Seize the Means of Community

Introduction

Let’s get this out of the way: the name Communitarium does sound suspiciously like a boutique rebranding of communitarianism. Maybe something you’d hear at a TEDx talk or see on a flyer at a community co-op. Is it just another attempt to rescue society with warm vibes and nostalgic appeals to “shared values”?

Absolutely not.

The Communitarium Project is something else entirely. While it shares a concern for community, it does not share communitarianism’s assumptions, goals, or ideological anchors. In fact, it begins with a radical departure: what if the very idea of community has been enclosed, emptied out, or falsely idealized? What if building real alternatives requires more than reviving old forms—and instead demands new kinds of spaces, new logics of relation, and new semiotic and informational infrastructures?

What Is Communitarianism, Anyway?

Communitarianism emerged as a critique of liberal individualism. Its central thesis is that individuals don’t exist in a vacuum—they're shaped by communities, traditions, and moral frameworks. That sounds pretty reasonable, and it is. But in practice, communitarianism has often leaned toward:

  • A focus on shared values rooted in tradition or culture,

  • Emphasis on duties over rights,

  • A skeptical stance toward pluralism and radical change, and

  • A preference for social cohesion over social complexity.

Even in its more progressive variants, it tends to romanticize locality, moral consensus, and stable norms.

What’s Different About the Communitarium Project?

The Communitarium Project flips the script. Instead of assuming community as a given—something to return to—it treats it as a hard-won, living, ongoing creation. A communitarium is not a moral order. It’s a living platform: a space where people create shared meanings, solve shared problems, and negotiate shared realities.

Here’s what sets it apart:

1. Invention Over Inheritance

Community is not something we go back to—it’s something we build. Not from scratch, but from the ruins and fragments around us. The -arium suffix (as in laboratorium, aquarium, planetarium) implies an enclosed, generative environment. A communitarium is a vessel for experimentation in how humans can live, think, and act together—without defaulting to inherited hierarchies or fixed identities.

2. From Sociality, Not Ideology

The project doesn’t begin with values or doctrines. It begins with a deeper exploration of how social interaction itself works—how meaning is co-created, how interpretive frameworks emerge and shift, and how attention, trust, and relevance are sustained in everyday life. It draws on a theory called the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF) that understands communities as dynamic information ensembles, not static moral groups.

3. Reclaiming the Semiotic Commons

Much of what once constituted shared reality—conversation, care, cultural memory—has been enclosed, privatized, and algorithmically managed. The Communitarium Project aims to counter-enclose: not just reclaiming spaces, but re-engineering infrastructures of communication, deliberation, and mutual intelligibility. The goal isn’t just to talk—it’s to make action possible, together.

4. Coherence Without Conformity

Rather than enforcing cohesion through shared values, the communitarium nurtures coherence through dialogue. It’s about making difference livable and meaningful—not erased, not tolerated, but integrated into a shared world through practices of listening, deliberating, and co-designing collective life.

So Why the Name?

Because no existing term quite captured this.

  • “Commons” evokes open resources, but not active communities.

  • “Platform” evokes software, not solidarity.

  • “Collective” suggests action, but not place.

  • “Community” is too often vague, romanticized, or depoliticized.

The word communitarium is meant to reclaim community as a site of invention, not nostalgia—a crucible where new modes of being-together can be designed, tested, and lived.

In Short

The Communitarium Project is not a call to return to community—it’s a call to re-invent it.

It doesn’t begin with values—it begins with environments. It doesn’t enforce consensus—it cultivates coherence. It doesn’t pine for tradition—it engineers new ways to hold each other, understand each other, and act in common.

In a world where meaning is fractured and solidarity is rare, the project isn’t offering another ideology. It’s offering a space.

Let’s build it.

But maybe you're wondering: Where is this project? Who runs it? Is there anywhere to join in?

That hesitation makes sense. It reflects the reflex to seek form—somewhere to enter, someone in charge, some clear beginning. But part of what the Communitarium Project is trying to surface is how our desire for structure has so often been captured by enclosure—by platforms, leaders, final vocabularies, branded visions. So for now, the answer is deliberately light:

The Communitarium is not a product. It’s a threshold.
Not an organization, but a co-emergent infrastructure.
Not something you join, but something you begin to help cohere.

It starts in shared conversations. In collaborative sense-making. In the attempt to metabolize meaning together with care, without defaulting to abstraction or spectacle. It is what begins to emerge when we re-learn how to interpret in common—without appealing to the Big Other, the algorithm, or the market to settle things for us.

So where is it?

Right now, it lives in ideas, in blog posts, in long threads and recursive exchanges. But it’s not staying there. And in fact, it’s beginning to gather shape in the form of an open discussion space—a Matrix chatroom for those interested in the project’s concepts, proposals, and trajectories.

If you’d like to schmooze, question, co-weave, or find anothe way to participate, you're welcome to join here:

👉 Communitarium Matrix Chatroom (if you already have a Matrix client, join #Introduction:communitarium.org)

This space is for: – Discussing the blog posts and glossaries as they emerge, – Extending and challenging the concepts, – Sharing existing related efforts, – Thinking aloud about infrastructure and next steps.

There's no agenda. No form to fill out. No fixed tone, beyond civility (and, hopefully, good humor).
Just an open weave for people who sense something here—something worth tending together.

So yes: it’s beginning, if you participate.

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A Socialist Life Needs Socialist Spaces

When I first joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), I was searching for something beyond the meetings, the organizing drives, and even the occasional victories. Most of the members I encountered, however, seemed committed either to participating in those ways or to sequestering themselves in various “study groups” or “reading groups,” collectively pursuing individual education or enlightenment without actually doing much with respect to the larger world or the broader, more active organization they had joined. But the question that lingered for me was this: where do we live our socialism?

For most of us, socialism is a belief, a set of values, a lens through which we critique the world as it is and dream about what it could be. But how often do we get to practice it? How often do we get to step into a space where socialist principles shape the ways we work, play, learn, care, and make decisions together? In the grind of daily life—under capitalism, with its isolations and exploitations—it’s easy to feel that our socialism is just an overlay on the same old structures, rather than a lived alternative.

This is where the Communitarium Project comes in. It’s an experiment—a tentative, provisional attempt to carve out spaces (starting online) where we can build the kinds of relationships, practices, and habits that sustain a socialist life. Not just moments of activism, not just communities of interest, but environments where we can engage in the full scope of daily relations and conviviality.

What would such a space look like? For one thing, it would foster mutual support and respect. This isn’t about imposing a rigid code of conduct or performing solidarity as a ritual. It’s about building relationships that are robust enough to hold the weight of honest conflict, disagreement, and growth. It’s about ensuring that everyone in the community has what they need to participate fully, whether that means material resources, emotional support, or simply the sense of being genuinely welcomed.

It would also be a place for communal deliberation and education. Too often, socialist groups replicate the structures of the wider world, with a small cadre of the knowledgeable or charismatic setting the agenda while the rest of us follow along. To live socialism is to treat education as a mutual process, where everyone has something to teach and something to learn. And it means making decisions collectively, not just through formal votes but through the ongoing work of understanding each other’s perspectives and finding common ground.

Perhaps most importantly, it would be a space for collective action that doesn’t just happen in bursts—a protest here, a campaign there—but as a continuous way of relating to the world. This doesn’t mean doing everything together, all the time. It means gradually coming to constitute an “us” about which it is reasonable to ask, “What can we do?” instead of the daunting default most of us face when confronted with problems in the world: “What can I do?” It means knowing that you’re part of a collective effort to improve the world, and that your individual actions are woven into a larger fabric of solidarity.

And while the project might begin in the digital realm, it can’t remain there. Connectedness to other communities and to the physical world is essential. A truly socialist life doesn’t see the online and offline as separate domains but as interconnected spaces where relationships and actions flow seamlessly.

This is the vision I’m working toward with the Communitarium Project. It’s speculative, contingent, and full of unanswered questions. How do we design spaces that encourage rather than constrain? How do we make them open to new people while ensuring they feel genuinely supported? How do we make sure they’re fun, nourishing, and life-giving—not just another obligation on the to-do list?

At the moment, the Communitarium Project is just me talking about these ideas and a “ghost town” of a self-hosted, online website cobbled together from available open source applications. Bearing in mind that, in many ways, I don't really know what I'm doing, I believe that users who would like to discuss the Communitarium Project with me may join the Matrix room I've set up for that purpose at https://matrix.to/#/#Introduction:communitarium.org. It won’t actually exist until a community coalesces around the mission of bringing it into existence. But I believe that if we’re serious about socialism as a way of life, not just a political program, we have to start trying. The Communitarium Project is one small step in that direction. If you’re reading this, maybe it’s a step you’d like to take, too.

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