Socialist Media Platforms: Part II – The Bigger Picture
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.