Seize the Means of Community

In the digital age, censorship no longer needs fire. It only needs a server farm, a contract clause, and a friendly chat with a platform lord.

In March 2024, reporting revealed that the Trump administration may have tried to pressure Amazon to remove books it found ideologically threatening. If so, there was no public decree, no courtroom drama, no great bonfire in the town square—only a quiet maneuver in the shadowy space where state power meets platform compliance. If it proves not to have been true in this case it nevertheless bears thinking about, if only because it is so plausible, given what this administration has proven itself capable of.

Digital book removal is, of course, a far more efficient course of action than burning books.

Welcome to technofeudalism, where power is not seized by controlling factories or armies, but by managing the informational terrain on which contemporary life unfolds—DNS records, app store policies, recommendation engines, fulfillment networks, and above all, the cloud.

This is not capitalism in its classical form. This is something new, or at least newly visible. In this regime, cloud capital—the infrastructure of storage, access, and algorithmic gatekeeping—supplants the industrial ownership of yesteryear. You don’t need to destroy ideas. You only need to remove them from the searchable index, to revoke access to the files, to suspend the account that shares them. No spectacle, no martyrdom—just a broken link.

And here's the rub: the mechanisms that make this possible aren't just authoritarian impulses. They're also deeply woven into the fabric of intellectual property law.

IP as an Arm of Cloud Power

The digital economy has long depended on IP to justify ownership not just of content, but of access. Platforms don't just “host” books, videos, or music. They license them, track them, and revoke them at will.

Even physical books are increasingly treated as rights-managed objects. When a title is removed from Amazon’s store or from Kindle’s backend, it’s not confiscation—it’s “compliance with licensing terms.” In the logic of IP, no one ever owns knowledge. They merely rent it. And landlords can evict.

What this means in practice is that all public memory is becoming contingent. Contingent on contracts, on terms of service, on whether a corporation finds it profitable—or a government finds it tolerable—for that memory to exist.

And because IP is enforced not only by law but by code and infrastructure, it allows both corporations and states to act without public deliberation, without visibility, and without accountability.

From Burning Books to Blackholing Meaning

In an earlier era, censorship required visibility. A banned book became a cause célèbre. Burning books sparked resistance. But technofeudal suppression is deniable. No one sees the fire. You only notice the silence. A title you once saw is gone. The author is de-platformed. The link goes dead. And you're not sure if it's a glitch, a decision, or your own faulty memory.

This is not just about state overreach. It is about the total enclosure of public memory by private infrastructure, governed by a tangle of IP restrictions, market logics, and shadow negotiations. It is about the slow suffocation of schmooze-level social reality—those informal, face-to-face, improvisational exchanges that once sustained communal knowledge—beneath a regime of algorithmic silence.

Reclaiming the Means of Cultural Continuity

The Left has not yet risen to the challenge. Too often, we respond to censorship in terms of content, not infrastructure. We protest the banning of a book without questioning why it is Amazon’s choice to make. We decry a de-platforming but do not ask why every platform is a privately-owned fiefdom.

The Communitarium Project begins here: with the recognition that meaning is infrastructural, and that power over memory is the power to shape reality. We must stop treating digital access as a convenience, and start treating it as a terrain of struggle. The IP regime must be contested—not only for its corporate excesses, but for its role in handing our cultural bloodstream to a handful of cloud barons.

We do not yet know the full list of books removed under Trump’s pressure. But we do know this: the next generation of censors will not burn the books. They will simply revoke the license.

And no one will know they were ever there.

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I was born into a settler-colonial hallucination with no opt-out menu and would like to lodge a formal complaint.

As the current iteration of American political reality unfolds—chaotic, punitive, and seemingly designed for maximal psychic dissonance—I find myself gripped by a strange frustration: I was never consulted. Not about the place, the time, or the terms of my arrival.

There was no pre-natal advisory session.

No orientation packet.

No checkbox for “non-authoritarian polity with breathable air, plausible public discourse, and functioning democratic mechanisms.”

And yet, here I am—grafted into a national mythology that never asked for my participation, only my compliance.

Even now, I'm still trying to parse the fine print of this assignment. But from what I can gather, I was born into a settler-colonial enterprise built atop a stolen continent, rationalized by something called the Doctrine of Discovery—a medieval real estate theory in which European flags had magic land-claiming powers, and the inhabitants of entire continents were deemed “non-Christian” enough to disappear.

The economic engine of this nation? Slavery. Not incidental, not regrettable-but-external—but constitutive. Built-in. An unpaid labor platform that allowed freedom to bloom for a few by chaining it to the backs of the many.

The ideological software? White supremacy. Not a bug, not a leftover glitch—but the operating system. Still running in background processes today.

And the ecological footprint? More like a bootprint. Forests razed, rivers poisoned, species erased—all for extraction and expansion. Capitalism’s version of manifest destiny, playing out across biomes, watersheds, and planetary boundaries.

So forgive me for asking—but:

Can I speak to someone more senior?

Because I don’t recall signing up for a nation that treats Indigenous sovereignty like a historical inconvenience, that exports democracy the way it used to export sugar and slaves, that wraps empire in the language of freedom and sells it back to itself on cable news.

I don’t recall agreeing to a system where billionaires build bunkers, Black children get body-searched, and the rest of us are told to vote harder.

I don’t recall clicking “Accept All Cookies” on the collective hallucination that this is the best we can do.

Look—I get that this might be above your pay grade. I get that maybe the whole Pre-Natal Assignment Desk was underfunded, outsourced, or AI-optimized to maximize narrative conflict. But still: if there’s someone I can talk to—a supervisor, a mid-level seraph, a demiurge with jurisdiction—I’d appreciate a conversation.

Preferably with someone who remembers how to spell “society.”

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The Communitarium Project begins with the insight that all interpretation is social—and ends, perhaps, in communities that build and inhabit media platforms designed not for performance, but for shared life.

The Communitarium Project doesn’t exist. Not yet. It will come into being only when ensembles of people recognize themselves as instances of it—claiming, shaping, and living into the form together.

At the heart of the Communitarium Project lies a simple question: what might it mean to build platforms—not for content, not for branding, not for personal performance—but for living together?

This question has been gestating in a private corner of the internet, incubated by a person (me) who, for all the reading and writing, cannot will a community into being. That’s the nature of the social—it’s never singular. And that’s the paradox at the project’s core: no Communitarium can exist unless it is forged in common.

Aspirations Without Instantiation

It’s worth saying clearly: when I’ve spoken about what the Communitarium is, I’ve been speaking aspirationally. No such thing exists in the world today. I can sketch outlines, build software scaffolds, write posts like this one—but the project will only be real when multiple people choose to live inside its frame, inhabit its spirit, and collaborate in shaping its trajectory.

I’ve tried, tentatively, to get things rolling—setting up servers, tools, a blog—but those have been instructive false starts. Or at least solo starts, which may amount to the same thing in this case. A Communitarium of one is no Communitarium at all. Worse, it courts the dangers of gurufication, of mistaking charisma or authorship for shared authorship, of imagining gospel where there should be symphony.

The premise of the project is precisely anti-proprietary. Not just in terms of code or content—but in spirit. No one should own the project. No one should be able to declare it finished. It must remain permanently available for remix, for reinvention, for collective divergence.

Not the First to Care—But Differently Positioned

It’s worth acknowledging: the Communitarium Project is not the first attempt to build platforms “for living together.” Others have tried—often with sincerity and even beauty—to design digital spaces oriented toward empathy, mutual understanding, or the common good.

Many of these efforts have taken shape within what’s sometimes called conscience capitalism: a tweaked, humanized version of platform capitalism that tries to rein in its worst tendencies. Projects framed around ethical design, platform cooperativism, or stakeholder alignment have emerged with the promise of kinder algorithms, friction-reducing affordances, and communities of care.

But as we’ve argued elsewhere, such efforts, for all their merit, operate within the same gravitational field that shaped the very social media platforms they seek to reform. They offer thoughtful resistance—but from within the enclosure. They attempt to reorient platforms without rethinking the deeper forces of monetization, individuation, and the algorithmic capture of sociality.

The Communitarium Project, by contrast, aims to begin from a different premise: that interpretation itself is social, and that any infrastructure for meaning-making must be grounded in collective possession, mutual responsibility, and enduring re-negotiation. If capitalism—however conscience-laced—remains the unexamined backdrop, it will reassert its logic through monetization, gamification, and extractive metrics. And then we’re back where we started.

Online First, but Not Online Forever

That said, if a thing is to begin anywhere in the 2020s, it may have to begin online. That’s not an aesthetic choice, nor even an ideological one. It’s a matter of reach, of cost, of flexibility. You can fail more cheaply online, and iterate more quickly. You can bring strangers into a circle, and see if they stay. You can scaffold a fragile “we” across time zones and social strata.

But the Communitarium must not be an online-only phenomenon. That way lies abstraction, ephemerality, detachment. The digital beginning must already bear the seeds of the real—be oriented toward the body, toward land, toward meals and tools and music and eye contact. We begin online because we must, but we do so with the goal of outgrowing it.

Reclaiming the Social—and Redefining It

What is “the social,” anyway?

Not, in this framing, merely something that happens between humans. Not just culture, or conversation, or custom. What I’ve been working toward—underlying the whole Communitarium project—is a rethinking of the social as an ontological category. A mode of coherence. A way of sustaining difference-in-relation. A generative tension between individuation and mutuality. A force as basic as gravity, but one we’ve failed to honor.

If that sounds metaphysical, so be it. But it also has practical consequences. Because if the social is real in this more foundational sense, then the task of sustaining it, of extending and deepening it, becomes not just political but civilizational.

That, to me, is the meaning of socialism—not a party line or economic formula, but an ongoing labor to preserve the social from its enclosures: by markets, by hierarchies, by algorithms, by loneliness.

The Engine of Parasocial Virality

If today’s social media have become anti-social, it’s not just due to design flaws or economic incentives. It’s because they’ve harnessed and industrialized something far older and more primal: parasociality.

Human beings are wired to recognize, interpret, and respond to other people as intentional beings. But when mediated through asymmetrical, attention-driven platforms, that responsiveness becomes exploitable. Parasociality—our capacity to form one-sided relationships with mediated figures—has always existed. But in the age of likes, livestreams, and influencer culture, it has been commodified at scale.

What began as an incidental byproduct of media has become the central mechanism of engagement. Platforms reward those who can best simulate intimacy at scale, while stripping audiences of the tools for reciprocal recognition or collective agency. “Authenticity” becomes a performance. “Community” becomes a fanbase. And the social becomes a theater of individualized longing.

Layered atop this is virality, another form of social distortion. Not connection, but transmission. Not deliberation, but frictionless propagation. Viral content bypasses the interpretive and deliberative circuits that make actual collectivity possible. It privileges shareability over sense-making, spectacle over depth.

Together, parasociality and virality constitute the extractive logic of social media. They transform our social instincts into marketable data flows. They short-circuit the potential for mutuality by replacing it with engagement metrics. They rewire “togetherness” into a set of transactions—of visibility, of aspiration, of simulation.

A socialist media platform, then, cannot simply tweak these dynamics. It must refuse their primacy. It must de-center parasociality, resist virality, and create space for slower, reciprocal forms of visibility and understanding. This will likely feel awkward at first—less exciting, less instantly legible. But it is the awkwardness of a different kind of social metabolism taking shape.

Toward Socialist Media

By this redefinition, the Communitarium Project is socialist—not in the traditional, doctrinaire sense, but as a platform for the social to be enacted, extended, and honored. And insofar as its early life plays out online, we might as well call what we’re trying to build socialist media platforms.

Not “social media platforms”—that phrase has become a ghost of itself. Today’s social media are isolative, agonistic, distraction-driven, individually tailored and collectively corrosive. They turn connection into signal, and signal into surveillance.

By contrast, socialist media platforms would be: – Oriented toward collective presence, not individual performance
– Designed to foster deliberation, not dopamine
– Tuned for shared meaning, not personalized noise
– Built to enact a “we”, not to monetize the “me”

We are nowhere near this yet. But perhaps we can begin—cautiously, messily, hopefully. And not alone.

If anything in this resonates, let it resonate outward. We need not all agree. But we might still find ways to listen, to build, to schmooze, and to imagine.

#TheCommunitariumProject

👉 Join the conversation!

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What if we stopped calling them “social media”?

Because whatever they once were, today’s platforms isolate more than they connect. They feed outrage, reward performance, flatten dialogue, and turn our most human capacities—curiosity, empathy, belonging—into revenue streams.

But here’s the thing: the problem isn’t just what these platforms do. It’s what they’re for.

They’re designed to extract attention, to harvest data, to maximize engagement—not to help us understand one another, not to help us coordinate, and definitely not to help us build a shared world.

That’s where socialist media platforms come in.

We’re not talking about just replacing one billionaire’s app with another—this time open-source, or nonprofit. We’re talking about a complete rethinking of what media platforms are for.

Socialist media platforms are designed not to exploit the social, but to nurture it.
They don’t monetize parasociality—they slow it down, open it up, turn it toward mutual recognition.
They don’t chase virality—they build trust, rhythm, and shared deliberation.
They’re not about performance—they’re about participation.
Not clicks—commitments.
Not followers—fellows.

They’re built on the idea that meaning is made together, that interpretation is a social act, and that we become more capable—more free—when we learn how to listen, build, and decide together.

Socialist media platforms aren’t just a better version of what we have. They’re infrastructure for the world we don’t have yet—the one we need if we’re going to survive this century with dignity.

They begin online, sure. But they point outward: toward co-ops and collectives, toward shared kitchens and codebases, toward unions of labor and care and meaning.

Because in the end, they’re not just media platforms.
They’re social scaffolds.
Places to rehearse the future, and then bring it into being.

👉 So… want to help build one? Join the conversation!

#TheCommunitariumProject

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In the wake of 2008, two responses emerged: one to soften capitalism's image through ethics and purpose, and one to move beyond it by reimagining individuality and community from the ground up. The Communitarium Project rejects capitalist assumptions, to build shared life beyond enclosure and accumulation.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many asked: Can capitalism be saved from itself? For some, the answer lay in reforming its spirit—humanizing markets, re-centering values, and emphasizing purpose over profit. For others, the crisis revealed something deeper: that capitalism’s very logic had become incompatible with human flourishing.

These two paths—the capitalist conscience movement and the Communitarium Project—represent divergent responses to the same moment of rupture. They share surface similarities—both speak of cooperation, transparency, and shared values—but their underlying orientations could not be more different.

What is the Capitalist Conscience Movement?

The capitalist conscience movement refers to a constellation of initiatives that emerged or gained traction in the 2010s. Its central aim: to soften capitalism’s sharpest edges without fundamentally altering its structure.

The most prominent expression of this tendency is the rise of conscious business, described here, and popularized through frameworks such as:

Across these efforts, a familiar refrain emerges: capitalism can work for everyone—if it remembers its soul.

The Trouble with Good Intentions

While often well-meaning, this movement tends to leave the structure of capitalism intact. It refrains from questioning the core mechanisms of:

  • Accumulation: the relentless pressure to turn every relation into profit
  • Enclosure: the privatization of commons, attention, knowledge, and care
  • Market mediation: the idea that access to life’s essentials must pass through money and markets

In doing so, the conscience movement risks becoming capitalism’s repair shop—not a source of liberation, but a method of stabilization.

By injecting values like purpose, empathy, or stakeholder accountability, it offers capitalism a moral facelift while leaving the deeper mechanisms of exploitation and alienation unexamined.

The Communitarium Project: A Deeper Response to 2008

The Communitarium Project was born from a different reading of the same historical moment. Rather than seeing 2008 as a hiccup, it interprets the crisis as a revelation—a moment when the fragility, fiction, and enclosure of social life under capitalism became visible.

Its founding premise is not that capitalism needs a conscience, but that we need to relearn how to live, think, and act beyond it.

And crucially, it also takes into account two powerful forces that most conscience-capitalist efforts ignore:

1. The Rise—and Fall—of the Internet’s Democratic Promise

The early internet hinted at radical possibility: decentralized communication, open knowledge, bottom-up coordination. But what emerged instead was the platformization of life: a technofeudal regime where data is extracted, attention is commodified, and every interaction becomes surveillance.

2. The Birth of Technofeudalism

We now live under a system where platforms, not markets, dominate allocation. Ownership and control are increasingly exercised through opaque algorithms, not price signals. It’s not capitalism 2.0—it’s something more dangerous: a fusion of enclosure and computation, more totalizing than either.

What the Communitarium Project Aims to Build

Rather than patching up capitalism, the Communitarium Project begins by refusing its most foundational assumptions—especially the liberal conception of the individual as a self-contained, rational chooser navigating a field of market opportunities and social preferences.

Where the capitalist conscience movement leaves intact the hegemonic fiction of individualism—what we’ve elsewhere termed idiotism—the Communitarium Project rejects it outright. It understands the self not as a bounded unit but as a participant in ongoing, co-constructed fields of meaning, formed and re-formed through shared activity, care, and communication.

In place of the alienated subject of late capitalism—resigned to navigating platformed life through scrolling, reacting, consuming—the Communitarium Project centers the relational subject, whose capacity for action arises from enrollment in living, schmooze-level social ensembles.

And this extends to its understanding of community. “Community,” in the capitalist conscience movement, often refers to thin aggregates—brand followers, customer bases, stakeholder groups. The Communitarium reclaims the word for something richer: environments of collective attention and mutual constitution, where deliberation, caregiving, storytelling, coordination, and disagreement are embedded in material and symbolic mutuality.

It aims to:

  • Rebuild the microstructures of shared reality that capitalism dissolves
  • Foster environments of meaning, not just environments of purpose
  • Recover community as a site of generative contradiction, not merely of shared interests
  • Reimagine individuality as something fluid and relational, not fixed and possessive

Conclusion: Soften It, or Supersede It?

This is the deeper divergence.

The capitalist conscience movement asks: How can capitalism grow a heart?
The Communitarium Project asks: What kind of social world grows the kinds of people we need?

The former operates within the dominant logic of liberal individualism.
The latter seeks to undo that logic, and to recompose human sociality itself—not through abstract ideals, but through the construction of environments that make shared life possible again.

The good news? We still have the tools. We still have each other.

And we still have time—but not much.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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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:

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Previous post

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.

1. Burnett’s Style Is Designed to Obscure Authorship

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.

2. Entertainment Still Isn’t Taken Seriously as Political Infrastructure

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:

  • Collaboration is conditional
  • Authority is personal charisma
  • Justice is elimination
  • Attention is value

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.

4. The Culture Rewards the Performance, Not the Frame

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.

5. What This Reveals About Hegemonic Power

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.

6. The Task Ahead

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.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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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:

  • Community is strategic, not constitutive
  • Talk is branding, not mutual understanding
  • Morality is performance, not relational ethics

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: The Isolated Public Actor

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.

Possessive Individualism: From Person to Pitch Deck

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.

The Effacement of Schmooze

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:

  • The confessional monologue (performed interiority)
  • The boardroom showdown (staged accountability)
  • The alliance meeting (recorded negotiation with a purpose)

What disappears is:

  • Idle talk
  • Non-instrumental care
  • Deliberation without stakes
  • The ambient improvisation of sociality

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.

Branding as Ontology

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 Response

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:

  • Designing spaces for non-instrumental talk
  • Supporting forms of identity that are not performances
  • Reclaiming deliberation as a shared, messy, necessary act
  • Cultivating solidarity that is not based on virality

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?

#TrumpAndMAGA

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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.

Survivor: Community as Temporary Alliance

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: Turning Bankruptcy into Myth

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: Entrepreneurial Morality Play

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.

Viewership and Cultural Penetration

All three shows have been commercial and cultural powerhouses.

  • Survivor averaged 20–30 million viewers in its early seasons and still runs today, now past Season 40.
  • The Apprentice won Trump an Emmy nomination and remained a staple of NBC’s lineup until Trump’s 2016 campaign.
  • Shark Tank has run for over 15 seasons and remains popular with both general audiences and educators who use it to teach business.

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.

Media and Scholarly Commentary

  • The New Yorker detailed how Burnett created “a simulacrum of Trump” and shielded unaired footage that might contradict it.
  • A 2017 study in Feminist Media Studies analyzed The Real Housewives (produced under Burnett’s MGM umbrella) as a platform for showcasing gendered affluence and performative femininity
  • Writers like Emily Nussbaum and Adam Serwer have highlighted reality TV's role in mainstreaming authoritarian charisma and flattening political nuance into spectacle.

Burnett Taught Us to Cheer

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.

#TrumpAndMAGA

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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.

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