Towards a Digital Pluriverse

Futures of polycentrism , beyond either atomized decentralization or top-down centralization, where collective self-determination is protected through overlapping rights and responsibilities, abundant digital public infrastructure, and mechanisms for accountable governance.

we imagine the digital pluriverse as a space that can make way for a mosaic of communal, alternative, and autonomous cultural and economic worlds.

These advocates aimed to counter the universal–not with a disregard of all things universal, but with an embrace of ‘many universals’. This is not a rejection of the necessity of scale; instead, it embraces federation and branching and —pluricultures over monocultures. Thus, the pluriverse arrays itself against a single universality as much as it i... See more

to navigate the intersections between scale and regeneration, between growth and the commons. A principle of ‘many universals’ could provide the framework for balancing the tension between, on one hand, enabling community-led and governed projects to flourish, and, on the other, the need to then challenge massive and well-resourced centers of power... See more

Futures where we move past tired promises of “freedom from”—from established institutions, from regulation, from responsibility—and towards the shared capacity for building “freedom to”—to create, to learn, to struggle, to strengthen collective institutions, to ensure shared security.

Meaningful alternatives are possible:

How might we actualize this ethic within the digital realm?

For this, we turn to pattern languages, an organized and coherent set of patterns , each describing a problem and the core of a solution, illustrated with examples . The term was coined by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa in their 1977 book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction which contains hundreds of pa... See more

We turn to the frame of the Pluriverse because we believe it has much to offer in a time when our current digital space is increasingly colonized by a single vision of what is possible—a vision spurred on by the incentive structures of enclosure and control.

Futures of regenerative scale and shared growth, that combat monoculture through a stronger, broader, and more rooted ecology of adaptation and co-evolution.