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1. From Mamdani to Schmoozalism

In writing about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, we introduced the term schmoozalism to describe the radical etiquette that animated his appeal. Here we want to step back and spell out more broadly what we mean by the word.

Crucially: schmoozalism is not socialism itself. It is the ethos in which socialism can grow naturally. Without this soil, socialism may sprout in programs or policies, but it withers under pressure — reversible, co-optable, thin. With this soil, socialism develops as the fruit of ensemble practice: resilient, lived, and deeply rooted.

Schmoozalism is best understood by its contrasts. It stands in opposition to Randian objectivism, which exalts the isolated heroic self. It opposes managerialism, the philosophy that reduces all human relation to systems of control, optimization, and management. And it rejects the neoliberal ethos that has dominated politics and economics for the last half-century: a fusion of heroic individualist rhetoric with managerial rule by markets, presented as inevitable and without alternative.

Against these currents, schmoozalism affirms a different foundation: the primacy of ensembles, the reciprocity of individuality and community, the exploratory character of play, and the convivial medium of the communitarium. What began as a description of Mamdani’s political style becomes here the sketch of a broader ethos, one we believe can serve as the living basis for socialism’s renewal.

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2. Idiotism: Clarifying the Term

The world we inhabit today is structured by idiotism. By this we mean not the modern insult directed at someone’s intelligence, but the older sense of the word drawn from ancient Greece. In Athens, an idiōtēs was not a fool but a private person — one who withdrew from the affairs of the polis (the shared civic sphere) to focus only on personal concerns.

Idiotism, in this original sense, is the condition of self-enclosure: the withdrawal from communal life into privatized existence. It is the reduction of human beings to isolated, possessive units, cut off from the shared ensembles in which meaning, solidarity, and flourishing take shape.

This is the sense in which we use the term here. Idiotism is enclosure of the self. Under hegemonic capitalism, it becomes the privatization of meaning and the elevation of personal opinion and intent, treating individuals as units of consumption, production, and attention. Individuality is recoded as entrepreneurial selfhood — each person a mini-firm, optimizing for productivity and recognition.

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3. History as Contingency, Not Necessity

Karl Marx and his contemporaries often conceived of history as an inevitable trajectory, a logic unfolding with necessity. From their perspective, socialism seemed destined to follow capitalism. Schmoozalism departs from this framework.

We hold history to be contingent. The comprehensive idiotism of our age was not an inevitability but one possible outcome. The siphoning of communal resources by higher-level hierarchies could have played out in other ways. In the nineteenth century, without knowledge of mass media, suburbanization, neoliberalism, and the Internet, it would have been difficult to foresee how fully idiotism would metastasize.

Thus, we should not accuse nineteenth-century socialists of “failing” to predict today’s conditions. Their horizon was bounded by the enclosures they directly confronted — land, labor, and capital. But this fairness does not excuse the absorption of idiotism that occurred within socialist thought.

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4. Civilization as Siphoning (and the Role of Imaginaries)

To understand socialism’s blind spots, we need to place it within a much older civilizational pattern: the siphoning of resources from communal conviviality into hierarchical formations.

Human beings are endowed with pro-social tendencies: trust, reciprocity, curiosity, empathy. These evolved to sustain schmooze-level ensembles — the small-scale interactions through which meaning and solidarity emerge.

But civilizations have repeatedly fracked these resources, siphoning them upward into larger organizations: fiefdoms, early kingdoms, city-states, priesthoods, bureaucracies, corporations, empires, and modern nation-states. Smaller units often preserved some conviviality but were gradually subordinated. Over time, contests of scale led to the consolidation of ever-larger siphons.

At these larger scales, imaginaries became indispensable. In local ensembles, members see each other face to face. But at national or imperial scales, people must imagine one another as co-participants. Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” of the nation is the classic example: millions of strangers bound by shared symbols, narratives, and rituals. These imaginaries can extend solidarity, but they are also easily captured — siphoning pro-social impulses away from local conviviality and into bureaucracies, armies, or states.

Neoliberalism adds a distinctive turn: it managerializes the siphoning itself. Communities are not only drained but actively recoded as markets. Mutual aid becomes “volunteer service delivery.” Schools become “competitive education providers.” Even friendship is colonized by metrics and platforms. Neoliberalism is the siphon that insists extraction is freedom.

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5. Socialism’s Absorption of Idiotism

Socialism, while opposing exploitation, often carried forward this civilizational siphoning.

• Taylorism: Lenin’s embrace of “scientific management” treated workers as interchangeable cogs. Socialist ownership of the factory did not dissolve the idiotism of Taylorized labor.
  
• Ownership as Panacea: Many socialists assumed that once workers owned production, communal relations would naturally emerge. This was less materialism than crypto-theology: a faith that solidarity would appear without cultivation.
  
• Possessive Individual: Socialism inherited from liberal philosophy the conception of the individual as proprietor — a figure cut off from communal reciprocity, relating to others only through contract or coercion.
  
• Intellectual Property: Nineteenth-century thinkers could not have foreseen the rise of the intellectual property regime, now central to capitalist enclosure. IP fences off creativity and knowledge themselves.
  

Socialism’s vulnerability came not only from external enemies but from its own shallow rooting in ethos. Without the grounding of schmoozalism, socialism too easily imported idiotism into its own soil.

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6. Idiotism Beyond Socialism

Other traditions also sought liberation while carrying forward idiotism:

• Existentialism: Presented the “authentic self” as a solitary hero, echoing Leibniz’s windowless monad. Schmoozalism instead insists on individuality as reciprocal and ensemble-defined.
  
• Cognitive Psychology: Even embodied cognition emphasizes the body of the individual, leaving out the ensemble. Schmoozalism stresses that cognition is always ensemble-enabled.
  
• Game Theory & Behavioral Economics: These fields complicate homo economicus with heuristics, but the “player” remains an isolated actor. In reality, a prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is also a parent, a neighbor, a community member. To erase these multiplicities is to reproduce idiotism. Schmoozalism restores multiplicity as the real ground of decision and meaning.
  

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7. Schmoozalism as Counter-Idiotism

Schmoozalism begins with the recognition that individuality and community are co-evolved wholes: inseparable, mutually enabling, constituted in relation.

Schmoozalism as Soil

It is the soil of socialism, not its fruit. The fruit is what we call socialism: institutions, policies, and economies organized around solidarity and reciprocity. But the soil is schmoozalism: the radical etiquette, interpretive practice, and ensemble conviviality that make those fruits possible and sustainable.

Without schmoozalism, socialism can be decreed, even built for a time, but it remains brittle. With schmoozalism, socialism grows organically, renewed in each generation through the ensembles that sustain it.

Communitaria as Media and Counter-Siphons

Communitaria are not reservoirs to be drained but media: living substrates where ensembles can arise and flourish. They are also counter-siphons: structures that replenish conviviality at its base, reversing civilization’s age-old depletion.

Venture Schmoozalism

Venture schmoozalism names the exploratory character of ensemble life:

• Study: probing, testing, learning.
  
• Creativity: recombining meanings and practices.
  
• Invention: ensemble construction of tools and institutions.
  
• Play: the foundation of them all — enacting multiplicity, bending or reinventing rules, keeping ensembles fluid.
  

Civilizational siphons suppress play, enforcing rigid rules and commodifying leisure. Schmoozalism restores play as a political ontology of multiplicity.

Historical Glimpses

• Sewer Socialism: In Milwaukee, early 20th-century socialists focused on sanitation, housing, and public works. This was venture schmoozalism in practice — pragmatic, ensemble-oriented, inventive. But managerialism gradually hollowed it out, reducing citizens to clients of bureaucracies.
  
• Cooperatives: Exploratory economic ventures that often absorbed corporate managerialism under competitive pressure.
  
• Mutual Aid Societies: Rich forms of ensemble solidarity, later subsumed by bureaucratic welfare systems.
  
• Open Source: A digital commons of playful invention, partially captured by corporations and IP regimes.
  

Each example shows both the vitality of schmoozalism and the danger of managerial capture.

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8. Horizons and Pragmatism

Schmoozalism is not statist and not anti-statist. States are contingent resource-ensembles, legitimate only insofar as they serve smaller ensembles.

This stands directly against neoliberal inevitabilism, which insists that all institutions must be marketized. Schmoozalism affirms contingency instead: there is no natural inevitability, only the choices and experiments of ensembles.

Its stance is pragmatic: “when in Rome.” Schmoozalism engages state and economy tactically, but it does not enthrall itself to them. Its foundation is always the schmooze-level.

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9. Conclusion

Schmoozalism is not socialism itself. It is the foundational ethos in which socialism becomes durable. It is the counter-idiotism that restores conviviality, replenishes multiplicity, and reopens the imaginative ground of collective life.

Where Randian objectivism exalts the isolated self, schmoozalism situates individuality within ensembles. Where managerialism reduces life to systems of control, schmoozalism fosters fluidity and exploration. Where neoliberalism insists on inevitability, schmoozalism insists on contingency.

Communitaria are the living media where this ethos is cultivated: counter-siphons, replenishing conviviality, sustaining multiplicity. They are where socialism’s foundation is laid anew, not in abstraction but in playful, exploratory, ensemble life.

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➡️ Read the introductory essay: Schmoozalism: The Radical Etiquette Behind Mamdani’s Appeal
➡️ Read the companion essay: Why Mamdani’s Success Depends on Civic Communitaria

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Takeaway: Schmoozalism is the ethos of ensembles: the soil from which socialism can grow, the practice of restoring conviviality at its source, and the invention of futures through play.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

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Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has mobilized New Yorkers on a breathtaking scale. But a Mamdani mayoralty will quickly run up against the trap of neoliberal managerialism and the danger of cultish overreach. Its strength will come not from charisma or technocracy, but from civic communitaria: living assemblies where New Yorkers sustain collective competence.

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The Promise of a Mamdani Mayoralty

No one can miss what has just happened in New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign brought tens of thousands of people into motion, united by clear demands: affordable housing, childcare, and a city that works for the people who keep it running.

That movement already distinguishes him from the “CEO mayors” of the last generation. Yet as Ross Barkan and others have warned, the role of mayor is not only agitator-in-chief. It is also manager of one of the most complex municipalities in the world. A Mamdani mayoralty cannot evade this reality.

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The Managerial Trap

Managerialism insists that “competence” means efficiency, budget discipline, and keeping business confidence high. Its success is measured in bond ratings and growth indices.

If Mamdani allows himself to be judged by these standards, he will find himself fighting on the enemy’s terrain. He will be forced to reassure markets rather than mobilize people. The result: promises whittled down, demands deferred, energy dissipated.

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The Charisma Trap

There is another danger, equally real: that Mamdani’s ability to mobilize people in motion gets misread as charisma.

Charisma can inspire, but it cannot institutionalize. If competence is located in the aura of the leader, then a Mamdani administration risks devolving into a personality cult. That is as sterile as managerialism, for both collapse the civic into a single figure — either the technocrat or the hero — rather than the living intelligence of the people themselves.

We call Mamdani’s alternative approach schmoozalism — a radical etiquette of encounter that defined his campaign.

But schmoozalism, on its own, is an ethos. It is the soil of politics, not its full harvest. To bear fruit, it requires structures that make the ethos durable. That is what we mean by civic communitaria.

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A Schmoozalist Alternative: Civic Communitaria

What the campaign has proven is that competence can be distributed. Fifty thousand volunteers, disciplined coalitions, neighborhood roots: this is not charisma, it is infrastructure.

Civic communitaria would extend that achievement into governing.

• Unlike New York’s community boards, they are not bound by municipal charters or limited to advisory roles.
  
• Unlike conventional civic organizations, they do not simply represent members to City Hall.
  
• They are porous ensembles, open to anyone, oriented to the life of the city, cultivating mutual practice alongside deliberation.
  

What are they in practice? Civic communitaria are set up, run, and maintained by their own members. They are organized online through open-source, federated platforms that ensure no single company or city agency controls them. The online layer is only a tool — a facilitative space where neighbors deliberate, coordinate, and share resources — always oriented toward real-world action: meetings, mutual aid, monitoring, and mobilization.

Think of them as people’s fora in that they provide ongoing space for deliberation and collective decision-making. Think of them as community centers in that they anchor real-world projects, practices, and forms of care. But unlike either alone, communitaria weave these elements together. They are independent but aligned: starting from support for Mamdani’s broad policies while remaining free to evaluate, pressure, and articulate needs in their own voice.

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Why Mamdani Needs Civic Communitaria

• They preserve campaign energy, preventing post-election demobilization.
  
• They measure success in lived outcomes — secure housing, accessible childcare, reliable transit — rather than abstract efficiency metrics.
  
• They inoculate against cultism by dispersing agency and competence among plural assemblies.
  
• They erode managerialism’s monopoly by showing that competence can be collective, deliberative, and reproducible.
  

A Mamdani administration that welcomes such formations at its side will be stronger, not weaker. It will be accountable to real people, not merely to markets or the myth of charisma.

Because communitaria are not just instruments. They are the fields in which the soil of schmoozalism bears fruit: the spaces where everyday radical etiquette ripens into collective governance, where socialism becomes livable.

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The Larger Horizon

Civic communitaria are one expression of a broader communitarian project: building living formations of shared life that complement but are not captured by state institutions.

If Mamdani’s mayoralty helps plant and nurture these new civic forms, his legacy will not be limited to policy wins. It will be remembered as the moment New Yorkers began to rebuild the civic in full — together, in deliberation, in care, in common action.

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Takeaway: Zohran Mamdani won’t save New York — but with civic communitaria, New Yorkers can save it together.

➡️ Read the introductory essay: Schmoozalism: The Radical Etiquette Behind Mamdani’s Appeal

➡️ Read the clarificatory essay: Schmoozalism: A Clarificatory Introduction

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

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Zohran Mamdani’s campaign captivated New Yorkers not only through its demands and discipline, but through its atmosphere. What drew so many to his side was not just policy, but practice: a way of being with others that we call schmoozalism — a radical etiquette that resists managerialism and reopens politics to human encounter.

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Why Mamdani Felt Different

When supporters talk about Mamdani, they don’t begin with bullet points from a policy platform. They talk about his presence. His availability. The sense that when you encountered him, he was there to listen and engage, not to manage you as a constituent or a volunteer.

The campaign reflected this ethos. Tens of thousands of volunteers joined not because they were given marching orders, but because they felt part of a living conversation. Tasks were clear, yes — but always framed in relation to one another, never in the top-down language of a corporate team.

This was not accidental. It was the felt difference between Mamdani’s campaign and the managerialism of establishment politics. It was the everyday practice of what we are calling schmoozalism.

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What Is Schmoozalism?

At its core, schmoozalism is a radical etiquette.

It is not about grand gestures or personal charisma. It is about the ordinary practices of encounter: greeting, listening, adjusting, deliberating, joking, telling stories, giving recognition.

Schmoozalism thrives at the schmooze-level of politics — the ongoing human traffic of conversation, care, and collective sense-making. Where managerialism prioritizes procedure, and charisma prioritizes aura, schmoozalism prioritizes relation.

It is radical because it insists that these everyday encounters are not superficial, but the very heart of democratic life.

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Schmoozalism vs. Managerialism

• Managerialism: defines competence as control, efficiency, and reassurance to markets. It is technocratic and aloof.
  
• Schmoozalism: defines competence as the ability to cultivate relationships of mutual recognition, to host deliberation, and to sustain collective effort. It is intimate and attentive.
  

Managerialism seeks to suppress disruption in the name of order. Schmoozalism sees disruption as deliberation: a chance for voices to be heard, for disagreements to be worked through, for community to be renewed.

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Not Charisma, Not Cult

It is important to be clear: schmoozalism is not a new name for charisma.

Charisma is the aura of a singular figure. Schmoozalism is distributed practice, reproducible across thousands of encounters. Where charisma risks cultism, schmoozalism resists it — because it depends on multiplicity, not centrality.

Mamdani’s success does not come from his personal magnetism alone, but from his capacity to host and model this radical etiquette in ways others can take up and carry forward.

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Why It Matters Now

Politics in the United States has been suffocated by two models: managerialism and spectacle. One reduces politics to spreadsheets and bond ratings; the other reduces it to personality cults.

Mamdani’s campaign pointed to something else. What people experienced was politics as a shared conversation with purpose — one that could scale to tens of thousands without losing its human texture.

That is schmoozalism. And that is why it resonated so widely.

But schmoozalism is not itself socialism. It is the soil from which socialism grows. Without this ethos, socialism too easily withers under pressure. With it, socialist possibilities take root in the everyday life of a community.

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The Road Ahead

The lesson of Mamdani’s campaign is not only that schmoozalism works electorally. It is that schmoozalism is the social fabric from which a new politics must be woven.

The next question, then, is how to sustain it beyond a campaign — how to prevent it from dissolving under the pressures of managerial office, or being misread as the aura of a single figure.

Our answer: civic communitaria. They are the living formations that can carry this ethos forward, making it durable enough to support a socialism rooted in shared life.

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Takeaway: Mamdani’s appeal comes from more than policies. It comes from a radical etiquette of encounter — schmoozalism — that reminds New Yorkers what politics feels like when it is ours.

➡️ Read the companion essay: Why Mamdani’s Success Depends on Civic Communitaria

➡️ Read the clarificatory essay: Schmoozalism: A Clarificatory Introduction

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

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This conversation hosted by Laura Flanders in April, 2025, between Masha Gessen and Jason Stanley is a reminder of how precarious the state of democracy has become in the United States. Both speakers, drawing on histories of survival under authoritarian regimes, agree that what we are witnessing is not simply a continuation of “bad policies” but a catastrophic acceleration that may soon pass the point of no return.

As Masha Gessen puts it:

“Democracy is never a state of being. Democracy is a vector of development.”

And Jason Stanley echoes:

“Democracy is a practice, an ideal. You’re in a democracy when you take yourself to be engaged in the project of realizing that ideal.”

Democracy is not a possession, not an end state we inherit or can complacently rest upon. It is a trajectory of practice—enacted or abandoned every day. And right now, the signs of abandonment are unmistakable.

From Political to Sociopolitical Crisis

What Gessen and Stanley diagnose is not only a political crisis in the narrow sense of institutions, parties, and elections. It is a sociopolitical crisis: the erosion of the cultural, practical, and communal underpinnings that make “politics” possible at all.

• When education is attacked as “woke” indoctrination, the capacity for public reasoning is undermined.
  
• When nostalgia for “great men” and “conquered frontiers” replaces democratic ideals, the cultural substrate of democracy collapses.
  
• When mass surveillance and corporate data capture become the default architecture, the possibility of free deliberation shrinks to a ghost of itself.
  

Gessen warns that we are already in the stage of autocratic breakthrough, where electoral means may no longer suffice to reverse authoritarian advance. Stanley underscores that the very identity of the country is being shifted—from imperfect democratic ideals toward chauvinist myth.

Why Socialism Must Be Redefined

If democracy is a practice, then it cannot be sustained by electoral ritual alone. It must be enacted in everyday life, through communities that share power, resources, and meaning. Here, the Communitarium Project proposes that we need a redefinition of socialism that resonates with Gessen and Stanley’s account of democracy:

Socialism is the lived practice of federated communities that design, maintain, and recalibrate ensembles for distributing power, meaning, care, resources, and purpose equitably among people across scales.

In this sense, socialism and democracy are not rivals but different facets of the same practice. Democracy orients us toward egalitarian ideals; socialism builds the material and interpretive infrastructures that make those ideals livable.

From Analysis to Action

Where Gessen and Stanley leave us with warnings and historical parallels, we suggest more actionable steps:

1. Rapidly constructed online spaces must serve as headquarters for real-world efforts—commons for coordination, deliberation, and knowledge-sharing.

2. These spaces must seed on-the-ground, person-to-person nodes of counter-power: care networks, mutual aid, study circles, neighborhood assemblies.

3. We call this counter-community: formations where people practice the distribution of power, care, and meaning in miniature, making socialism not a distant program but a daily lived fact.

4. Through federation, these nodes can become resilient counter-power infrastructures—not just resisting authoritarian advance but offering more compelling, life-affirming futures than the nostalgic fantasies of empire.

By making it simple for people to build and maintain decentralized, community-owned spaces, we’re not just preparing for some future transformation—we’re already living it differently, here and now. Every communitarium node is a small but tangible step away from reinforcing the hegemonic structures that rely on our inertia. The more we shift our energy and daily practices into these spaces, the less legitimacy and power those extractive systems retain.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Laura Flanders opened the conversation with Dr. King’s warning about the “fierce urgency of now” and the risk of arriving at history’s judgment too late. Gessen sharpened it further:

“Now is not the time to act underground.”

The Communitarium Project agrees. What we need are not only warnings but frameworks for immediate, collective enactment. The practice of democracy will not survive unless it is suffused with the practice of socialism—embodied in counter-communities that anchor solidarity, cultivate deliberation, and defend freedom.

If democracy is to remain a vector, socialism must be its infrastructure. And both must be lived, together, now.

#TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

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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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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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