After putting together three posts about a powerful media mogul who shapes public perceptions on matters that affect the course of history I felt the need to distract myself. My thoughts turned to an old classic movie about a powerful media mogul who shapes public perceptions on matters that affect the course of history and, because I felt the need to lighten my mood, this somehow happened:
Roy Cohn has become a symbol. Books, documentaries, and political commentary have turned him into shorthand for the ruthless, amoral politics of 20th-century America—a mentor to Trump, a ghost at the banquet of modern conservatism.
But what about Mark Burnett?
Why do we invoke Cohn by name, but rarely speak of Burnett, whose influence is arguably more far-reaching? Why has the architect of a decades-long cultural reprogramming effort—who helped make Trump palatable, power telegenic, and performative branding the default moral posture—remained in the shadows?
The answer isn’t just that Burnett “stayed behind the camera.” His relative invisibility reflects a systemic condition: our culture has trouble seeing the structural operators of spectacle. The very logic that Burnett’s productions normalized—aestheticized personality, agonistic individualism, and content-driven morality—also works to obscure their own production. Burnett didn’t just build the medium. He helped encode its metaphysics.
Unlike Cohn, whose influence operated through proximity to power, Burnett’s power lay in formatting the visible. His editorial logic turned social interaction into consumable fragments: confessionals, judgments, eliminations, victories. Every “real” moment was framed, stylized, and scored.
But because he worked through spectacle rather than speech, Burnett’s influence is diffuse and deniable. He never appeared in the boardroom. He didn’t sit on the couch in Shark Tank. He constructed worlds and let them run.
We might call this bunraku-style authorship: the hand that moves the puppet is meant to disappear. The illusion is strongest when the manipulation is most seamless.
Though Burnett helped redefine the cultural meanings of leadership, morality, and success, entertainment journalism rarely connects such formats to political ontology. Serious political analysis still focuses on speeches, votes, policy—rarely on semiotic infrastructures.
But Burnett’s productions taught people how to feel about wealth, competence, failure, and trust. They helped millions rehearse, nightly, a worldview in which:
That is politics by other means.
Burnett has maintained tight legal and proprietary control over his footage. Notably, efforts to release unaired clips from The Apprentice—rumored to contain racist and misogynistic remarks by Trump—have been shut down or stonewalled. Burnett’s refusal to release the tapes during the 2016 election, despite internal pressure, directly shaped what the public was allowed to see.
The New Yorker and Vanity Fair both reported that Burnett and his associates invoked legal threats to keep damaging material out of public circulation. This is not accidental. It is part of a broader practice of controlling the narrative, and thereby, the moral frame.
Burnett didn’t just protect Trump. He protected the sanctity of the format—the illusion that what you saw was real, earned, complete.
Burnett understood what the audience wanted—and he built formats that gave it to them. Not stories. Not ideologies. Formats. Reproducible shells into which new contestants, entrepreneurs, and egos could be poured.
This formal logic does not invite authorship. It invites replacement. The audience identifies with the performer, not the constructor. That’s part of the enclosure.
And this is the deeper reason Burnett remains unexamined: we were trained to look at the contestant, not the cut. To celebrate the pitch, not the producer. To take the edit as the world.
Burnett’s invisibility is not just a media story. It’s a case study in how hegemonic power works in the 21st century. Not through coercion or direct ideology, but through formats of experience that shape how we perceive the world, others, and ourselves.
The genius of hegemonic power is that it doesn’t need to argue. It doesn’t announce itself. It structures the conditions of thinking—and then withdraws from view. You feel like you’re just “seeing things clearly,” “responding to reality,” or “being practical.” But you're operating inside a semiotic enclosure that has already defined what counts as clarity, reality, or practicality.
Burnett’s work helped install exactly this kind of enclosure. His shows offered moral schemas—about who deserves to win, what failure looks like, how to recognize value—that didn’t come with slogans or manifestos. They came with music cues, camera angles, and emotional beats. And because they came in the language of entertainment, they were absorbed without resistance.
The most effective ideology is the kind you don’t recognize as ideology.
The most enduring control is the kind that feels like your own free choice.
Burnett’s formats didn’t just entertain. They taught millions to think in ways that served hegemonic interests—to internalize competitive individualism, aestheticized authority, and a morality of merit filtered through charisma and packaging.
What’s erased in this process is the recognition that other ways of thinking—cooperation, deliberation, mutual care, schmooze-level ambiguity—are not just possible but necessary. When these disappear from the horizon of plausibility, we don’t just lose practices. We lose imaginative agency.
The Communitarium Project is not just about reintroducing community. It’s about restoring the conditions under which community can be imagined. That requires confronting the infrastructures that have made people think they are only as real as their brand, only as worthy as their charisma, only as moral as their visibility.
Mark Burnett didn’t preach. He didn’t propagandize. He formatted.
And we have lived inside those formats for decades.
It’s time to name them.
It’s time to exit the frame.
It’s time to build something else.
The first post laid out the facts: Mark Burnett created a media empire that changed how millions of Americans think about power, success, and social life. Through Survivor, The Apprentice, and Shark Tank, Burnett helped install a new cultural operating system—one where competition is sacred, hierarchy is natural, and individual branding is the ultimate virtue.
But these shows weren’t just entertainment. They were training grounds—aesthetic regimes that prepared viewers to live in a world where:
This post explores how Burnett’s media logic overlaps with idiotism, possessive individualism, and the obliteration of schmooze, making a case for why the Communitarium Project is a necessary countermeasure.
Idiotism doesn’t mean stupidity—it comes from the Greek idiotes, meaning “private person,” one who does not participate in public or collective life. Burnett’s productions offer a vision of sociality where each individual is fundamentally alone, even (or especially) in groups. Alliances are temporary. Trust is naive. Everything is strategic.
In Survivor, contestants form “tribes,” but the moral logic of the show punishes loyalty and rewards betrayal. The winner is the one who plays the others.
In Shark Tank, collaboration is replaced by pitch. The crowd is gone; the entrepreneur stands alone, appealing to concentrated capital.
In The Apprentice, the boardroom is a sacred theater of judgment, and your value is tied to your ability to dominate the task and the edit.
Each show models idiotism as survival. Participation in community becomes a performance for individual advancement. Idiotism, once a pathology of political life, is now a media genre.
C.B. Macpherson’s concept of possessive individualism described the liberal subject as one who owns himself—a self-contained, self-owning individual whose freedom lies in control over his labor and its fruits. Burnett updated this for the 21st century: the individual doesn’t just own himself—he markets himself.
Shark Tank is the clearest case:
Your business idea is inseparable from your persona.
Your success depends on being persuasive, passionate, legible.
Your personal story is an asset class.
Failure isn't just economic—it's existential. You weren’t compelling enough. Your affect was off. You didn’t brand yourself well.
In this schema, human worth is narrativized capital—the capacity to attract attention, investment, or admiration. The self becomes an entrepreneurial project. The world becomes a panel of judges.
Schmooze-level interaction—fluid, informal, collectively sustained communication—is the substrate of real social life. It’s how trust forms. It’s how communities negotiate meaning. It’s how differences get metabolized without being weaponized.
Burnett’s productions surgically remove the schmooze. What remains is:
What disappears is:
The edit eliminates what isn’t narratively useful. This logic seeps into everyday life: if a conversation isn’t “content,” it’s noise. If a relationship doesn’t scale or convert, it’s wasted time. We start living as if we’re being edited.
Burnett didn’t just install new heroes—he installed a new ontology. In his media universe, to be real is to be branded. Visibility is not only power; it is existence.
The unbranded are invisible.
The unedited are irrelevant.
The untheatrical are unworthy.
This produces a moral order in which identity is earned through performance. You must render yourself legible to the dominant gaze. You must signal mastery, polish, affective control. You must be content.
This isn’t just an aesthetic shift. It’s a massive semiotic enclosure. It constrains what it means to be a person, a citizen, a neighbor.
The Communitarium Project is not nostalgic. It doesn’t seek to undo modernity or erase digital life. But it does insist that we cannot build a democratic future on the ruins of schmooze, under the reign of idiotism, and through the eyes of the edit.
That means:
In short: resisting the Burnett Doctrine by rewiring our social imagination.
In the next post, we’ll ask: Why do we invoke Cohn by name, but rarely speak of Burnett, whose influence is arguably more far-reaching? Why is media production still seen as apolitical, even as it reshapes political possibility? And what does it mean that the most influential ideological operator of the 21st century may have been a TV producer with a theology of spectacle?
When journalists and critics trace Donald Trump’s path to power, one name gets constant attention: Roy Cohn. The notorious attorney taught Trump how to attack, deny, countersue, and treat every conflict as war. Cohn is infamous, and deservedly so.
But there’s another figure—arguably just as influential—who has remained largely behind the curtain: Mark Burnett.
Burnett didn’t teach Trump how to fight. He taught America how to cheer. As the creator of Survivor, The Apprentice, and Shark Tank, Burnett didn’t just reflect cultural values—he reprogrammed them. He helped install a new interpretive frame, one in which competition is moral, wealth is wisdom, and power is personal charisma.
This is the Burnett Doctrine: a cultural infrastructure for neoliberal individualism, built one episode at a time.
Burnett’s American TV career exploded with Survivor in 2000. Based on a Swedish format (Expedition Robinson), the show was retooled by Burnett into a high-stakes spectacle of social Darwinism. The setting was “tribal,” but the message was hyper-individualistic: trust no one, form alliances only to break them, and remember—it’s you against the world.
The show was a ratings juggernaut. The first season finale attracted over 51 million viewers. Burnett was the creator, executive producer, and the architect of its editing style—a style that turned human interaction into a game of advantage, confession, and betrayal.
It’s not that people weren’t trying to form community. It’s that the game punished them for it.
The Apprentice, launched in 2004, starred Donald Trump as the ultimate business authority. Never mind that Trump’s real-life business record was a trail of bankruptcies, lawsuits, and branding stunts. Burnett, again as creator and executive producer, crafted the fantasy of a golden-tower patriarch with the power to make or break your future.
The New Yorker reported that Burnett’s team worked hard to engineer this illusion, sometimes downplaying Trump’s financial issues and exaggerating his power and success.
The impact was enormous. The Apprentice was a hit, especially among wealthy and college-educated viewers. Trump became a symbol of capitalist competence—not because he was one, but because Burnett cut him that way.
Shark Tank, which Burnett began producing in 2009 (adapted from Japan’s Money Tigers), extends the Burnett Doctrine into economic morality theater. Entrepreneurs enter. A panel of multi-millionaires evaluates their ideas, their branding, their charisma. Deals are made or denied in real-time.
The show made investing emotional, dramatic, and moral. If you win the sharks’ approval, you’re a visionary. If not, your failure is personal. Your numbers were off. Your story wasn’t compelling enough. Your posture lacked authority.
This is possessive individualism made binge-worthy. Collective economic struggle disappears; all that remains is the isolated individual pitching salvation to capital.
All three shows have been commercial and cultural powerhouses.
The influence isn’t speculative—it’s measurable. These shows shaped not only what people watched but how they think about leadership, morality, and social interaction.
Roy Cohn taught Trump how to destroy. But Mark Burnett taught America how to applaud it.
He created television that made domination thrilling, made branding seem moral, and turned group negotiation into cutthroat theatre. These weren’t side effects—they were the ideological payload. Burnett didn’t just ride the reality TV wave. He shaped the cultural grammar that made Trump’s political performance intelligible—and desirable.
We watched. We learned. And we voted.
In the next post , we’ll look at how Burnett’s media style dovetails with broader cultural trends—idiotism, branding, possessive individualism, and the war on schmooze-level interaction—and why the Communitarium Project was born as a response.
Too often, socialism is framed as a theory to be argued or a system to be installed. But perhaps we should begin elsewhere—not with ideology, but with orientation. Not with a program, but with a posture.
What if socialism, at its heart, is simply a way of doing things together?
A way of living more communally—not because we’ve signed a manifesto, but because we’ve come to see our lives as interwoven. A way of acting more collectively—not because the state requires it, but because we realize that most of what matters can’t be done alone. A way of caring more reciprocally—not as noblesse oblige or moral duty, but as a natural expression of a life shared on level ground.
To embrace socialism in this sense is to cultivate the art of widening our us. It means learning to extend our sense of self so that it includes others—sometimes many others—with whom we share no prior allegiance but with whom we now share a world. It's a daily practice of enlarging who counts as “we.”
This isn’t to say that beliefs and theories don’t matter. But they’re not the starting point. They come after we notice that something is off—too isolated, too competitive, too lonely, too enclosed. And what we’re reaching for isn’t an abstract system—it’s a more humane way of organizing life on Earth.
In this light, socialism is less a destination than a disposition. It’s not about who has the right slogans or citations. It’s about how we live, work, share, decide, and care—together. It asks: do we orient ourselves toward interdependence or isolation? Toward collaboration or control? Toward sufficiency or scarcity?
This kind of socialism doesn’t wait for permission. It begins wherever people are already trying to meet each other’s needs with dignity, already experimenting with fairer, kinder, more communal ways of doing things. It takes root in a thousand small acts of mutuality—and it grows when more people can afford to be generous, more people can afford to trust, and more people can find themselves in an us that is worth belonging to.
So yes, there are systems to change. But the transformation begins not with diagrams or doctrines.
It begins with our doing things differently together.
Toward a Communal Commentary on the Raw Material of Shared Life
A perspective on the Communitarium Project
“In the absence of God, we found the schmooze.”
— Fragment from the Book of No One
What if the future of political life doesn't begin with a manifesto, a blueprint, or a charismatic leader—but with a comment thread?
What if the deepest antidote to social unraveling isn’t more certainty, or more ideology, but better conversations—and better tools to sustain them?
The Communitarium Project was born from a recognition: that under technofeudal conditions, meaning itself is being enclosed. Public reason collapses into algorithmic bait. Common speech is flattened into signal. Shared language is exhausted by overuse, drained of resonance.
But the problem isn’t just political. It’s ontological. What’s at stake is our ability to interpret the world together, to live inside something like a shared reality. And what the Communitarium sets out to build—provisionally, awkwardly, experimentally—is a space in which that shared interpretation can begin again.
Not a new gospel.
A new Talmud.
The Talmud is not a creed. It does not offer a smooth surface of agreement. It is layered, recursive, polyphonic—a living archive of commentary, dispute, and careful memory. Its power lies not in answers, but in the rigor of the questions, the intensity of attention, the generosity of argument.
It is a space where disagreement lives without rupture.
Where interpretation multiplies instead of narrows.
Where community forms not around belief, but around the shared labor of making meaning.
This is what we need now—not because we share a God, but because we do not.
Because in the absence of fixed authority, shared attention is what we have left.
If the Communitarium is a space of collective commentary, what are we commenting on?
There is no one text. But here are some candidates:
In truth, the Torah we comment on is whatever insists that it be interpreted together.
Whatever resists solitude.
Whatever demands co-presence.
To call this project sacred is not to smuggle in the divine. It is to recognize that some things are treated as sacred because we refuse to reduce them—because we gather around them, argue over them, pass them on.
The Communitarium has no final vocabulary. No infallible authority. No orthodoxy.
What it has—what it protects—is the possibility of shared interpretation.
The infrastructure of collective intelligibility.
The right to dwell inside problems without closure.
This is not a faith.
It is a practice.
A refusal to let meaning be privatized, extracted, or algorithmically compressed.
A conviction that some forms of speech—slow, dialogic, generous—are what hold the world together.
A Talmud for atheists is not a contradiction. It is an aspiration.
It suggests that in the absence of divine commandments, we construct obligations through dialogue.
That without prophecy, we remember carefully.
That where politics fails to deliver liberation, we create the infrastructures of mutual intelligibility—not as a workaround, but as a ground zero for transformation.
To build the Communitarium is to practice sacred world-making without metaphysical guarantees.
It is to hold open the space where difference can become dialogue, where language can become shelter, and where community can become the site of co-created meaning.
Let us write together.
Let us disagree well, remember slowly, and speak with an ear for what might be heard.
Let us treat language not as spectacle or signal, but as shared labor.
Let us build tools for commentary, for co-interpretation, for schmooze—not for the gods, but for each other.
Let us seize the means of community.
And let that be holy enough.
#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity #CommunitariumProject
One of the most quietly radical aspects of the Communitarium Project is its rethinking of personhood. This is not just a matter of identity politics, nor merely a shift in psychological theory. It is a decisive move away from a long-standing civilizational inheritance—what we have elsewhere called Western idiotism.
The term idiotism, as adapted in the Communitarium context, does not refer to foolishness or lack of intelligence. It refers to a particular model of the individual that has dominated Western philosophy and political thought since at least the Enlightenment:
This figure is what ancient Greek democracy called the idiōtēs: one who declines public, common life and retreats into private affairs. In this deeper sense, idiotism is not an insult but a diagnosis: a condition of ontological enclosure, where the self is imagined as its own foundation.
Even Marxism, despite its collectivist ambitions, retains residues of idiotism. The classed subject may be socially situated, but it is still often conceived as a container of ideology, awaiting correct alignment with historical necessity. The revolutionary agent is still an individual made legible by structure.
The Communitarium Project takes a different path.
To understand the liminal self fully, we must begin not with consciousness or identity, but with enrollment. In the Communitarium model, persons are best understood as beings adapted for ad hoc participation in schmooze-level Kantian wholes—ensembles that maintain their own identity by reference to the coordinated activity of their parts.
From this perspective, the self is not a monad, not an atomistic unit, not a stable substrate onto which roles or identities are layered. Rather, it is a relational organ—a dynamic interface shaped for compatibility with emergent forms of coordination.
In the language of the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF) or General Theory of Interpretive Systems (GTIS), the self is both a locus of interpretation and an agent of interpretation. It is where interpretive frameworks converge, overlap, and sometimes clash—and it is also capable of carrying those frameworks across contexts, transforming them, recomposing them, or making them available for new forms of prehension.
This makes persons less isolable than the Western tradition has imagined. The very idea of an individual as a unit separable from their ensembles is itself an artifact of enclosure: a misreading born of abstraction, not observation.
Philosophy, social science, and even Marxism have all tended to treat individuals as basic units of analysis—either to celebrate their freedom or to diagnose their conditioning. But in doing so, they often miss what the Communitarium seeks to foreground: that persons come into being not before the ensemble, but through it.
This also helps explain why consciousness is so elusive. In the Communitarium view, consciousness is not the possession of a bounded subject but a liminal process—a flickering, recursive function at the interface between selves and their ensembles. It emerges at the thresholds of coordination, where portable sociality must be negotiated, re-voiced, or carried across contexts. Consciousness is not what an individual has, but what arises at the seams of ensemble intelligibility—where it is most vulnerable to unraveling, and where it is most actively reinforced.
In this sense, the Communitarium Project runs directly counter to traditions of possessive individualism, which treat consciousness, agency, and identity as properties of discrete, self-owning entities. We propose instead that selves are real but relational, emergent but embodied, meaningful only within the recursive weave of shared interpretation.
The liminal self is defined not by what it is, but by what it carries: – Portable sociality – Contextual attunement – Fragments of shared meaning
This is the self as a kind of carrier wave—capable of sustaining ensemble coherence across contexts, while also allowing for divergence, reflection, and repair.
Hence, the liminal self is not merely in-between identities or collectives. It is structurally pre-adapted for passage, resonance, and co-constitution within dynamic ensembles. This is not fluidity for its own sake, but a kind of semiotic permeability shaped by evolutionary and cultural selection for adaptive participation in shared meaning-making.
This reconfiguration of the self has wide-ranging consequences:
This is not individualism. Nor is it collectivism. It is symbiotic subjectivity: a way of being that emerges from and supports the semiotic health of the ensemble.
In a world saturated with spectacle, algorithmic identity, and weaponized individualism, idiotism has become not just a philosophical legacy but an infrastructural default. It underwrites surveillance, monetization, and disembedded politics.
To build communitaria is to challenge this default. Not with a better blueprint for the individual, but with a new mode of inhabiting interdependence.
This is why the Communitarium Project must be rooted in the rehabilitation of personhood: not through self-assertion or self-sacrifice, but through the stepwise weaving of selves into shared meaning. Through the prefigurative acts of schmoozing, co-presence, gesture, and ensemble memory.
It is not enough to change institutions. We must change the conditions under which selves become visible, legible, and capable of sustaining mutual life.
That work begins not in theory, but in every moment of prehensive recognition.
Let’s meet there.
When a project starts using words like commons, mutual aid, enclosure, and alienation, someone will eventually ask: Isn’t this just Communism with a new label?
It’s a fair question. And it deserves more than a reflexive denial or a knowing smirk. The Communitarium Project does share some terrain with Communism, particularly in its critique of capitalism. But what it seeks to build—and how it seeks to build it—could not be more different.
This post lays out that difference: clearly, respectfully, and without strategic ambiguity.
Let’s begin where overlap exists: – Alienation: Both frameworks understand capitalism as a system that separates people from their labor, their communities, their own self-understanding, and the natural world. – Enclosure: Both regard the private seizure of common life—land, care, time, attention, expression—as a central mechanism of control. – Commons: Both imagine a future in which what is shared is protected and generative, not commodified or hoarded. – Mutuality: Both understand that coordination and care must replace competition and coercion.
So yes, both name the problem. But they diverge in how they understand its depth—and how they imagine its transformation.
Communism, particularly in its 20th-century forms, emphasizes mass-scale coordination through: – State planning – Central authority (often party-based) – Rational control over production and distribution
The Communitarium Project, by contrast, emphasizes: – Schmooze-level deliberation – Soft protocols and reflexive governance – Ensemble intelligence at human and ecosystemic scale
Rather than seize power, the Communitarium seeks to redistribute interpretive capacity and reweave decision-making into everyday life.
We do not oppose coordination. We oppose enclosure of coordination—by the state, the algorithm, or any imagined Big Other.
Communism tends to treat individuals as bearers of ideology or class position—shaped by material conditions, but subordinate to historical roles. The revolutionary subject is a class actor first.
The Communitarium Project begins elsewhere: – With liminal selves who navigate multiple overlapping ensembles – With mortal computation, not ideological purity – With the portable sociality individuals carry between collectives
Where Communism seeks solidarity through shared identity and position, the Communitarium seeks mutual recognition through contextual intelligibility and recursive care (reflexive, ensemble-level maintenance of care practices—material, semiotic, and interpretive—that includes but extends beyond mutual aid).
Communism often holds that there is an eventual clarity to be achieved: class consciousness, the scientific method properly applied, the truth of history once emancipated from ideology.
Communitarium holds that no such finality exists. – All meaning is historically situated – All sense-making is ensemble-bound – All truth is subject to social computation and interpretive repair
There is no Big Other. No final arbiter. Only the mutual weave.
Communism tends to be anthropocentric. It aims to manage nature rationally, stewarding the Earth on behalf of humanity’s collective future. Nature is a system to be understood, preserved, and utilized.
The Communitarium Project treats ecology differently: – Not as backdrop or resource, but as co-constitutive interpretive field – Nonhumans are not inputs but participants in prehensive relations – Meaning is not extracted from nature but woven through situated interaction
The goal is not sustainability-as-resource-efficiency, but recommoning the interpretive relation with the living world.
Communism favors rupture: – Seize the means of production – Overthrow the capitalist class – Replace the old with the new
Communitarium favors stepwise weaving: – Build new interpretive infrastructure – Reintroduce social and symbolic protocols of mutuality – Create communitaria that gradually displace capitalist and statist dependencies
This is a recursive, relational revolution—one that proceeds through recomposition, not rupture.
Communism emerges from: – Marxism and dialectical materialism – Enlightenment rationalism – Hegelian notions of historical becoming
The Communitarium Project draws from: – A longer historical view of power, enclosure, and abstraction, treating capitalism (and now technofeudalism) not as exceptional ruptures but as continuations of broader civilizational patterns—particularly those involving the enclosure of meaning, land, and relationality – Ethnomethodology and micro-sociology – Semiotics and pragmatism – Feminist care ethics – Complexity theory and ensemble cognition – Decolonial and Indigenous philosophies
Where Communism seeks historical mastery, Communitarium seeks semiotic mutuality.
Both frameworks reject capitalism. But Communism often imagines replacing it with a planned economy enforced by a transitional state.
The Communitarium Project envisions capitalism-erosion and state-erosion as twin projects: – Not through seizure or collapse, but through displacement and irrelevance – By building commons so dense, reflexive, and durable that extractive systems fade – Through lived coordination that no longer depends on capitalist or statist infrastructure
We don’t overthrow the state. We stop needing it.
| Axis | Communism | Communitarium |
|---|---|---|
| Coordination | Central planning | Ensemble intelligence |
| Governance | State, party | Soft protocols, schmoozing |
| Selfhood | Classed subject | Liminal node in ensembles |
| Truth | Scientific clarity, class consciousness | Mortal computation, interpretive repair |
| Ecology | Rational stewardship | Co-constructed semiotic entanglement |
| Strategy | Rupture, revolution | Stepwise weaving, recomposition |
| Lineage | Marxism, Enlightenment, Hegel | Ethnomethodology, care, semiotics, decolonial thought |
The Communitarium Project doesn’t dismiss Communism. It honors the clarity of its critique. But it steps off its path.
We don’t want to seize the world. We want to live in it together, differently.
That means restoring what was obscured: the ensemble, the interaction, the fragile rhythms of mutual intelligibility. It means treating meaning itself as commons. And building the infrastructure that lets us maintain it.
If that’s a revolution, it will sound quieter than most.
The conversation has begun: 👉 Join it here
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trumpism isn't old fascism reborn—it's fascism recomposed for the digital age: grievance as policy, spectacle as governance, and symbolic violence scaled without constraint. April 2, “Liberation Day,” marked a shift from trade to retribution, rhetoric to ritual. The enclosures are gone—what comes next?
Donald Trump is not a Nazi.
But Trumpism cannot be understood outside the semiotic architecture that has always underpinned fascist formations—grievance turned into identity, enemies turned into policy, spectacle turned into governance.
What’s different now isn’t just the content of this politics. It’s the infrastructure that allows it to form, spread, and sustain itself—not through ideology or institution, but through affective fidelity and semiotic warfare.
Trumpism is not fascism reborn. It is fascism recomposed, in an age where meaning itself has become a battleground.
In the weeks leading up to April 2, 2025, Donald Trump began referring to that date as “Liberation Day.” Commentators braced for impact. The markets wobbled. Foreign leaders issued warnings. The message was clear: this would not be a policy announcement—it would be a symbolic rupture, a dramatic reversal of course for the American economy and its place in the world.
On that day, the Trump administration unveiled a sweeping set of so-called “reciprocal tariffs.” But these were not reciprocal in any meaningful economic sense. They were calculated using a retributive formula: halving the U.S. trade deficit with each country and dividing it by that country’s exports to the U.S., guaranteeing a minimum tariff of 10%. The actual outcome was economically unpredictable but symbolically precise: it declared that the U.S. would no longer play by the rules of interdependence—it would punish those who had, in Trump’s telling, taken advantage of its generosity.
This was not economic strategy. It was ritualized grievance. “Liberation Day” was framed as the moment when America threw off its chains—chains of globalism, of diplomacy, of negotiation—and asserted its dominance through calculated injury.
This logic extends well beyond tariffs. Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, and has revived the fantasy that the U.S. might simply “take Greenland.” These are not idle provocations. They are semiotic incursions: they naturalize the idea that American greatness means surrounding countries are provisional, absorbable, and properly subject to U.S. will.
This is Lebensraum by suggestion—not through military conquest, but through perceptual annexation and symbolic absorption.
Trumpism does not explain economic decline or cultural disorientation in systemic terms. It translates vague, collective unease into targeted, personified threats.
This dynamic is ancient. Across cultures, people have long responded to uncertainty and disorder by attaching blame to recognizable figures: neighbors, outcasts, strangers, “the corrupt,” “the impure,” “the possessed.” In many small-scale societies—documented in anthropological fieldwork—witchcraft accusations arise within face-to-face communities where everyone knows everyone else. In these contexts, symbolic violence operates without anonymity, and its consequences, however unjust, are entangled in ongoing social life.
But even this intimacy never guaranteed justice—only proximity. As societies scale up and stratify, the social distance between accuser and accused increases. Blood libel, emerging in medieval Europe, marks a turning point: here, accusers and targets no longer share daily life or mutual visibility. Jews, confined to ghettos and marked as “other,” could be accused en masse of ritual crimes. The accusation required no familiarity, no interpersonal knowledge—only stereotype and systematized fear.
Trumpism operates at the far end of this arc. In today’s digitally fragmented, media-amplified society, symbolic violence no longer requires any direct contact, shared space, or even basic knowledge of the accused. A trans teenager in a different state becomes the target of a national panic. A school librarian is turned into a symbol of indoctrination by people she will never meet. The tools of accusation have become portable, anonymous, and instantly scalable.
What once took a whisper in the village square now takes a keystroke.
Trumpism didn’t invent this transformation. But it is the most effective political formation yet to emerge from the convergence of social alienation, media saturation, and symbolic dispossession.
It’s often said that Trumpism wages war on truth. But this is not quite right. The more telling damage occurs at the level of tacit consensus—the unspoken agreements that allow people to treat certain things as stable enough to act upon together.
These include:
These forms of consensus are not epistemological commitments. They are social affordances—the minimal conditions of collective coordination.
Trumpism corrodes this not by replacing it with a new framework, but by eroding confidence in every framework at once. It floods the field with counter-claims, mockery, conspiracy, and dismissal. What’s left is fidelity to tribe rather than belief in the world.
The internet did not invent symbolic violence. But it unleashed it—decontextualized it, accelerated it, and freed it from reciprocity.
Historically, symbolic power—especially the power to define, accuse, exclude—was enclosed within institutions. Law, religion, media, and bureaucracy created hierarchies of interpretation and enforcement. This enclosure was exclusionary, but it also created friction and procedure.
Now, that enclosure has collapsed. Everyone has access to the tools, but no one bears the burden of stewardship.
What was once gossip or ritual is now broadcast globally and memetically weaponized. What was once a muttered accusation in the village square is now a trending hashtag.
Trumpism thrives in this environment—not as a cause, but as a synchronizing field. It does not need coherence. It needs only affective alignment: fear, resentment, scorn, and pride.
When Trump says something inflammatory or incoherent, he rarely clarifies. He leaves meaning hovering.
This ambiguity is not sloppy communication. It is a method of dispersing interpretive responsibility. The audience does the work of decoding—or refusing to. This allows the effects to accumulate—incitement, resentment, polarization—without any one statement being clearly actionable.
This is semiotic saturation: creating a haze in which speech circulates without anchoring, but always in the direction of domination and fidelity.
Trumpism is not merely a political movement. It is a semiotic regime—an emergent structure of meaning-making, loyalty-building, and system-undermining, made possible by the breakdown of older enclosures and the rise of digital symbolic force.
It redeploys ancient tactics—scapegoating, grievance, purification—but under conditions that maximize their reach and remove their limits.
This is not Nazism, redux. It is something adapted to the present: fascism without uniforms, authoritarianism by meme, expansionism through suggestion, repression through ambiguity.
To respond, we must do more than refute it. We must reclaim the capacity for shared interpretation, rebuild spaces of mutual accountability, and grasp what it means to live in a time when symbolic power has escaped its old containers.
April 2 was called “Liberation Day.”
The real question is: liberation from what—and into what kind of world?