generative environment. A communitarium is a vessel for experimentation in how humans can live, think, and act together—without defaulting to inherited hierarchies or fixed identities.
2. From Sociality, Not Ideology
The project doesn’t begin with values or doctrines. It begins with a deeper exploration of how social interaction itself works—how meaning is co-created, how interpretive frameworks emerge and shift, and how attention, trust, and relevance are sustained in everyday life. It draws on a theory called the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF) that understands communities as dynamic information ensembles, not static moral groups.
3. Reclaiming the Semiotic Commons
Much of what once constituted shared reality—conversation, care, cultural memory—has been enclosed, privatized, and algorithmically managed. The Communitarium Project aims to counter-enclose: not just reclaiming spaces, but re-engineering infrastructures of communication, deliberation, and mutual intelligibility. The goal isn’t just to talk—it’s to make action possible, together.
4. Coherence Without Conformity
Rather than enforcing cohesion through shared values, the communitarium nurtures coherence through dialogue. It’s about making difference livable and meaningful—not erased, not tolerated, but integrated into a shared world through practices of listening, deliberating, and co-designing collective life.
So Why the Name?
Because no existing term quite captured this.
“Commons” evokes open resources, but not active communities.
“Platform” evokes software, not solidarity.
“Collective” suggests action, but not place.
“Community” is too often vague, romanticized, or depoliticized.
The word communitarium is meant to reclaim community as a site of invention, not nostalgia—a crucible where new modes of being-together can be designed, tested, and lived.
In Short
The Communitarium Project is not a call to return to community—it’s a call to re-invent it.
It doesn’t begin with values—it begins with environments. It doesn’t enforce consensus—it cultivates coherence. It doesn’t pine for tradition—it engineers new ways to hold each other, understand each other, and act in common.
In a world where meaning is fractured and solidarity is rare, the project isn’t offering another ideology. It’s offering a space.
Let’s build it.
But maybe you're wondering: Where is this project? Who runs it? Is there anywhere to join in?
That hesitation makes sense. It reflects the reflex to seek form—somewhere to enter, someone in charge, some clear beginning. But part of what the Communitarium Project is trying to surface is how our desire for structure has so often been captured by enclosure—by platforms, leaders, final vocabularies, branded visions. So for now, the answer is deliberately light:
The Communitarium is not a product. It’s a threshold.
Not an organization, but a co-emergent infrastructure.
Not something you join, but something you begin to help cohere.
It starts in shared conversations. In collaborative sense-making. In the attempt to metabolize meaning together with care, without defaulting to abstraction or spectacle. It is what begins to emerge when we re-learn how to interpret in common—without appealing to the Big Other, the algorithm, or the market to settle things for us.
So where is it?
Right now, it lives in ideas, in blog posts, in long threads and recursive exchanges. But it’s not staying there. And in fact, it’s beginning to gather shape in the form of an open discussion space—a Matrix chatroom for those interested in the project’s concepts, proposals, and trajectories.
If you’d like to schmooze, question, co-weave, or find anothe way to participate, you're welcome to join here:
👉 Communitarium Matrix Chatroom (if you already have a Matrix client, join #Introduction:communitarium.org)
This space is for: – Discussing the blog posts and glossaries as they emerge, – Extending and challenging the concepts, – Sharing existing related efforts, – Thinking aloud about infrastructure and next steps.
There's no agenda. No form to fill out. No fixed tone, beyond civility (and, hopefully, good humor).
Just an open weave for people who sense something here—something worth tending together.
So yes: it’s beginning, if you participate.