Seize the Means of Community

TheCommunitariumProject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#TheCommunitariumProject

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The Communitarium Project is an effort to create shared spaces—both online and (eventually) offline—where people can collaborate, deliberate, and take action to challenge the status quo. It is an evolving experiment in building a digital commons for meaningful engagement, exploring alternative models of collective ownership and governance.

The Communitarium Project is an attempt to create online and real-world spaces where people can come together not just to talk, but to think, plan, and act in ways that challenge the status quo and explore alternative futures. It is not another social media network, nor is it simply a forum for discussion. Rather, it is an experiment in constructing a shared infrastructure for collective learning, deliberation, and action—a digital commons that could serve as a base for both ad hoc and ongoing efforts to engage with the world and work toward meaningful change.

Why Now?

We are living through a period of deepening fragmentation and enclosure—not just in the realm of politics and economics, but in how we think, communicate, and organize. Social media platforms, designed to extract attention and data rather than foster genuine collaboration, have further atomized discourse and reduced political action to fleeting moments of engagement. At the same time, the forces of technofeudalism have transformed much of the digital sphere into a landscape of walled gardens, where participation is structured around the logic of consumption rather than shared ownership.

The Communitarium Project is an attempt to address this predicament. It seeks to explore alternative models—ones in which participants are not consumers but co-creators, owners, and maintainers of the spaces in which they operate. It envisions networked commons rather than isolated platforms, where deliberation is oriented toward meaningful engagement with the world rather than endless self-promotion or reactive outrage.

Core Principles of the Communitarium Project

  1. Deliberation with Purpose – Unlike social media, which rewards rapid, emotionally charged engagement, the Communitarium fosters structured, thoughtful deliberation. It is a space for long-form discussions, collaborative research, and careful planning for real-world action.
  2. A Commons, Not a Market – Participation is not about amassing followers or crafting personal brands but about contributing to a shared project. Information, ideas, and tools are meant to be developed collectively and made accessible to those who need them.
  3. Action-Oriented Collaboration – The goal is not just to talk about the world but to change it. The Communitarium aims to provide tools and structures for coordinating efforts—whether that means organizing local initiatives, developing counter-institutions, or strategizing long-term projects.
  4. Mutual Accountability – Members of a Communitarium instance are not isolated individuals but part of a collective. Anything published from within this space carries the reputation of the community, and participants are answerable to that community for their contributions.
  5. Networked but Grounded – The Communitarium does not seek to exist purely as an online phenomenon. Its purpose is to enable real-world connections and material action, using digital infrastructure to facilitate meaningful offline engagement rather than replace it.

Exploring Platforms: Hubzilla and Beyond

Hubzilla had been considered as a possible foundation for Communitarium-oriented online spaces because it is one of the few federated platforms that allows for true autonomy, flexibility, and self-governance. Its unique features—including nomadic identity, federated access control, integrated knowledge-sharing tools, and group-oriented functionality—making it an intriguing candidate for fostering the kind of community-driven, action-oriented spaces the Communitarium Project seeks to explore.

But Hubzilla proved difficult to administer, leading to problems in the initial installation that have been difficult to fix. Hubzilla, it seems, will require a higher level of expertise than is currently available to this project.

So we are next turning to the streams repository, a descendant of the Hubzilla project designed to be simpler, more streamlined...and mostly public domain.

The streams repository is such an unusual project that it is worth quoting from its README at length:

The streams repository is a fediverse server with a long history. It began in 2010 as a decentralised Facebook alternative called Mistpark. It has gone through a number of twists and turns in its long journey of providing federated communications. The fediverse servers Friendica and Hubzilla are early branches of this repository.

The first thing to be aware of when discussing the streams repository is that it has no brand or brand identity. None. The name is the name of a code repository. Hence “the streams repository”. It isn't a product. It's just a collection of code which implements a fediverse server that does some really cool stuff. There is no flagship instance. There is no mascot. In fact all brand information has been removed. You are free to release it under your own brand. Whatever you decide to call your instance of the software is the only brand you'll see. The software is in the public domain to the extent permissible by law. There is no license.

If you look for the streams repository in a list of popular fediverse servers, you won't find it. We're not big on tracking and other spyware. Nobody knows how many instances there are or how many Monthly Active Users there are. These things are probably important to corporations considering takeover targets. They aren't so important to people sharing things with friends and family.

Due to its origins as a Facebook alternative, the software has a completely different focus than those fediverse projects modelled after Twitter/X. Everything is built around the use of permissions and the resulting online safety that permissions-based systems provide. Comment controls are built-in. Uploaded media and document libraries are built-in and media access can be restricted with fine-grained permissions – as can your posts. Groups are built-in. “Circles” are built-in. Events are built-in. Search and search permissions? Yup. Built-in also. It's based on Opensearch. You can even search from your browser and find anything you have permission to search for. Spam is practically non-existent. Online harrassment and abuse are likewise almost non-existent. Moderation is a built-in capability. If you're not sure about a new contact, set them to moderated, and you'll have a chance to approve all of their comments to your posts before those comments are shared with your true friends and family. For many fediverse projects, the only way to control this kind of abusive behaviour is through blocking individuals or entire websites. The streams repository offers this ability as well. You'll just find that you hardly ever need to use it.

Because federated social media is a different model of communications based on decentralisation, cross-domain single sign-on is also built-in. All of the streams instances interact cooperatively to provide what looks like one huge instance to anybody using it – even though it consists of hundreds of instances of all sizes.

Nomadic identity is built-in. You can clone your identity to another instance and we will keep them in sync to the best of our ability. If one server goes down, no big deal. Use the other. If it comes back up again, you can go back. If it stays down forever, no big deal. All of your friends and all your content are available on any of your cloned instances. So are your photos and videos, and so are your permission settings. If you made a video of the kids to share with grandma (and nobody else), grandma can still see the video no matter what instance she accesses it from. Nobody else can.

Link your scattered fediverse accounts and their separate logins, with one channel and one identity to share them all.

Choose from our library of custom filters and algorithms if you need better control of the stuff that lands in your stream. By default, your conversations are restricted to your friends and are not public. You can change this if you want, but this is the most sensible default for a safe online experience.

There are no inherent limits to the length of posts or the number of photos/videos you can attach or really any limits at all. You can just share stuff without concerning yourself with any of these arbitrary limitations.

Need an app? Just visit a website running the streams repository code and install it from your browser.

Nobody is trying to sell you this software or aggressively convince you to use it. What we're trying to do is show you through our own actions and example that there are more sensible ways to create federated social networks than what you've probably experienced.

This approach seems even more in line with the goals of the Communitarium Project than did Hubzilla's, albeit at the price (currently) of offering fewer of the CMS features. These, however, can be provided by companion federated platforms under the same umbrella, as the need for them arises. In the longer term it can be hoped that the project becomes successful enought that it can attract developers and designers skilled enough to build new affordances from the materials provided by the streams repository.

What Comes Next?

The first step is building and testing potential Communitarium instances, ensuring that they are structured to facilitate meaningful collaboration rather than mimic the patterns of traditional social media. From there, the work begins to refine these spaces, create necessary tools, and connect people who are looking for something beyond the isolated, reactive nature of contemporary online engagement.

The Communitarium Project is not a ready-made solution—it is an invitation to co-create, experiment, and adapt. I (and, hopefully soon, we) will be working on building the facilities which will allow interested individuals to join this effort, the first step is to join this effort and begin thinking about how we can use these spaces to coordinate, create, and engage with the world in new ways.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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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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Toward a Communal Commentary on the Raw Material of Shared Life
A perspective on the Communitarium Project

“In the absence of God, we found the schmooze.”
— Fragment from the Book of No One

The Communitarium and the Hunger for Shared Meaning

What if the future of political life doesn't begin with a manifesto, a blueprint, or a charismatic leader—but with a comment thread?

What if the deepest antidote to social unraveling isn’t more certainty, or more ideology, but better conversations—and better tools to sustain them?

The Communitarium Project was born from a recognition: that under technofeudal conditions, meaning itself is being enclosed. Public reason collapses into algorithmic bait. Common speech is flattened into signal. Shared language is exhausted by overuse, drained of resonance.

But the problem isn’t just political. It’s ontological. What’s at stake is our ability to interpret the world together, to live inside something like a shared reality. And what the Communitarium sets out to build—provisionally, awkwardly, experimentally—is a space in which that shared interpretation can begin again.

Not a new gospel.
A new Talmud.

What Is a Talmud (and Why Might We Need One)?

The Talmud is not a creed. It does not offer a smooth surface of agreement. It is layered, recursive, polyphonic—a living archive of commentary, dispute, and careful memory. Its power lies not in answers, but in the rigor of the questions, the intensity of attention, the generosity of argument.

It is a space where disagreement lives without rupture.
Where interpretation multiplies instead of narrows.
Where community forms not around belief, but around the shared labor of making meaning.

This is what we need now—not because we share a God, but because we do not.
Because in the absence of fixed authority, shared attention is what we have left.

So What’s the Torah?

If the Communitarium is a space of collective commentary, what are we commenting on?

There is no one text. But here are some candidates:

  • The world itself—understood not as raw data, but as already interpreted, already relational, already meaningful to someone.
  • The language we’ve inherited—thick with history, conflict, poetry, and pain.
  • The structures of everyday life—the schmooze-level negotiations where power, care, justice, and recognition actually play out.
  • The wreckage of past revolutions and the whispers of future ones.
  • The multiplicity of selves—improvising, co-invoking, always half-made.

In truth, the Torah we comment on is whatever insists that it be interpreted together.
Whatever resists solitude.
Whatever demands co-presence.

A Theology Without God

To call this project sacred is not to smuggle in the divine. It is to recognize that some things are treated as sacred because we refuse to reduce them—because we gather around them, argue over them, pass them on.

The Communitarium has no final vocabulary. No infallible authority. No orthodoxy.

What it has—what it protects—is the possibility of shared interpretation.
The infrastructure of collective intelligibility.
The right to dwell inside problems without closure.

This is not a faith.
It is a practice.
A refusal to let meaning be privatized, extracted, or algorithmically compressed.
A conviction that some forms of speech—slow, dialogic, generous—are what hold the world together.

From Commentary to Community

A Talmud for atheists is not a contradiction. It is an aspiration.

It suggests that in the absence of divine commandments, we construct obligations through dialogue.
That without prophecy, we remember carefully.
That where politics fails to deliver liberation, we create the infrastructures of mutual intelligibility—not as a workaround, but as a ground zero for transformation.

To build the Communitarium is to practice sacred world-making without metaphysical guarantees.
It is to hold open the space where difference can become dialogue, where language can become shelter, and where community can become the site of co-created meaning.

Closing Invocation

Let us write together.
Let us disagree well, remember slowly, and speak with an ear for what might be heard.

Let us treat language not as spectacle or signal, but as shared labor.

Let us build tools for commentary, for co-interpretation, for schmooze—not for the gods, but for each other.

Let us seize the means of community.
And let that be holy enough.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity #TheCommunitariumProject

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When a project starts using words like commons, mutual aid, enclosure, and alienation, someone will eventually ask: Isn’t this just Communism with a new label?

It’s a fair question. And it deserves more than a reflexive denial or a knowing smirk. The Communitarium Project does share some terrain with Communism, particularly in its critique of capitalism. But what it seeks to build—and how it seeks to build it—could not be more different.

This post lays out that difference: clearly, respectfully, and without strategic ambiguity.

Shared Ground

Let’s begin where overlap exists: – Alienation: Both frameworks understand capitalism as a system that separates people from their labor, their communities, their own self-understanding, and the natural world. – Enclosure: Both regard the private seizure of common life—land, care, time, attention, expression—as a central mechanism of control. – Commons: Both imagine a future in which what is shared is protected and generative, not commodified or hoarded. – Mutuality: Both understand that coordination and care must replace competition and coercion.

So yes, both name the problem. But they diverge in how they understand its depth—and how they imagine its transformation.

Coordination and Governance

Communism, particularly in its 20th-century forms, emphasizes mass-scale coordination through: – State planning – Central authority (often party-based) – Rational control over production and distribution

The Communitarium Project, by contrast, emphasizes: – Schmooze-level deliberation – Soft protocols and reflexive governance – Ensemble intelligence at human and ecosystemic scale

Rather than seize power, the Communitarium seeks to redistribute interpretive capacity and reweave decision-making into everyday life.

We do not oppose coordination. We oppose enclosure of coordination—by the state, the algorithm, or any imagined Big Other.

The Structure of the Self

Communism tends to treat individuals as bearers of ideology or class position—shaped by material conditions, but subordinate to historical roles. The revolutionary subject is a class actor first.

The Communitarium Project begins elsewhere: – With liminal selves who navigate multiple overlapping ensembles – With mortal computation, not ideological purity – With the portable sociality individuals carry between collectives

Where Communism seeks solidarity through shared identity and position, the Communitarium seeks mutual recognition through contextual intelligibility and recursive care (reflexive, ensemble-level maintenance of care practices—material, semiotic, and interpretive—that includes but extends beyond mutual aid).

Truth and Epistemology

Communism often holds that there is an eventual clarity to be achieved: class consciousness, the scientific method properly applied, the truth of history once emancipated from ideology.

Communitarium holds that no such finality exists. – All meaning is historically situated – All sense-making is ensemble-bound – All truth is subject to social computation and interpretive repair

There is no Big Other. No final arbiter. Only the mutual weave.

Ecological Implications

Communism tends to be anthropocentric. It aims to manage nature rationally, stewarding the Earth on behalf of humanity’s collective future. Nature is a system to be understood, preserved, and utilized.

The Communitarium Project treats ecology differently: – Not as backdrop or resource, but as co-constitutive interpretive field – Nonhumans are not inputs but participants in prehensive relations – Meaning is not extracted from nature but woven through situated interaction

The goal is not sustainability-as-resource-efficiency, but recommoning the interpretive relation with the living world.

Means and Method

Communism favors rupture: – Seize the means of production – Overthrow the capitalist class – Replace the old with the new

Communitarium favors stepwise weaving: – Build new interpretive infrastructure – Reintroduce social and symbolic protocols of mutuality – Create communitaria that gradually displace capitalist and statist dependencies

This is a recursive, relational revolution—one that proceeds through recomposition, not rupture.

Intellectual Lineages

Communism emerges from: – Marxism and dialectical materialism – Enlightenment rationalism – Hegelian notions of historical becoming

The Communitarium Project draws from: – A longer historical view of power, enclosure, and abstraction, treating capitalism (and now technofeudalism) not as exceptional ruptures but as continuations of broader civilizational patterns—particularly those involving the enclosure of meaning, land, and relationality – Ethnomethodology and micro-sociology – Semiotics and pragmatism – Feminist care ethics – Complexity theory and ensemble cognition – Decolonial and Indigenous philosophies

Where Communism seeks historical mastery, Communitarium seeks semiotic mutuality.

Capitalism-Erosion, State-Erosion

Both frameworks reject capitalism. But Communism often imagines replacing it with a planned economy enforced by a transitional state.

The Communitarium Project envisions capitalism-erosion and state-erosion as twin projects: – Not through seizure or collapse, but through displacement and irrelevance – By building commons so dense, reflexive, and durable that extractive systems fade – Through lived coordination that no longer depends on capitalist or statist infrastructure

We don’t overthrow the state. We stop needing it.

In Summary

Axis Communism Communitarium
Coordination Central planning Ensemble intelligence
Governance State, party Soft protocols, schmoozing
Selfhood Classed subject Liminal node in ensembles
Truth Scientific clarity, class consciousness Mortal computation, interpretive repair
Ecology Rational stewardship Co-constructed semiotic entanglement
Strategy Rupture, revolution Stepwise weaving, recomposition
Lineage Marxism, Enlightenment, Hegel Ethnomethodology, care, semiotics, decolonial thought

A Final Word

The Communitarium Project doesn’t dismiss Communism. It honors the clarity of its critique. But it steps off its path.

We don’t want to seize the world. We want to live in it together, differently.

That means restoring what was obscured: the ensemble, the interaction, the fragile rhythms of mutual intelligibility. It means treating meaning itself as commons. And building the infrastructure that lets us maintain it.

If that’s a revolution, it will sound quieter than most.

The conversation has begun: 👉 Join it here

#TheCommunitariumProject

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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.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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Cults create deep commitment and social cohesion, but they also rely on coercion, ideological rigidity, and hierarchical control. The Communitarium Project seeks to harness the strengths of cult-like communities—meaningful engagement, shared purpose, and counter-hegemonic vision—while avoiding their pitfalls. building solidarity without becoming insular, authoritarian, or dogmatic.

The Communitarium Project is an effort to foster deep, engaged, and meaning-generating communities without replicating the manipulative and authoritarian structures that often define cultic formations. To build something that truly resists social fragmentation, we need a strong sense of collective purpose—but we also need to ensure that commitment does not slide into coercion, and that shared meaning does not ossify into dogma.

This challenge is particularly pronounced in the digital sphere, where online communities struggle to strike a balance between meaningful engagement and ideological rigidity. Given that communitaria will initially exist as digital spaces, before evolving into real-world infrastructures, we must carefully consider how online dynamics shape commitment, identity, and power.

The Appeal of Cult-Like Structures

Cults are remarkably effective at fostering deep social cohesion and intense collective purpose—qualities that communitaria also aim to cultivate, but in a way that remains open-ended and non-coercive. Some of the elements that cults get right include:

  • A strong sense of belonging – Cults make individuals feel uniquely valued, embedded in something larger than themselves. Communitaria must achieve this without requiring submission to authority or ideological purity.
  • Symbolic and ritual engagement – While cults often use ritual as a mechanism of control, symbolic practices—storytelling, shared commitments, participatory deliberation—can reinforce communal bonds without dogma.
  • A counter-narrative to the dominant culture – Cults thrive by positioning themselves as revolutionary alternatives to a corrupt system. Communitaria, too, must challenge hegemonic individualism, but in a way that remains self-critical rather than sliding into insularity.

These factors explain why cult-like energy can be compelling, particularly in fragmented, alienating societies where people are desperate for real connection and collective power. But if communitaria are to endure as ethical and participatory communities, they must avoid the authoritarian tendencies that often arise when groups seek to preserve their internal coherence at all costs.

Where Cults Go Wrong—and How to Avoid It

The dangers of cultic structures are well-known: hierarchical control, coercive belonging, epistemic closure, and the demonization of outsiders. These tendencies can manifest in online communities just as easily as in physical ones. Some specific risks to be aware of:

  1. Leaderships and Power Accumulation – Most cults revolve around an unquestioned leader or hierarchical elite who centralizes interpretive power. In contrast, communitaria must be radically decentralized, ensuring that leadership roles are temporary, accountable, and distributed. Digital spaces must avoid the gravitational pull of personality cults—even charismatic figures should be subject to community critique.
  2. Epistemic Closure and Ideological Rigidity – Cults maintain control by sealing off members from dissenting viewpoints and punishing those who question the narrative. Online communities often fall into a similar trap, where engagement is filtered through algorithmic reinforcement loops that create ideological purity spirals. Communitaria must resist these enclosures by institutionalizing debate, dissent, and interpretive flexibility.
    • Instead of having sacred texts or dogmas, meaning must remain an open, living process.
    • Disagreement should be a feature, not a failure—structured into communal deliberation rather than seen as a threat to coherence.

  3. Us vs. Them Thinking – Cultic formations rely on demonizing the outside world to keep members bound together. While communitaria must necessarily critique the dominant order, they must not become self-isolated enclaves that see all outsiders as adversaries. This is especially important online, where polarization is actively encouraged by platform dynamics. Communitaria must:

    • Build bridges with other communities rather than fortifying ideological barriers.
    • Engage outwardly rather than defensively, recognizing that cosmopolitanism strengthens rather than weakens solidarity.

  4. Psychological Manipulation & Dependency – Cults manufacture dependency, making members feel that they cannot exist outside of the group. Online communities often replicate this dynamic by making platform participation central to members’ identities. Communitaria must provide real agency, not manufactured dependency:

    • Membership must be active but voluntary—engagement should be meaningful, not performative or compulsory.
    • Members should feel free to step away, shift their level of participation, and engage without fear of exclusion or retaliation.
    • Privacy must be respected, ensuring that participation does not turn into surveillance or social control.

Starting Online: Unique Challenges & Safeguards

The fact that communitaria will initially exist in digital spaces brings specific risks:

  • Hyper-visible online personas can lead to performative rather than genuine participation.
  • Echo-chamber effects can make internal discourse brittle and resistant to critique.
  • The rapid spread of information can turn minor disputes into public crises.

To counter these risks, communitaria must establish early safeguards:

  1. Radical Transparency – No hidden power structures, no secretive decision-making.
  2. Deliberative Ethics – A culture of slow thinking and collective inquiry rather than knee-jerk reactions.
  3. Soft Boundaries – Membership should be fluid, not rigidly enclosed—a network rather than a sect.

Final Thought: Cult Energy Without Cult Control

The Communitarium Project aims to build strong, participatory, and deeply engaged communities without replicating the rigid, coercive, and dogmatic structures of cultic formations.

A guiding question: Are we creating a space where people feel empowered and free, or one where they feel controlled and obligated?

If the answer ever tilts toward the latter, we must have the courage to dismantle and rethink our structures—always prioritizing openness, flexibility, and the continuous negotiation of meaning.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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