“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
Ilya Prigogine
Living in community, especially a community actively aligned toward serving a particular cause, can imbue an otherwise mundane domestic life with splendid serendipity. The reduced cost of coordination, such as the high likelihood of spontaneous discussion and collaboration within the house, has proven over time to be conducive to various emergent developments. For example, our community house has several people actively working at the intersection of public goods and technology, and we’ve decided to host a residency to help catalyze collaboration across these efforts.
Our house, a co-op called Embassy, has been active for over a decade. Characterized by participatory governance and co-budgeting, Embassy has hosted salons, dinners, author discussions, and various other community events over the years, and has been home to hundreds of people. Several peer-support initiatives have spawned from here, ranging from restorative justice housing projects to communal housing application networks. Our current residency program, Automation for the People, is an inquisition into how emerging technology and alternative economics can serve the common good in non-extractive and convivial fashions. Participants in this program (including house stewards, program fellows, as well as members of the broader community) collaborate on projects ranging from home server configuration, coordination of post-labor economic discussion groups, thematically aligned film screenings, public salons, project showcases, and more.
Given this particular relational container, our daily routine affords plenty of opportunity for progress. We have our coffee on the porch together, and discuss the prospects of the looming economic collapse threatened by precarious rehypothecation between the leading AI companies. One of our fellows bakes a loaf of focaccia, which we enjoy while we work on our community home servers, deliberating on which utilities we think it can offer to our network, and how its infrastructure may prove resilient in the face of changing political and economic circumstances. Over the day, those of us who work from home do chores, track the bills to pay, schedule upcoming events at the house, place our communal grocery orders from the local grocery co-op, repair broken furniture, reset the bunk beds after guests leave, and handle the various other tasks associated with running a 20-person house. In the evening, one of our fellows plays the piano, while we scan books from our library into our new self-hosted book-lending platform, which our offline house AI can catalog and manage. Then we make some popcorn, and go downstairs to watch a Swiss film about a 19th century anarchist collective organizing in a town around a watch factory.
One of our house stewards has spoken of this idea of communal luxury, and how it can be incrementally rendered more accessible, if even slightly, to the wider public. Another house steward has argued in favor of the “complete development cycle” contained in the house, where ideation, development, and end users constitute a complete feedback loop for home-cooked software. At a high level, one can argue that our daily mode of relating with other people, and making sense of problems together, plays a determining role in the emergent higher orders of local, national, and global politics. If we can’t figure out how work together to keep our kitchen clean, how can we work together to keep our elections clean?
Much of the experimental economics of this living arrangement regard how domestic labor can be consolidated, how wasteful consumption can be minimized, and how the cost of having a robust and enriching social life can be reduced. Beyond that, many of our technological and governance inquiries concern how this lifestyle can be protocolized and rendered more accessible, so that a wider socio-economic stratum of the population can afford to practice it. Even if this model can’t scale beyond local communities, then hopefully some positive externalities can be generated.
