This piece of internet content proposes a very concrete pathway towards optional communism.
This pathway begins with you, the reader, reading these words, and ends in a hypothetical future where the human species has consensually re-organized itself into 16 million (ish) different ‘bolos’ - intergenerational formations of 300-500 people.
First, let us reexplain: the bolo is a cooperative, communistic entity with a hard limit on size. Its purpose is to offer a competitive, pleasing, and prosperous form of social organization that is organically preferable to the present social organization.
The method for achieving this purpose is for voluntary organizations of highly autonomous people to pursue a long-term goal (a business, project, farm, or what have you) with the intention of remaining a bolo, and not breaking the implicit agreements and principles of the bolo: ,autonomy within highly localized community.
A successful bolo, as with any successful endeavor, will inspire imitators and have affiliates, which, ideally but not necessarily, will cooperate with each other preferentially.
Here’s how it happens
The Beginning
Imagine that our hypothetical reader is convinced by this content, and decides to become a subscriber.
They pay three dollars per month, and get access to 150% more content, and (more importantly) a forum that’s even better than old internet forums used to be.
One reason why the forum is so good:
users can contribute content to the Deep Socks newsletter, and if it works, they get paid a commendable rate, a rate according, perhaps, not just to a “living” wage, but a deliciously living wage.
So our reader has become a reader-creator.
They have become a reader-writer in a sibi: that’s the bolo’language name for a specialized handcraft shop.
In this case, they are a handcrafter making internet content for deep socks, a substack newsletter. One reason why deep socks becomes so successful is that it cultivates a handcraft ethos towards internet content creation.
We spend a lot of time “consuming” internet content: why should creating it not be better?
Now we are ready for the next step in this concrete pathway towards optional communism:
Initial mimetic spread.
The premise of “handcraft internet content” created by a “democratically organized groups of reader-writer” attracts more and more mimetic desire: more people want to be reader-writers.
Some of them come to be reader-writers for Deep Socks. Some work for Spielsocken, the game-oriented, English/German vertical.
Others go and write for chaussettes gastronomiques, the food-oriented French/English vertical.
Each vertical is a different sibi. Each is run autonomously, but in concert. Nobody has a boss and everyone loves not having a boss.
Now we can take the next step:
intensive mimetic growth.
The reader-writers from chaussettes gastronomiques want to form cooperative of Catalan wine aficionados, so they create mitjons de vi, which grows very fast, because of the inherent deliciousness of the product and the suavity of their marketing.
Some of the players in Spielsocken want to form a studio to create emotionally ambiguous arcade games.
This studio receives funding from Socks’bank, the funding sibi of the emerging collective, and does not succeed, because people want emotional clarity from their arcade games.
Now there’s 515 people involved in 50 different sibis. 10 average each, some smaller, some bigger. Most people involved in an average of 2.8 sibis.
One member reads about an abandoned village in the Pyrenees, on the spanish side. “I’m tired of the internet. Who wants to start Socks’Bolo?”
It turns out there’s a group of 50 basque reader-writers who would be interested in starting galtzerdiak’bolo: aka, socks’bolo.
And then (in our timeline) it happens: 380 people move to the village, set it up, get really good internet, and then they rises up to around 500 fast.
The bolo grows its own food, repairs most of its own supplies: the general mood is learning, an eagerness to develop the handcraft skills needed to flourish in this strange world.
As specified in the founding concept of ‘sila’ - each bolo offers free room and board to between 30 and 50 travelers per night.
Because the uniqueness, legendary gastronomy, and spectacular views in galtzerdiak’bolo, the waiting list to come visit grows very long. Visitors must wait seven years to come stay at the bolo: but it was free!
And then the last step on the pathway to voluntary communism happens:
the mimetic cascade.
Because the galtzerdiak’bolo is so popular, some people want to start 襪子’bolo in Taichung, and so they do, and then it keeps happening, the copying, over and over, it happens because life is better inside a bolo than outside of it, for reasons you may begin to grasp now. Are you ready to start?