Practical Revolution

Building a new society in the shell of the old can seem so impossibly hard. Capitalism, meanwhile, makes organizing ourselves look easy by paying us to pretend that’s what we’re doing. Maybe the longing for leaderless swarms in the protests of 2011 partly stemmed from the image of a team at a software conglomerate, or a noncommercial, open-source project nonetheless parasitic on its corporate sponsors. But the kind of democracy and community we glean from tech culture lacks a deep structure, a core; tech culture is particularly good at disguising the reality that its core has become investor returns and Wall Street IPOs. The CEO’s absolute authority dresses up like charisma. Rapt in admiration, we the people are being de-skilled out of actual self-organizing.

This article by Nathan Schneider in The Nation is a fascinating look at a "distributed think tank" called Edgeryders and their efforts toward establishing what they call an "unMonastery" in Matera, Italy. The unMonastery was a hackerspace dedicated to living cheaply and working on projects such as open-source alternative energy sources.

Essentially, the unMonastery attempted to self-organize in a way that disregarded, or at least sidestepped, the rules of capitalism, bringing together unused space with underutilized people to help build a better world. Does it sound impractical? Sure. But think about why: our system is rigged so that if you want to survive, let alone thrive, you need to possess a certain minimum amount of a fictional construct (money), and the amount you can gain on your own is set by an equally artificial beast (the market).* There are many ways to lose this game, but it's almost impossible not to play.

So, with this kind of revolution, the challenge is to play the game well enough to stay alive, while simultaneously testing new rules, which will only stick around if they're practical, feasible, and beneficial enough to outweigh the inevitable costs. It's inherently an experiment; failures are part of the process. And with each failure, we'll learn a little more about what the next system will someday be.