The Communal Cult
The Communal Cult
Technology is not limited to new devices. It includes the tools people use, the machinery behind workplaces, the networks that carry information, and the infrastructure communities depend on. Some of it is obvious; some becomes so ordinary that we stop seeing it as technology at all. Yet these systems shape how needs are met, how labor is organized, and who […]
I keep seeing people hoping the AI bubble will pop, and I don’t think many of them have really thought through what they want afterward. I hear people say they want AI gone because they’re tired of dealing with it and miss a time that felt simpler. I understand that feeling, but the bubble is about the money and speculation […]
Part of why I started my original friend group, The Communal Cult Discord, was that I was tired of having to deal with conservatives, reactionaries, and bigots. I wanted to have friends and a space where that wasn’t always the thing I had to work around. And having the group has helped me get clearer about who I actually want […]
Postleftism, metamodern communalism, and our departure from the inherited left 1) The Work of Liberation: We want a liberatory society in which people govern the conditions of their lives, hold productive resources in common, and receive what they need to live with dignity. Freedom should reach into the workplace, the home, and the institutions through which communities make decisions. People […]
The NO AI movement in VRChat was asking for a kind of control it hadn’t worked out how to exercise. Its supporters wanted AI excluded from their experience of the platform, and some wanted it removed altogether. A filter or a ban would need a reliable way to identify how the work had been made. The movement’s demands ran ahead […]
We need to stop talking about the AI bubble popping like the technology will disappear and the problems will sort themselves out. A bubble means investors have pushed prices beyond what a business can realistically justify. When it bursts, those bets fall apart. China has already had a sharp crash in some AI-linked shares, and American tech shares have taken […]
We keep acting as though knowing whether AI was used tells us whether a game is worth playing or a piece of art is worth looking at. It doesn’t. What VRChat and Valve have said about this gets at why that argument keeps going nowhere. VRChat has said it isn’t adding AI-generated labels or filters because people don’t agree on […]
Today is the day I mark as the beginning of my practice (October 31, 2008; when I was 13, so 18 years of study), and I guess it has me feeling sad. Looking back over this last year, I know I’ve made strides. I’ve developed ideas, put a lot into writing, and become clearer about what I believe. But I’m […]
1. Definition, Sacred Existence, and the unity of care Viadescioisc Veganism is the ethical, spiritual, ecological, and political practice of cultivating right relation through the continuing reduction of avoidable harm, exploitation, domination, and taking of life. It brings Viadescioism’s sacred understanding of existence into Viadescioisc Communalism’s commitments to shared provision, democratic stewardship, and liberation. It is philosophical in commitment, reducetarian […]
A Viadescioisc treatise on authoritarian socialism, technological abundance, and the liberatory society By Vaarla Ona 1. Party Rule Has No Claim to Socialism We refuse to concede socialism to Marxist-Leninist rule. Socialism requires the people to possess effective control over the productive resources and public institutions through which they live. A party that reserves the final authority for itself has […]
Our communalist flag brings together a green field, a golden sun, a blue center, interwoven rings, and a red star. We see in those linked rings communities cooperating while retaining […]
Our opposition to lifestylism, performativism, purity culture, and political unseriousness, and the constructive meaning of our post-leftism. By Vaarla Ona Our frustration: What exhausts us is the expectation that good intentions should settle questions about what people actually support. Someone can be compassionate in their immediate relationships while defending political arrangements that expose others to exploitation, exclusion, or violence. Their […]
1) Sacred Existence and Spiritual Reciprocity: We understand existence as relational, changing, and participatory. By a being, we mean anything that exists. Relationships are the connections through which beings affect, […]
We need to become more conscious of where our language comes from, because what we choose to say and what we refuse to say both help define who we are. Internet slang is rarely neutral: words move through communities, carry assumptions with them, and often reach us after their original context has been stripped away. Some language comes from ordinary […]
One of the principles we need to carry into the liberatory society is anti-cruelty. This matters precisely because liberation requires us to confront people, institutions, and movements that may be actively hostile to liberation. We are going to encounter reactionaries, authoritarians, fascists, racists, queerphobes, misogynists, and people who want to preserve systems of domination. We need to be capable of […]
One of the things we have to understand clearly is that authoritarian socialism is not the same thing as liberation, and the existence of social programs under an authoritarian state does not automatically make that state socialist in the emancipatory sense. This matters because people often point to achievements such as universal healthcare or mass education as though those things […]
The liberatory society is the society organized around the idea that people should have real power over their own lives, rather than being dominated by governments, employers, landlords, corporations, patriarchal institutions, racial hierarchies, or any other structure that treats some people as rulers and others as subjects. When we talk about the liberatory society, we are talking about one broader […]
I have very little patience for people who describe themselves as apolitical or politically nihilistic, especially when they want to enter a community that is explicitly progressive. The problem is that describing yourself as “outside politics” usually means refusing to think seriously about the social conditions that shape everyone’s lives. Politics is not limited to politicians, and parties. It includes […]
We have to reject one of the most poisonous confusions in revolutionary politics: the belief that a willingness to kill proves seriousness. Too many self-described revolutionaries, especially in the United States, have absorbed the deepest assumptions of American gun culture while imagining themselves to be opposing it. They reject the flag, the police, the Republican Party, the militia movement, and […]
Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians! My anti-Zionism comes from the same place as my opposition to every other system of domination: no people should have to live beneath another people in order for somebody else’s national project to survive. Zionism, as it has been realized through the Israeli state, created and preserves a political order in which […]
Anti-whiteness is not hatred of people with light skin. It is opposition to whiteness as a political and social system. Whiteness is a historically constructed category that was used to organize privilege, citizenship, labor, property, and social status in ways that separated Europeans from Africans, Indigenous peoples, and other racialized groups. In colonial Virginia, lawmakers gradually hardened racial distinctions in […]
A lot of people are attracted to Marxism-Leninism because authoritarian systems can look effective from the outside. They can build quickly, move resources quickly, reorganize cities quickly, punish corruption quickly, and carry out enormous projects without spending years asking whether everybody affected agrees. That speed can be mistaken for liberation. But there is a huge difference between getting something done […]
From my perspective, Marxism-Leninism is not truly anti-capitalist because it does not actually abolish the social relationship that makes capitalism what it is: a small group controlling production while everybody else works underneath them and has little real power over the economy. It changes who owns and manages capital, but it does not fundamentally change the structure of domination. Instead […]
I think spirituality and religion have to be taken seriously in any truly liberatory society, because human beings do not live only through economics, law, and politics. We also live through meaning, ritual, grief, awe, memory, mystery, death, hope, belonging, and the question of what our lives are for. A communalist, libertarian municipalist, and democratic confederalist society cannot simply inherit […]
I do not really consider myself a leftist, and I do not consider myself a Marxist either. I am a socialist, but my socialism does not come primarily through Marx. It comes much more from utopian socialism, religious socialism, older communal traditions, Indigenous and BIPOC forms of communal life, reciprocity, mutual obligation, shared stewardship, and the idea that human beings […]
A lot of people get stuck arguing over anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, council communism, communization theory, and all of these earlier revolutionary traditions as if one of them has to be the final answer. I do not think that is the most useful way to look at them. At their best, all of them are attempts to move away from domination and […]
Social revolution is not just taking power. It is changing what power is, where it lives, and how people relate to one another. Social revolution means moving from a society where people are governed from above to one where people increasingly govern themselves. Dual power means building institutions that ordinary people can rely on instead of depending entirely on institutions […]
I have been thinking a lot about how genuinely social-revolutionary communalism, libertarian municipalism, and democratic confederalism actually are. They do not just ask for a kinder version of the present world. They ask us to imagine a society that exists after capitalism, after domination, after the centralized state, after hierarchy has stopped being treated as the natural structure of human […]
Viadescioism is a living religion, spiritual philosophy, and spiritual practice founded on the sacred understanding of existence as divine, relational, and filled with Emanations of Oxakna. It teaches seekers to understand reality physically, mentally, and spiritually; to cultivate their Skaknao, or whole self; to work with Kna, the essence of being; to live through virtue, balance, harmony, and freedom; and […]
Viadescioism is a living religion, spiritual philosophy, and spiritual practice centered on understanding existence physically, mentally, and spiritually. It is a whole path of being and becoming: a way of studying reality, honoring divinity, cultivating the self, practicing virtue, engaging with sacred language, and walking toward deeper divine realization. In the Viadescioic understanding, existence is not dead matter. Existence is […]
This one’s going to be unpopular but we need to say something that many people are too anxious, too angry, or too captured by capitalist fear to say clearly: AI art training is not automatically stealing. Learning from existing work is part of how art has always lived. No artist emerges from nothing. Culture is not born from sealed private […]
Today, I don’t know if any of you have been paying attention, but one of the big conversations right now is around Hasan Piker expressing what a lot of us who’ve been paying attention have been thinking: if the next election comes down to Gavin Newsom versus JD Vance, we are absolutely fucked regardless of who you pick. And, a […]
The place I am writing from is not accidental. I exist after enchantment has been stripped from the world, after the Enlightenment taught us to mistrust participation and after postmodernism taught us to mistrust meaning itself. I can feel how deeply that loss shaped the way I think, the way I doubt, the way I hesitate every time I reach […]
Many people misunderstand the differences between a commentator, an activist, a politician, and a philosopher, especially when discussing socialist ideas, and this confusion leads to unfair expectations about how each type of figure should behave. A commentator is someone who analyzes, interprets, or communicates ideas to the public shaping discourse but not necessarily organizing or legislating; figures like Bhaskar Sunkara […]
It’s difficult for a lot of people to separate the difference between Cold War propaganda and the very real harms committed by states like the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. And this confusion affects both sides of the conversation. On one side, some people absorb old Red Scare narratives so deeply that every socialist idea gets reduced to gulags, […]
It’s perfectly valid to say you hate AI art, to hate how derivative and hollow it feels. You don’t need to justify that dislike by reinventing what “art” means, or by appealing to some mystical idea of the artist’s soul. That kind of reasoning only distracts from the real issue. Art has never lived comfortably inside definitions of what is […]
