Towards a Digital Pluriverse

The Pluriverse: A World Where Many Worlds Fit

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

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.

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.

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

This could look like financing mechanisms for open-source vs. closed-source infrastructure in order to enable community resourcing and abundance, navigating careful partnerships with existing institutions to build polycentric governance in the face of corporate control, and empowering data and platform cooperatives modeled after the worker cooperat... See more

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

Meaningful alternatives are possible:

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

Futures of plurality , where choice is meaningful because difference and divergence are possible.