Building Capacity for Exit to Community

I want us to be writing more of these utopian sci-fi stories, because that's my dream, living in that post-capitalist Star Trek world. We can start in the world that we live in now, creating little bubbles of that new future, really living it, and inviting more and more people to live in that different reality with us, in a in a deeply real, moving... See more

I've worked in a lot of "non-hierarchical" organizations, and management or leadership do not go away. You don't succeed in that space by removing them and leaving a vacuum. You succeed by reinterpreting things like management and leadership into distributed processes, transparent roles that can rotate and are accountable back to the community at l... See more

Money is an important heuristic for groups to measure their capacity to support their work properly and not burn people out. Money is not the be all end all, but people get really put off by how it's been so co-opted by the capitalist, extractive system that we're trying to escape. My theory of change is, instead of running away from it, we need to... See more

Design-by-committee is a real risk for a software company. It's so hard to build software, because you can literally build anything, there are infinite possibilities, so you have to have a really coherent design and product vision. I really don't think you can distribute that to thousands of people, so we have to figure out where in the system that... See more

Ultimately, the non-transactional thing works on the basis of trust. You have to have trust first, before you can get that virtuous cycle going, because you have to start by giving and not knowing what you'll get back. It's something like an abundance mindset, trust in the community. But at the same time, if you give and you don't get meaningful va... See more

Exit to Community is values-aligned, structurally-aligned, and financially-aligned. For us, it makes a lot of sense.

It's hard to sit there complaining about paying money if you can see it costs $300 get the accountant to file that thing we need, and that the person you enjoy talking to gets paid this much. Seeing it all transparently is quite powerful.

No one in our community is super excited about putting down their main thing they're passionate about to just do governance. Builders and activists don't necessarily want to do a bunch of bureaucratic stuff. I hope we can make it feel immediate, like 'I participate and my voice is heard and it really has an influence that positively impacts me and ... See more

Money is an important heuristic for groups to measure their capacity to support their work properly and not burn people out. Money is not the be all end all, but people get really put off by how it's been so co-opted by the capitalist, extractive system that we're trying to escape. My theory of change is, instead of running away from it, we need to... See more