Seize the Means of Community

Motivations for a Behavioral and Ethos-Oriented Turn

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1. Traditional socialism lacks a theory of sociality

Classical socialism—especially in its Marxist and state-centered variants—tends to treat sociality as either:

• a derivative of economic conditions, or
• something that will naturally emerge once class antagonisms are resolved.

But our project insists that sociality is not a byproduct—it is the substrate. Without an account of how meaning, solidarity, and coordination are produced in real-time ensembles of interaction, socialism lacks the tools to build or maintain a genuinely collective life.

Hence the shift: socialism must be defined by its capacity to cultivate the conditions of shared social meaning, not just economic redistribution.

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2. Political structures without behavioral infrastructure collapse or calcify

We've noted that socialism, when pursued primarily through political means (e.g., parties, states, revolutions), has repeatedly suffered:

• Bureaucratization (technocratic or authoritarian drift)
• Alienation (between people and the very institutions meant to represent them)
• Stagnation (due to insufficient feedback from lived communal practice)

In each case, mortal computation fails: the social systems can no longer adapt to the complexity of lived experience, because no real deliberative substrate exists.

Even when socialism secures political victories—whether in legislation, governance, or electoral representation—these gains often prove fragile. In a socio-political landscape still dominated by fragmented, commodified, and idiotized sociality, shifts in belief and conviction can rapidly erode hard-won progress. Without cultivating a transformed social substrate capable of sustaining and defending these changes, purely political gains are too easily undone.

Thus, we must shift the focus to behavioral coordination and interpretable social practices at the schmooze level—not as “soft infrastructure,” but as foundational.

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3. The erosion of community is the deeper crisis

Modern capitalism has not merely privatized goods—it has enclosed and fracked the very environments of community, hollowing out the schmooze-level processes through which humans co-create shared sense, normativity, and care.

This enclosure has produced:

• Widespread loneliness, anxiety, and deaths of despair
• The rise of identity as consumption, not co-production
• A pervasive inability to coordinate, even around shared interests

Any meaningful socialism must address this directly—not just through programmatic policy, but by rebuilding the capacity for shared life.

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4. Interpretive and epistemic enclosures have become central tools of power

Our framework has emphasized that:

• Power is exercised through control of interpretive frameworks
• Systems of diagnostic categories, algorithms, bureaucracies, and economic abstractions now shape what counts as real, legible and noticeable—not just who gets what

This means socialism must go beyond redistribution. It must:

• Contest epistemic hegemony
• Rebuild commons of interpretation
• Enable polycentric deliberation and contested meaning

Therefore, socialism must be understood as a way of life capable of resisting and replacing dominant frame systems—not merely as economic reorganization.

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5. A socialism that cannot live before it wins will never win

Socialist theory has too often imagined transformation as something that will occur after seizing power. But waiting until “after the revolution” to begin building egalitarian, mutualist, meaningful ways of living:

• Prevents experimentation
• Narrows appeal
• Replicates the very alienation it seeks to overcome

We’ve been working from the idea that real socialism must be prefigurative in its approach—able to live and adapt now, in fragments and formations that demonstrate its value long before they command state power.

Hence, a socialism that begins in ethos, practice, and ensemble, not just party or program.

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6. The unit of analysis must shift from the individual to the ensemble

Modern liberalism, and even much of left theory, retains the individual as the basic ontological and epistemic unit. But this leaves it vulnerable to:

• Capitalism’s exploitation of the isolated, commodified self
• Misrecognition of how deliberation, identity, and cognition are ensemble phenomena
• The reduction of “solidarity” to altruism, rather than co-constituted interest

Our framework proposes that:

• Human social ensembles are Kantian wholes
• Meaning, purpose, and coordination emerge relationally
• The “self” is adjustable and partially distributed

This shift mandates a socialism defined in terms of interpersonal infrastructure, not just class allegiance or programmatic affinity.

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7. Political ideologies have become disembedded from lived reality

Today’s political life (including on the Left) often operates in abstract, symbolic registers:

• Discourse circulates online, detached from everyday life
• Organizations recruit identities but fail to sustain sociality
• Tactical victories are disconnected from habitable alternatives

The result is a spectacle of politics without embedded social practice.

A socialism worthy of the name must re-embed itself in habitable, quotidian, and meaning-generative social formations.

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8. The Communitarium Project requires a foundational ethos, not a doctrinal platform

As we’ve developed the Communitarium Project, it has become clear that:

• The basis of resistance is ensemble-embedded cognition and care
• What is needed is not doctrinal agreement, but a shared infrastructure for living together meaningfully

This requires:

• A political economy of meaning, purpose, and interpretability
• A commitment to ecological evaluation of practices
• An emphasis on adaptive, federated mutualism

Socialism, in this sense, is not an ideology to be imposed but an ethos to be grown.

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Coda: Expanding the scope of “socialist”

Under an ethos-oriented definition, “socialist” no longer applies only to economic arrangements, political programs, or party labels. It becomes a descriptor for any domain—value and trading relationships, modes of social interaction, understandings of kinship, forms of art, approaches to education, systems of care, technological development, and more—where the relational and interpretive infrastructure reflects the principles of shared life.

The point is not that such applications are already well established—they are not—but that our redefinition makes it possible to meaningfully apply the adjective “socialist” in domains where it has rarely been used. Whether in the design of cooperative economic arrangements, the cultivation of egalitarian learning environments, or the creation of collaborative tools and platforms, “socialist” should mark the presence of practices that prioritize shared meaning, mutual obligation, and ensemble-based creativity over commodification and extraction. In this way, the scope of the term expands to encompass the full range of human cooperative activity.

#TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

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1. The Problem We Face

We live in a world of escalating crises — environmental collapse, economic inequality, technological overreach, political instability — yet the dominant systems for thinking about and acting on these crises feel exhausted.

Our inherited political vocabularies still try to address 21st-century problems with 19th- and 20th-century categories. Terms like democracy, freedom, solidarity, and community persist, but their meanings have been thinned, simplified, or distorted by overuse, commodification, and systemic enclosure.

When people speak of the social, they often mean something passive or optional — a realm of connection distinct from “real” politics or economics. Yet what we call the social is the ground of everything: it is where meaning is created, where purpose is forged, and where action becomes possible.

If we want to make socialism adequate to the present, we have to rethink not only its policies or structures, but also its ethos — what it assumes about the self, about community, and about how people live, work, and act together.

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2. Why Redefine Socialism

We all grew up with a political vocabulary in which socialism was framed primarily as a matter of economics and state policy: public ownership, redistribution, class struggle. Those remain important — but they are not enough.

I'm suggesting that socialism is not a set of policies. It’s a way of organizing life so that the systems we build, maintain, and inhabit serve the flourishing of people in their full, embedded, interdependent existence. That means not just changing ownership structures, but changing the terms of belonging and the terms of engagement.

To do this, we have to look critically at factors that earlier formulations of socialism took as unproblematically foundational:

• A concept of self as discrete, bounded, and internally coherent.
• A view of the individual as the primary unit of analysis, with “society” as an aggregation of such units.
• An assumption that the meaning of “social” is self-evident and unchanging.

My work in the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF) and the General Theory of Interpretive Systems (GTIS) has led me to reject those assumptions. I see the self as porous and adjustable, individuality as relational, and “the social” as a dynamic web of mutual prehension, purpose, and coordinated action.

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3. Idiotism and the Fracturing of the Social

I call it, with Neal Curtis, idiotism: not just an individual attitude, but a systematically facilitated epistemic enclosure. The term comes from the Greek idiōtēs — a private person disengaged from public life — and here names a condition in which the shared interpretive and deliberative capacities of communities are weakened.

Idiotism encourages people to treat their private interpretations as self-sufficient, to disengage from the slow work of joint meaning-making, and to resist the obligations and adjustments that come with living among others.

It is reinforced by platforms, institutions, and economies that suppress deliberation and extract immediate engagement. This is the engagement of clicks, swipes, and outrage — unidimensional and easily harvested — not the engagement of mutual responsibility, shared projects, and long-term cooperation.

This is where the redefinition of “social” becomes urgent. Without a richer conception of how people co-create meaning–purpose–action in real time, socialism risks inheriting the same fractured epistemic field that capitalism thrives on.

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4. The Role of Indexical Stability

You begin to notice that real cooperation requires more than incentive or ideology — it demands what most current systems actively undermine:

• Indexical stability — the dependable ability to know and maintain what we are each referring to in shared contexts, so that “this,” “here,” “now,” and “us” mean the same thing for everyone involved.
• Mutuality — not just care, but the full range of reciprocal engagement, shared obligation, and collaborative action that sustains a functioning community.
• Infrastructures for joint world-maintenance — the material, procedural, and cultural supports that make shared life possible.

When indexical stability erodes — as it has in politics, media, and even daily communication — coordination falters. We no longer share enough reference points to deliberate, decide, and act together effectively. The social becomes noise.

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5. Value, Purpose, and Action

In humane, embedded communities, value is not an abstract number or market price; it is what people recognize as worth sustaining, protecting, or cultivating. This value emerges directly from shared meaning, common purpose, and joint action.

Under hegemonic systems, value is extracted, tokenized, and severed from the conditions that give it life. It becomes a tool for control rather than a reflection of mutual commitments.

Part of redefining socialism is reclaiming value as something generated and held in common — inseparable from the purposes we pursue and the actions we take together. Here, value is not just a metric but a living property of sustained cooperation.

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6. Engagement as the Measure of the Social

We use the word engagement easily, but rarely ask what kind. In functioning communities, engagement is multidimensional: conversational, deliberative, material, cultural, and affective. It is measured in the density and resilience of relationships, not in raw counts of interactions.

In current online systems, engagement is flattened into a single extractable dimension — attention. The richness of mutual engagement is replaced by metrics that can be sold to advertisers.

Redefining socialism means restoring engagement to its full register, where it is not just contact but co-presence; not just reaction but contribution; not just participation but shared maintenance of a world.

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7. Toward a Socialism of the Social

This leads to a political conclusion: socialism, as redefined here, is the design and maintenance of federated interpretive ensembles capable of distributing power, meaning, purpose, and resources through mortal computation across scales.

It is a socialism that begins with the social — with the practices of mutual engagement, the infrastructures of joint world-maintenance, and the conditions for indexical stability — because without these, neither economic redistribution nor political reform will hold.

This is not socialism as an end-state or a fixed doctrine. It is socialism as an ongoing ethos: an active commitment to the shared work of building, sustaining, and repairing the worlds we inhabit together.

#TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

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Too often, socialism is framed as a political identity one must adopt in order to access deeper forms of solidarity. But many people who might be drawn to socialist values are never offered a meaningful, low-barrier path into lived participation. Building a broader movement means making socialism something people can practice before they’re asked to profess.

This is not a call to replace or abandon any part of how DSA currently functions. On the contrary: we are advocating for an expansion of DSA’s self-understanding and activity, one that makes its most powerful internal affordances—collective deliberation, mutuality, democratic coordination—more available to people outside its formal boundaries. The goal is not revision or retreat, but refinement, packaging, and outward diffusion.

When Zohran Mamdani brought “socialism” into mainstream New York politics, he didn’t just propose a new set of policies. He shifted the register in which socialism could be understood—not as an ideology to adopt or to fear, but as a way of showing up, of caring for neighbors, of being accountable, joyful, and resolute. As I argued in Zohran Mamdani Won’t Save New York, but He Can Help New York Save Itself, he opened a cultural crack that lets people imagine socialism differently—not as a political philosophy, but as a presence.

But that crack won’t widen unless we seize the opportunity it presents.

And to do that, we need to radically reframe the threshold of entry.

Socialism as Practice, Not Password

DSA, to its credit, has cultivated an internal world that reflects socialist values: collective deliberation, shared labor, mutuality, and democratic coordination. But to access that internal world, one must typically start with political alignment—an identification that many people are not yet prepared (or positioned) to adopt.

This means that what’s most precious—the lived experience of socialist life—is functionally gated by political commitment.

But what if we flipped that model?

In Socialism Is a Way of Doing Things Together I made the case that socialism should not be offered primarily as a policy platform or a critique of capitalism. It should be a way of relating and acting together, visible and available before it is named. A thing you do, not just a thing you believe.

Organizing Isn’t About Winning

That’s why it matters to recognize something many organizers already know in their bones: Winning Is Not the Purpose of Organizing

Yes, we fight to win concrete things—housing protections, labor rights, and public infrastructures that can serve as the basis for shared life, or be reclaimed as part of the commons, resisting its ongoing erosion by hegemonic forces.

We organize to build new modes of life. We organize to create solidarities where none existed, to cultivate agency where there was resignation, and to construct durable ensembles capable of meaning-making, care, and resistance. Whether the campaign fails or succeeds, the ensemble remains—if we've done the real work.

This is why starting with lived socialist practice—regardless of political identity—matters so much. Because the relational fabric is the movement. Because people become socialists by doing socialism, not just by arguing for it.

Communitaria: Platforms for Living Socialism Before Naming It

The question, then, is how to invite people into that practice.

That’s where what we are calling communitaria come in—socialist community media platforms designed not to proclaim socialism but to enable it to be built and discovered. These are not branding vehicles or propaganda outlets, but low-barrier, participatory habitats: digital spaces that embody a socialist ethos—even if they are not called “socialist”—that function more like third places, streetcorners, or kitchen tables than campaigns or conferences, and that are constantly oriented toward enabling consequences beyond the digital world.

These platforms are being designed to reflect the values they aim to cultivate: built on free and open-source software, community-hosted and maintained, and federated rather than centralized. This ensures that the infrastructure itself resists enclosure and reinforces shared ownership, autonomy, and resilience.

While communitaria place no ideological or political requirements on participation, they are designed to afford political capacity. They provide tools and environments that support fact-gathering, reporting, joint document production, deliberation, responsibility allocation, resource management, publishing, and event planning. In other words, they make ad hoc political responsiveness easy and natural, rooted in shared practice rather than doctrinal allegiance.

The binding commitment is not to a party line, but to an ethos of collective life—an evolving culture of mutual aid, co-creation, and shared responsibility. Taken as a whole, this ethos constitutes a socialist way of living together—even for those who have not (yet) named it as such.

Communitaria let people enter into shared rhythms, without having to clear ideological gates. They prioritize coordination over conversion. They offer people the chance to build, discuss, disagree, contribute—and in doing so, begin to live another kind of life.

Culture Before Commitment

When people begin to experience socialism as a culture—as a viable, compelling, generative way of life—they become more likely to defend it, organize for it, and name it.

In a limited, ad hoc, and unsystematic way, DSA has already developed the early affordances of this kind of cultural infrastructure—spaces where people can practice mutuality, shared decision-making, and political imagination. The task now is to recognize that this is a distinct and transferable capacity: one that needs to be clarified, refined, and extended beyond the organization’s internal life.

What we’re proposing is the deliberate creation of an online test kitchen—a limited but generative environment in which people can workshop the attitudes, practices, and vocabularies of collective life. The goal is not containment, but diffusion: to develop forms of solidarity and shared meaning that can be taken up, adapted, and lived far beyond the bounds of DSA itself.

The problem isn’t that socialism is too radical. It’s that most people have no way to try it before they’re asked to buy in. The threshold is too high. And the benefits are obscured behind abstractions.

Let’s make the first experience one of mutual support—not a test of ideological readiness, but a shared search for where one might meaningfully land.

Because socialism doesn’t start when we win. It starts when we build something together that’s worth keeping, whether the campaign succeeds or not.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #DSA #RedefiningSocialism

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The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment” – Post #2

The promise of Mamdani’s campaign is not a rescue. It is an invitation—to join in an ongoing, collaborative reconstruction of the political life of this city.

Previous post in the series:

The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment” – Post #1: Zohran Mamdani as DSA in the Flesh: Disindividuated Politics, Foundational Justice, and the Power of Sincerity

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has done more than put a socialist on the brink of the mayor’s office. It has revealed the latent presence of something larger: a city-wide appetite for transformation, voiced by thousands who canvassed, organized, and voted—not just for a candidate, but for a different way of living together.

If Mamdani wins, his victory will not be the culmination of that movement, but the beginning of a new, more demanding phase.

Because Mamdani cannot save New York.

But he can help New York save itself—if we, the people who made his victory possible, understand that this is not a moment to stand back and hope. It is a moment to step forward and stay in motion—to enter into informal but sustained collaboration with a mayor who shares our values, and who depends on our ongoing presence to make them real.

We cannot treat politics as a matter of choosing the right person and waiting. We have to treat it as an enduring relationship—between elected officials and the public, yes, but also among ourselves, as neighbors and co-creators of the city we want to inhabit. Mamdani’s platform is a point of departure, not a destination. He will need help to realize it—help not just in the form of policy advice or advocacy, but in the form of a mobilized, federated, citizen-driven civic presence that can bring social and political pressure to bear in real time.

That means groups of ordinary people—not as lobbyists, not as NGOs, not as “stakeholders,” but as citizens—must become visible and consequential to the political process in new ways. We must show up in formats the system is not built to expect: not occasional protestors or passive constituents, but persistent ensembles of deliberating, collaborating, justice-seeking people.

We need a civic infrastructure that supports that kind of presence—an ecosystem of small, self-directed, self-governing communities that share political intention, moral vision, and concrete practices. These communities will not be arms of city hall, nor will they be traditional political organizations. They will be something looser, deeper, and more durable: places where the social and the political are no longer kept apart.

Places where people who exchange recipes also organize to end food deserts. Where transit riders discuss land use and urban form. Where book clubs become working groups. Where people talk, argue, analyze, and act. Not once, but week after week. Not as a campaign, but as a way of life.

To do this, we need tools: open-source platforms for discussion, collaboration, and publishing; deliberation forums that support iterative decision-making; shared archives of thought, analysis, and plans. But tools alone won’t do it. What’s needed is a shift in posture—from seeing ourselves as supporters of a campaign to seeing ourselves as co-stewards of a city in flux, building with and beyond the Mamdani administration the structures that will let justice take root.

This is not about perfection. It's about presence. About showing up, regularly, in places where our collective voice is legible—to ourselves, to each other, and to those in office.

Mamdani’s mayoralty, should it come, will not be a magic wand. But it can be a scaffolding. It can be the formal opening of a political partnership with the city’s people—so long as we stay in the room.

We cannot expect one man to transmute our hopes into a new city. But we can let the fire he lit change the way we treat each other—and the way we show up in public. If we act now—carefully, joyfully, together—we may find ourselves building the kind of New York that no administration could ever deliver alone.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement

More posts in the series:

The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment – Post #1: Zohran Mamdani as DSA in the Flesh: Disindividuated Politics, Foundational Justice, and the Power of Sincerity

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The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment – Post #1

I want to explore—and ultimately defend—a line of thinking that may serve both as a response to skeptics who doubt Zohran Mamdani’s capacity to follow through on his political commitments and as an explanation to the uninitiated for how he has already achieved what he has.

In short: Mamdani has been telling us all along how he intended to do what he’s now doing—but his audience, in many cases, wasn’t the general public. It was the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization to which he has long belonged and which he credits not merely as his support base, but as the precondition of his political possibility.

There are recorded moments throughout his early political career where Mamdani clearly states: I am only possible because of DSA. He frames his own activity not as a heroic exception or as personal genius, but as a manifestation of DSA’s collective program and organizing structure. He argues, for instance, that attacks on him personally are less effective because he is not merely a charismatic individual or a vulnerable political actor. He is part of a collective body—and is seen to be part of it. His political persona is embedded within a shared infrastructure.

I want to go further. Mamdani has acted as if he were a lens onto DSA. But since most of the public, in our increasingly parasocial world, pays more attention to the lens than to what it is focused on, he has effectively become “DSA in the flesh.” To borrow from early Christian rhetoric, he has become a kind of incarnation—a visible, tangible, and rhetorically savvy mediator between:

• the world that does not understand or recognize DSA, and
  
• the world DSA is trying to build.

He is not merely articulating ideas. He is enacting a strategy of disindividuation, in which political speech and action are never framed as personal expressions, but as the result of collective deliberation and organizing. He continually redirects questions from reporters—questions often framed in the idiom of individual ambition or liberal self-making—and turns them toward collective stakes, shared conditions, and systemic causes. In doing so, he challenges what might be called idiotism: the isolationist logic of possessive individualism built into the default grammar of political discourse.

But there is another dimension to Mamdani’s political appeal—one that helps explain why this strategy has worked where others have floundered. It is not just that Mamdani is aligned with a powerful organization, or that he deploys strategic messaging more skillfully than his peers. It is that he is widely and deeply perceived as sincere.

An old, multiply-attributed adage holds: “The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” But Mamdani has found a more direct path to political effectiveness. He doesn’t perform sincerity; he embodies it. Everyone who knows him—or watches him closely—believes him to be sincere. His consistency, humility, clarity of purpose, and refusal to posture all reinforce a basic sense that what you see is what he believes. And in a political world saturated with cynicism and performativity, this perceived sincerity is itself a radical form of credibility.

And so while Mamdani’s political strategy is operational, it is not coldly tactical. His effectiveness derives from the trust he inspires among those who have long felt excluded from power—not just because he promises to represent them, but because he seems to already be of them.

When he proposes legislation, he is not simply putting forward a bill; he is deploying a political test. A Mamdani bill is never just a policy idea. It is also an invitation to collective visibility—a chance for a constituency long treated as marginal to assert its centrality.

Take, for example, a bill that would tax the top 1% of income earners—something that would require implementation at the state level. If Governor Hochul is weighing whether to veto such a bill, she is not just doing policy math. She is being asked to consider whether doing so will trigger a groundswell of opposition from people who are increasingly seen as the true stewards of the city—the ones who build it, clean it, transport it, teach it, cook for it, care for it, and hold it together.

The supporters Mamdani has coalesced are not just numerous—they are morally and materially foundational. They are seen to represent New York’s everyday life and long-term interest in a way that property developers and managerial elites do not. And so Mamdani’s strength comes not simply from organized force, but from a growing recognition that his politics are anchored in justice, equity, and authentic representation.

This is what differentiates his politics. While traditional electeds operate in the performative register of individual persuasion or technocratic competence, Mamdani operates in a register of emergent legitimacy. His proposals are not just backed by infrastructure—they are backed by a rising sense that the people he speaks for are the city’s true body politic, and that those who oppose him are not just obstructing progress but sustaining an illegitimate status quo.

This is the “how he will do it” that critics and observers often miss. Mamdani is not betting on institutional goodwill. He is not just wielding numbers. He is advancing a reconstitution of the political imagination—one that says the right to shape the city belongs not to those who own the most of it, but to those without whom it cannot function.

In this way, his politics exemplify one of the core principles animating the Communitarium Project:

A proposal backed by organized popular power cannot be evaluated solely on its perceived ideological merits or messaging. It must be evaluated in terms of its capacity to mobilize collective action and its representational legitimacy among those who materially sustain the world in question.

Mamdani doesn’t need to hold executive power to influence executive decisions. What he wields is a politics of foundational justice—and he does so as a node in a living, distributed, and increasingly visible political body.

This is what makes him legible—both as a singular figure and as a prototype of what a post-individualist politics might look like. Not a man with a platform. A membrane between worlds. A vector of activation. A politician who understands himself not as the source of politics, but as its relay—and whose legitimacy comes not just from movement support, but from embodying the right of the many to reclaim the city they keep alive.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #DSA

More posts in this series:

The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment – Post #2: Zohran Mamdani Won’t Save New York—But He Can Help New York Save Itself

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Preface The logics of formal rationality, geopolitical abstraction, and American exceptionalism became progressively entangled over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries—and, in figures like Donald Trump, they culminate in the idiotization of social reality. What began as a set of highly abstract, formalized tools for thinking the world (automata, deterrence, strategic choice) has, through successive degenerations, been embodied in performative forms of power that no longer simulate rationality, but parody it.

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1. The Strategic Turn: Von Neumann and the Formalization of Rationality

John von Neumann stands at the root of this genealogy. In modeling economics, warfare, and even biology as systems of formal logic, he initiated a powerful abstraction: human beings as strategic agents, interaction as games, life as computable pattern. His work birthed game theory and cellular automata, sowing the idea that human behavior could be managed and predicted through mathematical formalism.

This was not merely an intellectual project. It aligned with a national mood: mid-century America, facing the Cold War and commanding planetary scale, needed tools to manage vast complexity without losing control. Game theory offered the illusion of rational mastery, enclosure through comprehension.

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2. Cold Abstraction: Kahn and the Thermonuclear Mind

Herman Kahn extended von Neumann’s logic into the thermonuclear domain. For Kahn, even nuclear war could be modeled, strategized, and won, so long as one remained emotionally detached enough to treat mass death as a variable.

This was the next phase of enclosure: not just mapping the game but inhabiting its cold logic, turning apocalypse into a scenario. American exceptionalism here becomes explicit: while the world might burn, the U.S. could endure.

Kahn’s work reflects a shift from isolationism to strategic exceptionalism: America would not simply retreat, but govern global chaos through calculation. Kahn's posture mirrors the national affect: paternalistic, distant, and singular. (Kahn, notably, served as one of the real-life inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s character Dr. Strangelove—a parody that may, in retrospect, have undershot the reality it satirized.)

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3. Tacit Signals and Social Systems: Schelling and the Interface of Strategy and Behavior

Thomas Schelling softened this logic, introducing the human back into the model. He studied how agents coordinate not just through commands, but through tacit signals, expectations, focal points, and credible threats. His models of segregation, brinkmanship, and commitment mechanisms made clear how micro-decisions could create macro-patterns.

Schelling’s great insight: even limited preferences, bounded rationality, and social signaling could lead to large-scale enclosures. But he left the political stakes largely unexamined. How these enclosures are legitimated, maintained, or weaponized would fall to future actors.

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4. Homo Economicus Ascendant: Trump as Strategic Idiot

Trump represents the performative degeneration of this trajectory. He is not the rational strategist von Neumann envisioned, nor the detached planner Kahn embodied, nor even the social modeler Schelling portrayed. He is instead a synthetic product of all three: he preserves the outward form of game logic—competition, leverage, advantage—but strips it of coherence, proportionality, and rational structure. His moves are impulsive rather than calculated, improvised rather than strategic, theatrical rather than credible.

In Trump, all interaction is reduced to “the deal”—a hollow transactionalism that desaturates schmooze-level social reality. Where others used game theory as model, Trump treats it as ontology. There are no deliberative processes, no shared frameworks, no community. There are only wins, losses, leverage, and spectacle.

His America is the idiotized imagined community: a national ego wrapped around grievance, projection, and brute negotiation. And at the core of this performance lies a grotesque metaphor: auto-erotic sovereignty. Power is exercised not as responsibility, but as gratification; diplomacy becomes dominance theater; international relations are reenacted in the register of “if you're famous, they'll let you”— with the world cast in the role of the submissive other. The nation becomes not a commons, but an extension of his libido and his brand.

In Trump, Homo economicus is no longer metaphorical. He is the game—and the only rule is him.

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5. Mood and Machine: National Affects as Systemic Drift

This history isn’t just intellectual. It’s affective. Each phase of this genealogy correlates with a national mood:

• Postwar anxiety seeks mastery (von Neumann)
• Cold War fatalism seeks survivability (Kahn)
• Late-century ambiguity seeks coordination (Schelling)
• Post-2008 decline seeks vengeance (Trump)

What binds these is not ideology, but a progressive enclosure of interpretive frameworks into systems of calculation, control, and strategic egoism. Sociality becomes strategy. Meaning becomes leverage. Deliberation becomes posture.

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6. Toward a Counter-Genealogy: Communitaria and the Resaturation of Meaning

The Communitarium Project emerges as a counter-move: not rejecting enclosure per se, but recognizing that it has been captured and idiotized. Rather than surrender social interaction to strategic modeling, the project insists on rebuilding ensembles of mutual interpretation, where meaning is not extracted or computed but co-constituted.

The Communitarium doesn’t long for a lost intimacy or preach anti-rationalism. It proposes a resaturation of schmooze-level sociality through collective deliberation, shared interpretive labor, and contextual moral economies.

In short: to resist the idiotized legacy of von Neumann, Kahn, Schelling, and Trump is not to deny structure or strategy—but to re-embed them in community, where computation serves life, not the reverse.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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New_ Public wants better digital communities. So does the Communitarium Project—but it starts further back, aiming not to reform platforms but to form new communities, infrastructures, and counter-realities beyond capitalism. A comparison:

The Communitarium Project shares a family resemblance with the initiative described in New_ Public’s post on a new social product for communities. Both begin with the premise that today's dominant platforms are failing us—not just in terms of functionality or civility, but at the level of purpose. Both seek to center human connection, public good, and communal well-being over engagement metrics and ad revenue. But where New_ Public sketches a more incremental renovation, Communitarium proposes something closer to a reinvention.

This post lays out some of the key similarities and differences, not to denigrate one project or exalt the other, but to make the aspirations of the Communitarium Project clearer to those who sense something is broken and are looking for ways to build anew.

Shared Concerns

1. Platform Capitalism Is Inadequate Both projects recognize that the logic of profit-maximizing platforms corrodes community life. Surveillance, extraction, and gamified attention distort human relationships and prioritize virality over solidarity.

2. We Need Spaces Designed for People, Not Advertisers The notion of a “social product” that nurtures belonging, collaboration, and deliberation—rather than just click-through—is a point of strong agreement.

3. Digital Infrastructure Can Be Designed Differently This is not just about codes of conduct or better moderation. It’s about building the underlying infrastructure—tools, protocols, and norms—that support richer, more humane interactions.

Where Communitarium Diverges

1. From Community Engagement to Community Formation New_ Public’s offering is geared toward existing communities—groups that already have some cohesion or identity—and giving them tools to flourish online. Communitarium is interested in what makes communities possible in the first place. It asks: how can new communities form, take root, and govern themselves in ways that are resilient, ethical, and post-capitalist?

2. A Platform for Autonomy, Not Just Expression Communitarium is not just a space to talk or share—it is an infrastructural commitment to collective autonomy. It is being designed to support deliberation, shared decision-making, mutual aid, and the co-creation of meaning. This requires something more robust than a “product.” It requires a world.

3. Explicitly Anti-Capitalist, Post-Individualist While New_ Public remains within the orbit of liberal reformism, the Communitarium Project draws openly from anarchist and socialist traditions. It rejects the enclosure of knowledge, the commodification of selfhood, and the atomization of digital life. It seeks to erode capitalism not by opposing it in rhetoric alone, but by offering alternate arrangements in which cooperation becomes natural and necessary.

4. More Than Safe Space—A Counter-Reality The goal is not to carve out a tranquil refuge on the internet. The goal is to cultivate sites of counter-power: federated spaces where people not only feel heard but become capable of acting together, deliberating together, and creating together. It is about forming symbiotic ensembles that can extend into material reality.

5. No Federation, No Cosmopolitanism Unlike the Communitarium Project, which is being built with federation and pluralistic interoperability as core principles, New_ Public’s offering appears to center around isolated community instances. While this may suffice for strengthening local cohesion, it lacks the cosmopolitan vision of a federated network of counter-power—communities capable of recognizing each other, deliberating across contexts, and sharing a common informational fabric without centralization.

Points of Contact and Possible Dialogue

Despite these differences, New_ Public and Communitarium aren’t enemies. They may be playing different roles in a broader movement toward reclaiming the social from the grip of technocratic capitalism. If New_ Public is renovating the civic front porch, Communitarium is rebuilding the neighborhood—perhaps even changing the zoning code.

There’s room here for cross-pollination. New_ Public’s focus on user needs, facilitation, and user-centered design may offer practical insights. Meanwhile, Communitarium’s insistence on rootedness, relationality, and emancipatory infrastructure could deepen New_ Public’s philosophical horizons.

Learn More

If you'd like to explore the ideas behind the Communitarium Project in greater depth, you can browse all posts related to it here.

Conclusion

We’re in an age of pervasive enclosure: of time, attention, discourse, even hope. If we are to reclaim what it means to live and think together, we must be willing to go deeper than product design or platform reform. The Communitarium Project is an effort to imagine and build that depth—a re-founding of community itself on different terms.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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Class, Myth, and the Obsolescence We Must Design

“Worker” has been a rallying point and a mythic role. But its durability is both a strength and a trap. If the Left is to move forward, we must use the term strategically—while refusing to treat it as permanent. The worker must remain historically specific, ideologically provisional, and ultimately, replaceable.

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The word worker carries a lot of weight. It evokes exploitation, solidarity, class consciousness, dignity, struggle. It calls back to miners, machinists, domestic laborers, union organizers, and precarious service staff. It has anchored the identity of the Left for generations.

And yet, for all its power, worker is a category we must learn to wear lightly. Because as much as it’s been a tool of resistance, it’s also become a conceptual enclosure—a role that subtly dictates what kinds of agency, solidarity, and futures we are allowed to imagine. Left unexamined, it becomes what we might call a teleological trap: the idea that the worker is not just a political subject but the inevitable political subject. That history will unfold toward worker power, and that the shape of that power is already understood.

This assumption has consequences. It constrains the language we use to describe emerging forms of labor, care, and value. It orients the imagination of justice around wage labor and production. It discourages rethinking what social roles we want to preserve or transcend.

From the point of view of the Communitarium Project, this is a problem. Because our aim isn’t to build a better worker-led society—it’s to build the conditions under which people are no longer defined by their function within a labor regime at all.

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Capitalism Needs the Worker Too

It’s easy to forget that “worker” is not just a revolutionary identity—it’s a capitalist one. The worker is the unit of labor. A cost center. A human resource. Even in heroic leftist formulations, the figure of the worker often remains within this same structural role: the one who produces value, and who therefore deserves more of it.

But what if production isn’t always the horizon of value? What if the fixation on the worker prevents us from recognizing other roles and relationships—caregiver, sharer, sustainer, thinker, neighbor, co-inhabitant—as equally central?

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The Mirror Myth: Worker vs. Entrepreneur

One reason “worker” remains so sticky is because it is rhetorically useful. It lets the Left anchor its identity in opposition to the myth of the entrepreneur: the self-made, risk-taking capitalist ideal. But as long as this binary holds, both roles reinforce each other. Each needs the other to stay coherent. One becomes the moral hero of collective labor; the other, the moral hero of individual ambition.

And both risk flattening lived complexity into a role: are you the exploited or the self-starter? Are you a cog or a visionary?

In reality, people are neither. Or rather: they are much more than either.

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Synchronic Utility, Diachronic Obsolescence

We don’t have to throw the word away. In immediate struggles—against wage theft, for labor protections, in organizing campaigns—it remains indispensable. But if we care about what comes next, we have to hold it differently.

The distinction here is between synchronic and diachronic commitments. In the now, “worker” can rally solidarity and clarify antagonism. But across time, we must recognize it as a historically situated term, bound to particular modes of production and particular visions of the social order.

If we reject historical inevitabilism, we must also reject the permanence of our categories. “Worker” is useful, not sacred. It is temporary, not timeless. Its strategic value depends on our ability to eventually let it go.

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Designing Its Obsolescence

To take this seriously means actively planning for its obsolescence. Not its erasure, but its dissolution into richer and more nuanced terms—terms that reflect a world not organized around jobs, employers, wage labor, or linear productivity.

That requires infrastructure: new languages, new institutions, new forms of collective identity that don’t just reward “hard work,” but support people in living well, together, beyond the metrics of employment. This is part of what the Communitarium Project seeks to prototype: spaces where people coordinate, create, and metabolize complexity without being defined primarily by what they produce.

This is not the end of class struggle. It’s the effort to outgrow the categories that capitalism made necessary in the first place.

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Refusing the Final Vocabulary

The Left needs to be capable of strategy without orthodoxy, solidarity without role lock-in. The figure of the worker has done important work, but it cannot be our final vocabulary. If we want a future beyond capitalism, we need terms that don’t just resist its logics but refuse to reproduce them in reverse.

We need to stop imagining the worker as our endgame. And start building the conditions in which the worker, too, can rest.

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#LanguageOfTheLeft

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The Communitarium Project isn’t about reviving communes or escaping society—it’s about building transitional, interstitial spaces where people can live, think, and act together differently. Not utopias, but shared infrastructures for sense-making, coordination, and care—without enforcing consensus or closing down difference.

It’s a familiar reaction. Mention “communes” in leftist circles and you’re likely to get a mix of eye-rolls, half-hearted smiles, and uneasy memories. For many, the word evokes a long history of well-meaning but often unsustainable experiments in collective living—some genuinely inspiring, others chaotic, insular, or quietly authoritarian. The skepticism is understandable. And yet, the desire to live differently, to reorganize how we share time, space, labor, and care, hasn’t gone away.

The classic idea of the commune is often structured around a kind of withdrawal. The hope is that by stepping outside capitalism, outside the state, outside inherited norms, people can start fresh. A new society in miniature, designed from scratch. But in practice, the world tends to follow us in. Patterns of domination, resource scarcity, informal hierarchies, and cultural sediment don’t stay outside the gates. They come along for the ride. And when the project buckles under their weight, it’s easy to conclude that the whole idea of living collectively is naïve or doomed.

But maybe the problem isn’t with the desire for a more communal life. Maybe it’s with the model we’ve inherited—and the assumptions it carries about how transformation happens.

The Communitarium Project is not an attempt to revive the commune. It isn’t a separatist outpost, an idealized return to the land, or a lifestyle alternative. It doesn’t promise self-sufficiency, purity, or escape. Instead, it proposes something quieter and more deliberate: we’re not trying to leave society behind; we’re trying to reimagine it in place. We’re not building enclosed utopias where existing rules are suspended; we’re building transitional, interstitial spaces that engage with the world as it is, while gradually reshaping it from within.

The structures we’re experimenting with—whether we call them hubs, nodes, collectives, or something else—are meant to support shared life in a way that remains open, adaptive, and historically aware. They’re designed to hold people in common purpose without collapsing difference, and to support coordination without reproducing hierarchy or burnout. The point isn’t to create a single model for everyone to follow. It’s to cultivate conditions where different communities can generate their own practices, based on their own needs and histories, while still finding ways to communicate and align across differences.

What also distinguishes the Communitarium Project is its emphasis on how we perceive and process the world together. Most collective projects focus on shared outputs—labor, decision-making, provisioning—but the Communitarium emphasizes shared intake as well. It’s designed to help people collectively interpret a world that has become too complex and contradictory to navigate alone.

That said, this is not a call for consensus thinking or interpretive uniformity. On the contrary, multiplicity and divergence are essential to the process. The goal is not to arrive at a common worldview, but to build the capacity to hold different perspectives in active relation—to metabolize disagreement, asymmetry, and partial understandings without collapsing them into a single narrative. The work is not about finding the right line, but about inhabiting the conditions under which lines can be drawn, revised, and challenged in good faith.

This is what makes the Communitarium’s model metabolic rather than doctrinal: it digests contradiction rather than eliminating it. It doesn’t offer ideological security, but the opportunity to participate in collective inquiry that remains grounded in material needs, shared time, and cohabitation with difference.

For that reason, the Communitarium is not meant to be isolated. It is interstitial by design. It exists in the gaps and overlaps between institutions, between geographies, between official narratives and lived realities. It aims to be locally rooted but globally connective, rigorous without being rigid, durable without being enclosed. In this way, it serves not as an escape hatch, but as a set of proto-infrastructures—an evolving effort to build and test the social forms that could support a more just, more livable future.

The word “commune” carries a great deal of historical and emotional baggage. That baggage has often led people to dismiss any attempt at collective living as utopian, impractical, or cultish. But if we let that skepticism become a reflex, we risk shutting down some of the most important work we still have to do. The Communitarium Project doesn’t promise utopia. It offers something more modest, and maybe more useful: a way to begin building shared life differently—not all at once, and not everywhere, but in ways that are attentive, accountable, and capable of change.

So yes, it’s okay to groan a little when you hear talk of communes. But it’s also worth asking whether that groan is doing the work of caution—or just reinforcing a sense of futility. The question isn’t whether we can go back to the commune. It’s whether we can build something forward-facing that’s able to hold us—and help us hold each other—through what’s coming next.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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For over a millennium, antisemitism has thrived on grotesque fabrications — a conspiracy theory with no authors, accusing a people with no crime. Jews have been portrayed, in different times and places, as shadowy manipulators of power, hoarders of wealth, global puppet masters, and even sadistic child murderers. These lies, devoid of evidence and rooted in fear and envy, fueled pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, and ultimately genocide.

What’s striking, in the eerie mirror of modern American politics, is how these very tropes — long used to justify persecution of an innocent people — now find something resembling flesh in the form of Donald J. Trump. Not as a Jew, of course, but as the embodiment of those phantasmal accusations, made real in the actions and ambitions of a single man.

Trump, a man of immense inherited wealth, has flaunted that fortune while refusing transparency, skirting taxes, and using his position to enrich himself. Where Jews were falsely accused of controlling the press or banking, Trump has actively tried to co-opt the Justice Department, weaponize the IRS, and install loyalists at every level of power — not through secret cabals, but through brazen public acts. He has attempted to delegitimize elections, demanded personal loyalty from officials sworn to the Constitution, and encouraged violence from his base — a demagogue openly courting authoritarianism.

Perhaps most disturbingly, where the blood libel myth falsely claimed Jews murdered Christian children, real-world violence often destroyed Jewish families — including children — as collateral in waves of collective punishment. Trump, by contrast, has demonstrated indifference to the lives of actual children: jailing them at the border, ignoring climate threats, and supporting policies that tolerate mass death by gunfire in schools. These aren’t hallucinations. They’re documented.

This isn’t a moral inversion or an act of rhetorical vengeance. It’s a bitter historical irony. Trump is not what Jews are; he’s what antisemitism imagined them to be, and in that tragic irony lies a warning: those who weaponize myths may one day get their monster, not in the people they feared but in the leaders they adoringly follow.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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