It feels like the world is getting meaner. Scarier. Our backs against the wall from problems immediate and local, slow-boiling and global.
How did we get here? What is a diagnosis for the mess we are in? What are the “rootiest roots”, the factors that are most causally upstream to all the outcomes we observe? And can we use our understanding for leverage?
We can try to understand what is occurring, I have, but an analytical approach will be mired in disagreement — in a post-fact society it is practically impossible to reach global consensus about the contemporary. There is no common ground to build on. This is part of the problem, we lack the means to collectively reason and reach consensus about our problems.
In the absence of global consensus, the pragmatic alternative is local triage. What can we do in our local circumstances to act?
DWeb As Local Triage
To me, DWeb is a movement about culture more than technology, and one word sums it up: autonomy.
An autonomous, self-sufficient system does not need to reason about the global picture. It can operate locally in accordance with its needs, it does not need permission to start, it can just get going.
A movement based on autonomy is also one of strong tolerance. Anecdotally, the kind of people who care about DWeb seem to also have a desire to be true to themselves, to be authentic and integrous; I believe it is the root of why they care about autonomy in the first place. Autonomy is a defense mechanism, a way to guarantee that our truest self is safe to exist.
For DWeb to be truly autonomous it must start with social structures that are also self-reliant, and must enable them to serve themselves. “No man is an island”, no individual can be autonomous on their own. But a community?
Serving Community to Serve Itself
What we think of as “human” — culture, language, morality, technology — arose in the context of community. An alienated individual in a kind of Hobbesian jungle does not need them and cannot sustain them. They are communal and collective in nature.
Echoing Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone I do not think it is a coincidence that collapse of community coincides with rise of alienation. If transactionality is the language of impersonal large-scale institutions of markets, corporations, and governments, then reciprocity is the language of community. Collapse of community is collapse of reciprocity, leaving the transactional, scarce and mean.
“Econ” in economy comes from “oikos” meaning house, or home. Baked literally into “economy” is an assumption that the smallest autonomous unit of society is the home; it is the root of safety. If autonomy is the means, safety is the end. If local triage starts with autonomy, then change starts at home.
For me that means two things. A house — physical shelter designed to address material needs. A community — social safety that comes from caring and being cared for by others. Nuclear family is the smallest possible formulation of home, and arguably has proved insufficient; it needs more community.
We have to work with the world as it is, and an urban group-house delivers a step-change in self-reliance and autonomy without going to the extreme of moving off grid and setting up a commune.
Autonomy will not happen overnight. But something else begins to happen. Imagination is grounded in experience, experience creates the metaphorical space to reason within. Transactional experiences inform a transactional imagination. In contrast, living in a community provides a daily practice of shared infrastructures, and with it, a new vocabulary to reason with, and a new future to build towards.
A Path To and From Autonomy
What does local triage look like in the context of home? Cutting costs.
From an actuarial standpoint “cutting costs” is synonymous with building autonomy.
When a company increases revenue it is inherently extractive, not necessary in a bad way, but energy is leaving one system and entering another. Conversely, cost reduction means decreasing the flow of resources leaving the system. Cost reduction comes from two sources: self-reliance, and recognition and reduction of false needs.
Cutting costs is in-housing our needs, sourcing solutions from within the system. It is building self-reliance.
Cutting costs is recognition and reduction of false needs. This starts with awareness, seeking understanding of our own motives, and learning the difference between perceived and true needs. This is non-trivial, it is an object that is so close to your face that it is difficult to take into focus.
There is a deep and tragic irony of consumerism. Why do we need a car? Is it functional, a need for transportation? Or is it something else? Is it status, a sense of self-image, the belief that I am the kind of person that should look a certain part? Why does this self-image matter?
Status matters because it comes with the promise of social safety. High status is worthy of love, it is worthy of help, it deserves safety. There is a simple reason that the drive for status is insatiable: it is a false promise.
Safety based on transactionality is not safety, because transactionality shows the precise limits of care. Safety is something deeper. Safety is knowing you are fundamentally enough, rather than having enough. From this perspective, the billionaire class represents wealth without safety. They are parched on a desert island, trying to quench their thirst with oil rather than water. They need water like the rest of us, they need home, but keep chugging oil.
If autonomy is the means, safety is the end, and safety comes from community. It comes from paying forward care by catching others, and learning safety by being caught yourself.
Cutting costs means building communal autonomy, in-housing our needs, recognizing false needs, and building safety by catching and being caught.
A New Loop
Cutting costs begets self-reliance, self-reliance begets safety, safety begets self-awareness of false needs, which begets further cost-cutting. Benevolent cycle.
Turn fear and paralysis of the global scope into safety and action in the most local, and yet most universal, scope: home.
Only when home is safe can we start the work of looking outwards again. And when we do, we will not be alone, at the very least we will have a team, and at the very most we will have a federation. We will be prepared with the tools, imagination, and social power to build that world.
In the American Gilded Age, a period that had many uncanny rhymes with the present, the necessary response to concentrated scale was federated scale. But to build a federation requires something to federate, something local and autonomous. The first step of a federated response is an autonomous and safe home.
DWeb serves communities, to enable them to serve their own needs and build their own autonomy, and change starts at home.