Take the initiative

Sociatecture

is a vessel for ideas, a tool for realizing those ideas, and eventually a group action. It provokes and sponsors basic social renovations, from secession and conversion services, to setting up parallel people’s governments, to organizing courses in self-determination and cooperation, to redesigning neighborhoods. This website is like an idea bank, a place to withdraw notions for a social designer's thinking. Or, it is a toolbox, where ideas are tools. It is not a planning social engineering site.

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  • By means of Thinkamajig, it encourages socially open dialogue about basic social issues, including those issues that organize the energies of Sociatecture.
  • Through DiaTribe, WikiEthica, and WikiPlan it conducts research into and records possibilities for socio-individual transformation and for linking existing efforts. Individuals and groups are welcome to contribute.
  • It’s most active processes are the College for a New Society, the Conversion and Secession services, and Architectural Streets Theater. Here we intervene in ongoing social processes in order to imagine new paths towards the goals of direct democracy, equitable economic life, multidimensional persons, self-determination, and various forms of co-autonomy. Once again, this involves as many people as are interested.

A few foundational ideas to work from:

  • Neither individuals nor groups have essences. Both are dynamically changing gatherings of various energies, emotions, thoughts, materials, and practices—all of which are continually (if not so obviously) in flux. Hence, identity—whether individual or collective—is highly fluid, and is healthiest when its fluid character is on display and when emphasis is concomitantly placed on practices and processes.
  • Correlatively, society is something we do or put into practice, as are cities, states, and nations. Every group is a way of actively arranging ourselves, our practices, and our materials; none are things.
  • We are positively atheistic, modeled more on primitive Daoism in China than on contemporary debates in European network. That means there is this life, this world, and that’s it. No otherworldly space-time to escape to. No natural leaders to guide living.
  • Disconnected utopian design is the most destructive form of social design. Instead, we create opportunities for participation in design of society. Hence, Sociatecture is a designer of participatory processes of social design.
  • Though we generally do not initiate them, we support dark anarchist critiques (through direct action) of given social conditions. We ourselves have a feel more for light anarchism.
  • Ideas have authors—that is, there are speakers for ideas and artists of ideas. They cannot, however, be owned and should not be copyrighted or registered as trademarks. Open source is our style. They are invited to contribute who are interested not in hijacking the above proposals but in being moved by and elaborating (on) them.
  • We are largely ruled by psychology; our self-awareness is essential to engagement with authoritarian relationships and to break through the myths which dominate social reality.

a fuller philosophy for sociatecture:

Key concepts:

  • sociality
  • socio-individuality
  • self-organization
  • design
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