Seize the Means of Community

thecommunitariumproject

a reflection toward the ethos of communitaria

Winning should not be the purpose of organizing. It should be a by-product.

But this is not a call for quietism, nor a dismissal of what many now face as existential threats. In the present moment—when hard-won rights are being rolled back, when institutions are captured by oligarchy, when the ruling order criminalizes dissent and encroaches on every form of collective life—winning is often a necessity. Sometimes survival depends on it.

There are times when winning means stopping a pipeline, freeing someone from prison, securing a ceasefire, defending a clinic, preventing a ban, resisting a coup. In such moments, organizing must win—or people suffer irreparably.

But that is precisely why we must be careful.

When organizing is consumed by winning, its soul begins to shrink. It adopts the tempo of campaigns rather than lifeways. It treats people as assets or voters rather than as participants in the shaping of shared meaning. It focuses on resisting power, not building power. And worst of all, it may forget to ask what kind of world we want to live in beyond the struggle.

So yes, we fight to win. But we must also refuse to let “winning” become the only thing we know how to do.

Capitalism encourages us to think in terms of winning—as market share, as domination, as victory over others. Even the most well-meaning left movements often internalize this competitive frame, speaking of “winning power” as though the goal were to inherit the throne rather than dismantle the castle. We fall into cycles of mobilization driven by urgency, moral crisis, and the desire to defeat an enemy—but without building durable alternatives in how we live, work, care, and relate. We become crisis-chasers. The campaign never ends. The election never ends. The fundraising never ends.

The Communitarium Project begins elsewhere. It starts from the intuition that we cannot outcompete capitalism on its own terrain. We must change the terrain. Not with slogans, not with purity tests, not with aesthetic defiance—but by building environments of shared life that allow for collective agency, mutual care, and meaningful deliberation to flourish. These are the conditions under which real freedom grows—not as individual autonomy floating in space, but as the lived experience of shaping the world together.

This means organizing not toward a win, but toward a way of life. A socialist lifestyle, if we must use that word, is not primarily about consumption choices or moral consistency—it’s about how we make meaning together. It’s about restoring the infrastructures of reciprocity and repair that capitalism has eroded. It’s about cultivating an “us” robust enough to withstand fragmentation, capture, and despair. And that “us” cannot be built by tactical maneuvers alone.

In this sense, the fixation on “winning” is not just a strategic error. It is a symptom of idiotism—in the classical sense, where the idiot is one who retreats into the private sphere and disengages from collective life. Modern idiotism doesn’t always look like retreat; it often takes the form of constant activity, performative outrage, or solitary moral heroism. But it remains private in effect. It does not bind us together in common purpose. It does not help us stay with each other when things get hard.

The Communitarium Project resists this idiotism by reclaiming the local, the dialogic, the schmooze-level reality of human life. It proposes that we need not just movements, but places—communitaria—where people live, argue, experiment, and grow together. Where political action is not separated from the daily processes of storytelling, caregiving, and collective sense-making. Where success is measured not by how decisively we win the next battle, but by how deeply we embed shared agency into the structure of our days.

This is also a challenge to the language of the left. So much of it is borrowed from war, from management, from academic critique. We talk about “mobilizing” people, “deploying” strategies, “leveraging” movements, “seizing” opportunities. These metaphors betray us. They frame the world in terms of resources and threats, not relationships and possibility. They obscure the slow, patient, dialogic work of reweaving a frayed social fabric.

The Communitarium vision calls for different metaphors—of gardening, tending, fermenting, assembling, repairing. These are not metaphors of passivity. They are metaphors of durability. They suggest a politics not of conquest, but of cultivation.

And if we do this well—if we build spaces where people come alive to each other again—then yes, victories may come. But they will come as by-products of coherence, not as prizes wrested from our enemies. They will come because we have remembered how to live together, and because no system—however powerful—can stand against a people who have done that.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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For centuries, academia—especially its most prestigious institutions—has positioned itself as the gatekeeper of intelligence, merit, and social value. It has operated as an enclosure, defining who counts as “intelligent,” who deserves access to status and opportunity, and who holds the authority to shape public knowledge. Degrees and credentials have been treated as markers of moral and intellectual worth, justifying access to influence, power, and higher social standing.

But this system is facing a profound crisis, one born not from a single cause but from a series of betrayals, contradictions, and systemic failures. AI is just one factor accelerating a collapse that has been long in the making.

Academia as Enclosure

For generations, academic institutions have served as enclosures that control access to social power. By determining who earns credentials, who produces knowledge, and who gains entry to the “inner circle” of expertise, they have shaped the very meaning of merit and intelligence. But this enclosure has always been artificial. Intelligence, as academia has defined it, has been deeply shaped by cultural biases, class structures, and historical exclusions.

This is not just about who is accepted into prestigious programs, but about which forms of knowledge are legitimized, who gets to be heard, and what counts as “real” scholarship. It’s about who gets to produce narratives that shape society and who is excluded from the conversation.

The Betrayal of Ideals

The crisis facing academia is not merely about external technological pressures but about its betrayal of its own proclaimed ideals. Recent examples lay bare the extent of this failure:

  • Suppression of Free Speech and Democratic Values: Columbia University's suspension, expulsion, and revocation of degrees for 22 students who protested in support of Palestinian peoples is a stark example of how academic institutions have betrayed their professed commitment to democratic discourse and free expression. Rather than fostering critical engagement, academia is actively silencing dissent to maintain institutional alignment with dominant power structures.

  • The Replication Crisis: The “publish or perish” culture has fueled a replication crisis across numerous academic disciplines. Under pressure to meet narrow, reductive criteria of “merit” and “success,” researchers have produced work that is increasingly unreliable, driven by the need for quantifiable outputs rather than meaningful insight. The system values quantity over quality, compliance over criticality.

  • Exploitation of Academic Labor: Academia has also proven to be an exploitative employer. The adjunct professor system, where highly educated individuals are paid poverty wages without benefits or job security, exemplifies how the institution values profit and efficiency over fairness and intellectual integrity. This is not an aberration but a structural feature of the modern university.

  • AI as a Disruptive Force: AI further challenges the legitimacy of academic systems. If AI can replicate many forms of academic output—from research summaries to essays—then the value of credentialed labor as a marker of merit erodes. AI is not the cause of academia's crisis but a harsh light exposing its long-standing weaknesses.

Academia's Defensive Response

Rather than confronting these crises, academia often responds by reinforcing its enclosures:

  • Gatekeeping Discourse: Institutions suppress controversial discourse and punish dissent under the guise of maintaining “order” or “academic standards,” betraying their proclaimed commitment to open inquiry.

  • Valorizing Process Over Insight: Institutions elevate methodologies and procedural rigor as shields against critique, even as these processes produce unreliable, redundant, and exclusionary work.

  • Defending Institutional Prestige: The prestige of traditional academic institutions is presented as self-evident proof of their value, despite the ways that prestige reflects historical exclusion, economic privilege, and complicity with power.

These defenses are not about protecting intellectual rigor but about preserving authority and the structures of power that depend on academic enclosure.

Reclaiming the Purpose of Knowledge

The crisis facing academia is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge and how we structure learning communities. The intelligence-merit link is already broken, and academia must now confront hard questions:

  • What is the Purpose of Higher Education? If education is no longer about credentialing intelligence, what should it be about? Should it be about cultivating mutual learning, collective problem-solving, and social engagement?

  • What Counts as Valuable Knowledge? If academic knowledge is no longer privileged by virtue of its institutional enclosure, how can we elevate more diverse, emergent, and community-grounded ways of knowing?

  • Who Gets to Create and Share Knowledge? Should academic institutions continue to gatekeep knowledge production, or should we prioritize more open, participatory, and collective models of inquiry?

  • What Becomes of Expertise? If expertise is less about individual credentials and more about collective interpretive capacity, how should authority and knowledge be shared and cultivated in community?

The Communitarium as Counter-Enclosure

The Communitarium can be an experimental alternative to traditional academia—a site that rejects the intelligence-merit narrative and the sacralization of academic prestige. It offers a model for mutual, emergent, and relational knowledge-making that is free from the hierarchies of traditional institutions.

  • Mutual Learning Spaces: The Communitarium is not about certifying intelligence. It’s about cultivating spaces where people learn from each other, hold complexity together, and deliberate in mutual, open-ended ways.

  • Resisting Knowledge Gatekeeping: It resists the tendency to define legitimate knowledge through rigid methodologies or institutional conventions. Instead, it values diverse insights, practical experiences, and emergent collective reasoning.

  • Valuing Process Over Prestige: The Communitarium doesn't measure value by outcomes, credentials, or institutional status. It values the process of inquiry, mutual care, and shared meaning-making.

  • Democratizing Expertise: It treats expertise as a communal capacity, developed through deliberation and mutual understanding, rather than as a scarce resource controlled by credentialed authorities.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

AI didn’t break academia. Neither did any single scandal or betrayal. Academia’s collapse is the result of a long history of complicity, exploitation, and enclosure—a system that has betrayed its own ideals and reduced intelligence and merit to narrow, exclusionary categories.

The collapse of this fiction is an opportunity to rethink how we value knowledge, how we share it, and how we create spaces for collective learning and understanding.

The choice is clear. We can double down on the illusions that have protected exclusion, hierarchy, and prestige, or we can begin constructing new, mutual counter-enclosures that prioritize openness, deliberation, and collective emergence.

The Communitarium is an experiment in the latter. It is an invitation to imagine learning and knowledge differently—not as markers of merit, but as practices of mutual engagement and shared becoming.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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For centuries, societies have relied on the presumption that “intelligence” is a natural marker of “merit”—a justification for status, wealth, authority, and influence. Intelligence has been coded as a scarce resource, a sacred trait that legitimizes power and hierarchy. The smarter you are, the more you deserve. The greater your intelligence, the greater your right to influence and reward.

This logic has been particularly influential in justifying the special status of the managerial and executive class. These roles have been elevated on the assumption that they require rare and exceptional intelligence—the capacity to “see the big picture,” to “strategize,” and to “lead.” Managerial power is portrayed as an inevitable outcome of superior cognitive ability, strategic insight, and the ability to manage complexity. This framing is central to how hierarchy justifies itself.

But this foundational myth is collapsing, and AI is accelerating its demise.

The rise of advanced AI systems threatens to expose a long-standing cultural illusion: that intelligence, as traditionally defined, is inherently tied to moral worth, social merit, or deservingness. As AI grows capable of performing tasks historically reserved for the “intelligent”—writing, coding, composing, analyzing, and even strategic planning—it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that these abilities are signs of virtue or deep human value.

The uncomfortable truth is that much of what society has valorized as “intelligence” is reducible to processes of pattern recognition, task execution, and repetition—things AI can now do at scale, without consciousness, morality, or merit. The emergence of AI forces a reckoning: if machines can perform these tasks without deserving status or reward, why have humans—especially the managerial class—been so richly rewarded for doing the same?

Intelligence as Narrative Enclosure

The presumed connection between intelligence and merit has been one of the dominant narrative enclosures of modernity. It is a crypto-theological belief—one that sacralizes intelligence as a marker of human worth, progress, and inevitability. It underwrites the mythology of meritocracy: the belief that those who succeed in society do so because they “deserve” it, because they are smarter, better, more capable.

The executive and managerial class has been the ultimate beneficiary of this mythology. The ability to “lead,” “decide,” and “envision” has been framed as the highest form of intelligence, deserving of the highest rewards. But AI disrupts this story. It reveals that intelligence, at least as measured by performance in certain tasks, is not a marker of moral virtue or social contribution. Intelligence is mechanical, procedural, replicable. Strategic analysis, predictive modeling, and decision optimization—all traits that have been used to justify managerial supremacy—are tasks AI can perform without merit, meaning, or consciousness.

The System’s Defensive Response

Rather than accepting this collapse, we can expect systems of power to respond with narrative defense mechanisms. They will attempt to salvage the illusion of merit by doubling down on new forms of enclosure:

  • Redefining Merit: Human intelligence will be reframed as more “authentic,” “moral,” or “creative” than machine intelligence. Managerial roles will be mythologized as uniquely dependent on “vision,” “judgment,” or “character” even as these traits become indistinguishable from algorithmic processing.

  • Moralizing AI: The narrative will shift to portray AI as dangerous, lacking in humanity, and morally suspect. The system will suggest that humans, by virtue of their inherent moral character, deserve continued power and reward, even as AI performs the labor they once did.

  • Elevating Control Over Merit: As the illusion of intelligence collapses, systems will seek legitimacy not by claiming moral merit but by emphasizing control. The right to wield AI will become the new ground of social privilege. Those who “control the risk” will claim the right to control the rewards.

  • Gatekeeping Creativity and Leadership: There will be a renewed effort to protect traditional markers of human leadership and vision, not by expanding access but by reinforcing institutional control. Only certain decisions, strategies, or insights will be deemed “authentic,” while AI-generated plans will be dismissed as imitation—even though much of managerial decision-making is already patterned, procedural, and derivative.

The Deeper Threat: Revealing Merit as Fiction

But the real threat is not that AI will outcompete humans in the labor market. The deeper threat is that AI will reveal how hollow the merit system has been all along.

If AI can write, code, strategize, or analyze without consciousness or moral character, then why have these capacities been treated as indicators of worth in human societies? Why have they justified higher pay, greater status, or disproportionate power? Why has the managerial class been positioned as inherently deserving of control and reward, when their role has often been to aggregate, process, and replicate information?

The answer is uncomfortable: because intelligence, as it's been socially constructed, has always served as an enclosure. It has been a way to justify and reproduce inequality. It has been a tool to gatekeep who has access to value, reward, and recognition. And AI exposes this mechanism by replicating “intelligent” outputs without any claim to deservingness.

Toward a Post-Merit Framework

This moment demands a radical reframing of how we think about value and worth. If AI shows us that intelligence does not equate to merit, then we must rethink what truly matters in human systems.

  • Mutuality Over Merit: Value must be rooted in mutual contribution, care, and collective engagement—not in isolated outputs or competitive status. Mutual aid, not performance metrics, becomes the basis for collective thriving.

  • Plasticity Over Intelligence: The capacity for mutual interpretation, deliberation, and collective problem-solving becomes more important than cognitive speed or technical proficiency. Value emerges from how we hold complexity together, not from how quickly we produce answers.

  • Collective Emergence Over Individual Genius: Rather than valorizing individual achievement, we can focus on how value emerges through collective processes—how knowledge, care, and meaning are co-constructed in community.

  • Decentralizing Control: Systems must resist the tendency to reinforce elite control over AI and knowledge production. Instead, they should prioritize shared access, transparency, and collective governance over technological capacities.

The Role of the Communitarium

The Communitarium can be a space where these new frameworks are cultivated. It can be a site where value is defined by mutuality, deliberation, and emergent collective intelligence—not by hierarchical measures of performance or output. It can resist the urge to sacralize “intelligence” as a measure of merit and instead foster spaces where relationality, care, and shared sense-making are the highest forms of contribution.

In the Communitarium, AI is not a threat but an exposer—a force that helps dismantle the myths we have relied on to justify exclusion, inequality, and hierarchy. The challenge is not to preserve the illusion of human merit but to build systems where value is rooted in collective reciprocity and mutual recognition.

Conclusion: The Collapse as Opportunity

The collapse of the intelligence-merit link is an opportunity. It allows us to break with old enclosures and ask deeper questions about what we value, why we value it, and how we might build new systems that reflect mutual care, collective deliberation, and shared flourishing.

AI didn’t break the merit system. It just exposed the fractures that were already there. Now, we face a choice: to double down on the illusions that have sustained inequality, or to begin constructing new, collective counter-enclosures that make space for a genuinely mutual, post-merit future.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#TheCommunitariumProject #DSA

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In previous posts I have tried to explain why I think new forms of online communities are necessary, some of the history that has brought us to this point, some of the principles and theories which I think can inform our decisions, and some of the goals which I think we should adopt.

I have begun trying to build one instance of such an online community but I am old and somewhat creaky, underskilled for the task, and insufficiently disciplined to persist without substantive feedback.

I understand that it's a long shot but I'm hoping to find people interested in rolling up their sleeves and building, bottom-up, robust and enduring online collaborative communities of broad, egalitarian purpose. This will, I think, require the development of a new kind of organizing, digital community organizing, which borrows from the traditions of voter organizing, civil rights organizing, community organizing and labor organizing that precede it.

If we are going to build for an uncertain future we cannot specify in detail what our community will eventually look like; we're just going to have to work that out as we go along. Which means that, in order to conduct all-inclusive discussions, the community will have to be of a humanly-manageable size, small enough that everyone stands a chance of getting to know and to trust each other.

We'll all have to be engaged participants (no lurkers!). We'll need to cover a wide range of interests and abilities: concerned citizens, activists, academics, techies, designers, content creators, coders, enthusiasts, writers, organizers, etc.

As multiple communities of this sort form we will need to find ways to forge robust and mutually supportive relations among them.

Even though I cannot (and don't want to) dictate the final form of these communities I can describe some initial hopes, wishes, and thoughts about what might emerge from this effort:

I hope it will be possible to build a community which will serve as a model for a network of online, general-purpose, communities-for-community's-sake that are:

  • small (members numbering no more than the population of, say, a NY neighborhood);
  • intentional (which is to say, elective and with some degree of mutually agreed common purpose);
  • cooperative;
  • commons-oriented;
  • self-formed, self-supporting and self-maintaining;
    • members (who are able) should collectively pay for its hosting; and
    • develop the technical capacity to keep it running (either within their ranks or by recruiting those who can); and
    • regularly participate in the “chores” that must be done to administer the site;
  • committed to mutual aid;
    • actively greeting and educating new members;
    • actively monitoring the ability of members to negotiate the environment and keeping an eye out for those who may need help;
    • actively working to maintain the site as a safe and hospitable environment for as broad a range of people as possible;
    • seeking to find other ways members can assist and collaborate with each other, both online and in the real world;
  • built exclusively out of software that is freely shareable and whose code is openly readable;
    • with clear, democratically-developed and communally-enforced rules of conduct, standards of participation and guidelines for constructive criticism/engagement which are regularly collectively reviewed and periodically revised;

  • engaged in active, robust efforts at inter-community relations (not just individual cross-community relationships);

  • which is to say, a community whose members understand their membership to entail constantly collectively negotiating the character and identity of that community;

    • transparent (in terms of finance, governance, technical design and maintenance, inter-community relations, etc.);
    • dedicated to the repair and improvement of the world.

This is an enormously ambitious project, hard to imagine on first reading. But, for now, I hope I've given you enough to start thinking about it.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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Reclaiming Sociality: Rethinking Community in the Age of Corporate Control

[I buried an important statement of purpose in a forbidding and unreadable previous post. So here it is again, rewritten and updated, easier to find and to read.]

In the context of modern civilization, many of the intimate community structures that once shaped human life have been fragmented and reconfigured by larger institutional forces. This transformation has often resulted in a commodification of human connection, where once-meaningful interactions are extracted, altered, and repackaged in ways that benefit powerful entities, leaving many of us feeling increasingly disconnected and individualized.

But what if there was a way to reimagine and rebuild our communities to counteract this trend? The Communitarium Project offers a potential path forward.

The Shift in Community Dynamics

Historically, human interactions often occurred in direct, face-to-face settings where decisions were made transparently and collaboratively. However, over the past few centuries, the rise of centralized institutions and corporate algorithms has transformed these interactions into more transactional and profit-driven exchanges. The result has been a shift away from organic communal bonds towards more controlled, monetized forms of engagement.

For instance, social media platforms provide an illusion of connection while primarily serving as tools for data collection and commercial exploitation. Corporate wellness programs and engagement initiatives, while marketed as ways to enhance well-being and collaboration, frequently function as mechanisms for gathering data and reinforcing control.

In this landscape, our natural tendencies for cooperation and meaningful interaction are often co-opted for purposes that may not align with collective good. The rich textures of everyday social interaction have been flattened, standardized, and absorbed into systems that prioritize efficiency and profit.

Introducing the Communitarium Project

The Communitarium Project responds to this trend by aiming to offer an alternative that reconnects with the essence of intimate, small-scale sociality. Drawing from the insights of scholars like Erving Goffman and James Scott, the project seeks to establish platforms that support genuine interaction and collective decision-making.

Central to the Communitarium is its decentralized, open-source design. Unlike corporate platforms, which centralize power and control, the Communitarium operates on local servers, allowing communities to create their own environments for communication and collaboration. This approach seeks to provide tools for building relationships and making decisions in ways that are less susceptible to commercial exploitation and surveillance.

Inspired by the resilience of small-scale social systems, the Communitarium aims to create spaces where communities can thrive without the constraints imposed by large-scale institutions. By focusing on direct, accountable interactions, it strives to counteract the effects of standardization and hierarchical control.

Reclaiming Community

The Communitarium Project represents more than just a technological solution; it is a step towards reclaiming the forms of community that have been diminished in modern society. It acknowledges that the fragmentation and alienation many experience are not inevitable but are the result of deliberate processes of extraction and commodification.

Through fostering environments for open deliberation and shared action, the Communitarium seeks to restore trust, accountability, and transparency in community interactions. It offers a vision of a world where human connection is valued not as a commodity but as a shared resource for building a more equitable society.

Moving Forward

Addressing the challenges posed by current institutional dynamics requires concerted effort and innovation. The Communitarium Project provides a framework for leveraging technology in ways that support rather than undermine human connection. By creating spaces where communities can engage freely, it offers a path towards reimagining how we live and interact together.

This initiative marks the beginning of a journey towards reclaiming and revitalizing our social bonds. The path ahead is complex, but the Communitarium Project represents a meaningful step towards a future where community and connection can flourish on their own terms.

#TheCommunitariumProject

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Communitarium Project – IV

Cultivating Civic Engagement and Ecological Evaluation

In previous posts, we've discussed how the Communitarium Project offers an alternative to the capitalist lifestyle by fostering solidarity, mutual aid, and collective action. In this post, we’ll explore how communitaria can play a crucial role in re-educating people in the lost arts of civic engagement and democratic participation. At the same time, we’ll examine how these spaces can serve as laboratories for ecological evaluation, enabling a more holistic, context-sensitive approach to decision-making and problem-solving.

The erosion of civic engagement in modern society is not just a symptom of capitalism—it’s a deliberate feature of what Neal Curtis calls idiotism. This term refers to a state where people are isolated from the public realm, leading to the degradation of their capacity for collective action and shared governance. Under capitalism, we are conditioned to retreat into hyper-individualism, treating public issues as distant, irrelevant, or simply unsolvable. The Communitarium Project aims to reverse this process by creating environments where democratic participation and public life are not only encouraged but required for community well-being.

Rebuilding Civic Engagement

The capitalist system has stripped away much of the infrastructure that once supported vibrant civic life. Town halls, cooperatives, and local councils have given way to consumerist spaces and a politics of disengagement. Communitaria seek to restore these lost forms of social life by providing platforms where people can relearn the practices of cooperation, deliberation, and shared responsibility.

In communitaria, participation is not a choice—it’s a way of life. Members are expected to be active in decision-making, from the management of resources to conflict resolution and project planning. This participatory structure offers a space for training in civic virtues, such as accountability, transparency, and compromise. Unlike the transactional logic of capitalism, which encourages competition and individual gain, communitaria are spaces where collective well-being is prioritized. Here, people can practice solidarity as a learned behavior, not just a response to crisis but an ongoing, deeply ingrained practice.

Training for Cooperation and Deliberation

The Communitarium Project also offers a direct response to the cultural and political isolation fostered by idiotism. In capitalist societies, most people lack meaningful opportunities to engage in governance, often left feeling powerless or indifferent. Communitaria can break this cycle by offering hands-on experience in democratic processes. From electing representatives to organizing community projects, participants gain skills in cooperation, negotiation, and deliberation.

These micro-democracies will serve as real-life laboratories where people can practice self-governance, learning how to navigate the complexities of communal life. By engaging in these processes, participants build the confidence and skills necessary to engage in broader forms of public life beyond the walls of their community. This kind of education can ripple outward, rebuilding a culture of civic engagement that has been systematically dismantled by capitalist structures.

Ecological Evaluation as a Core Practice

But civic engagement is only part of the transformation that communitaria aim to bring about. They also provide an ideal setting for a more holistic, multi-dimensional approach to problem-solving: ecological evaluation. As we discussed in earlier posts, ecological evaluation moves beyond narrow, quantifiable metrics—favoring an approach that accounts for the social, ecological, and communal impacts of decisions. The capitalist evaluative model prioritizes efficiency, profit, and growth, often at the expense of the environment and community well-being. In contrast, ecological evaluation demands that we consider the full spectrum of consequences, recognizing that no decision occurs in a vacuum.

Communitaria, with their emphasis on participatory governance, are natural incubators for this kind of evaluative practice. Decision-making in these spaces isn’t confined to economic metrics; instead, it considers the broader effects on relationships, ecosystems, and community health. By embedding ecological evaluation into the fabric of communitaria, we can begin to normalize this broader, more thoughtful approach to decision-making.

Shifting the Evaluative Default

In the long run, communitaria could shift the default approach to evaluation away from capitalist models. Over time, members would come to see ecological evaluation as the natural way to make decisions, whether they are managing communal resources, developing infrastructure, or resolving disputes. By regularly practicing this form of evaluation, they would develop a richer sense of how their choices impact not only their immediate community but also the wider world. This would mark a profound cultural shift, one in which people come to value complexity and interconnection over efficiency and reductionism.

Communitaria thus represent more than just an alternative lifestyle. They are spaces where people can relearn both the lost skills of civic engagement and the lost art of evaluating holistically. In contrast to the alienation and isolation of capitalism, communitaria provide environments in which members can actively participate in the governance of their own lives, practicing solidarity and sustainability as intertwined processes.

Cultivating a New Culture of Solidarity and Evaluation

By combining participatory governance and ecological evaluation, communitaria offer a blueprint for rebuilding public life in a post-capitalist world. As these communities proliferate, they could create a new culture in which people not only engage in collective decision-making but also approach every issue with a broader understanding of value—recognizing the interconnectedness of social, environmental, and personal well-being.

In this sense, communitaria are not merely alternatives to capitalist living; they are crucibles in which new ways of thinking, acting, and evaluating can be forged. Over time, as more people experience these new systems of incentives, constraints, and values, they may begin to shift away from the capitalist lifestyle without even consciously opposing it. Instead, they will simply adopt new habits of life that prioritize cooperation, sustainability, and collective well-being.

The Communitarium Project, therefore, offers not just a critique of capitalism but a vision of how to build something better—one community at a time. By embedding civic engagement and ecological evaluation into everyday life, it provides a practical path toward creating a more just, sustainable, and meaningful world.

The Communitariun Project, Part I: Living the “Capitalist Lifestyle” Without Knowing It

The Communitarium Project, Part II: Imagining a New Way of Life: From Capitalist Erosion to Real Utopias

The Communitarium Project, Part III: Combatting “Idiotism” and Rebuilding Our Collective Life Through the Communitarium Project

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Communitarium Project – III

Combatting “Idiotism” and Rebuilding Our Collective Life Through the Communitarium Project

One of the greatest challenges in building alternatives to the capitalist lifestyle is confronting the way in which our very ability to participate meaningfully in society has been eroded. Neal Curtis, in his book Idiotism: Capitalism and the Privatization of Life, describes how capitalism has systematically “privatized” our social existence, reducing our capacity to engage with others and view ourselves as part of a collective. Curtis argues that this privatization creates what he calls idiotism—not in the pejorative sense of the word, but derived from the Greek idiotes, meaning someone who is concerned only with their private affairs and removed from public life.

In this post, we explore how the Communitarium Project seeks to combat idiotism by rebuilding the collective sphere of life. In a world where our attention, relationships, and communities are constantly commodified, communitaria offer an alternative that reclaims these basic human needs for collective good, restoring meaning to our interactions and relationships beyond their market value. Through this process, we can confront the capitalist forces that keep us isolated, hyper-individualized, and disconnected from our ability to act collectively.

Idiotism: The Privatization of Life

Under capitalism, we are increasingly encouraged to live as isolated individuals. The idea of being part of a community, or seeing oneself as responsible to and for others, has been replaced by the imperative to compete, consume, and maximize personal gain. Curtis’ notion of idiotism captures how capitalism shrinks the scope of our lives, directing our energies inward toward private concerns—our careers, our purchases, our individual successes—at the expense of any sense of broader solidarity or public responsibility.

Idiotism is more than just a retreat from civic engagement; it is a fundamental reshaping of how we experience the world. As consumers, we are trained to view everything through the lens of individual utility. Our relationships, attention, and time become commodities to be bought, sold, and optimized for personal benefit. Even basic human capacities like trust, cooperation, and care for others are reshaped into transactional, market-driven interactions.

In this way, idiotism dovetails with the capitalist lifestyle. Under the current hegemonic system, people are often unaware that their daily choices and actions—far from being “free”—are deeply shaped by capitalist ideologies that prioritize individualism, consumption, and competition. Our sense of solidarity and shared purpose is eroded, replaced by a world where public life is minimized, and we retreat into our own private spheres.

The Communitarium as a Solution to Idiotism

The Communitarium Project seeks to confront this privatization by rebuilding public, collective spaces for meaning generation and social life. In contrast to idiotism, communitaria offer a lifestyle that is rooted in community, cooperation, and shared responsibility. Rather than seeing themselves as isolated consumers, members of a communitarium experience a way of living that is grounded in mutual aid, collaboration, and care for others.

Within communitaria, people actively engage in the governance, management, and nurturing of their communities. The spaces themselves are designed to foster these connections. Whether they are physical, digital, or a blend of both, communitaria provide a platform where people can contribute to and benefit from collective life. From shared resources to cooperative decision-making, these communities offer a radical alternative to the privatized existence that capitalism promotes.

One of the key ways the communitarium combats idiotism is by providing structures where people can see the tangible results of their cooperation. For example, instead of relying on corporate-owned services to meet their needs, communitarium members might collectively grow food, run community kitchens, or develop shared housing. This fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility that goes beyond individual consumption and helps people recognize the power of collective action.

Reclaiming the Intimate Processes of Social Life

In the first post, we discussed how capitalism has “fracked” the most intimate processes of social reality—our trust, attention, and ability to cooperate—and turned them into resources to be exploited at scale. This not only commodifies our relationships but also distorts the very nature of what it means to be human. Under capitalism, our ability to connect with others is repurposed into something transactional, which strips away the deeper meanings that can only be found in genuine, non-market-driven interactions.

The Communitarium Project offers a space to reclaim these processes. By building communities that prioritize human connection over market value, communitaria restore the capacity for trust, cooperation, and solidarity. Members of a communitarium are not competing with each other for scarce resources or trying to maximize personal gain; instead, they are building a community that supports collective well-being. This restores the schmooze-level social reality—the day-to-day interactions and meaning-making processes that form the bedrock of human life, but which have been so deeply exploited under capitalism.

Communitaria create the conditions for these basic social processes to thrive by removing the incentives for competition and consumption. They offer a space where people can focus on mutual support, shared goals, and collective decision-making. In doing so, they actively counteract the hyper-individualism that capitalism encourages and create a culture where solidarity and cooperation are valued over personal gain.

Resisting Hyper-Individualism Through Solidarity

One of the most insidious effects of idiotism is the way it isolates us, making collective action seem impossible. The idea of solidarity—of acting together for mutual benefit—feels foreign to many people who have been trained to see themselves as competitors in a zero-sum game. This hyper-individualism not only impedes our ability to work together but also leaves us vulnerable to exploitation, as we are less able to organize and demand better conditions for ourselves and our communities.

The Communitarium Project directly challenges this by creating spaces where solidarity is not just a theoretical concept but a lived reality. In a communitarium, members see firsthand how their collective efforts can create positive change. Whether it’s through shared governance, resource pooling, or mutual support systems, communitaria provide a model for how people can come together to meet their needs without relying on the market or the state.

Over time, as more people experience life in a communitarium, the capitalist narrative of hyper-individualism begins to break down. People start to see that cooperation is not only possible but preferable—that solidarity can provide security and fulfillment in ways that capitalism cannot. The communitarium becomes a seedbed for new forms of social organization, where people learn to trust each other again, where mutual aid replaces competition, and where collective well-being is prioritized over individual gain.

Toward a Collective Future

Ultimately, the Communitarium Project represents a bold vision for combatting idiotism and reclaiming our collective life. By creating spaces where people can reconnect with one another and with the deeper, non-commodified processes of social reality, communitaria offer a real alternative to the privatized existence that capitalism promotes. They provide a model for how we can live differently, rooted in solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid.

As these communities grow and proliferate, they have the potential to erode the capitalist structures that keep us isolated and disconnected. The more people experience the value of collective life, the less they will be drawn to the hyper-individualism of capitalism. In this way, communitaria offer a path toward a future where idiotism is replaced by a renewed sense of shared purpose and public life—a future where solidarity and cooperation are not just ideals but realities.

In the next post, we will explore how the Communitarium Project can scale up these efforts and create lasting, structural change that extends beyond individual communities. By building networks of communitaria, we can begin to lay the groundwork for a new way of organizing society—one that prioritizes human connection, collective responsibility, and the common good. Stay tuned for more on how we can bring this vision to life.

The Communitariun Project, Part I: Living the “Capitalist Lifestyle” Without Knowing It

The Communitarium Project, Part II: Imagining a New Way of Life: From Capitalist Erosion to Real Utopias

The Communitarium Project, Part IV: Cultivating Civic Engagement and Ecological Evaluation

#TheCommunitariumProject

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The Communitarium Project – II

Imagining a New Way of Life: From Capitalist Erosion to Real Utopias

[What follows was largely generated by ChatGPT, after extensive prompting by me. It conveys my basic thoughts pretty well but... ChatGPT is prone to a style I call 'corporate rah-rah', stating as certainty things I am more comfortable proclaiming as possibilities. I have, in one place below, crossed out ChatGPT's phrasing and substituted my own. Elsewhere I have inserted my own writing — surrounded by brackets. I have not made as many changes as I deem warranted but those changes I have made should be enough to give you an idea of how I would do so.

One big point I should make clear: Although in what follows it is sometimes unclear, my immediate vision of the Communitarium Project is strictly one of the forging of online spaces. I thinks such spaces can serve as think tanks, laboratories, prototypes, and staging grounds for the larger projects of “capitalist erosion” which will be required in the real world. I also believe that, in important ways, the online world is more vulnerable to collective action than are institutions of the real world, something which I believe the rise of TikTok demonstrates.

And now, our feature presentation: ]

Introduction

If the first step in resisting the capitalist lifestyle is recognizing it for what it is, the next step is imagining alternatives. What does it mean to live differently? And how do we create spaces where people can experience a lifestyle that doesn’t revolve around productivity, consumption, and individual competition?

In this post, we explore how the Communitarium Project can foster a new way of living by drawing on the ideas of Erik Olin Wright, particularly his notions of “real utopias” and “capitalist erosion.” Wright’s work provides a useful framework for understanding how small, intentional efforts can challenge capitalism and create viable alternatives, even within the system itself.

The Power of Real Utopias

Erik Olin Wright’s concept of “real utopias” starts from a simple but radical premise: Utopian thinking—envisioning a better, more just world—isn’t just a matter of fantasy or speculative fiction. Instead, utopian ideals can guide the creation of real-world institutions, practices, and communities that embody those ideals. Wright believed that we can experiment with different forms of organization and social relations that represent the values we want to see flourish in society. These experiments might start small, but their success lies in their ability to demonstrate that alternatives to capitalism are not only possible but desirable.

A “real utopia” is a space where cooperation, equity, and collective well-being are prioritized over competition and profit. It’s a place where the values that often seem out of reach in a capitalist society—solidarity, mutual aid, sustainability—are made tangible. Wright believed that real utopias could act as prefigurative models, showing that a different world is possible even within the constraints of our current system.

The Communitarium Project is, in essence, a real utopia. It envisions intentional communities—both physical and digital—where people can organize their lives around principles that subvert the capitalist logic. Within communitaria, the lifestyle isn’t driven by market incentives or individual gain, but by cooperation and shared responsibility. These communities offer a lived experience of an alternative way of life, not as an abstract theory but as a tangible, practical reality.

Capitalist Erosion: Chipping Away at the System

Wright’s idea of “capitalist erosion” refers to the process by which alternative institutions gradually weaken the hold of capitalism by providing functional, attractive alternatives to capitalist structures. Rather than waiting for a revolutionary overthrow of the system, capitalist erosion suggests that the slow, steady growth of non-capitalist practices can undercut capitalism’s dominance.

One key mechanism of capitalist erosion is the creation of spaces where people can meet their needs in ways that do not rely on capitalist markets. This is where the Communitarium Project plays a critical role can play a role. By building communities based on collective ownership, shared resources, and cooperative decision-making, communitaria [can] erode the capitalist lifestyle by offering an alternative that is not only feasible but preferable. The more people engage with these spaces, the more they begin to see that capitalism is not the only option.

For example, within a communitarium, members might [,eventually,] collectively own resources, such as housing, food production systems, or even digital infrastructure. [More immediately, they can certainly undertake to create and own their own digital platforms. ] Decisions about how to allocate resources are made democratically, prioritizing the collective well-being of the group over profit or individual gain. In doing so, the communitarium offers an alternative to the hyper-individualism and consumerism of capitalist life. It shows that people can meet their needs through solidarity and cooperation rather than competition and accumulation.

Over time, as more people participate in communitaria and other non-capitalist spaces, the dominance of capitalist institutions can be eroded. This is not to say that capitalism will disappear overnight, but that its hold on everyday life can be weakened as people find ways to live outside its logic. The proliferation of real utopias—like the communitarium—can slowly undermine the capitalist system by providing functional alternatives that chip away at its monopoly on organizing social life.

Creating the Conditions for Capitalist Erosion

One of the most important tasks of the Communitarium Project is to create the conditions for capitalist erosion to take place. This means not only establishing communitaria but also making them accessible and attractive to people who are accustomed to living within a capitalist framework. It’s important to recognize that most people living a capitalist lifestyle aren’t actively choosing it—they’re simply responding to the incentives and constraints of the world around them. The challenge is to create spaces where different incentives and constraints exist, so people can experience a new way of living without feeling like they have to “opt out” of the system.

This is where Wright’s concept of “interstitial transformation” becomes useful. Rather than seeking to confront capitalism head-on, interstitial transformation involves building alternative practices within the cracks and margins of the system. The Communitarium Project aims to build these “cracks” by creating spaces where people can experiment with new ways of organizing their lives—ways that are not bound by the logic of the market but instead prioritize human connection, mutual aid, and sustainability.

For example, a communitarium might offer a platform for resource-sharing that operates outside of traditional market mechanisms. People could share tools, skills, or even housing in ways that prioritize collective well-being over individual gain. In doing so, they are participating in a small-scale version of what a post-capitalist world could look like, while also weakening capitalism’s grip on their lives.

Living the Alternative

The most powerful aspect of the Communitarium Project is that it allows people to live the alternative, rather than merely theorize about it. One of the challenges in confronting capitalism is that it feels so all-encompassing, so totalizing, that imagining life beyond it can seem impossible. But real utopias like communitaria show that another way of life is not only imaginable but already happening.

The key to capitalist erosion lies in making this alternative lifestyle accessible, attractive, and sustainable. As more people come to see the value of cooperation, mutual aid, and shared responsibility, the capitalist lifestyle will begin to feel less inevitable. In the next posts, we’ll explore how the Communitarium Project can build the structures and networks necessary to make this new way of living a reality for more people, and how the gradual erosion of capitalist norms can open the door to a more just and sustainable world.

Stay tuned as we delve into the specific practices, values, and structures that communitaria can offer, and how these real utopias can grow and proliferate to create lasting change.

The Communitariun Project, Part I: Living the “Capitalist Lifestyle” Without Knowing It

The Communitarium Project, Part III: Combatting “Idiotism” and Rebuilding Our Collective Life Through the Communitarium Project The Communitarium Project, Part IV: Cultivating Civic Engagement and Ecological Evaluation

#TheCommunitariumProject

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The Communitarium Project – I

Living the “Capitalist Lifestyle” Without Knowing It

Introduction

Most of us don’t wake up each day and consciously decide to live according to capitalist values. In fact, many people don’t even think about their daily decisions in terms of capitalism. We simply make the best choices we can—about what jobs to take, what products to buy, how to spend our time—based on what’s available to us. Yet, whether we realize it or not, we’re living within a “capitalist lifestyle.” This doesn’t mean we’re all rabid defenders of capitalism, but rather that the systems of incentives, constraints, and ideas that shape our lives overwhelmingly favor and reinforce capitalist structures.

Let’s break this down. The capitalist lifestyle refers to more than just engaging in a market economy or holding certain political beliefs. It’s a pattern of living that centers on productivity, consumption, and individual achievement. These values have become so deeply embedded in our culture that we rarely stop to question them, much less recognize that they belong to a particular system. Instead, they feel like “just the way things are.” We work hard to achieve personal success (or even just to keep our heads above water), compete with others to get ahead, and consume products and services to meet our needs or improve our status. The world is built to reward these behaviors, so naturally, we follow along.

The Invisible Hand of Capitalist Incentives

What’s crucial here is that most people living within this capitalist framework don’t necessarily know they’re doing so. It’s not a matter of choosing to support a capitalist system out of ideological commitment; it’s simply the way the world around us operates. From an early age, we are taught to measure success in terms of financial gain, professional advancement, and personal achievement. Schools train us for competitive careers, workplaces reward us for maximizing productivity, and the broader culture celebrates consumption as a form of self-expression. These incentives are so pervasive that we often accept them without a second thought.

Consider the following examples:

  • Education: Students are steered toward degrees and careers that promise the highest earnings potential, with little attention given to what kind of work benefits society as a whole or fosters personal fulfillment.
  • Work: Jobs are increasingly precarious and competitive, rewarding those who hustle hardest, while collective efforts or community-oriented careers are undervalued.
  • Leisure: Our free time is filled with activities designed to keep us consuming—whether through streaming services, shopping, or engaging with social media—all of which operate on platforms that profit from our participation.

These examples show that the capitalist lifestyle isn’t just about working in a capitalist economy; it’s about how we internalize the values of that system, how it shapes our behavior, and how it limits our options. When the incentives of the system steer us toward individualism and consumption, it’s hard to imagine alternatives that prioritize cooperation, solidarity, or community well-being.

A Way of Life by Default

Because capitalism is so ingrained in our daily lives, we often don’t recognize that our choices are being made within a constrained system. It’s like living inside a box where all the rewards and signs of success point in one direction: individual gain. And the more we follow those signs, the more we reinforce the capitalist system itself.

This doesn’t mean we’re powerless or that people can’t resist. In fact, many people are already trying to live outside these constraints by prioritizing communal activities, adopting sustainable living practices, or organizing collective projects. But the system as it stands makes these choices difficult to sustain. The “capitalist lifestyle” isn’t just about how we spend our money or time—it’s a whole way of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world. It’s a structure that encourages us to believe that personal advancement is the highest goal and that success comes from maximizing our individual potential.

Breaking Free: Awareness as the First Step

The first step to challenging the capitalist lifestyle is recognizing it for what it is: not an inevitable reality, but a system that shapes our choices and values. We don’t need to subscribe to anti-capitalist ideologies to begin questioning this lifestyle. Instead, we can start by asking ourselves how much of our daily life is driven by external incentives that reinforce individualism, productivity, and consumption at the expense of community, cooperation, and mutual well-being.

What would happen if we designed a lifestyle that rewarded different behaviors—where the systems of incentives and constraints were restructured to prioritize collaboration over competition, shared resources over personal wealth, and collective well-being over individual achievement? This question brings us to the heart of the Communitarium Project.

In the following posts, we’ll explore how the Communitarium Project aims to create spaces where people can experience a new way of living, one that doesn’t rely on opposing capitalism directly but instead offers a viable and appealing alternative. Through these intentional communities—both online and offline—people can start to see the possibilities for a different kind of life, one that is built on cooperation, solidarity, and mutual care.

In short, the capitalist lifestyle might be the default for now, but it doesn’t have to be the only option. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into how we can begin to shift from the invisible hand of capitalism to something more meaningful and sustainable for everyone.

The Communitarium Project, Part II: Imagining a New Way of Life: From Capitalist Erosion to Real Utopias

The Communitarium Project, Part III: Combatting “Idiotism” and Rebuilding Our Collective Life Through the Communitarium Project The Communitarium Project, Part IV: Cultivating Civic Engagement and Ecological Evaluation

#TheCommunitariumProject

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